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Albert Camarillo became part of what he described as “the new social history that has focused on heretofore excluded from traditional historic studies” with books such as <I>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0870744976/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0870744976&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=b90bbac5b79df04cc5f3b3b16950ffda Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848-1930] </I> <ref>Albert Camarillo, <I>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0870744976/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0870744976&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=b90bbac5b79df04cc5f3b3b16950ffda Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848-1930]</I> (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press, 1979), pg 2.</ref> His book on the experiences of Mexican-Americans, or Chicanos, in Santa Barbara and Southern California was part of a larger academic effort to reclaim the history of Chicano communities from obscurity. Although he did not necessarily consider his work part of Western history, he did endeavor to establish the continuity of the Chicano historical experiences after 1848.
Camarillo disproved the perception that Chicanos lost their historical grounding as they transitioned from Mexicans to Americans. By demonstrating the political and economic displacement of Chicanos in California, and illustrating the development of barrios and their relationship to the dominant Anglo-American culture, Camarillo exposed a part of Western history that had nothing to do with the Turnarian closing of the frontier. Camarillo used economic, demographic and social data to articulate the vibrant, dynamic history of Chicano people in Southern California, and the larger history of capitalist development in the West, and by doing so established a useful model for understanding Hispanic displacement in the Southwest. He integrated the Chicano experience into the exploitive and racialized economic system that enabled the incorporation of the American West, and in many ways anticipated the goals of the of the New Western historians that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s.