Version 18 Feb 2012
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MEXICAN INDEPENDENCE
AND MISSION SECULARIZATION
Condensed from “The Mexican Frontier 1821-1846: The American
Southwest under Mexico” by David J Weber
University of New Mexico Press, 1982
Some pages are available online at: Google Books - Weber
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Note:
Weber’s book considers not only Alta California, but the entire northern “frontier” of
Mexico. An 1819 “Transcontinental Treaty” had defined the far northern and
northeastern borders separating the colony of New Spain from Oregon (British)
and Louisiana (French) claims. In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded
all Mexican territory north of the Rio Grande and Gila Rivers to the United
States, where (augmented by the small Gadsden Purchase in 1852) it became the
states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California, and portions of
Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma. The
term “New Spain” refers mainly to Mexico, including the northern
frontier. Strictly speaking, New Spain also included the Philippines and some
other islands in the western Pacific and the Caribbean. The seat of
government of New Spain was located at Mexico City. I
have collected sections of Weber’s writing that are most relevant to
California, unavoidably including some indirect references to the other
frontier territories, especially to New Mexico whose situation regarding
Spanish-era missions somewhat resembled that of Alta California. Keep
in mind that most of Weber’s references to government using such terms as “federal officials,”
“government aid,” “the national treasury,” “the legislature,”
“the President,” “states,” etc, refer to Mexican government. “The Governor,”
however, usually means the Governor of Alta California. |
In the early nineteenth century, news usually traveled slowly along the rutted, dusty, and dangerous highways that began in Mexico City and ran north to the edge of New Spain. In the spring of 1821, a stunning piece of news moved quickly north. A Spanish officer, Agustín de Iturbide [ee-toor-BE-day], had declared Mexico’s independence from Spain. The peaceful transition from Spanish to Mexican rule in 1821 came on the heels of a decade of destructive revolt and counterrevolt that affected the frontier in varying degrees. Those ten violent years had begun on September 16, 1810, when Padre Miguel Hidalgo called for independence in the town of Dolores, near Guanajuato, setting off a war between the exploited masses and the privileged few, many of whom happened to be Spanish-born.
*
Throughout the eighteenth century, pobladores on Mexico’s far northern frontier had little voice in governing themselves. Like Spain’s subjects everywhere, they had lived under the enlightened and paternalistic despotism of the Bourbon monarchs, who did not encumber themselves with constitutions or popular participation in government. No representative parliament met regularly in Spain; no legislatures met in her colonies. Local government had decayed and appointed officials held offices that had once been filled by elections. Outsiders, rather than local people, occupied key posts even in such remote areas as the northern frontier of New Spain.
For most of the northern frontier the worst effects of the independence struggle were indirect. Paralyzed by the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula [Spain and Portugal] in 1808 and distracted by rebellions in Mexico and throughout the New World, Spain could no longer administer her empire. This crisis disrupted everyday life in areas as remote as Mexico’s Far North. In the decade following the Hidalgo revolt, trade on the frontier was disrupted, supplies were cut off for the military and the missions, and the salaries of officials went unpaid. “For a good many years,” wrote one California Franciscan, “the blows have succeeded one another with such violence as to render us almost insensible.”
In addition to the impact of turmoil in Spain and Mexico, the frontier faced other extraordinary problems in 1821. Two expanding nations, Russia and the United States, seemed poised to seize portions of the region. Long before independence, officials in New Spain had worried about foreign encroachment on the underpopulated Far North. Without Spain’s protection, the threat must have seemed even more immediate to officials of newly independent Mexico.
Isolated Alta California was the last of the northernmost provinces to swear loyalty to the new order. Ever since 1781, when Yuma Indians ousted Spanish intruders and regained control of the Colorado River crossing, the overland connection between Sonora and Alta California had ceased to exist. In a sense, California had become an island, dependent upon the sea for communication with the outside world. Nearly all of California’s 3,200 gente de razón [persons of Hispanic background] lived near streams on the edge of the sea on the temperate, 500-mile stretch of coastal plain between San Diego in the south and San Francisco in the north. Most californios [Hispanic residents of California] lived in or near one of the province's three duly constituted municipalities, the pueblos of Los Angeles, San José, or Santa Cruz (then called Branciforte), or near the decaying military posts of San Diego, Santa Barbara, Monterey, or San Francisco. All of these urban centers were small.
By January 1822, if not before, the news of the insurgents’ success had reached Monterey. A few months later, a junta consisting of the comandantes of the four presidios, along with two priests and other important figures, met at the governor’s house in Monterey. On April 11, members of the junta, the troops, and the citizenry in general gathered in the plaza and publicly took an oath of allegiance to the new government. Within a matter of days that ceremony was repeated at each presidio, pueblo, and mission along the coast.
Clearly, however, the frontier governors [of the several northern territories], who were all military officers, had not endorsed independence with enthusiasm. Instead, they had cautiously watched the direction of the prevailing political winds. The immediate force which set those winds in motion was the Plan of Iguala, issued on February 24, 1821 by the former Spanish officer, Agustín de Iturbide. This Plan, a declaration of independence from Spain, called for a constitutional monarchy and ingeniously if temporarily united all classes and political persuasions under a formula known as the “Three Guarantees”: independence from Spain; recognition of Catholicism as Mexico’s only religion, and equality of all Mexicans.
At first, frontier governors opposed Iturbide’s plan. California’s Spanish-born Governor Pablo Vicente de Sola ridiculed Iturbide’s “absurd views,” and termed independence “a dream.” A poor prophet but a good soldier, Sola eventually responded to orders and supported Iturbide by April of 1822.
Governor Sola had been so slow to acknowledge independence, however, that the new government in Mexico City feared that California had remained loyal to Spain or that Russia had annexed it. Iturbide sent a cleric, Canon Agustín Fernández, to report on the local mood. Fernández found no evidence of disloyalty; neither did he discover enthusiasm for the new government. When Fernández ordered the Spanish flag lowered for the last time over the plaza at Monterey, the assemblage watched it descend in stony silence.
