It Didn’t Start with Proposition 187: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Nativist Legislation in California

Authors

Glen Gendzel, San Jose State UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-1-2009

Publication Title

Journal of the West

Volume

48

First Page

76

Last Page

85

Disciplines

History

Abstract

The writer surveys California's long history of nativist legislation. In doing so, he demonstrates that three recent Californian ballot initiatives—Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot that denied public services such as education and nonemergency medical care to so-called illegal aliens, Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action in the public sector, and Proposition 227, which banned bilingual education in public schools—were not just a spasmodic backlash against recent demographic trends but were the culmination of a century-and-a-half of nativist politics in California. He shows that, from the beginning of statehood, anti-immigrant laws aimed at Latin-Americans and Asian-Americans have received broad support from the California electorate, which has always been, and still is, predominantly white and native-born.

Comments

Originally published in Journal of the West 48:2 (Spring 2009). Copyright ABC-CLIO, LLC ©2009, reproduced with permission of ABC-CLIO.

Recommended Citation

Glen Gendzel. "It Didn’t Start with Proposition 187: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Nativist Legislation in California" Journal of the West (2009): 76-85.