Before Gold: California Under Spain and Mexico Series – serie

First published in 1981, Harry W. Crosby's Last of the Californios captured the history of the mountain people of Baja California during a critical moment of transition, when the 1974 completion of the transpeninsular highway increased the Californios' contact with the outside world and profoundly affected their traditional way of life. This updated and expanded version of that now-classic work incorporates the fruits of further investigation into the Californios' lives and history, by Crosby and others. The result is the most thorough and extensive account of the people of Baja California from the time of the peninsula's occupation by the Spaniards in the seventeenth century to the present. Californio Portraits combines history and sociology to provide an in-depth view of a culture that has managed to survive dramatic changes.Having ridden hundreds of miles by mule to visit with various Californio families and gain their confidence, Crosby provides an unparalleled view of their unique lifestyle. Beginning with the story of the first Californios - the eighteenth-century presidio soldiers who accompanied Jesuit missionaries, followed by miners and independent ranchers - Crosby provides personal accounts of their modern-day descendants and the ways they build their homes, prepare their food, find their water, and tan their cowhides. Augmenting his previous work with significant new sources, material, and photographs, he draws a richly textured portrait of a people unlike any other - families cultivating skills from an earlier century, living in semi-isolation for decades and, even after completion of the transpeninsular highway, reachable only by mule and horseback.Combining a revised and updated text with a new foreword, introduction, and updated bibliography, Californio Portraits offers the clearest and most detailed portrait possible of a fascinating, unique, and inaccessible people and culture.

California's early history was both colorful and turbulent. After Europeans first explored the region in the sixteenth century, it was conquered and colonized by successive waves of adventurers and settlers. In Contest for California, award-winning author Stephen G. Hyslop draws on a wide array of primary sources to weave an elegant narrative of this epic struggle for control of the territory that many saw as a beautiful, sprawling land of promise.In vivid detail, Hyslop traces the story of early California from its founding in 1769 by Spanish colonists to its annexation in 1848 by the United States. He describes the motivations and activities of colonizers and colonized alike. Using eyewitness accounts, he allows all participants - Native American, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American - to have their say. Soldiers, settlers, missionaries, and merchants testify to the heroic and commonplace, the colorful and tragic, in California's pre-American history.Even as he acknowledges the dark side of this story, Hyslop avoids a simplistic perspective. Moving beyond the polarities that have marked late-twentieth-century California historiography, he offers nuanced portraits of such controversial figures as Junípero Serra and treats the Californios and their distinctive Hispanic culture with a respect lacking in earlier histories. Attentive to tensions within the invading groups - priests and the military during the Spanish era, merchants and settlers during the American era - he also never loses sight of their impact on the original inhabitants of the region: California's Native peoples. He also recounts the journeys of colonists from Russia, England, and other countries who influenced the development of California as it passed from the hands of Spaniards and Mexicans to Americans.Exhaustively researched yet concise, this book offers a much-needed alternative history of early California and its evolution from Spanish colony to American territory.

Franciscan missionary friar Junípero Serra (1713-1784), one of the most widely known and influential inhabitants of early California, embodied many of the ideas and practices that animated the Spanish presence in the Americas. In this definitive biography, translators and historians Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz bring this complex figure to life and illuminate the Spanish period of California and the American Southwest.In Junípero Serra: California, Indians, and the Transformation of a Missionary, Beebe and Senkewicz focus on Serra's religious identity and his relations with Native peoples. They intersperse their narrative with new and accessible translations of many of Serra's letters and sermons, which allows his voice to be heard in a more direct and engaging fashion.Serra spent thirty-four years as a missionary to Indians in Mexico and California. He believed that paternalistic religious rule offered Indians a better life than their oppressive exploitation by colonial soldiers and settlers, which he deemed the only realistic alternative available to them at that time and place. Serra's unswerving commitment to his vision embroiled him in frequent conflicts with California's governors, soldiers, native peoples, and even his fellow missionaries. Yet because he prevailed often enough, he was able to place his unique stamp on the first years of California's history.Beebe and Senkewicz interpret Junípero Serra neither as a saint nor as the personification of the Black Legend. They recount his life from his birth in a small farming village on Mallorca. They detail his experiences in central Mexico and Baja California, as well as the tumultuous fifteen years he spent as founder of the California missions. Serra's Franciscan ideals are analyzed in their eighteenth-century context, which allows readers to understand more fully the differences and similarities between his world and ours. Combining history, culture, and linguistics, this new study conveys the power and nuance of Serra's voice and, ultimately, his impact on history.

