Stateside With Rosalea Barker: California

If I’d been living in 1840 where I live today, the last line of my mailing address would have read “Mexico”. Twenty years earlier it would have read “New Spain”, but the 1821 Mexican Revolution resulted in the ousting of a colonial power and its replacement by a republic, just as the American Revolution had done for Britain’s North American colonies forty years earlier.

Two years later, in the same year the Mexican Constitution was adopted in 1823, US President Monroe asserted in a State of the Union address that European nations should no longer colonize republics in the Americas, which left the way open to this day for the United States to interfere in other nations’ domestic affairs in the region—the “voluntary” annexation of the Republic of Texas in 1845 and the US-Mexican War of 1846-48 being a prime example.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended that war, was a “treaty of peace, friendship, limits, and settlement with the Republic of Mexico” and is, in a sense, the founding document of the State of California. After it was signed in February 1848, all that remained was for the settlers to form a republican style of government, write a constitution, and fulfill the population requirements necessary for admittance to the Union as a state, instead of being just part of a “territory”.

The discovery of gold at Sutter’s mill, near San Francisco, in January 1848, made short work of the population requirement, but there was a lot of debate in Washington DC about California’s admission due to the slavery question. At the time, there were already 15 slave states and 15 free states. Texas was one of the slave states and at one time had asserted that its territory extended all the way to the Pacific, so the Southern states thought California should be a slave state too, especially because they wanted to build a transcontinental railroad through the southwest.

A September, 1900, article in the San Francisco Chronicle, posted on the Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco’s excellent website gives a good account of the slavery controversy. The Mexican constitution had banned slavery, and the enslavement of Indians in the San Francisco area had also been specifically banned; on top of that, miners seeking to make their fortunes by virtue of their own labor didn’t take kindly to the idea of slaveholders not doing any work themselves but getting rich anyway.

Another post on that site reproduces an article written by Guadalupe Vallejo and published in The Century Magazine in December, 1890. The article begins:

“It seems to me that there never was a more peaceful or happy people on the face of the earth than the Spanish, Mexican, and Indian population of Alta California before the American conquest.”

Alta (Upper) California was a province of Mexico. Baja (Lower) California in present-day Mexico was a separate province, the dividing line being between the Dominican missions south of San Diego and the Franciscan missions to the north. Prior to the Mexican Revolution, of course, the whole area had been part of New Spain, under the purview of successive Spanish Viceroys in Mexico City, who appointed local governors. Despite discovering it in 1541, the Spanish didn’t have much interest in the Pacific Coast of North America except as a place for its commercial fleet to get fresh water and timber for repairs.

According to the historian David Day in his book Conquest, the Spanish deliberately decided not to map their territory on the Pacific Coast of North America. “For much of the sixteenth century, the sea route [from the Philippines and South America back to Spain] was a closely guarded secret so that it might remain the exclusive province of the Spanish. As well, the charts of the Californian coast, drawn by the several Spanish explorers sent to look for its reputed civilized cities, gold mines, and pearl fisheries, were also kept under lock and key so as not to alert rival nations to the riches thought to exist there.”

However, by the 1760s, it became obvious that the Russian trade in the fur from sea otters in the Pacific Northwest and the steady progress of the English who were pushing across the continent towards California were a threat to Spanish occupation that could not be ignored. In 1773, Juan Bautista de Anza, captain of a small military outpost in Sonora received permission from the Viceroy of New Spain to find an overland route from there to northern California.

According to Web de Anza at the University of Oregon, de Anza’s successful discovery of an overland route led to a small group of settlers leaving from Sonora in March 1775 to spearhead Spanish occupation of the newly discovered harbor where San Francisco now stands. Each year, the descendants of the original 30 families celebrate the June, 1776, “birthday” of San Francisco at the Presidio—a former Spanish then Mexican then US military establishment that is now home to such commercial enterprises as George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic in the Letterman Digital Arts Center.

It is possible to follow the De Anza National Historic Trail from Nogales in Mexico to San Francisco. The trail “invites travelers to experience the interweaving of the three elements of the Spanish plan for the colonization of its northern frontier: presidios (military forts), missions (religious centers), and pueblos (civilian towns)”.

The names of the original Spanish settlers (Californios), including the military officers who manned the forts, are prominent on maps of California, largely because they were given such huge land grants. I live in what is now the city of Oakland beside a creek that might very well have been used to float hides and tallow down to SF Bay from the Peralta family’s San Antonio Rancho. Another six cities today also occupy the land that was granted to Sergeant Luis Maria Peralta by the last Spanish governor, in 1820, in recognition of his forty years of military service to the Spanish king.

The website of the Peralta Hacienda Historical Park points out that: “Although the United States government promised all rights of citizenship and property ownership to the Californios through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo…, the American government found other ways to legally cause the Californios to eventually lose their dominant place in California society.” After California’s admission to the Union in 1850, the 1851 US Federal Land Act “contributed to the fall of the rancho era, since it required the Californios to prove their land titles in court.” The lengthy litigations that followed gave breathing space to the Anglos who had come for the goldrush to now squat on the land and lay claim to it.

“When the star of the Spanish-speaking settlers fell,” the website continues, “that of the Native Californians was nearly extinguished. The US did not view Native Californians as essential to their economy as the rancheros had during the Mexican era, nor as souls to be saved, as many of the mission priests had, but as a scourge to be eliminated.” It bears pointing out that in the final paragraph of Article XI of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States made a solemn undertaking to take “special care” not to place the Indian occupants of the vast new territories it had just acquired (including California) “under the necessity of seeking new homes”. (Yeah, right!)

Article XI of the first California Constitution (1849) has this to say about another contentious issue of the time—the right of women to own property:

“All property, both real and personal, of the wife, owned or claimed by her before marriage, and that acquired afterwards by gift, devise, or descent, shall be her separate property: and laws shall be passed more clearly defining the rights of the wife, in relation as well to her separate property, as to that held in common with her husband. Laws shall also be passed providing for the registration of the wife's separate property.”

Section 12 of the same 1849 Article stated: “No contract of marriage, if otherwise duly made, shall be invalidated, for want of conformity to the requirements of any religious sect.” At the 1879 Constitutional Convention, this became Section 7 of Article XX, but it has long since disappeared from the California Constitution (which is still dated 1879). In November, 2008, the constitution was amended by voters approving the addition of a new Section 7.5 to Article I, which reads: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

Because of the initiative process, both citizens and legislators can put constitutional amendments on the ballot. The result is that California’s current constitution is the longest in the world, and there is a drive afoot at the present time to hold a new constitutional convention in 2011.

--PEACE—

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

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