ABSTRACT
The arrival of the soldiers and missionaries marked the beginnings of a plunder economy in Alta California. The plunder economy of the Spanish priests and soldiers involved a different logicone based on bringing scattered Indian communities together into a single place, transforming their food landscapes into agricultural fields. The Spanish Crown introduced a new process into the equation when they seized native fields and made land grants to the first settlers in Los Angeles. The Indian communities responded to the theft of their lands and the destruction of their food landscapes in various ways. A sixth change to the emerging political-economic system of the 1850s consisted of a degree of transparency with regard to the use of money to influence political decisions at the municipal, county, state, and national levels of government. In the 1870s and 1880s, a distinctly capitalist spatial logic was inscribed on the palimpsest of earlier landscapes in Southern California and the Inland Empire.
