Photo Exhibit Focuses on San Diego’s newest immigrant communities
California - "We All Came from Somewhere Else"
1. Early Migration:
- - The first California human inhabitants arrived over ten thousand years ago from Asia by boat or Bering strait land bridge and became ancestors of what we call today "Native Americans".
- - Spanish colonization began in the late 18th century, establishing missions and settlements.
- - Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, after the Napoleonic Wars, leading to more land grants and settlement.
- - The Gold Rush (1848-1855) brought a massive influx of people from around the world, especially from China and other parts of the U.S after the US took California from Mexico in 1846 as a result of the Mexican American War.
- - Chinese immigrants first flocked to the United States in the 1850s, eager to escape the economic chaos in China following the British Opium Wars, and to try their luck at the California gold rush. Chinese immigrants faced significant discrimination, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 after helping to build the transcontinental railroad which opened rapid travel to California from the eastern US.
- - Mexican immigration increased in the early 20th century, with many settling in diverse urban neighborhoods.
- - The Great Depression led to forced deportations of Mexican Americans, including U.S. citizens, while Americans from the midwest came to escape the "dust bowl".
- - World War II and resulting labor shortage in California brought the Bracero Program, allowing Mexican laborers to work temporarily in the U.S.
- - Post-war and subsequent immigration continued to diversify California's population with waves through Angel Island from Vietnam, the Phillipines, Korea, India, Iran, and Iraq after various Indo-Pacific regional conflicts.
- - As of 2019, 27% of California's population was foreign-born, the highest percentage of any U.S. state.
- - Latin American and Asian immigrants make up the largest groups of recent immigrants.
- - Immigration has slowed somewhat due to improved conditions in Mexico and recent policy changes.
- - California's culture, economy, and identity have been shaped by waves of immigration from various parts of the world.
- - The state has a complex history of both welcoming immigrants alternating with periods of discrimination against them.
- - Recent efforts, such as Governor Newsom's "Immigrant Heritage Month," aim to recognize and celebrate the contributions of immigrants to California.
San Diego’s immigrant communities featured in new photo exhibit – San Diego Union-Tribune
A new series of photo exhibits focuses on San Diego’s diverse immigrant communities. The series can be seen for free at community venues, such as City Hall and libraries across San Diego.
In “The New Colossus: A Photographic Celebration of San Diego’s Immigrant Communities,” artist John Raymond Mireles captures the lives of local immigrants in their daily surroundings.
The exhibit title was inspired by the title of a poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty, called “New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus and her words “Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”
The exhibit, which opened in June in honor of National Immigrant Heritage Month, features eight themed displays of portraits of immigrants.
“I chose each of the themes for this project so that I could better tell a more complete story of immigration and immigrants here in this country. Each theme looks at this complex issue from a different point of view, whether it’s of the individual in the photo telling their story, emphasizing the historical context of immigration or it’s seeing how an immigrant experiences the duality of living in two different cultures,” Mireles said.
California’s History of Immigration: How Immigrants Built the State, and How They Were Treated in Return
Immigrants continue to shape the face of California today. Chad Zuber / Shutterstock Shutterstock License
California, the most populous state in the union, with slightly more than 39.6 million residents, also has the largest population of immigrants. As of 2019, the most recent year with a precise count available, 10,564,220 Californians were born outside the United States—27 percent of the state’s population.
In the U.S. as a whole, 13.7 percent of the population is made up of immigrants—about half of California’s percentage. Most of the migrant population is composed of folks properly documented to reside in the U.S.. According to the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), about 2.7 million undocumented immigrants live in California.
Where do those undocumented immigrants come from? Mostly Mexico, Central and South America—79 percent were born in those regions, the largest portion (61 percent) from Mexico, per MPI data. Asian immigrants come in second, at 18 percent of the undocumented population.
Those born in Latin America also make up the largest percentage of legally authorized immigrants, at 49.5 percent. Asia-born immigrants are next at 40.2 percent, with Europeans comprising 6.2 percent of all immigrants now living in California.
California is a state built by people who came from somewhere else. It was not until 2010 that people born in California outnumbered those who had migrated from either another state or another country. Today, about 56 percent of Californians are “native” to the state. But if you go back to its founding, the entire territory and everyone in it switched countries and became “immigrants” of sorts overnight.
