Slavery is often associated with the South. A new book shifts the narrative West. “California, a Slave State,” details 250 years of slavery and slave revolts in California. KPBS reporter Katie Hyson spoke with the book's author, Jean Pfaelzer, a public historian and University of Delaware professor, about slavery throughout the state's history, and how it continues today. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
What prompted you to write this book? Take me back to that moment.
Pfaelzer: It was actually quite a powerful moment. I was sitting with a very small photo that I had actually found in the basement of a library, and it's of a Chinese girl in the early 1880s. She looks about 14, maybe 15, and she's in a caged brothel on Jackson Street in San Francisco.
I stared at her, and then I just heard myself say, “What happened to the 13th amendment?” How is it possible that there was slavery, public slavery, in a caged brothel on Jackson Street in San Francisco?
I had to take this story and find out why we couldn't protect this little girl. I had to find out where we were at as a country and where California was at as a state.
And the other moment that drove me to this book is, I was up in Northern California, and I read in the local newspaper that a 15-year-old girl, again, a teenage girl, had been found, and she had actually saved herself. She had been kept in a locked metal box on a marijuana grow (operation) in Lake County. She was homeless. She'd been strolling the streets of Hollywood. She'd been picked up by two men, driven the length of the state and then locked in this metal box with two holes — one to prod her, one to hose her down. And then she was let out, either to trim the buds off of the marijuana plants or to sexually service the owners and maybe the other field workers. And that was deeply jolting to me. It's very near where I have a cabin, just to the north in Humboldt County. And it seemed like this was a neighbor and a neighboring ranch. I've hiked that land. I've backpacked on that land. How could I not know what was happening in my own state?
I don't think when most Americans think of slavery that they think of California. What is California's history of slavery, and how is it different from how slavery unfolded in the rest of the country?
Pfaelzer: California has commonalities with Southern slavery. But this book disrupts this North — South model map of slavery in the United States. More and more historians are looking into how slavery seeped north. But we hadn't taken the story west. And part of what defined slavery in California is that it both imported legal traditions and practices of brutality — ways of registering ownership, ways of hanging onto slaves — from the East.
But California has this unique geography. It had 250 very small tribal affiliations, tribal clans. It was a beautiful, fertile, fecund state. It had the border, it had the mines, it had no labor force. And that was one of the driving forces to slavery: Who was going to work and profit from this new land that we had just captured from Mexico?
The presence of the American military to enforce and implement with a lot of brutality the slavery of Native Americans.
And then there was the gold rush, which brought people and labor traditions and a need for workers from all over the world.
What I didn't know, even growing up in California, was that plantation slave owners had marched about 2,000 enslaved plantation Blacks from the South. And so there was a tradition of Southern slave owners who immediately took control of the state and wrote their codes into California law.
You wrote that California entered the United States with a state constitution to never tolerate slavery. Then within months, legalized enslaving indigenous people. When I read that, I thought it's racial injustice just underneath a progressive surface. Do you see ways that persists today in California?
Pfaelzer: We have this aura of this utopian dream of sunshine and surfers and the wine country and great food and a free-spirited sexuality. And all of that is sitting right on top of a desperate situation of modern slavery and modern human trafficking.
In the sweatshops of San Francisco are Asian women, sometimes with babies strapped to their back who are kept in cages. If you walk through parts of San Francisco, you can see barred windows and no signage, and those are sweatshops. We see girls standing by the freeway exits selling flowers. Those girls are very likely trafficked. We see teenage girls at truck stops. And we now know that at the detention centers at the border down near Tecate, down near Tijuana, that desperate migrants are being either sold and escape and take the opportunity to flee from the detention centers and find themselves trafficked as field workers, as factory workers.
Right now, there's prison labor and then there's sexual slavery. Think of the internet and the websites like Craigslist or the site that just got shut down, Backpage.com. Those are supermarkets for the unfree slavery in the sex trade.
So, it's happening now, and it's built on the traditions that grew over the 250 years that I write about.
