California Terroir: Viniculture, Race, and Place in 19th-Century California

The California Wine Country brings to mind images of bourgeois, European-style vacations and weddings, not the settler colonial histories of Indigenous removal and Spanish, Mexican and American colonization. When European and Anglo-American migrants imported European viticulture to California, they transformed the landscape into a commercial region by rejecting Indigenous land management techniques and destroying Indigenous and Mexican land claims. In addition to transforming the land, vineyard owners erected a labor regime that depended upon the labor of a variety of Indigenous, immigrant, and working-class men and women. By using winery archives, manuscript collections, and state documents, this paper argues that the creation of California Wine Country was part of a settler colonial project that produced racialized places and laborers. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates the California wine industry erases Indigenous and Mexican histories while upholding settler myths and notions of racialized labor that continue to uphold agribusiness labor schemes in the state.