Description
Book SynopsisHonorable Mention for the 2024 OAH Frederick Jackson Turner Award
California’s wine country conjures images of pastoral vineyards and cellars lined with oak barrels. As a mainstay of the state’s economy, California wines occupy the popular imagination like never before and drive tourism in famous viticultural regions across the state. Scholars know remarkably little, however, about the history of the wine industry and the diverse groups who built it. In fact, contemporary stereotypes belie how the state’s commercial wine industry was born amid social turmoil and racialized violence in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century California.
In
The Grapes of Conquest Julia Ornelas-Higdon addresses these gaps in the historical narrative and popular imagination. Beginning with the industry’s inception at the California missions, Ornelas-Higdon examines the evolution of wine growing across three distinct political regimes—Spanish, Mexican,
Trade Review"Ornelas-Higdon shows in her work how California's wine industry was part of a larger global industry facing many new technological and scientific concerns in the century, but she also shows how the story of California wines has its own narrative based on its unique cultural, racial, and environmental histories. This work is a useful addition to the field of wine history and California history."—Karl Trybus, H-Environment
“Julia Ornelas-Higdon’s important and absorbing study places California’s celebrated wine industry at the center of processes of conquest and settler colonialism, and the construction of race and class hierarchies over the long nineteenth century. Viticulture, as she so adeptly demonstrates, defined race, citizenship, and belonging in Spanish, Mexican, and American California.”—Jessica Kim, associate professor of history at California State University, Northridge
“
The Grapes of Conquest examines how wine producers used racialized discourses to erase California viticulture’s Indigenous, Spanish, and Californio roots, while uplifting white agricultural citizenship and defining wine as a civilizing agent. It recuperates the multilayered ethnic history of grape production and labor while illustrating the racialized complexities involved in creating space, identities, and citizenship during the long nineteenth century.”—Yvette J. Saavedra, assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Oregon
