The Chris Moeller Archives

Deporting the extranjeros

Turnabout is fair play.

In 1840, Juan Bautista Alvarado, the Governor of Alta California, a region under the rule of Mexico that you now know as California, ordered an investigation into the foreign residents of the Los Angeles district. All undocumented residents, fifty goldbricking transients in total, were detained for not having official papers. After interrogation, fourteen were placed under guard at the presidio of Santa Barbara. After a ship with more foreigners arrived from the north, 24 Americans and 23 Britons were deported by sail boat via the Pacific to the provincial capital in the heart of Mexico.

Alvarado referred to these illegal aliens trespassing upon Mexican soil “malditos extranjeros,” wicked foreigners, some of whom sought “to strip us of the richest of our treasures, our country and our lives.” The governor feared their involvement in a revolution like the one that had brought him to power in 1836. The jail in Monterrey soon became filled with extranjeros, dirty outcasts from dirty cities like New York City and London, dens of drunkenness and despair, and godforsaken, hardscrabble American rural provinces like Howard County, Missouri and Sevier County, Tennessee, places where human slavery was actually permitted. They were vagabonds, deserters, and horse thieves, said Alvarado. He wrote his superiors in Mexico, demanding a tightening of the Californios' borders with the United States as well as the military resources to patrol them. He quietly believed that the United States should pay for the enforcement of the border, but he didn’t have the foresight to write this thought down in his memoirs. This rich saga is told in the new book by Yale University history professor John Mack Faragher: “Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles,” and that's only one chapter.

You know the rest of his story. You’ve lived it. California declared its independence and the free state that featured a prowling bear on its flag was annexed by the United States. The flood of foreigners in the 1840's forced a proud language and heritage to be forever lost. The life blood of hundreds of thousands of new immigrants wrecked the economy. The great overland migration brought financial ruin upon-- not only California-- but the entire United States, and it has never recovered. Those of Spanish and Mexican dissent in California stopped practicing the religion of Roman Catholicism, as it would inevitably become banned by the new majority population. The freedom to govern themselves was lost to the residents of the sad sack state, and soon nobody wanted to live there anymore despite its sublime climate, and they didn’t.

posted by CM @ 6:34 AM