1848: California’s Residents Become Instant Americans
By early 1848, nearly two solid years of war against Mexico had cost 13,000 American lives. At that time, the entire U.S. population was about 17 million. In today’s terms, the Mexican-American War would have left 254,000 Americans dead. But Mexico was hurt even worse, with 25,000 casualties.
The war started with a bitter dispute over Texas. The region had declared independence from Mexico in 1836, but the American government in Washington, D.C., dragged its feet on making Texas officially part of the U.S. When U.S. President James Polk decided it was time to annex Texas, war broke out on April 25, 1846.
By Feb. 2, 1848, the Americans had pushed far south and captured Mexico City. The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on that day. Under the treaty, Mexico not only conceded any rights to Texas, it agreed to sell 525,000 square miles of other territory to the U.S. for the sum of $15 million (approximately $550 million in 2022 money). Among that huge swath of land, the territory that two years later became the state of California.
The treaty also gave the Mexicans living in California the choice to become U.S. citizens. In effect, these citizens of a “foreign” country, including an elite of wealthy landowners—the territorial Governor Pío Pico among that group—became instant immigrants. The treaty also promised that their land rights would be honored. Fast-moving events, however, would render that promise mostly hollow. Just about a week before the treaty ending the war was signed, a momentous event took place that would, almost overnight, turn California into a land of dreams for immigrants and migrants from all over the U.S. and the world—and something of a nightmare for Californians.
At Sutter Creek in the Sierra Nevada, at a mill owned by “Captain” John Sutter, a Swiss-German explorer who built the first white settlement in California, a man named James Marshall discovered gold. Over the next two years, more than 300,000 migrants flooded California, with dreams of striking it rich.
Mexicans, who until 1821 (when Mexico declared its independence) were Spanish subjects, formed the largest bloc of immigrants to early California. Independence from Spain provided a great incentive for Mexicans to move north in search of land and wealth. Under Spanish rule, all lands were held by the crown and land grants were few. That changed when the new government of Mexico took over. Starting in 1834, the government issued more than 600 land grants to well-to-do Mexican immigrants as well as to white settlers such as Sutter.
Next Wave of Immigrants Arrives From China
It was a century-and-a-half before social media, but news of the discovery on Sutter’s land spread in a hurry, not only across the U.S. and its territories, but around the world. In 1849, word of the gold strike reached Hong Kong and quickly disseminated throughout China—a country then in the midst of a 30-year economic depression.
The struggling Chinese people envisioned a better life in this land they called gam saan, or “gold mountain.” By 1851, an estimated 25,000 had left their homes and arrived in California, instantly becoming about 10 percent of the state’s entire population at the time. But as happened with most aspiring Gold Rush millionaires, very few of the Chinese immigrants found success in the mining business.
The state was hardly welcoming to the Chinese immigrant miners. In 1850 the newly formed state legislature passed a “foreign miner’s tax” that charged any gold prospector who was not a U.S. citizen $20 per month—the equivalent of almost $750 today—just to hold a license. Though in theory the tax applied to all immigrant miners, in practice it was collected only from the Chinese and Mexican immigrants who followed their dreams to California. White European immigrants generally got off without paying.
The tax expired in 1870, but by that time the state had drained Chinese miners of $5 million (more than $100 million in 2022 cash). Between the tax and general brutality of trying to make it in the mining business, thousands of Chinese immigrants simply gave up. Being broke, they couldn’t afford passage back across the Pacific. So they took whatever work was available—which thanks to pervasive discrimination, wasn’t much.
One industry was happy to hire Chinese labor—the railroads. As many as 20,000 Chinese laborers laid tracks for the Transcontinental Railroad ,taking pay between 30 and 50 percent less than their white counterparts, and dying at a frightening rate from the hazardous nature of their work. While the exact number of Chinese workers killed remains uncertain, historians estimate the figure could be over 1,000.
When railroad work dried up, Chinese immigrants continued to face discrimination that shut them out of most jobs available to white Californians of that era. So many opened their own businesses—shops, laundries, restaurants and whatever they could as they attempted to survive in the “gold mountain.”
The Chinese Exclusion Act
The Chinese received little thanks for their labor, and the services they provided in constructing the foundations of California’s infrastructure. In 1882, driven mainly by California legislators and politicians, the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law designed specifically to restrict immigrants from Asia from entering the country.
