May 19, 1850
Four thousand Mexican miners gathered in Sonora, California, to protest the Foreign Miners’ Tax, which was enacted to drive them from gold fields. Before the discovery of gold, native Mexicans greatly outnumbered Anglos in California. By 1849 massive migration turned the Mexicans into a minority. Soon the Anglos dominated the state legislature, enacting laws like the Greaser Act (1855), which defined vagrants as “all persons who are commonly known as ‘Greasers’ or the issue of Spanish or Indian blood … and who go armed and are not peaceable and quiet persons.” This anti-loitering law, according to Steven W. Bender in his book “Greasers and Gringos,” was the precursor to modern laws directed at loitering, gang activity, and other apparently race-neutral offenses that in practice are often used to justify interrogatory stops of persons of color.