*
At the dawn of Mexican independence, the future of the frontier missions seemed bleak. Most immediately, the ten-year struggle for Mexican independence had disrupted the mission economies. Government aid to the distant northern missions had all but stopped by the mid-1810s as Spanish officials diverted resources to crushing rebel forces and stopped sending the padres’ annual stipends (sίnodos) and money for supplies. Following independence, the economic situation remained dismal. The national treasury was often empty and traditional sources of funds, such as income from estates, mortgages, and contributions from wealthy and pious individuals, had become undependable.
Loss of income was not the only cross the padres bore as a result of the turbulent struggle for independence. Government aid no longer reached the frontier military garrisons, so troops appropriated supplies and food from the missions and depleted still further the Franciscans’ dwindling resources. In Alta California, where relatively young missions prospered more than anywhere else on the northern frontier, troops drained the mission economies but did not destroy them.
The war for independence also hindered the Franciscans’ ability to enlist new recruits. Instead of training Mexicans for the priesthood, the Order had depended almost entirely on Spain as a source of new priests. By 1820, however, few Spaniards wanted to go to the rebellious colony. Strained relations between Spain and Mexico in the 1820s probably made recruiting difficult. The shortage of priests in Mexico grew critical in the late 1820s, as aftershocks of the independence struggle heightened Mexican xenophobia against Spaniards. In 1827 and again in 1829 the government ordered Spanish residents of the republic, with few exceptions, to leave. In California and New Mexico the orders did not strike with full force because local officials balked at enforcing them. To expel the Spanish-born Franciscans would have been easy, but who would replace them?
*
More profoundly threatening, however, were ideological pressures, which had been building up for decades. A humanistic tradition that argued against the natural inferiority of Indians and in favor of the equality of Indians with other men had powerfully influenced Spanish thought since the sixteenth century. In the glow of the Enlightenment, eighteenth-century Spanish liberals rekindled the spark of humanism and combined it with an anticlericalism that spelled trouble for the frontier missions. The most dramatic manifestation of this new spirit had been the Crown’s 1767 order to expel the Jesuits throughout Spain and her empire – an action inspired more by politics, however, than by ideology. As a result, officials removed Jesuits from Pimerίa Alta and replaced them with Franciscans, who inadvertently acquired a monopoly of the entire mission field from California to Texas.
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“Pimerίa Alta” denoted the Pima Indian region of Sonora and southern Arizona, where missions were established by Eusebio Kino, a Jesuit, between 1687 and 1711. Kino is also acclaimed for having pioneered a land route (across the lower Colorado River) to coastal Alta California which, although considered impractical at the time, proved that California is not an island. The beginning of the “Mission Era” in Alta California, supervised by Junipero Serra, a Franciscan, coincided with the expulsion of Jesuits from Spain and its provinces. Other European countries, notably Portugal and France, also expelled Jesuits during the same era. A simplistic “ideological” explanation for the expulsion, consistent with the trend toward “humanism and anticlericalism” described by Weber (above), is that Jesuits favored the conservative Inquisition and opposed the liberal Enlightenment. This rationale of course ignores Weber’s observation that the expulsion was “inspired more by politics … than by ideology.” |
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Governors of Mexican California From History of California (for Children), by Helen Elliott Bandini (p 178) 1822
04 11
(213 days)
California became a province of the Mexican Empire 1822
11 10
(867 days)
Luίs Arguello, first native Governor 1825
03 26
(227 days)
California became a province of Mexican Republic 1825
11 08
(1910 days)
José Marίa Echeandίa (1) 1831
01 31
(309 days)
Manuel Victoria 1831
12 06
(406 days)
José Marίa Echeandίa (2) 1833
01 15
(987 days)
José Figueroa 1834
08 09 – [Secularization program officially began] 1835
09 29
(95 days) José
Castro (1) [Became Governor when Figueroa died] 1836 01 02 (122 days) Nicolás Gutiérrez (1) 1836 05 03 (126 days) Mariano Chico 1836 09 06 (60 days) Nicolás Gutiérrez (2) 1836 11 05 (32 days) José Castro (2) 1836 12 07 (2215 days) Juan Bautista Alvarado 1837
and 1838 – [Gov Alvarado appointed Juan Bandini majordomo of Mission San
Gabriel, and granted him Ranchos Jurupa and El Rincón] 1842
12 31
(784 days)
Manuel Micheltorena 1845
02 22
(534 days)
Pίo Pico 1846 08 10 – [End of Mexican rule in California] |
Secularization
(definition)
In the late eighteenth century the Franciscans came under increasing pressure to secularize their missions. Secularization had always been the eventual goal of missionization, although the law specified no precise time for that to occur. Secularization meant the replacement of state-supported missionaries from religious orders (regular clergy), whose task had been to propagate the faith, with parish-supported priests or curas (secular clergy), who would be responsible for the preservation of the faith. As missions became parishes, Indians would cease being wards and become parishioners and taxpayers – no small matter for the royal exchequer. Moreover, parishioners would assume support of the priest through the payment of diezmos or tithes, and other fees, thereby ending the government’s responsibility to send annual sίnodos to the missionaries.
Secularization also implied that Indian communal property, held in trust by missionaries, would be returned to the Indians and the surplus would enter the public domain.
In theory, secularization seemed compatible with the goals of the Franciscans who saw their [ideologically liberal, Enlightenment-oriented] purpose, as one put it, in “denaturalizing” the Indians and transforming “a savage race into a society that is human, Christian, civil, and industrious.” Having “civilized” the Indians, the Franciscans would turn them over to parish priests and move on to work among a new group of “savages.”