In 1910, with San Francisco a primary port of entry for Chinese immigrants, the Bureau of Immigration quickly constructed a facility on Angel Island, about six miles offshore in San Francisco Bay. Despite its nickname of “the Ellis Island of the West,” the purpose of the facility was less to welcome immigrants, than to keep them out.
The Chinese Exclusion Act not only created a nightmare for immigrants from China—many of whom forged identities to pass themselves off as merchants, clergy, diplomats or teachers, groups that were exempted from the Act—it served as the model for decades of restrictive immigration laws. Most notoriously, the Immigration Act of 1924 set strict quotas on immigrants of specific races and nationalities, and banned immigrants from Asia altogether.
The 1882 Exclusion Act was finally repealed in 1943, but the new law placed a limit on visas for Chinese immigrants at 105 per year nationwide. About 13,000 Chinese Americans served in World War II, but about half had still been denied citizenship due to the Exclusion Act. A new immigration law passed in 1952, however, repealed the last vestiges of “exclusion” while maintaining strict quotas on Chinese immigration. The quota system was not swept away until the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, and as a result over the following decade, the Chinese American population doubled.
California Immigration in the 20th Century
Immigration from Mexico into California exploded in the early 20th century. From the turn of that century to 1920, the Mexican American population in the state ballooned by a factor of 11, from just over 8,000 in 1900 to more than 88,000 two decades later. That made Mexican Amercans about 3 percent of the state’s population at that time. Today, Mexican Americans comprise about 26 percent of California’s population, and they make up 84 percent of the state’s Latin American residents.
Most immigrants from Mexico, however, did not make the trip to California directly from south of the border. They most often crossed the border into Texas and remained there for a few years before migrating west to California with the hope of better-paying jobs. In the first third of the 20th century, Mexican immigrants tended not to settle in neighborhoods exclusively populated by other Mexicans, but in communities with diverse immigrant populations.
Prior to 1930, many Mexicans in Los Angeles—the most popular city for Mexican immigrants—settled in an area called the Plaza which today also includes the city’s Little Tokyo and Chinatown neighborhoods, and in that era also housed a large population of Italians.
In 1929, however, came the stock market crash which ignited the Great Depression. As millions of people lost their jobs, Mexican immigrants came to be seen as unwelcome competitors with white Americans for the increasingly scarce jobs that remained. Pres. Herbert Hoover announced a program he called “Real Jobs for Real Americans.”
In reality, the program was essentially what today might be called “ethnic cleansing.” In California and other states with large Mexican immigrant populations, local governments staged “repatriation drives,” which were actually mass, forced deportations. According to research by former California state Senator Joseph Dunn, 1.8 million U.S. residents were forcibly deported to Mexico during the 1930s—and 60 percent of them, almost 1.1 million, were U.S. citizens who despite their citizenship were not considered “real Americans” either by the government or large segments of the white population.
Under Hoover, laws were put in place banning the hiring of anyone of Mexican descent into a government job, and large corporations including California’s powerful Southern Pacific Railroad got on board with the program, laying off thousands of Mexican American workers.
War Brings Mexican Workers Back to California
World War II brought a sudden change, if not in racial and ethnic bigotry, than at least in attitudes toward Mexican workers. Established by executive order by Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942, the Mexican Farm Labor Program, better known as the Bracero Program, allowed Mexican laborers to enter the United States on short-term work contracts, primarily to fill a shortage of agricultural workers created by the military draft.
The program remained in place for 22 years, bringing about 4.6 million laborers from Mexico into the U.S., most of them into California. While the program created opportunities for Mexican immigrants to legally enter the country, American employers too often looked to skirt the program’s requirements, hiring undocumemted workers instead of those who arrived through the Bracero Program.
The influx of undocumented workers created a backlash and in 1954, under Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the U.S. government instituted the rather shockingly named (by today’s standards) “Operation Wetback.” It was yet another program of mass deportation that sent about 1.1. million workers back to Mexico.
California Immigration Today
The COVID-19 pandemic and Donald Trump-era anti-immigration policies have slowed the pace of immigration to California. According to research performed at the University of California-Merced, the state’s immigrant population, including documented and undocuemented immigrants as well as those who have won U.S. citizenship, dropped by six percent from 2019 to the end of 2020. That means the figure of 10,564,220 immigrant residents cited at the top of this article fell to about 9.7 million in approximately 12 months.
