Many of my research papers in college took me back to the place I grew up: Santa Barbara, California. This writing sample in particular is a final paper I wrote for a Political Ecology course I took in Spring of 2022. I believe it displays my interests in eco-colonialism, chaparral ecology, and alternative land management practices as well as my abilities in research, historical analysis, and critical thinking.

The Secularization of the Santa Barbara Mission: 

Californios, Cattle, and Capital

Introduction 

Where mountains and oceans meet, the Santa Barbara Riviera offers a multitude of rich, unique ecosystems that foster great biodiversity. One critical ecosystem common in the Santa Barbara foothills is the oak chaparrales, which for at least eleven thousand years before European arrival, were actively managed, cultivated, and shaped by the Chumash people.

Unexposed by European pathogens that are thought to have killed 40-100 million Indigenous peoples in the Americas by 1560 (Denevan, 1992), the Chumash aggregated in densely populated, sizeable settlements throughout the coast (Lightfoot & Parish, 2009). They utilized certain land management techniques like pruning, weeding, clearing of organic debris, and controlled burns to cultivate a plethora of diversified, native plants and optimize the hunting potential of game habitats (Anderson, 2005). These practices that Parish and Lightfoot title “pyrodiversity techniques” (2009 pp. 125) enabled Native Californians to take advantage of climate perturbations like droughts and El Niño events to cultivate diverse plant types, maintain subsistence flexibility and seasonal mobility, and, as a result, ensure food security for dense populations (Lightfoot & Parish, 2009 and Dart-Newton & Erlandson, 2006). To further diversify and supplement their diets, mainland Chumash traded with multiple other groups like the Island Chumash, the Yokuts, the Salinan, and the Tübatulabal (Davis, 1961), which was based on a shell-bead currency system (Gamble, 2002). 

However, these subsistence and trade pathways were disturbed by European exploration and settlement through the introduction of novel diseases and resulting population loss; new, intensified forms of hunting, cultivation, and trade; as well as the privatized, exclusive land regimes. Santa Barbara mainland and its Channel Islands were first explored by the Spanish in 1542 and permanent settlement of Spanish colonists started in 1769 with the establishment of a militarized presidio (Ejarque et al 2015). As globalized trade began to expand during this time due to the outsourcing of colony-produced goods from Western countries like Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Russia (Lightfoot et al. 2013), the race to claim resource-rich California was on. The Spanish constructed presidios and missions with Native Califronian labor to establish their territorial rights through the coercion and enslavement of Native Californians to produce loyal, agrarian, Catholic citizens that would add to the colonial labor force (Ibid). Spanish California Missions were to be temporarily  under Spanish rule until Native Californians could become “people of reason;” once full cultural and religious conversion took place, Native Californians were promised the return of their land rights for agricultural production. (Milliken et al. 2009). However, when Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821 and the Mexican government claimed Alta California - which included California, Utah, Nevada and territories in Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico - Spanish promises to return land to Native Califronians were left unfulfilled. Mission secularization laws passed in 1833 and 1834 by the Mexican government were used to minimize Spanish influence and privitize lands for Mexican land grants to support livestock production for global trade, specifically cattle hide trade with Britain and America (Burcham, 1961). 

Claims and Counterclaims Shaping Exclusionary Landscapes

This case study will illustrate how the secularization of the Santa Barbara Mission addressed conflicting claims of Spanish friars, Chumash, Mexican officials, and Mexican ranchers, aka Californios. Spanish friars laid claims to mission land in order to further convert and “save” the Chumash people. Chumash held both ancestral claims and legal claims sanctioned by Spanish and Mexican governments. However, formal Chumash claims conflicted with Mexican policies and land grants that promised any willing citizen large swaths of land for agricultural production that increased the country’s GDP through global trade. 

