Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
Historical Contexts in Modern Reporting: Joe Payne on Chumash War and California's Complex Dynamics
Can local journalism survive in an age dominated by tech giants and algorithm-driven content? Join us as Joe Payne of Political Payne returns to Varn Vlog after a three-year hiatus to share his firsthand experiences and insights into the evolving landscape of journalism. From his humble beginnings at a community alt-weekly to his academic pursuits in history, Joe offers a compelling narrative on the critical role of local journalism and the challenges posed by corporate consolidation and elitist media practices.
Our discussion takes a deep dive into the intricacies of local media coverage, particularly in addressing labor and political issues. We draw historical parallels, underscoring how academic limitations often hinder a broader understanding of global contexts. Joe sheds light on the Chumash War, emphasizing the profound importance of historical context in contemporary reporting. This conversation also explores the complex histories of indigenous resistance within the Spanish mission system in California, revealing how economic and social structures shaped these communities.
We then shift our focus to California's political and cultural dynamics, exploring regional differences and historical roots. Joe's journey of balancing creative work and academic pursuits serves as a testament to the resilience required in today's media landscape. Wrapping up, we stress the need for better communication strategies among historians and journalists to make complex ideas more accessible and engaging for the general public. Tune in for an enriching discussion that bridges the past and present, offering valuable insights into the future of journalism.
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Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
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hello and welcome to varn blog, and I'm here with joe pain of political pain, um, one of my earliest guests on this channel about three years ago. A lot's changed since then. Um, hey, brian, hey, and uh. Uh, two years ago, just to remind people. Or three years ago, um, doing this for a while, uh, just to remind people, you came on the show to talk about the development of journalism and its abandonment of any lower working class base.
Speaker 2:So you know, uh on the decimation of the industry, uh, by the tech Lords and all of that jazz.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it's related, because what what that does is it makes uh journalism an influence slash, um, altruistic, and implies and who can afford to do that but the children of the wealthy. And that also means that credentialization starts being weirdly a priority, even though it's a priority that doesn't lead to anything much about the job. I mean, there's no reason why a journalist needs more than, I would say, an associate's degree training today, and if we were still dealing with writing training from 20 years ago, maybe even just a high school degree. But that's my abject opinion as a person who dropped out of journalism in the year 2000,aring what was going to happen, uh, with the internet and being both right and also under ambitious about how bad it was going to go, um, uh, so yeah, well, I mean, I I started out as a um, as a writer at a weekly, at a community alt weekly newspaper, as an intern in high school and then getting a part-time job and then working my way up over the years.
Speaker 2:But it's definitely one of those things where having a newspaper in your community, having multiple newspapers in your community, that the people who report usually at these papers are a part of your community, uh, that I mean the, the people who report usually at these papers, are a part of your community as well.
Speaker 2:You know they go to your local government meetings, like it's an important hub in the spoke of our, you know, severely flawed system, um, and it's just been deteriorated and um, atrophied.
Speaker 2:And so journalism, I mean I, I I waited to go get my this could kind of dovetail into what we're here to talk about, but I waited to get my. You know, my bachelor's degree and I'm now continuing on to get a master's was working in journalism and I kind of realized I'd be stupid to go pay to get a degree in that if I was gaining all the experience I needed to write, which it was, you know, a weekly paper. Every week you have to write something. So that's a good way to to start writing is have a system set up where you have to write um, you know, and so, uh, I'm glad I waited to transfer and go study history now, because it's just taking this kind of writing base that I developed and expanding on it and challenging myself in that respect, and I actually kind of discovered what my focus is in my local journalism, you know, looking at local history and whatnot.
Speaker 1:Yeah and whatnot. Yeah, um, I mean that's going to get us to talk about the chumash war. But, uh, I think one of the things that we have to deal with and I say I say this a lot as, as uh, reading a lot of international journalists, I think I came down real hard on bencent vevins for being, like I saw, uh, very good on contemporary issues but having no historical context to understand that, like, their actual analysis was not as good as their reporting. You know I was very sympathetic to Bevin's complaining about well, you know we always reported this through English language news reporting.
Speaker 1:I remember during the Arab spring, watching Democracy Now and going you're only talking to people who speak English, which means they're and they speak English well, yeah, exactly, which means they're either foreign, educated and come back, or they're highly, highly educated elites, interesting, which means you're getting a very particular perspective about what's going on, and Bevins calls this out in his book on the subject, but then kind of also does it himself and like going through these people's critiques of the movement as kind of self critiques of these like anarchist, inspired, fairly well educated elites, as opposed to, like I don't know, talking to Muslim brotherhood members and et cetera, who may not be so well versed in that kind of theory. And so, you know, I remember just thinking like a. You need a historian to really clue you in, because you believe a lot of myths about these prior movements are unified than they actually were, um, and, and that's leading you to make some mistakes in analysis. And two, even though you see the problems with over-reliant English speakers and people you can communicate with, you're still kind of doing it.
Speaker 2:I haven't read that Bevan's book. I read the Jakarta Method, which I enjoyed quite a bit, but I thought it was an interesting journalist's take on history. But yeah, you do have to look at it for the weaknesses that are there, I guess, or trying to, you know. I mean, of course, just talking. I think it's important to talk to survivors of something like what happened in Indonesia in the Cold War. I've been attempting to reach out to ancestors of chumash who lived through the war. Um, you know, I think it's important to bring uh folks's voices in there, but, um, you also gotta I mean, it's part of why I've taken a bit of a hiatus from my channel while I'm in school is, um, and you know, when you go to write something, you know, just based on what I've read so far in my master's program, I go back and I read my senior project that got published about this topic and I go, oh my gosh, there's so many other things like I hadn't read yet that I could have tied into here or brought into it. But it's definitely one of those things where, for me, studying history, I was very much inspired by the late Michael Brooks to do so because it is important to, like you said, have that necessary backstory Journalists so often?
Speaker 2:I mean they don't. I used to see it at my newspaper where they would want to hire young, fresh out of J school kids from you know nowhere to come in and work for cheap. They're always you know 20 something and willing to work for nothing and they would come into our community and then they don't know anything about our community. It's not like they don't know history. They don't know recent history. So you have that problem where just something like the most basic form, like reporting on your local city government or city budget, or you know, that's all, just it's it's, it's all just kind of crumbled away and you're left with like Facebook groups and other kind of you know, you know the news newspapers are like aggregators of, just like newswire services. You know local newspapers and, um, you know it gets, uh, gets depressing, honestly.
Speaker 1:But well, I mean, there's a couple of things that issue here. One is like for me, you have this breaking down of ungatekeep media, um, but that does not necessarily lead you to more truth because there's no one fact-checking it. I mean, one of the things that I've been talking about, the real tragedy of the current moment is really good international reporters now participating in Twitter culture warshit, because no one's funding them to go really do good international reporting except as commentary and punditry, not as actual reporting, and this leads to a whole lot of shoddy stuff going out there and people saying they know stuff that they actually do not know. Not know, um, uh. That said, we also have to admit that the old system in some ways was worse or just as bad, because the gatekeeping system really did narrow down acceptable opinion, um into like the two sides problem, and the two sides were were were fairly controlled on what they were, and now that that's broken up in a bit, that's led to a general distrust of the media, because it was frankly homogenizing things and it's being partisanized has not really fixed that. It's only made it worse.
Speaker 1:But you know, for me and you, we're both leftists I know that you and I have had quiet political differences, even though we're friends. I wouldn't put you up against the wall, but you know, thank goodness, but I have the vindication of being pessimistic in regards to recent activism, and I just want to say that I actually think that's a weakness. It's a weakness that my pessimism is so often vindicated because it really shouldn't be. That's an easy position to take, really shouldn't be like it. That's an easy position to take um and um. I would love someone to push back on the quote black pill. Uh, I'm not a black pillar, though, and that's that's what I I think people misunderstand. I'm not here to like shoot down all your dreams, just to shoot down all your dreams. I'm here to shoot down all the stupid parts of your dreams, so maybe some of the smart parts can actually emerge.
Speaker 1:Um, and when it comes to journalism, I think the left has has actually not really looked at this, uh, honestly, um, because one thing that I still have not seen addressed is the alternative quotation marks media, yeah, yeah is just as much about not having grounding in any particular place as anything else.
Speaker 1:So we have no incentive to actually work on local politics and, as I've told people who want to come onto my show to do that like I'm like I'm not going to help you because my audience is. There's more audience, my audience in New York are in fucking Oslo are.
Speaker 2:France or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, are are. Uh, for me it's like Nordic countries, england, canada and like the, the, the Northeast coast like some of the comedians I like right, yeah, uh, as opposed to even the west.
Speaker 1:You know california, I think the only western city that shows up high on my download rates is, uh, seattle, and then portland.
Speaker 1:You know, I live in salt lake city, like my own community doesn't really listen to me. Um, and that means that, as an answer to the problem of over nationalization and myopic media narratives, the alternative media actually doesn't answer the call because what it does is mainly just give an alternate voice on the same news that everyone else is spinning. So it's a different spin, a bunch of different spins. It's not one spin, but it's not actually like no one's really building up like deep dive local labor reporting or local political issues that lead you to understand the problems with national strategies, because they really understand these problems, you actually do need to know local issues, the ability to push out to talk about labor unions where you're at, as opposed to some abstract national average, national average Like there's. There's a bunch of problems that the answer to the problem of, uh, you know, consensus means mainstream, whatever that is, media still replicates many of the problems. Okay, and I think when it comes to historical stuff like the Chumash war, this actually exacerbates, uh, the situation.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a lot you could say there. I mean, I do see parallels, you know, let me think, let me think for a second cause. There was a lot there, you know you. Basically, I mean, I tried to do some of those things on my YouTube channel talk about local labor, talk about local politics, and there's very little like audience for it. But you never know, if you put together an OK video on some local issue, it might continue to get views as time goes on when people search your area. I went on. But of course you know it's the algorithm is is funneling us all uh down reactionary rabbit holes all the time. So, like that, my most watched video pertaining to local politics or anything local was when I went out and did one of my few uh protest live streams and, like a trump supporter and a, you know, antifa guy started swinging at each other. You know, of course that's going to get a lot of views. So it's like, you know you, I mean, that same critique could exist for older forms of media.
Speaker 2:I worked at an alternative newspaper and even you know, like in this very, at the time, conservative agricultural valley it was, it was understood that, you know, we were considered the liberal paper, you know, but that was just because we would quote an immigrants rights group instead of whatever guy on the streets and we don't want them here. You know what I mean. Like we would actually call a nonprofit and unlike the, unlike the daily news, but even then, like the owner, the publisher and the people in charge were very like, sensitive about upsetting the community and so it was only as oppositional or as alternative as what that community would allow. You know what I mean. So so that it's just like it's so weird because some things still exist. A local Fox, affiliates television news still exists. We have local, uh, conservative am radio subsidized by local business interests. That still exists.
Speaker 2:But the local newspapers have dwindled. There's less pages, there's less issues, there's, you know, come out. There's, um, you know, less news, less people working there, less positions, and you know, and the papers that still do exist, they've been consolidated, corporate and you're not going to. You just can't get local reporting after that or you're not going to get the same kind of local reporting. Mcclatchy, near here, had bought up a bunch of newspapers and one of them was near here in San Luis, obuis, obispo, and like they, they, like all the editors or proofreaders went away. They're all state, they're all based in sacramento now. So everybody in the state is sending all their stuff there and, like the first week they committed this huge faux pas and like offended the community, um, by trying to use some you know some story in their promotion and it was in bad taste and it was just because there was nobody there with a local connection to say, hey, guys, like you know what I mean. And so there's all these issues.
Speaker 2:If we're going to like broach into history a parallel that I see and it's pretty interesting and we could talk about it is just how you know, when you go to study history academically, you're expected to choose a region, a time and a and a place and not look to you know far askance beyond that, um, or at least that's how it's, it's been practiced, and um, it's really neat. You know, california mission history is technically latin american history. It's like right at the end of, uh, spanish colonialism, uh, the mexican revolution and um, you, know the Mexican Revolution for independence.
Speaker 1:We got to be clear, which, of course, thank you very much.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, thank you very much yeah, not the other one. Please correct me as many times yeah that's.
Speaker 1:That's not, for that's not correcting you, so much as it's making sure that my audience, who doesn't know Mexican history, keeps, oh yes yes, of course, and and and um, you know.
Speaker 2:So I mean, out of latin american history we get the idea, or we get world systems theory, like that's, you know, it comes out of that and just this idea of that, like you can't um. Or comparative history, um, some of these in the in the stack here are, do comparative work.
Speaker 1:And yeah, I was gonna say like uh, latin american history is influenced by world systems theory. In the stack here do comparative work. Yeah, I was going to say Latin American history is influenced by world systems theory, but it's kind of French, like in an origin.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course it's French. Latin American studies. I can't remember. We were just. I was watching some of your videos about it, but we were going over it in Latin American history last quarter.
Speaker 1:I can send you something about it. Uh, I guess this is also an advertisement to my audience that I have, uh, um, a video that's patron only about a engagement I did with the lefty book club explaining the weaknesses of the paradigm and the strengths of the paradigm. Um, and it's kind of particularly weird overlapping history in and out of and in and out of marxism. But, like, I think you have to look at one thing that you have to think about when you deal with systems, right, um, there are innovative historians doing work on, like the mediterranean system are the transatlantic uh trade network in transatlantic, you know um the development of of the transatlantic uh culture from from like west africa, europe and the subtler states in the amer.
Speaker 2:Triangle yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so there's no history that views the world that way, but the dominant English paradigm I think because of fear of, you know, not just Marxism but a lot of positivistic historical schools that tried to build systems in the 19th and early 20th century is to go running screaming in the other direction, eschewing anthropology, sociology, economics, et cetera, and doing micro history most of the time as the dominant paradigm, which I find interesting even in itself.
Speaker 1:Like micro history as a field actually did not start off like hostile to systems. It was actually kind of emerging in italy to like flesh out things that were being missed in this large systemic thing, but it didn't see itself as opposed to that. But in this, like I've heard people over and over and over again with historical trainings, like we just don't do systems like that, that that's not what we do, and I'm like I'm like, well then, how do you like justify your paradigms? And I get something about research methodologies and I'm like, yeah, that's not actually historiography, though, like you know, like historiography actually does require you to have a theory in a set of norms to, to, to figure this out. And it's not just methodological norms, it also unifies the vocabulary etc. And like, for example, the many of the great historical debates right now, is x historiographic claim is not true, like there is no dark ages or this and the other and my response to.
