3.5: Summary

In 1846, Mexican California was a pastoral society that was rapidly changing because of the changes set in motion by the secularization of the mission lands and the opening of the province to foreign trade and settlement. Few could have foreseen that within a few years, even more profound changes were to catapult California into an entirely different era. On the eve of the American conquest, differing cultural traditions and visions competed for control of California’s future.

The oldest customs were those of the native peoples, who had been decimated by disease and challenged in their customary territories. Those who lived away from the coastal regions and avoided contact with the Spanish and Mexican colonists continued to live as they had for thousands of years. Even while their physical environment changed, through the introduction of new plants and animals, they continued in their spiritual beliefs about the correct ways to live. Others adapted to Mexican Catholic society by mixing their traditional ways with those of the newcomers. They became acculturated to and dependent on their conquerors.

The Mexican, Spanish-speaking mestizos in California inherited a culture that emphasized family honor, community and regional pride, and ethnicracial hierarchy. For them, the land was less for profit than for possession and dominance, a mark of the prestige of being an hidalgo, or nobleman. The younger Mexican Californians grew up nourished on ideas of popular democracy, free trade, and rationalism, inheriting an ideology of the American and French Revolutions as it was translated through Mexico. Progressive Mexicans believed that they could benefit from political and marital alliances with the Anglo Americans and had a positive view of the Americans’ contribution to California.

The English-speaking settlers in California were divided over their views of the future. Mexicanized Americans, like Don Abel Stearns, thought that Mexicans and Americans could and should coexist in harmony for their mutual profit, and that the Californios were willing students in the development of the region. The newer immigrants, those who had come overland by wagon train in the 1840s, considered the Mexicans to be a lazy, thriftless people with few redeeming graces. The Californios who owned the ranchos were obstacles to progress, they thought, and the Californios’ Catholic faith was an anathema to these Protestant families. Many of them had absorbed a sense of Manifest Destiny, a belief in the inevitable expansion of the United States across North America, often linked to a faith in the superiority and inevitable triumph of the Anglo American race over native peoples and Mexicans. The future, the Americans thought, belonged to them.