As Californio claims prevailed, they and the Mexican government further excluded, marginalized, and violated local Chumash populations that were already made vulnerable by the introduction and spread of European pathogens; colonial alterations to the local landscape and biodiversity; and enclosures, enslavement, and coerced labor rationalized by the expansion of Spanish Catholicism. This exclusion can be understood in terms of what Ribot and Peluso (2003) term “access mechanisms,” specifically rights-based mechanisms and structural and relational mechanisms like access to capital, labor, and markets that allows people to benefit from a given resource and, inherently, causes others to suffer from inaccess. When the Mexican government intensified private-property regimes in California through Mission Secularization, Californios obtained access to large swaths of land, which undermined the promises made to the Chumash, who were then further excluded from their means of production. This process can be classified as Marx’s (1867) primitive accumulation, which states that under the privatized enclosure of a common resource that typically provides a direct means of subsistence production for a population, that population becomes a displaced excess labor source; this excess labor provides capitalists with the ability to manipulate and devalue labor to commodify and over-produce a good and, therein, accumulate a profit or capital to be reinvested in their venture. However, the secularization of the Santa Barbara Mission differed from other mission secularizations because Spanish friars were able to remain at the Santa Barbara Mission for maintenance (Bancroft c. 1885). Secularization excluded Indigenous people but also disenfranchised them in such a manner that they were forced into poverty and a novel type of servitude under a capitalist, racialized system that left them vulnerable when California territory changed hands from Spanish, to Mexican, eventually to American nations. 

Part I: 

Formal and Structural Access Mechanisms: Mexican Land Grants

Secularization served as a malleable tool for the Mexican Government to grant Californios lands in and surrounding Santa Barbara Mission territory to override the religious, moral claims of missionaries to land and Native labor as the ancestral and conflicting legal claims of the Chumash. Within the first eleven years after Mexican Independence, land grant distribution was rare, but from 1833-46 about 95% of the 473 total land grants were given to Mexican citizens (Hornbeck, 1978). Regulations that guided secularization and land distribution to Mexican settler families were called directives, which were first passed in summer of 1834 by Governor Figueroa (Milliken et al. 2009). When Governor Figueroa died in 1835, officials were not enforced to follow the Directives word-for-word so most land went to upper-class Mexican citizens (Ibid). If these Directives were strictly followed, land access and distribution would follow the typical ejido structure that was broke lands up into community-based commons; however, land was privately divided up in large blocks, which followed the haciendo structure that entrusted upper-class and politically connected Mexican families with large swaths of land (Ibid). Directives offered land to all family heads and to Californio men over 20 years old (Bancroft c. 1885). To obtain land from the Mexican government, individuals had to submit a map-like picture called a diseño of their desired territory as well as their name, date of birth, occupation and country of origin (Beebe and Senkewicz, 2015). These directives also promised freed neophytes [Catholic-converted] Native Californians land for crops and grazing as well as livestock (Bancroft c. 1885). However, Native Californians were required to participate in common work in croplands, vineyards, rancheros, and townships; they also did not have the right to sell their alleged land or livestock granted to them by the Mexican government (Ibid). These directives provided formal rights-based mechanisms for upper class Californios, who were disproportionately favored over Native Californians through structural access mechanisms like greater access to technology (guns, intensive farming tools, larger amounts of livestock, ect), greater access to forced Native Californian labor, and greater access to markets through the hide trade with Europe and America. 

Shifting Relationships: Californios, Missionaries, Chumash, and Land

In the Final Secularization Act of 1845, Santa Barbara missionaries were permitted to stay to maintain the Mission. (Bancroft c. 1885). However, while friars and missionaries still could upkeep the actual structure, they lacked their original power because they no longer held the land that was promised to and, therefore, motivated Chumash neophyte laborers. Chumash in turn sold their labor power to those who did hold land -the Californios- in exchange for the prospect of eventual repatriations and freedom from a new form of indentured servitude. For example, Friar José Antonio Anzar at nearby Mission San Juan Bautista wrote to the Mexican government administrator, José Tiburcio Castro, complaining that Native people no longer want to work for the mission and all turn to rancheros for work because “there is nothing (the prospect of land)” for them there. (Beebe and Senkewicz 2001, pg 398). Castro then responded to Anzar that he wanted “nothing more than to have (...) all the natives of this population dedicate themselves to promoting his (Castro’s) interests,” which greatly aligned with those of the Californios producing hides for commercial sale and trade (Ibid, pg 400). Therefore, Californios cheaply commodified Chumash labor power in order to produce excess cattle hide for profit.

