Shu Wan (8:55)

Okay, thank you so much for your answer. I really appreciate your discussion. And once after reading your book, I will say I'm convinced that, I mean, throughout the history of California, slavery, all type of human bondage has been everywhere throughout history of California. So now let's talk about your book. So when I read your book, I want to say I took an impression of two sentences on page 30. You meant, you say, freedom is a struggle, not a status. This is a story of how California's distinct population arose from the rank of the unfree. So I would say the two sentences are among my favorite sentences in your book. So after reading the book, I won't say I take the impression that freedom is not given, but again, by struggle and fighting. So I want to ask you the question that how do understanding the sentence in your book, freedom is a struggle, not a status.

Dr. Jean Fraser (10:06)

I think that our notion of freedom, my younger notion of freedom, was that it was a done deal, that there was human bondage, and then something happened. The Civil War happened or a slave revolt on a plantation happened. And lo, there was freedom. And that isn't the way freedom is. Freedom is something we have to constantly renegotiate and remind ourselves and fight for. And as we're seeing even in today's Supreme Court decisions, for example, when they, you know, in the past couple of years, the Supreme Court undid the legislation that guaranteed and protected the right to vote. And to me, that was one of the most dangerous decisions that the Supreme Court issued because those of us who've been involved in civil rights checked that box, the right to vote, and we just had to monitor it. We didn't expect that right to disappear, which is so much at the heart of our liberty and our notion of citizenship. I think that the idea is that freedom is not a status. It's not a stare where we've landed and that it's over. And as I look at what's happening now, the day that we are doing this interview is Juneteenth, which is the day that recognizes when Texas learned of the Emancipation Proclamation. The Emancipation Proclamation was a very, actually a very wonderful, but a very tentative document. As we celebrate it, it's a real message to us that freedom is not a status. That even this announcement of freedom was so contingent, it didn't mean absolute equality as it says in the Texas document of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves. It qualified itself right from the get go, saying that the now quote, freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. Part of the definition of slavery is you can't choose your employer, you can't quit, you can't leave, you can't negotiate for a better wage because there are no wages. And then the document goes on. They, the new freedmen are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere. There was none of the things that support freedom, like jobs, like housing, like health care, like the right to gather as a community. None of that was in the Emancipation Proclamation. And it only covered the states that had seceded. So all of these other places, like Maryland, my California, like Delaware, were not included in the, in this Emancipation Proclamation. So that's what why I say it's not a status because we're not there.

Shu Wan (14:08)

Okay, thank you so much for your answer. Again, I totally agree with you, like about your discussion about the meaning like freedom of freedom, which is not just a status, it's about struggle. So, and then another question is about the organization of your book. When I read your book, I noticed that you organize your book by the encounters between four empires and the people in land that we call California now. So for the first empire discussed in your book, the Spanish Empire, I want to invite you to talk about the existence of slavery in the communication and the connection between Native Americans and that empire and the California mission in the second half of the 18th century.

Dr. Jean Fraser (15:04)

We don't think of California as a colony. We think of it more as this free spirited or independent place or at least a state that has political equivalence to any other state. Slavery starts with the very first invasion of California. And one of the things that distinguishes slavery in California from say the traditional the old north south paradigm or template of slavery is that it breaks through that border. In 1769, Spain invades California at the southern border, right at San Diego right now, right where there's the detention center that are built between Tijuana and Tecate. And San Diego, that's where the detention centers for immigrants is right now. That's exactly the place where Spain invades California in 1769. And there are about 100 Spanish soldiers. There are only eight Franciscan Catholic priests. It's all led by Father Juniper Serra, who two, three years ago was just made a saint with great controversy by Native Americans. And in San Diego, Junipera Serra builds the first mission. And the Mission San Diego de Acala in San Diego launches this chain of 21 missions. And it's a slave plantation. The Spanish are carrying a bull, as it's called, a directive, an order from the Pope to enslave 300,000 Native American Californians and stop the Russians who are moving from the north and to take this territory of California. They didn't expect that they would find the silver that they found in Mexico and Peru. They really didn't know much what to expect. And this really pathetically small, disagreeable group of people, the soldiers didn't want to be there. This was the bottom of the line assignment. There was no silver, there was no corruption, there was no graft. All there were, to their surprise, 250 Native American tribes in California. They didn't expect the resistance, the slave revolt. They also didn't expect how fertile and beautiful and fecund California was. They evolved the hope that California will support slavery in Mexico and Peru with food. From the first, there was a slave revolt within a couple of years. The people who were enslaved in San Diego, the Kumeyaay tribe, the Kumeyaay Indians swoop in from the mountains and they swoop in from the clans along the coast in a massively well orchestrated, well armed, well prepared rescue. And they swoop down on the mission, they burn the mission, they kill the head priest and they free all of the Kumeyaay at Mission San Diego. And so our story begins with empire invasion, brutality, rape, human bondage and liberation.

