But before his program got fully underway, conservatives seized power in Mexico City, and Echeandía was replaced by Manuel Victoria, a fervent supporter of the church. In 1831, immediately upon his arrival, Victoria suspended secularization and announced his intention of governing without the legislature, which he condemned for supporting what he characterized as Echeandía’s “scheme of spoliation.” Outraged Californios complained loudly. In Los Angeles the leader of the protests was José Antonio Carrillo, the wealthy and influential son of the former commander of the Santa Barbara presidio. Determined to brook no opposition, Victoria ordered Carrillo and his followers arrested. At least a dozen men were imprisoned in Los Angeles, and Carrillo was forced into exile in Baja California.
With liberal Angelenos muzzled, the center of the resistance shifted south to San Diego, where former governor Echeandía was living in retirement. The leader of the liberals there was Pío de Jesús Pico, Echeandía’s political protégé and brother-in-law of the exiled Carrillo. In many ways Pico was typical of his generation. Born into the family of a soldier garrisoned at San Gabriel in 1801, he spent his early childhood at the mission and at the presidio in San Diego. His father died prematurely when Pico was eighteen, and shouldering the responsibility of supporting his mother and seven younger siblings, he enlisted in the military and spent nearly ten years as a subaltern. He quickly learned that success depended on building a network of personal relations with officers, officials, and merchants, as well as arranging advantageous marriages for his numerous sisters. A garrulous man of serious purpose, Pico was highly successful despite the burden of a clownish nickname—la breva aplastada, the squashed fig—which poked fun of his enlarged facial features, likely the symptom of a glandular disorder.
Pico later recalled the moment of his conversion to liberalism. He was assisting Captain Pablo de la Portilla, commander of the presidio, in an investigation of a Los Angeles merchant suspected of misappropriating official funds. But the merchant refused to cooperate. “No Mexican citizen ought to answer before any military authority,” he declared. “Mexican citizens constituted the sacred base of the nation, not the military.” For Pico, who had been taught to grant ultimate respect to superior officers, this was a stunning assertion. Yet the more he thought about it, the more he found himself in agreement. “From that date,” he later wrote in his memoirs, “I began to know the sacred rights of a citizen.” Soon thereafter he left military service, determined to pursue a political career. He won a term on the San Diego ayuntamiento, then was chosen as a delegate to the legislature. He supported the secularization plan of Governor Echeandía, who rewarded him with a substantial grant of former mission land. Pico’s path to success was echoed by the careers of dozens of other young Californios. What distinguished him was his single-minded ambition.
Angered by the banishment of Carrillo, who had married one of his sisters, Pico authored a letter of protest and distributed it among kinsmen and friends. The letter provoked public agitation in Los Angeles and was followed by the arrest of more young Angelenos, including Pico’s brother Andrés. For Pico that was the last straw. In association with his brother-in-law Carrillo and San Diego merchant Juan Bandini, another member of the dismissed legislature, Pico worked up a pronunciamento denouncing Governor Victoria’s “criminal abuse” and calling for his overthrow. The three men denied that their rebellion had anything to do with secularization. But in his memoirs Pico was more candid. “I was determined to end the mission system at all costs,” he wrote, “so that the properties could be bought by private individuals.”
Recruiting a dozen supporters, the rebels armed themselves and late one evening in November 1831 boldly marched on the presidio, disarmed the guard, and seized the armory. Captain Portilla, Pico’s old commander, put up token resistance but soon joined the rebellion. A day or two later, he and Pico led a force of some fifty mounted soldiers and a couple of dozen rebels north to Los Angeles, where they freed all the political prisoners. Joined by liberal Angelenos, the rebel force expanded to more than one hundred and fifty men, and Captain Portilla readied them for a confrontation with Governor Victoria.