Chumash, who were forced or freed from the Santa Barbara Mission, could no longer easily return to their subsistence pathways as they had either been raised or accustomed to mission life and their native landscapes had been completely altered by Spanish and Mexican colonial agriculture. Like other Native Californians who practiced pyrodiversity management, as supported through a 2015 paleoecological study of pollen and charcoal in the Santa Barbara area, Chumash people regularly practiced controlled burning (Ejarque et al 2015); fire-use altered their environments to make the hunting and gathering of food more accessible, encourage useful local species growth, and increase overall chances of survival. (Smith 2007). When enclosures and coercion of Chumash for labor began with Spanish Missions and were perpetuated by Mexican Californios, Chumash could no longer maintain the flexibility and mobility needed for pyrodiversity cultivation (Lightfoot and Parrish, 2009), and these landscapes were further degraded by European agricultural species like cattle (Anderson, 2005). The open grasslands left behind by pyrodiversity techniques further invited the privatization and commercialization of California lands as they were prime real estate for Spanish and then Mexican livestock grazing. Once enclosed and managed by European missionaries and settlers, Chuamash controlled burnings were minimized and replaced with overgrazing of primarily cattle. This introduction of livestock and major shift in land use by an alien people to suit their economic and political goals can be termed landscape “transportation” (Ejarque et al. 2015), which altered landscape and native species composition, especially that of the ungulates that were traditionally hunted by Chumash and competed with cattle for food. 

Mission establishment and following secularized land enclosures also altered the social landscapes of Chumash communities. As seen in Santa Barbara Mission uprising of 1824, when groups of non-converted or partially separated Chumash banned together to protest against their loss of family members, subsistence pathways, as well as physical and cultural sovereignty, they were rumored to have made threats towards both Spanish soldiers and neophytes alike and promising to kill them all (Beebe and Senkewicz, 2015). This social divide, as well as economic divides created through intensified European trade systems and physical divides established by fencing during secularization, also eroded away at the regional trading system that provided Chumash with needed resources elsewhere for their diversified diets. Furthermore, Anderson (2005, pg. 80) explains, secularization of Missions caused neophytes to “scatter,” and many became “destitute and lived in dire poverty.” Already fragmented by missionization, secularization of the Mission further divided Chumash communities. 

Narratives within the Frontier Processes 

In tandem with Ribot and Pelluso’s access theory, the secularization of the Santa Barbara Mission and the enclosure of the surrounding land can be understood by Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin’s (1992) “Frontier Processes” that were applied to the missionization of California by Sandos (1997). Sandos explains that “instead of regarding a frontier as an ever-moving line, it is more useful to think of a frontier as a series of simultaneous processes,” which include species-shifting, boundary setting, state-forming, land-taking, market-making, and self-shaping (Ibid pp. 198-199). These frontier processes used to transform and then commodify the Santa Barbara landscape by Spanish missionaries and Mexican settler-colonialists were driven by expansionist, utilitarian narratives that were rooted deep in Catholicism, racialization, and Lockean theory. While these frontier processes are fluid and were all used by both Spanish missionaries and Mexican officials and Californios, Spanish missionaries particularly practiced state-forming and self-shaping and Mexican settler-colonialists weaponized land-taking and market-making to further their own political-economic agendas and thus rob Chumash people of their ancestral lands, autonomy, and identities that were very interconnected to the land access from which they were excluded. 

In Santa Barbara, Spanish missionaries justified state-making and the self-shaping of Chumash individuals as a mode of spreading the Catholic faith and save “undisciplined and haughty” Native Californians from their lives on “unproductive lands” that “force them [Chumash] to wander about in search of herbs and roots” (Sebastián de Sistianga c. 1744 in Beebe and Senkewicz, 2015. Pg. 94). Because the lands of Santa Barbara appeared untilled and unmanaged as Native cultivation practices did not match the formal, rotational, and typically undiversified agriculture that took hold in Europe at the time (Mazoyer and Roudart, 2006), Spanish missionaries believed they could save Chumash by giving value to the land through the forced labor and cultural conversion of the Chumash people to transport the Spanish agrarian landscape to Santa Barbara lands. This belief that value and ownership of land originates from the labor invested in the land can be traced back to popular 15th century theorist John Locke (1689), whose ideas took hold of Western Europe as feudal agriculture was replaced with organized, enclosed production. As a solution to the perceived “useless” California lands and “lazy” people that inhabited them, Spanish missionaries turned to their own Savior: God. As students of God and Jesus, Spanish missionaries followed their doctrine to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you”(Matthew 28:18-20). To make this new agrarian colony-state for Spain, Spanish missionaries and officials believed the self-shaping -or religious and cultural conversion- of Chumash people was necessary. 

