El Cinco de Mayo: An American Tradition

El Cinco de Mayo

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of

the Valerie Barth and Peter Booth Wiley Endowment Fund

in History of the University of California Press Foundation.

El Cinco de Mayo

AN AMERICAN TRADITION

David E. Hayes-Bautista

Portions of chapters 3 and 4 were published originally as David E. Hayes-Bautista and Cynthia L. Chamberlin, Cinco de Mayo’s First Seventy-Five Years in Alta California: From Spontaneous Behavior to Sedimented Memory, 1862 to 1937, Southern California Quarterly 89 (2007): 23–64. Portions of chapter 4 were published originally as David E. Hayes-Bautista, Cynthia L. Chamberlin, Branden Jones, Juan Carlos Cornejo, Cecilia Cañadas, Carlos Martinez, and Gloria Meza, "Empowerment, Expansion, and Engagement: Las Juntas Patrióticas in California, 1848–1869," California History 85 (2007): 4–23, 66–72.

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University of California Press

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University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2012 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hayes-Bautista, David E., 1945–

El Cinco de Mayo: an American tradition / David E. Hayes-Bautista.

     p.    cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27212-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-520-27213-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Hispanic Americans—California—History—19th century.  2. Hispanic Americans—California—Ethnic identity  3. Cinco de Mayo (Mexican holiday)—Social aspects—United States.  4. Cinco de Mayo, Battle of, Puebla, Mexico, 1862.  5. Cinco de Mayo, Battle of, Puebla, Mexico, 1862—Social aspects—United States.  6. Cinco de Mayo, Battle of, Puebla, Mexico, 1862—Press coverage—United States.  7. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Social aspects.  I. Title.

F870.S75H384    2012

394.262—dc23                                                                                 2011041840

Manufactured in the United States of America

21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1 • Before the American Civil War

