My mama, Rosa Castillo-Diaz, was born in central Texas, in a small town called Penelope, nestled in Hill County, squarely between Waco and Dallas. Although she lived in Detroit most of her adult life, her heart belonged to Texas. She spoke of it in endearing terms, and proudly called herself a Tejana—a native Texan of Mexican descent. She visited family there regularly. When we shared a cup of coffee or went on long drives, she described Texas in great detail, the curves of the land, the scorching sun and the fields that stretched on forever.

I visited Penelope many times in my dreams. I flew there con mi mamasita. Hand in hand we went over rivers and streams, when the sun was shining and the moon was beaming. We never stopped flying, even when the wind blew, and rain came down hard and lightning bolts flashed around us. Our hands became one, and all the while she told me cuentitos, little stories of her motherland, stories of her childhood.

We finally arrived at the ranchito where she was born. We hovered over it, we were still in time and space, taking in the land that held her heart. She pointed out the details she talked about over the years.

There was the church where she was baptized, but it had been rebuilt since she was a child. There was the one road that ran through the center of town. Offshoots of the main road led to dirt roads that ran in various directions. There were fields and farms and row upon row of neatly planted crops. Gentle hills that were more like slopes rose from the earth, as if they were mountains that forgot to keep growing. And all around us was an endless blue sky and a sun that burned forever.

But this was all in my mind’s eye, in my heart, where I kept it hidden for years. I made a vow I would go to Penelope someday. Someday.

I visited Penelope several years ago. But I didn’t fly there as I had in my dreams. I was visiting friends in Austin and decided to take a daytrip to make this long awaited pilgrimage. My heart fluttered as I got into the rental car and studied a map of the area. I felt solemn. I didn’t know what I would find or what I was looking for; I only knew I needed to see this storied place.

I headed north on the freeway, and eventually passed Waco. We visited Waco regularly when I was a child. My parents packed us tight into a station wagon and made the trip to see my abuelo and tías and tios, and myriad of cousins. My abuelos took their children and settled there after leaving Mexico. I remember the thick heat of the air and old, clapboard houses, running in the sun and walking down to the river. As I drove past Waco, I felt my heart lurch, I wanted to stop and visit my cousins, but I was on a mission that day.

I followed the map and finally turned off the freeway. I drove down what felt like an eternity of long, endless roads. After what seemed hours of driving, I noticed a lonely sign on the side of the road that simply said ‘Penelope’, pointing in the direction of the town. Seeing the sign made my heart jump. This place that captured my mother’s heart was suddenly real. I pulled over and looked at that sign long and hard as if it were a message from Diosito or my mother. I continued driving and a few miles later another sign appeared. It simply said, Penelope 2.
​

My heart leapt again. I stopped the car and got out and stepped into what felt like an oven. The heat was suffocating, and my lungs felt like they were on fire. I took picture after picture, as if I were afraid the sign and the stories from my mother would somehow disappear, like fantasmas, ghosts, or a mean trick of my eyes.
The two miles stretched on forever.

But Penelope suddenly appeared, and it was indeed a ranchito, a small town, a spit town, a blink your eyes and it’s gone town. I drove slowly as I entered the outskirts of town. There appeared to be a main road that made a loop connecting back to the thoroughfare, which led in or out of town. I noticed the casitas, little houses, spread out through meandering streets. The yards were large and dry and spoke of hard work. Cars were propped on bricks and work rags hung on open hoods. Cactus and scrub brush grew everywhere, and just like my mother, everything here was neat and tidy.
I drove back around to the main road and out of town, and when I came to the end of it, I turned the car around and drove through it again. I can’t tell you how many times because I stopped counting.

My abuela, Nicasia, and my mother, Rosa, left Penelope shortly after her younger sisters died from diphtheria. My mother was six or seven at that time. We have one family photo of my mother’s sisters, my tías. It is a sepia tinted portrait of them in their wooden coffin. Their two small bodies are dressed in white, lace bonnets adorn their heads, tiny bows tied neatly under their chins. They rest side by side. They have the same cherub cheeks as my mother. Their angelic faces appear asleep when I look at them.

There was little to hold my abuela in Penelope after her daughters died. Other voices called her south and west. There was too much grief here, and the land too hard. There was cotton to be picked, fields to be harvested and pecans to be shelled, all outside of this ranchito.

The main pecan shelling factories were in or around San Antonio, and fields of cotton and farm work waited in the Waco area. But I still looked with hunger for any sign of her and my mama.

I took countless pictures of the roads, and as I headed out of town for the umpteenth time, I noticed several lonely abandoned buildings. I parked my car and stared at them, even after years of being forgotten, they were still tidy and impossibly sweet. I held my breath as I got out of the car and crossed the road. The hot air still took me by surprise.

