El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  Gadsden arrived in Mexico in 1853 with authorization to spend $50 million, and he made an offer for parts of the northern Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora, and most or all of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Baja. Already bruised and frustrated, Mexican officials refused the plans.11 In any case, such a large addition would have further exacerbated the concerns of abolitionists in the United States. The United States and Mexico agreed instead on a payment of $10 million for a strip of land south of the Gila River and west of the Río Grande—the southern part of modern Arizona and New Mexico—of around thirty thousand square miles. Signing the December 30, 1853, deal for Mexico was Santa Anna, who was back from exile and enjoying another of his nine political lives as president. He was in need of money—the war had been expensive and Mexico was in debt—and willing to negotiate over a more realistic offer. He also wanted to avoid another conflict with the United States.12

  Although Santa Anna ceded little in the Gadsden Purchase, many Mexicans were outraged. Not only did Mexico lose even more land, but as part of the deal the United States no longer had to help prevent Indian raids in the territory, an important issue where Apache attacks were still common. Indeed, many of the Native Americans in the former Mexican lands had not acknowledged that country’s authority and were unlikely to do so for the United States.13 This new border cut through the lands of many nations, including the Tohono O’odham. Some had met and extended hospitality to the earlier group of surveyors as they were working their way west, while other groups paid them little mind, but all of the Native Americans in the borderlands would at some point be forced to confront the line drawn by these interlopers.14

  The purchase included Mesilla, which saw the border move across it, tipping it into U.S. control. On November 16, 1854, troops raised the U.S. flag over Mesilla Plaza.15 Today it is a suburb to the southwest of Las Cruces, but it retains its village feel. A small bandstand in the main square has the flags of both nations painted on it, with an M above and a “54” below. On the other side of the structure is the city seal illustrated with a cross and mallet, and its motto “A Dios rogando y con el mazo dando”: Pray to God and strike with your mallet, or, as the saying in English goes: Heaven helps those who help themselves.

  IF DETERMINING THE actual boundary line was the first matter of concern after Guadalupe Hidalgo, the second was to determine who owned the land in the parts ceded to the United States. The Mexicans had built upon the Spanish precedent of land grants, but the majority of these were around the settled areas of California, Texas, and New Mexico, although some stretched into places that would become Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. While the treaty stipulated that such grants would be respected, potential Anglo settlers had their suspicions—and hopes—that they might not be. Thousands of acres had not been surveyed and the U.S. government now needed to determine which lands were public. Nowhere was this land question more pressing than in gold rush California.

  The lure of riches pulled in people not only from the eastern United States but from all over the world. Even before the famed “forty-niners,” many Mexicans, Peruvians, and Chileans, who had experience in Latin American mines, arrived in California. They were joined by fortune hunters from Europe and East Asia. As the waves of people rushed into California, their force transformed the landscape. Military or mission outposts such as San Francisco became urban centers, as saloons, shops, bordellos, and boardinghouses mushroomed.

  The competition to find the mother lode was fierce, and U.S. miners were quick to complain about the foreign prospectors. By 1850, California introduced a tax that required any miner who was not a U.S. citizen to pay a license fee of $20 a month. This led to immediate protests, and it was rewritten the following year, this time exempting white Europeans but not Mexicans or other Latin Americans. Instead, they were objects of assaults and even lynchings in the aftermath of what was known as the “Great Greaser Extermination Meeting” held in the summer of 1850 by Anglos in Sonora. As a result, the number of Hispanic miners dropped from fifteen thousand in 1849 to around five thousand by the end of the following year.16 The Native American population fared badly as well, plummeting to thirty thousand by the 1870s.17 Many California Indians were pushed off their land by speculators or prospectors, or exploited as workers in the mines. Legislation was aimed at their displacement—Indians who were “loitering” could be pressed into a work gang for months at a time.18 At the same time, some five hundred thousand migrants flooded into California between 1848 and 1870, most of them white settlers from elsewhere in the United States, especially the Northeast and Midwest.19