Speaker 1:That is like an historiographic claim is not true or false, any fucking way it's it's. Is it useful for understanding the periodization or not? And so, yeah, I mean we talk about, like Mission California history. That's Latin American history, absolutely, but it's also not American history. Yeah's, latin American history.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. But it's also not American history. Yeah, it's American history. It's borderlands history. It's you know, it's Native American history. It's Spanish history.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, it's all together Right. I mean, for example, for those in the Chumash War, just for an example are often miscalled the Chumash Revolt just for example, are often miscalled the Chumash revolt.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean it's. I mean that's the historiography of it as far as, like you know, it's only recently, in the past 20 years, that anybody's been calling that. What happened a war, you know, and so you know, like the old history, I mean in the seventies and the 80s, I mean this was a well-known occurrence. There was historiography, there's historiography of the late 1800s about what they called the Chumash Rev end. The Chumash led the largest armed rebellion against the California missions, not if we consider the entirety of mission history, but yeah, it was called for years by scholars. It was called a rebellion, a revolt, an uprising. But only recently would we frame it as a war um which which I I think it should be um.
Speaker 2:But it's really interesting just to consider the historiography of the california missions for a second, because you know they've kind of become like a flashpoint with juno percera, um, you know his canonization and um, the california missions are what they would call alta california at the time were like a later iteration of the mission system. Most of the missions in Central and South America they go back to some late 1500s and throughout the 1600s or 1700s, maybe not late 15. But I could be wrong about that. But you know their missions across Central and South America, peru, I mean, you know, you name it Throughout the Spanish Empire. Lots of them, lots of indigenous resistance. But the California missions don't really get started until the 1780s or the 1770s. Rather, the first, monterey and San Diego, are founded, and then a few more, and they kind of add to them over the years are founded and then a few more, and they kind of add to them um, over the years.
Speaker 1:They're basically extremely right that the any state in mexico, be it the empire of mexico, new spain and any of those prior existing states uh, for those of you who don't know, mexico has been many nations technically. Uh, oh, yeah, oh yeah, um, uh.
Speaker 2:Well, where I'm sitting was Mexico and I actually have ancestry that goes back to this part of California, almost to this time when California was Mexico, to California are Franciscan. This is after the Bourbon reformers and the Jesuit expulsion, so like the Jesuits were expelled from in the 1700s, this is like very much enlightenment influence on the mission system and the Franciscans. They maintain colleges in Mexico and throughout. You know some of their missions and so they were, you know a little more, I guess, enlightened or for whatever reason. Juniper, sarah, there are a lot of reasons, but the Franciscans were able to jockey into a better position after the Jesuits were expelled and so they were left in charge of the missions of Alta California of the missions of alta california.
Speaker 1:Um, and yeah, well, just from my standpoint in mexican history, I tend to know that the southern half of mexico tends to be dominican territory, exactly. And uh, strong inquisition shit going down there. Oh yeah, um, and I read a really good book about that last quarter, and then the northern half of Mexico slash Alta California, slash Baja California, slash the Del Norte in general for those of you who don't know, the Del Norte is basically Utah, down through, actually further down than we probably would go today.
Speaker 1:It probably stops around Chihuahua, coahuila, those desert northern modern states in Mexico, and we have to remember Coahuila used to be Tejas, coahuila, that was one giant Mexican state state. Uh, and I think it's also interesting, as you point out, to get to california.
Speaker 2:California is settled by the spanish really late like really late like they were basically doing it to head off the russians, because they didn't want encroachment on their silver mines and their mercury mines in northern mexico and, uh, some of what they're cultivating there, and so they just shot up the coast and afraid that the russians were going to go down from alaska like yeah, exactly, and so they established it.
Speaker 2:Monterey is where, or santa cruz is where the presidio was, um, and maybe the first mission was uherey. I'm sorry my recall isn't perfect, but you know, and it's interesting because from the beginning of missions were always targets for resistance, or the natives who were bonded to them would resist in many ways, and then the natives who lived in and around the area would often resist in the South and Central American context. And it's same, like from the beginning, like 1785, like 10 years after San Diego's.
Speaker 1:You know, san Diego is, you know, established, like hundreds of the Indians there just rain down and attack and kill the Pad padre and set fire to the mission let's talk about the mission system a little bit, because I don't think most people who don't study both late medieval history, actually, and uh latin american study, realized that the indigenous people, when they weren't being outright enslaved, um all uh Columbus.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Um, they uh, and, and, by the way, one of the other revolts it's really a war that I think is now called a war is the King, the King George's war, and in, uh, in new England, um, and that's a very bloody war with the indigenous people, but that's partly about the enslavement of indigenous people and I think people often don't know like, oh yeah, the puritans had slaves. They were not black, though they were, uh like often the you know uh, indigenous captains from various wars in north america, or they were from the Caribbean exported out etc.
Speaker 1:But what makes the Spanish development a little bit more interesting and harder to deal with from our standpoint and for those listening. There's just a cat. That's what you're hearing. That's totally okay. Animals are always welcome on the show.
Speaker 2:Talking about slavery and the missions that question.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, the missions when the indigenous people weren't outright enslaved, they were basically bonded serfs.
Speaker 2:They were bonded serfs. It was a medieval institution. It was very much a feudal institution. Um and that's what um you know, because there is a lot of scholarly debate about was it slavery? Are these just plantations with bells on them? You know, and um really there, there's especially like once you get like native american um historians and and activists um involve. I'm um trying to.
Speaker 1:Honestly, it gets hard to even talk about whether or not serfs were slaves too, like.
Speaker 2:That's like a big yeah, a big question, so so, but even there's differences between like, like the, the, the material economy, or the, the uh political economy of the alta californ missions and the, the, the missions from prior in Mexico, south America, central America. You had other institutions like, was it the encomienda there, you know. They basically had like a plantation system where at any time someone from around the surrounding area could come to the mission, request a one of the bonded Indians to the mission and request their labor, and it had to be provided. The missions acted as hubs not just of commerce and trade and travel and a pit stop, but they would provide the labor to the people around, the people around. That necessarily wasn't the case, uh, in alta california where, um, it was more that the, the, the, the bonded, the people bonded to the mission worked at the mission. They produced goods at the mission agriculture, animal husbandry, crafting, um and then those were sold from the mission and the mission was its own kind of um you know economic engine um, yeah, you know economic engine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they weren't getting paid. Their labor was forced and coerced. They were required to labor you know however long, but they did have paseo. You know they did have weeks away from the mission where they something that is kind of true across mission history is the missionaries like grip on the indigenous people is always tenuous. Their, their religious indoctrination is like one um franciscan talked about, it's like held up by tax. You know what I mean. At any moment they'll, they could just revert back to their way of living or their or their, their social structure or, um, their traditional life ways. So, you know, after a, a harvest, they would get like a summer vacation and get to go off into the mountains or go to some of the villages. You know now, you know that's.
Speaker 2:That doesn't sound like chattel slavery. But at the same time they were expected to come back and they were expected to, you know, stay on the missions or they're just all these different things where you might. You might say yes, strictly speaking, the Franciscans were not waging a genocide against indigenous people in California, but they were concentrating the population on the missions and required that and required people to concentrate there, and that only made the population loss from communicable disease way worse, so it was functionally genocidal. You know what I mean. So it's like it wasn't chattel slavery. It's still bonded serfdom and coerced labor, but again it's complicated.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, I think this complication and I say this again when people not knowing history like opens up when you know the history of Europe, yeah, exactly. And when? People not knowing history, like opens up when you know the history of Europe? Um, uh, exactly Because the difference between a slave and a surf is minor.
Speaker 2:And in early periods there is none.
Speaker 1:Um, uh, as through the medieval period, this shifts and basically um surfs have more and more rights. You can't really call them slaves. They have, but they don't have freedom of movement. Um, they don't have, they're not entitled. They're entitled to some of the fruits of their labor, not all of it, and they're not paid like they're not.
Speaker 2:They do not earn wages and they don't have really have justice. They don't have any sense of justice, they can't like, they can't appeal their grievances. If the lord comes and you know, uh, you know rapes the daughter, then there's nothing, there's no recourse for that.
Speaker 1:The recourse is appeal to the king and the in the appeal to the king is hey, if you do, if you let those people do more of this, we might revolt um, yeah, yeah, exactly and the system.
Speaker 1:When people want to understand, like, why did new Spain not become what North Anglo North America became?
Speaker 1:And it's not because of, uh, like, the Spanish are inferior, it's that the structures they brought over were more medieval and they maintained a medieval type economy for far longer totally than than the, the anglo-north americans. And that meant that reinvestment did not go into production, it went into military arms and the church, which is also why anti-clerical sentiment when it erupted, I mean from the chumash war, but even in spain, like 100 years later, in the church, which is also why anti-clerical sentiment when it erupted, I mean from the Chumash War, but even in Spain, like 100 years later, in the Crisera War and the other Mexican Revolution. It leads to really interesting tensions because one of the things you wouldn't expect, given how nasty the church was to indigenous peoples, I mean, and the Franciscans are bad, the Dominicans are really, really bad and the Jesuits are so bad they kick them out. And I know today we always think of, oh, the Jesuits. I'm like, yeah, the Jesuits are a liberal force in the church now.
Speaker 2:Today, yeah, yeah yeah, it might be that way now with the woke pope or whatever hippie pope you want to call him Right.
Speaker 1:They've been kind of like the progressive end of the church with the Franciscans for about maybe 80 years. But in the 19th century they are not the progressive end of the church. Everybody's afraid of them actually.
Speaker 1:And they're secretly trying to control everything, including other Catholics. So that's something to keep in mind. And it's also interesting today because in southern Mexico, despite all that oppression, the chrysera war is actually opposed by indigenous mestizo peasants, uh, which is interesting given how much the church fucked with them, um, and in earlier time periods they are the first people to fight the church, because the church was the, the, the main institution of bondage in a lot of ways for a lot of these indigenous groups, and in this case, in the mission system, literal bonded labor, I mean they.
Speaker 2:Yeah, once you were baptized you're on the hook man, you belong to the mission, they will ride out and get you if you try to run off. Fugitivism was a big problem and I mean so. I mean there's a lot ways we could approach it. But like essentially the the chumash war, I'm kind of formulating this idea of thinking about the chumash war which, um some scholars very recently have kind of talked about, um which is just like the idea that when the chumash war happens, for anybody who doesn't know, the chumash war happened in 1824 at this constellation of missions it's actually in my home county, santa barbara county mission santa barbara mission, san janez mission, la paris, madiconsetio, um, that's in near present day lampoke, um. There's just a lot of really interesting detail we could go into. But the Chumash, before contact, were able to maintain linguistic ties and trade networks across thousands of miles of coastline from present day Ventura up through Santa Barbara, san Luis Obispo, ventura counties. Santa Barbara, san Luis Obispo, ventura counties, mission Santa Barbara was established first, and then they expanded inland over the mountain range to San Ynez and La Purisima, and when the revolt happened it started at San Ynez but it quickly spread to Santa Barbara and La Purisima, there was basically mass absconcion or whatever, from san janez and santa barbara. They abandoned the mission rather than trying to hold it. Um, hundreds held la parisima for more than a month and that's where it's like super cool, super militant, they're cutting gunner holes in the side of the you know where the whatever, in the side of the tower and the walls, and they're building palisades getting ready for you. They know there's going to be a battalion coming, but hundreds, more like thousands, more than a thousand, just flee inland. They just head inland across what today is like Los Padres National Forest and they make their way out towards, like Bakersfield, buena Vista Lake, it was called and they, you know they basically return. They meet up with friendly Yokut. They return to a lot of their traditional, you know life ways. They're basically surviving in a marshy lake.
Speaker 2:You know, and you know when the Franciscans and the it's interesting because the Franciscans and the Mexican military are it's very Rashomon they're pointing fingers at each other. You know the Franciscans want to blame this new secular state for all of their problems. You know the soldiers are so mean to our Indians, not us. You know the soldiers are like these. You know these damn hippie Franciscans can't keep these savages in line.
Speaker 2:But then the two are working together to kind of enact this counter revolution when they have, you know, first at La la prisma, by putting down the revolt, public executions. You know the whole, the whole deal, um. But then they have to go inland a few months later, um, and return these hundreds of people back to the missions, back to the labor regime, um. And so the franciscans and the mexican military do this hand in hand. But even in that moment there are hundreds of chumash who probably just fled or, we know, fled even further inland. And so you know, in some degree, you know they, those folks were successful, they were never returned to the mission. But from then on, this is from then on until there's also the Stanislaus revolt some years later. But from then until the 1830s, when the missions are completely secularized across all to California, you know it's just basically everybody. Anybody on a mission knows you can flee inland to the interior, and you're going to find friendly Indians who are, you know, just resisting the missions. You know, the missions were hugged to the coast. To the coast because Spain was a maritime empire and so there was rampant fugitism in this last decade of the mission period.
Speaker 2:I think the Chumash War, being right smack dab in the middle of the Alta California mission system, central coast, halfway between the bay and LA and Southern California, I mean it was debilitating. And then the Franciscans are in constant paranoia since then that there's going to be another revolt. And they did have lots of revolts. You know, there was a revolt early on at Mission San Luis Obispo where the Indians set the roof on fire. This was before the Chumash revolt where they set the thatched hay roof on fire. This is before the true master vault where they they set the um, the thatched hay roof on fire. And after that, because that that was, you know, became such a concern, they introduced spanish tile, uh to san luis obispo. So the spanish tile that we see everywhere in california in our architecture is based off of counter-revolutionary uh tactic, you know, by by the uh, the franciscans.
Speaker 2:It's interesting because there was some element of a constant state of, I don't know, slave societies or societies with slaves that's another debate in history but just this idea of like a militarized culture or a society that's at war all the time I don't know how to word it the best way but basically this idea that at every mission there were soldiers stationed and, like you said, said they were producing. When the missions first started, they were subsidized by the crown, just to have some kind of established, you know, just to just put a little toe out there, um. And then the missions acted as before they could get the presidios built, um, or after the presidio was built, they're supporting the Presidio with food, with goods, with clothing, with hides.