Indian labor was vital to the early economic development of the Los Angeles region. This first volume in the new series Before Gold: California under Spain and Mexico explores for the first time Native contributions to early Southern California. Opening with a survey of the economic dimension of traditional southern California Indian cultures, Phillips then examines the origins and collapse of the missions, the emergence and expansion of the pueblo of Los Angeles, and the creation and decline of the ranchos. He closely considers the Indians' incorporation into these foreign-imposed institutions and the resulting impact on the region's economy and society. While concentrating on the Tongvas (Gabrielinos), Phillips also considers Indians who entered the region from the south.Based on exhaustive research, Phillips's account focuses on California Indians more as workers than as victims. He describes the work they performed and how their relations evolved with the missionaries, settlers, and rancheros who employed them. Phillips emphasizes the importance of Indian labor in shaping the economic history of what is now Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside counties.Featuring more than two-dozen illustrations and maps, Vineyards and Vaqueros demonstrates that no history of the region is complete without a consideration of the Indian contribution.

Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (1807–90) grew up in Spanish California, became a leading military and political figure in Mexican California, and participated in some of the founding events of U.S. California. In 1874–75, Vallejo, working with historian and publisher Hubert Howe Bancroft, composed a five-volume history of Alta California—a monumental work that would be the most complete eyewitness account of California before the gold rush. But Bancroft shelved the work, and it has lain in the archives until its recent publication as Recuerdos: Historical and Personal Remembrances Relating to Alta California, 1769–1849, translated and edited by Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz.In Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo: Life in Spanish, Mexican, and American California, Beebe and Senkewicz not only illuminate Vallejo’s life and history but also examine the broader experience of the nineteenth-century Californio community. In eight essays, the authors consider Spanish and Mexican rule in California, mission secularization, the rise of rancho culture, and the conflicts between settlers and Indigenous Californians, especially in the post-mission era. Vallejo was uniquely positioned to provide insight into early California’s foundation, and as a defender of culture and education among Mexican Californians, he also offered a rare perspective on the cultural life of the Mexican American community. In their final chapter, Beebe and Senkewicz include a significant portion of the correspondence between Vallejo and his wife, Francisca Benicia, for what it reveals about the effects of the American conquest on family and gender roles.A long-overdue in-depth look at one of the preeminent Mexican Americans in nineteenth-century California, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo also provides an unprecedented view of the Mexican American experience during that transformative era.

A generation after the U.S. conquest of California, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo set out to write the story of the land he knew so well—a history to dispel the romantic vision quickly overtaking the state’s recent past. The five-volume history he produced, published here for the first time in English translation, is the most complete account of California before the gold rush by someone who resided in California at the time.Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (1807–90) grew up in Spanish California, became a leading military and political figure in Mexican California, and participated in some of the founding events of U.S. California, such as the Monterey Constitutional Convention and the first legislature. With his project, undertaken for historian and publisher Hubert Howe Bancroft, Vallejo sought to correct misrepresentations of California’s past, which dismissed as insignificant the pre–gold rush Spanish and Mexican periods—conflated into one “Mission era.”Instead, Vallejo’s history emphasized the role of the military in the Spanish colonization of California and argued that the missionaries after JunÍpero Serra, with their medieval ideas, had actually retarded the development of California until secularization in the early 1830s. Culture, he contended, was of intense interest to the Californio people, as was the education of children. His accounts of Indigenous peoples, while often sympathetic, were also characteristic of his time: he and other California military leaders, Vallejo maintained, had successfully subdued “hostile” Indians and established mutually beneficial relationships with others.Out of keeping with Bancroft’s American triumphalism, Vallejo’s monumental project was consigned to the archives. With their deft translation and commentary, Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz—authors of a companion volume on Vallejo’s work—have brought to light a remarkable perspective, often firsthand, on important events in early California history. Their efforts restore a critical chapter to the story of California and the American West.

First published in 1981, Harry W. Crosby’s Last of the Californios captured the history of the mountain people of Baja California during a critical moment of transition, when the 1974 completion of the transpeninsular highway increased the Californios’ contact with the outside world and profoundly affected their traditional way of life. This updated and expanded version of that now-classic work incorporates the fruits of further investigation into the Californios’ lives and history, by Crosby and others. The result is the most thorough and extensive account of the people of Baja California from the time of the peninsula’s occupation by the Spaniards in the seventeenth century to the present. Californio Portraits combines history and sociology to provide an in-depth view of a culture that has managed to survive dramatic changes.Having ridden hundreds of miles by mule to visit with various Californio families and gain their confidence, Crosby provides an unparalleled view of their unique lifestyle. Beginning with the story of the first Californios—the eighteenth-century presidio soldiers who accompanied Jesuit missionaries, followed by miners and independent ranchers—Crosby provides personal accounts of their modern-day descendants and the ways they build their homes, prepare their food, find their water, and tan their cowhides. Augmenting his previous work with significant new sources, material, and photographs, he draws a richly textured portrait of a people unlike any other—families cultivating skills from an earlier century, living in semi-isolation for decades and, even after completion of the transpeninsular highway, reachable only by mule and horseback.Combining a revised and updated text with a new foreword, introduction, and updated bibliography, Californio Portraits offers the clearest and most detailed portrait possible of a fascinating, unique, and inaccessible people and culture.