2 • The First Battle of Puebla, 1862

3 • The American Civil War and the Second Battle of Puebla

4 • The Juntas Patrióticas Mejicanas Blossom

5 • One War, Three Fronts

6 • Shaping and Reshaping the Cinco de Mayo, 1868–2011

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

1. Mastheads from Spanish-language newspapers in California, 1850s

2. Los Angeles County births, by ethnicity, 1850–1869

3. Reginaldo F. del Valle, later president pro tempore of the California state senate, age five

4. Abraham Lincoln

5. Benito Juárez, president of the Republic of Mexico, 1858–1872

6. La Voz de Méjico’s report of the Mexican victory at the first battle of Puebla

7. A newspaper report of the first Cinco de Mayo celebration in California, 1862

8. Mastheads from Spanish-language newspapers in California, 1860s

9. The Emancipation Proclamation in Spanish, 1863

10. Confederate president Jefferson Davis

11. Emperor Maximilian of Mexico

12. Filomeno Ibarra, president of the Los Angeles junta in 1864

13. San Francisco junta member Hipólita Orendain

14. Sonora, California, junta member María Noriega

15. Los Angeles junta members José López, Jacinto Haro, and Julián Valdez

16. Captain José Ramón Pico

17. Native California Cavalry recruiting advertisement, 1863

18. Mariano G. Vallejo in Monterey, 1886

19. Ygnacio Sepúlveda, a county, federal district, and superior court judge

20. Abraham Lincoln’s reelection campaign advertisement in Spanish, 1864

21. Spanish-language report of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, 1865

22. Cinco de Mayo advertisement, 1877

23. Cinco de Mayo advertisement, 1884

24. Cinco de Mayo advertisement, 1893

25. Mexican Protective League of California advertisement, 1919

26. Article about braceros celebrating the Cinco de Mayo, 1945

MAPS

1. Spanish-language newspaper agents in California, 1850s

2. Locations donating to the Latino sword of honor, 1862

3. Locations with a junta patriótica mejicana, 1862–1867

Introduction

ACCORDING TO ONE VERSION of Bautista family legend, on May 5, 1862, my great-great-grandfather, Bartolo Bautista, stood on the walls of Puebla and watched the mighty French army march into view.¹ He had been born in San Miguel Atlautla, in the state of Mexico, about seventy kilometers southeast of Mexico City, high on the slopes of Popocatepetl, on the opposite side of the volcano from the city of Puebla.² The French charged, a battle ensued, and amid the smoke and noise, my great-great-grandfather’s unit was isolated, surrounded, and taken prisoner. They were told that they were going to be shot and should prepare themselves to die. The French put my great-great-grandfather and his comrades up against a wall. First, however, they ordered the prisoners to remove their shirts. The French army lived off the territories they occupied and therefore intended to use their victims’ clothing, so they did not want to get the shirts bloody. The Mexican prisoners removed their shirts and presented their bare chests to the firing squad.

But now the French soldiers appeared to be carrying on a confused discussion. Finally, one of them pointed to my great-great-grandfather and waved him out of the execution line; he was not going to be shot. Why not? A birthmark had just saved his life. The dark splotch over his heart was in the form of a hand, all five fingers clearly visible, so detailed that one could even see the fingernails. The French soldiers superstitiously refused to take aim at the heart below such a birthmark, so he was let go. He returned to Atlautla and later had a family, and I now exist to write this book 150 years later.

I first heard this story in the early 1970s, in Atlautla. An uncle, Adán Páez, who had a story for every occasion, managed to slip this particular incident into a long line of family and town lore he was sharing with me over merienda, the Ibero-American equivalent of teatime, served between four and six in the afternoon. Even now, forty years later, I can still see him, with his white hair and mustache, leaning over the table toward me to give emphasis to the description of my great-great-grandfather’s birthmark, and I remember the words he used to describe the remarkable feature: tan detallada que se veían hasta las uñas de los dedos (so detailed that even the nails on the fingers were visible).³

In the early days of the Chicano movement in the 1960s—more than a century after my great-great-grandfather’s (possibly apocryphal) brush with death before a French firing squad at the first battle of Puebla—we few Latino undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley, were pushing to make the Latino presence felt on campus. We devised an annual Cinco de Mayo concert at the Greek Theatre, where salsa musicians such as Carlos Santana, Coke Escovedo, Ray Barreto, and Eddie Palmieri shared the stage with Tex-Mex conjuntos, East Los Angeles doo-wop bands, and the occasional mariachi. Later, in the 1970s, I was a student at the University of California Medical Center, San Francisco. As the Cinco de Mayo approached one year, the editor of the campus newspaper, the Synapse, asked me to write an article about why the holiday was important to Latinos. I pulled together what information I could, but nothing really explained to me why we Latinos in the United States, particularly of the Chicano generation, should celebrate a battle that had taken place a hundred years ago, fifteen hundred miles away. I talked with a few people around the Bay Area and got some descriptions from the older generation of Cinco de Mayo celebrations in the 1930s, but no one knew why this day was celebrated. I developed my own explanation, based on feelings rather than data, because there were no data then: by celebrating Cinco de Mayo, we were celebrating resistance. I felt there must be much more to it, but my research was in other areas, such as Latino patient behavior, so after that one article, I did not return to the theme for decades.

The tremendous growth in Spanish-language media during the 1980s and 1990s attracted a number of reporters and journalists from Venezuela, Columbia, Argentina, and, of course, Mexico. They too were puzzled by the celebration of the Cinco de Mayo in the United States. In the early 1980s, I was asked by a news reporter from the Spanish-language television station in San Francisco why we Chicanos celebrated Cinco de Mayo. I could not tell her why, but I did tell her that I too had noticed this. A few years earlier, I had happened to be in Guadalajara on May 5, so I had hurried downtown, expecting to find parades, music, dancers, and orators. I thought the center of action would be the cathedral plaza, so I picked out a spot on the sidewalk and waited to see the activities . . . and waited . . . and waited. Hours later, I returned to my cousins’ house, disappointed. Rather than witness the most spectacular Cinco de Mayo festivities of my life, I was witness to the fact that it is not a major celebration in Mexico. As a young reporter posted to Los Angeles in the 1980s for the Spanish-language paper La Opinión, Sergio Muñoz (now of the Los Angeles Times) raised the issue in print: Cinco de Mayo is not a very important holiday in Mexico. . . . How does Cinco de Mayo come to be celebrated in the United States?⁴ Reporters have asked me some version of that question many times since.