In practice this seldom occurred. Franciscans consistently pronounced neophytes unfit and unready to take their place in Hispanic society. Indians, the padres reported, did not place sufficient value on private property, thrift, or hard work and would either “eagerly return to their former unrestricted habits” or become victimized by rapacious settlers.
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The [government] wants the Indians to be private owners of lands and of other property; this is just. The Indians, however, want the freedom of vagabonds. The [non-Indians] want the absolute liberation and emancipation of the neophytes … in order that they may avail themselves of their lands and other property as well as of their persons. I do not see how these opposing interests can be harmonized. – Fray Narciso Durán, Alta California, 1833 |
Whether the Franciscans’ goal of Hispanizing Indians could have succeeded is another matter. Some contemporaries argued that acculturation would not take place because the missions kept Indians apart from other members of society. Certainly the fact that the padres represented a minority trying to “denaturalize” a majority made the padres’ task of directing cultural change more difficult. When they failed to alter Indian culture, some Franciscans blamed Indian obstinacy rather than questioning the goal. After forty years of experience with California Indians, Fray Narciso Durán wrote in 1845: “The Indians, in my opinion, do not deserve to be directed by a missionary. A slavedriver is what they ought to have.” The padres commonly compared the Indians with “children” and termed them inferior and incapable of change. In practice, then, many of the Indians who accepted the faith had to be forcibly held in missions through corporal punishment and few seemed ready to live as equals among non-Indians.
*
In New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas, the decline of the Franciscan missions under independent Mexico occurred quietly in comparison to their spectacular demise in Alta California. There, missions and missionaries remained a force to be reckoned with in the 1820s. In contrast to other provinces on the northern frontier, California missions still possessed considerable vitality. By 1823, shortly after independence, the twenty-first and final mission in California had been established at Sonoma, north of San Francisco Bay. At about the same time, the number of Indians attached to those missions reached its zenith, over 21,000 [about 1,000 Indians per mission]. In the names of those neophytes, Franciscans held a near monopoly over the temperate coastal lands from San Diego to Sonoma. Mission orchards, fields, pastures, and shops, all operated by Indian labor, produced most of the food and manufactured goods for the isolated province.
The California Franciscans, despite their travails during the recent wars for independence, presided over the most prosperous missions on the frontier at the dawn of Mexican independence, and they fought to preserve them. In general, California Franciscans opposed the conversion of missions for the classic reasons: Indians were not yet prepared to assume the role of citizens and needed the protection of the padres, or pobladores would exploit them. Before surrendering control over their neophytes, most Franciscans wanted safeguards established so that Indians would not be exploited or return to their so-called pagan ways.
One bold and ingenious plan came from Fray Narciso Durán. The genial, blue-eyed, Spanish-born padre, who had served at San José since 1806 and twice acted as father president of the California missions, suggested that construction of a new inland chain of missions accompany secularization of the coastal missions. In resurrecting this idea, which had been discussed in the first years of the century, Durán recognized the necessity of opening coastal lands to colonization if California was to attract immigrants and grow. At the same time, he argued, inland missions built to the east of the coastal ranges would block former mission Indians from fleeing into the interior. Indians who seemed unsuited for life among the gente de razón could be relocated to the new missions as the old ones were abandoned. Too costly to implement, as Durán acknowledged, the idea represented the only way for the California missions to survive.
*
Ideology aside, californios and federal officials alike saw the missions as an obstacle to economic development of the province. The missions’ near monopoly over California’s coastal strip and over the indigenous labor force hindered badly needed immigration and retarded growth of private ranches and farms. Missions also retarded growth of new towns. Thus, secularization seemed to represent the key to the prosperity of California and ultimately to its security.
But the government faced a dilemma. Although long-range development of California seemed dependent upon secularization, the disruption of mission farms and ranches seemed certain to bring immediate ruin to the provincial economy. The military forces stationed in California and her public officials depended upon the missions as a source of food, supplies, “forced loans,” and their very salaries, which the perennially impecunious federal treasury usually failed to provide. Officials also feared that without Franciscan control, mission Indians might revolt. Mission Indians outnumbered the californios by at least six to one. California, it appeared, could not grow so long as the missions existed, but neither could it survive without them.
Under these circumstances, the government adopted a gradual approach toward secularization, hoping to weaken the power of the padres and make land and labor available for private development, while avoiding economic ruin and Indian revolt, and maintaining the allegiance of the powerful Spanish-born Franciscans, whose loyalty was suspect. From 1825 until 1833, successive governments in Mexico City adopted remarkably similar strategies for implementing the secularization law of 1813 in California. The governors sent to California by independent Mexico carried instructions to proceed “slowly and prudently.” They permitted select Indians to leave certain missions, and granted them land and the full rights of citizens.
Mission Indians did not clamor to be included in the new plan to make them property owners. It is not surprising that the few Indians who were released from the restraints of institutional life did not turn into Mexicans overnight. Instead, as one historian has put it, many demonstrated “the kind of psychological disorientation that often accompanies decolonization.” Freed mission Indians, according to one British observer, were reduced to beggary and thieving after having “gambled away their clothes, implements, and even their land.” Fray Narciso Durán reported that liberated Indians became “slaves or servants of white men.”
*
Governor Figueroa, who deplored the missions as a “monastic despotism,” also adopted a gradual approach and his program began auspiciously. By 1834 he had established three Indian towns in Southern California. Ironically, it would be Figueroa, who had opposed secularization “at one blow” because “such a cure is worse than the disease,” who would preside over the rapid dissolution of the Alta California missions. A sudden shift in federal policy prompted Figueroa to act in a way that he otherwise would have viewed as unwise.
On August 17, 1833 the liberal vice-president Gómez-Fárias signed into a law a bill specifically secularizing all missions in both Alta and Baja California and requiring immediate replacement of Franciscans by secular clergy. The bill made no provision for the disposition of mission properties, but other legislation, not yet approved by Congress, contained a formula for distributing that property to various groups, including colonists from Mexico and from foreign countries.