INFORMED OF THE REVOLT, Victoria headed south from the capital at Monterey with an armed force of Mexican soldiers and Californio militia, vowing to execute Pico. On the morning of December 5, 1831, approaching Cahuenga Pass in the Santa Monica Mountains, several miles northwest of Los Angeles, he found Portilla and his rebel Mexican soldiers and Californios commanding the high ground. The men on both sides knew each other well, the soldiers having served together and the Californios sharing kinship connections. Surprised to see such a large number of fighters arrayed on the ridge, Captain Romualdo Pacheco, commanding the governor’s force, advised Victoria to withdraw until they could secure reinforcements. The governor was a brave soldier who had compiled a distinguished record of service during the war of Mexican independence. But he was also an impulsive hothead, and he dismissed Pacheco’s suggestion as evidence of cowardice. “Officers in skirts,” he said scornfully, “should move to the rear.” Pacheco, an accomplished military officer with an unblemished record of his own, jerked to attention and shot back a reply: “I’m a man with cojones, as you’ll soon see.”
Scanning the ranks of his opponents on the ridge before him, Victoria recognized Captain Portilla, whom he had met upon his arrival in California. “Leave that pack of scoundrels and join me!” he shouted, and began to advance. Portilla responded with a single word. “Halt!” It struck Victoria like a thunderbolt. His right forearm shot up impulsively in a vulgar gesture of contempt. “I’m no man to be halted!” he sputtered, and barked out an order for his men to open fire. They responded with a ragged musket volley aimed over the heads of their opponents. No one was hit, but the blast unnerved Portilla’s soldiers and most of the Angelenos. They wheeled their horses and retreated in disorder, and soon riders were streaming into the pueblo. Among them was young Andrés Pico. This was his first armed engagement, and he later admitted to having been so frightened that he rode straight through the Plaza to a vineyard near the river, taking cover beneath an arbor and remaining there until late in the day when hunger and thirst drove him back to the Plaza. There he learned that the battle had not concluded as he had expected.
When Victoria saw that his soldiers had aimed high, he flew into a foaming rage. He was not accustomed to commanding “men in petticoats,” he stormed. For Captain Pacheco, the taunt was a match applied to his short fuse. Thinking with his cojones rather than his cabeza, he drew his sword and galloped forward toward the enemy. His charge was answered by José María Ávila, a prosperous ranchero and former Los Angeles alcalde, as well as an accomplished horseman and noted daredevil. The men of both sides silently watched as the two champions sped toward each other. Ávila carried a lance, the standard weapon of Mexican mounted cavalry, and he thrust it at Pacheco, who swerved adroitly to avoid it. As the jousting riders passed, Ávila pulled a pistol from his sash and fired wildly over his shoulder at Pacheco, and by chance the ball found its mark, tearing into the officer’s back and hurling him from the saddle. He was dead before he hit the ground. Ávila galloped on, his lance extended, bearing down on Governor Victoria himself.
Accounts differ about precisely what happened next. The sources all agree that Ávila was shot and killed by musket fire, but not before Victoria suffered several grievous wounds to his face and chest. Seeing their colleague dead on the ground, the remaining Angelenos retreated. But with Captain Pacheco dead and Governor Victoria severely wounded, there would be no pursuit. Victoria’s aides hurried him to Mission San Gabriel, where he received emergency medical treatment. He survived his wounds, but was finished with California. As soon as he was fit for travel, he returned to Mexico by vessel.
It was a decisive moment. Despite their cowardice in the face of battle, the Californios had successfully deposed the sitting governor. For the first time in their history they were in charge of their own destiny. The legislators reconven
ed in Los Angeles and, exulting in their newfound power, appointed Pico acting governor. In order to administer the oath of office they needed a bible, a chalice, and other objects from the Plaza church, but the priest refused them entry. Juan Bautista Alvarado, secretary of the legislature, climbed onto the roof and through a skylight, bringing out the items they needed, an act of improvisation that would be long remembered. But former governor Echeandía, who had remained in San Diego, objected that by appointing one of their own the Californios had taken things a step too far, and in deference to his mentor, Pico agreed to step down. There followed a year of political infighting that kept California politics in turmoil until early 1833 and the arrival of Victoria’s appointed successor, Brigadier General José Figueroa.
