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The 'Californios' were Spanish-speaking inhabitants of Alta California, first a part of New Spain, later of Mexico. 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. Some white Americans (Yankees), who settled California spoke Spanish and lived as Mexicans, are considered Californios.
At first, 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. There were 21 Missions under the Roman Catholic church along the fabled route, ''El Camino Real'').
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. Some wealthy Californio nobles intermarried with the settlers, thus a few prominent families in California may have Spanish or Mexican ancestors.

Contents

Californio independence

Key Californio battles

The end of Mexican rule

Californios after U.S. annexation

Californio identity in the 20th century

Notable Californios

Californios in literature

See Also

External links

Californio independence

Mexico's commander in California, Pío Pico, abandoned the Californios (Mexicans living in the province), who organized an army to defend themselves from the United States. The Californios defeated an American force in Los Angeles on September 30, 1846, but were defeated after the Americans reinforced their forces in Southern California. Mexico then 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 1840s, among them was John Sutter, a land owner from Switzerland and founder of New Helvetia, in present-day Sacramento.
That town was made famous in the 1848 California gold rush after miners found gold on the banks of the American River. When thousands of American settlers came to the acquired "virgin" lands, long-time Californio residents assisted the new immigrants to raise livestock and crops in the area.

Key Californio battles

★ 1846 -

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★ Battle of Dominguez Rancho, October 9. Jose Antonio Carrillo leads Californio forces in victory against 350 US Marines and sailors near Los Angeles.

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★ Battle of San Pasqual, December 6. US Cavalry General Stephen Kearny's dragoons are defeated by Californio forces, led by Andrés Pico north of San Diego.

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★ Temecula Massacre, December 1846. Californios and Cahuilla Indians combine to wipe out a party of Pauma Band Luiseno Indians responsible for a massacre of eleven unarmed Californios, near Temecula.

★ 1847 -

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★ Battle of Rio San Gabriel, January 8. Kearny's 600 man army defeats the 160 man Californio force near Los Angeles.

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★ Battle of La Mesa, January 9. Kearny, Robert F. Stockton and John Fremont's combined US forces, defeat the Californios in the climactic battle for California, at present day Montebello east of Los Angeles.
The Mexican-American war campaign in California is said to ended by July 1847, when the U.S. cavalry seized Pio Pico's adobe in present-day Bell, California south of Los Angeles, and the arrest of Mexican-Californio noble Don Antonio Lugo in his adobe near present-day Chino, California.

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 many years at this point. Many Indians were, however, able to assert their rights to mission lands, but unfortunately they were not given official papers documenting the same.
Following the discovery of gold in 1848, Congress set up a Board of Land Commissioners to determine the validity of Spanish and Mexican land grants in California. California Senator William M. Gwin presented a bill that, when approved by the Senate and the House, became the Act of March 3, 1851.^[1] Unless grantees presented evidence supporting their title within two years, the property would automatically pass into the public domain.^[2] This proviso was contrary to Articles VII and IX of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which guaranteed full protection of all property rights for Mexican citizens. Although the Commission eventually confirmed 604 of the 813 claims received, the cost of litigation forced most Californios to lose their property. This land in turn was parcelled out to immigrant squatters under the 1862 Homestead Act.

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.
But 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, instead of the native Coast Miwok, Ohlone, Wintun, Yokuts and other Native Americans who inhabited the region for centuries before European contact. They maintain the political ideology this was 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, Chicanos – a 20th century designation – and some are preferably identified as Spanish Americans.
Many Californios continued to live in pueblos alongside Native peoples and Mexicanos well into the 20th century because the agricultural economy of California allowed several of these communities: (Santa Ana, San Diego, San Fernando, San Jose, Monterey, Los Alamitos, San Juan Capistrano, San Bernardino, Hornitos, Santa Barbara and Indio ).
They lived in relative autonomy, although some social acts of segregation by custom, but 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 ("Indio") peoples with Spanish surnames under the terms "Spanish" and "Mexican", sometimes "colored" because many Anglos assumed having brown skin counts as being "black people".

Californio identity in the 20th century

Until recently, especially within long-standing Mexican communities in Southern California, a number of people who claimed Native Californian and Californio ancestry could be found. However in the 1970 and 1980 US census reports, less than 1,000 Americans of Mexican descent in California called themselves Californios. It is often believed that these communities have become extinct, or that they have become absorbed or integrated with the more recent Immigrants form Mexico and Central America over the recent decades.
But, Californios and Mexicanos has varied on many things in regard of the two groups' cultural differences. In the 1910's and 1920's when a large wave of Mexican immigrants poured into their communities in California and the Southwest US, social friction took place between the two Hispanic groups, as the older generation felt more "American" than recent arrivals from Mexico.
There are strong historical ties between Mexicanos, many whose families emigrated to the U.S. between 1900 and WWII, and the Californios and Native Californians. There was a constant exchange of culture and language between mainland Mexico and these enclaves 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 20th century is very difficult at this point.

Notable Californios

★ José María Alviso Grantee of Rancho Milpitas, Alcalde of San José

★ Juan Bautista de Anza

★ José Antonio Estudillo

★ José María Estudillo

★ Arcadia Bandini, co-founder of Santa Monica, California

★ Juan Bandini

★ José Raimundo Carrillo

★ José Antonio Carrillo

★ Manuel Dominguez

★ William Edward Petty Hartnell, also known as ''Don Guillermo Arnel''

★ Robert Livermore, namesake of Livermore, California

★ Eulalia Perez de Guillén Mariné

★ Joaquin Murietta, basis for fictional hero Zorro

★ Andrés Pico

★ José Maria Pico

★ Pío Pico, the last Mexican governor of Alta California

★ Sepulveda Family

★ José Sepúlveda

★ Abel Stearns

★ John Temple, early Long Beach rancher

★ Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, the namesake of Vallejo, California

★ Tiburcio Vasquez, bandit

★ José María Verdugo, recipient of major land grant

★ Benjamin Davis Wilson, also known as ''Don Benito Wilson''

★ Jose Antonio Yorba, major land grant recipient

★ Juan Matias Sanchez, Juan Matias Sanchez Adobe, Rancho Merced, Montebello, California

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 1950s on television; although the historical truth of the era is sometimes lost in the story-telling.

See Also

★ Hispanic

★ Peninsulares

★ Spanish American

★ Mestizo

★ Spanish people

External links

★ ''Californios, a People and a Culture'', a personal website

★ Californios ~ early Mexican San Diegans

★ "Mexican Americans in California," ''FIVE VIEWS: An Ethnic Historic Site Survey for California'', California Department of Parks and Recreation Office of Historic Preservation, December 1988 (includes discussion on Californios)