Due to faulty communication and poorly drafted legislation, the californios misunderstood these measures to mean that the Gómez-Fárias administration intended to grant all of California’s mission lands to a group of Mexican colonists led by José Marίa Hίjar and José Marίa Padrés.
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Kevin Starr, pp 47 ff: In 1833 the Mexican Congress demanded that all missions be secularized and their lands distributed to Hispanicized Indians and, perhaps, to new colonists. Hearing the news, two Mexican entrepreneurs – José Marίa Hίjar, a wealthy landowner from Jalisco, and José Marίa Padrés, an army officer from Puebla who had spent a year in Alta California as inspector of troops and customs – used their connections with acting president Valentín Gómez-Fárias to promote a colonization scheme in which certain secularized mission lands of Alta California would be assigned to a colony organized by Padrés and Hίjar. From one perspective – the populating of Alta California with industrious civilians – the Hίjar-Padrés colony was good news. Here were people who actually wanted to go to California! Acting president Fárias went so far as to appoint Hίjar governor of California, and in 1834 some 250 colonists, together with their promoters, arrived there. The Hίjar-Padrés colony contained a number of men – Ignacio Coronel, José Noe, and Agustin Olvera, among others – who would distinguish themselves in the years to come. The governor of California at the time, however, Brevet Brigadier José Figueroa – a distinguished soldier and civil administrator, correctly considered by historians to have been the most competent governor during the Mexican era – opposed the colony. The mission lands, Figueroa argued, should be secularized in favor of the Indians living on them and not merely for the benefit of arriving colonists. These were Indian lands, after all, held in trust for them by the Franciscans; and it was the formal intent of the mission system to transform Native Americans into full-fledged citizens. In his opposition to the Hίjar-Padrés scheme, Figueroa was influenced in part by the fact that he himself was of Native American descent. Fortunately for Figueroa, the new president of Mexico, Antonio López de Santa Anna, canceled Hίjar’s commission as governor as Hίjar was en route; and so on August 4, 1834, issuing a 180-page proclamation, Figueroa took personal charge of the secularization process. Half of all mission properties, he decreed, would be assigned to mission Indians, and the missions themselves would be secularized at the rate of ten in 1834, six in 1835, and the remaining five in 1836. |
Garbled reports of these matters reached California and alarmed settlers who had long coveted mission properties and now saw them slipping from their grasp. Meanwhile, Governor Figueroa had received no formal orders to implement the new secularization law; he expected Hίjar, the new governor, to bring those instructions. In an effort to head off Hίjar and make the best of a bad situation, Figueroa accepted a secularization program drawn up by the California diputación, and announced it on August 9, 1834, prior to Hίjar’s arrival. This plan called for the immediate secularization of ten missions and secularization of the remainder soon after. It permitted Franciscans to remain in order to tend to spiritual matters until secular priests arrived. Indians would receive private plots of land, which they could not sell, and would also get tools, seeds, and livestock. A mayordomo, appointed by the governor, would take charge of surplus fields, orchards, and herds. Profits from this surplus property would be used for the expenses of “good government,” such as the salary of the priests and the mayordomo, the support of schools, or supplies for the military garrisons. Lest mission ranches cease operating and this income dry up, the plan permitted the governor to require Indians to labor on the surplus lands.
The plan adopted by Figueroa and the diputación served the interests of upper class californios. It blocked the acquisition of mission lands by immigrants from Mexico, by foreigners, and by lower class californios who would have benefited from the Gómez-Fárias legislation. The Figueroa plan also kept the mission economy intact and maintained the flow of vital revenues by requiring the forced labor of Indians, even while freeing them in theory. The plan did not provide for californios to obtain mission lands directly, but it did the next best thing by opening the way for upper class californios to assume positions of mayordomos of mission property. Figueroa and the oligarchs in the legislature, then, seemed to have found an ingenious way to thwart the efforts of the liberal Gómez-Fárias to integrate the California Indians. The californios changed the legal status of mission Indians to conform to republican ideals, without changing their actual status. Instead of remaining neophytes under the padres, Indians would become peones under a mayordomo.
Plunder of the
Missions
Between 1834 and 1836 all twenty-one missions were secularized, but not in the manner Figueroa intended. He did not live long enough to supervise the process, dying in office in September 1835. Meanwhile, Hίjar never had a chance to put the Gómez-Fárias plan into effect, either. In one of those quick shifts of power that increasingly characterized Mexican politics, Antonio López de Santa Anna ousted Gómez-Fárias and revoked Hίjar’s governorship. Santa Anna, now the champion of conservatives, hoped to reverse the process of secularization that his predecessor had set into motion, but the independent-minded California oligarchy ignored his instructions to delay and secularized the remaining missions.
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Kevin Starr: Unfortunately, Figueroa died the following year, and the secularization process he had outlined in his manifesto, with its fair-mindedness and strict accountability, was ignored. Only a small percentage of mission Indians ever came into possession of the properties they and their forebears had been working for half a century. |
Following the death of Figueroa, California government became more and more chaotic. During the turbulence, missions constituted the principal source of revenue for ambitious politicians. Mission overseers, who generally belonged to one faction or another, sold off cattle, grain, and lands that rightly belonged to former neophytes, and missions deteriorated under their stewardship. In 1839 Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado tried to check what nearly all writers have termed the “plunder” of the missions, but it was too late. The missions had “entirely gone to ruin,” one of Alvarado’s agents reported, and non-Indians had moved onto Indian lands. “All is destruction, all is misery, humiliation and despair,” wrote one padre in 1840.