The 1960s and 1970s were a period of tremendous transformation for Latinos in California. Some of the changes were organizational, for example in the health care field. Enthusiastic young Chicanos established hundreds of community clinics, such as La Clínica de la Raza in Oakland, where I was executive director from 1970 to 1974. They also laid the foundations for a number of organizations still functioning in the field of Latino health, such as the California Latino Medical Association for physicians, the Latino Medical Student Association for medical students and residents, and the Chicanos/Latinos for Community Medicine for pre–health professional students. Similar developments took place in education, legal aid, policing, banking, and even the grocery industry.

The field of history was likewise undergoing changes. As María Raquél Casas has pointed out, since the days of Hubert H. Bancroft, histories of California have painted a picture of a Latino elite spiraling downward, shorn of land, wealth, and power, slowly disappearing.⁵ From around 1870 to around 1970, Latinos often were depicted as passive bystanders to the state’s historical development. The 1970s saw the emergence of a new historical approach, which explored the concept of Latino agency. New studies began to look at American history through the lens of Latino experience, from labor organizing to family formation. Gradually a new body of work has formed in which Latinos are studied as both individuals and groups of individuals able to reflect on other individuals and groups and imbue their interactions with meaning. These socially constructed meanings enable any group to create lines of action that involve other individuals and groups, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in cooperation.⁶

Lacking in California history for decades were the voices of groups and communities that found themselves in conflict with immigrants from the eastern United States who had claimed control of California and the American West since 1848. Yet since the 1970s, an increasing number of works have been providing alternative viewpoints. Lisbeth Haas has studied how Indians, Mexicans, and recent arrivals from the eastern United States interacted with one another for more than 150 years in one location, San Juan Capistrano, to give a sense of how Latino identity was socially constructed there over time. Her work sensitizes readers to the notion, developed by Stuart Hall, that cultural identities are not fixed in a single or hidden history, but are ‘subject to the continuous play of history, culture and power.’ ⁷ María Raquél Casas has examined the lives and households of elite nineteenth-century California women married to non-Latino men to better understand Latino agency in the history of ethnic encounters and conflicts. Casas has heard the voices of these intermarried Latinas and their children constructing a cultural coalescence by choosing, borrowing, retaining, and creating distinctive cultural forms in the course of their daily lives.⁸ Conversely, John Walton has emphasized that public history also is socially constructed via the interaction of different events and narratives in a process of collective action that he terms historical sociology.⁹

A narrative of the social construction of the public memory in California known as the Cinco de Mayo adds to this body of thought. As Latinos exercised their agency to create this new public event during the early days of the American Civil War, they were engaging in the social construction of their own identity and culture, that of Latinos living in the United States during a time of war. This experience also provides nuance to the narrative of Latinos during the Gold Rush period. The Gold Rush attracted a huge immigration from Mexico, Central America, and South America, which dwarfed the relatively small population of Californios, the native-born Latinos of California. By virtue of sharing a common language, Spanish, and to a slightly lesser extent a common culture, this inadvertently cosmopolitan population of Latinos in California interacted with one another, worked claims together, set up businesses together, published newspapers in Spanish together, married one another, and had children who would grow up to be largely bilingual and bicultural. Latinos in the state also experienced outright prejudice, discrimination, and denial of justice, ranging from the Foreign Miners’ Tax and the greaser law to claim jumping and lynching. Some historians have suggested that Latinos responded to these acts of discrimination by creating oppositional culture, a purposeful rejection of mainstream culture so as to resist domination.¹⁰

Yet during the years of the American Civil War and the French Intervention in Mexico, we can also see a process of Latino appropriation of mainstream culture emerging in California in which Latinos accepted and internalized certain elements of that culture on their own terms. For instance, the editors of Spanish-language newspapers urged Latino U.S. citizens to embrace electoral participation, but from a perspective of Latino agency. Oppositional dynamics thus were joined with cooperational dynamics, and both affected definitions of self and family, in a process similar to that discerned by George J. Sánchez in Latino communities in the early twentieth century. Ethnicity . . . was not a fixed set of customs surviving from life in Mexico, but rather a collective identity that emerged from daily experience in the United States. As such, ethnicity arose not only from interaction with fellow Mexicans and Mexican Americans, but also through dialogue and debate with the larger cultural world.¹¹

