Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo

1 Pages 275 Words

Researching at the library for another class, I ran across on exemplary narrative by Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. “Recuerdos historicos y personales tocante a la alta California” compromises nearly one-thousand pages of personal, social, and cultural history. In it, Vallejo seems embittered toward the Americanos and yet aware of his own self-betrayal. As a man in his sixties relating the history of California from 1769 – 1849 with a clear view of its social formation, its transition from Spanish to Mexican influence, and its radical transformation under the American regime, his is a narrative that fuses his own story with the larger social history of the times.
Vallejo is perhaps the prime example of the political Californio entrepreneur in the 1800’s whose fortunes measurably reflect the shifting politics of the time. He parlayed his soldering under the Mexican regime into ascending rank and ever expanding property ownership. He built an estate in northern California that began with nothing and eventually grew into 175,000 acres of land, thousands of cattle and horses, luxurious homes and furnishings, and many servants. In the mid-1870’s he was stripped of the acreage surrounding his home in Sonoma. He lost his wealth to lawyers and other “ingrates” and was left roaming San Francisco and the Sonoma countryside asking friends for small loans.
Vallejo’s narratives provide a broad field of information on Hispano-Mexicano life before the loss of California and much of northern Mexico to the United States in the war of 1846-48. They tend to describe the significant historical, political, and social events of the time. They present a picture of a peaceful pre-American California....