Shu Wan (19:29)

Okay, thank you so much for your answer. I totally agree with you that I mean the Spanish empire brought slavery to the real land offering so. And I also noticed in your answer you mentioned the invasion of another empire, Russian empire in California. I want to say that's a strike. I want to say that fact surprised me when reading your book about your book, especially when you're talking about a presence of Russian empire and its attempt to introduce brought in slavery into California. So for this one I want to invite you talk about how that Empire, I mean, Russian empire and its hunger for natural resources brought slavery and native Alaskan into California.

Dr. Jean Fraser (20:29)

What the Russian invasion did, it's the one is it makes it very clear that this is an empire story. Second, Russia is the first group to transport slaves into California. Not indigenous people or not African Americans coming from the south, but slaves. It's a slave trade. And the Russians had invaded Alaska. And initially what they wanted was another route to China. Everybody is always looking for a sea route to China so they didn't have to cross way over the Ural Mountains at the edge of Siberia. And they don't find it. But what they do find are otters, little cute sea rats. And otters have a million hairs per square inch. They're the silkiest, softest fur in the world. And this is what China wanted from Russia. So Russia's now got the key to open up trade with China and they invade Alaska. The only people who know how to trap and kill the sea otters are the Alaskan natives. They sail out in very low, handmade, beautiful skin kayaks. And they take only what they need from the ocean. They honor the otter. The Alaskan natives know, for example, that when something dies and any of us who've ever helped someone die know that the dying person is very thirsty. The Alaska native, in honoring the otter on these three day hunts, wouldn't drink water until they had poured water over the mouth of the otter. This was beyond a totem. It was part of their spirit world and part of themselves. The Russians forced the Alaska natives to kill the sea otter. They captured the women.

Shu Wan (22:52)

They.

Dr. Jean Fraser (22:53)

They hold them ransom for otter skins. They're raped, and Alaska is starving because it's a gendered world where the men went out and hunted seals and did the fishing. The women dug for roots with the men captured to go hunt. The otter people are dying and starving. And the Russians march across Alaska. And when they've decimated a lot of the population and killed off all the otters, they turn right and they sail down the coast and land in Northern California. And they abandon the native. The Alaska natives on coves, on the very raw rocks of the Farallon Islands. They can't land in a lot of places because the Spanish are already there. They don't want them. And they make millions, truly millions of dollars in modern currency. Starting a Pacific trail. Sorry, a specific slave triangle from Alaska, California, Canton. And they are actually using old American whaling ships to do the trade. They're up in remote Alaska. They don't have the ships to ship all of these otter pelts that are worth millions and millions of dollars. So it's keeping alive the Russian empire and it's supporting the the real greed of the Chinese mandarins. If you look at these old paintings of the Chinese Mandarin class and you see the fur collars or the fur cuffs on their hands or fur at the bottom of their robes, those are otter skins from Alaska and California that they are wearing for display, but also for warmth.

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Dr. Jean Fraser (25:44)

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Shu Wan (26:00)

Okay, thanks so much for your answer again. So for next question, I want to shift from from the history of slavery in California in the early 19th century to the mid 19th century. So for this period you both emphasize the importance of gold rush. So for the golden rush, I want to invite you to talk about enslaved and free black people's experience with slavery in California and how the so called free state he did evil. In other words, making the evil invisible.