There had been another shift of the political winds in Mexico City, and Figueroa turned out to be a secularist who was sympathetic to the Californio cause. He granted full pardon to all the rebels. “Let peace return to occupy her seat in this delightful country,” he declared. He also restarted Echeandía’s program of secularization. Characterizing the missions as “entrenchments of monastic despotism,” Figueroa placed ten missions, including all those in southern California, in the hands of civil administrators who were charged with converting mission lands, livestock, and tools to private use. It had required systematic violence to transform the indigenous inhabitants into a mission workforce. It would require yet more violence to transition to the new order. Secularization would be midwife to the contested birth of capitalist California.
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CHAPTER 3 •
A COUNTRY ENTIRELY
ALTERED
WHEN THE NEÓFITOS of Mission San Luis Rey, ninety miles south of Los Angeles, learned of Governor Figueroa’s secularization program, they laid down their tools and refused to work. “I am not an animal to be made to work for bosses who are not to my liking,” one of them complained to the governor’s assistant. “Set me free if you are a just man!” They remembered the promise of eventual emancipation. “These Indians will do absolutely no work nor obey my orders,” wrote Captain Pablo de la Portilla, who had been appointed civil administrator of the mission as a reward for his role in the rebellion against Victoria. Hundreds of Luiseños, as the neófitos of San Luis Rey were known, abandoned the mission and headed for their ancestral rancherías. “We are free!” they shouted. “It is not our pleasure to obey! We do not choose to work!” Scores marched north to Mission San Gabriel, where they agitated among the Indians there and assaulted Father José Bernardo Sánchez when he confronted them. “He was filled with sorrow because of what the Indians had done,” the padre’s housekeeper later recalled. Sánchez retired to his room, lamenting “the time I wasted in behalf of these unfortunates.” He died several weeks later.
Recent converts, tied by kinship and community to sacred sites and old gathering spots, were eager to get away from the missions. Many joined gentile bands in the mountains and deserts, on the periphery of southern California, and some participated in raids on ranchos and mission estancias, stealing horses and cattle for subsistence. In December 1834, a large group of emancipados from San Gabriel, in league with the unconverted, desert-dwelling Cahuillas, raided the mission outpost at San Bernardino, seventy miles east of Los Angeles, taking captives and spreading destruction. A force of mounted Angelenos hurried to the scene, but arrived to find more than a dozen neófito corpses amid the smoking ruin. Indian violence directed at the missions inevitably meant the death of other Indians. As the raiding intensified, rancheros organized reprisals, seeking not only vengeance but captives to replace lost workers. Although captive taking was illegal according to Mexican law, local authorities justified it by arguing that Indian raiders were outlaws. Whatever the rationalization, these forays continued the old mission policy of grabbing fugitives to augment the labor force.
Not all emancipados abandoned the missions. A minority, mission born and bred, knew no other life, and they pinned their hopes on the promised distribution of land and livestock. But for the most part the new civil administrators ignored Indian rights and practiced corruption on a lavish scale. Antonio F. Coronel, an educated Mexican who migrated to Los Angeles in the mid-1830s and held numerous civic offices over the years, was among the few who were critical. “Huge tracts of land were given away to private individuals,” he later wrote, “leaving the Indians with nothing.” Most administrators began their terms with little property, he noted, “but in no time they were the owners of the most valuable ranchos, with great herds of horses and cattle.”