Other factors slowing immigration from Mexico, according to a New York Times report, include improved economic conditions in Mexico, the aging of Mexico’s own population, and the collapse of the U.S. housing bubble in the mid-2000s, which reduced demand for laborers to work on home construction and maintenance.
In June of 2022, however, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared “Immigrant Heritage Month,” a signal that California has at least tried to change its attitude toward its immigrant population from the days of mass deportations and bans on entry of the previous century.
“Immigrants, whether they arrived to seek safety or opportunity, have been integral to the identity and growth of California as we know it,” Newsom wrote in his proclamation. “The state will continue to support and stand with immigrant families and lead in building more inclusive and just policies which foster innovation and advance our collective economic and community growth.”
Mexican California | Early California History: An Overview | Articles and Essays | California as I Saw It: First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900 | Digital Collections | Library of Congress
In 1808, Spain's American colonies, one by one, began to fight for independence. Even before this spirit spread to Mexico, California felt the effects of the rebellions, for Spain's hard-pressed navy could not spare ships to bring supplies to the missions, presidios, and pueblos north of San Diego. Thus, in the dozen years that followed, local authorities relaxed restrictions on trading with non-Spanish merchants so that the colony could survive, and Californians became accustomed to contact with sailors, traders, hunters, and trappers from England, France, Russia, and, of course, the United States.
In 1821, Mexico achieved her independence, and word of this event reached Alta California the following year. The colonial policies of the republic were to be quite different from those of the Spanish monarchy. Not only were Californians allowed to trade with foreigners, but foreigners could also now hold land in the province once they had been naturalized and converted to Catholicism. Under Spain, land grants to individuals were few in number, and title to these lands remained in the hands of the crown. Under Mexican rule, however, governors were encouraged to make more grants for individual ranchos, and these grants were to be outright. Most important, the new Mexican republic was determined to move to "secularize" the missions, to remove the natives and the mission property from the control of the Franciscan missionaries.
This process began in California in 1834. In theory, the Franciscans had administered the mission lands in trust for the natives living there when the missionaries arrived, but few Native Americans benefited from the end of the mission system: although each family was to receive a small allotment from the former mission lands, the few who tried to make a living from these plots gave up after few years. Most of the missions' adobe churches and outbuildings soon fell into disrepair, although priests at some missions struggled to continue their ministry to the Mission Indians. Most of the missions' lands were disposed of in large grants to white Californians or recently-arrived, well-connected immigrants from Mexico. In the ten years before the missions were dismantled, the Mexican government had issued only 50 grants for large ranchos. In the dozen years after the missions were secularized, 600 new grants were made.
A new culture sprang up now in California: the legendary life of the ranchero and his family in a society where cattle-raising and the marketing of beef and hides became the central factors of economic life. With the end of the missions, most local attempts at manufacturing stopped. The California ranchers, their lands generally close to the southern California coast, became more and more dependent on the goods brought by the foreign merchants who came in search of hides. As British, Canadian, and United States settlers moved to Oregon, there was also an inevitable encroachment of non-Mexicans in northern California across that border. And more and more trappers and daring "mountain men" followed their taste for adventure and their search for furs in northern California and across the Sierras further south.
There were a few permanent residents of non-Hispanic birth or descent before 1824, but their numbers increased steadily in the Mexican era. The first United States citizens to come overland to California were trappers led by Jedediah Smith in 1826. The first organized group of settlers from the United States who crossed the Plains to California was the party led by John Bidwell and John Bartleson in 1841. Once in California, Bidwell went to work for Johann August Sutter (1803-1880), the most important of the foreign immigrants in Mexican California. A German-born Swiss businessman, Sutter arrived in San Francisco in 1839 and obtained an enormous grant of 48,000 acres at the junction of the Sacramento and American Rivers, where he established "New Helvetia," a settlement with a fort, orchards, vineyards, and wheatfields. Sutter's fort soon became a stopover for the American settlers who followed the Bidwell party through the Sierras, including survivors of the ill-fated Donner Party of 1846. Besides such settlers, trappers, and hunters there were also sailors who had jumped ship.
