As part of the University of Oklahoma Press’ series Before Gold: California Under Spain and Mexico, Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz published the two-volume Recuerdos: Historical and Personal Remembrances Relating to Alta California, 1769–1849, the first edited translation of Mariano Vallejo's remembrances of early California originally produced for the noted historian Hubert Howe Bancroft. They return to the series with this welcome monograph on the noted political and military leader of the region. This work serves two purposes. First, it serves as an extension of the earlier documentary editing project, a project in which they were prohibited from adding too much explanatory material due to the length of the source itself. Second, it can serve as a stand-alone history of early California, filtered through Vallejo's experiences. The only other relatively recent, significant work on Vallejo is Alan Rosenus's 1995 work General M. G. Vallejo and the Advent of the Americans.
This present work is driven by two themes: colonization and culture. The first six essays trace Vallejo's life from his role as a colonizer of Alta California to his eventual end as one of those colonized in the American take-over of the region. In these essays, Beebe and Senkewicz demonstrate the way that Vallejo benefited from his Spanish ancestry and ties to the ruling class of Alta California. Throughout these sections, the authors discuss Vallejo's relationships with indigenous Californians, taking particular care to address the problems of the sources that comprise our fragmented historical record. They make it clear that while Vallejo, at times, led attacks and then at other times acted to protect various Native California groups, the indigenous Californians were working strategically in building their relations with him and other Californios. The authors also highlight the, sometimes tense, relations between the Californios and the leaders of the mission system. In this book, the missions are not the center of life in early California, which is a refreshing take.
The final two essays center on the culture in which Vallejo lived, looking at both his views of other Californios, the ranking members of Mexican era California who identified with their Spanish ancestors, and the role of family during that time. In many ways, Vallejo's memoir was a response to contemporary criticisms of Californios as uncultured and uneducated. According to the authors, he tried to explain the communal culture of the day, tie their customs and traditions back to a Europe that was largely perceived as more culturally sophisticated, and emphasize the attempts to build institutions of education in the state. The authors point out that many of the difficulties that early Californios encountered in establishing schools were due to a lack of potential teachers and political stability. The last chapter is largely comprised of family letters to and from Vallejo, a man who was often away from home. It reveals the increasing responsibilities for women in the household as well as the position the Vallejo family members found themselves in as they lost both wealth and status.
The value of this work is largely as a history of Alta California in the Spanish, Mexican, and early American eras. Much of this history is condensed in textbooks, and the military and political history is often overshadowed by the history of the mission system in typical course readings. Although the final two chapters on culture and family are largely limited to the ruling class of the region, the first six chapters do much to contextualize a history that for students often contains far too many unfamiliar figures, such as a seemingly endless parade of governors, who quickly fade from the scene. Helpful in that regard are illustrations and maps at relevant points as well as a thirty-two-page section of Biographical Sketches, offering paragraph-length entries for significant historical figures.
