Douglas Monroys Thrown Among Strangers The Making of...

Douglas Monroys Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California When Spaniards colonized California, they invaded the native Indians with foreign worldviews, weapons, and diseases. The distinct regional culture that resulted from this union in turn found itself invaded by Anglo-Americans with their peculiar social, legal, and economic ideals. Claiming that differences among these cultures could not be reconciled, Douglas Monroy traces the historical interaction among them in Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California. Beginning with the missions and ending in the late 1800s, he employs relations of production and labor demands as a framework to explain the†¦show more content†¦The Indians fused the material and spiritual into one existence and conceived time and life as cyclical. Culture was reproduced over and over because ?the individual has had no freedom to act in ways different from those of the ancestors.?(11) They are portrayed without history, and he later concludes that ?entrance into histo ry killed them?(282), implying that history is a European phenomenon. Rice, on the other hand, states: California?s Indians are popularly viewed as static remnants of ancient Stone-Age peoples. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Before and after the advent of whites in their lands, native cultures constantly changed and adapted to shifting social and ecological conditions. (Rice, 31) Denying a group their own history subtly, yet dangerously, produces formation of the ?other.? Monroy contradicts himself by writing, ?Unbeknownst to most Europeans, the natives they encountered varied more widely that did the different European people themselves.?(6) They spoke between sixty-four and eighty different languages (Rice, 32). Surely such a diverse group of people could not have developed without changing and adapting to specific areas or circumstances. The Spanish philosophy of colonization entailed military regulation and religious conversion at the missions. According to Monroy, more women than men were attracted to the missions because they were oppressed in Indian society. ?We see here how the power