Cashing the “California Banknote”: Anglo Settlers in Mexican California

In this talk, I consider American expansion in Mexican California,a region seen as an important gateway to the vast Pacific beyond
its shores. The encroachment on Spanish and later Mexican
territory also permitted the development of a trade in raw materials
that, for instance, supplied the shoe factories that were springing
up all over New and Old England and required great quantities of
leather. These products were then sold back to the newly affluent
rancheros who had developed a taste for these American consumer
goods, in exactly the same way as East Coast Americans were
importing products made in Britain from their own raw materials.
This is one example of how the circulation of people and objects
through networks of exchange connected the Atlantic and Pacific
worlds.

Dr. Kariann Akemi Yokota is an associate professor and Associate
Chair of the History Department at the University of Colorado
Denver. She is the author of Unbecoming British: How
Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (Oxford
University Press, 2011) that was included in CHOICE’s
“Outstanding Academic Titles” list for 2012. Her forthcoming
book is entitled “Pacific Overtures: Early America and the
Transpacific World, 1760-1853.” Her research interests include
transnational relations in the era of the American Revolution,
interethnic relations in the twentieth century, and material and
visual culture.

hm 11/7/14