Mexico always had trouble ruling her distant province. The last governor sent to California from Mexico City was Manuel Micheltorena who came in 1842. His appearance triggered a local revolt, and he withdrew in 1845. Pío Pico, a local ranchero of part African heritage, became governor. Unofficially, California had achieved home rule. A year later, Mexico faced a still greater challenge. By then, California was home to a native population now reduced to less than 100,000 and to some 14,000 other permanent residents. Of these, perhaps 2,500 were "foreigners," whites of non-Hispanic descent, and of these, probably 2,000 had immigrated from the United States since 1840.
How Early Humans First Reached the Americas: 3 Theories
According to most archeologists and geneticists, the best theory for how the first humans migrated to the Americas is the same one that many likely learned in grade school: they crossed the Bering Strait from Asia via a now-extinct land bridge.
“One can only imagine what they thought when they got to North America south of the ice sheets and looked around and realized nobody else was home,” says David J. Meltzer, an archeologist and professor of prehistory at Southern Methodist University. “‘Wow, we’ve got an entire land to ourselves.”
Thanks to advances in genome sequencing and data analysis, we know that some of the first humans to set foot in North America (known as Paleo-Americans) were direct descendants of ancient people in Siberia, which is solid evidence for the land bridge hypothesis.
But not everyone is convinced that all Paleo-Americans walked to the Americas from Asia. There are outlier archeological sites in both North and South America that date to times before a land route was accessible. Could some of the first Americans have crossed oceans to get here? And do those theories hold up to scientific scrutiny?
Here is the evidence for three theories explaining how the first humans arrived in America: the land bridge theory, the trans-Pacific migration theory and the controversial Solutrean hypothesis.
The Land Bridge Theory: Crossing Beringia
Origins of the Clovis People
The theory with near-unanimous support from both archeologists and geneticists is that the first humans to populate the Americas arrived on foot via a temporary land bridge—across a region known as Beringia—that connected Eastern Siberia to Alaska for a span of roughly 5,000 years.
Why did they cross that forbidding, near-lifeless landscape into an unknown world? And once they arrived, why and how did they push southward so quickly? The classic explanation—that they were following animal herds—is far too simplistic, says Meltzer, author of First Peoples in a New World: Populating Ice Age America. “It’s not as though animals were headed down to Miami.”
Archeologists and anthropologists are still searching for the “why” of “how” of the first human migration to the Americas, but they’re zeroing in on the “when.” Thanks to a handful of well-preserved Ice Age archeological sites, and a precious few fully-sequenced genomes from Paleolithic human remains, a rough timeline has emerged.
The ancient ancestors of the first Americans left Siberia between 24,000 and 21,000 years ago. That’s been confirmed by comparing the DNA of Paleo-Americans with the DNA of Paleo-Siberians to pinpoint the moment when those two human populations diverged.
“We’re analyzing a mind-bogglingly huge scale of data to detect these patterns,” says Jennifer Raff, a geneticist and anthropologist at the University of Kansas. “These are really subtle differences that you wouldn’t pick up on if you were not sequencing every single base pair of these ancient genomes.”
According to paleoclimatologists, thick ice sheets covered much of the northern latitudes from 23,000 to 19,000 years ago, a period known as the Last Glacial Maximum. With all of that sea water trapped in ice, sea levels dropped, exposing a stretch of dry land between Asia and North America.
When Did They Cross the Land Bridge?
If a land route to the Americas was open at least 20,000 years ago (if not earlier), when exactly did the first Americans cross it? That’s one of the liveliest debates among archeologists.
For decades, says Meltzer, the consensus was that the first Americans arrived around 13,000 years ago. That date corresponds with thousands of finds across North America pointing to a shared archeological culture known as Clovis (named after a specific type of fluted spear point first found in Clovis, New Mexico in 1933). Clovis points were everywhere by 12,000 years ago, so the archeological evidence overwhelmingly backed an initial arrival 13,000 years ago.
But then came Monte Verde in Chile. At this remarkable site, thousands of miles south of the Bering Land Bridge crossing, archeologists unearthed solid evidence of a human settlement dating to 14,800 years ago, well before Clovis. After Monte Verde broke the 13,000 barrier, even more pre-Clovis sites emerged: Paisley Caves in Oregon (14,400 years ago), the Debra L. Friedkin Site in Texas (15,500 years ago) and Cooper’s Ferry in Idaho (16,000 years ago).
By Land or By Sea?