In 1998, Alvar W. Carlson published a study of Cinco de Mayo celebrations in the United States, recording them in twenty states, but with 79 percent taking place in California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada. Nonetheless, he mistakenly presents the Cinco de Mayo as a holiday imported by immigrants from Mexico to the United States between 1965 and 1995.¹² Cinco de Mayo celebrations in western states other than California surely have a history of their own, but a search of the literature so far has not turned up any scholarship about the origins of this celebration in those states, even Texas and New Mexico. The scant extant scholarly literature presents the Cinco de Mayo as a sort of St. Patrick’s Day event, a chance to party and consume alcoholic beverages.¹³ The anthropologist Clayton A. Hurd recently depicted Cinco de Mayo celebrations as alienating Latino students from non-Latino white students.¹⁴ A search for literature on the public memory of the Cinco de Mayo in Mexico found a few studies of twentieth-century uses of the commemoration in the creation of local identity but to date has not turned up any general histories of the commemoration of the event between 1862 and the twenty-first century.¹⁵

The fact that the holiday has been so little celebrated in Mexico while being so widely celebrated in the United States leads to the conclusion that the commemoration took two very different, independent paths, one indigenous to the United States and one indigenous to Mexico. This book focuses on its development in the United States, where public memory of the Cinco de Mayo was socially, and deliberately, constructed during the American Civil War by Latinos responding to events and changes around them.

My discovery of the history of the Cinco de Mayo was unplanned. My primary field of research is the epidemiology and demography of Latinos in California. In the course of my work, I began developing population-based data sets for the period between 1940 and 2000.¹⁶ After consulting the work of two colleagues who had used nineteenth-century data sources in the 1970s, Albert Camarillo and Richard Griswold del Castillo, I decided to gather and analyze data from as far back as 1850, when California became a state.¹⁷ Conscious of the vagaries of identifying Latinos in twentieth-century administrative data sets, I started with two fairly small, limited data sets: marriage licenses filed in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles Counties from 1850 to 1910.¹⁸ About 1 percent of a population gets married in California in any given year, so these data would be, in effect, a 1 percent sample, biased toward the young-adult population. Although African Americans, Native Americans, and Asians were routinely identified as such in these early sources, Latinos were not. I developed an algorithm for identifying Latinos in the marriage certificates, and my research team at the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at UCLA then extracted all the vital information from every certificate in which at least one partner was Latino and put it an electronic spreadsheet.¹⁹

I chose Los Angeles County as a case study county and had the research team extract the relevant data from six decennial U.S. censuses for that county from 1850 to 1910.²⁰ They collected the data on every household in which my algorithm identified at least one person as Latino, yielding information on Latino-headed households, Latinos living in boardinghouses, Latinos staying in hotels, Latinos working as live-in servants in non-Latino-headed households, and every other possible combination of household living arrangement.

We also attempted to extract data from county birth and death certificates but found these data spotty and inconsistent until the twentieth century. To help fill in the blank spots for the nineteenth century, I therefore decided to use birth, baptism, marriage, death, funeral, and memorial service announcements from contemporary Spanish-language newspapers, beginning with Los Angeles’ El Clamor Público, published from 1855 to 1859.²¹ The effort soon was expanded to include Spanish-language newspapers published in San Francisco. San Francisco was the major port of entry during the Gold Rush (1848–1860s), and the newspapers published there yielded new types of data: lists of people whose letters awaited pickup at the post office and passenger lists of ships and stagecoaches. A significant difference quickly became apparent: while Los Angeles Latinos were predominantly of Californio origin—that is, born in California while it belonged to either Spain or Mexico or born as U.S. citizens to California-born parents—Latinos in San Francisco and the rest of Northern California were predominantly immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and South America who came to the state during the Gold Rush.