Speaker 1:But also just this material production has a massive effect on Revolt. Also happens in the context of the Mexican War of Independence, which was not even totally settled.
Speaker 2:It wasn't even yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, when this was going on. I mean because, people who don't know, mexican War of Independence formally starts on September 27th of 1821.
Speaker 2:Hidalgo, yeah yeah, hidalgo Revolt is the Franciscans when they bitch about it. This damned Hidalgo revolt.
Speaker 1:Right, it really kind of begins in 1810, around September 16th, so it'll last 11 years, much longer than actually the U S a war of independence and however the, the war of independence, um, and however the the uh, the church is functionally operating, still taking orders from, from spain and rome, yeah, um, it was almost like the missions because it was a frontier institution and they knew that.
Speaker 2:You know, the mexican government knew that they needed these frontiers institutions. They were tolerated, almost like a Spanish embassy or consulate or something. You know what I mean. There were like little relics of old Spain that they tolerated. But the goal was always for the Mexican government was always to secularize the missions. And then, you know, there was the promise that they would give the natives some land, of some of the mission land. Hardly any of that happened and if it did, it was was not very good land at all.
Speaker 1:I was about to say that the and and what is it? It's in the 1830s, I think it's 1834, 35. The mission system is 34. Yeah, formally taken over by the Mexican government secularization, and so one of the interesting things about that is, while there was some land promised, initially, indigenous were driven off the land, or they were literally moved from serfs into true slavery. For people who don't know, mexico does outlaw slavery way before the united states, but not yet, um. So it's so. A lot of the chumash were enslaved, um, which they more or less were beforehand, but now they really are, and they're given like a small piece of land.
Speaker 2:And I think it's what like. So that is like specifically one group, the San Ynez Valley Band of Chumash Indians who can trace back to Mission San Ynez. But there are other bands that aren't necessarily nations. Um, you know, um, some, some, some uh groups go by which mission they were from. But there's venturino, there's um barbaraño, um purisman, purisman. You know they're based off of which missions are at. But the san yanez one is here in santa barbara county, it's down the highway, puris Men, puris Si Men. You know they're based off of which missions they're at. But the San Ynez one is here in Santa Barbara County. It's down the highway, whichever, I can't remember the highway from present day, mission San Ynez, and you know it's the Chumash today there's. They're like piecing together their language from uh, they're trying to revive their language which died. Um, there are recordings by a guy named john harrington. He was an ethnographer in a um early 20th century.
Speaker 1:So there's all these other harrington, but anyway which?
Speaker 2:which? I'm not sure which one you're talking.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but um, yeah, he he, michael michael harrington oh, okay, no yeah, he he had a lot of recordings of indigenous people across the us but tons of chumash um, and there's actually two accounts of the chumash revolt that come from people who didn't live through it but who you know, or the generation after or grew up around people who lived through it, and we have their account of it, um, from the early 20th century. Um, uh, you know, but I I am trying to reach out um to the chumash and I have heard from people loosely here, here and there, who say they have family or ancestors who were involved in it.
Speaker 1:Um, but um, yeah, nobody would be alive who was involved in it.
Speaker 2:But yeah, no, of course 1824, 200 years ago this year, 200 years ago this year. But I mean, that's another thing in history, like this idea of if somebody's been silenced, if we can't hear from it. I think there's all I've been able to find so far that are direct accounts from Chumash regarding this conflict, because a lot, because a lot of the documents of mission history were lost in the great San Francisco fire, unfortunately. But what? What there is from this time? There is an interrogate, there are two interrogations of Chumash men that are captured when they're when they're inland near Bakersfield trying to return them. But those are just interrogations, you know what I mean. And so that's about as direct of a source as we get from true mesh of the time. And then everything else is just through the lens of what the Franciscans said happened, what the soldiers said happened, what people who?
Speaker 2:There's histories of the rebellion written in the late 1800s by californios, you know, um writing their memoirs, you know, and and so there's a lot of interesting, um, you know, depictions and discussions around it, but for me, what's super interesting is just, um, you know, because a lot of mission history has asked this question like what, if it's not slavery, why did? Did Native Americans go to the missions? Why did Indians go to the mission? Were they forced to go? Were they rounded up? Were they compelled? You know, was it a choice? All of the above, yeah, yeah, in the 90s, you know, it always like matches what the historical movement is. In the 90s, there were people just all about the environmental history, which is good. But if you're going to just look at environmental history for this rebellion and ignore the political history that's swirling all around these people, then it's incomplete.
Speaker 1:Well, let's talk about who the chumash are a little bit. For those of you don't know that they're uh uh, indigenous uh grouping uh loosely in um coastal california, coastal california, um. They speak a language that's lost but is related to the takik languages, which are themselves a subset of the utah, mashika or yusto aztec uh languages. I don't like the word aztec because it's actually incorrect um uh, but anyway, um uh. For those of you who don't know that, the indigenous histories of the american west, the, the mashika or the aztec, actually aren't aren't originally from central mexico. They're actually probably from um uh, the, the, the greater uh desert valleys around um. Now uh utah, um uh, arizona, new mexico and um eastern california, northern new spain, yeah right, arizona, new Mexico and Eastern California.
Speaker 2:Northern New Spain.
Speaker 1:Right, they were themselves settler-colonialists, yeah.
Speaker 2:Pretty intense. Central American pre-contact history is wild.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's dead too, it's uh, it's well, I mean it's actually, but I think it's to bring up why it's really important for people to know this. A lot of people think, oh well, the spanish one, because they were more technologically advanced than the mexica or the aztecs. Bullshit, bullshit. Yeah. Like they won because the other tribes hated the fuck out of the Mashika, because they were literally eating them. And like the other tribes signed up with the conquistadors not realizing what they were signing up for.
Speaker 2:And not realizing that they were picking up communicable pathogens. Not realizing communicable pathogens, um, not realizing. So it's. It's interesting because, um, in Central and South American mission history, um, you have like once, uh, uh, you like, you have this mass population loss, um, but after a century or more of missionization across Central and South America, the population kind of plateaus, the population loss plateausaus and you have much more, uh, uh. You know native peoples, um, you know having, or miscegenation, or whatever it was as it was called. You know, um, spain, uh, the spanish culture compensates this for this with its complex, weird, um, caste system, um and uh.
Speaker 2:But, as you know, once, once the Native Americans get enough time to develop some skill on horseback, get some metal tips for their tools. You know the, the, the, the plants and animals that Spain brings over are massively disruptive to the ecology of any area. You bring sheep and goats and cows and horses to an area, these ungulates, they're going to, they're going to rip up the vegetation. So, you know, these natives start compensating by, you know, capturing horses and this is a very much like against Spain's interests. These are their, this is their. You know material product, right, so they, they, they do not want that to happen.
Speaker 2:But an indigenous group in Central or South America can make use of their terrain, the tropical terrain, the mountainous terrain. Steal a bunch of horses, get competent on them on horseback, steal enough from the missions, attack the missions, sack the missions, steal enough from them, go to another area, trade for some metal tip tools and then go back and do it again and kill even more people, right? So there's constant resistance and and the natives adapt, you know, over time, because Go ahead.
Speaker 1:No, and the Mashika like the Mashika loss. I've mentioned this before. There's three things that cause the Mashika like the mashika loss. K I've mentioned this before. There's three things that cause the mashika to lose one communicable disease. It's in that, by the way, that is why north america also did not turn out like africa. All right, um, because otherwise the populations would have dictated. This was. The decimation of the settled peoples in the east coast of north america was and we're learning this from genetic evidence. Uh, we used to think that the english were like lying about finding cities that were empty. No, they were not. No, they were not, they were not um, it's more like.
Speaker 2:We've always heard 50 to 60 or 60 plus percent. It was like close to 90. I mean it's in the 80s, in the 90s percent of population loss. I mean what? This is the thing about? The missions too. So some of the patterns that happen in central and south america they repeat in california, but in some ways they're even it's.
Speaker 2:It's even worse from an ecological standpoint because, um a lot of the plants and and of course, the animals that spain brings with them whether again like it could be um consciously, they're bringing sheep and goats and and cows which are going to decimate the grasses or eat all the acorns, like they bring wild pigs or goats. They eat all the acorns. The chumash subsisted if they weren't living out of the ocean. They were living off the acorns all around them, scattered all over the place, all over the. You know the the floor that's. We're just surrounded by oaks and they were grinding up um acorns.
Speaker 2:After a few decades of spanish um incursion. You know um like they're. Not only are the majority of your population getting sick, but the over time and it gets precipitously worse over the years less of the food stuffs that you, as an indigenous person, were used to finding, you're finding less and less of them. You know all these animals are, you know, incurring on your traditional foods or even other animal foods that you might enjoy. And then you're also, if you do kill one and eat one that you might enjoy. And then you're also, if you do kill one and eat one, the Spaniards, the soldiers, might come through and whip you for it, or you might just get sick from that goddamn animal, you know, exacerbating all these other problems.
Speaker 2:I was just reading a book called Children of the Coyote by Stephen Hackle, and he calls this across California. He frames it as a dual revolution for Indian people, like it was. At the same time, they're being attacked by pathogens. They are being massively attacked their, their, their ecology, which they've cultivated themselves for years fire and stick agriculture. You know the the. There was a lot of just cause they didn't have animal husbandry. Or you know when I think it was Portia first came through Santa Barbara in like the late 1500s or early whatever. The first Spanish, you know, excursion through here, the Chumash gave him more fish than he could eat. They were throwing it out. You know, dried fish that is. And so you know they.
Speaker 1:But they didn't need animal hummus, humus tree, they had agriculture, aquaculture already totally had aquaculture.
Speaker 2:So the chumash also are fascinating because they had plank canoes, they had a very strong maritime culture. They were hunting porpoise and whale in the in the santa barbara channel. You know, and again, like you can, um, there are archaeological sites, you know, many miles inland, you know more, at least 100 miles inland, in the mountains, and they're filled with muscle shells and, and you know the, the chumash used to shell uh bead currency. Um, you know, so, like you have these, these waves of disruption to their way of life. It starts with disease. They populated the Channel Islands for quite a while. That's. Some of the earliest human remains in North America are the Chumash on the Channel Islands from 16,000 years ago. They were able to thrive out there, thousands of them, for, you know, millennia.
Speaker 1:There's also indication that in this Channel Island stuff they may have actually come into contact with Polynesians. Yeah, we don't know that and that's speculative. It's based off of the plank canoe because other indigenous tribes in the area don't have them in the area don't have them. And there's some superficial similarities in the word uh in poly in polynesian languages for the plank canoe and in chumash um uh. We don't have any other evidence so I don't. Before I got people at me that I'm saying like we don't know. But they were clearly an extensively traveled seafaring culture on plank canoes, uh, uh, very early on. So, yeah, they don't need animal husbandry, they got fish.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they got muscles and clams and dolphin and gray whale, white whale, I mean a blue whale, gray whale if they could take them down and and they could and they did, you know. So we, we have, um, a lot of the tools they made out of, you know, bones, I mean they had, they had a very like thriving material culture. And even, like the spanish took notice, there was I can't remember, um, there was some like spanish spaniard, uh theorist who hadn't been to any of these places but he was reading everybody's accounts, like at the time, and he kind of he had these tears of ideas of savagery and civilized savage, savages and whatnot and he he kind of categorized the chumash as wow, look at how these people live. Like they, they have, um, you know they, they had, you know, political culture. They had, uh, um, you know, uh, townships. You know they had uh methods of managing population in their towns, like expanding things if they needed to. Um, you know and you know I'm trying to think like they, you know they had sweat lodges. You know they had a lot of material culture. That just made sense it, it's a very comfortable environment so there was a lot of abundance here.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, there were certain social things that freaked the Spaniards out, of course, you know the. We have some of the early, um, you know, documented transgendered people, or were found um, transgender women in, or double spirit, as you know, as they were called, or whatever. This freaked the Franciscans out, that biological males would be living among the females and doing, or doing the women's work as they saw it. You know, um, you know. So there's just like this uh, and again, they, they, they were able to keep linguistic and trade connections across.
Speaker 2:I mean, you know it takes hours to drive it on the 101 you know what I'm saying like uh, uh, from ventura through santa barbara, up through the central coast, all you know hugging uh point conception, and, and you know, on the channel islands, you know, up to san luis obispo, and that's where the esalen kind of uh begin, up there. So you know, and again, like maintaining uh trade ties, and at least when the rebellion happens too, when the chumash rebellion happens and they're holding La Parisima, the call goes out across central California and up and down the coast. Some of the scholarship shows Indians arriving from other missions, from other groups, from other tribal groups, who just saw the Chumash were waging a war against the spaniards. They're trying to get the spaniards out of our land. Let's do it, let's join them, you know, so it's yeah, it's made a mistake.
Speaker 1:A hundred years ago, sided with the spaniards against mashika. Let's let's kick these bastards out now.
Speaker 2:Yeah um, uh, you know it's. It's interesting. The missions enticed indigenous people with their material goods. You know what I mean. The, the um, the franciscans didn't just immediately brutalize you know whoever they saw. So you know there was curiosity about them. A really interesting thing about um, there was one as our uh article I read, about mission santa barbara, where they ordered like more, uh, sewing needles.
Speaker 2:They're putting in an order to Spain, or whatever. Can we get some of this? Can we get some of that? We're going to need more than a thousand sewing needles. The whole reason for that is because the Chumash had their bead, their shell bead culture, and they would use those needles to drill a little hole in the shell and feed some kind of whatever through to you know, bead them. And so, like you know, the Franciscans were doing what they could to entice the Chumash or the Indians to get on the missions and then, once you have, as Hackle would say, this dual revolution of everybody's getting sick, everybody's dying, we can't find any food anymore, right? So you know what else it's. It's a pragmatism. You know what? What else can we do? Um, and and even so.
