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Hispanas and Hispanos
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F rom the sixteenth century to the present, California's human and physical geography has been part of the mythical, the fabulous, the fantastic, the mysterious, the marvelous, the romantic, and the monstrous of the Western imagination (1). Sixteenth-century gold-seeking conquistadores who read the Sergas de Esplandián and other novels of chivalry imagined California as an island next to the terrestrial paradise, peopled by man-killing Amazons mounted on flying griffins, wielding weapons of pure gold, and led by their beautiful black queen, Calafia (2). Centuries later, professional historians interpreting the history of European colonialism and the national development of the United States--whether of the Turnerian Frontier or Boltonian Borderlands schools of historiography--researched and wrote masculinist histories of California (3). Theirs were histories of mission friars, governors, comandantes, soldados de cuera (leather-jacket soldiers), and the institutions they established or failed to establish on this borderlands frontier. Turnerians postulated the legacy of the "Black Legend" and peopled California with "digger Indians and racially mongrelized, unspeakably cruel Spaniards and their indolent Mexican descendants," who lost California to the superior American race (4). Boltonians countered with the "White Legend" and peopled California with intrepid, hardy peninsular Spanish forebearers, including benevolent mission friars. They saw Spanish institutions as the foundation of California's agricultural and ranching economy, its urban environment, and its water and community property laws. Contemporaneously, popular historians in search of historical roots to claim for the Golden State, created a romanticized "fantasy Spanish heritage." They populated California with aristocratic blue-bloods, haughty Spanish dons, and flirtatious Spanish señoritas, subsequently represented in Hollywood films, television series like The Mask of Zorro, and in advertisements selling everything from California oranges to refried beans (5). Debunking the myths and defining new categories of historical analysis, historians now are approaching demographic, political, military, ecclesiastical, and other records of California and its peoples with new questions. Social, cultural, women's, Chicano, Native American, and labor historians are centering on previously ignored historical subjects to recast the story of colonial California. In particular, they are researching and writing histories of California's diverse Indian cultures; of the mestizo (racially mixed) settlers, settlements, and society created here; and of women, workers, and families in the development of this colonial world (6). Drawing on both old and new sources, including oral histories and testimonies, these works more broadly explore relations of power. They analyze California as a space of war, conflict, and indigenous resistance to colonial domination as well as a space of political, cultural, and social negotiation between very different peoples and societies. Exploring questions of racial and sociocultural formation and transformation, they place questions of historical agency, subjectivity, and the construction of identity at the center of the examination of history and memory. In new studies, memoirs, and critical editions, the narrative voices of Eulalia Pérez, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Apolinaria Lorenzana, Pablo Tac, Delfina Cuero, José María Osio, and many others are deepening our understanding of Indian and mestizo societies in Spain's northernmost outpost of empire (7). By the late 1760s geopolitics prompted the Bourbons to colonize Alta California, whose coastline Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo and Sebastian Vizcaíno had explored and mapped much earlier (in 1542 and 1602, respectively). Now, however, Russia and England threatened Spanish dominion on the Pacific coast, and the Sonora Indian rebellions threatened to destabilize the northern mining regions. To fortify and defend Spain's far northern frontier, colonial authorities sent a force of sixty soldiers and nineteen Franciscans to occupy Alta California in 1769. During the first five years (1769–1774), the secular and religious armies established a tenuous hold on the region. Soldiers staffed the presidios and served escort duty at the missions. Franciscan friars worked to transform indigenous peoples, to convert them into good Christians and good peasant stock who would defend the colony from foreign invaders. However, sexual assaults and violence toward Indian women among some of the soldiers, and Indian resistance to the military occupation, destabilized the California enterprise (8). To quell the sexual violence, strengthen the population base, and provide models of Christian family life, colonial authorities recruited married soldiers and settlers with families. They also provided incentives of land, animals, and supplies to soldiers who married Christianized Indian women, "daughters of the country," and remained in California permanently. In California, as throughout the Spanish colonial world, gender, sexuality, and the reproduction of family life were central issues in the politics and policies of conquest. The first generation of mestizo families migrated to Alta California in three military-led recruitment drives from Sinaloa and Sonora. Upon arrival, they joined indigenous families from Baja California who had come with the original entrada of 1769 and were already living in the missions. Royal authorities intended the mestizo colonists to serve as