Prof. Dr. Jean Pfaelzer

My research at BCDSS will be on a collection tentatively titled  tentatively titled Voices of the Enslaved of California, based on the archival material I collected for California A Slave State (Yale University Press, 2023). Voices will include an extensive introduction on the particularities of first-person narratives of the enslaved in California. I'll focus on a collection of voices of the enslaved from the US West,  drawn from narratives of captives at the missions & ranchos, enslaved African Americans brought out for the Gold Rush, early convict laborers at San Quentin, children forced to labor in "outing" programs at the Indian Boarding Schools, testimony from kidnapped Chinese prostitutes, and survivors of modern human trafficking. This once-shrouded history spans three centuries of diverse types of slavery and slave revolts. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build the chain of Catholic missions. Russian otter hunters shipped Alaska Natives—the first slaves transported into California—and launched a Pacific slave triangle—Alaska, California, China. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the Gold Rush. chain gangs supplied convict labor and San Quentin Prison incubated California’s carceral state. Kidnapped Chinese girls were shipped across the Pacific, and sold in caged brothels to lonely settlers who flooded the state to capture their fortune in gold and land. Indian boarding schools forced children to work in California’s new farms and hotels. r California gorged on slavery; its appetite for unfree bodies and unpaid labor persists today in the global traffic in human beings who end up sold into the sex trade or trapped in sweatshops and remote marijuana grows. My research looks West to upend the long-held North-South map of American slavery and reveal the slave revolts that mark California’s history: These first-person voices of the enslaved describe the burning of Spanish missions; prison uprisings; a West Coast underground railroad; and countless battles for freedom in the streets and the courts that we still see today. These narratives affirm that California was a state that was built on slavery.  Transcribed, written, or recorded over 250 years, they shred the state’s utopian brand, rewrite our understanding of race in the West, and redefine America’s uneasy paths to freedom.  These diverse voices put slavery in the US West in a global context.  During Fall, 2024, I will be a Visiting Professor at Cambridge Univ. where I will finish the British end of the archival research on Muted Mutinies: Slave Revolts on Chinese "Coolie" Ships Bound for Cuba and Peru. These slave ships were owned by Russia, France, Portugal, Great Britain, Holland and the US. I will review and start to write up this research. Finally, my previous book, Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans has been optioned for a 4-part TV series.  If the script is ready, I will review it as it comes in. I am very much looking forward to the input of my colleagues at Bonn on all these projects.

• Human Rights Commission on Reparations, San Francisco, 2023
• The "Outing Programs" Human Trafficking at California’s Native American Boarding Schools; Supportive Testimony H.R. 5444 / S. 2907