Month Day, 2016
Introduction
The work of history and historians isn’t a simple one. Historians must find sources, analyze them, think about them and decide which stories are worth telling and which ones should be left in the background or completely ignored. This function which can easily be summed up as representation is the hardest part of the historian’s job and something which has changed a lot in the past few decades. History writing in recent years has changed its focus from a top-down perspective where the decisions of the privileged, powerful connected few are explored and analyzed to the bottom-up approach where historians have tried their hardest to amplify the voices of those who had none or very little. The voices of religious or racial minorities, immigrant groups and the most often ignored group of all, women. Many of these people have no one who have the ability to their story, so their lives are left in the shadows until someone like a historian who is willing to look outside of the traditional sources crafts narratives which can illuminate these dark spots. A book like Testimonios is very valuable in this sense because it does work to fill in these gaps and tells the stories of those who have no voice. There is something undeniable about the nature of this work and its historical function, so much so that it brings to question the priorities of historical storytelling and how it can have a powerful impact by shedding light on lives, experiences and making them something which is useful about life in the past and how it impacts the present. Life in California in the first half of the nineteenth century was dominated by many important questions which included the relations between the Californios and the Americans, the place of Native American population in early California and finally the role of Californio culture and society. These points do well to illustrate how California changed in this time period and how this transition impacted the lives of the people of California.
One of the single most important things to ascertain when writing any historical paper is the quality and the biases of your primary sources. This paper is based on the book Testimonios: Early California through the Eyes of Women. This book is a collection of interviews conducted in the nineteenth century of Californio women in the process of doing research for a much larger work about the history of California. These women although they have valuable voices and their stories are very important for informing the history of early California are still polluted by biases, preconceived notions, and other opinions. It is our job to figure out when stories are biased and when they are valuable and to cut through that bias. The best way to cut through that bias is to use historical knowledge and context to inform one narrative and its inherent biases. Context is usually best supplied not randomly but through the judicious use of secondary source material. Historical writing is about telling stories and most importantly about bringing context to a historical time and place. Narratives like the ones provided in Testimonios are only valuable insofar as they are analyzed and given a place within the larger historical record and processes.
Social Relations between the Americans and Californios
Americans found many different ways to enter Californio society and one of the ways they did so be through marriage. During the early part of the nineteenth century, “Anglo-Americans began to arrive and insinuate themselves into the Californio elite. Ambitious young men from Massachusetts and elsewhere married into Californio families by converting to Catholicism and becoming Mexican citizens, as Mexican law required.” These new American settlers had a belief that the local Californio elite as lazy and the Mexican as “indolent,” which is to say, lazy. California many Americans claimed was perfect for the Mexican character, because of how fertile the land was. Several of the women interviewed in the Testimonios were married or had family members who were married to American men and this often served the purpose of creating alliances between great Californio families and these new American businessmen. The lives of Californio women were undeniably impacted by these marriages and there are examples throughout the testimonios which illustrate this very well. These connections are easily expressed by the relationship of Teresa de la Guerra with the British merchant she would soon marry William Hartnell, Teresa de la Guerra was the of Captain Don José de la Guerra y Noriega who was a member of the Royal Army and was sent as an alférez de caballeria to the garrison at Monterrey. Doña Teresa married a William Hartnell who was a British citizen who in 1822 came to “California to establish a large house of commerce in the port of Monterey that would be engaged primarily in purchasing hide and tallow from the missionary fathers of the Alta California missions.” Hartnell, who became Don Guillermo suffered a series of business setbacks he was finally named “visitor general of the missions” by Governor Alvarado a job that according to Doña Teresa because “he no longer belonged to himself or to his family, but rather to his job.” Doña Teresa’s marriage to William Hartnell is illustrative of the kind of connections between the Californio elite, the government and these English speaking opportunists. The function of these marriages was simple and they had a social function. These marriages served as a method for members of the Californio ranchero class to protect their wealth and to improve “their family’s racial standing and social aspirations.”
