Newly arrived in 1850s California, a group of German immigrants adopted viticulture and founded Anaheim as a wine colony. Along with industry leaders and boosters, they helped expand the region’s commercial wine industry from its Spanish and Mexican roots, using viticulture as a vehicle of Americanization in California. Per the observations of wine industrialists, trade groups, and boosters, these German immigrants represented the American ideal of agricultural citizenship as a barometer of belonging in California. This notion was rooted in large-scale land ownership and relied on modern technology, shipping infrastructure, agricultural science, marketing, and wage workers. Significantly, Anaheim’s German wine growers also employed modern agribusiness techniques that laid the foundation for the citrus industry in the early twentieth century.

This special issue of Pacific Historical Review , “Gender and Intimacy across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” is guest edited by Miroslava Chávez-García and Verónica Castillo-Muñoz. The articles in the collection reflect the primacy of gender and intimacy as tools of analysis in recovering the experiences of women of Spanish-Mexican and Mexican origin in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century borderlands. As the authors demonstrate, using gender and intimacy, along with race, ethnicity, class, and culture, allow for the recovery of women’s personal and family lives and how they intersected with the economic, political, and social transformations of the region. The result is nuanced understandings of how women negotiated and resisted state-based, patriarchal ideologies and practices that sought to limit their lives and those of their families. The special issue includes a preface from Marc S. Rodriguez, this introduction, and articles by Celeste Menchaca, Erika Pérez, and Margie Brown-Coronel.