Recuerdos

A generation after the U.S. conquest of California, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo set out to write the story of the land he knew so wella history to dispel the romantic vision quickly overtaking the states recent past. The five-volume history he produced, published here for the first time in English translation, is the most complete account of California before the gold rush by someone who resided in California at the time. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (180790) grew up in Spanish California, became a leading military and political figure in Mexican California, and participated in some of the founding events of U.S. California, such as the Monterey Constitutional Convention and the first legislature. With his project, undertaken for historian and publisher Hubert Howe Bancroft, Vallejo sought to correct misrepresentations of Californias past, which dismissed as insignificant the pregold rush Spanish and Mexican periodsconflated into one Mission era. Instead, Vallejos history emphasized the role of the military in the Spanish colonization of California and argued that the missionaries after Junpero Serra, with their medieval ideas, had actually retarded the development of California until secularization in the early 1830s. Culture, he contended, was of intense interest to the Californio people, as was the education of children. His accounts of Indigenous peoples, while often sympathetic, were also characteristic of his time: he and other California military leaders, Vallejo maintained, had successfully subdued hostile Indians and established mutually beneficial relationships with others. Out of keeping with Bancrofts American triumphalism, Vallejos monumental project was consigned to the archives. With their deft translation and commentary, Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewiczauthors of a companion volume on Vallejos workhave brought to light a remarkable perspective, often firsthand, on important events in early California history. Their efforts restore a critical chapter to the story of California and the American West.