The realization that there were different population patterns in various parts of the state led to further expansions in the scope of my investigation. I selected Tuolumne County as a case study of a mining county, San Luis Obispo as a ranching county, and San Francisco as an urban county different from Los Angeles, and we extracted data on Latinos from the 1850 to 1880 censuses for each of these counties. The newspaper search expanded again, to include Spanish-language papers published in Santa Barbara between 1852 and 1898.

While collecting vital statistics on the Civil War period from the San Francisco newspapers La Voz de Méjico and El Nuevo Mundo, initially I was annoyed by the constant appearance of lists of contributors to organizations called juntas patrióticas mejicanas (Mexican patriotic assemblies). These lists were so numerous that at times they crowded out other news, including the notices of births, marriages, and deaths I was looking for, and for months I brushed them aside, wanting to get at the real news. Then one day I had an epiphany. These lists, from all over California, as well as parts of Nevada and Oregon, were a previously unstudied data source independent of government records. These lists, and their reason for existing, were the news. Examining them, I noticed the wide geographic spread of junta membership. From The Dalles in Oregon to Santa Ana in California, from Half Moon Bay on the San Francisco Peninsula to the Reese River in Nevada, 129 locations reported having a junta. The research team entered the junta contributors into an electronic database and discovered that nearly 14,000 individual unduplicated names were recorded in these lists.²² The juntas were an extensive, largely grassroots organization; I can think of few other Latino organizations that boast almost 14,000 members, even in the twenty-first century. Moreover, many of the contributors’ names did not appear in censuses, marriage licenses, or baptism records. I had found a new data source for my demographic modeling.

While the team was extracting the contributors’ names and the locations of the juntas, I read the correspondence published alongside the lists. This included organizational bylaws, notices of the election of officers and meetings, transcriptions of speeches given at meetings—and detailed descriptions of the celebration of the Cinco de Mayo. The papers’ reports also turned out to be a gold mine of qualitative information that had been available to Latinos in California at that time: military dispatches from Mexico, private correspondence about the French occupation of Mexico, articles copied from Mexican and French newspapers, reports from the battlefields of the American Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, correspondence between Generals Grant and Lee, anguished news of Lincoln’s assassination. My research on present-day Latinos often uses qualitative information, such as in-depth individual interviews and focus group sessions, to flesh out social trends suggested by quantitative data sets; indeed, my first peer-reviewed papers in the health care field were based on qualitative work. Now I was applying my experience in using qualitative sources to uncover the daily lives of the population tracked in the historical demographic data, at least as they were reported in the Spanish-language newspapers.

Thus, this book fits into the new tradition of Latino social history described above and offers two modest additions to its growing methodology. The first is the use of multiple population-based data sets to gain some sense of the scale of the Latino population in California in the second half of the nineteenth century. In demographic research on present-day populations, the use of multiple data sets is preferred to the use of a single set, as every data set has its strengths and its limitations, which must be made transparent to the reader. The problems inherent in modern-day U.S. census data—the chronic undercount of Latinos; difficulties in defining exactly who is a Latino; respondents’ confusion over not just race versus national origin but also self-identification as Hispanic—already were evident in censuses from 1850 to 1910. They were exacerbated by a lack of call-back procedures to include people who weren’t home the day the enumerator counted a neighborhood, and by most enumerators’ unfamiliarity with spelling Spanish names. Additionally, the Foreign Miners’ Tax likely did not encourage Latinos to step forward and be counted during the 1860 census and probably did not encourage enumerators to probe too deeply into Latino settlements either. In today’s terms, the censuses of 1850 to 1910 are samples of unknown bias and unknown undercount, yet they are one readily available data source. The data sources independent of the censuses—marriage licenses, baptismal certificates, funeral notices, passenger lists, post office lists, and membership lists of the juntas patrióticas—are also biased and limited, but all these sources taken together provide a better view of the Latino population than would any single data set used in isolation.