Those early, pre-Clovis dates were exciting, but they posed a new challenge for archeologists. According to geological evidence, thick glaciers blocked the land route from the Bering Land Bridge into North America until the glaciers started retreating around 15,000 to 14,000 years ago. So how were humans already in Idaho and Texas before the land route opened up? Or as far south as Southern Chile by 14,800 years ago?
“This is a point of great controversy among archeologists,” says Raff. “You’ll find plenty of archeologists who say [the first Americans] came through an ice-free corridor [over land], which didn’t open up until 14,000 years ago. But we have pre-Clovis sites that are early enough in the Americas that can’t be explained by the ice-free corridor.”
For Raff and others, a more likely scenario is that the pre-Clovis humans reached America in boats. The western coastline of North America was ice-free thousands of years earlier than the interior. The pre-Clovis humans could have crossed the Bering Land Bridge on foot, then used simple boats to skirt around the glaciers and make their way down the West Coast of North and South America.
Genomic evidence also supports the coastal boat theory.
“All of the ancient genomes that have been sequenced carry the signature of rapid movement—the rapid divergence of different lineages in the Americas—suggesting that people were moving very quickly,” says Raff. “It’s harder to move that quickly on foot than by boat.”
It could be, says Meltzer, that there were many “pulses” of migrations into the Americas via the land bridge over several millennia, but that the pre-Clovis arrivals were highly mobile and relatively few in number.
“We know that people can be present long before they pop up on archeological radar,” says Meltzer. “It may be that what Clovis represented [13,000 years ago] was the population in the Americas finally getting to the point where there were enough of them out there producing enough stuff that they became archeologically visible—really visible.”
The Trans-Pacific Migration Theory: Sailing the Open Seas
Inuit whaling for bowhead whales in the Arctic Ocean paddle an umiak, a seal-skin boat, near Barrow, Alaska.
In 2015, a geneticist named Pontus Skogland published some intriguing results from sequencing the genomes of modern-day indigenous people living in the Amazon region of South America. While the vast majority of their genome was shared with indigenous people in other parts of the Americas—and clearly descended from Eastern Siberia—there was a mysterious “signal” in the data.
According to that signal, the indigenous Amazon villagers appeared to share an ancient common ancestor—named “Population Y”—with indigenous people from “Australasia,” a region that includes indigenous Australians, New Guineans, Papuans and more.
For some, this was evidence that ancient inhabitants of Australia or its nearby islands may have used Polynesian-style wayfinding to sail thousands of miles across the open Pacific Ocean to arrive on the coast of South America.
While a trans-Pacific migration to the Americas sounds plausible, there are problems with the theory.
“We don’t have any evidence, archaeologically or genetically, of a trans-Pacific migration,” says Raff. “We do have evidence of a faint signal of shared ancestry between some South Americans, both ancient and modern, and individuals in Australasia, but it doesn’t match what you would expect from a trans-Pacific migration. The signal would be a lot stronger in individuals on the West Coast, and less as you move farther East, but it doesn’t fit with that model. It’s scattershot throughout the population.”
Because of the nature of the signal, Raff and other geneticists believe that Population Y is very, very old, and originated in Asia (the same genetic signal was present in a 40,000-year-old man found in a Chinese cave). Tens of thousands of years ago, some descendants of Population Y went north and others went south. Some of those northern descendants ultimately crossed the land bridge and made it to South America, while some of the southern descendants populated Australasia.
The Solutrean Hypothesis: Across the Atlantic Ice
There are no archeological sites in the Americas that pre-date 16,000 years ago, according to Meltzer. “There are claims to sites that are 20,000, 25,000 or even 130,000 years old,” says Meltzer, “but at the moment those claims are highly questionable at best.”
Not everyone agrees. Bruce Bradley, an emeritus archeology professor at the University of Exeter, thinks that there’s compelling evidence that humans were occupying sites along the East Coast of North America as far back as 20,000 years ago. And he has a controversial theory for how they got there so early: they came from Europe.
Bradley’s theory—which he detailed in a 2013 book, Across the Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America’s Clovis Culture (co-authored with the late Dennis Stanford)—centers on something called the Solutrean archeological culture. Roughly 23,000 to 18,000 years ago, ancient humans living in modern-day France and Spain produced a distinctive and elaborate toolkit of stone blades, spear throwers and harpoons that archeologists call Solutrean.
