AMST217 Carceral Landscapes: From Colonial Invasion to the Prison Economy

This course explores the expansive history of surveillance, policing, and incarceration in the territory now known as California. Engaging Indigenous critiques of settler colonial power, we begin in the late 18th century when Spanish Franciscan priests and imperial soldiers enslaved Native people in missions along the Alta California coast. We will move through crucial sites, such as the first California legislature’s 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, to the establishment of the US border patrol in the early 20th century, and the criminalization of mobility of Indigenous, Latinx, and mixed-race people from both sides of the US-Mexican border, considering how these cases illuminate Kelly Lytle-Hernández’s insight that “mass incarceration is mass elimination.” Reading across scholarship, archival sources, activism, and news coverage, we will discuss the relationship between militarization and carcerality locally and globally, from the American occupation of California during the Gold Rush (1849), to post-WWII racialized urban policing, to the current construction of the “security fence” along the US-Mexico border that cuts through Kumeyaay lands.
Offering: Host