The second modest addition is the use of nineteenth-century Spanish-language newspapers as a qualitative data source. These were public communications, intended to inform a wide audience. Certainly they contain biases, of which the reader must be aware. For instance, four of them—La Voz de Méjico, El Nuevo Mundo, and La Voz de Chile y de las Republicas Americanas, all from San Francisco, and El Amigo del Pueblo from Los Angeles—espoused the Union’s cause in the Civil War and Juárez’s during the French Intervention in Mexico. But another Spanish-language paper, El Éco del Pacífico, published in San Francisco from 1852 to 1865, supported the Confederacy and the French Intervention. Yet all these newspapers served, in effect, as community bulletin boards, and their pages contain multiple voices, not always in harmony with editorial policy: junta news, transcripts of speeches, letters from self-appointed correspondents, announcements, advertisements, and so on. They offer a view of California—and parts of Nevada and Oregon—constructed by Latinos exercising their agency.

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

I use the term Latino to refer to those individuals with origins in the cultural-historic traditions of Latin America and the Caribbean. It is intended to be reflective not of race but of culture; as the U.S. Census Bureau informs enumerators and readers of its reports, Hispanic may be of any race.²³ Debates have raged since the 1960s over which terms should be used to refer to this population: Chicano, Boricua, Hispanic, pocho, Mexican American, Latino, Raza, Hispano, Spanish.²⁴ These debates about terminology only become more complex as their historical context is also taken into account. They usually center around the question of whether to use a modern word that twenty-first-century readers will understand or one current in the historical period under discussion, which people of that period would have understood. Latinos in California during the Gold Rush and the American Civil War also puzzled over the proper term to use for a population that included Californios, Mexican immigrants, Central Americans, South Americans, Spaniards, and the bilingual, bicultural children of all these groups who were born in California. Luckily, one word exists that both periods would understand. Latino was among the terms used by nineteenth-century Spanish-language newspapers in California, in essentially the same way it is used today. I therefore prefer it for this book.

This book generally covers the years 1848 to 1867. It studies Latinos creating a society and an identity during the California Gold Rush, the American Civil War, and the French Intervention, through the lens of the Cinco de Mayo holiday. Public commemoration of the first battle of Puebla did not cease with the imperialists’ defeat in 1867, but to do justice to the post–Civil War history of the Cinco de Mayo in California would take, literally, another book. Therefore, I perforce end with a chapter that briefly sketches an outline of the history of Cinco de Mayo commemorations from 1868 to 2010, since it has been celebrated in California communities every year since 1862.

The 150th anniversary of the first battle of Puebla occurs on May 5, 2012. It should be recognized in the commemorations of the 150th anniversaries of the French Intervention in Mexico and the beginning of the American Civil War, as the Cinco de Mayo’s origins lie in those historic conflicts. I hope this book will serve to remind us of the traditionally close connections between Mexico and the United States, formed in large part via the long-standing communities of Latinos in the United States.

ONE

Before the American Civil War

WHY IS THE CINCO DE MAYO so widely celebrated in twenty-first-century California, and across the entire United States, when it is scarcely celebrated in Mexico? If the Cinco de Mayo were primarily a Mexican holiday, then the U.S. version ought to be but a pale imitation of the Mexican original, yet it is the other way around. This fact provides the key. Although the holiday celebrates a Mexican victory over the French at Puebla on May 5, 1862, the answer to the question is not to be found in Mexico. It is found instead in California, Nevada, and Oregon during the Gold Rush and the American Civil War—for the Cinco de Mayo is not, in its origins, a Mexican holiday at all but rather an American one, created by Latinos in California in the middle of the nineteenth century.

To understand why Latinos in these western states in 1862 and later responded so passionately to a battle that took place fifteen hundred miles away, first one must understand the changes that took place in their population and culture as this territory evolved from being part of the Republic of Mexico to being part of the United States. It is also vital to understand how Latinos viewed the issues of the American Civil War—freedom versus slavery, broad-based democracy versus elitist oligarchy—through the lens of their experience in Gold Rush California and neighboring territories. Most of all, it is important to understand where Latinos of the time stood on issues of language, identity, citizenship, and political participation. In short, in order to understand why the Cinco de Mayo is celebrated today all across the United States, first the experience of Latinos in California and the far West during the crucial period from 1848 to 1861 must be understood, from the announcement of the discovery of gold in California to the moment Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