Dr. Jean Fraser (26:38)

It's an important question. I was born in Los Angeles, went through the public school system and I had no idea that southern plantation enslaved people were marched across the plains, marched across the plains or shipped down to Panama, cross over through the jungles of Panama to the Pacific side, wait with thousands of other people for ships to carry them up to San Francisco for the gold rush. And plantation owners, where the land in the south was really worn out. Cotton is harsh on the soil, tobacco is harsh on the soil. And this was the new get rich quick was to take enslaved people, keep their families hostage, back on the plantations, transport them to California for the gold rush. And what happens in California, which is pretty unique. It's almost like thinking of California as a border state like Maryland, where enslaved people meet free blacks. Free blacks have come out to California partly for the same reason men from all over the world are coming to California. Chinese men, Argentinians, Chileans are coming to California for the adventure and the fantasy that they're going to get rich quick. Free blacks are coming for that. And they persuade the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass that they're not abandoning the abolitionist movement. They have the same rights as everybody else to try and profit off of California. But they're also, and this makes them very unique, they're running away from the 1850 Fugitive Slave act where free blacks can be seized just because they're black, just because of the color of their skin and taken into slavery. There's the drive toward California, but there's the flight from the Fugitive Slave Act. They end up in California and to their surprise, they encounter a group of 2,000 enslaved Black plantation workers who've been brought out for the Gold rush and, and instantly California launches In the early 1850s, the first civil rights movement where they are raising money to get the freedom for enslaved blacks and they're having to take themselves to court. Free blacks are, because they have to prove that they're free, but they're not allowed to testify in court and they're not allowed to enter evidence on their behalf. Without being able to enter evidence, you can't prove that you're a free person. So free blacks are organizing a profoundly important civil rights movement based on the right to testify, which is a step toward freedom. It gets back to your first question that freedom is not a status. It's not a status for free blacks.

Shu Wan (30:26)

Yeah, thank you so much. I really appreciate you. I mean, your examination about the sentence freedom struggle is not a status by the example of enslaved people, enslaved black people, and free black people's experience with slavery in California. So I want to say while reading a book, I noticed that you mentioned, besides black people, Native American in California were also victims of slavery as a hiding evil in a so called free state. So for this one, I would like to invite you to talk about their experience as state slave laborers in their homeland.

Dr. Jean Fraser (31:11)

The Gold rush is happening just at the time of the Native American genocide in California where the American military is slaughtering, slaughtering Native Americans so that they can open the land for white ranchers and white settlers. And the population is in flight. Native villages are being burned. And it's at this point in 1850 that California becomes a state. The very first law, the very first law passed in California is called the act for the Government and Protection of the Indian. That's kind of an ironic name. What that law did shorthand for it was the quote, the Indian act is to legalize the forced kidnap and forced indenture of Native Americans. They keep re upping the act until 1860, where a native American male could be indentured until he was 30 and a native American female could be indentured, forcibly indentured until she was 25. And so the American military is just on a rampage of taking vagrants from the genocides, the burning of the villages and Native Americans, it's easy for us to picture it. They were refugees in their own land and they're picked up on the road. Native Americans are seized out of jail. They are taken from the military forts, some of the forts that sprung up for the Civil War, that weren't needed for the Civil War in California. So they've got something else to do there. We find instances, hundreds and hundreds of instances of kidnappers. They were actually called traffickers at the time, taking native people, mainly native children and women. They've killed off a huge number of the Native American men and taking them and selling them to hog farmers, to wheat growers, to cattle ranchers, to hotels to become, to domestic homes, to become servants, and to everywhere, everywhere the women are forced into sexual slavery.

Shu Wan (34:08)

Okay, thank you so much for your answer. I want to say actually in my prepaid questions, my next question would be about California's first civil rights movements. But I'm pretty sure in your answer to my last question or the question before last question, you have already well answered this question. So let's jump to the next question about women. So I would say beside the forced labor of male Africans, African and Native Americans, another format of slavery discussed in your book is sexual slavery and the prostitution. So for this one I would like to invite you talk about women's experience with the evil. I mean slavery in late 19th century California.

Dr. Jean Fraser (35:01)

