Californios

This research paper will be an analysis of the differences of language, cultural and historical barriers between the third and fourth generation descendants of the Californios and the Mexican Revolution immigrant refugees in the 1900’s to the end of the 1920’s in greater Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay Area.

In 1850’s, thousands of Californios, Mexican citizens living in the Alta California Territory, had a country’s boundary cross them, and they became American citizens when the United States annexed this part of the former Mexican Empire. This paper will ask “How did crossing this new cultural and physical boundary of the Northwest Territory affect their Mexican descendants fifty years later?” During the time of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1924, there were no restrictions on Mexican immigration at this time and many Mexican nationals were fleeing México and crossing a physical boundary, the United States - Mexican Border. How did this open border policy affect Mexicans in California at this time? Are these two groups similar? Or do they clash having been raised in different countries the last 50 years? What changes occurred in California make the groups similar or different? How do the descendants of the Californios view themselves ethnically at this time, Mexican, Spanish? Are both groups bilingual or exclusively monolingual English or monolingual Spanish? Is one group fully assimilated and the other is not or are they bridged by a common culture and history?

El bandido Tiburcio Vasquez desarrolla su carrera en un momento de dificultad política y social para los californios, que desde 1848 pasan a formar parte de EEUU. Se examinan la entrevista bilingüe que Vasquez concede en la víspera de su ajusticiamiento, así como fuentes contemporáneas en inglés y en español sobre él. Desde el marco teórico de la liminalidad, se muestran las herramientas por las que se folcloriza el pasado californio, además de la conceptualización de Vasquez como bandido y quiénes originan esos juicios. Se concluye que los bandidos californios, y especialmente Vasquez, representan la disolución parcial de la identidad california, empujada por el marco social y político de EEUU.

This chapter considers the etymological roots of the Pocho expression in order to understand the meaning it was assigned by Mexican statesmen and elites in the wake of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 in order to interpret the Pocho consciousness of scholar and poet Américo Paredes, the works of satirists Esteban Zul and Lalo Alcaraz, and performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. The sum of the sections submits that the Pocho identity may be located in the intimacy of the self-ironic turn.  If community is conversation, then the Pochos have long been silenced by the colonially-imposed rhetoric of deficiency. As the following study demonstrates, it was not until the 1990s that satirists claimed the right to enter the conversation and give full rein to the intimacy of their intracultural positionality as a historical and linguistic consequence of the interdependency between the United States and Mexico.

La intención de este texto es la de mostrar en qué forma la política lingüística seguida en California tras la anexión, que pasó del bilingüismo reconocido al monolingüismo acérrimo, ha condicionado y aún condiciona hasta hoy las circunstancias sociolingüísticas del dialecto español de California. Palabras clave: español de California, siglo XIX, política lingüística The aim of this text is to show how linguistic policy in California has conditioned and still today conditions the sociolinguistic circumstances of the Spanish dialect of California after the annexation, which went from the recognized bilingualism to the staunch monolingualism.

Few actual examples of Spanish and Mexican textiles from California exist. Archival research indicated several types of fabric were made in the late 1700s - early 1800s. The study reproduced these woven fabrics using handspun yarn and natural dyes. Part I provides a background to the study, and Part II describes the experimental process to produce the textiles.