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   From: remailer@domain.invalid   
      
   California Bound recounts a tumultuous history of mass migration,   
   displacement, and litigation that led to the establishment of   
   California’s earliest African American communities.   
      
      
   While the exhibition focuses on the hundreds of enslaved Africans   
   who were brought to California shortly before and after its   
   ratification as a state in 1850, the curators date the earliest   
   presence of people of African descent in the region to the 1700s and   
   1800s. Spanish colonization of the Gulf of California, which relied   
   on the labor of enslaved indigenous and African people since the   
   16th century, resulted in a multicultural landscape. An early   
   community of non-Indigenous people in California were the   
   Californios, who were either Mestizo (mixed European and Indigenous   
   ancestry) or of mixed African and Indigenous ancestry. Among Los   
   Angeles’s first settlers, the Pobladores who arrived from Mexico in   
   1781, more than half of 11 families were of African or part-African   
   ancestry.   
      
   While the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 promised full US   
   citizenship and property rights for Californios, who were previously   
   Mexican citizens, the discovery of gold in the same year would   
   upturn their lives and the lives of the roughly 150,000 Indigenous   
   people who were living in the region. Between 1848 and 1854, up to   
   300,000 people entered the region as part of the Gold Rush,   
   resulting in Californios and Indigenous people being outnumbered and   
   claims to their land undermined. The mass migration of people   
   included Mexicans, Chileans, Peruvians, and Chinese, alongside free   
   Africans who also sought opportunity in the west. Many of these   
   minority groups, however, were exploited as agricultural laborers,   
   domestic servants, and sex workers, while white migrants from the   
   American South brought enslaved Africans to work in the gold mines.   
      
   California Bound goes into great detail about the political and   
   economic divides that emerged from debates over California’s   
   statehood and the legal status of slavery. It explains the divide   
   between pro-enslavement southerners who sought to maintain the   
   institution of slavery and the anti-enslavement northerners who   
   desired to abolish it outright. A third political group in   
   California, the Free Soil Party, also opposed slavery not on moral   
   grounds, but based on the economic self-interest of whites who   
   lacked the capital to compete with slave-owners and wished to   
   eliminate competition from African labor, both free and enslaved.   
      
   California joined the US as part of the Compromise of 1850, which   
   also included the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act as federal law.   
   The new law required enslaved fugitives to be returned to their   
   enslavers upon capture, and officials and citizens of free states to   
   cooperate accordingly. While California’s entry into the Union as a   
   free state might have been considered a victory for abolitionists   
   and enslaved Africans, political realities within the state tempered   
   any hopes that California could become a true safe haven. Shortly   
   after statehood, pro-enslavement lawmakers passed statutes excluding   
   minority testimony against whites in criminal and civil cases. In   
   1852, the state legislature passed the California Fugitive Slave   
   Law, legalizing the arrest and removal of runaway enslaved Africans   
   who arrived with their enslavers before statehood. These legal   
   structures would set the stage for the eight stories that are at the   
   heart of California Bound.   
      
   While the exhibition’s legal documents and letters don’t always make   
   for the most compelling visual artifacts, the curators bring their   
   contents to life by surfacing eight legal cases that resulted in   
   freedom or enslavement for Africans living in California. There’s   
   the story of Frank, an enslaved 18-year-old forcibly brought to work   
   in the Sierra Nevada mines who later escaped to San Francisco and   
   legally attained freedom with support from a local community of free   
   Africans who petitioned on his behalf. The legal precedent in the   
   case would shock the state’s pro-enslavement legislators and result   
   in the passage of the state’s own Fugitive Slave Law in 1852.   
      
   The story of Bridget “Biddy” Mason might one day be adapted into a   
   film for the spectacular way in which Mason and her family were   
   rescued by black cowboys at the Cajon Pass in San Bernardino. Biddy   
   Mason, who was born into slavery in 1818, arrived in California with   
   her family as slaves of Robert Marion Smith, a Mormon who migrated   
   west to establish a religious compound in the state. In Los Angeles   
   County, Mason befriended a free African couple, Robert and Minnie   
   Owens, who were successful owners of a livery stable and cattle   
   business. When Smith attempted to move to Texas, a pro-slavery   
      
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