There were two buildings and in between them was what might have been a courtyard, or another building. It was hard to know. The space now held a wild array of scrub brush and pines, reaching up between the buildings for the blue sky above. An old picket fence, long worn of any paint, held up a massive trumpet flower vine. Their orange color popped against the faded fence.

​One of the buildings was made from red brick, its bones still strong and in place. A large white sign painted on the facade gave away its lineage. It said, “Penelope Grocery.” Another building, short and squat, bustled up to the lot, it was whitewashed and padlocked, layers of white paint made for thick flakes from the bright sun.​

A wooden bench sat forlorn in front of the buildings, as if it was waiting for company. The head of a lion decorated the cast iron arms of each end. Clay flower pots full of cactus sat at attention in the mid-day heat. I walked up and down the swatch of sidewalk in front of the buildings, searching for my mama and abuela. Tenacious prickly pear cactus grew out of the concrete, bright yellow blossoms adorned them like golden crowns. The intense color of the flowers added to this already surreal scene.

My mother was always a surprise, while other parts of her were a mystery. Walking on the sidewalk where she may have walked with her mother, I should not have been surprised by the bright orange trumpet vines, the yellow flowers of the prickly pear cactus, the faded sign that said Penelope Grocery, and the lion’s head adorned bench—but I was. Somehow, all these details were her.

The day wore on. I spoke with the church secretary where my mother was baptized. She answered so many questions I had, as if she had the keys I had been looking for to open the doors of my mother’s past. She helped me to see my mother’s truth, and she told me where to look for the past.

I have a habit of taking rocks, large and small from trips I take. I picked up a rock as I left the church and put it in my pocket. It was late afternoon, and I decided to visit the cemetery the secretary talked about in detail. I got in the car and began to drive again. In front of me was another endless road, but just as I got to what felt like the edge of town, there on a cerrito, a gentle hill, was the cemetery.

I pulled in and sat in the car. I thought about how I had dreamed about this moment for so long. I closed my eyes and remembered the stories she told me about this place. I listened for her voice. Finally I got out slowly and walked to the edge of the cemetery, and the sun swallowed me whole.

I stood there and looked around me. There was sun everywhere, but this was not the kind, gentle Michigan sun that bows down and kisses the north during the summer months. This sun knew no kindness. It scorched the land around it. The blinding light and a cloudless baby blue sky went on for eternity.

Light gusts of wind came and went, but they too were filled with what I can only call an inferno. When I took a breath, I felt there was more fire than oxygen in the air. The burning heat penetrated my clothing, my skin, my soul. I thought surely this light must purge all sin, all darkness, all wrongness, and nothing can live here that is not true, or pure, because everything else has burned away.

A deep truth settled in my soul as I stood there looking out at this land that claimed my mother’s heart. I realized that every story, every word she ever told me was true, and that realization filled my bones, my marrow, my being. That truth felt like a convergence of angels, all meeting at the same time, in this ranchito where she was born.

This was the land she longed for, the quiet and stillness she craved filled the air around me. En la tierra que ella no puede olvidar. In the land she could not forget. I found her.

Stories swirled at my feet. There was no bitterness in her stories. There was only her truth. She and her mother and her sisters and brother ate lard, sprinkled with sugar or a pinch of salt to make it more palatable. Her mother spread the concoction on tortillas, there was no other food to eat.

Her mother, Nicasia, loved coffee. She sweetened it with a little sugar and watered down milk. Nicasia deliberately spilled it onto her saucer, so my mother could have a sip of that watered down, sweetened coffee.

Together they shelled pecans to perfection, because the pecans that were whole and unbroken sold for a higher price. They burned the shells to heat their one room shack. They boiled vats of water to do other people’s laundry. My abuela was a skilled artisan, she tatted and crocheted complex patterns from sight, it was one more way to earn money.

But it was the indignities or racism and poverty that hurt my mother the most. She was slapped for speaking Spanish, her mother tongue. She learned to swallow her voice. She never yelled or spoke loudly and she spoke English without a trace of Spanish. She never, ever, sang above a whisper. She was left handed, but that was also not allowed. There was the teacher who would not touch her hair, but used a stick off the ground to look for piojos, the dreaded lice on her head.

She longed for her sisters who died from diphtheria. Their small bodies dressed in white, were laid in a simple wood casket. But the Mexicans were not allowed to be buried in the cemetery, according to the church secretary. The Mexicans buried their dead in fields, close to their homes, alone and unmarked, on the rancho.

