The Grapes of Conquest examines the origins of the wine industry at the California missions, as well as its subsequent commercialization in nineteenth-century California under Mexican and American governance.

Keiller's quest for stories and images that both animate and illuminate the U.S.-Mexico border landscape leads the author to California's Santa Maria Valley. Border writer Keiller follows her intuition to the genius loci of the Santa Maria River Valley. She reads about an old adobe located at the Bien Nacido Vineyard and intuits the location matches the landscape that calls to her. She meets vintner James Ontiveros and the story of early Californios begins to emerge. James Ontiveros, a ninth-generation Californio, introduces Keiller to the story of his ancestors traveling north into Alta California with the 1781 Pobladore Expedition to establish Los Angeles and the Santa Barbara Presidio. Images of diseños, ranchos, horses, long-horned cattle, reatas, trails, missions, and wine embellish the tapestry of relationships interwoven throughout Vaquero Turned Vintner: The Ontiveros Border Story. The author's love of the Mexico-United States border landscape energizes her experiences exploring the story. Barbara delves into the layers of the story using her skills as a therapist … listening to storytellers, asking questions, and researching the archives. Lures, cues, dreams, and intuitions lead the way. Keiller describes her evolving relationships with people, the landscapes, and the wildlife throughout her odyssey that covers more than a decade from California, Baja California, Mexico, Arizona, Spain, France, Argentina, and Chile. She reports details in the form of a diary, much like the early explorers reported the day-to-day experiences on their expeditions into Alta California.

The author of A History of Wine in America recounts the beginnings of California’s wine trade in the once isolated pueblo now called Los Angeles. Winner of the 2016 California Historical Society Book Award! With incisive analysis and a touch of dry humor, The City of Vines chronicles winemaking in Los Angeles from its beginnings in the late eighteenth century through its decline in the 1950s. Thomas Pinney returns the megalopolis to the prickly pear-studded lands upon which Mission grapes grew for the production of claret, port, sherry, angelica, and hock. From these rural beginnings Pinney reconstructs the entire course of winemaking in a sweeping narrative, punctuated by accounts of particular enterprises including Anaheim’s foundation as a German winemaking settlement and the undertakings of vintners scrambling for market dominance. Yet Pinney also shows Los Angeles’s wine industry to be beholden to the forces that shaped all California under the flags of Spain, Mexico, and the United States: colonial expansion dependent on labor of indigenous peoples; the Gold Rush population boom; transcontinental railroads; rapid urbanization; and Prohibition. This previously untold story uncovers an era when California wine meant Los Angeles wine, and reveals the lasting ways in which the wine industry shaped the nascent metropolis.

Freedom's Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction

Noted California historian rips the oh-so-laid-back label off the California wine trade to show the violent and obsessive world underneath

Who should have the right to own land, and how much of it? A Squatter's Republic follows the rise and fall of the land question in the Gilded AgeÑand the rise and fall of a particularly nineteenth-century vision of landed independence. More specifically, the author considers the land question through the anti-monopolist reform movements it inspired in late nineteenth-century California. The Golden State was a squatter's republicÑa society of white men who claimed no more land than they could use, and who promised to uphold agrarian republican ideals and resist monopoly, the nemesis of democracy. Their opposition to land monopoly became entwined with public discourse on Mexican land rights, industrial labor relations, immigration from China, and the rise of railroad and other corporate monopolies.

Indian labor was vital to the early economic development of the Los Angeles region. This volume explores for the first time Native contributions to early Southern California. Based on exhaustive research, Phillips's account focuses on California Indians more as workers than as victims. He describes the work they performed and how their relations evolved with the missionaries, settlers, and rancheros who employed them. Phillips emphasizes the importance of Indian labor in shaping the economic history of what is now Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties.

In 1769–1770, Spanish Catholic missionaries, soldiers, and Cochimí Indians traveled to Alta California. They relied on domesticated animals, like horses and cattle, for food security in the continual expansion of the Spanish empire. These rapidly increasing herds consumed traditional sources of Indigenous foods, medicines, tools, and weapons and soon outstripped the ability of soldiers and priests to control them. This reality forced the Spanish missionaries to train trusted American Indian converts in the art of cowboying and cattle ranching. American Indian Cowboys in Southern California, 1493–1941: Survival, Sovereignty, and Identity by David G. Shanta provides new insights into the impact of horses and cattle on the Indigenous peoples of the Spanish Borderlands after early colonization. He examines how the American Indian cowboys formed the backbone of Spanish mission economies, the international trade in cowhides and tallow that created the Mexican ranchero class known as Californios, and later on American cattle operations. Shanta shows that California Native peoples adopted cowboying and cattle ranching, first as a survival strategy, but then also acquiring and running their own herds and forming a new, California American Indian economy based on cattle. Their new economy reinforced their demands for sovereignty over their ancestral lands with exclusive rights to essential elements, including the essential elements of pasturage and water. This book affirms the innovative nature of American Indian Cowboys and brings to light how they survived, kept their cultures alive, and gained recognition of their sovereign status.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.