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  The San Diego mission priests gave Lorenzana three big tracts of grazing land in the Jamacha valley in what is now San Diego County. The missionaries gave her the papers confirming the transfer, and in 1833 she turned to the government to affirm her ownership. In 1840, she was granted two square leagues of land (roughly nine thousand acres, or twenty-four square miles). She began to improve the land, invest in structures, and plant crops near the Sweetwater River. Now a woman of means, Lorenzana hired a manager to oversee the ranch while she continued to live at the mission.

  When the United States invaded Mexico in 1846 and American troops occupied San Diego, Lorenzana moved north to San Juan Capistrano in what is today Orange County. Her ranch was, for a time, left behind.

  When California became part of the spoils of war and Mexico’s vast northern territories passed to American sovereignty, Rancho Jamacha was seized by Americans. The Treaty of Guadulupe Hidalgo of 1848 ended the war between the two countries, but left thousands of Mexican citizens behind in a new country. Their future was unclear, despite the firm and unequivocal assurances made in the treaty to Mexican nationals now living in U.S. territory:

  Mexicans now established in territories previously belonging to Mexico, and which remain for the future within the limits of the United States, as defined by the present treaty, shall be free to continue where they now reside, or to remove at any time to the Mexican Republic, retaining the property which they possess in the said territories, or disposing thereof, and removing the proceeds wherever they please, without their being subjected, on this account, to any contribution, tax, or charge whatever.

  Those who shall prefer to remain in the said territories may either retain the title and rights of Mexican citizens, or acquire those of citizens of the United States. But they shall be under the obligation to make their election within one year from the date of the exchange of ratifications of this treaty; and those who shall remain in the said territories after the expiration of that year, without having declared their intention to retain the character of Mexicans, shall be considered to have elected to become citizens of the United States.

  In the said territories, property of every kind, now belonging to Mexicans not established there, shall be inviolably respected. The present owners, the heirs of these, and all Mexicans who may hereafter acquire said property by contract, shall enjoy with respect to it guarantees equally ample as if the same belonged to citizens of the United States [emphasis mine].

  Despite the guarantees of the treaty, the Land Act of 1851 set up a U.S. Land Commission to establish which Mexican Californian land claims were legitimate. Unfamiliar with U.S. legal processes, unable to argue their claims in English-language proceedings, many landowning families took mortgages to pay their court costs, and ended up losing their land. A group of American military men who began to work as developers and land speculators after the Mexican War took control of Rancho Jamacha.

  Through a series of transactions that were at the very least ill-advised, La Beata began to take mortgages on her ranch, and sell parcels of it outright. By the mid-1860s Lorenzana no longer retained any rights to the land, but for years to come she would insist it had been stolen from her, and until 1880 she would occasionally seek legal relief. Under its new Yankee owners, Rancho Jamacha became a profitable and productive agribusiness. To her dying day, Lorenzana would maintain that she was swindled out of her ranches, though the record would indicate otherwise.

  Her chronicler asks extensively about the ranches, and recounts the old woman telling him, “It is a long story and I don’t even want to discuss it. The other two ranches they somehow took from me. So, that’s the way it turns out, that after working so many years, after having acquired an estate, which I certainly didn’t dispose of by selling or by any other means, here I find myself in the greatest poverty, living only by the grace of God and through the charity of those who give me a mouthful to eat.”

  A foundling becomes a heroine in colonial California, a landowner in republican Mexico, and then a poverty-stricken public charge of the United States of America. Lorenzana was a symbol for the losses experienced in the transition, as people poured into the newly annexed territories from points east. With the burden of proof placed on her and the other ranch owners after the Mexican War, she ended the process of awarding title as a landless person, long before her legal rights were finally recognized.

  Apolinaria Lorenzana died in 1884. She had been born in 1790, so she lived a remarkably long life for the time, a life that stretched from the early days of the Spanish missions to the closing of the American frontier and California’s fourth decade as a state of the union. Her life would also become a cautionary tale, a reminder of the difficulty of making the transition from life in Mexico to life in the United States, even if you never emigrated to a new land, but a new land came to you.

  • • •

  THE NINETEENTH CENTURY saw the creation of the manifest destiny–driven “sea to shining sea” continental territory of the United States. Much of the Latino population of the United States is a legacy of the encounters and clashes between the young nation pushing west from the Atlantic and the Spanish Empire and Republic of Mexico.

  The hundred years from 1800 to 1900 were a time of constant challenges to the peoples of North America, demanding their reimagination as individuals, as they were transformed, often by events beyond their control. An Indian in Texas, baptized a Roman Catholic and called by a Spanish name, might have begun the century as a Spanish subject, had children who became Mexicans, grandchildren who would mature to adulthood in the Texas Republic and the state of Texas, and great-grandchildren who spent brief years living in the Confederate States of America.

  Many of the American citizens who made their way to the Pacific Coast went “native,” marrying into Mexican families, converting to Catholicism, and learning to do business with their neighbors in Spanish. Yet as we saw with Apolinaria Lorenzana, just a few decades after their arrival, the same Californio families who welcomed their immigrant American neighbors soon found themselves foreigners in their own homeland.