LATINOS IN CALIFORNIA

The experience of the native-born Latinos of California, the Californios, may be exemplified by Francisco P. Ramírez, born in 1837 in the Mexican state of Alta California.¹ On the night of February 1, 1848, when he went to bed at his parents’ home on Aliso Street in Los Angeles, not far from the plaza around which that city had been founded in 1781, he was an eleven-year-old citizen of Mexico. Later, as an adult, he recalled childhood evenings at home while California was still part of Mexico. Who does not sigh upon recalling the winter nights when, beside the hearth, we listened to the sad history of the Aztecs, the cruelty of the conquistadors, the deeds of our own parents?² He belonged to the regional variant of Mexican society and identity called Californio (Californian). His grandfather, Francisco Ramírez, had arrived in California from Tepic, via Sonora, in 1794. His father, Juan María Ramírez, had been born in Santa Barbara in 1801. Juan had married Petra Abila of the Abila family, who had been resident in Los Angeles since 1783; their family home, the Avila Adobe, still stands on Olvera Street.³ Young Francisco had Californio roots as deep as it was possible for a Latino to have in a state that had been settled by Latinos only in the late eighteenth century. But that night while he slept, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo took effect, formally ending hostilities between the United States and Mexico after the Mexican-American War and making California a territory of the United States, henceforward to be administered under U.S. law.

When Francisco Ramírez awoke on February 2, he was a citizen of the United States of America. At first, this might not have seemed to have had a significant effect on his daily life. He still spoke with his parents in Spanish, ate the same sort of morning meal—most likely including tortillas and beans—and probably learned his usual lessons and went out to play with his usual friends. The familiarity of daily life, however, changed radically later in 1848, when Sam Brannan brought to San Francisco samples of gold just discovered in the Sierra Nevada and news of the discovery spread around the world.⁴ Without leaving his native California, Ramírez would meet strange new people, learn new languages, and become acquainted with new laws, habits, and customs.

Tens of thousands of immigrants, the Forty-Niners, poured in from the Atlantic states of the United States in search of gold. Despite this relocation, they doggedly continued to define themselves in terms of the Atlantic coast. They awaited news from the Atlantic brought by ship and sent their correspondence back via Mails for the Atlantic States. They complained that California did not have the amenities that nearly every city on the Atlantic has and shared fond memories of omnibus riding in the cities of the Atlantic. Life in California frequently eroded their standards of behavior, leading the editor of an English-language newspaper to wonder, Why is it that some men, when they come to California, throw off all the guards that surrounded them in Atlantic cities? They assured themselves that they were eager to return to their homes in the Atlantic States when their sojourn in California was over, and indeed many of them did. Many others stayed. Their self-identification with the Atlantic region makes it logical to refer to these immigrants as Atlantic Americans, defined as people with origins in the historical experience begun by predominantly British settlers on the North Atlantic coast of the United States, which molded the socialization of people raised in that region, irrespective of race or ethnicity. Therefore, Atlantic American in this book refers to any and all non-Latinos from nonwestern states, including both Yankees and Southerners.⁵

Moreover, tens of thousands of Latino miners and other immigrants came north at the same time, by land from Mexico or by sea up the Pacific Coast from Central and South America, bringing their own regional customs with them. For example, a little over a year after Ramírez awoke as a citizen of the United States, a young gentleman from Guadalajara, Mexico, Justo Veytia, had his first look at San Francisco from the deck of the Volante on April 1, 1849. Veytia had made the decision to travel to faraway California as a gambusino, a prospector looking for gold. He kept a diary of his journey, begun at his elegantly appointed home on the main plaza in Guadalajara. Traveling in the company of friends and relatives, he made his way through various towns in Jalisco to the seaport of San Blas, where he boarded a ship for San Francisco. After suffering four weeks of bad food and seasickness, he finally reached his destination and recorded his first glimpse of California through a traffic jam of ships. "Around ten in the morning, we anchored in the bay, where something like forty vessels, both large and small, swayed