Speaker 2:So this is where, um, I, I get interested by subaltern theory and there, there in the 90s, there was a movement called New Mission History which was really seeking to give the Native Americans voice, talk about their agency, talk about Because they'd just been ignored in the historical record. A lot of historians of the early mission historians are Franciscans. Oddly enough, a lot of them stationed at Mission Santa Barbara Zephyr, mengelhardt, maynard Geiger these were guys who maintained the. Santa Barbara has an archive that's still maintained by the Franciscans, by the Catholic Church, and so you know these historians depicted oh well, look, this is what the Franciscans wrote.
Speaker 2:Everything was fine and they, you know they all celebrated the new mission and you know they write more about, about, you know all the stuff and the building of the structures than they do the indigenous people. New mission historians try to address that even now, like the latest, uh, kind of look at some mission history that kind of builds off of new mission history is okay, we understand, like you know, in a subaltern way, looking at the natives. But what about the franciscans? Uh, uh, you know, can we? It's okay to ignore them for a bit and focus on the indigenous, but what about them together, them interacting, the franciscans interacting in between the indigenous and the crown, you know what I mean. Or or the local secular mexican military, you know, as all of these different groups jockeying for position. It's super fascinating, like there's just there's a lot to it.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, when we talk about understanding the one, I think our theoretical frameworks actually matter because they give us our way to talk about this. So, like, uh, I'm a big believer in, um, using some world system languages and talking about settler patterns. Um, I actually am not so keen on turning settlerism into like a pure way to talk about contemporary politics, because it's confusing, but we do have to acknowledge that that is what birthed this world here in the americas. Um, uh. But also, like, just in the way, just to bring up all the stuff you need to know, to really like understand this, if you're, say, a journalist reporting on indigenous issues in california today, uh, you need to know the history of medieval feudalism, the church's relationship to that. Why, why were the spanish more feudal in their organization than the english? What was the results of, uh, smallpox and other viral and bacterial infections on north america? How bad was the decimation? To know that, actually, you can't even rely on written sources. You actually have to look at genetic data.
Speaker 2:Archaeological evidence.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, you need to know constructed linguistics. I mean, one of the things I said, chumash was a Uto-Aztecan language. That's actually something that I thought was true, and now I'm doubleing as we're talking, I'm like, well, it might be, but there's other theories as to what it is. And look, I don't think any one person as a journalist can never know this. This is why I know we're all turned off by discourse communities because people use that language to ill intent in the 1990s and early aughts to make us all good liberal subjects, author or person.
Speaker 1:You need collective history, doing collective work to construct an understanding of which a journalist could take account. And you know, you, you we were joking, uh, uh, um, and and chats back and forth with each other. I was like, yeah, and the two months war gives us a chance to talk about, wow, journalism needs history. And you kind of also joke back and history doesn't need journalism too. Um, and I think it is super important for us to understand, to construct an image of this events. We need the franciscan things, we need the. The news as it was, was going through mexico and new spain.
Speaker 2:Uh, we need the ethnography of the indigenous people, you need social history, you need environmental history, you need epidemiological history. You know you need understanding. Agriculture understanding, I mean, just like the social history is really fascinating too, especially because you're looking at the Franciscans trying to apply a social program as well as a labor that's tied to their labor regime. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:And then you have all the material reality that's swirling around that religious history, because there is a religious reason that leads to some of the differences in and settler patterns yep between the the new spain regions and the anglo regions and the french regions of north america. The french, the spanish, were much more willing to intermarry.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, this is interesting because you mentioned earlier that the missions were feudal, right, and there's been some interesting historians who've talked about how the mission itself is a European institution. It's, like you know, it reminds me of like sealing wax or whatever. You know, you push your crest into the wax, it's like the rubber stamping this feudal European institution out in the middle of nowhere, this feudal European institution out in the middle of nowhere, and even if you have, you could have a hundred years of indigenous people attacking the mission and resisting the mission and, you know, doing what they can to subvert the goals of the missionaries. But anybody who gets into that mission and is and is bonded to it becomes baptized and then if they get married, that that's, you know, they become married and that's documented, and then they produce kids who are baptized under there. Like it reproduces these christian um, you know. And and as far as like, like you said, intermarriage, like the um, I would say colonial spain showed a um, you know, there was a lot more, I don't.
Speaker 2:I mean in some ways, like you said, with the Dominicans and there was no compromise, but in other ways, there was this compromise with just the reality, like they're, like, there's no other way. We have to let Spaniards intermarry with non-Spaniards because, just, we don't have the numbers of Spanish women here. So we just, you know, but, but we want to, they wanted to christianize those people. Because they wanted to, you know, have them in this labor, um, you know, in in this labor system, and of course, christianity teaches that you just need to work because it's good for you and and that's what the lord wants, you know, um, so go ahead no, I mean but but, and I think you're absolutely right about that.
Speaker 1:However, we should also point out that it ends up being markedly less brutal, in some ways, than the protestant form of the same thing. Uh, sometimes and I'm gonna put an emphasis on sometimes, because when Spain goes brutal, holy shit, do they go brutal?
Speaker 2:Well, that's the thing, like the Spanish black myth right there in historiography, you know, protestant and English historians take, like the accounts of Bartolomeo de la Casas and and other early Spanish accounts of the brutality of the Spanish Empire of Columbus, and you know, it was this kind of white man's burden style. Well, look, ours might be bad, but look at what these Spaniards are doing. And I mean that's where a lot of, like you know, north American racism towards Central and South America is like. Oh well, those, yeah, they might act like they're Europeans, but we all know they were interbreeding, we all know they're. You know that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they were feeding their indigenous. I mean, I remember being taught this, honestly.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:The Spanish were feeding their indigenous to dogs, which actually, in some cases, is probably true.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Their indigenous also being fucked up, a way to think about it, but that you know, I always used to think, though my response that was always like but why are they way more mestizo than mixed anglo-white people? I'm just saying, like I know everybody claims to be, uh, probably a relative of a cherokee or something, but we don't look like it. Um and uh, they do, um so, and even as a high schooler, I would just remember, like isn't this transparently obvious to everyone else that, like they were more willing to intermarry than we were like um, yeah, exactly, and if you're not?
Speaker 1:willing to marry and you're not willing to incorporate into your economic. So if you're not willing to do production or reproduction with a group of people, historically speaking, what happens? You kill them like that. Yeah, are they kill you?
Speaker 2:I mean, depending on you know who's got the tactical advantage you know, and I've cracked Mattingly's An American Genocide which is about California and it's basically as soon as the Anglos take over in California, that's what happens, is they just? They're not trying to convert nobody, they're just sweeping through, you know, boxing people and kettling villages of you know, natives and slaughtering them. Villages of, you know, natives and slaughtering them, cook or who are I'm trying to remember, no, I can't remember who famous California explorer, us, you know, frontier militarist is responsible for some of those early attacks in, you know, in the American context. So that's the other thing. The other thing about California history is this area, this state, you know, which is huge, goes through so many waves of change over the last, just the last few hundred years. You know, you have um, thousands of years of pretty much, you know of indigenous um, you know culture, and then you know it's, uh, the.
Speaker 2:The first missions happened in the 1780s, you know, by the, by the early 1800s there's been mass population loss um the the countryside is being transformed by grazing animals and those animals come with burrs and seeds, like in their hooves or whatever. Or the boats, you know status, stowed away on the boats are also seeds from other, like weedy plants that actually do quite well here in California. So they, they sweep across the landscape and disrupt, um, you know the, the ecology of the of the state. You know hundreds or, sorry, thousands, if not a million or more, indigenous people are just wiped out by disease. Um, then then you have this, uh, these institutions across california, the missions which, uh, you know, attempt to inculcate, indoctrinate, whatever uh indians into this european, christian, spanish, uh you know, feudal mode of of operation.
Speaker 2:Um, you know the, the mexican war, for you know, the Mexican War for Independence, the Mexican Revolution for Independence happens in the early 1800s, 1810 and on, you know, and every wave of colonization brings in more people. It brings uh different conflicts. You know, once, once you have a, a generation of mexicans in california. They, they are um spiteful of the spanish and and the crown, and and and then they're spiteful of the missions and the missions are spiteful of them. And then you have the, the revolution, and and they're all each other. Then you have the mexican-american war, and california uh becomes a us state, and then you have a widespread genocide. Oh, sorry, you know, gold is discovered in the state.
Speaker 1:Then we got to really get rid of the indigenous.
Speaker 2:That's when the genocide program kicks into high gear and that's when, of course, it becomes a US state Got to get the gold, and you know I mean, just think of the changes in California over the last hundred years. Silicon Valley, I mean, you know I live in an in. You know people like to call this a small town or it's a growing city, but this is an industrial valley. I live in an ag valley, you know, and it used to be ranching, used to be cattle ranching. That got displaced in the early. That got displaced in the early part of the 20th century by vegetable agriculture when they developed ice houses. Those people all get swept up by the 80s when there's the winemaker movement, like in the movie Sideways or whatever. And then the Central Coast is hit again. Now it's cannabis is like coming in and disrupting, like the ag industry so right.
Speaker 1:And then the illegal cannabis grow in the deep north of california is now like probably opium or something like I, I don't but it's not good, it's not good.
Speaker 1:There's a trippy doc on netflix called murder mountain about like, about the emerald triangle and man, it's wild out there yeah, I mean, I uh, I have been uh like studying because I have friends up north of mendocino, and like looking at. One of the things about california is, you know, I knew about part of red state california which is the greater modesto valley, and and then and then there's the weird bizarro red state land of orange county, but then there's, oh yeah, it's everywhere wild yeah, there's the wild shit north of sacramento, which isn't even always red.
Speaker 1:It's very poor, though, and can be all over the place politically. Um, and people's understanding of california is unfortunately homogenized because that is run by the most gerontocracy form of the Democratic Party, even more than New York. The political machine that literally ran California was mostly established in the fucking 70s, and those same people and their immediate descendants pretty much run the state.
Speaker 1:Uh, that's feinstein, that's pelosi, that's. That was jerry brown, the once and future governor of california. Uh, and that is jerry brown's protege, gavin newsom. I mean like um, but the actual history like california, like texas, like like a lot of the bigger states, actually has micro regions and stuff.
Speaker 2:It's really important to understand if you're gonna fuck with california shit yeah, oh, nothing pisses me off more than when people act like they know california you know what I mean and they're talking about la. Or they're talking about San Francisco, and it's like California is not one place, man, it's not one place. San Diego is not like LA. You know what I mean Politically. Or or you know in other ways, um, the, you know a lot of whatever central Valley, the Inland Empire is not like LA, you know. Uh, um, I've spent a little time, you know, haunting around Yorba, linda and Corona, you know, trying to get to the Nixon Library, but I didn't have too much luck. But you know American conservatism like you know, as we understand it, and like you know, modern second half of the 20th century, modern American conservatism was born in California. Yeah, reagan Ranch is in santa barbara, right they're.
Speaker 1:They're grooming the next generation of of conservatives there at, you know, as we speak I was invited to a friend to a redditor exclusive club just in just north of sanford, um, and I got to where a lot of like black Black Athena was written there. But you know what was also written there Milton Friedman, richard Pipes and Samuel Huntington's books. So like, in fact, I got to sit in Richard Pipes slash Thomas Kuhn's office for a couple of minutes.
Speaker 1:It was very disturbing, uh, uh, and I like to tell people, whereas the modern democratic movement, as we understand it, was kind of a compromise between, um, the chicago, new york machine politics and southern democrats who could carry uh, southern, uh, southern states, and when the dixiecrats gave up the ghost about in the like, truly gave up the ghost about in the like, truly gave up the ghost at the local level, because people don't see again all the United States is like this and a lot of journalists don't seem to fucking know it.
Speaker 1:Um, even though we're dealing with recent history, like the idea that, um, the South has been solidly read because it's been racist, um, the South has been solidly read because it's been racist. Which it has been racist absolutely is a total misunderstanding, because at the state level, most of the southern states were not run by Republicans until the aughts, because the bitterness about the Civil War went that deep imagine that uh, yeah, um, and and I'm also going to say something as a person who, who has always been like, the greatest america failure of american history is like the hayes compromise in the end of reconstruction.
Speaker 1:All that said, a lot of southern bitterness at the northeast is justified beyond the ending of the confederacy because it was turned into a fucking textile mill, um, and an agricultural shit post, uh, which was reliant on black labor but also on underpaid white labor, which, which, uh, no one in the northeast was particularly interested in fixing until the new deal.
Speaker 1:So, um, that that understanding. If you don't understand that, you have a hard time understanding. Like, okay, well, why are there these weird machine politics that are run by the black congressional congress in these southern states that biden wants to court? Well, because they literally were given to them, uh, in compromises with conservatives, uh, as ways to gerrymander districts and stuff, with that machine being handed over to the conservative wing of the black community in the democratic party, largely when they were being defected. When people who literally run their elections changed the the sin on the end of their name from d to r, because it wasn't even in in georgia. The democrats didn't lose, they just changed their party affiliation. When they finally lost the the state house, when they, when they finally lost the governorship, the same Dixie crats just became Republicans like overnight yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's changed her name. Yeah, man, I mean California, like it. Like I said, you know thinking, you know California cause, you know you, you know about whatever, like you said, gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris or Willie Brown or Dianne Feinstein, and just like the difference between the Central Valley California versus coastal California, here to know versus versus, yeah, versus la, versus, uh, san diego versus, you know um, far inland, uh, uh, or far you know, towards, like the border counties, you know, super rural, can I mean the rural, urban divide existence in um california, all throughout it. Um, that's what you have, those like secessionist, new state people. They want to create a new california or whatever. Um, but um, he, just here locally, like I'm in santa barbara county, I'm in santa maria, california. This is north santa barbara county, santa barbara, I mean I, I allude to this in in some in my scholarship that I when I wrote about the chumash war. Santa barbara is home to some of the wealthiest, most powerful people on the the planet. It is called the American Riviera, california's Riviera. It's beautiful.
Speaker 2:If you ever get a chance to go to Santa Barbara you'll have a good time. It's a beautiful place and I'm in the big flat, rancher Valley, ag Valley, an hour north, right at the edge of the county split, hour north right at the edge of the county split. The division, the political division in the in this county has always been north, south, liberal liberals and conservatives. You know we have north county conservatives. You know they might be more business class. You know suit and tie Republicans they might be more. You know spit to spittoon. You know fifth generation rancher. You know local landed elite could be. You know our conservative like represent representation, but I mean it's.