  Amid the spectacular growth and radical transformation of California, the question of statehood quickly arose. By 1849 all of the necessary articles were in place, including a governor and legislature. A constitution had been drawn up, which made the crucial stipulation that the state would be free and prohibit slavery. When California brought all of this to the attention of Washington for confirmation, it provoked a political crisis. Another bargain was struck, once more brokered by Henry Clay, and known as the Compromise of 1850. This was a series of measures that allowed California to join the union as a free state but created territorial governments in Utah and New Mexico, which at this point included Arizona, with no mention of slavery. The other parts of the compromise abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia, although slavery itself was still permitted in the capital. To appease southerners, the controversial Fugitive Slave Act was passed, requiring free citizens in any part of the country to aid in the recovery of runaway slaves. After these deals were made, California joined the union on September 9, 1850.

  Gold was not the sole interest in California: fortunes were being made in land speculation as well. Henry Cerruti arrived in Monterey on January 27, 1847, as a surgeon with the U.S. military, when the territory was still on the brink of many of these changes. Even then, Cerruti was able to observe that “shortly after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, their [Californios’] herds and lands increased in value one hundred fold. … Unaccustomed to the sharp trading of the newcomers they were soon relieved of their lands by selling them very cheap.”20 He was not surprised to find that the Californios were now a “hostile people, contented and happy previous to the advent of the Anglo Saxon ruling territory.”21

  California, at the time of the 1848 treaty, had more than ten million acres under Spanish or Mexican land grants.22 Two issues now loomed: the validity of these grants, and the arrival of squatters. The military governor Stephen Watts Kearny pledged that under U.S. administration the Californios’ rights and property would be protected. Despite being “now but one people,” many Californios and foreigners who had earlier been granted land remained wary.23 Letters expressing concern soon landed on the desk of Kearny and his successor, Richard Barnes Mason.24 Pierre Sainsevain, a Frenchman who owned land around Santa Cruz, soon saw the arrival of squatters on his property. Mason heard Sainsevain’s complaints, agreeing that “those persons who have no claim to land adjoining this Frenchman should not be permitted to intrude within the claimed boundaries.”25 The sentiment might have been reassuring, but there was little Mason could do to enforce it. Thousands of these “squatter” migrants who arrived in California brought with them the belief that they were entitled to land now that it was part of the United States. In addition, many were supporters of Free-Soil sentiments and considered the earlier Mexican system as semifeudal and, correspondingly, of Indians and Mexicans as unfree, nonwhite labor.26 The squatters looked to the legal system to support their views, arguing that the Mexican land distribution system was a relic of an older order that gave power to the wealthy through the concentration of landowning. One prospector wrote in 1850 that the recognition of the Mexican grants would place “the multitude at the mercy of the few, engrafting in fact the peon system of Mexico or the feudal tenure of Europe upon our republican institutions in California … a state of things to which our Anglo-Saxon race are strangers.”27 It was an argument the
courts had agreed with, in part because of the Preemption Act of 1841, which, in theory, allowed squatters to buy the land they had been working from the federal government at the minimum price. However, the existing land grants in California meant that the land was not yet public and could not be sold.

  At first, some squatters staked out land for gold prospecting, while others chose to farm, drawing from the earlier precedent of “improving” the land and thus having a right to it.28 Growing demand meant that land speculation in itself could be lucrative, aided by an overall lack of reliable surveys. The squatters erected fences, built makeshift dwellings, and tried to establish their right to the land through filing preemption claims.29 In doing so, they stoked the growing anger of the Californios whose land they occupied. Their behavior also provoked other Anglo settlers and, at times, the government, both of whom often disapproved of the squatters’ methods.30 At various points throughout the 1850s and into the early 1860s violent clashes erupted between squatters and the authorities, as in 1850 in Sacramento, and in 1861 in San Jose.31