  The welcome mat rolled out for the English-speaking immigrants from the East may have been fueled by the ambivalence felt by the northernmost of Mexico’s citizens about the preexisting ties to a country and a polity that could seem very far away. “They felt California was the bastard child of Mexico, that they were forgotten,” says Rose Marie Beebe. “Their antepasados [ancestors] were Spanish. They had children born in California, so they are Californios. They are a mix of people. They view themselves as Mexican but not Mexican. They live in an area far away from Mexico City, far away from the central government.

  “And then, when the Americans come in, and the whole situation with the Mexican War, we lost part of ourselves. We were under Spanish rule and then under Mexican rule and now under American takeover. I think what comes out in the testimonials is the fear, the foreboding, of what is going to come next.”

  Even today the descendants of the Spanish, then Mexican families who inhabited what is now the Southwestern United States will say, almost ruefully, “We didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us!”

  To grow up in the North America of the twenty-first century is to live in an orderly, territorially stable country whose national borders are fixed and immutable. American states entertain no realistic speculation that they might become independent nations. Mexican states and Canadian provinces do not and will not flirt with switching their allegiance from Mexico City or Ottawa to Washington, D.C.

  The nineteenth century was one of steady, repeated change that often caught whole populations off guard, wondering where, and to which people, they really belonged. One flashpoint on the continent was to be Texas, where the United States and Mexico bumped into each other west of the Mississippi River. As with California, Texas was important to Mexico not as much for the tiny settlements dotted across the province as it was as a bulwark agai
nst other empires: France, and Britain, and then the United States of America.

  The two countries were both young. Mexico accomplished its break from Spain in 1821, the United States not even a half-century earlier. However, Mexico was made weak and directionless by factional battles that kept it perennially on the verge of civil war, while the hardening constitutional order in the United States brought about increasing wealth, size, and security.

  It was Mexico’s historical misfortune that the two states’ interests would collide when they did, in an era of coups and military strongmen, while Americans were preparing to pounce and simply take what they wanted.

  • • •

  JUAN NEPOMUCENO SEGUÍN was born in San Antonio de Bexar, the largest Spanish settlement in the province of Tejas. The Seguín family arrived in the San Antonio River valley in the 1740s, making it one of the oldest Spanish families in that part of the empire. The valley was the locus for Spanish settlement in the region.

  Juan’s father, Erasmo Seguín, was an influential officeholder through Juan’s childhood. In 1821, Erasmo informed American settler Moses Austin that Austin’s petition to the Mexican central government to establish an American colony in Tejas had been accepted. Moses did not live out the year, but Erasmo began a friendship with Moses’s son Stephen F. Austin—the American “Father of Texas”—that would last for the rest of his life. Austin began his life in Tejas wanting to work within Mexican law. The Austins counseled their fellow Americans against any overt Protestant practice that might draw the ire of the government-established Roman Catholic Church, and settlers were advised not to antagonize Mexican authorities.

  Erasmo Seguín served in the Mexican congress, was a delegate to the constitutional convention, and was one of the three Texas representatives elected to present the province’s grievances to the central government in Mexico City. Erasmo later joined the political opposition to the military strongman General Antonio López de Santa Anna.

  Thus one of Erasmo’s three children, Juan, came by example to the tumult of revolutionary Texas, and a life lived with feet in two countries. The Seguín family’s American journey would symbolize the triumphs and tragedies of the nineteenth century for Tejanos, the Spanish-speaking Mexicans of Texas.

  In his early twenties, Juan was already showing an interest in public affairs. At twenty-two, he was elected a San Antonio alderman. In the coming years the battle between the two main factions of Mexican politics was coming to a head: One faction, the Federalists, wanted a loose confederation with a high degree of self-rule in the provinces; the other, the Centralists, wanted a central government with a strong hand in the farthest reaches of the country.

  In May 1834, when Santa Anna dissolved the Mexican congress that elected him president, and suspended the constitution, several parts of the country moved into open revolt. Of the states that used the constitutional crisis as a chance to break away, only the Republic of Texas, the Tejas portion of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas, managed to establish its independence. That was not the end of the story. Santa Anna wanted Texas back.

  Juan Seguín, one of the most prominent Mexicans to take the side of the American settlers in the battle for Texas independence. Mayor of San Antonio under Mexico, he led Spanish-speaking soldiers in the critical Battle of San Jacinto. Seguín became a senator in the new Republic of Texas but later headed south to live in Mexico. CREDIT: SEGUÍN, JUAN NEPOMUCENO; ACCESSION ID: CHA 1989.096; COURTESY STATE PRESERVATION BOARD; ORIGINAL ARTIST: WRIGHT, THOMAS JEFFERSON / 1798–1846; PHOTOGRAPHER: PERRY HUSTON, 7/28/95, POST CONSERVATION

  Juan Seguín, like his father, was publicly critical of Santa Anna’s decision to suspend the constitution and declare himself president under a new, centralized governor. Like Erasmo, Juan believed the future prosperity of his home relied in part on the presence of colonists from the United States. Under the old government, Juan Seguín had risen to the rank of colonel in the territorial militia, and had become the alcalde, or mayor, of San Antonio. He now openly organized against the Santa Anna government and helped establish a constitutional convention for Texas. In their earliest forms, the wars for Texas independence are really understood as a battle against the Centralists, who wanted to run the vast country from Mexico City and defend the power of the Roman Catholic Church.

