by
The Baffler
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But what is killing the state is not overdevelopment or lousy public planning or even climate change. It is the persistence of certain ghosts. If California-in-flames is at the forefront of the Anthropocene, which by one scholarly definition is the age in which “humans in their attempt to conquer nature have inadvertently become a major force in its destruction,” then the key word is not humans—because not all of us were involved in the attempt—but conquer. California is where Anglo-European settlement of the Americas came up against the hard edge of the continent. This is where the conquest ended, and where it bounces back.
Five years earlier, when organized groups of Anglo settlers first began to trickle in over the Sierra Nevada mountains, scholars estimate that fewer than four hundred “foreigners” were living in what was still the Mexican state of Alta California. The newcomers, who in the eyes of the Mexican authorities were illegal immigrants with no valid claims on the land, made their homes in a vast territory already inhabited by about eight thousand Californios, as the state’s Mexican citizens were known, and more than a hundred thousand Indians. They were not content to share it. In June 1846, unaware that President James K. Polk had already declared war on Mexico, a small band of settlers, supported by the dashing Army captain and genocidaire John C. Frémont, took up arms against the Mexican government. On arriving, Bryant promptly organized a company of volunteers and joined Frémont’s troop.
Land speculation, tamed into what we unironically call “real estate”—for what could be less real than an earth emptied of all but monetary value?—would remain one of the state’s dominant economic motors. It is not hard to draw a straight line from the settler hustles of early statehood to the inequities that map California today. James Irvine arrived in 1849 and figured out he could make more money selling goods to miners than by mining himself. He funneled his profits into San Francisco real estate and Mexican land grants in southern California, ultimately holding title to about one hundred thousand acres. In the late twentieth century much of that land, still owned by the Irvine Company, would be subdivided into “master-planned communities” throughout what had by then become suburban Orange County. The Irvine Company now owns sixty-five thousand apartments and forty shopping centers and has been a major financial supporter of groups organized to defend California’s Proposition 13, a 1978 ballot initiative that froze property taxes, hobbling the state’s ability to fund education, health care, and public housing. Legitimated by a century and a half of dedicated lawyers, legislators, and lobbyists, the grifts are subtler these days, but the results are the same: vast wealth remains in a few, very powerful hands.
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