Cal Poly Researchers Awarded NEH Grant to Study Africans in Early California History
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 21, 2025
San Luis Obispo, California — A Cal Poly team led by history lecturer Dr. Cameron Jones and computer science professor Dr. Foaad Khosmood has been awarded $150,000 by the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) for their project AfricanCalifornios.org: A Digital History of the Role of Afro-descendants in Early Spanish and Mexican California (1768-1850).
The award was announced last week by the NEH as one of 219 funded nationwide by the federal agency. Of the 31 funding announcements for California institutions, the Cal Poly award is the third highest after projects at UCLA and USC. The interdisciplinary proposal was jointly submitted by the two colleges and the Institute for Advanced Technology and Public Policy (IATPP). Cal Poly students from both history and computer science departments are already working on the project.
Scholars and the public readily accept that Afro-descendants populated Spanish and Mexican California, though little work has been done on the topic. Often cited is California’s 1790 census which identifies roughly 19% of their populations as being of African descent. The extent of the impact of Afro-descendants in early California, however, has been little understood. This is because most Californians of African descent elided their origins in church records. They hoped that Spain and later Mexico’s desire for Hispanicized settlers could overcome their perceived inferior origin that elsewhere barred them from entering the higher echelons of society. At least anecdotally this seemingly worked, as the last Mexican Governor of California, Pio Pico, was a well-known Afro-descendant. However, the larger narrative of the role of African descendants in early California history has remained largely hidden.
This project uses innovative computational techniques from natural language processing and data science to create user-friendly visualizations that allow scholars, students, K-12 teachers and the public alike to understand the role of Africans and African descendants in California History up to the statehood in 1850. To accomplish this the team will complete a comprehensive website, AfricanCalifornios.org. The site will host histories, visualizations, and databases, as well as lesson plans for students from 4th grade to college-level for teachers to use.
As one NEH evaluator stated: “[The project] is an important and much needed corrective to the dominant narrative in California history, the history of the U.S. West, Chicana/o/x and Mexican American History, and Borderlands History”
The public is invited to attend a special lecture, presentation and information session on the African Californios project on Thursday, February 20, 2025 at Cal Poly PAC Phillips Hall (006 - 0124) starting at 5:10 PM. Media and interested community members are encouraged to attend.
Cameron D. Jones, project director, is an award-winning author with multiple publications on the Spanish American borderlands. He has been a part-time lecturer in the history department at Cal Poly for the last ten years. Foaad Khosmood, project co-director, is Forbes Professor of Computer Engineering, and research director at IATPP. Project members include computer science students Anthony Colin Herrera, Marco Araiza, and Savannah Bosley and history students Jack T. Martin and Aaron Prieto.
IATPP is Cal Poly’s University-wide institute dedicated to interdisciplinary research on socially impactful projects involving advanced technology.
For more information please see: https://www.africancalifornios.org