Native Americans in Early California: Conflict and Resistance
One of the most important factors in the early history of California was the role which settlement both Spanish/Mexican settlement and then American settlement played on the lives of the local Native American population. Spanish colonization of California was highly driven by the establishment of missions. These missions were founded by Franciscan fathers which were aimed at the conversion of native populations to Catholicism. Lisa Heidenreich argues. that the movement of native populations into the missions starting in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century was forced upon California’s native populations. While the Franciscan missions in California portrayed one side of the relationship between the Spanish settlers and the native population there was yet another much more aggressive side of the relationship between the two groups. Alan Taylor argues that mission life was very dangerous for those newly arrived Indians “who were easy pretty to infectious diseases and to syphilis, which inflicted infertility and still on Indian women,” Disease was a major problem elsewhere and it impacted the life of the Potwin Indians which lived in the Central Valley of California. There was a major epidemic in 1832 which impacted these Indians to the missions for help. Native populations were greatly impacted by disease and other factors which ultimately made them helpless and led them into the missions and considerably changed their lives.
Mexican settlement of the frontier meant that there was still a substantial native population in the area and Vallejo was the man which the Mexican government chose to handle the problem of its northern frontier. In her testimonio, Dorotea Valdez described the events of when Chief Solano went to Monterey with his Warband. Dorotea Valdez described them as wearing “feathers around their heads, many of them had tattoos around their wrists, arms, and legs. We did not like having them here because their behavior was really overbearing.” This description of the Indians was just the beginning, Dorotea claims that she “believed that they were devils who had been let loose from hell.” This was the place which natives had in northern California society during the first half of the nineteenth century. Natives were considered “savages”, “devils” and a “plague sent by God.” This shows the relationship between Indians and Californios and how men like Vallejo were important in creating order on the precarious frontier.
Californio-American Relations and the Bear Flag Revolt.
The Bear Flag Revolt was a part of the larger Spanish-American War and in June of 1846, Fremont and his men in Northern California. Fremont and his men marched on and took Monterey.. The memories of the local women regarding the Bear Flag revolt and the action of Fremont and his men. Rosalia Vallejo recounts her memories of the day of the beginning of the rebellion. She begins, “about half past five in the morning of June 14th, 1846, an old gentleman called Don Pepe de la Rosa came to my house and notified me that a band of seventy-two rough looking desperadoes, many of them runaway sailor from whale ships had surrounded the house of General Vallejo and had arrested him.” She continues, describing the raising of the Bear Flag in Sonoma. She described the Bear Flag itself as “a piece of linen about the size of a large towel, in it was painted a red bear and lone star.” The most interesting thing which Rosalia Vallejo was referring to Captain Fremont as “the man who had planned the wholesale robbery of California.” This characterization of the Bear Flag revolt, John Fremont and the Americans was corroborated by many other testimonies including that of Dorotea Valdez and Angustias de la Guerra Ord. Her big problem with Fremont was that he treated the Californios unreasonably and they were bad “Yankees” as opposed to the men who were living with them in California. The Bear Flag Revolt meant for the Californio community the loss of their land to the American government and culture forever.
Conclusion
The narratives left by these Californio women many of them of the connected land-owning ranchero class are extremely valuable because they are a lens into the past told from a different perspective. History is often told from a removed perspective, the point of view of a great man, the business of an agency or even geopolitics. These testimonios on the other hand show how history impacted the everyday life of real people and how everyone was affected by it. These weren’t events which happened in a vacuum and they had very real effects. They showed the process of social change from Spanish Alta California to American California and how these women lived their lives. History is about people and I am glad we are now telling these stories.
References.
Beebe, Rose Marie, and Robert M. Senkewicz. 2006. Testimonios: early California through the eyes of women, 1815-1848. Berkeley, Calif: Heyday Books.
Chavez, John R. The lost land: The Chicano image of the southwest. UNM Press, 1984.
Heidenreich, Linda. This Land was Mexican Once: Histories of Resistance from Northern California. University of Texas Press, 2009.
Kropp, Phoebe Schroeder. California vieja: Culture and memory in a modern American place. Univ of California Press, 2006.
Leonard, David J., and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo. Latino history and culture: an encyclopedia. Routledge, 2015
Monroy, Douglas. Thrown among strangers: The making of Mexican culture in frontier California. Univ of California Press, 1990.
Taylor, Alan. Colonial America: A Very Short Introduction. Vol. 339. Oxford University Press, 2013.