The destruction of California mission properties, however, did not come about solely because of the activities of unscrupulous mayordomos. Mission Indians themselves displayed contempt for the system that had kept them forcibly institutionalized and participated actively in destroying it. Under the padres, many Indians had resisted missionization in subtle ways, and one of every ten had attempted to run away. With the authority of the padres gone in the mid-1830s, most Indians refused to labor for the overseers and showed little interest in acquiring land near the missions; some fled civilization entirely to live among independent Indian societies; others drifted into white settlements where they became laborers or servants; and others went to work on the private ranchos that californios had begun carving out of former mission properties. The self-governing Indian towns, which Figueroa had begun to establish, disintegrated quickly and the number of Indians remaining on mission lands plummeted.
The number of Franciscans in California also fell. Notwithstanding the arrival of reinforcements from the College of Guadalupe at Zacatecas, which sent eleven Mexican-born padres to California in 1833 to replace the depleted ranks of the Fernandinos, the number of Franciscans declined dramatically. Thirty-six grayrobes had served the province in 1820; twenty-one remained in 1836; and only eleven in 1846.
The last of the missionaries had no missions. In dire need of funds to run his government, Governor Pio Pico had put most of the remaining mission property – including the crumbling buildings and the chapels themselves – up for public auction in 1845. The central government and the Franciscans tried to prevent this sale, but the independent and desperate frontier governor proceeded nonetheless. The United States government would later judge Pico’s action illegal, but at the outbreak of war between Mexico and the United States, California mission property had been secularized, nearly destroyed, and lost completely to the Church. Little wonder, then, that one Catholic historian has termed the Church in California “near extinction” in 1846.
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Kevin Starr: The twenty-one missions themselves – built of adobe by Indians under the supervision of Franciscans guiding themselves from architecture books brought north from Mexico – survived [or were restored] as physical structures. A number of them – San Diego de Alcala, San Juan Capistrano, San Gabriel Arcangel, Santa Barbara, San Carlos Borromeo, San Francisco de Asis (more commonly known as Mission Dolores) – continue to thrive today as active parish churches. Mission Santa Clara de Asis on the southern edge of San Francisco Bay became the nucleus of a Jesuit college. Starting in the late nineteenth century, preservationists would organize a decades-long program of restoration, seeing in the twenty-one missions romanticized emblems of the Spanish colonial past. |
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Bandini vs
Alvarado, May 1837-Apr 1838 [Note that this time period overlaps with Bandini’s appointment by Alvarado as mayordomo of San Gabriel (1837) and Alvarado’s land grants of Jurupa (1837) and El Rincón (1838) to Bandini.] In this year [1836], soon after a revolution at
Monterey, as a result of which Governor Gutiérrez had been banished and Juan
B. Alvarado selected as governor in his place, San Diego was again drawn
actively into the political affairs of the time. There was considerable local
dissatisfaction with the course of events, and Juan Bandini and Santiago E.
Argüello were sent to Los Angeles and Santa Barbara as commissioners to
consult with the councils of those towns upon the situation. It was decided
to insist upon the carrying out of a law already upon the books making Los
Angeles the capital, to invite the co-operation of Los Angeles and Santa
Barbara, and a provisional political chief was to be selected to act until
the national laws should be again in force. Provision for the military
support of the movement was also anticipated. The report of the commissioners
was approved upon their return, but obstacles to the program soon began to
appear. The soldiers showed a disposition to make the occasion a pretext for
demanding their arrears of pay. The Santa Barbara council, too, failed to
endorse the plan in its entirety, and proposed one of its own. It therefore
appeared that nothing could be done, and at the end of the year as the net
result, the Los Angeles council awarded the San Diegans a vote of thanks.
Early in 1837, new town councils were elected, and that of Los Angeles
evolved a new plan which was indorsed by the restless San Diego politicians. Governor Alvarado left Monterey with an army of
eighty-five Californians and foreigners, about Christmas. At Santa Barbara
he was kindly received, and entered Los Angeles without opposition about the
22nd of January. Andrés Pico was present with a body of twenty soldiers, and
Pίo Pico and Francisco M. Alvarado, also of San Diego, were said to be
on the way, but did not arrive until all was over. Alvarado succeeded in temporarily
pacifying the Los Angeles town council, and everything was quiet in the
southern district during February and March. On account of disquieting
rumors, however, Alvarado thought it necessary to send General José Castro
southward, with orders, in case these rumors should prove well founded, to
remove or spike all the guns, carry off the horses, and distribute the supplies
in such a manner as to prevent their falling into the hands of the enemy. A
new assembly was gotten together at Santa Barbara on April 10, 1837, and
submitted a new series of propositions for the pacification of the country.
Los Angeles promptly rejected these proposals, and San Diego, while more
politic, pleaded for delay.
During all this time Juan Bandini was acting upon the
advice of a friend who, on a former occasion, had suggested that he should
“go home and keep quiet,” and appears to have taken little part in the
turmoils of the time, although the Picos and other San Diegans were deeply
implicated. The matters about which the different factions were quarreling
were such as would form proper subjects of discussion in political campaigns
– mainly about the form of the civil and political code after which the
government of the country should be patterned. The southerners were restless
and irreconcilable, and Alvarado seems to have had cause, for his suspicions. On May 21, 1837, Bandini, who had been for some time
living quietly upon his ranch, came into San Diego with an armed force,
proclaiming their purpose to engage in hostilities. Again he and Argüello
were sent as commissioners to Los Angeles, with a ready-made plan for the
cure of all the country’s woes. The Los Angeles town council approved, but
feared to act, and Bandini therefore proceeded to inaugurate the revolution
himself, by seizing the Los Angeles garrison and glens. There was doubtless
an understanding with the commandant of the guard, as the coup was
accomplished without resistance, including the capture of a gun which Pico
had carried off from San Diego. Three commissioners were appointed to treat
with Alvarado, and Bandini was then obliged to hurry home to San Diego,
whence alarming reports of Indian hostilities had been received. Bandini and his men carried the captured gun with them
and were received with shouts of triumph by a procession of their townsmen.