Speaker 2:You know Santa Barbara is known for. You know the environmental movement and the oil spill that happened out there or the oil spills that have happened out there and the response. Oil spill that happened out there or the oil spills that have happened out there and the response. Whereas you know this Valley that I'm in again, but you know before it was plant agriculture there's. It was also an oil field like this I'm we're surrounded by capped oil wells, um and uh uh.
Speaker 2:The the political divide between North and South. When I grew up there was like a move to split the County. There was a vote of a county split and it's funny because ever since we got district elections our kind of city politics has changed a little bit, but even then, like Democrats or you know more liberal candidates, they're in severe. I see it. You know it's very easy to get captured by Santa Barbara, by the machine. That's where the machine politics emanates from in in this area is from santa barbara, and I mean you have, like, huge donors to the democratic party, not just julie louis dreyfus, who live in santa barbara. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:Um, very, very important, powerful, wealthy, wealthy, wealthy people yeah, I would tell people, if you want to look for, like, like the, the secret valleys of where American wealth is outside of New York and Florida We'll talk about why it's in Florida one day, but that's beyond it you look at Woodside, where the people who are richer than Palo Alto will even allow for, and you look at Santa Barbara and then you look at, like, the nice parts of san francisco and the nice parts of la um, and this is also why I I find california's politics actually to be fascinating compared to even texas, and I find texas fascinating too. My texas listeners don't don't think I've forgotten my Tejanos out there but um, uh, y'all are weird, but um, uh, and when I, when I talk about y'all, I have to speak in my native accent but, um, uh.
Speaker 1:So for the people know that is not me culturally appropriating texas speak.
Speaker 1:I'm georgian yeah, you're from georgia, um, uh, but uh, california like political cultures in california to me were batshit. And still I started understanding the microclimates and what it kind of said, because for me new york is the democratic party's past and I mean that in in the good sense. Like they have, like they have municipal policies and stuff set up even before they went bankrupt that have kept the city from having the homeless problem in california. Has they have, uh, they have infrastructure, social infrastructure left over from after the New Deal and the Great Society that's been maintained even after a bankruptcy that has never been established in California.
Speaker 1:California has its own shitty attempt at a welfare state based on capital gains taxes.
Speaker 2:But like we used to have state mental health facilities, but again, like the birth of modern, uh, conservatism happened here and ronald reagan happened here and he deinstitutionalized the whole state. You know, and and uh, we have one not far from here, atascadero, like one of the only state hospital, mental hospitals that was left. It's because it's for the criminally insane, you know, or or it's for it's for criminals, and and so it's just like and I want to also talk a little bit about that though, because this is if you understand the history here.
Speaker 1:I mean, we're talking about history a lot. We talked about the chumas war. We'll come back to that. I promise listeners you're not just gonna yeah, all over this, but I want to. But I want to point out that the deinstitutionalization actually kind of started from legit concerns on the left and was immediately picked up by the california right. Um, to have progressives as an ally in finding a way to cheapen it because of, uh, deinstitutionalization was kind of a left-wing demand at one point.
Speaker 2:Until you know because we saw the conditions right yeah, the conditions were bad.
Speaker 1:Agency was disrespected, Um, uh, you know um, about gun control.
Speaker 2:You know, uh, reagan, and gun control after the, the Panthers. You know like, and it's so funny Cause just like another, just to bring up my, my County's example, like you know the, the, you know the, the um, the, the politics up in north county, where I'm at, just skews, you know more conservative. But it is like when people try to say california is, you know degrowth, well, where in california is degrowth? Because, like you know, the rubber stamp is heavy, where, uh, where I'm, where I live, and there's development going on all the time. So when people tell me you know nobody in California is building housing, nobody's doing it, you're wrong, you know, you just don't know where it's happening. But you're right, I mean, it's just interesting.
Speaker 1:It's degrowth in the sense that like only in the sense that property values in San Diego, la, sacramento, and they have slowed a little bit.
Speaker 2:They're not building anything in Santa Barbara, they're not building anything in San Luis Obispo, but my town is a bedroom community for those areas. I mean, the traffic on Highway 1 at 5 o'clock, you know, at the end of the day is coming back south to Santa Maria from San Luis Obispo. That's where the traffic's, on that side of the highway, you know. So we're the affordable bedroom community where it was a suburb, but now they're building up and creating more density. Building up and creating more density, but it's still. It's still where, where the place people think of and want to move because they can't get, can't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean, nobody can afford anything. You know it's, the prices are still ridiculous here in Santa Maria, but at least we have stuff going up and we have a lot of stuff going up. So you know, it's just one of those things where it's like california is not one state, california is um, and the regional politics you know. I mean just like the proximity of uh, of uh. You know I'm in between two college towns and just the difference in those college towns, you know and, and the colleges u, ucsb, you know Santa Barbara's college town and you know some of the politics, campus politics, you see, and whatnot, versus where I go, cal Poly, san Luis Obispo, which is a polytechnic, and you got tons of kids in there who are from, you know, longtime ranching families and ag business interests. I mean that college is, you know, teaching people aerospace, engineering and architecture. That's where Weird Al got his architecture degree.
Speaker 2:And like the politics on campus, you know they have the land acknowledgements and they have this and that. But man, when those Palestinian kids, you know they got their heads cracked by the campus police, you know last protest they had and a few of them got arrested like oh, because uh, boeing or lockheed was on campus. You know what I mean. And and they're not gonna you're not gonna embarrass us in front of lockheed at this school. You know it's polytechnic, uh, you know. So it's like the politics in san luis obispo have the slightest veneer of like progressivism. Look at all our bike lanes, but, goddamn, it's like there's a very conservative undercurrent. Um that, uh, san luis obispo county is also responsible for a long time held assembly district that dips into my, into my, into santa maria valley. That's been held by republicans since forever, basically.
Speaker 1:Well, well understanding. I mean, you and I are talking about this in a little way, but let's talk about why this is important, um, because, like, if you're not from california, who gives a fuck? Right, uh, uh. Except that you want to understand the weirdnesses of the way these large states and you know, here we're looking at new york, texas, california, uh and then collections of states, the mountain west, the south, has a block, uh, cascadia as a block um really affect these ideas. You actually do have to understand the weirdnesses of local inputs that are affecting the way people are thinking about political economy. I'll give you a weird example that, um, that You're talking about this in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo.
Speaker 2:Santa Maria yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think about my, my, my deep exposure into California culture, even though I, you know, if I had my way, I would break California up into 55 States, and you know a lot of other people yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would Blake most of the States up, if I'm quite honest, and then all in the mountain West I'd be like and in the, in the, in the, in the, in the in the mountain west, I'd be like, and in the in the in the north, and then in the in the northwest it'd be like and all y'all are now one state, because there's no reason we don't need two dakotas and a montana. Sorry, that's one state. Um, uh, but anyway, um, for administrative positions, um, you have to understand, like, the weirdness of california politics because, um, I remember being baffled by the fact that agriculture was so powerful in the modesto valley that they didn't meter fucking water until you almost ran out of it. Um, yeah, and I was like what you don't meter? You don't meter industrial use of water, and like, even in the, even in the crazy ass east, we do that shit. Like even in the south, like what do you want?
Speaker 1:Uh, and then that started changing and the other thing that's changed it's made that area real contested. Is it modesto, as far out as like Ripon, and Modesto is now a bedroom community for the Bay Area, where in the past it wasn't even a suburb of the Bay Area. It was its own little like mini town with some suburbs around it that serve the agricultural valley all the way up to Salinas. Well, that's the thing Right. All the way up to Salinas. Well, that's the thing Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, those areas are under constant danger of becoming the new suburb of the hinterland, of whatever industry. I mean, and that's the thing. You see it around here they're trying to entice tech people to come here. And this valley is an agricultural, you know it's an, it's an ag Valley, but they, they want, you know they were. I think everybody wanted the Amazon warehouse, but there are other companies that have. You know, I'm thinking of a tech company mind body that's in San Luis Obispo. I've known a bunch of people who've worked for them. There's call centers here that you know what I mean. They're like, they're always trying to entice that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:But but again, like it, it's funny to see, like my town, my city, go from the affordable place to live to seeing it develop to serve. You know the college towns on either side and you know everybody's it's getting harder and harder to afford to live in the city. Everybody's, it's getting harder and harder to afford to live in this city. Um, you know, and our homelessness has increased and, um, you know the people living in our river bed, quite a bit of them. Um, if you want to go on a soliloquy real quick, I'll be right back. I gotta hit the bathroom all right.
Speaker 1:Uh, for those listening because I'm probably not gonna edit this out, we took a break. Now we're back. For those of you who are wondering, why does that matter, it's just an excuse because I'm not editing it out. So, I think, when it comes to indigenous studies and also California, similarly to California, actually as an analogy, as a way to explain this, I hate the way we talk about indigeneity as a monolithic thing.
Speaker 1:Um, uh, the tribes of the of the east, uh, even if you want to call like, even calling them tribes is somewhat anachronistic uh, the peoples of the east versus the peoples of the northeast versus the peoples of central america versus the people of the West Coast proper versus the people of the Mountain West. There are interrelationships, there are similarities and differences, but they are radically different peoples and the response to them was radically different as well. And one of the things as a Marxist, one of the things I don't always love when Marxists talk about settlerism, is they kind of treat it as a homogenous process or they don't look at, they only look at the English case. They don't look at the French and Spanish case.
Speaker 2:The Spanish case is. There's a lot to it.
Speaker 1:I mean, and the role of Catholicism and the entire West Coast is important because it wasn't just the, the Spanish, trying to cut off the Russians from bringing orthodoxy down. And, for people who don't know, the fourth North American saint of orthodox Christianity is from Alaska and St Christianity is from Alaska and St Takun, and there was an Orthodox settler movement that was, you know, expanding into Canada, definitely in Alaska. That was an extension of what was done in Siberia and the far and the far Eastern of the, of the of the Tsarist empire. So like this was a multi-imperial contestation. When the english get involved in on the west coast very, very late, um, you know, basically through the mexican-american war and to some degree through the louisiana purchase, um, but the mission system is also really important in understanding the indigenous system in Seattle, but it's a different, are in the in Washington and Idaho, but it's a different. And Oregon, it's a different mission system because it's a French version, not the Spanish, and there are differences and they have different outcomes.
Speaker 2:And just the difference between all these mendicant orders and the Spanish mission system. Whether it's Jesuits or Dominicans or Franciscans or what have you, they had different approaches to it. They some one sect, might have different approach here than they did there. Natives here might behave in one way, here than that, one way, uh, here than that, you know, like in in, in one place. The franciscans are well received, like the fact that they're um ascetics, like you know that they don't have a whole lot of worldly possessions. That does well, that reads well, with some native groups. Other native groups are like man, what a bitch, like this guy doesn't even have any gold or anything hanging from. You know what I mean. So it's like that, like all of their approaches are just super complex. And then California is ecologically, materially very, you know, and you know. Think of how Mexico or Spain was behaving in Mexico over gold and silver, right, or mostly silver and you know the myth about it being mostly about gold is mostly for TV, but yes, it was silver.
Speaker 2:I mean, most of the gold that came out of Spain, that came out of Mexico to Spain, was in the first year. It was like everything that Aztecs had, whereas the real or that they were, that they were finding and mining and amounts with silver. And then you had to have, um, you know, you had to have mercury mines and salt mines and, uh, to process the silver and and, um, you know. So, you know, in some ways Spain would, they would defend their mercury mines even more. Um, passionately, my cat, uh, they'll defend their, their, you know, mercury mines even more intensely than some other areas, because they know they need those for their silver mines.
Speaker 2:And if they had known gold was in california, that you know, the hills were filled with gold as well. You know, who knows how different the alta california, the, the um, the putsch that they did in the late 1700s, like if, if, it would have been the same if they, if the spaniards, had discovered gold, but it, you know, it was much too late, uh, for them by then yeah, I mean, this is a you know.
Speaker 1:On one hand, I also don't want to, like you know, cut the catholic church.
Speaker 1:Too much slack um, let's not do that the residential schools in canada were often run by uh, but by the french catholic church. I mean, like the, you know uh, for the depopulization and settler colonization of of the americas, particularly north america, the catholic church actually has a lot to answer for. It just tended to be, it tended to be forced. I mean, I know this is this. This sounds like almost crash to use, but it tended to be forced. I mean, I know this sounds like almost crash to use, but it tended to be for softer genocide cultural and or ethnological, but not literal genocide, and so like.
Speaker 2:They weren't trying to wipe people out. I mean, do we have to pat them on the back because they wanted their labor? You know what I mean. Like we have to pat the Franciscans on the back because they didn't trying to wipe people out. I mean, do we have to pat them on the back because they wanted their labor? You know what I mean. Like we have to pat the Franciscans on the back because they didn't want to slaughter everybody, because they really wanted to have them in bonded labor. And you know I mean how.
Speaker 1:And if they marry some Spaniards, you know that's a, they're serfs anyway. I mean, we're not like I don't want to make it sound like also, like like a new Spain was super woke, like the cast of system was, you know, crazy actually and it's and it's a view of race and it led to colorism, is like, is like the simple, the like simple residue of the cast of system, right, but like even that's not totally accurate, because if you're born from a spanish moor and you're black skinned but you're from the continent and you're in north america, you're actually really high up in the casta system. Uh, even compared to like a peninsularis born white, it's, it's wild.
Speaker 1:Like it's, it's very confusing, it's um, there's also like a writ of sangre, so you could get a writ of blood, so they could literally give you a white card well, yes, said the sangre, yeah, you could, you could, you could buy to have your uh, blood cleaned, um it.
Speaker 2:And it's interesting because that plays out in the missions too. You know, you, you, at mission rebellions, you'll have an indigenous californian who's at odds with the military, military authority that's present on the missions, and they're like a mestizo, or they could even be, um, uh, you know, like, basically, joining the military made you a white. You know, in in their context, you could be, um, you know, whichever casta of a darker skin, costa, and then, if you join the military, you've become de facto white. And so you have these soldiers being like I don't know, I shouldn't have to do this labor anymore, like that was someone was reading in the hackle book. You know that they, they associated. Well, you're the Indians, you do this labor. Now, we're not, we're not anymore, we shouldn't be laboring here like this. This is, this, is not work for us.