Slavery is very gendered. Always. It's gendered all over the world. It's gendered because women, and it often includes men, but mainly women are enslaved for their sexual and reproductive bodies. In my book California a Slave State, there's a discussion about the kidnap of Chinese girls. But everywhere where there was slavery, there was the assault on women. At the missions, there were special women's dormitories called moneros. And this is where the women were held. And nightly the Spanish soldiers and also the Franciscan priests would come in and choose what woman they wanted to rape that night. Meanwhile, the person in charge of the women's dormitories would start a chant or a song so that other people couldn't hear the Screams and the shouts of pain and pleasure of those assaults. With the gold rush, men are coming from all over the world to California. And there are very few women who come come with the men. It was very expensive to come. And I think the men also wanted the adventure. You know, we're gonna be in the woods and, you know, we're going to be in the woods and have this guy time. Meanwhile, expeditions go to China under contract and seize Chinese girls. They were destitute. There had been the Taiping revolt. The Chinese peasant class is starving. Millions of people have gotten killed in this bizarre utopian revolution that goes on and on and they drift towards the port cities of China and contractors come and they seize Chinese girls. Sometimes they seize babies or very young women and they load them onto ships. Occasionally destitute families would sell their daughters because they were starving. So it was sort of a Sophie's Choice to save the rest of the family. A girl would be sold and shipped into slavery in California. They were sold on the docks of San Francisco. We picture slave dens, for example, in New Orleans. This is happening on the docks of San Francisco where girls were stripped, they were examined, they were searched and they were sold and then sent into the caged brothels of the little girl where we began our conversation. The little girl at the edge of Chinatown and kept in these brothels. Wherever there was slavery, there was sexual slavery. And we see it going through to today with sex trafficking and modern human trafficking.

Shu Wan (38:45)

Okay, thank you so much for your answer. I would say as a Chinese national and growing up in China, I really appreciate your discussion about the victimhood and the traumatic experience of Chinese women in California. As a. Some Chinese women in California in the late 9th century as sexual slaves. So now let's turn to the 20th century. So for the past of slavery or history of slavery in the past century in California, I want to invite you talk about the Toriel region for which I would not use the word development of modern castle Rio state and the fortress economy.

Dr. Jean Fraser (39:33)

The carceral state in California is born at the same time as African American slavery and Native American slavery. In the 1850s in California, there was cries of how much crime there was in the streets and how many immigrants were coming from all over the world. The same sort of racial cries we hear now that create a kind of anti immigrant intention. But there was crime. There was a billion and a half dollars a year. And I believe you would need to multiply that by 30 at least to get into modern currency. But in the early 1850s, a billion and a half dollars a year was leaving California to go into the banks and rescue the financial system in the East Coast. And so there was money. It was. There was so much loose money, things were crazy priced. A loaf of bread cost $12. So there is money around, and there was theft and there was destitution and hunger and crime. And California needs, because it's a brand new state, it needs to set up a criminal justice system. The legislature hires a incredibly corrupt man and gives him a partnership with the then governor of California, and the two of them are given $100,000 to build a penitentiary. They take the money and don't build a penitentiary. Instead, they take boats, ships that are sitting in California harbor and turn them into prison brigs in San Francisco Bay. For those listeners who are from California, it's a huge bay. And there were 400 ships abandoned in San Francisco Bay as the crews and the captains rushed up to the gold country in the mountains. They take some of these ships and turn them into prison brigs. This corrupt guy who has the state contract to build a penitentiary takes two of these prison brigs and he's sailing them around San Francisco Bay. And private people are taking prisoners to build their mansions. Cities like Sacramento and San Francisco are taking unpaid prisons to build the sewage systems, to build the hotels, to build the new roads, and finally the legislature says, build the darn prison. But these are people who are living in filthy, tiny cells that have just been built into the hulls of these ships, the ships that had brought people to California for the gold rush and sailing them around and making profit off of the labor. And this is hard labor to build a street, you needed to break granite. To build a sewage system, you were breaking granite and they're sleeping rough. The guards didn't even want to go down into the hulls of the ships they were guarding. And because they smelled, people were angry. People were escaping all the time. And finally, they build San Quentin prison. In San Quentin Prison, they keep the gig going. They build mills in San Quentin Prison inside the prison to make furniture or sew and weave jute bags for the new agriculture to hold the wheat so it doesn't fly around. So the prisons are supporting private farmers in California who are going to create the wealth, the incredible wealth and power of California agriculture. But they couldn't ship the wheat without these burlap bags. The bags are being made by tortured prisoners, prisoners in San Quentin. They are working 12 hours a day standing at the loom to weave these burlap bags. If they spoke they were tortured. And in the book, there are pictures of water torture and beatings. What happens in San Quentin is one of the largest prison strikes in. In American history. 100 years before Attica, 1,000 prisoners in San Quentin refused to work in the jute mills.