Before journalism, I worked in nonprofit assistance for sex workers, and that included women who had been trafficked. When you learn how to spot it and your eyes are open, you start to see it everywhere. And I went through a period of time where it was really hard to sleep at night. And you feel a little crazy because it's almost like you're aware of this reality that most people are not aware of when they're walking around in daily life. Did you go through this with this book?
Pfaelzer: I did very much. I've had this cabin in Humboldt County for almost three decades. And I'm very aware that we're in the Emerald Triangle, that we're in marijuana country. I didn't know until I started talking with growers up here that the field workers were unfree and they were from Guatemala and Honduras. I interviewed the head inspector for our county sheriff, and our county sheriff is a guy named Bill Honsal, who is very aware of what's happening here. We're financially underserved, and what Bill Honsal says is, more girls go in than come out. Where are the bodies? And these are people who are my neighbors.
The way it hit me most intimately was I saw an ad for a seminar on human trafficking in Humboldt County. And it was run by a woman who goes by the name of Elle Snow — that's not her real name for her own safety. And we became friends and we spent a lot of time together. Elle was groomed by a guy who came up from Sacramento.
She was working as a manager in a Sbarro pizza parlor in the town of Eureka. And he charms her. “You look like you're having a hard time. Talk to me. I'm your friend.” And for six months he took this woman who didn't have a lot of money out to fancy meals. And he listened to her. He called her every night.
There are books on Amazon that tell you how to become a trafficker. And Elle's trafficker followed it to a T. And he gave her a sense of comfort of fatherliness. He was two decades older than her. And then one time he comes into Sbarro and he says, “You look like you're having a rough time. Let's go away for the weekend.” And he takes her back to his apartment in Sacramento. And after one torrid, wonderful, romantic night, she wakes up without her money, her wallet, her driver's license, her clothes. He beats her up and he tells her she's going to walk the street. And the only option of not walking the street is to go to work in a brothel in very wealthy Walnut Creek in a fancy home behind a gated community. And in hearing her story — she allowed me to tape her and we spent many days together — the story became very personal and very real.
So, yeah, it's all over the place. I see it. I go to a conference and I watch the maids change the sheets in a hotel bedroom. Ninety percent of people who are trafficked in California are women and many of them are in the domestic service trade, working as maids in hotels and waitresses or washing dishes or working in the clothing trade.
So the history that I write about takes us right to the now and it terrifies me. We almost have to close our eyes to not see it. But I didn't see it until I wrote this book.
What do you think justice would look like now?
Pfaelzer: Right now there are serious moves for reparations in California. In fact, I'll be testifying before the San Francisco Reparations Committee in a week or two. And for the first time, somebody's putting a price tag on what this history costs us. The figure for the last three weeks has been $8 billion — which is more than the state budget — to repay the pain, the loss of jobs, of homes, of education, of health care, downstream from slavery.
And I think we haven't accepted that this history is expensive, that it costs, and that we have a debt. We have a financial debt. We have, as ethical and moral people, a human debt. And I think the cost has startled people. The opposition to reparations is enormous.
I don't know how we'll put a price on it. I don't know how we'll afford it. I don't know how we will define who is entitled to it.
I know that different groups of people want different things. California Native Americans want land. They want land as well as a check. And I found that 48% of good land in California is not developed. Half of the state could be returned to the people we took it from. So land would be one kind of reparations.
Money to compensate for the losses is a very radical demand. And yet it's going to cost us to pay for being downstream from the history we created.
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Pfaelzer: We are a state of slave revolts.
When we all did the fourth grade mission projects and built the missions out of sugar cubes, we didn't know that there were organized slave revolts coordinated between the missions that burnt the missions to the ground, that in some cases, slaughtered the priests who were raping the Indians, the soldiers and the priests. And there were slave revolts and mass escapes. We didn't know that native people captured at the mission in San Francisco built these canoes out of tule reeds and sailed across the bay into freedom and were chased by these Spanish soldiers. But many got away.
So like the woman I met, Elle Snow, who ran away from trafficking, human beings did not take this without demanding and fighting and putting themselves at risk and often winning their liberty.