  Davy Crockett (1786–1836). When the ruins of an old mission church called the Alamo became a myth factory in March of 1836, one of the biggest legends to come from the doomed fortress was Crockett. The politician and soldier headed west to join the growing American community in Texas after losing his reelection bid to the U.S. House of Representatives. He was one of the last Americans to die in the battle as Mexican forces breached the walls and entered the compound. Already famous before the war in Texas, Crockett’s folk hero status was only further burnished by his fight to the death in San Antonio. CREDIT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  Seguín’s first goal was probably not the establishment of an independent nation, or to cease to be Mexican. When he organized a Tejano militia in 1835 he rode to the aid of the Mexican governor of Tejas, a Federalist, who shared his opposition to Santa Anna. Seguín took a commission as a captain in the Texas Army from Stephen F. Austin in early 1836. With his company of thirty-seven men, Seguín rode scouting and resupply missions for the revolutionary army. Was he still a Mexican? What did he seek when entering combat against his political foes in the Mexican Army? The politician and soldier invested his future completely in the success of the republic. In his memoirs, Seguín declared, “I embraced the cause of Texas at the report of the first cannon which foretold her liberty.”

  He holed up in the Alamo with its doomed defenders when the advance guard of Santa Anna’s troops were spotted as they headed toward San Antonio to take back the city. Seguín fought with William Travis, Jim Bowie, and the famed American-born fighters in the old mission. Before the climactic assault by Santa Anna’s army, the Spanish-speaking officer was dispatched as a courier to deliver news of the siege at the Alamo to Texan forces. By the time Seguín returned to San Antonio, Santa Anna and his forces had already wiped out the Alamo garrison.

  Seguín fell back to Gonzales, where the Texan revolution began, and combined with American-born commanders to prepare for another battle with Santa Anna. It came just a few weeks later in the Battle of San Jacinto, where Juan Seguín was the only Texas Mexican to lead troops in battle on the side of the American settlers. His participation was militarily unimportant, but deeply symbolic at the same time. Seguín and his men were singled out for their bravery by the two senior American commanders, Sam Houston and Edward Burleson. San Jacinto was the pivotal battle in the war against Mexico, and has been called the “Yorktown of Texas.” Seguín’s unit ratified the idea that Tejanos were ready to risk their lives for the new country.

  Map of Texas in 1836. After the successful war against Mexico, the new Republic of Texas was much smaller than the later state of Texas. More land seized from Mexico in the later Mexican-American War would be added, along with territories that would become the states of the American Southwest. CREDIT: THE DOLPH BRISCOE CENTER FOR AMERICAN HISTORY, THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

  When the smoke cleared, Seguín was an officer in a victorious army. He had been an early adopter of the Texan cause and a community leader in his old country, and he sought to serve his new one. If the Texas revolt had been successfully turned back by the Mexican army, the U.S.-born rebels could have easily headed home. Seguín, one could argue, had taken a bigger risk, making war on his home country and his own government.

  First, Seguín monitored the retreat of Mexican troops, escorting them back to the Rio Grande. He then headed home to San Antonio, where he supervised the burials of the ashes of the Alamo defenders, and became the military commander of the city. At first, he hoped the native-born Tejanos would make common cause in building a new country with the newcomers from the United States. He had, as he writes in his memoirs, �
�a wish to see Texas free and happy.” Seguín was shocked by the resentment and racism that confronted a fellow Texas patriot and comrade in arms. Though they were still a majority of the residents of the new country, most Tejanos were peasants, and came to be viewed as outsiders, a problem to be overcome.

  It is important to remember what many of the new arrivals saw when they looked at Texas. They saw a place where they could bring the cotton economy of their native American South—not just the plants of the genus Gossypium, but the accompanying slavery that made King Cotton so profitable.

  When they looked at the Mexicans who already lived on the land, the newcomers did not see new partners in making their fortune, just more nonwhite people. South Carolina senator and defender of slavery John C. Calhoun recoiled from the idea of annexing Mexican territory in 1848: “. . . we have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind of incorporating an Indian race . . . I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the government of a white race.”

  Putting Mexicans on an equal level with citizens of the United States, Calhoun further said, would have been an “error” of the kind that had “destroyed social arrangements” in other countries.

  However much the settlers across the Southwest might have invoked their Spanish heritage, Calhoun like many Americans had no question that they were not white. As nonwhites, Mexicans, even in their own country, deserved little consideration: “. . . in the whole history of man, as far as my knowledge extends, there is no instance whatever of any civilized colored races being found equal to the establishment of a free popular government, although by far the largest portion of the human family is composed of these races. . . . Are we to associate with ourselves as equals, companions, and fellow-citizens, the Indians and mixed race of Mexico? Sir, I should consider such a thing as fatal to our institutions.”