Shu Wan (45:04)

Okay, thank you so much for your answer again. I really appreciate that. Especially when I read your book and listen to. Listening, sorry, listening to your talk about the cancer estate, it remind me of, like I want to say, I'm not American historian, so I have a very limited knowledge of American history, but it remind me of the famous Hollywood movie Shawshank's Redemption. I want to say it just describe those prisoners in jail. They were forced to work. So. But after talking about the past, let's talk about, I mean, the present issue, present of slavery in California. I want to say, I think it's very common. Some people, they may say, okay, okay for slavery. If we talk about slavery, okay, it's maybe still a serious issue in remaining parts of war in somewhere in the world, but not in the United States. So for American society, slavery is just the evil past, but it's not a big issue at the present. So my question is that how do you think about. What's your comments of this opinion that slavery is over? It's not a big issue in America, especially in California today.

Dr. Jean Fraser (46:27)

I think all over the United States today, we're seeing a rise in human trafficking. People either call it human trafficking or modern slavery to distinguish it from the old slavery. There's a lot of carryovers from the old slavery in terms of control, violence, no wages for labor, attack on the human body through labor or assault. So there are many threads that tie the old slavery to the new slavery. But wherever you turn, wherever we turn in the United States and not just California, we're seeing modern human trafficking. The field divides it between sex trafficking and labor trafficking. I personally don't make that distinction. It's a controversial issue. I think any person who is forced to perform a sex act is also performing an act of labor. And often they're having to do both at the same time to work for the person who has prostituted them. If we look around now, 90% of people who are trafficked in the United States right now are female. And these are people who are changing the sheets in the motels we go to. We go into a conference and stay in a hotel. And we come into a room and there is a migrant, often a migrant, generally a woman who is changing the sheets or cleaning the bathroom very, very quickly because they have to do 30 rooms a day of cleaning in a hotel. We know that the very comfortable clothing that we all love to wear. And more and more after the pandemic, when we were calling our pajamas sweat clothes or athletic clothes, but the same clothes, these are made in sweatshops in San Francisco and in Los Angeles. We see if you come off the freeway and you see people who are people of color selling flowers at the edge of the freeway somewhere, there is a trafficker watching those teenagers selling flowers as we stop at the stop sign on the off ramp. We know that there is human trafficking in the fields of marijuana, in the tomato grows in the orchards. Our immigration policy is creating human trafficking because we don't have enough people to do the field labor to support our food and our food resources and our agriculture. We know that people are being trafficked from detention centers. We know that children are being taken out of foster homes. In fact, some foster families will take money for, quote, raising 10 or 12 children and then selling them into human trafficking. It's permeated our industrial culture. It's permeated our food culture. The pot grows, the marijuana grows. The pleasure centers, the sex trade are all being supported by unfree labor. And it's up to us to see it. We're beginning to see signs of recognition in women's bathrooms now, especially if you go, for example, into a gas station. There's a sign in many languages in. In English, in Spanish, in Mandarin, that say, very simply, are you okay? Are you free? If not, call this number, and it's the number of either the police or a human trafficking organization that will come get you. So there are signs of it, but it's our job to notice it and to become abolitionists and to become rescuers.

Shu Wan (51:15)

Thank you so much for your answer. So I'm very pressured to mention about the sign of human transfixing in the restroom. So it reminded me of my impression, my first impression of the United States. A few years ago when I first come to US I arrived in United States at. Sorry, at the airport in San Francisco. So I went to a restaurant and I also said. I also saw the sign, which say, as you mentioned, okay, you mentioned, like, if you feel unsafe, if you think you are a victim of human transfixing in different language at that moment, I won't say this sign, I mean, surprised me, because I want to say before I come to United States, I thought, okay, human trafficking, any kind of slavery, is not a big issue in American society. But after reading your book, I'm convinced that. No that's not true. It's still a big issue. So thanks so much. At the end of our episodes today I want to talk to my audience so to my listeners. So for any of my listeners if you take interest in the history of California, the history of slavery in the United States or you even just still believe like okay I think slavery is just not about California. California was and is free state and for American society slavery is not a big issue. It's just about the past. I highly recommend consider buying a copy of Dr. Jim Fraser's newest book California A Slave State which is a fantastic book. I highly recommend you to read it. I believe if you still as mentioned you still believe slavery is not a big issue for either California or either contemporary American society. I believe you must change your mind after reading this book. So thank you so much for listening to our episodes today. Thank you.

Dr. Jean Fraser (53:34)

Thank you for having me.