Today in Labor History May 19, 1850: Four thousand Mexican and Peruvian workers gathered in Sonora, California, to protest the "Foreign Miners' Tax," enacted to drive them from gold fields. 500 armed vigilantes (mostly tax collectors and Anglo miners), chased them off by firing into the crowd. The tax was imposed during the height of the 1849 Gold Rush, and in the wake of the Mexican-American War (1848), in which the U.S. seized California from Mexico. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (Feb 1848) gave U.S. citizenship to Mexican nationals who were living in California at the time the treaty was signed. However, the U.S. denied citizenship to Indigenous Peoples until the 1930s, even if they had also been Mexican nationals prior to the war. Meanwhile, English, Irish, and German immigrants protested the new tax and got it amended to exempt any miner who was a “free white person.” The effects of the tax, and the racist violence that accompanied it, was to drive large numbers of Latin American and Chinese miners from the gold fields. This exodus, in turn, caused a sharp drop in rents and commerce for the landlords and store owners who catered to the miners. They lobbied for repealing the tax, and were successful in 1851.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #mexicanamerican #immigration #racism #mining #california #gold #mexico #vigilantes #peruvian #chinese #guadalupehidalgo #indigenous