models of acculturation--of Christianization and Hispanicization--for Indian people. Racially, ethnically, and culturally, Hispano families of Alta California represented a richly diverse range of the mestizaje--the historical amalgamation of people of Spanish, Indian, and African descent--living in the presidios, pueblos, villas, and reales de minas (mining towns) on the far northern frontier (9). Except for the governors and Franciscan missionaries, most of whom were born in Spain and thus were Europeans (peninsulares), California's Hispanos were part of the large, racially mixed native-born mestizo population of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Socioracial hierarchies and stratification marked by differences in religion (Christian/non-Christian), nativity (peninsular Spain/American birth), and later race were established early in colonial Mexico. These hierarchies existed on the northern frontier as well, but were considerably more flexible. Geographic distance from the centers of power, the difficulty of attracting colonists to these remote regions, shared privation, and the precariousness of life in a militarized frontier zone, where Indian resistance often led to open warfare, leveled the field. Moreover, the defensive needs of the frontier led authorities to lift the ban against the admission of Indians, mestizos, and men of African descent into the Spanish military, offering the possibility of socioracial mobility. Military muster rolls; population censuses; and marriage, baptismal, and death records of colonial California mark both the uses of the complex nomenclature that referred to racially mixed residents and the change in its application across time. These designations, organized under the larger rubric of castas (castes), located individuals racially and socially (10). As the century wore on, use of the compound designations dropped off and español, mestizo, neófito, and gentil became the most frequently used terms, with some individuals moving across the spectrum from indio or mulato to español. Although less rigid than in Mexico's urban areas and centers of power, socioracial stratification and its related power differentials did not disappear from the colonial borderlands where proof of limpieza de sangre ("purity of blood"--that is, untainted Spanish ancestry) remained a source of political, economic, and social privilege. California's mestizaje consisted of the fusion of varying racial/ethnic groups who were themselves the product of the historical conquest of other, multiple frontiers. Most soldier-settler colonists came from the economically depressed region of Sinaloa and Sonora and were from impoverished families (11). They embodied the history and cultures of the native peoples of the northern frontier as well as that of an enslaved African-descent population brought to labor here. Others, particularly the artisans, orphaned children, and convicts sent to the colony from Guadalajara and Mexico City, brought additional cultural and racial mixes. In coastal California, intermarriage between newly Christianized California Indian women and mestizo and mulato soldiers, sailors, and muleteers further enhanced the mestizaje, although intermarriage declined after the arrival of soldier and settler families with marriageable daughters (12). What was life like for these families? Arriving in Monterey in 1774, the first soldier families found housing not yet built, soldiers who were overworked and ill, and a famine in its second year. Although some conditions improved with time, presidios remained overcrowded. Supply ships were often late--if they arrived at all--and delivered food that was spoiled and clothing that was inadequate for the families' needs. The outfits and supplies the families received upon signing up for California soon wore out, and the food rations promised to military wives as part of the inducement to migrate north were not always forthcoming. Soldiers' salaries were often in arrears, and pay was often in script to be redeemed at the commissary, which sold goods at highly inflated prices. During the last decade of Spanish rule, soldiers in Alta California received no pay at all. Presidial families lived with the absence of military spouses and sons, who were often on reconnaissance duty or on punitive expeditions against the Indians. At times the soldiers took Indians captive, at others they brought Hispanos back from Indian captivity. Fear of Indian attack and captivity severely restricted mobility, especially of women and children. Travelers needed a license or a passport from the commander in order to leave the presidio. Families of the soldiers assigned to escort duty at the missions and of the artisans working there might also live at the mission compound. Their wives and daughters instructed Indian women in Hispano women's domestic work, thereby advancing the project of Hispanicizing the indigenous population. Some women, including the widow Eulalia Pérez and Apolinaria Lorenzana, who remained single, worked full time in the mission system. Employed as llaveras (keepers of the keys, or matrons) at missions San Gabriel and San Diego, respectively, they supervised the domestic and manufacturing work commonly associated with women's labor in the home. They were also in charge of the neophyte women's dormitory, in which unmarried girls were nightly placed under lock and key. (Separation of the sexes and repression of indigenous peoples' sexuality was part of the conversion process and one means of instituting Western patriarchal systems of sex and gender.) Both Pérez and Lorenzana received small ranch grants in payment for their services. In the Hispanic world, women had a legal identity, could