Speaker 2:You know, they thought they'd gotten out of that, they'd gotten out of that cast, you know, and so and that's a fascinating thing about California history too, is it's Spanish, but it's also Mexican, because you had, like, the Franciscans who were coming up from you know, sarah, but his acolytes and whatnot. These were Mexican Franciscans. A lot of them had studied at the Mexican colleges that they had. So you know, it's interesting how, in some ways, some things that were used in Mexico or central to Mexico, like the encomienda, were just like, for whatever reason, were not repeated out in california.
Speaker 2:Um, but then there were just other factors, like the um, the, just by coincidence, the landscape being a little more hospitable, not like totally hospitable, but just a bit more hospitable to the spaniards and their livestock and their plants than like certain, you know, like deep in the jungle of the madre, or like yeah or in the amazon, or whatever you know yeah or even like in chiapas and oaxaca, where you're just like, okay, I'm going between desert and rainforest, like very quickly, like um alligators and pythons and mosquitoes and poisonous thing every everywhere.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no large ungulates like other than maybe a few deer um um, you know, uh, whereas california. That we shouldn't, we shouldn't overestimate the hospital, the hospitality of california's environment, because, like no, yeah, it's true uh, uh. As a person who recently drove from utah to uh to palo alto and back, the daughter pass fucking, sucks, sucks dude, uh and that and that's, but then again, that's why the missions hug the coast.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean. And that's why the chumash did so well in santa barbara and on the channel islands, like that's. That was their source of abundance was, you know, the ocean? I mean, I grew up, I grew up out here. I used to go to pismo beach as a kid and you see bubbles in the sand. You just dunk your hand in there and come up with a clam, like you can't do that anymore, obviously because they're they're mostly all gone, um, but you know that, like there is this area, there is something. You know this. You know it's, it's very mean. The Chumash wore hardly any clothes. You know what I mean. They, they were very, um, you know they had very, yeah, the Northern bays.
Speaker 1:It's not. The weather's not as unpredictable yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, and it's not a desert like LA.
Speaker 1:you know what I mean in the world want to live in santa barbara you know what I mean. Like get santa barbara and woodside.
Speaker 1:However, yeah, to put it up, the weather's a little crazier up there in in the north bay, I mean so um and california is weird even by us standards, because the interplay of coast and mountain and various mountain ranges, including mountain ranges that are underwater peeps what do you think the Bay Area is Leads to a particularly strange set of microclimates, even compared to other large states like Texas has microclimates, but it's nothing like California, where the Bay Area's weather is almost counter-cyclic to nature. It's cold in the summer and not really cold in the winter. It's like what?
Speaker 2:the fuck. This area is prone to drought. We're finally out of our historic massive drought that we've had. And that was another thing that, like historians tried to argue that the Chumash went to the missions cause there was drought. You know, but it's like that's. That's a very simple explanation.
Speaker 2:The Chumash lived here for thousands and thousands of years. You think they couldn't cope with a drought. You know what I mean Like. So you know it's there, just from where I'm sitting, I can be in, you know, and drive less than an hour. I can be in sand dunes that don't hardly exist anywhere else, like estuaries and sand dunes. I can be in oak savannas. I can be in, you know, rocket. You know some of the. You know southern mountain ranges. I can be in the mountains, snow caps, sometimes parts of the year, within sight of where I'm at. I could drive, you know, inland and be in upper desert, you know, in less than an hour.
Speaker 2:So you know it's, and these people knew how to navigate it. You know, they knew like it is an interesting thing that the Chumash, who were some of them during the rebellion, hopped in their plank canoes. They, you know, got their old, dusted off the plank canoes and went out to chill on the islands while all the the violence was going on. But even more people went inland knowing that it was away from the ocean. It was away from you know what they're, what they were used to living with, but they it's interesting what they went to a lake inland and um they, they behaved in some ways I've done some study of like slaver bull and they behaved in some ways like maroon colonies in place, you know, like in jamaica or um, cuba or elsewhere, where they were just so hard to get to and they were living, you know whatever. It's like rambo style.
Speaker 2:You know, the deeper they go out into the bush, that you know. Uh, that I have. You know I read uh, mexican soldiers going fuck cause they live out here. They can eat. You know everything that lives in there and we're just getting bit by bugs and every. You know it's. It's different. We can't get them out of there, you know. So, um, the material, the, the, the material aspect of that, that's something that has changed in mission history in the last like 20, 30 years. Just looking at the material basis of and the material culture of a native group, like you said, it could be totally different across different parts of the state, depending what was available to those people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, this is another thing that you know. We've been talking a lot about California, because that's clearly your passion.
Speaker 2:It's easy, it's you know's path of least resistance.
Speaker 1:Sometimes, For those of you who don't know I'm actually. I became obsessed with California. The same reason I became obsessed with Texas, although Texas was interesting, because I'm like why are you part of the South Texas? I don't know that I trust you. Why are you part of the South Texas? I don't know that, I trust you.
Speaker 2:This whole Republican history you claim to just feels fishy to me.
Speaker 1:And why were you a slave state?
Speaker 2:But anyway, Well, there's a new book that just came out California a slave state.
Speaker 1:Well, the thing is California kind of was, as was, I mean, weirdly like the southern half of Utah was, which is often not discussed.
Speaker 2:Southern California.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's. You know now. I mean some of the non-slave slaves on the West Coast, not the East Coast Sorry, we get my coast flipped. Like Oregon, it wasn't a slave state, but Oregon was a Klan colony.
Speaker 2:It was a white supremacist colony. Big time, Big time man.
Speaker 1:And I say Klan colony, I'm not even joking, like that's not like. Go read their first constitution.
Speaker 2:Yeah, go read their first constitution. That was something that bugged me. I finally watched Deadwood and there was a black character in Deadwood. He's like I just want to get out of here and make it to Oregon and I was like no, do you really want? To go to Oregon.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Like I don't think you would have wanted you might want to get out of here and go to California or Washington, but if you're going to Oregon, so um, a professor I study with at cal poly named cameron jones, dr jones, he, um, he wrote a pretty good mission rebellion book about uh peru the peruvian missions, uh, rebellion, some peruvian missions, uh, it's called in.
Speaker 2:Uh, was it in? Um something to two masters or whatever I gotta. I feel bad. I'm blanking on his um. I'm trying to look and find it in in service of two masters. I believe it's called Um, but he has since like kind of turned his focus more to Afro California. It was like, actually, uh, black Californians in California history, um, cause they were here, even though they're, they're, you know, not exactly mentioned. You know, a lot of black people in California would be identified under some other designation.
Speaker 1:Right yeah, this is also true in Mexico where, like Afro-Mexicans, is kind of buried because the caste is kind of buried.
Speaker 1:Then you have to find, you have to trace people back to Moros and then figure out if the Moros are former Muslims or if they're black. The moros are, are former muslims are. If they're black, um and uh. Usually they're black, but not always, because you'll hear sometimes like oh, we don't have a lot of africans here, and I'm like dude, uh, you know, in mexico, and I'm like, I'm like dude, have you seen pleblen and porto vallartin cuisine? Like that's fucking african. I don't know what you're on. Um, uh, like that's a big.
Speaker 2:That's a big thing. We think we have trouble talking about that here. Um, brazil, mexico, that, just that history of, of slavery, because that's that was part of the castas too. The castas were divvying up, not just what happens when spaniard gets with a with an indian, what happens when the indian gets with an esclavo or an esclavo with a. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:And so it was like all this, um, it's a big mess right, yeah, and you're right, like, like, uh, mexico didn't outlaw slavery till what? The 1840s. I mean, that's kind of what prompts uh the tejas rebellion, which they invited. The mexicans invited uh, gringos. They invited gringos to settle um because they didn't have enough people to send north. Uh and um, that was a mistake. Um and uh, uh. And then they outlawed slavery and the the gringos were like nah, uh, uh also.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all of a sudden go ahead we're gonna, we're gonna blame the stew for, for you allowing the stew to attack us, uh, and we'll use that as a pretext to leave and keep our slavery. Although even that's complicated because, like houston, or houston if you want to call him by his corrupted Tejas form of his name, houston is what it originally is. We know that from the street in New York and the county named after him in Georgia Was not a pro-slavery guy. So Texas' history is also wildly weird, but tied into the same thing where there's competing settler-colonial items, basically, and then like there are Spanish missions in Texas, right.
Speaker 1:And then there's this need the encomienda system didn't go up that high for whatever reason, and so they needed other ways to bring industry in, and that led to them inviting dissident gringos in, and, you know, all kinds of haywire ensues.
Speaker 2:But my favorite is always the San Patricios, but go ahead, oh yeah, they're fun. That's just a fun story.
Speaker 1:But I mean, one of the things that we have to quit doing in the United States, I think, is I complain a lot about the United States left, doesn't know the history of the United States left before, say, 1965.
Speaker 1:Right Like but I also complain a lot that, like the united states, left doesn't understand, like, even when it's adopting, like, settler frameworks somewhat accurately, but using them in this really broad way, that it doesn't understand our interconnections of of european colonial history, indigenous history, the, the transatlantic world, etc. In shaping what this is um and uh, in creating something like, yeah, whiteness comes from europe, but, my god, the north americans perfected it because otherwise we were going to have to deal with our ethnic differences and we didn't want to do that. So, and whiteness was provisional, you could kick people out or add people in, depending and you know how we handle Latin people, even to this day is tied into that.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, yeah, absolutely, Like I live, I live in an ag valley. Yeah, absolutely, I live in an ag valley. Some of the families that own land here in the valley have been here and owned that land since it was Mexico or not long after. There are rancher families here in the valley that maybe they came, know they. They came up and made money. They came from mexico not too long ago, um, or, or you know they. They could just be, like I said, descended from people who came out here a long time ago, um, but you know, like that, like I would see this, I noticed this growing up in this, in this valley, um, growing up, it seemed more, um, like the dynamic was the.
Speaker 2:The dynamic when, when you were young and and you learn, was oh, there's like white people and latinos in in the city, there's a lot of latinos and and. But then, growing up, I was like, well, you know, there's a lot of different. I, growing, I knew kids who maybe their parents were from Mexico, maybe they were born in Mexico or, but not just Mexico. I knew kids you know who's them or their family came from Peru or Argentina or Puerto Rico or Colombia, like I do a lot.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of people here in this valley but specifically what you see play out in the labor is you know, you get to, you get to, you know, I get to know enough about the cities that grow up that there's a racial caste system in this city where you have in still indigenous, the indigenous people from Mexico are here working the ag, you know, working in the fields, working in the agricultural industry, in the labor, and then you were, and then you look at the management, not sometimes the fields, working in the agricultural industry, in the labor, and then you look at the management, sometimes the ownership. The ownership could be white, blanco, weddle, totally. The ownership could be mestizo or what we would.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it could be Criollo, mestizo, whatever. Yeah, criollo is the Mexican term.
Speaker 2:There's also a bunch of Portuguese here in the valley. It takes many, many flavors. But you'll see this dynamic of I did it on my channel once where we had a video from one of the fields where you have a four-foot-something Oaxacan woman who speaks Mixteco as her first language, as her primary language, trying to argue for better pay with a six something mestizo guy, who's you know, looming over her and enunciating hispanish slowly, like condescendingly, condescending to her, shitting on the way she speaks spanish, which is in her first language. So like that, right there, that's the thing. You know what I mean. Like and you know you look around and and the architecture of municipal buildings, government buildings, is mission style, you know. Like the, you know we celebrate Spanish settler colonialism in California, you know so yeah, just like Texas.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's Texas in this way, california is actually very similar to your arch nemesis, Texas.
Speaker 2:A lot of Texans, it's sad to say a lot of texans now are embarrassed californians, yeah, I know a lot of them I know and a lot of texans resent the number of embarrassed californians in texas, but exactly, well, but then texans actually come to california visit and they oh you know I didn't get assaulted by purple haired homeless, you know, whatever, whatever they think is going to happen, no, homeless people have the money for purple hair, but I mean, I do think they're like California.
Speaker 1:California's political problems to me actually illustrate what I'm afraid of of the future of the Democratic Party, though, and that is that it has fairly progressive policy but can't fix anything for the poor at all.
Speaker 2:At all, at all.
Speaker 1:And it has not been able to undo any of the conservatism that was born there, even though they run the political machine of the large state there. Even though they run the political machine of the large state, like the micro politics really matters, and most people even most californians, I don't think know it anymore. Um, they might know it for their city, but they don't know it for their, for like all the regions of their state. Um, uh, that's also true for utah, by the way. I mean, like, like, california to me is interesting in that california and texas are the best way to talk about this, because they're so fucking big. It's so diverse.
Speaker 2:It's like 100 million people between our two states maybe. Yeah, I mean, like you know, it's a lot of Americans.
Speaker 1:I was talking about it Like 17% of all economic activity comes out of either New York or California, but then if you add Texas into that, it's like 26 or something Like it's a lot about it like 17 of all economic activity comes out of either um new york or california, but then if you add texas into that, it's like something like 26 or something like it's a lot. Um, uh, so like three of the 50 states uh really do drive a lot of this stuff um, and part of that is by historical accident of of size and ports um more than anything else.
Speaker 2:It's so funny like that that is something I point out to people so often is is, you know they go, man, hollywood and the bay area. It's like, man, there were two massive shipping ports like, yeah, it all starts there. Man, like that, that, you know, how do you get an industry you know to to build up? Or I mean you, agriculture is the heart of this state. It has been for a long time. I mean that that's what the that's what the Franciscans were doing in the missions was agriculture, like tens of thousands of goats and sheep and and you know they're growing.
Speaker 1:That's what you guys Lima beans. Yeah, yeah, there's really interesting scholarship about indigenous resistance via I mean yeah, yeah, yeah, and there's actually like that.
Speaker 1:There's really interesting scholarship about indigenous resistance via and Spanish Franciscan inculcation via the arts, via music, via paintings, via iconography. So yeah, I'm going to let my Pierre Bardot fan show up, but I actually said this. I was talking to a friend of mine actually in Woodside the other day, one of the other days, a couple weeks ago.
