Mariano Vallejo's 1875 History of Spanish and Mexican California: An Annotated Translation and Biographical Study

FAIN: FB-56164-12

Rose Marie Beebe
President and Board of Trustees of Santa Clara College (Santa Clara, CA 95053-0001)

This project will publish for the first time Vallejo's five-volume 1875 history of Spanish and Mexican California. In this seminal document he argued that the culture and experiences of his own Hispanic people deserved a significant place in the narrative of American history. Vallejo maintained that California before the US conquest exhibited significant social, cultural, and political achievements, of which the American newcomers, blinded by racial stereotyping, were unaware. The manuscript is a rich and relatively untapped source for a deeper understanding of the cultural diversity, social tensions, and multiple identities that feature prominently in the historical and contemporary study of the "borderlands." The completed project will be an accessible, accurate publication of the manuscript, complemented by a substantial critical introduction and extensive scholarly annotations that will include the latest research on 19th century California, the US Southwest and northern Mexico.

Associated Products

Recuerdos: Historical and Personal Remembrances Relating to Alta California, 1769-1849 (Book)
Title: Recuerdos: Historical and Personal Remembrances Relating to Alta California, 1769-1849
Author: Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz
Abstract: A generation after the U.S. conquest of California, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo set out to write the story of the land he knew so well—a history to dispel the romantic vision quickly overtaking the state’s recent past. The five-volume history he produced, published here for the first time in English translation, is the most complete account of California before the gold rush by someone who resided in California at the time. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (1807–90) grew up in Spanish California, became a leading military and political figure in Mexican California, and participated in some of the founding events of U.S. California, such as the Monterey Constitutional Convention and the first legislature. With his project, undertaken for historian and publisher Hubert Howe Bancroft, Vallejo sought to correct misrepresentations of California’s past, which dismissed as insignificant the pre–gold rush Spanish and Mexican periods—conflated into one “Mission era.” Instead, Vallejo’s history emphasized the role of the military in the Spanish colonization of California and argued that the missionaries after Junípero Serra, with their medieval ideas, had actually retarded the development of California until secularization in the early 1830s. Culture, he contended, was of intense interest to the Californio people, as was the education of children. His accounts of Indigenous peoples, while often sympathetic, were also characteristic of his time: he and other California military leaders, Vallejo maintained, had successfully subdued “hostile” Indians and established mutually beneficial relationships with others. Out of keeping with Bancroft’s American triumphalism, Vallejo’s monumental project was consigned to the archives. With their deft translation and commentary, Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz—authors of a companion volume on Vallejo’s work—have brought to light a remarkable perspective, often firsthand, on important events in early California history. Their efforts restore
Year: 2023
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Type: Translation
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780806190778
Translator: Rose Marie Beebe
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo: Life in Spanish, Mexican, and American California (Book)
Title: Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo: Life in Spanish, Mexican, and American California
Author: Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz
Abstract: Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (1807–90) grew up in Spanish California, became a leading military and political figure in Mexican California, and participated in some of the founding events of U.S. California. In 1874–75, Vallejo, working with historian and publisher Hubert Howe Bancroft, composed a five-volume history of Alta California—a monumental work that would be the most complete eyewitness account of California before the gold rush. But Bancroft shelved the work, and it has lain in the archives until its recent publication as Recuerdos: Historical and Personal Remembrances Relating to Alta California, 1769–1849, translated and edited by Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz. In Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo: Life in Spanish, Mexican, and American California, Beebe and Senkewicz not only illuminate Vallejo’s life and history but also examine the broader experience of the nineteenth-century Californio community. In eight essays, the authors consider Spanish and Mexican rule in California, mission secularization, the rise of rancho culture, and the conflicts between settlers and Indigenous Californians, especially in the post-mission era. Vallejo was uniquely positioned to provide insight into early California’s foundation, and as a defender of culture and education among Mexican Californians, he also offered a rare perspective on the cultural life of the Mexican American community. In their final chapter, Beebe and Senkewicz include a significant portion of the correspondence between Vallejo and his wife, Francisca Benicia, for what it reveals about the effects of the American conquest on family and gender roles. A long-overdue in-depth look at one of the preeminent Mexican Americans in nineteenth-century California, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo also provides an unprecedented view of the Mexican American experience during that transformative era.
Year: 2022
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Type: Multi-author monograph
Type: Translation
Type: Other
ISBN: 9780806190761
Translator: Rose Marie Beebe
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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