The Indian troubles soon came to an end, and then, the military spirit
running high, the “Army of the Supreme Government,” numbering over a hundred
men, was recruited and left [San Diego] for the north on the 10th of June.
Captain Portilla was in command of this expedition, which occupied Los
Angeles, hastily evacuated by Castro’s forces on the 16th [16 Jun 1837], In the meantime Captain Andrés Castillero, representing
himself to be a commissioner of the general government, arrived at San Diego
with the new laws of December 29, 1836, which were to replace the federal
constitution of 1824. The oath of allegiance was administered to the San
Diego council and citizens on June 12th [1837], and then Castillero joined
the revolutionary army at San Luίs Rey. Arrived at Los Angeles he
summoned the council, as well as the officials, soldiers, and citizens, and
they took the oath on June 18th amidst festivities and great rejoicing. He
then proceeded to Santa Barbara, where he met Alvarado in July, and induced
him to take the oath of allegiance to the new constitutional laws. This the
southern contingent regarded as an act of treachery, but being left without a
cause to fight for, the army and the San Diego plan alike melted into thin
air. Alvarado remained governor under the new laws, until in October [1837],
when Carlos Carrillo succeeded him. In January 1838, Governor Carrillo closed the ports of
San Francisco and Monterey and established the custom house at San Diego. He
was no more fortunate than his predecessors in maintaining peace, and was
soon involved in a war which culminated in the battle of San Buenaventura,
the latter part of March. Being defeated, Carrillo with a few friends and the
remnant of his army fled to San Diego. Here he endeavored to raise a force
to renew the war, and was aided by Bandini and others. A force of about a
hundred men and three cannon was collected and met the enemy at Las Flores,
on April 21st [1838]. A long negotiation followed which ended in a
compromise—the enemy carried off the cannon and Alvarado again became
Governor. |
Colonization
The Colonization law of 1824, which permitted individual states to draw up regulations for colonization, provided that procedures for territories, such as California and New Mexico, would come from Congress. Lacking pressure from would-be landowners, Congress took no action until it approved the colonization regulations of November 21, 1828, which spelled out the method whereby territorial governors, with approval of the diputaciónes, could grant land to Mexicans and foreigners. Those procedures continued to be used erratically until the end of the Mexican era.
A land rush did not follow. Foreigners found the most
desirable lands already occupied. In California, missions occupied the choice
coastal lands until secularization in the mid-1830s, and mission lands were
inviolable under the 1828 colonization regulations. The real land boom in California
awaited the secularization of the missions.
In 1834, more than 200 Mexicans including farmers, tradesmen, and professionals with their families, led by José Marίa Hίjar and José Marίa Padrés had been sent by President Gómez-Fárias to establish a colony in California. Soon, however, they had found themselves locked into a complex dispute with Governor Figueroa and the californios, which doomed the establishment of the colony – in large part because their program seemed to threaten the economic interests of the californios.
Governor Figueroa, who had come to California with orders to populate this region as a check on Russian expansion, tried to fill the gap with a settlement at Sonoma. Ironically, Figueroa could not find sufficient colonists for the town and it grew slowly, leaving the area open to a stream of Anglo-Americans who began to flow into the Sacramento Valley in the 1840s.
Land Grants
In the early 1840s, governors of both New Mexico and California used land grants to award political supporters and to repay loans or gifts, which kept their sinking departmental treasuries afloat. Land was one of the few commodities with which the last governors of New Mexico and California could bargain.
By placing vast tracts of public land in private hands, the last Mexican governors of New Mexico and California shaped settlement patterns and economic structures in their regions for decades to come.
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Kevin Starr (p 49): By the time the missions were secularized and the remaining padres were repatriated to Mexico city or Spain, a new social institution, the land grant rancho, had become predominant. All told, more than six hundred land grants were made during the Mexican era; and these vast holdings, extending across the rolling hills of coastal California as far north as Petaluma above San Francisco Bay, dominated the economy and defined the society of Mexican California. Now ensued the age of the dons: men such as Don José Andres Sepulveda, the feudal lord of the eighty-square-mile Rancho San Joaquin in present-day Orange County, granted to Don José in 1837 by Governor Alvarado. There, in his capacious hacienda called “Refugio” (the Refuge), Don José and his extended family lived a life that would later be celebrated in California legend. For a later generation, rancho life represented Mexican California at its best. Life on
Mexican-era Land Grant Ranchos It was a prodigal [Merriam-Webster: unrestrained in spending or using up one's means] existence, generous and unheeding. Innumerable longhorn cattle roamed the hills. Families were large and extended. It was common for more than twenty relatives, near-relatives, and retainers to sit down to plentiful meals of beef, tortillas, chili peppers, rice, tomatoes, garbanzo and green beans, pumpkins, onions, oranges, apples, pears, and imported chocolate and spices, all of it prepared by Indian cooks under the supervision of the mistress of the house. Families met for three full meals a day, and there were midmorning and midafternoon snacks. In a society challenged by a paucity of civil institutions – two or three schools, one active printing press, the absence of urbanism – family was everything, the fundamental fact and premise of social life. Everyone was connected by blood or baptismal relationships, and no child went uncared for. If one needed a horse, one borrowed it from one rancho and left it at the next, and made one’s own horses likewise available to others. At designated times of the year – religious feast days, the completion of branding or slaughter – the rancheros would gather their families and retainers at one or another hacienda for weeklong festivities that included late nights of dancing to the music of guitars, violins, flutes, and castanets, the hilarity of the evening intensified by imported wine, a domestic brandy called aguardiente, and spiked punches. On such festive occasions, the dons would dress in elaborate charro riding suits and ride on silver-studded saddles that represented a significant portion of their wealth. Rancho society had its cruel, even barbaric side. The treatment of Native American labor was frequently harsh. Despite such disadvantages, Native Americans and men of mixed blood developed into vaqueros who must be considered among the most skillful horsemen of all time. Only a small percentage of the population was literate, yet Monterey-born Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, educated in one of the few schools of the territory, was a lifelong and voracious reader, a collector of books, and an antiquarian historian of acknowledged skill. |