Speaker 1:This is an interest in my, in my, in my personal life, but I was, you know, in this area and I went and looked at my friend and I was like when did our bourgeoisie become so fucking boring? Looked at my friend and I was like when did our bourgeoisie become so fucking boring? Um, and and I said that because I'm like if they're boring and don't understand art patronage, they don't understand social reproduction, which means we're fucked because we have a shitty, blind, futureless, boring ass elite, um, that that has come from a particular subset of the bourgeoisie, that uh sucks. And I think you're absolutely right. And this is something marxists often miss, because they they think superstructure means not important, um, and that that could be further from the truth, like even marx angles realize that's a feedback loop, it's a circle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:But to get into this a little bit more specifically. Yeah, of course people were competing with the arts. I remember also, like Catholicism is weirdly Syncratic, and it was in Europe too. But, like you know, the first time you go see the rain dance for mary with people in like mexica headdresses in northern mexico, you start realizing, holy shit, they were okay with more than I thought, like as long as you dressed it up in the presence of the virgin of guadalupe or some saint or as I like to talk about southern Mexico. So much the passion of Thunder Jesus, which is the real thing. What do you mean, thunder Jesus? Well, they got people to convert by a cross being struck by lightning in this area of a sky. God, totally, and so like you have the passion of thunder, jesus.
Speaker 1:I don't really know how to explain it to you other than that um yeah, the, uh, the.
Speaker 2:The true master is supposed to have um, you know the. The interesting thing is, first of all, the, the syncretism. Some historians argue that it's been overstated. You know that. Like you know I mean talk about cafeteria Catholic, like picking what you want. You know what I mean. Like the natives, you know they were basically it was window dressing. You know, the parts of Christianity they appreciated the most are what already, like you said, resembled what they already believed anyway. So the Chumash might have been doing a little bit of this and that you know. I think they might've taken a cross with them, or or some of the um.
Speaker 2:That's another interesting thing in in, in mission history is the, the, the. There's an obsession by the Franciscans on all their stuff, all the little amounts that they need to, you know, do a mass or do, uh, you know whatever, this ride, or that um, and you know the, or that um, and you know the. Or you know the franciscans, trying to be good pr uh, campaigners as they were, may make a big point to say well, when, the, when, the, when the neophytes set sanny and is on fire, our devout ones ran in and saved whatever, this tapestry or the vestibule or or some other thing. You know, like the, the, the Franciscans tried to elevate natives that you know attach themselves to Christianity in some way. But one of my again I can't remember which book it was, but somebody, one of the Franciscans, said their faith is held on by pins, you know, by tax, like it's. It's it's barely there at all, but I mean that's true for Europeans too.
Speaker 1:I mean, this is one of the things where I always like like uh, have you seen christmas festivals in medieval? I mean, obviously we haven't seen them, but just read about them. They were fucking orgies like nuts dude.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they made fun of the rich they.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they were, they were occasionally they would kill a rich person like bro, when you learn from history that, um, that, like the dickens, like the scrooge story, is to try to like, make the rich people feel OK about getting like basically ransacked by poor people. Every year, you know, around Christmas time, the poor would come to your house and say, mr Scrooge, we're going to kill you unless you give us that. You know he wasn't flicking the coin like that whole morality place so that it's's for the rich to feel good about. You know what I mean like right, yeah, it's, it's wild and and and. Mission history, california history. You know, uh, on one hand, you don't want to overstate you, like you said, you don't want to overstate things and be like, you know there are plantations with bells on them. It was, it was slave, it was slavery. You know it's a little more complicated than that.
Speaker 1:But it isn't far away from plantations with bells on them either. I mean, the encomienda system is plantation with bells on them Exactly.
Speaker 2:And when you look at some of just what Sarah was witnessing like soldiers lassoing Native women and raping them and his, well, that's just the soldiers I can't do anything about. You know what I mean. Like that, like when you see all that stuff play out, like I get um, you know it's, it's interesting man like that at the school I do, I go to you know again, like they're training, they are training the uh the bourgeois, they're, they're they're training the uh the bourgeois, or they're they're they're training the um. You know the next generation of you know elite business and Silicon Valley, or or. You know what I mean. Like there, there's a lot of engineering that goes on at that school, um, but you know they'll do a land back, or or or a land acknowledgement and like, down the street my ancestors had a land grant. You know what mean.
Speaker 2:So I, I have a a like my own personal relationship to this. You know, like I, my family has a graveyard. That's um, we still maintain that's like historically designated spot, you know, and it's like um, you know, I'm sure I'm. I pass by my distant cousins all the time, uh, all around, all around me, because you know that there are, there were different waves of settler colonialism out here. You know my dad's um mom came from scotland in the 60s or whatever, but you know I had a my on my mom's side.
Speaker 1:I had a grandmother who got here in the 1860s probably right, yeah, I mean, one of the ironies of settler history is it's formerly people being settled who are often the forefront vanguard of settlers, like it's people who are, you know, like, if you want to I mean even in the United States if you want to staff an army and keep people from rebelling against you, what do you do? Well, you attract all the Southerners into the military, like, that's who got land grants.
Speaker 2:You got a land grant if you served in the military and that was it. It was a reward for being a part of the martial uh efforts of this, of this project. You know, and and I think that that's also what's fascinating to see in california, history is, you do have these competing interests. You have the franciscan. From the beginning, spain and Mexico wanted to control the California missions. Spain wanted them to be secularized quickly, but the Franciscans were able basically to exert some of their influence, because it was so difficult to deal with even establishing, establishing agriculture, but also just the natives. The natives just kept dying. They didn't want that. Like you know, we said softer genocide. They didn't want all these people to die, they wanted them to work for them. You know what I mean, right? Um, so you know, just seeing it, you know, you, you have an idea of it. I mean it's definitely interesting because I grew up. I grew up here and in fourth grade, fourth grade we all did the mission project. The kids making them out of sugar cubes are now little models out of the missions and just in my lifetime, la Purisima is a very well-preserved state historic park. You should check it out if you're ever around. They don't really. They went from in my, just from when I was a kid, having, like elderly white people acting in character as the indigenous, you know, making candlesticks or whatever other thing you know, or looming there was actually quite an industry of loom weaving at these missions around here. But you know, seeing, just from that to now, they still don't mention the rebellion. I mean, this mission was a battleground. You know, seeing, just from that to now, they still don't mention the rebellion. I mean this mission was a battleground, it was a war zone and it's not really talked about.
Speaker 2:And the other thing about La Purisima they held La Purisima and the original site of the mission had been decimated more than 10 years earlier by a massive earthquake and flooding like more than 10 years earlier by a massive earthquake and flooding Like. I can't imagine if you're on some religious mission project, if your mission gets a massive earthquake, you know, basically runs a fissure through the middle of it, topples the whole thing down, then there's mudslides and rain. So a lot of the the indigenous that held La Purisima had been involved in rebuilding it at a new location, just like a decade before. In fact, one of the leaders of the rebellion, pacomio, had been involved in rebuilding it at a new location, just like a decade before. In fact, one of the leaders um of the rebellion, pacomio was, his name was like a skilled carpenter because he'd been involved in that um, you know, so, so, and that's the other weird thing, once you get into also alta california, they gave uh, certain uh in indigenous and indian uh people within the mission some political power.
Speaker 2:They had, like you know, basically al-kaldes or whatever you know, who were basically acted, uh, you know, on behalf of, as, like, middle management between the franciscans and the indigenous, you know, and then those people did it was a double-edged sword that that's the guy who ends up, you know, some, some of those Alcalde's end up leading this rebellion, and that's what I really am fascinated by this, by the Chumash Wars, because it really shows that these people were skilled in a lot of different ways and once they were given any little bit of military training or or or political power, they used it against their captors, um, uh, and, and they were pretty well organized and they did quite well and they, they got pretty close um to, you know, at least overthrowing those missions. But you know, um, that's why I'm fascinated not just by revolution but counter-revolution and the contours of the counter-revolution. The Chumash War is pretty fascinating as well.
Speaker 1:Well, I would like to say that I think Marxism is a history, is a theory, as much of counter-revolution as it is a revolution, and yes, I'm stealing that from emma, but nonetheless I think he's correct about that. Um, uh, I would also think what I, what I challenge people to take away from this wide-ranging conversation, is that knowledge production god, I hate using that term, but whatever uh, knowledge production, uh, in the left does have to be much broader than a just theory. Theory is important. It gives us our norms, it gives us our way to talk about this, as you talked about today. We can't talk about this without historiography, and the historiographic choices matter. They really do. Whether or not you counter the, the chumash war, as a war or as rebellion or as an insurrection, kind of does matter. And similarly to the king george war, our rebellion are the, the, the irkory wars, etc.
Speaker 1:Um, I also think class history is more complicated in in the united states that we tend to give it credit for, both, in the you know, glorious working class american sense that quotes, that shuts out the settlerism, or, conversely, in federalism that pretends that all the working class was unilaterally okay with what was happening to the indigenous people because they weren't um um, even in new spain, um, you know yes yeah, yeah, that's true, and and just the intermarriage alone, like uh, um speaks to that and and you know, yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to mean to no yeah, I mean, well, this is the problem with talking about people's like as if, uh, they're static and shut down at the point they enter, they interact with settlers because, um, these cultures are still, you know, I, even in indigenous studies, sometimes there's an attempt to like push post-settler stuff like horses way, way back in the past and like there's not a lot of evidence for it. There's some, I'm not gonna lie, there's some, but there's not a lot. Um, and I get that, I get even why you'd want to do that. But I also feel like that freezes these cultures as like, oh, they were developing and then they met white people and they froze or died, and that's just not true.
Speaker 1:The Chumash still have a history, even though their past has largely been erased from them. And, and understanding, you know, for the modern Chumash, the Chumash war is kind of where it begins, you know, and how they got screwed by the Mexicans and the and the Americans later. I mean, like you know, there are still chumash around, but there's not a, they're not like the dna or the dna, there's not a ton like they're, they're, they're, they're the reservation that they do have.
Speaker 2:The nation they do have here in the county is tiny. Um, I mean, there was a massive controversy of them. They bought a piece of land just across the highway from their reservation, where they have a casino. Ironically enough, they bought this land from Fess Parker, the Hollywood actor who played Davy Crockett for Disney. Yeah, and this was very controversial. He basically sold them on his deathbed, I've been told, which was very controversial. He basically sold them on his deathbed, I've been told, which was very controversial in the valley.
Speaker 1:Um, I mean, they're like dirty settler colonialists, sell, sell these indigenous people a chunk of land.
Speaker 2:Well, this is like. This is the thing, like I, it was called camp for the land. When they bought it they had to go that our county would not, wouldn't speak with them, wouldn't sit down with them. The like the, the feds, the bureau of indian affairs told them like you like said you have to sit down and speak with these people, other county wouldn't do it. Um, there's just this very I mean in san yanez, in that valley, you know, which is like again, like that's where neverland ranch, and you know, I mean, watch out, david crosby might hit you with his tesla. You know, if you're out for a jog, like there's money out there and and um, in san janez, like when this camp four controversy was going on, you'd have these people show up to the meetings at the richard spencer haircuts, just railing at at you know, the tribe. And these people are just directly descended from the folks who took over that valley, you know what I mean, from the Chumash. And it was never part of the plan to give them that reservation, let alone let them expand it. But they're about to open a cultural center and museum this year on that land that they ended up going around the county to. Of all people, doug LaMalfa, the Republican representative who introduced the bill to Congress, and they, they were able to get it annexed. Um, so, you know, like the struggle's real, uh, for the Chumash, and I know, I know I know folks who are Chumash and I didn't ever you know, it's just one of those I wrote about the the war for when I worked at the paper and I had a, but this buddy of mine who read it later, you know, uh, talked to me about it and he was just like he's like, yeah, he's like thanks for writing it because, like, growing up here we knew about this. We would sit there in fourth grade and we knew about this but and we just sat there while everyone else didn't talk about it. You know, um, so, just like, on a local level, this is one of those things where people don't know that the chumash led.
Speaker 2:The chumash led a rebellion against the missions. You know that was the largest uh mission rebellion in alta california, like thousands of them. You know, essentially, either fled or fought across three mission. You know it's metal as fuck man. They set one on fire. You know they, uh, either fled or fought across three missions. You know it's metal as fuck man, they set one on fire. You know they stole all the best shit from Santa Barbara. You know they held Santa La Parisima for a month and fortified it. They were ready to fight for it.
Speaker 2:And when they finally did surrender, out there near Bakersfield, they did it with. I mean, they had pomp and circumstance, much like a state. They waved flags, they shot off ceremonial guns to indicate that they were parlaying and meeting peacefully. Like you know, these were people who already had a dynamic way of living before contact. But then, throughout all the turbulent you know revolutionsolutions that happened because of Spanish colonialism, they were there, adapting to it. They were there, they're still here, but they were rolling with the punches. Every oppressed people tries to make the system work for them, whether they're enslaved people trying to sue for their freedom or what have you.
Speaker 2:But you know there's a lot of examples of it out here. It's super fascinating, I mean, and you know, still strong Catholicism within, you know, the community within Chumash Not all of them, obviously, but you know, the more folk I talk to and I'm always putting that out there I just want to hear from people who can tell me more about it. But it's just, you know, and again just understanding this area and the politics of this area the, the industry, the money, where the money is in this area, you know it's, it's. You know again, like the Padres of that time wanted to be stationed in Santa Barbara because it was so beautiful but plentiful, it's still the same today. Like all the Franciscan scholars, they really want to get a job at Mission Santa Barbara because it's not just beautiful but there's a lot of power and influence, I guess you could say, in the area no-transcript.
Speaker 1:Someone the other day about that. You know California ideology essay from the 1980s that got repopularized recently and I was like maybe it's the early 1990s. It's a British guy who wrote it and on one hand I think that that essay is accurate about Silicon Valley and was predicting where it was going to go in a pretty accurate way, and in another hand it doesn't really understand either United States or California California.
Speaker 1:And so while the outsider-ness actually allows you to see things, you can't see as an insider from California, I'm probably sure people would be shocked by the predictions that were right from that essay 30 years ago. But I'm also. There's stuff that it doesn't see and get and it actually leads you to misunderstand all the American culture. And because most Americans don't have a good sense of where they're from and live and the real history of that, they often can be hoodwinked by things that are actually not really true and projected back on us. And then there's weird stuff Like I've talked about, like how european anti-americanism is actually weirdly based on the class sensibilities of the new york times, like, like. And they're like. What do you mean? I'm like they're.
