The Mission Inn (1903)

During President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1903 visit to the Inn he exclaimed, “Here I am in the pioneer community of irrigated fruit growing in California…You have made of this city and its surroundings a veritable paradise.[1]” A telling distinction, at and around the turn of the twentieth century the Anglo-Americans establishing themselves in the region were migrants to inhabited lands, yet aback the success of an evolving citrus capitalism they became exalted as “pioneers”. Evidently, it was of the white settler’s opinion that the territory was formerly “underutilized” by Indigenous inhabitants[2]. A clearly disparaging opinion that is further illuminated by a publication for the Riverside Land and Irrigation Company in 1877 which reads: “It is a matter of surprise to many that visit us, that more has not been accomplished; but it must be borne in mind that the aborigines and their successors, the Mexican and Spanish races, were so long isolated from the ‘rest of mankind’ that there was no stimulus to exertion other than to get sufficient to eat and keep them[selves] comfortable.”[3] The language above displays how regional transitions toward capitalism evolved scripts of racial hierarchy from the white settlers and propounds the belief that the Anglo farmers were the only ones to make value of the land. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, or LACC, reiterated such beliefs stating in the 1880s that southern California needed “an immigration of industrious and intelligent practical farmers, such as were to be found in the Middle West,” or “More people of the right kind.[4]” Unfortunately, as the scope and scale of the citrus industry proliferated racial stratification grew concurrently.

The pace of production exploded “from one million boxes of oranges in 1887 to more than 65.5 million boxes of oranges lemons and grapefruits in 1944” and with it the Americanization process of the West.[5] Citrus capitalism spawned large corporate farming operations such as the Limoneira ranch north of Los Angeles. Founders of Limoneira and others like it constructed company towns in which housing and schools were constructed for Japanese male laborers, Mexican families, and other white workers. The proprietors of such industrial operations actualized their nativist beliefs by developing a sense of “paternalism” and attempting to transform what they deemed to be “uncivilized” immigrant workers into “American ‘civilized’ residents.[6]” The citrus growers' use of paternalistic tactics facilitated control over the labor force by binding workers’ housing with their job and Americanizing workers through favorable methods of education.[7] An Indian boarding school in Riverside, located only a few miles from the Mission Inn and built with the same pseudo-Spanish revival architecture, typified the culturally denigrative and manipulative force exacted upon non-whites. The Sherman Institute for the Indigenous made it its mission to assimilate young Indian men and women featuring a protestant curriculum and a system of “outing” labor in which the men would be sent to work on mega-farms and the women to work in white-owned households. To quote Historian Kevin Whalen, “For school officials, outing labor tied together a broader curriculum that aimed to eliminate tribal languages and cultures, replace native kinship and family structures with an idealized nuclear family, and inculcate basic reading, writing, math, and language skills to facilitate the entry of native people into the wage-labor markets of the western United States.”[8] This process is indicative of the widespread economic and cultural shifts that were so destructive to non-white populations, rewriting and censoring the narratives of the land.

“By placing the navel orange tree in the courtyard of the Mission Inn, the historical society recognized citrus growers as the rightful inheritors of California in a narrative celebrating Anglo American migrants’ ability to turn a Mexican desert into an American garden.”[9] The advent of white settlers in the Riverside region and the citrus capitalism they catalyzed, like the symbolic planting of the navel orange, rewrote the history of the region attributing praise to the bringers of financial success and Americanism while silencing those who had come before.  

[1] United States President, and Theodore Roosevelt. California Addresses. San Francisco, The California Promotion Committee, 1903.

[2] Carpio, Genevieve. "The Rise of the Anglo Fantasy Past.” 46.

[3] Riverside Land and Irrigating Company, Southern California: Riverside Land and Irrigating Company of San Bernardino, California (San Francisco: Frank Eastman, 1877), 19.

[4] Gendzel, Glen. "Not Just a Golden State.” Southern California Quarterly 90, no. 4 (2008): 363.

[5] Tobey, Ronald, and Charles Wetherell. "The Citrus Industry and the Revolution of Corporate Capitalism in Southern California, 1887-1944." California History 74, no. 1 (1995): 12.

[6] McBane, Margo. "Whitening a California Citrus Company Town: Racial Segregation Practices at the Limoneira Company and Santa Paula, 1893––1919." Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts 4, no. 2 (2011): 214.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Whalen, Kevin. "Indian School, Company Town: Outing Workers from Sherman Institute at Fontana Farms Company, 1907–1930." Pacific Historical Review 86, no. 2 (2017): 290.

[9] Carpio, Genevieve. "The Rise of the Anglo Fantasy Past.” 41.

Carpio, Genevieve. "The Rise of the Anglo Fantasy Past: MOBILITY, MEMORY, AND RACIAL HIERARCHIES IN INLAND SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA,1870–1900." In Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race, 22-63. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvfxvcnd.7.

Gendzel, Glen. "Not Just a Golden State: Three Anglo "Rushes" in the Making of Southern California, 1880-1920." Southern California Quarterly 90, no. 4 (2008): 349-78. doi:10.2307/41172443.

McBane, Margo. "Whitening a California Citrus Company Town: Racial Segregation Practices at the Limoneira Company and Santa Paula, 1893––1919." Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts 4, no. 2 (2011): 211-33. doi:10.2979/racethmulglocon.4.2.211.

"Mission Inn Foundation." History of the Mission Inn. https://missioninnmuseum.org/learn/history/.

Riverside Land and Irrigating Company, Southern California: Riverside Land and Irrigating Company of San Bernardino, California (San Francisco: Frank Eastman, 1877), 19, Rare Book 267134, Huntington Library.

Tobey, Ronald, and Charles Wetherell. "The Citrus Industry and the Revolution of Corporate Capitalism in Southern California, 1887-1944." California History 74, no. 1 (1995): 6-21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25177466.

United States President, and Theodore Roosevelt. California Addresses. San Francisco, The California Promotion Committee, 1903. Web.. https://lccn.loc.gov/03031227.

Whalen, Kevin. "Indian School, Company Town: Outing Workers from Sherman Institute at Fontana Farms Company, 1907–1930." Pacific Historical Review 86, no. 2 (2017): 290-321. doi:10.2307/26419748.