Like Spanish missionaries, Mexican officials and Californios transported their own intensified agrarian and pastoral landscapes through various frontier processes, specifically land-taking and market-making. For instance, in 1842, when California Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado granted a plot of land to petitioner Joaquín Estudillo, Governor Alvarado wrote Estudillo may have the land if Estudillo built and inhabited a house within a year of claiming the territory and planted “some fruit trees or some forest trees of some utility” (Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado c. 1842 in Beebe and Senkewicz, 2015. Pg. 433). The Mexican government wanted to ensure the land granted to its citizens was being utilized for some type of production. With great swaths of land and encouragement from the government to produce useful commodities, many Californios turned to cattle ranching; by early 1800s, California became one of the main sources of tallow and hides in the global market (Fischer, 2017). In fact, one Monterey merchant said that “the currency of California is Bullock hides and bags of tallow(...)” (Ibid. Pg. 87). In a similar fashion to the Spanish missionaries, Mexican officials and Californios took a Lockean approach to the management and use of Santa Barbara land. However, in this execution, the goal was not to make productive citizens of Chumash people but of Mexico’s legal, white citizens that typically had greater access to social and political power, capital, technology, and, therefore, the ability to produce for and enter the global cattle hide market. Native Californians were permitted to participate in these markets, but as sources of labor and ranch hands (Fischer, 2017). While transporting their own pastoral, commodifiable landscapes and expanding their utilitarian frontier, Mexican officials and Californios practiced land taking, which enclosed spaces once held in common by the Chumash, produced an excess source of Chumash labor, and then furthered their market making endeavors as excess production of hides became possible with high supplies of labor. In increasing the production to further expand the cattle and hide market in California and, therefore, the Westernized ideal of land value, Mexican officials and Californios excluded Chumash and other Native Californians from land ownership and the social, economic and political autonomy that results from such ownership. 

These Western, utilitarian views of land that drove frontier processes in Alta California completely disregarded narratives of the Chumash people. As Harraway explains in her works, all knowledges originate from certain historical contexts and individual biases and that dominant knowledges are no more privileged than others but are based in a hegemonic, coloniality of the psyche (Haraway, 1988). Chumash people, like Spanish missionaries and Californios, held their own situated knowledges on how land must be related to and managed. For instance, the Chumash creation story tells the tale of how the Chumash people were the first people of the land and sprouted up from the Channel Islands after being planted as seeds by the Earth Goddess, Hutash (Chumash Indians Creation Myth, 2003). In her book, Anderson discusses this view as a “kincentric” view of nature, as nonhuman creatures were like relatives and “nature is the embodiment of the human community” (Ibid. Pg. 57). This belief system can be seen in its manifestation in Chumash pyrodiversity practices that carefully matched the pulses of nature and were based on experiences and perspectives that had been collected and passed down for generations (Ibid). Because nature held spirits, agency, and great power, it could belong to no one, and, therefore, the privatization, enclosure, and allotment of land that intensified through secularization was a foreign concept to Chumash that conflicted with their belief systems. Furthermore, when Chumash were excluded from the very lands that birthed, sustained, and cared for their people and that were to be returned to them according to the promises and legal decrees by both missionaries and Mexican officials, their ancestral and legal claims to land were disregarded by the Mexican government. 

The hegemonic, Lockean narratives of Spanish missionaries and then Californios that colonized knowledge systems in Santa Barbara prioritized organized agriculture and pastoralism to such a degree that missionaries and settlers were blind to the situated knowledges, spiritualites, and methodic land management practices of the Chumash people. Because of their racist and ignorant perceptions that Chumash people were unproductive and wasting Santa Barbara land, missionaries, Mexican officials, and Californios created a racialized knowledge hierarchy that prioritized their narratives and, therefore, their claims to Santa Barbara land, which excluded Chumash from not only the land they depended on for subsistence but also their spiritual origins and their own pre-colonized belief systems. Through their weaponized frontier processes, missionaries and settlers transported not only their physical landscapes but their social, moral, and ideological landscapes to manipulate and decimate local Chumash minds and bodies for their own political-economic gains. 