As I stood there and looked at that sky and felt that harsh sun, I could see all the stories come down at once to where I stood, like a communion of saints. All those ghosts and echoes from the past were all there in town, going about their lives as best they could. I could see them, cooking and cleaning, picking cotton, going to la misa, mass, boiling water for laundry and sewing, and looking for a way to stave off the hunger that haunted them at times. It was all there.

Standing in the scorching air that seemed void of any oxygen, I felt a mixture of emotions. Parts of me felt gears that had been missing were suddenly in place, while other parts felt devastated by the truths of my mother’s words. I felt a loss for my tías and abuela, but also I felt whole and filled up. I felt anger for the shame my mother carried for being Mejicana and poor. But I also felt an incredible pride to be the daughter of a Tejana, that odd breed of toughness, hard-work, and sweetness. I felt proud of this little ranchito where prickly pear cactus and trumpet vines blossomed in the most random places, and the neatness of a community prevailed.

I felt a deep gratitude for my abuela y mama. Adversity was a given, but tenacity and grace were a gift. My mother loved flowers and anything that was beautiful. My abuela was an artisan whose incredible tatting and lace-work were worthy of being framed. Both of these women were smart and resourceful. They didn’t just make do, they made beauty where there was none. They brought life to the darkest of corners, and created a legacy that continues to grow and blossom. I come from strong Mejicana-Tejana women.

We are drawn to our pasts planted by our antepasados, our ancestors. Their words and stories are passed on generation after generation. Our abuelos and abuelas call out to us over time and space to listen to stories told and untold. Their stories become our story, embedded in who we are, their traits become our traits. What draws us home are those people who didn’t give up, their ghosts follow us now, cheering us on.
​
I looked at that cloudless baby blue sky and knew every word mi mamacita told me was true and I smiled. My heart was glad with a bittersweetness that tasted of her cafecito--con un tantito de leche, y un poquito de azúcar--her strong coffee, softened with a drop of milk and sweetened with a bit of sugar. ​

​Elena Dolores Solano was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. She is one of fifteen children. Her parents were migrant workers who moved north in the 1940s. She is a certified school counselor and works with Latino/a students in the public school system of Detroit. She is also a Licensed Professional Counselor. Ms. Solano has written for many years of her experience growing up in a large Mexican American family in Detroit. In her spare time Ms. Solano enjoys collecting anything old, a Solano family tradition, cooking Mexican food and spending time with her children, her family and friends.  

​PREFACE
From page 3

Joaquín Murrieta was a typical young man who had ridden up from Sonora, Mexico, in 1850 to join friends and family already in the Sierra foothills searching for gold in their streams and rivers. When the clamor arose because Americanos had found nuggets up near Sacramento, his life and those of other Mexicanos changed radically, in fact, the history of the west took a hard turn toward violence and greed because of the yellow metal.

Mexicano men and women, who were already experienced placer miners from their home state of Sonora, were attacked, forced off their claims, and either run off or killed. Murrieta’s wife, Carmelita, was violated and murdered by White marauders; his brother also killed. Joaquín, a peaceful man swore to avenge these deaths; further, he vowed to return control of California to Mexico -the state had also been stolen in the U.S. war against Mexico between 1846 and 1848.

Murrieta did not succeed, but he neither surrendered nor fell victim to White posses assembled by the state government to hunt him and his followers to ground. This book tells the story as his descendants have known it and passed it down through several generations. This is the story of the Murrieta as much as of Joaquín, their standard bearer.

Herein, they set out their oral history backed up by evidence from a few records that have survived and physical places that remain despite the ravages of time, which are known to Murrieta’s descendants. Together, they show that, rather than the self-serving legend promoted by newspapers and story-tellers in behalf of the people who had feared and hated him, Joaquín Murrieta died peacefully and in one piece in Cucurpe near his ancestral home in Sonora.

¡Que viva Joaquín Murrieta!
                                                            Armando Rendón, Author of Chicano Manifesto
 
FOREWORD
From page 4 

Joaquín  Murrieta is a man whose story has deeply influenced the conscience of those who are fighting for social justice. It was first told in the 1850s by a Cherokee Indian writing as John Rollins Ridge. He wrote about a Mexican immigrant miner who came to California during the gold rush only to encounter a racist violence that killed his brother and his wife.

In revenge he along with a small band of compatriots set out to punish the aggressors and in the process he became a symbol of the resistance of Mexicanos against the Anglo American takeover of their lands and the attacks on their culture. The first Chicano film in 1969 was entitled "I Am Joaquín" drawn from a poem inspired by Joaquín 's resistance movement. The Chicano movement drew from the iconic story of Joaquín  to inspire young people to value their history and draw from it a spirit of resistance. Outside the U.S. revolutionary thinkers took Joaquín  Murrieta as a symbol of their struggle against American imperialism. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote an epic poem about Joaquín  portraying him as a countryman.