own property including land, and could will it to their heirs. On this and other frontiers, interest in attracting women of marriageable age as potential wives for soldiers and single settlers relaxed, but did not eliminate, gender stratification. Initial plans to establish agricultural pueblos, or civil communities, in Alta California called for "sturdy Spanish settlers" to plant, cultivate the ground, raise livestock and support the missions and presidios with their produce. Inducements to migrate north and found new pueblos included receipt of a house lot, a planting field, livestock, and agricultural implements. Each vecino (citizen) received ten pesos a month and daily rations for three years. These were government loans to be paid back out of the corn and other crops that settlers raised. The pueblos of San José and Los Angeles developed slowly while a third civil community, la Villa de Branciforte, remained largely undeveloped. Families built homes, worked their plots, established municipal governments, founded communities, and laid the seedbed for California's future agricultural primacy. Upon retirement or disability, military veterans and their families moved to the pueblos, established smaller communities adjacent to the presidios, or applied for ranch grants which they worked at their own expense. Veterans were encouraged to remain in California with inducements of land and resources unavailable to civilians. Most of the thirty-five private landholdings awarded during the colonial period were made after 1784 (13). These were provisional grants; the land could be used in perpetuity and inherited, but not sold. These early ranch grants initiated the region's pastoral era and stock raising industry. They became the mainspring of Mexican California's ranching economy when, upon independence from Spain, Mexico instituted private ownership of land. At the end of Spanish colonial rule in 1821, California's Hispano population ranged between 3,000 and 3,500, most of it due to natural increase rather than new immigration. However, despite young age at marriage, families in California were considerably smaller than commonly thought, although there were regional variations. One historian found a provincial average of slightly more than three children per family in 1790, while another found an average of seven children per family in San José (14). Historians attribute smaller family size among married Hispano couples to various factors, including high infant mortality rates, miscarriages, infertility, marital discord, the extended absence of husbands, and personal choice. In extending Spanish colonial rule to the Pacific coast of the northern frontier, Hispano and Hispana settlers confronted untried conditions and new worlds of indigenous peoples. As in other frontiers, Indian-mestizo relations were at times friendly, at others hostile. Intermarriage, which added new dimensions to the racial and cultural mestizaje, existed simultaneously with violence and open warfare, as Indians resisted to military occupation, and annihilation of their cultural and religious traditions. Contrary to earlier views, indigenous communities did not wholeheartedly accept Hispanicization or become acculturated. One study of mission economies concludes that the California Indians maintained 30 percent or more of their material culture, and that their retention of religion and other nonmaterial elements must have been higher (15). Earlier histories describe the culture Hispano colonists brought, planted, and transformed here as characterized by "individualism, regional isolation, village orientation, resistance to outside control, innovation and a reliance upon themselves, family cohesiveness, and the preservation of the Catholic religion as a unifying force" (16). More recent works reveal Hispano frontier society to be much more complex, dynamic, and contested than previously thought. Criminal, civil, and ecclesiastical court records and wills reveal litigation within and without the family over matters large and small including land, material goods, and sociosexual relations. The patriarchal family, the most basic unit of sociopolitical organization and power relations internally as well as externally, was a space of fissures and cleavages, where women contested male domination (17). Questions of race, occupation, social status, and language remain central to new histories of the mestizaje in frontier California. Military privilege, racial identity, and time of arrival in California combined to locate large landholdings, prestige, and power in a few families. Six of the major families who became known as the Californios--the Alvarado, Carrillo, Castro, de la Guerra y Noriega, Pico, and Vallejo families--fit this profile. In all cases, the male progenitors were commissioned or noncommissioned military officers, who had arrived with one of the major expeditions between 1769 and 1776, and were identified as españoles and mestizos. While José de la Guerra y Noriega was born in Spain, Mexican-born Ygnacio Vicente Ferrer Vallejo went to the trouble and expense of obtaining certification of his limpieza de sangre (18). The six families also established extensive marriage networks as well as political and economic linkages with each other and with Euro-Americans who began arriving in Alta Californa in the 1820s. In doing so, they refashioned the mestizaje yet again on the eve of a new conquest. Out of the struggles of daily life on the edge of the Spanish empire, California Indian people and Hispanas/Hispanos added new regional dimensions to the historical, racial, cultural, and linguistic American mestizaje initiated in the sixteenth century. Other accretions occurred in the wake of cataclysmic geopolitical and economic changes wrought by Mexican independence and U.S. occupation in the nineteenth century. It remains for us, who have inherited the legacies of their convergence on intimate and other frontiers, to decipher its meaning (19). Endnotes 1. Dora Beale Polk, The Island of California: A History of the Myth (Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1991). 