Diversifying the Historiography of Social Control: Policing in Latinx California

• In Event: Windows into Historical Crime and Punishment

Abstract

Critical policing scholars have made clear the ways in which racially biased policing negatively impacts Black and Brown communities. The diversity within these racial categories, however, is under-investigated. We need to understand the range of experiences and interactions Black and Brown people have with U.S. police and how these communities navigate the networks of social control in their lives. In particular, much of the policing scholarship positions Latinx communities within the scope of contemporary urban policing (such as policing of gangs in “high crime” neighborhoods) or within the purview of immigration control. We know much less about how Latinx people have been historically policed in urban and rural spaces. This presentation draws upon my research in nineteenth century, archival material – including Spanish-language newspapers published in San Francisco between the 1860s and 1880s – to detail how Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Chileans, and other persons of Latinx origin made sense of their place, and the restrictions they encountered, in the aftermath of the Gold Rush in California. I aim to explore how practices of threat containment and order production developed in the Frontier West and their influence on how Latinx communities were policed, with key observations on Latinx belonging and resistance.

Author

• Eduardo Bautista Duran, Jurisprudence & Social Policy, University of California, Berkeley