Alfredo Acosta Figueroa has written an entirely new history of Joaquín , one that draws on the memories and documents of his family and Joaquín 's descendants. This history is deeply personal. We learn details that have never before been published. Joaquín 's birthplace, family, home in Trincheras Sonora, his returns to Mexico and death from old age in his homeland are all well documented. We have proof that he passed through San Juan Capistrano in 1865 and lived in Tecate in the 1870's. Murrieta was not killed by the California Rangers as claimed in the histories. His story continued to inspire. Don Alfredo documents how Mexicanos and Chicanos have been jailed just for daring to sing the Corrido of Joaquín  Murrieta. The legacy and truth of Joaquín  continues through the International Association of Descendants of Joaquín  Murrieta. Annually they commemorate Joaquín  at events in Mexico and the U.S.

This book tells the truth about Joaquín  Murrieta as recalled by his family and descendants. As such it is an important contribution to the struggles of Chicanos to be liberated from a colonial past that has been manufactured by films, novels, and textbooks. We all owe Don Alfredo a debt for having the energy and spirit to continue La Lucha.

Ricardo Griswold del Castillo , Professor Emeritus, Chicana and Chicano Studies, San Diego State University, Author of Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo A Legacy of Conflict
 
CALIFORNIA RANGERS IN PURSUIT OF JOAQUÍN MURRIETA
From pages 19-21

The California Rangers’ main purpose was to capture Joaquín Murrieta dead or alive and offered a reward of $1,000 to anyone who would bring them his head. Joaquín Murrieta was never identified by the authorities, arrested or jailed, but he was tried in absentia, however, and sentenced to death.   

Recruited to lead the California Rangers was the notorious Captain Harry Love, a veteran of the U.S.-Mexican war. His hostility toward Mexicans was well known. The respected newspaper, Alta Californian, commented that a license for mayhem had just been issued to Love’s Rangers, an opportunity to plunder into Mexico. Many people who knew Love, considered him to be nothing more than a treacherous, cruel murderer. Love’s motto was, “A good Mexican is a dead Mexican.” No Mexican was safe at the placer mine or on the lonely roads. It was open season on Mexicans. Most atrocities committed against Mexicans were done so by mobs of angry and hostile Anglo miners, escalated by the Rangers. Most of the California Rangers who were recruited were veterans of the Mexico-United States War and were regarded as adventurers and anti-Mexican. Ranger Bill Byrnes admitted that he allegedly joined a company that went hunting for Apache scalps in Chihuahua for a $50 bounty. Most Mexicans were indigenous and there was very little, if any distinction made by the Rangers.

The California Rangers ended up committing a crime spree of their own, illegally confiscating property from Mexicans and Californios, shooting them or hanging them in their pursuit. “The California Rangers were killers, and professional bounty hunters who had a history of violence.” (The Real Joaquín  Murrieta Robin Hood Hero or Gold Rush Gangster? by Remi Nadeau, 1992).

After three months of pursuing Joaquín Murrieta, Harry Love and his Rangers came upon a group of Mexican vaqueros at Arroyo Cantua. By then, Love’s Rangers were getting restless and discouraged with their $150 monthly pay. They were tired, hot and frustrated because they could not find Joaquín Murrieta. Harry Love, feared that because their three- month contract was nearly up, his Rangers would quit on him, so he decided to make his move on the Mexican vaqueros at Arroyo Cantua.

Eventually, each Ranger would give his own interpretation of what really took place during the ambush at Arroyo Cantua. Harry Love and his Rangers came upon Arroyo Cantua, a wash at the base of what is called Joaquín Rocks on Joaquín Ridge, which had three boulders overlooking the vast Western San Joaquín Valley. One version is that when Love and his men came upon the Mexicans, they presumed the men belonged to Murrieta’s band, led by Jesús Feliz, Joaquín’s brother-in-law.

Love’s version is that he and his men found 70-80 Mexicans tending a herd of 700-800 horses and when they approached the group, the Mexicans made no objections. Love, seeing that he was outnumbered, did not attempt to risk their lives in pursuing his investigation. Love and his men left.

​
In the San Joaquín  Valley, in Northern Calfornia, the Joaquín Murrieta Cavalcade is held annually at Three Rocks and Arroyo Cantua, to remember the atrocities committed by the California Rangers led by Harry Love's ambush on the four horsemen at Arroyo Cantua on July 25, 1853; presumably one of them being Joaquín Murrieta.

