Western History Association 59th Annual Conference

Visualizing Geographies of Unfreedom

• In Event: The Birth Of A State: Slavery, Confinement, Incarceration, And The Origins Of Ethnic Cleansing In California

Abstract

This presentation will explore how Digital Humanities tools can be used to better understand how forms of racial control changed the landscape of California. In particular, it underscores nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century laws, policies, and state-sanctioned violence and visualizes their consequences upon space, such as the shrinking of places where African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Chinese immigrants could move freely, if not semi-freely. For example, in the 1860s, California politicians took steps to curtail the mobility of Chinese immigrants by passing laws and ordinances banning Chinese children from public schools and denying Chinese admission to hospitals. Curbing mobility entailed delimitation of space. Other forms of racial control such as policing small but growing Black communities and genocidal violence against Native Americans changed California’s geography into one of confinement and surveillance. This presentation thus hopes to help us grasp the enormity of ethnic violence—a crucial element of California’s state building—through Digital Humanities approaches.

Samantha de Vera received her BA in Humanities with a minor in English from San Diego State University in 2014 and her MA in English from the University of Delaware in 2017. Now at UCSD's History PhD program, she focuses on African American women's history and is particularly interested in Digital Humanities. As former chair of the exhibits team of the Colored Conventions Project, she curated several digital exhibits, including "Black Women's Economic Power and the 1830s Colored Conventions in Philadelphia" and "Mobility, Migration, and the 1855 Philadelphia National Convention." Her other publications include "The Pharisees of Old New York in Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence" in the journal The Explicator and "'we the ladies...have been deprived of a voice': Uncovering Black Women's Lives Through the Colored Conventions Archive" in 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century.

Author

• Samantha Q de Vera, University of California, San Diego