The explorations of Francisco Garcés, an intrepid Franciscan friar of the eighteenth century, led to the opening of the first overland route from Mexico to California, produced new knowledge of unmapped terrain and unknown peoples, and revived dreams of Spanish imperial expansion. Beyond the Devil’s Road tells, for the first time, the full story of this extraordinary man’s epic life and journey and his critical place in the history of the American Southwest.From the moment he took up residence at the lonely mission of San Xavier del Bac in 1768, Garcés stood out among his fellow Spaniards for both the affection he showed the region’s Native peoples and his bravery. Traveling thousands of miles through modern Arizona, California, and Nevada to gather information for his superiors and preach to the unbaptized, he engaged the Indians of the Southwest with a respect for their ways and customs unprecedented among his peers, presaging a new—and better—model for cultural encounters. Along the way, he contacted more Indigenous groups than any other missionary of his time, often as the first European to do so. Garcés also paved the way and served as a guide for the famous expeditions of Juan Bautista de Anza in 1774 and 1775–76, bringing the first Spanish settlers to California—before the road he’d helped to open led to his death in the Quechan uprising of 1781.Consulting archives on three continents, including previously untapped sources and Garcés’s extensive diaries and letters, long obscured by unyielding language and handwriting, Beer crafts a nuanced and thoroughly engaging account of this incomparable explorer, groundbreaking missionary, and central actor in New Spain’s final sustained effort to expand its dominion into the lands that would become the American Southwest.

The experiences of Mexicans who were living in California when it was annexed by the United States is a crucial element of the history of the American Southwest. These Californios, as they called themselves, made California diverse and multicultural from the moment it became part of the United States. The Vallejos of Sonoma were one of the most prominent of these Californio families. This volume explores the experiences of this family, using more than 180 letters that Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and Francisca Benicia Carrillo de Vallejo exchanged with each other and their children between 1846 and 1888. This correspondence offers an intimate glimpse of the ways in which this family, and many Californio families from a variety of social and economic backgrounds, struggled to adapt to the political, social, and cultural changes that accompanied American annexation. They often found themselves unwelcome strangers in the land in which they had been born. They faced changing and at times conflicting demands on their public and private lives. In the face of a hostile legal system, they struggled to maintain ownership of their property, to raise their children in an environment they did not entirely understand, and to help each other maintain their dignity and social authority in a world they had not chosen. These letters demonstrate how the Vallejos and families like them, frequently ridiculed by the Anglos who entered California, nonetheless refused to be defined by these newcomers. Describing the creative manner of their resistance, these letters document a crucial aspect of the history of the Latino experience in California and in the greater American Southwest during the second half of the 19th century - with repercussions and relevance reaching into the present era.

From the Mexican American War and through the Civil War Era, Mexican and US social hierarchies collided in Southern California, transforming the character of Los Angeles from Mexican-Californian to "American." Influencing this transition in unexpected ways were three men of color: a Californio general turned legislator; a formerly enslaved barber; and a Mexico City-born politician and historian. In Dancing with Manifest Destiny: Elite Men of Color and the Making of American Los Angeles, Daniel B. Lynch reveals how these men—Andrés Pico, Peter Biggs, and Antonio Francisco Coronel—helped shape early Los Angeles by strategically embracing and creatively amplifying the racial and masculine ideals of white settler colonialism. Though not white Americans themselves, Pico, Biggs, and Coronel endorsed American-style white supremacy while leveraging elements of their own backgrounds that set them apart from and, in some ways, above white settlers. Lynch describes how this allowed them to establish commanding presences in three overlapping arenas: the equestrian culture of militias and vigilantism; the social world of the barbershop and demimonde; and the ideological realm of historical imagination in a layered colonial city on its way to becoming a major metropolis. While the interests of white men remained paramount in the ascendant settler city, there was room for a few elite men of color—men who did not fit the settler mold yet nonetheless represented a frontier masculinity uniquely suited to Southern California's distinctive diversity. Dancing with Manifest Destiny deftly documents how Pico, Biggs, and Coronel, standing center stage in frontier Los Angeles, maintained a surprising degree of influence amidst extremely hostile circumstances—at least for a while. The book recovers a forgotten layer in the origin story of Los Angeles, even as it offers fresh insight into entanglements of race, masculinity, and politics that persist to this day.