Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Vineyard Roots
1. Cultivating Alta California’s First Vineyards, 1769–1820
2. Wine Growing in Mexican California, 1821–1845
3. American Wine Making and Notions of Modernity, 1850–1870
4. Agricultural Citizenship and the Anaheim Wine Colony, 1854–1890
5. Immigration, Whiteness, and the Chinese Question in California’s Vineyards, 1860–1900
6. Wine for Wealth, Health, and Temperance, 1870–1920
Epilogue: Mythologies, Narratives, and Representations of California Wine
Notes
Bibliography
Index
 

About the Author

Julia Ornelas-Higdon is an associate professor of history at California State University, Channel Islands.

Reviews

"Ornelas-Higdon . . . broadens the study of California wine chronologically, geographically, and ethnically in this major contribution to Mexican American history." —D. M. Fahey, Choice

"While it is not a historian's job to present solutions to today's problems, Ornelas-Higdon offers two, given the present-day implications of her research. First, we should all highlight diversity in winemaking, past and present. Second, read and encourage scholarship that unearths the multiethnic and multiracial origins of the industry, because wine has remade California many times over, and it will continue to remake the state."—Camille Suárez, California History

"This is a book that is well suited to general audiences with an interest in wine history and scholars seeking a fresh approach to an industry we think we know."—Tatiana Irwin, Western Historical Quarterly

"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