| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 39.4

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 39.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

"This Land Was Mexican Once": Histories of Resistance from Northern California. By Linda Heidenreich. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. xiv + 255 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $50.00, cloth; $19.95, paper.)

What else flourishes amongst the grapevines of Napa? Apparently a great deal, says Linda Heidenreich. Examining what is now Napa County, an area north of San Francisco, Heidenreich says that between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries there unfolded what she calls "a bifurcated history." One branch concerns "dispersed histories," the record of various groups, who, because of their racial, ethnic, or linguistic heritage, do not always receive notice from scholars, much less the general public. This ignorance and neglect—to be fair these are not terms Heidenreich employs—leads to the "linear story," the second branch of bifurcated history in which Euro-Americans believed they were destined to stand supreme in Napa and elsewhere in California. Heidenreich contests the linear story, with its endorsement of Euro-American superiority, by showing that Native Americans, Spanish-speakers (namely Spaniards and Mexicans), Chinese immigrants, and African Americans were not backward groups fated to disappear, but vital populations who contributed, and still contribute, to the welfare of Napa and points beyond.

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