  In 1851 Congress passed the California Land Act, turning the question—and, in theory, any unclaimed land—over to the state. A Board of Land Commissioners was established, in front of which people would have to produce the required paperwork to prove the validity of their grant, be it from Spain or Mexico. Similar processes had been employed in settling land grant questions in other former Spanish territories, such as Louisiana and Florida.32 In California, people had two years to produce their claim, or the property would become public.33 The board had some eight hundred grants to wade through, and there was also an appeals process, which reached all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.34 It was a confusing and distressing process, not least because of legal and language barriers. Defending a claim could take years, and doing so left very few people with their full initial holdings.35 Lawyers were expensive and many poorer grant holders—especially within the Native American communities—had little choice but to sell all their land just to pay their legal fees. Even wealthier landowners could not escape losing some property.

  By 1854, the courts had ruled that land grants in California were different from those in Spanish territories east of the Mississippi, and this precedent was made concrete in the U.S. Supreme Court decision that December involving the large grant of John C. Frémont. He had bought the tract, Las Mariposas, from Juan Alvarado in 1847, as the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was awaiting ratification. It had been a Mexican grant area but its boundaries were never precisely surveyed. The terms of Alvarado’s Mexican grant meant he was supposed to live on and work the land, and not sell it, though he ignored these provisions. When Frémont went in front of the land commission in 1852, his case prompted a number of legal questions about Mexican law, customs, and actual use of the land. In the end, the Supreme Court came down on the side of Frémont, ruling that his 44,787-acre grant was valid, and in doing so protected the interests of other large landholders, preventing their territory from being ceded to the public domain and into the hands of squatters.36

  The land commission continued to process the more than eight hundred claims brought in front of it into the 1870s. In the end, around six hundred grants were confirmed, covering more than eight million acres.37 Some 47 percent of the claimants were Anglo—and yet only 17.7 percent were original Anglo grantees, meaning the grants had often already passed from Californio to Anglo hands before being confirmed by the board.38 To Pablo de la Guerra, a politician and judge, the matter had long been clear, and it was about more than land. Californios had become “foreigners in their own country.”39

  CALIFORNIOS, AS WELL as other Mexicans who were now American, spent much of the late nineteenth century trying to understand what a future in the United States might hold. One such Californio was Francisco P. Ramírez, who edited El Clamor Público, a Los Angeles–based publication that was the first Spanish-language newspaper to appear in California after the U.S. occupation. His editorials highlighted the injustices that were becoming part of everyday life for Mexican Californians. “Since the year of 1849,” he wrote in 1855, “a certain animosity (so contrary to a magnanimous and free people) has existed between the Mexicans and Americans, to such an extent that the Americans have wished with all their heart that all the Mexicans put together had no more than one head to cut off (to do away with them all at once).”40

  Ramírez was only eighteen years old when he began publishing the weekly paper in the summer of 1855, but he already had some experience with newspapers. He was a true Californio—his grandparents had settled around the Santa Barbara mission in the late eighteenth century, later moving to Los Angeles, where Ramírez was born in 1837, the fourth of thirteen children. Although his mother was from the prominent Ávila family in the city, he did not have much in the way of formal education, but he had learned English and French. By 1851 Ramírez was working as a compositor at the Los Angeles Star before moving to San Francisco in 1853 to work on the Catholic Standard, one of sixteen papers in the city at the time. The following year he returned to Los Angeles and was appointed editor of a Spanish-language page in the Los Angeles Star, transforming it into a popular section.41

  He would witness the metamorphosis of the village of Los Angeles into a bustling city. In 1850, it had a population of only sixteen hundred, but by the early decades of the next century it soared to over a million.42 He experienced the arrival of not just Anglos but people from all over the world, and saw at first hand the difficulties of the transition to U.S. statehood, as Californios attempted to realign their social and political status.

