Description
Book SynopsisThe Grapes of Conquest examines the origins of the wine industry at the California missions, as well as its subsequent commercialization in nineteenth-century California under Mexican and American governance.
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
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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
