Californio

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The Californios were Spanish-speaking inhabitants of New Spain's, and later Mexico's, Alta California. This area was later annexed by the United States following the Mexican-American War in 1848.

Californios included both the descendants of European settlers from Spain and Mexico, and also included Mestizos and local Native Americans who adopted Spanish culture and converted to Catholicism. Spanish officials encouraged Mexicans from the Northern and Western provinces, as well Mexico promoted other Latin Americans, notably from Peru and Chile, to settle in California before the U.S. annexed the province in 1848.

Much of Californio society lived at or near the many Missions, which were established in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some Americans became honorary Californios due to their early arrival, marriage to Californio women, and their adoption of, and adaptation to, Spanish culture and religion (the 21 Missions under the Roman Catholic church along the fabled route, El Camino Real).

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[edit] Californio independence

Mexico's commander in California, Pio Pico, abandoned the Californios, Mexicans living in California, who organized an army to defend themselves from the United States. The Californios defeated an American force in Los Angeles on September 30, 1846, and, after a military defeat when the Americans reinforced their forces in Southern California, signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo accepting American sovereignty over California on February 2, 1848. [1][2] European and Anglo American settlers in Northern areas of California threatened to rebel against Mexican rule in the late 1840's, among them was John Sutter, a Swiss-born land owner and founder of New Helvetia, in present-day Sacramento. Sacramento was made famous in the 1848 California gold rush after miners found gold on the banks of the Sacramento River. When thousands of American settlers came to the acquired "virgin" lands, long-time Californio residents assisted the new emigrants to raise livestock and crops in the area.

[edit] The end of Mexican rule

In the 1830s Californios differentiated themselves from Mexicanos, migrants from the Mexican interior, by asserting exclusionary land grant laws after the dissolution of the Mission lands in 1834. These laws created the conditions for favoritism in parcelling of Mission lands that had been worked by Indians for hundreds of years at this point. Many Indians were, however, able to assert their rights to mission lands, but unfortunately they were not given official papers. This made it easy for the California land commission, established by the Anglo-controlled state government in the early 1850s, to conveniently dissolve many American Indian and Californio lands and turn them into government land. This land in turn was parcelled out to emigrant squatters under the 1862 Homestead Act.

[edit] Californios after U.S. annexation

The mysterious "disappearance" of Californios after 1850 in state history is debated. Some Mexican Americans and Latinos residing in California claim to have genealogical roots with Californios before the arrival of Anglo-Americans. The romantic history of Californios has even fueled the political volatile issues of the La raza movement by some Hispanic activists who depict "Mexican" Californios as the state's original people. They maintain that there is a "lost land" of the Southwest U.S., where there was a Latin American culture: Californios, along with Tejanos of Texas, Hispanos of New Mexico, Nuevomexicanos, and Chicanos a 20th century designation.

Many Californios continued to live in pueblos alongside Native peoples and Mexicanos well into the 20th century because the agricultural economy of Southern California allowed several of these communities: (Santa Ana, San Diego, San Fernando, San Jose, Monterey, Los Alamitos, San Juan Capistrano, etc.) to live in relative autonomy although acts of segregation by custom, maintaining Spanish language newspapers, entertainment, schools, bars or clubs, and cultural practices often tied to local churches and mutual aid societies. Their "official" history, however, has historically been subsumed by the official modes of record-keeping (census takers, city records, etc.) that at some point (around the 1910s) lumped together all Californios, Mexicanos, and Native peoples with Spanish surnames under the terms Spanish and Mexican.

[edit] Californio identity in the 20th century

Up until the 1970s, in several long-standing Mexican communities in Southern California you could find that a surprising number of people claimed Native Californian and Californio ancestry. The dissolution of redlining (racist exclusionary housing policies) now has given the Californio/Mexican community in Southern California a greater amount of mobility but ironically a greater measure of invisibility. No longer relegated to the barrios, those who have the means move on to middle class neighborhoods that are often more ethnically diverse. Also, recent waves of immigrants from Mexico and Central America now are a greater presence in the old barrios, leading many to mistakenly believe that the Californios are now extinct. Perhaps as descendants merged with Mexican immigrants and other Latin American groups, it never contends to eradicate proof of Californio history.

There are strong historical ties between Mexicanos, many whose families immigrated to the U.S. between 1900 and WWII, and the Californios and Indios who, truth be told, most often have gone by the name Mexicanos even within the Spanish-speaking community. So while the Spanish Heritage Fantasy of fandangoes and Zorro may have appealled to the booster writers, tourist boards, and society matrons of the 1920s and 30s, and even the architects of that really cheesy California red-tiled mission architecture you see everywhere in So. Cal.(see Carey McWilliams's histories of the mythic creation of California), in truth that mythical Spanish past was very much alive and right under their noses in the barrios of California. There was a constant exchange of culture and language between mainland Mexico and these little islands of Mexicano/Californio/Indio culture, evidenced by marriage, migratory trends, and linguistic evolution in the region. To attempt to differentiate culturally between Californios and Mexicanos in the twentieth century is very difficult at this point. [citation needed]

[edit] Notable Californios

[edit] Californios in literature

Richard Henry Dana, Jr., recorded his 1834 visit as a sailor to California in Two Years Before the Mast. Other Americans such as Joseph Chapman, a land realtor hailed the first Yankee to reside in the old Pueblo de Los Angeles in 1831, described Southern California as a paradise yet to be developed. He mentions of a civilization by a Spanish-speaking colony, "Californios" thrived in pueblos, the missions and ranchos.

The Squatter and the Don by Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, a novel written and set in 1880s California, depicts a very wealthy Californio family's legal struggles with emigrant squatters on their land. The novel was based on the legal struggles of General Mariano G. Vallejo, the author's good friend. While the novel is by no means representative of the majority of Californios' lives and standard of living, it is truthful in its depiction of the legal process by which Californios were often "relieved" of their land. This process was long (most Californios spent upwards of fifteen years defending their grants before the courts) and the legal fees alone were enough to make many Californios landless. Californios felt confused about having to pay land taxes to American officials, because they opposed the idea on paying for land ownership that wasn't in Mexican law. In some cases Californios had little fluid capital because their economy had operated on a barter system, and they often lost their land because they were unable to pay the taxes. They could not compete economically with all the European and Anglo-American emigrants who arrived in the region with large amounts of money.

The end of Californio culture is depicted in the novel Ramona, written by Helen Hunt Jackson in 1884. The fictional Zorro has grown to become the most identifiable Californio due to short stories, motion pictures and by the 1950's on television; although the historical truth of the era is sometimes lost in the story-telling.


[edit] External links

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