From Indigenous and Mexican roots to modern immigration debates, California\u2019s past offers a broader understanding of American identity and citizenship.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.kqed.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/10\/2026\/06\/GettyImages-597922087.jpg\")
<\/div>\nA photochrome image of Mission Dolores in San Francisco, produced by the Detroit Publishing Co., circa 1895.<\/span>\u00a0((Photo by Underwood Archives\/Getty Images))<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Looking back 250 years is an opportunity to highlight the long legacy of Indigenous, Spanish and Mexican culture in the United States. We were here before there was a United States and, while that seems obvious, I find it worth repeating because we have been and continue to be treated as outsiders, as foreigners and as a threat.<\/p>\n I reached out to historian Steven W. Hackel, who teaches at UC Riverside and has written extensively about the Bay Area\u2019s history before the Gold Rush.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of people would have asserted for many years that California\u2019s history began with the Gold Rush and statehood,\u201d he told me. \u201cThat\u2019s sort of when all the lights came on at once, which really sweeps aside the early Spanish, Native American and Mexican history of California. So I spent much of my career trying to argue against that.\u201d<\/p>\n One reason for the oversight, Hackel said, could be prejudice. The early history of Northern California is less interesting because most of the historical documents are in Spanish and the focus is on the original Indigenous inhabitants and Spanish settlers who brought Catholicism. Another reason is that it\u2019s considered Mexican history.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had a very complex and significant colonial period in California. And the 1770s are when the Bay Area was really colonized richly. All the native groups that are in the immediate Bay Area region are either pulled into California missions or certainly engage with them at some level,\u201d Hackel said.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIs the settlement of California a part of the settlement of Mexico? I mean, there\u2019s no question. Our history is colonial Latin American history. It\u2019s not British North American history.\u201d<\/p>\n When I was growing up, my mother, who had been a schoolteacher in Mexico before she emigrated, was the first person to inform me that the United States had \u201cstolen half of Mexico.\u201d It was a history that was frankly brushed over in my AP American history class in high school and that I had to research on my own. For years, I was angry that one nation could steal another\u2019s territory and gloss it over by calling it \u201cManifest Destiny.\u201d<\/p>\n I have since realized that being angry about history doesn\u2019t accomplish much \u2014 unless that anger is applied to understand the present and future in a different way.<\/p>\n Last September, the Supreme Court ruled that immigration agents can legally question people based on their apparent ethnicity, accent and place of work \u2014 in other words. making racial profiling legal.<\/p>\n These so-called \u201cKavanaugh stops\u201d are one of many ways the Trump administration\u2019s crackdown on immigration has disproportionately punished Latine communities across the country despite the fact that the majority of Latines were born in the United States.<\/p>\n I produced a Forum episode in April about the psychological and behavioral toll of immigration enforcement on Latinos that was partly inspired by The Atlantic article titled, The Risk of Speaking Spanish in Public that described young people\u2019s fears of being targeted by ICE just because they \u201clook Hispanic\u201d or have a Spanish name.<\/p>\n And by \u201clooking Hispanic,\u201d we know that means having dark skin even though people from Latin America come in every color and ethnicity. Still, it seems like a cruel irony that having brown skin, which connotes having more indigenous ancestry, makes you more \u201csuspicious\u201d to immigration agents.<\/p>\n One of the guests on the show, Stanford sociologist Tom\u00e1s R. Jim\u00e9nez, told me that the Trump administration\u2019s policies are reshaping the idea of who qualifies as American by making it an official policy to question anyone who doesn\u2019t fit the prototypical look of what people associate with \u201cAmerican.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPolicies don\u2019t just tell us what we can and can\u2019t do, they tell us who we are,\u201d Jim\u00e9nez said.<\/p>\n I grew up not questioning if I was American enough. I didn\u2019t have time for that. The question of belonging was not important given that I was on a mission, like many children of immigrants, to make my parents\u2019 sacrifice worth it, to succeed, and \u201cmake it.\u201d I didn\u2019t question my Americanness because I was born and bred here. I was more concerned with not losing my Mexicanness in a society that looked down on people like me.<\/p>\n One of the byproducts of Trump\u2019s anti-immigrant policies is to discredit and delegitimize people who don\u2019t fit his vision of a true \u201cAmerican,\u201d but of course that didn\u2019t start with this administration. Sometimes historians choose to overlook history that doesn\u2019t fit their worldview.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are competing versions of what it means to be American, and those competing versions have always been there,\u201d Jim\u00e9nez said. \u201cAmerican identity is not one thing, and there are people who are trying to make it one thing, but we are a country that has welcomed immigrants from all over the world and, by global comparison, have created a country that has had lots of social mobility for immigrants and their descendants.\u201d<\/p>\n And, that is what I\u2019ll be thinking about when America turns 250 next month \u2014 that I, and my history, belong here.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n