Part II:

The Manifestations of Access and Exclusion:

By the end of Mexico’s reign over Alta California in 1848, Californios were the clear winners of this land conflict. While Spanish missionaries could remain in the Mission itself, they lacked the access to land and capital that would attract the Chumash people they needed to complete their mission to civilize them in Catholic, Lockean terms. Furthermore, the Chumash who survived European pathogens, coercion, enslavement, and poverty, became dependent on Californios for food, board, and commodities that “were given largely at the discretion of the employer” (Anderson, 2005. Pg. 81). To illustrate the extent of Native Californian labor use, by 1834 in California, 31000 mostly-Indigenous ranch hands tended around 400,000 cattle (Fischer, 2015). This use of cattle production and trade to alter landscapes, assert political-economic power, and turn “borderlands to bordered lands” is what Fischer (2015. Pg. 6) calls “cattle colonialism.” Under cattle colonialism, the Mexican government and Californios diminished Spanish missionaries’ powers and labor supplies and fostered larger Chumash labor forces for Californio use through increasing distribution of land grants. With the use of secularization in order to take advantage of Santa Barbara’s resource rich land, Californios were able to exploit cheap Chumash labor, increase their hide production and trade, and, therefore, earn greater profits to increase their personal wealth. 

When American settlers became more common in California, land owning Californios were enjoying their wealth and leisurely, family-oriented lifestyles while ranch hands and Native Californians managed the cattle (California on the Eve - Californios, 1998). Many yeomen American settlers and travelers noted how Californios, especially men, would flaunt their wealth with drinking and gambling (Langum, 1978). However, these examples of relaxed, hedonic behavior by the upper class Calfornios, ironically, caused American settlers to see Californios as “lazy and indolent,” which would later justify American usurpation of property once owned by Californios (Ibid. Pg. 182). 

Consequences of Secularization and Californio Privatization: 

After the Mexican War, also driven by conflicts over land, California became US property under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (“The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 2021). Under US rule, due to the somewhat informal nature of the diseño land grant system, many of the land grants bestowed on wealthy Californios did not hold up in court (Beebe and Senkewicz, 2015), however the mission secularization and privatization of Santa Barbara had long lasting effects on Chumash populations and local culture that still prevail today.  

Due to the privatized land regime established by the Mexican government and the vulnerability of remaining Chumash populations after secularization, post-Mexican Independence American yeoman settlers and the American government easily forced Chumash people onto reservations far from the coastal, productive lands they once inhabited. As the materialities of the land they were once accustomed to were completely altered by Mexican cattle pastoralism and the Californio employers that provided them with food and board were displaced from their lands, Chumash were at the mercy of Euro-American settlers. This compromised position forced Chumash, like many other Native Californians, to either pick up menial jobs for which they would be paid less than their white counterparts or retreat to inland territories, like Santa Ynez, with less game and water sources (Anderson, 2005). In following years, the Chumash reservation was established in 1901 in Santa Ynez, which is about 30 miles northeast of the coastal land inhabited by the Chumash who lived in or near the Santa Barbara Mission. 

While white American settlers robbed Californios of their land and pushed Chumash from the landscape and to the edges of society, Spanish culture was able to persist thanks to the upkeep of the structurally impressive Santa Barbara Mission. The influence and idolization of the Santa Barbara Mission and the city’s Spanish history manifests in the white, adobe stereotypical Spanish architecture that is commonly found in commercial and higher-income areas as well as a weeklong summer festival called Fiesta to “celebrate Old Spanish days” (SBFiesta.org). However, having grown up in Santa Barbara, Chumash culture and history is treated as a relic of the past that is preserved in museums and glossed over in elementary school textbooks and mission research projects (Gutfreud, 2010). While the Mission just celebrated its 200th anniversary in 2020, there was no recognition of the Chuamsh people who built it. As a romanticized Spanish culture persisted in Santa Barbara and very present Chumash communities were made invisible, Santa Barbara communities continue to ignore the violent, racialized, colonial history the mission’s structure and its practices were based upon.

Conclusion: 

This case offers a unique land conflict brought on by mission secularization with more stakeholders than usual because of the fact that Spanish missionaries were permitted to remain at the Santa Barbara Mission. While both Spanish missionaries and Chumash were marginalized in some way by Mexican Califorios, the fact that Spanish culture still heavily influences the aesthetic and values of the town while Chumash histories are trivialized is very telling of the racist, exclusionary social infrastructure perpetuated by secularization. When lands of and surrounding the Santa Barbara Mission were enclosed, fences and cattle were introduced to the once carefully managed environment, and Chumash were thwarted from realizing the promises of land made to them by both Spanish missionaries and Mexican officials. This secularized private property regime driven by capital accumulation and perpetuated by racist exclusion set a base for the further marginalization and displacement of Chumash people when American settlers arrived in Santa Barbara in the mid nineteenth century. While Mexico did not get to keep California land for long, the enclosures they built remained far longer than the Californios, cattle, and capital that came from secularization.  

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