  Inspired by El Clamor Público (The Public Outcry) of Madrid, Spain, he chose this name for his four-page publication.43 One particular complication from the start was that Californios—his intended audience—were not a uniform group. The wealthy landowners and the poorest workers did not necessarily share his politics, and there was also the small middle class of merchants and farmers, of which Ramírez was a part. These groups all faced the discrimination directed against them at times, but the wealthier and more powerful Californios had a better chance of insulating themselves from the worst abuses.

  In the same vein, the Anglo newcomers did not agree on the national issues of the day, including slavery. Although California was a free state, it had lured many people from the southern slaveholding areas, some of whom had arrived before statehood. They formed alliances with prominent Californios, drawn together by shared interests in landownership and in maintaining a certain social order.44 These men were Democrats, and their faction was known as the “Chivalry.” The Democrats had gained power in California, and in addition to the Chivalry, they had some initial success in courting the support of the squatters in the early 1850s.45

  In addition to politics, with many of the southerners continuing to advocate the spread of slavery into the West, their Californio allies also took part in lynchings and other vigilante activity.46 It was an alliance Ramírez loathed. He was very clear in his opposition to slavery and the hypocrisy that underpinned it, writing in one 1855 editorial that “very little is known here in California of the strange amalgam that appears in the United States for the liberty of individuals and associates, and the slavery of the black race. … Here in America, among a people so proud of their government, they do not care much for moral delicacy.”47 Ramírez may have seen enslaved people himself, given that around one thousand were brought by white owners from the South to California around the time of the gold rush.48 Some of the slaves were used in mining, or hired out, with some owners claiming they were “servants.”49 The state even passed its own 1852 Fugitive Slave Act, under which all runaway slaves would be sent back to their masters, crushing any hope that this westernmost state could be a place of freedom. It also allowed owners in California to continue to keep hold of their slaves, or legally remove them from the state.50

  Although Ramírez was from a privileged background, he struggled with the elite Californios, especially those who aligned with the pro
-slavery Democrats. His liberal opinions on issues such as slavery often angered or offended more conservative readers.51 In addition to national issues, Ramírez covered topics that he felt should be important to the Californio community, including the death of many Mexicans at the hands of vigilante mobs, the ongoing land issue, and the growing awareness of their social persecution. He directed his ire at measures like the 1855 Vagrancy Act, better known as the “Greaser” Act, because it targeted Mexicans as well as Native Americans. Under this statute, anyone found “loitering” risked arrest and possible forced labor. Writing about the act, he said such laws “have no equal in the annals of any civilized nation,” lamenting that the legislation “has served to widen the barrier that has existed for some time between foreigners and natives.”52

  Law and order issues affected the poorest Mexicans, but Ramírez failed to attract them as readers, in part because many were illiterate, and his paper folded in December 1859. In his final editorial Ramírez wrote, with palpable disappointment, that his purpose had been “the defense of the moral and material interests of Southern California; and speaking without reservation and with sincerity, my object was almost only to dedicate myself to the service of my native California compatriots, and generally of all Hispanic Americans.”53*

  IN TEXAS, THE land issue had an extra level of complication. The original draft of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had included Article X, which protected existing land grants, including Texas. James Polk, who was still president, demanded that the article be deleted before the treaty could be ratified. Sam Houston, then a senator for Texas, moved that the Senate debate the matter in secret, and there is no account of what was said in the chamber.54 The then secretary of state, James Buchanan, insisted that “if the grantees of lands in Texas, under the Mexican government, possess valid titles, they can maintain their claims before our courts of justice.”55 Mexican officials wanted clarification on the matter. This led to the creation of the Protocol of Querétaro, which stipulated that the United States had no intention of annulling any land grants made by Mexico in the ceded territories. The second article of the protocol said that legitimate titles “existing in the ceded territories, are those which were legitimate titles under the Mexican law in California and New Mexico up to the 13th of May 1846, and in Texas up to the 2d March 1836.”56 Polk had not been happy with this result, and he did not present the protocol along with the treaty when it went before the Senate for ratification.