San Francisco

Ahwaste San Francisco
Area
• Total	18,040 km²
Population
• Estimate	7,660,000

San Francisco is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. It is on a peninsula of approximately 121 km² between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, the city is the fourth most populous in California and the 17th most populous in the United States with an estimated population of roughly 826,000, If we include the San Francisco Bay Area, it adds the metropolitan region of more than 7.6 million people. San Francisco's modern identity is tied with the technology industry as a result of the vast concentration of wealth accumulated by the Silicon Valley tech boom of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

It is a city with one of the most intense and visible social contradictions in the world with billion dollar corporations' buildings beside homeless encampments and the highest average tech salaries in the world coexist with food banks serving half a million people yearly. Nine households in the region hold $110 billion which is 15 times more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 percent of households.

History

The San Francisco Peninsula and the broader Bay Area has been the homeland of the Indigenous Ohlone peoples since 4000 BCE. The Ohlone speak dialects of the Penutian language family and ’’Ohlone’’ itself is a construction forced onto them by colonizers, as they weren’t one people but each having their own identity. The Ohlone lived in an egalitarian tribelet structure organized on the basis of the clan, without private property in land, without commodity production, and without the state, occupying a certain territory under the administration of clans.

The Ohlone practiced small-scale agriculture though not in the systematic sense as they primarily hunted elk, deer, pronghorn and cultivating acorns. Through controlled burning of grasslands and understory, they managed the landscape to promote the growth of seed-bearing plants, to create browse for deer and other game, and to maintain open park-like conditions in the oak woodlands that created acorn gathering. As a result of generational knowledge of fire ecology, plant cycles, and animal behavior they created the extremely high biological productivity of the Bay Area environment.

Early Spanish colonizers were shocked at their environment which was a result of millennia of active human intervention, with the first colonizers arriving with the Spanish Portolá expedition of 1769 and the colonizers recorded their impressions of a land blooming with wildlife, actively managed landscapes and the Ohlone which greeted them with curiosity and hospitality though the Spanish turned violent as the Spanish colonists established their permanent settlement known as Presidio of San Francisco under Juan Bautista de Anza. Presidio of San Francisco was a military fortification with the motive of a Catholic mission for the religious conversion and economic exploitation of the indigenous Ohlone population.

The Franciscan friars, backed by the military force of the presidio, rounded up Ohlone people and concentrated them into one location and forcefully converted them and once baptized, the indigenous converts were bound to the mission and could not leave without permission and were now enslaved and forced to construct the colonial buildings, to cultivate the colonizer’s fields and orchards, to tend their vast herds of cattle, sheep, and horses along producing the hides and tallow that were California's main exports.

This system was enforced by torture, imprisonment, and other forms of physical abuse while runaways were hunted down by the colonial soldiers and returned in chains.

The Ohlone had no immunity to the diseases brought by the Europeans, smallpox, measles, influenza, syphilis and the crowded, unsanitary conditions of the enslavement spread the diseases along malnutrition, overwork, and psychological trauma this led to deaths consistently outpaced births among the indigenous population and by the end of the Catholic mission period, the Ohlone people had been reduced to a fraction of their pre-contact numbers. This was the result of a system of slavery and cultural genocide for the enrichment of the Spanish Crown and the Franciscan order.

Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821 led to the area now known as San Francisco becoming part of the Mexican province of Alta California. The newly formed Mexican government seized the Catholic church’s land in the 1830s, formally emancipating the indigenous slaves and distributing the church’s vast land to politically connected colonialist rancheros through massive land grants. For the surviving Ohlano, this brought no change or benefits as the land stolen by the Catholic church was now the private property of a new Mexican colonial aristocracy.

Some of the newly freed Ohlone remained as a dependent labor force on the ranchos, others fled into the interior attempting to recreate their shattered communities in the mountains and valleys but most became an landless indigenous proletariat that persist to this day. After the Mexican-American War which was rooted in territorial conquest prosecuted by the slaveholding expansionists which resulted in transferring all of Alta California to the United States.