2. Irving A. Leonard, Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and of Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth Century New World (1949; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 3. Antonia I. Castañeda, "Women of Color and the Rewriting of Western History: The Discourse Politics, and Decolonization of History," Pacific Historical Review 61 (November 1992): 501-33; Antonia I. Castañeda, "Gender, Race, and Culture: Spanish-Mexican Women in the Historiography of Frontier California," Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 11 (1990): 8-20; and Antonia I. Castañeda, "The Political Economy of Nineteenth-Century Stereotypes of Californianas," in Between Borders: Essays on Mexicana/Chicana History, ed. Adelaida R. Del Castillo (Encino, CA: Floricanto Press, 1990), 213-36. 4. Castañeda, "The Political Economy of Nineteenth Century Stereotypes," 213-36. 5. Deena J. González, "From La Leyenda Negra to La Tules," The Mask of Zorro: Mexican Americans in Popular Media (Los Angeles: Gene Autry Museum Publications, 1994). 6. Deena J. González, Refusing the Favor: The Spanish Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820-1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Albert L. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999); Robert H. Jackson, Race, Caste, and Status: Indians in Colonial Spanish America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999); Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Richard J. Orsi, eds., Contested Eden: California Before the Gold Rush (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan, eds., Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998); Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, eds., The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998); Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); Erick Langer and Robert H. Jackson, eds., The New Latin American Mission History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); and Douglas Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 7. Antonio María Osio, The History of Alta California: A Memoir of Mexican California, trans. Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996); Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonios (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Genaro M. Padilla, My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). 8. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers; Antonia I. Castañeda, "Sexual Violence and the Politics and Policies of Conquest: Amerindian Women and the Spanish Conquest of Alta California," in Building With Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies, ed. Adela de la Torre and Beatriz M. Pesquera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Virginia Mayo Bouvier, "Women, Conquest, and the Production of History: Hispanic California, 1542-1840," (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California, 1995). 9. Weber, Spanish Frontier; and Oakah L. Jones Jr., Los Paisanos: Spanish Settlers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979). 10. María Concepción García Saíz, Las Castas Mexicanas: Un Género Pictórico Mexicano/The Castes: A Genre of Mexican Painting (Milan, Italy: The Olivetti Company, 1989), 24-29; and Jack D. Forbes, "Black Pioneers: The Spanish-Speaking Afroamericans in the Southwest," Phylon 27 (Fall 1966): 233-46. 11. Jones, Paisanos. 12. Gloria E. Miranda, "Gente de Razón Marriage Patterns in Spanish and Mexican California: A Case Study of Santa Barbara and Los Angeles," Southern California Historical Quarterly 63 (1981): 1-21; Gloria E. Miranda, "Racial and Cultural Dimensions of Gente de Razón Status in Spanish and Mexican California," Southern California Historical Quarterly 70 (Fall 1988): 265-78; and Antonia I. Castañeda, "Presidarias y Pobladoras: Spanish Mexican Women in Frontier Monterey, Alta California, 1770-1821," (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1990). 13. Jones, Paisanos, 217. 14. Gloria E. Miranda, "Hispano-Mexicano Childrearing Practices in Pre-American Santa Barbara," Southern California Historical Quarterly 65 (Winter 1983): 307-20; and Katharine Meyer Lockhart, "A Demographic Profile of an Alta California Pueblo, San José de Guadalupe, 1777-1850" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Colorado, 1986). 15. Paul Farnsworth and Robert H. Jackson, "Cultural, Economic, and Demographic Change in the Missions of Alta California: The Case of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad," in Langer and Jackson, eds., New Latin American Mission History, 108-29; and Jackson, Race, Caste, and Status, 97-116. 16. Jones, Paisanos, 253. 17. Antonia I. Castañeda, "Engendering the History of Alta California, 1769-1848," in Gutiérrez and Orsi, eds., Contested Eden, 230-59. 18. Ibid. 19. I borrow "intimate frontiers" from Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers. Antonia I. Castañeda teaches in the Department of History at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas, where she was recently named to the O'Connor Chair in Borderlands Studies. Her research and teaching interests focus on gender, sexuality, and women of color in California and the borderlands from the sixteenth century to the present. |
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