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“The plan adopted
by Figueroa and the diputación served the interests of upper class californios.” Juan Bandini (1800-1859) |
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http://www.sandiegohistory.org/online_resources/bandini.html Juan
Bandini (1800-1859) In 1833 he
went to Mexico as congressman and returned the following year as
Vice-President of the Hίjar colonization company and inspector of
customs for California. His elaborate entertainment of Hίjar has been
alluded to. The colonization scheme was a failure, however. The California
officials also refused to recognize his authority over the customs and
brought a counter charge of smuggling which they succeeded in substantiating,
technically, at least. These
failures of his hopes were a severe blow to Bandini, from which he never
fully recovered. In 1836-7-8 he was the leading spirit in the opposition to
Governor Alvarado and on one occasion, at least, had the satisfaction of a
great public reception when the whole population of San Diego turned out to
meet him on his return from the capture of Los Angeles, in 1837. His return
at this time was due to Indian troubles. He was the owner of the Tecate rancho
on the Mexican border, which was pillaged by the hostiles and the family
reduced to want. But peace having been made, Alvarado made him administrator of
the San Gabriel Mission, and he was also granted the Jurupa, Rincón, and Cajon de
Muscapiabe ranchos, besides land at San Juan Capistrano. He held other
offices, but continued to oppose Alvarado and was present with troops at the
battle of Las Flores, in 1838. Bancroft admits
that he was one of the most prominent men of his time in California, of fair
abilities and education, a charming public speaker, a fluent writer, and
personally much beloved. He thinks, however, that in the larger fields of
statesmanship he fell somewhat short – an estimate which is one of the
penalties paid by those who, whatever their ability or deserts, fail of the
largest success. |
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The Journal of San Diego
History SAN DIEGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY QUARTERLY Spring 1971, Volume 17, Number
2 Linda Freischlag, Editor Native of
Arica: Requiem for a Don
By Katherine L Wagner …
Originally a resident of San Diego, Don Juan had moved to the pueblo of Los
Angeles late in 1837 after being appointed the Administrator of San Gabriel
Mission. Soon after this, he petitioned for and was granted the ranchos of
Jurupa and Rincón located along the Santa Ana River near the present day
Chino and Riverside area.
Within a few
years he resigned his post as administrator. He then devoted his efforts to
ranching and to a lumbering enterprise he had started in the San Bernardino
Mountains upon receiving a timber cutting concession from the Mexican
government. However, these occupations soon proved unsuccessful and Bandini
returned to Los Angeles in 1843 where he became a partner in a merchandise business with Abel Stearns,
who had married his daughter Arcadia several years before. In 1844 he served
as sindico in the town ayuntamiento. |
By Douglas Monroy P 126
The missions were to have been secularized with careful consideration for the rights and needs of the [mission Indian] neophytes. But the various decrees and laws guaranteeing Indian entitlements were paid little attention as a consequence of the intermittent political confusion that prevailed in California and the interior of Mexico. In July 1835 Governor Chico sailed from Monterey, fearing for his life. According to de la Guerra Ord, he “had sworn to support the principles of the new regime of centralism which had been inaugurated in Mexico [by Santa Ana’s coup] – a regime that was never acceptable to the Californios.” Another revolt in 1836 tossed out Chico’s easygoing but besotted and womanizing successor, Nicolás Gutiérrez. Juan B. Alvarado, the Californio who had tried to convince the neophytes to become citizens, assumed the governorship. Alvarado’s federalist revolt coincided with federalist ascendance in Mexico and essentially achieved self-rule for the Californios who had been “desirous for a long time to have a native son of the territory as governor.” The yoke of the central government effectively was eliminated. Now Californios were free to rule themselves (ever squabbling over such matters as the location of the capital), the land, and the Indians.
What remained of government during Alvarado’s rule, particularly after he was replaced in 1842 by Manuel Micheltorena, whose rule touched off even more chaos, was now firmly in the hands of the elite . The various governors after 1833 appointed commissioners and mayordomos to manage the remaining mission lands. Typically, the recipients of such appointments were cronies and cohorts of the political intriguers. Between federalism and periods of chaos Mexico could not check the actions of its frontier rulers. The fledgling elite Californios thus thwarted the plans of such Mexican liberals as Vice President Gómez Farίas to settle the former mission lands with Mexicans from the interior and even Indians. According to Angustίas de la Guerra Ord, “Of the administrators of the missions, some were incapable, others without morality, and some, a very few, were men of good faith who did everything possible to conserve the properties.”
The governors gave the guard of the chickens over to the foxes. Juan Bandini, for example, became mayordomo of San Gabriel in 1838. The mayordomos gained control of the mission lands and ruled over the former neophytes, who did the work and became peones, landless laborers. In 1841 Duflot de Mofras declared, “Those now in control are the rancheros … who have grown rich by plundering the missions and who, under the Franciscan regime, served as mayordomos, cowboys, and servants to the Fathers.” As the Yankee invasion loomed on the horizon, Governor Pio Pico sold off the last of the mission lands in 1845 and 1846 to his compañeros. The missions were transubstantiated into ranchos, Indians and all.
Shepherdless among land-hungry wolves, mortally wounded by disease and alcohol, and free to make contracts for their labor, the neophytes who had moved to Los Angeles became “servants of white men who know well the manner of securing their services by binding them for a whole year for an advanced trifle.” “All in reality are slaves,” declared Narciso Durán. Probably five thousand died during the disarray of secularization. Most, however, merely went someplace else and then aimlessly dawdled when they got there. Reported Hugo Reid in 1851 from his rancho, which was once part of San Gabriel, “Nearly all of the Gabrieleños went north while those of San Diego, San Luίs and San Juan overran this country.”
