Dancing with Manifest Destiny

From the Mexican American War and through the Civil War Era, Mexican and US social hierarchies collided in Southern California, transforming the character of Los Angeles from Mexican-Californian to "American." Influencing this transition in unexpected ways were three men of color: a Californio general turned legislator; a formerly enslaved barber; and a Mexico City-born politician and historian. In Dancing with Manifest Destiny: Elite Men of Color and the Making of American Los Angeles, Daniel B. Lynch reveals how these men—Andrés Pico, Peter Biggs, and Antonio Francisco Coronel—helped shape early Los Angeles by strategically embracing and creatively amplifying the racial and masculine ideals of white settler colonialism.

Though not white Americans themselves, Pico, Biggs, and Coronel endorsed American-style white supremacy while leveraging elements of their own backgrounds that set them apart from and, in some ways, above white settlers. Lynch describes how this allowed them to establish commanding presences in three overlapping arenas: the equestrian culture of militias and vigilantism; the social world of the barbershop and demimonde; and the ideological realm of historical imagination in a layered colonial city on its way to becoming a major metropolis. While the interests of white men remained paramount in the ascendant settler city, there was room for a few elite men of color—men who did not fit the settler mold yet nonetheless represented a frontier masculinity uniquely suited to Southern California's distinctive diversity.

Dancing with Manifest Destiny deftly documents how Pico, Biggs, and Coronel, standing center stage in frontier Los Angeles, maintained a surprising degree of influence amidst extremely hostile circumstances—at least for a while. The book recovers a forgotten layer in the origin story of Los Angeles, even as it offers fresh insight into entanglements of race, masculinity, and politics that persist to this day.