A Sour and Sordid Past: The Settler Colonial Roots of UCR's Citrus Experimentation Station
2022
Essay
Abstract
Settler colonialism systematically displaces Native people from their land by attacking all components of life and livelihood. In Southern California, Western powers, like Spain and the U.S., have continually asserted their dominant narratives on Indigenous people and their land. Before Spanish settlement, the Cahuilla Indians once occupied the land between the San Bernardino Mountains in the North, the Borrego Desert in the South, the Colorado River in the east, and (what is today) the city of Riverside in the West.
I investigate the path of the University of California (UC) Riverside's founding unit, the Citrus Experimentation Station (CES), and how its Spanish mission style reflects the sordid past of its architectural inspiration. I will begin with a look at Southern California in the eighteenth through twentieth centuries with the separation of Native people from their land using the architecture of the Spanish missions. Next, as ownership of the land transitioned from Spain (to Mexico) to the U.S. in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science emerged as a new form of capital, and the Morrill Land-Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890 and the Hatch Act of 1887 allocated funds to states to create land-grant universities and agricultural experimentation stations, respectively. Funded by the aforementioned legislation, the CES represents the Western heteropatriarchal narrative that prioritizes the domination and exploitation of land, forcing nature to conform to man. Under the guise of modernity and progress, scientific research was used as a mechanism of colonialism by accelerating natural processes to industrial rates, like with the growth of the nonnative citrus and agribusiness. This narrative runs completely antithetical to the goals of maintaining equilibrium of society and the environment in Cahuilla society.
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