“Everybody agrees, Solutrean-age humans were incredibly innovative,” says Bradley. “They lived in a relatively harsh environment [during the Last Glacial Maximum], but also started looking toward the ocean. We’re starting to see the beginnings in Western Europe of maritime adaptations—looking at the ocean and other aquatic resources.”
Bradley thinks that Solutrean hunters and fishermen may have fashioned simple “skin boats” (similar to the Inuit umiak) to expand their hunting territories along the ice-clogged North Atlantic. Eventually, those travels took them further and further across the ice until they arrived on the eastern shores of North America.
“We’re not talking about Solutreans getting in boats and sailing across the ocean,” says Bradley. “It wasn’t a migration, but an expansion of hunting territory.”
For Bradley, the evidence that Solutreans landed in America is found in sites like Parsons Island, Maryland, where stone blades and other tools (tentatively dated to more than 20,000 years ago) bear a striking resemblance to Solutrean technology.
“If you put this group of artifacts and technologies at a site in France, you wouldn't even question it,” says Bradley. “It’s Solutrean, period.”
Bradley hypothesizes that these ancient Solutreans were some of the earliest (if not the first) humans to arrive in the Americas and that their technology was what became Clovis, the archeological culture that spread across North America by 13,000 years ago.
The Solutrean hypothesis has many critics, Meltzer and Raff among them. Meltzer wonders how an ancient people with no archeological evidence of boat-making could have navigated an ocean. “Look, the Titanic didn't make it,” he says. “How are a bunch of Solutreans in a boat going to cross the Ice Age North Atlantic?”
For Raff, the proof (or lack of it) is in the genetic record. In 2014, scientists sequenced the genome of the Anzick child, the remains of a Clovis-era boy in Montana who lived 12,700 years ago, making him the oldest burial in the Americas.
“The Anzick genome showed absolutely no genetic evidence of European ancestry, nor do any genomes of pre-contact Native Americans,” says Raff. “Anzick very roundly refuted the Solutrean hypothesis.”
For his part, Bradley isn’t conceding. He says that the Solutrean hypothesis was never meant to “replace” the Bering Land Bridge theory.
“People definitely came out of Siberia; there’s no question about that,” says Bradley. “We’re not saying that everybody came from what’s now southwestern Europe. The Solutreans were just one of probably multiple groups that came to the New World at various times and from various places.”
The New Colossus series
The themes include
- “Homage,” a tribute to immigration stories and cultural pride;
- “Duality,” which looks at the immigrant experience;
- “The Golden Age,” which presents contemporary portraits of foreign-born San Diegans and reflects on the motivations for immigration;
- “In Their Own Words,” sharing personal stories;
- “Main Street USA,” showing foreign-born community members in their work environments and
- “Colonnade I” and “Colonnade II” presenting “larger than life portraits.”
“The exhibition not only takes its name, The New Colossus, from the poem located at the base of the Statue of Liberty, but it serves a similar purpose as the statue itself: to welcome immigrants into our homeland,” Mireles said.
Mireles, the City of San Diego’s municipal photo fellow through the Exposure program, worked with the city’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and Arts and Culture to create the series of photo exhibits based on the City’s Welcoming San Diego strategic plan. Mireles received the city’s inaugural Exposure Photo Fellowship, which is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
“The overall goal of this project is to celebrate and empower our immigrant communities and individuals through publicly exhibiting their portraits,” Mireles said.
Mireles’ public art includes an outdoor exhibition of his Neighbors project that he installed in 2015, consisting of vinyl-printed portraits of community members of neighborhoods in south and southeast San Diego. Mireles expanded the Neighbors project across the country, including public installations in New York City, Oklahoma City and Anchorage, Alaska.
The New Colossus series can be seen around the City of San Diego through Oct. 31.
Here’s the exhibit lineup:
- Homage, and Vien Dong, City Administration Building Breezeway and LobbyIn Their Own Words,
- Rancho Peñasquitos Branch LibraryMain Street USA,
- City Heights/Weingart Branch LibraryThe Golden Era,
- College-Rolando Branch LibraryColonnade I,
- Pacific Beach Taylor Branch LibraryColonnade II,
- Valencia Park/Malcolm X Branch LibraryDuality,
- San Ysidro Branch Library (Installation coming June 30) Individual Photo,
- Point Loma/Hervey Branch LibraryIndividual Photo,
- Linda Vista Branch Library
Visit https://www.sandiego.gov/exposurefellowship.
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