Speaker 1:They're mocking americans the same way, you know, elite professionals mock poor people oh yeah, and they are doing it in an american context, while claiming to be european supremacists or are actually good european cosmopolitans or whatever. Um, you know, uh, and I think you can get hoodwinked by that if you don't know your own history. Simultaneously, I don't think a lot of europeans actually understand their history particularly deeply, although they tend to understand it a little bit better than we do.
Speaker 2:Um, and I found it. Ever since I started studying history academically, I found most people who want to talk to you about history. It's just mostly pop history, it's what they saw in a movie, um, or, you know, like collective memory or whatever. You you know what I mean. It's very vague and once you actually start talking about real history, you always have to say, well, it's a little more complicated than that, and then springboard from there. But people's sense of who they are, where they come from.
Speaker 2:California is interesting that way, because there was this movement. You know, santa Maria used to be called Central City, you know, but there was this movement 100 years ago to well, let's, you know, let's embrace the heritage, right, and now it's just like you don't even think about it, it's just the backdrop. You know what I mean. Spanish tile is everywhere, but it was first brought here to so they wouldn't set it out, set the mission on fire. You know, and and um, that that's what, um, man, we didn't even get to talk about, like gramsci or foucault, and applying those ideas to, like, you know, the, the, the hegemony, um, you know, just like, how spanish colonialism exists in california. It's just like it's just in the air. You know what I mean and, and you know, I wouldn't be here, my dna strand wouldn't be here if it weren't where, you know, there's the, the material, and then there's the culture too. You know, and just how california's played out in our culture, um well, you guys, are.
Speaker 1:I mean, I always talk about world systems theories as applied to within a nation, but you guys are both, uh, a place with your own core and periphery, as we've made abundantly clear in this right and you're also the one of the three internal cores of the United States, as I've also tried to hint at. It's so weird.
Speaker 2:And it's it's like it's totally fractal too because, like you know, you have LA versus the, the Inland Valley, or the Bay versus, you know, the, the, the Inland, and then, just within this County, santa Barbara versus Santa Maria. You know you have that, you have that same thing repeated almost like fractally. You know you have that same thing repeated almost like fractally. But you know, there's always some place where the ruling class need to get away from all their hustle and bustle, and that's what Santa Barbara was. Then they crested the mountains and San Ynez became that. Now they've gotten even farther south. They've taken over this little one-on-one town called Los Alamos, just north of Santa Maria. It's called, they call it Little LA, but Los Alamos. It used to be like a farm worker community. In fact, los Alamos is where they put the Chumash after the missions Right and they're up in the north of the mountain.
Speaker 1:The valleys play a similar role to the mountains and the lower Appalachia.
Speaker 1:Yes, when like when I was a kid, play a similar role to the mountains and, uh, the lower appalachia where, like, where, like, uh, when I was a kid we still had living memory of them bringing electricity to north georgia in the fucking 60s, um, whereas today that is one of the most reactionary parts of the country, because that's where I mean. That's where, like the, the nouveau reis have gentrified the fuck out of the rural landscape to the point where, like, the mountains went from being hill people, country and, oh my god, and lower appalachia to like compounds, compounds for, for, uh, people running out of atlanta who want to hide their money. Um, and that shift happened in my lifetime. I saw it happen, um and um, whereas I saw the central part of the of georgia, which used to be this very, it was very, uh, dependent on paper mill, tobacco and and military manufacturing, get screwed over in the military reshuffling. So military Keynesianism went away, the paper mill became less important and went away, and then tobacco consolidated and went away and basically it became, like Gabe Renance writes about, like the industrial Midwest.
Speaker 1:This city, macon, which is not an industrial Midwestwestern city, had the same patterns of detroit because of the, the, the hollowing out of the center of the state, which used to be kind of a industrial and and local shipping hub, uh, for, for you know, cars into Atlanta, savannah, columbus, which Columbus is military, atlanta is arts and production and basically like little LA now, and and and Savannah is both tourism and a major fucking port for the East Coast.
Speaker 1:So those things together really like you want to understand a lot of the weird tensions and a lot of the racial tensions and a lot of why, like, for example, why are black people becoming more and more, black men in particular, becoming more and more conservative?
Speaker 1:You need to study places like central Georgia to understand the dynamics of that system, the change in the role of the church, the hollowing out of the social system, uh, the way black men were systematically shut out of having a voice and now that they kind of have one, they're kind of tired of liberal speaking for him all the fucking time like um, it's, it's this shift. And if you understand the political economy and the history of the area and I do think you have to understand both the marxists will sometimes pretend like this historical differences are just like abstractions of capital and manifest like no, they really do matter. Like there's a reason why georgia isn't quite the same as south carolina, for example, like and that has to do the fact that georgia actually started out although it gave it up really quick as a non-slave state, um, or not. Well, it wasn't a state yet a non-slave colony, and then it gave up the ghost after 20 years because it was fucking hard.
Speaker 1:Um, like, um so it's, you know, and it is something you have to know about regional history and, uh, I think it leads to, um, you know, a lot of understandings about, like the weirdness of modern political stuff in the South where people are going. Even I was like, wait, my state's purple now. Um, when you look at the long history of my state, I'm like actually it doesn't make sense, like I just wasn't thinking about it.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, yeah, well, I mean in this history that we've been speaking to spanish colonialism. You know mexican history. You know it's like or everybody acts, um, or you know only I guess idiots act, surprised that latinos don't just automatically vote for, uh, democrats. You know by that it's not just a waiting game on demographics, that latino men or women can be captured by conservative. Well, yeah, no shit, sherlock, you know what I mean. Like if you catholicism, for fuck's sake.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean who gets to immigrate here um uh tensions within the latin community.
Speaker 2:Um, uh, like the difference was between, like, creole and chicano and stuff like that like yeah, I mean chicano, uh, or like I, I know people who, in their lifetime, they like they are. They were born in Mexico, they've come here, they collected benefits, they're now a citizen and they're shitting on the people who, god damn it, they just want to get here, collect the benefits. You know what I mean. I know people who are first generation. We don't want them here. You know what I mean of it. You know what I mean I. I know people who are first generation. We don't want them here. You know what I mean. Like I, I had a um, I had hired a journalist who wasn't from here and she's just some white kid from the midwest and she basically has whiplash because she goes to like a community meeting here in town and it was the opposite of what she expects.
Speaker 2:There's all these latinos going like we don't want. We don't want them here, we don't want, uh, it's for H2A housing, for federal farm worker housing. Basically, trumpism. You know our, uh, our conservative city politics. Where it was was totally fine, having a nice facility built here in town. Embrace Trumpism. Um, we actually had. I mean, that's all. That's a whole other subject. It's getting late, but, like um, there was a woman murdered in Santa Maria by an immigrant that Trump was bringing up her name during the election. But again, this journalist had whiplash because there's a bunch of first generation or second generation Latinos saying all this stuff, we don't want them here. And then there's these white. It's the wealth class, it's the ranchers, the owners, who are like we got to be sensitive Because they have a labor shortage. We have like millions of dollars worth of crop rotting in the fields because they're literally there aren't enough people out here, yeah.
Speaker 1:Talk about this in Wyoming. Enough people out here. Um, yeah, talk about this in wyoming. Um, interestingly, the the ranchers sided with the progressives against the conservatives in wyoming for building the uh immigration prison by ice here. The reason why we kind of won that um was you chase away our workforce? Yeah, was ranchers going like you're gonna change the way she fucking labor.
Speaker 2:Those are our latins like I mean that's how that's how it operates here, like literally.
Speaker 2:I mean, there was, there was, uh, just over the the river, uh, santa maria river, in slow county. They were building h2a. This is a farm, this is a farm family that goes back. They got land they're sitting on. They're building housing on land they already own just to house their workforce because they need people.
Speaker 2:So bad that the the sorry that we don't have the invasion. As you know, all the conservative talk radio around here would say we don't have an invasion of undocumented people coming here to work. They're just not. My next door neighbor is an H2A house, you know. So like they buy up old seedy motels in town and all of a sudden they they're not targets of human trafficking and whatever kinds of crime anymore, these seedy hotels, because they're just guys who are tired and just been working all day. So there's all these dynamics going on. Oh, there was a H-2A farm work housing being built in the Pomo and someone torched it. You know racial terrorism. You know what I mean. Like that, I I see three percenter stickers along highway, one in the back of dudes trucks. You know what I mean like everybody's out here everybody's out
Speaker 1:here, you know yeah, well, I mean one of the things I always like that you want to find the real, fucking scary reactionaries. You don't look, you look in california ain't one state man.
Speaker 1:No, and actually I have a theory about why conservatives in areas where they come close to liberals, like in California, like in Florida, even though they won in Florida essentially and they lost in California why they're so extreme. I mean because basically in places that are monolithically soft C conservative, like Utah, there's actually several forms of conservatism in the legislature, some of which are basically the same thing as Democrats, yes, whereas in these places where it's contested, there is a real tendency to pull in either direction. But one more thing, and I think I want to end off this when people are wondering, like what's going to happen in the next election and why we should start being aware of class stuff in a more serious way, even if you care about racial stuff, a lot of lower middle class black people out of New York taking extreme anti-immigrant stances because they feel like their social welfare net is under threat by these immigrants and in a week since they're right because the federal government puts the onus on paying for that stuff on the states, even though the states don't control their immigration policy, yes, the feds will help, but not a lot, not as much as it costs. So in this sense that it's actually exacerbating tensions between non-white groups who are competing for resources that shouldn't need to be competing in one of the richest cities and one of the richest countries in the fucking world like it's. It's ridiculous, and yet that's where we are.
Speaker 1:We're gonna see that sentiment capitalized a lot on in the next election, and people who are still fighting the old fights from the bush and obama years are going to be completely blindsided by it, even though there's been warnings for three years, like and this is why trying to bracket out class politics as if different groups, even the chamas, don't have classes themselves, is a big fucking mistake, like um, and to really understand some of these, these, uh, these subtle class problems, as we're talking about and you know, in santa barbara, you actually do have to know local history and local conditions to be able to address it in any real way, because it's different in different places, sometimes radically, um, and that's my last takeaway from what we've been talking about. Thank you, joe. Where can people did you even still publish stuff? I don't know if politicalpaincom.
Speaker 2:Political pain on youtube. Follow me on youtube. Um, I'm gonna get back on the horse. I just I've.
Speaker 2:You know, honestly, like you know, um, michael rang in my yeah, I gotta finish my master's key. Michael was ringing in my ears the word a historical, um, and then, and then, just you know, listen honestly, listening to you and listening to others, where I just felt like I need to hit the books a bit before you know, I mean, hey, I guess I could have been a mind, I could be a successful Minecraft streamer by now, but, uh, or take whatever reactionary position, but um, I just uh, yeah, it's been a little while, I'm gonna get back at it. I do want to do a live stream, uh, pretty soon here. But, um, political pain on instagram, twitter, I I don't really go on x anymore, it's a, it's trash um, but you can find me on, I guess, facebook, youtube, my website, politicalpaincom. I'll be back there. I might post this on there, a link to this on there.
Speaker 2:But um, yeah, just just like, hitting the books, looking at you know, like, with a leftist lens, looking at California mission history. I definitely want to do some content about the Chumash War this year because it's the bicentennial of it. But yeah, I appreciate you asking me on. I haven't been on a show in a while. This is my newest cat since I stopped streaming and I wondered how bad this would go, because she is all over the desk when I'm at the desk. But she was pretty good this time. So, uh, thanks for having me, uh derrick, thanks for coming on um.
Speaker 1:Joe, people should definitely check out your work um and uh, uh. I'm kind of going through my, I'm at my uh, a little over three year anniversary and I have a release like oh god, almost 300 shows on the buzzsprout. Um, more than like oh, wow, yeah, 600 on youtube. And like, prolific guy, I have a thousand different things available on the Patreon.
Speaker 1:Guys, there's a lot Um um and you can sign up for a little $3. Um, uh, I'm, I'm. As someone said, I'm one of the worst advertisers, which is good that I don't really care because, like, I'm bad at it. Uh, but, um, I'm, I'm going back through a lot of my og guest and I wanted to have you on and, particularly now that you've gone back and studied history, I wanted to incorporate that topic because I do think, um, in the I don't know that the, the, the millennial left, is totally dead, but it's. It has it got his ass kicked at a bare minimum?
Speaker 2:um, yeah uh, by, by, by, supposed allies even, um so uh that's the thing I've been listening to, all these, uh, you know, talks and live streams and and reviews and all this stuff. But that that is you know, um, and it is a little bummer. You know, feeling like I'm illustrative of some of this stuff, like, yeah, I ain't got time to, yeah, it was the pandemic, I don't have time to run my YouTube channel for no money and do my journalism project for no money, and I got to go, I got to pay the bills, man, I got to keep a roof over these damn cats and I work hard so my cats can have a better life and I work hard so my cat's going to have a better life. But you know, I'm studying history to study power to, you know, to which I think is, you know, I went to school to sharpen the tools a bit and I definitely want to write more about the Chumash Rebellion, but you know, it's just one occurrence to explore the power dynamics that exist in our society today, that existed in the past, that influenced the world we live in, and it's undeniable, it's all around you, even whether or not you've noticed it or not.
Speaker 2:And I do think the left needs to communicate, needs to be better at communicating these things, but historians need to be better about communicating these things, because the ivory tower thing isn't complete bullshit. Um, you know what I mean, and and some historians pride themselves on making, uh, arguments that are inconceivable to most of the human population, or, or you know, making points that are inconceivable, and so that's why, you know, we talked about journalism history?
Speaker 1:Are you using language that's inconceivable? For no fucking reason.
Speaker 2:Yes, and that's where, as a journalist, I'm like man. Could we make this a little more user-friendly, a little more accessible? Could we craft narratives in a way that are more dynamic and engaging and not to say there aren't historians doing great work on that? But yeah, it is getting late and I just want to say again I appreciate you. Having me on in the conversation is a lot of fun, so we should do it again, all right, definitely.
Speaker 1:And, on that note, have a great day.
