experience. Until quite recently, the issue of "race" in American history was understood very largely a matter of white and black. It might be true that the first great racial question confronted by the English settlers in the future United States revolved around relations not with Africans, but with the native American Indians, but the Indians were steadily either exterminated or physically marginalized in remote regions. By the end of the eighteenth century, Indians were for most Americans more a matter of frontier mythology than a fact of everyday life. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the great race issue was that of African-Americans, first in the form of the struggle over slavery, then in the repression of the Jim Crow era, and finally in the civil-rights revolution. For most Americans, for most of our history, race relations were synonymous with white-black relations.
If we broaden the question from "race" to "ethnicity," the picture becomes more complex, but still rather narrowly drawn. From the middle decades of the nineteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth century, immigrants poured into the United States. As viewed from the East Coast, the center of American political and cultural life, they came from Europe. The symbol of immigration was Ellis Island. The great issue was the assimilation of Europeans--from Irish in the 1840s to Poles and Italians at the turn of the century--who were progressively less Anglo-Saxon or Protestant. But on the national level, other types of immigration, and the political issues raised by other sorts of immigrants, were invisible or nearly so until the last couple of decades.
Most of California enjoys a Mediterranean-type climate, and in this respect and in its mountainous geography has a good deal in common with Spain. It is thus one of the ironies of history that California was on the very fringes of the Spanish empire, and was only colonized by Sp...