Vineyards and Vaqueros

“Historians of Indigenous California are deeply indebted to the work of George Harwood Phillips…Vineyards and Vaqueros is fundamentally a historian’s history. Scholars working on Indigenous interactions with colonialism in California will find a wealth of carefully cited sources painstakingly crafted into a useful and readable narrative. Graduate students might well take inspiration from Phillips’s concluding chapter, which suggests many fruitful avenues for further research, particularly in exploring how Indigenous people experienced the events and processes he describes. His approach throughout the book challenges scholars writing on the history of Southern California to think harder about the origins of the region’s twentieth-century prosperity. He thereby provides a model for scholars studying other California regions to understand how thoroughly integrated into California’s economy Indigenous Californians were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Vineyards and Vaqueros is a foundational building block of a growing body of scholarly works on Indigenous labor in California and beyond.”—California History