Books in the Western Histories series

The Other California is the story of working-class communities and how they constituted the racially and ethnically diverse landscape of Baja California. Packed with new and transformative stories, the book examines the interplay of land reform and migratory labor on the peninsula from 1850 to 1954, as governments, foreign investors, and local communities shaped a vibrant and dynamic borderland alongside the booming cities of Tijuana, Mexicali, and Santa Rosalia. Migration and intermarriage between Mexican women and men from Asia, Europe, and the United States transformed Baja California into a multicultural society. Mixed-race families extended across national borders, forging new local communities, labor relations, and border politics.

Tracing a web of business and family relationships, this book shows in practical terms how patriarchy functioned from generation to generation in Spanish and Mexican California.

Drawing on political and social history as well as art history, this book includes essays that take a cultural measure of the region's great technological milestones, including San Diego's Panama-California Exposition, the building of the Hetch Hetchy Dam in the Sierras, and traffic planning in Los Angeles.

Who should have the right to own land, and how much of it? This book focuses on the follows the rise and fall of the land question in the Gilded Age - and the rise and fall of a particularly nineteenth-century vision of landed independence.

In the 19th-century debate over whether the United States should be an explicitly Christian nation, California emerged as a central battleground. This book sheds light on reconstruction's impact on Indians and Asian Americans by illustrating how groups fought for a political voice, refuting racist assumptions with their lives, words, and faith.