Write Long and Beautiful Letters Volume 9

The experiences of Mexicans who were living in California when it was annexed by the United States is a crucial element of the history of the American Southwest. These Californios, as they called themselves, made California diverse and multicultural from the moment it became part of the United States.

The Vallejos of Sonoma were one of the most prominent of these Californio families. This volume explores the experiences of this family, using more than 180 letters that Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and Francisca Benicia Carrillo de Vallejo exchanged with each other and their children between 1846 and 1888.

This correspondence offers an intimate glimpse of the ways in which this family, and many Californio families from a variety of social and economic backgrounds, struggled to adapt to the political, social, and cultural changes that accompanied American annexation. They often found themselves unwelcome strangers in the land in which they had been born. They faced changing and at times conflicting demands on their public and private lives. In the face of a hostile legal system, they struggled to maintain ownership of their property, to raise their children in an environment they did not entirely understand, and to help each other maintain their dignity and social authority in a world they had not chosen.

These letters demonstrate how the Vallejos and families like them, frequently ridiculed by the Anglos who entered California, nonetheless refused to be defined by these newcomers. Describing the creative manner of their resistance, these letters document a crucial aspect of the history of the Latino experience in California and in the greater American Southwest during the second half of the 19th century—with repercussions and relevance reaching into the present era.
 

Rose Marie Beebe is Professor Emerita of Spanish Literature at Santa Clara University.

Robert M. Senkewicz is Professor Emeritus of History at Santa Clara University. Beebe and Senkewicz are the coauthors of Junípero Serra: California, Indians, and the Transformation of a Missionary.