Once again, Pío Pico exemplified the type. Appointed by Governor Figueroa to succeed Portilla as administrator of Mission San Luis Rey, Pico and his extended family established a harsh regime that quickly alienated the remaining Luiseños. “I dedicated myself with great zeal to the job,” Pico later recalled, “and in a short time succeeded in bringing order out of chaos.” He did so at the expense of Indian liberty. Figueroa’s secularization plan authorized administrators to compel emancipados to labor on mission lands during a period of transition, and Pico exercised that authority liberally, sending armed men to drag Indians back to the fields. The Luiseños hated him for it. “Pío Pico, as well as those who followed him, were despots,” one of them declared. “All that San Luis Rey Mission produces,” another complained “was not enough for the administrator, his brothers, and brothers-in-law.” Pico expropriated mission livestock for his own use, but when he attempted to graze the animals on range reserved for the Luiseños he was besieged in his headquarters by several hundred angry men. Arming himself with a brace of pistols, Pico went out to confront them, threatening to fire if they did not disperse. Laughing, the Luiseños dared him to go ahead, warning it would be his last act on earth. Pico was eventually replaced, but not before he had crushed the hopes of hundreds of men and women. Shortly after he left the post the governor rewarded him with a grant of more than 133,000 acres of Mission San Luis Rey land.
Through policy, fraud, and coercion, a new landowning class took shape and took over. Governor Figueroa began the process of dividing mission lands into private ranchos, a project completed by his successors, the last of whom was Pío Pico himself. Between 1834 and 1846 nearly 1.4 million acres of prime southern California property, virtually all of the former mission estate, was transferred to private ownership. The grants went to a small minority of California’s gente de razón, a self-perpetuating elite made up of former army officers and sergeants, public officials, and their extended families. In the Los Angeles district the great ranchero families could be counted on two hands—Carrillo, Cota, Domínguez, Féliz, Lugo, Pico, Sepúlveda, Tapia—with fingers to spare. Not only land was distributed, but labor as well. Grants were drawn to include the sites of native rancherías, whose residents were told they must labor for the new owners or move on. Despite their liberation, emancipados realized very little improvement in their working lives. Laboring under various forms of servitude, thousands of Indians became vaqueros, field hands, or domestic servants for the new ruling class.
SOME VAQUEROS were Californios, quite a few were Sonoreños, but following secularization most were Indians. “They were the ones who broke the horses,” ranchero José del Cármen Lugo recalled. “Some rode with saddles and some rode bareback.” But most emancipados adopted the equestrian tradition brought to California by Mexican soldiers, a style of riding known as á la jineta, which Spaniards had picked up from the Moors, their opponents in the centuries-long struggle for control of Iberia. In contrast to heavily armored knights who sought to project brute force, Moorish cavalry depended on speed and maneuverability. The jineta rider rode with knees bent, feet directly below, squatting in the stirrups. He controlled his horse with a signal bit, designed to send instructions with the slightest movements of the reins, which the rider held loosely in his left hand, reserving his right for a lance, a short sword, or a coiled reata and lasso. Roping an animal, the vaquero quickly turned the reata two or three times around the short, thick ne
ck of the saddle horn, using it like a fisherman’s reel, “playing” his catch until it tired, making the work of both rider and horse considerably easier. Indian vaqueros made this equestrian tradition so much their own that when a horseman, regardless of ethnic background, performed some act of special skill—an effective turn of the reata, perhaps, with the rope whizzing around the horn and smoke rising from the singed leather—his fellow vaqueros would say of him, “se crió entre los indios,” he must have been raised by the Indians.
The standard vaquero outfit also came from cavalry tradition. Broad-brimmed, flat-crowned sombrero, short jacket worn over an open-collar shirt, chaperrejos of hide to protect the legs, and colorful sash into which was tucked the ever-present dagger, unless it was concealed in the leather botas, to which were attached heavy spurs with enormous rowels. “When he walks (which he seldom does),” wrote an English visitor to California, the vaquero looks “as if he has a couple of mimic wheelbarrows trailing at his heels.” This working outfit was common across class lines, although on fiesta days, when everyone dressed up, rancheros donned silk jackets, embroidered waistcoats, and velvet calzoneras with silver buttons down the legs, while vaqueros wore “whatever they could afford.” The vaquero cut a romantic figure, and foreign observers expressed awe at his riding skill, “flying like the whirlwind over the valleys, racing up and down the steep hillsides, plunging down crumbling barrancas, tearing through chaparral—wherever the maddened cattle sought to escape.” These men and their horses were exquisitely prepared for mounted warfare, as American dragoons would learn by painful experience.
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