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Ex-neophyte Indians living outside San Diego. Alienated from their original lands and estranged from their traditional means of gaining subsistence, Indians had to scrounge a meager existence from the towns. (Courtesy of the Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Museum.) |
By 1840 nearly one thousand neophytes had fled Mission
San Gabriel, leaving about four hundred on the old grounds. A similar number
stayed on at San Fernando. At Santa Barbara there were 711 neophytes in 1830,
The town, not known for economic dynamism, could not soak up the mission’s discharges. Alcohol cornered the attention of these now-legal huidos [runaways] who came to live an utterly debased existence on a tract of land the city ayuntamiento granted them in 1836. “The different missions,” lamented Reid, whose wife was a former neophyte, “had alcaldes continually on the move, hunting them up and carrying them back, but to no purpose; it was labor in vain.” Ultimately Spain’s efforts in Alta California yielded not Hispanicized vecinos of the king’s realm but thoroughly disorganized Indians who were displaced from their lands.
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[Weber, p
93-95]
No single
group in Alta California achieved the fearsome reputations of Apaches,
Comanches, Navajos, or Utes, but smaller tribes raided California settlements
with increasing intensity in the years before war with the United States.
Nonmission Indians from the interior, who enjoyed the relative security of the
Sierras, the Tulare country, and the Central Valley, together with deserters
from the missions took the offensive in the 1830s and raided coastal
settlements with regularity. Indians made life on the ranches insecure, and put
californios on the defensive by the
1840s. Few californios died at the
hands of Indians in these years, but destruction was such that one historian
judged Indian raids as California’s “most serious obstacle to progress and
prosperity.”
After the secularization of the California missions, rancheros attempted to expand into the interior, threatening the hegemony of autonomous Indian peoples.
In California some peaceful, sedentary, hunting and gathering peoples adopted new techniques of warfare, learned to use the horse, and became seminomadic cavalrymen in the 1820s and 1830s. These California Indians, intruded upon by Europeans for the first time in the late eighteenth century, went through a process of adaptation that other northern tribes, such as Apaches, seem to have experienced a century before.
Indian motives and adaptability, however, do not in themselves explain the great success that some autonomous tribes had in ongoing raids against the Mexicans. The explanation also lies in two changing conditions that characterized the decades following Mexican independence: first, the rapid influx into northern Mexico of Anglo-Americans who upset the balance of power and weakened old alliances based on trade; second, the failure of Mexico to mend most of those broken alliances and to strengthen its military posture to meet the new challenge.
As they moved westward, some unscrupulous Anglo-American traders helped tip the balance of power between Mexican frontiersmen and independent Indian tribes. Writing in 1830, the liberal savant from Coahuilla, Miguel Ramos Arizpe, explained how. Prior to the coming of the Americans, he said, Indians “did not have firearms except a small number of old muskets which they received as gifts from the Spaniards, with a very small supply of powder that hardly served them because of its bad quality.” Indians thus remained “rather weak” and dependent upon Spaniards alone for trade. Americans, Ramos Arizpe said, broke that dependency by furnishing Indians good guns and “very exquisite powder.” Thus fortified by their new trading partners, Indians raided Mexican settlements, taking livestock and even human captives that could be traded to Americans for more arms and ammunition, as well as whiskey and other goods. Some contemporaries considered it a mistake to assume that Indians did more damage with guns than with bows and arrows, but most apparently believed firearms to be more effective, including Indians themselves. Perhaps more important than the weapons Americans furnished, however, was the market they provided for stolen property, thereby encouraging Indian raids on northern Mexico. Little wonder that some of these American traders came to be charged with “land piracy,” even by their countrymen.
[p 136]
Although otter skins remained the prime trading commodity during the Mexican period, a foreign sea captain rarely found enough to fill his hold. Cowhides and tallow usually made up most of his cargo on the return trip and came to be California’s largest export commodities.
[Mission
Agriculture]
The skillful californios roped, slaughtered, and butchered cattle, then stretched, cleaned, and dried the hides. “Doubled lengthwise in the middle, and nearly as stiff as boards,” those hides would be stacked in a dry place along with cowhide sacks of tallow, to await the arrival of foreign traders who would ship them to England and New England. Meanwhile, most flesh of the slaughtered animals was left to rot, for the supply of beef outstripped demand in California, and salted or jerked beef (the only effective way of preserving it before refrigeration) was not popular.
The hide and tallow trade, the fur trade, and the Santa Fe trade offer dramatic examples of the ways in which the easing of trade restrictions by independent Mexico altered economic life on the northern frontier. In a less spectacular way, access to new markets and nascent capitalism jolted other areas of the frontier economy as well, especially production of raw materials.
In California, where foreigners had easy access to the coast and could export valuable hides and tallow without burdening themselves with the rest of the animal, ranching boomed as we have seen. During these years californios also exported a small number of horses, which an English visitor described as “plentiful as bullrushes,” to new markets in Hawaii, Oregon, and New Mexico.
Other products whose importance as export items increased in the Mexican era were wine and spirits. Grapes and grain, in the less perishable form of wine and liquor, could be easily transported over long distances, and a modest export trade in these beverages accelerated after independence as the private sector developed commercial wineries in California and as New Mexicans found new outlets for locally produced whiskey.
The Franciscans and their Indian laborers seem to have been California’s exclusive viticulturists until secularization in the mid-1830s placed the mission vineyards in private hands. In the Los Angeles region especially, foreigners such as Louis Vignes, a Frenchman, and Americans William Wolfskill and John Rowland, both former trappers, began to plant new vines while others tended the former mission vineyards. By the 1840s people as far away as Boston drank California wine.
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or go to “meiszen.net”: Meissner Family Web Site |