According to the Stockton newspaper, the Mexicans and horses left camp overnight and when the Rangers arrived the following day, the camp had been deserted.
At the crack of dawn, approximately three miles east of Arroyo Cantua, they saw a plume of smoke. There were 6-8 Mexicans that had just arrived at the camps. Love saw he had the upper hand. Love and his men ambushed the Mexican camp. Most of the Mexicans were sleeping. A Mexican reached for his gun on his horse but was stopped by a ranger’s shotgun. They gathered the Mexicans and Bill Byrnes who was the only Ranger to have presumably known Murrieta rode up and shouted, “This is Joaquín Murrieta, boys! We got him at last.” The Mexicans threw back their sarapes and fired their revolvers, shooting as they ran. Two Mexicans fell dead and a three-fingered man was shot 9 times.

Finally, Bill Byrnes rode up and gave him the coup de grâce with a shot to his head.
During the melee, the leader of the band leaped bareback onto his horse and galloped onto the banks of Cantua Creek’s dry bed, a drop of approximately 14 or more feet. The rider was knocked down, but he leaped again onto his horse and kept going down the creek bed. According to William T. Henderson, he also jumped the bank of the creek and pursued the horseman, shooting the leg of the horse.

Another Ranger was following along the bank and was able to shoot the Mexican that was running down the creek. When the Rangers got close to the Mexican, the Mexican began to plead with them, in Spanish, “Don’t shoot me anymore.” When the other Rangers arrived at the scene, they immediately riddled his body with bullets.

It is said that after the ambush by the Rangers at Arroyo Cantua, they cut the head of whom they presumed to be Joaquín  Murrieta. The Rangers also cut the hand off of the three-fingered man, called El Yaqui Tres Dedos. Again, the head was falsely identified as that of Joaquín Murrieta. Antonio Lopez and Jose Maria Ochoa were apprehended and taken prisoners to Fort Miller, northeast of Fresno. According to the newspapers who speculated about the information on Joaquín  Murrieta, Antonio Lopez drowned when they were crossing a slough. The olla with El Yaqui Tres Dedos, the three-fingered hand, was thrown away because it was quickly deteriorating. The head was put in an olla of whiskey. Jose Maria Ochoa betrayed his countrymen when he identified the head as being that of Joaquín Murrieta.

After the State paid Love a $1,000 reward, he was given an additional $5,000 for his patriotic duty. After the rangers presented their trophies to the authorities, the question arose: Was it the head of Joaquín Murrieta or was it the head of a Mexican who happened to be at Arroyo Cantua? The Alta California reported a group of Mexicans in Los Angeles who claimed they were attacked by a group of “gringos,” but they had escaped.

Four were killed, one of them being Joaquín Valenzuela. His head had been cut off for a trophy. Joaquín Valenzuela was one of the five Joaquín 's active at the time. It was not the head of Joaquín Murrieta. Bill Byrnes, the Ranger that presumably knew Joaquín Murrieta, said: “One pickled head is as good as any other, if there was a scar on the face and no one knew the difference.”
​

​Alfredo Acosta Figueroa was born in Blythe, California, in 1934 and still lives there He represents five generations of Indigenous-Xicano heritage from the Colorado River Reservation, which encompasses the Palo Verde/Parker Valleys. At one time, his family was the only one around with origins in mining during the La Paz, Arizona-Colorado River Gold Rush in 1862. Growing up, he heard stories of his great, great grandmother, Teodosia Martinez, a cousin of Joaquín Murrieta. At family gatherings, they would play “El Corrido de Joaquín Murrieta;” Alfredo learned the song and when he took up the guitar at 12 years of age, learned to play it. In 1986, Murrieta’s descendants met in Blythe to found the International Association of Descendants of Joaquín Murrieta. On October 23, 1988, Alfredo organized the first Caravana del Recuerdo in Murrieta’s honor in Trincheras, Sonora, Joaquín’s birthplace.
 

Last month I turned 77 or as a friend put it, I got another chance to go around the sun.
I remember when at a younger age, I used to downplay the importance of birthdays calling them “just like any other day” until I heard someone say “maybe to you is just like any other day but tell that to your mom who carried you for 9 months and see how she feels.” 

As a man, I will never know the pain or experience of life conception or delivery but as a personal reflection, I know the excruciating pain of coming back to life after a ten-day coma due to an open-heart surgery I underwent in 2012.  

I remember how, after coming out of a 10-day coma my entire body was in shock and frankly I couldn’t tell what hurt and what didn’t, what parts of my body work and what didn’t, but as time went on, my body started to react to the intervention and pain and discomfort set in big time. My mouth felt totally destroyed due to the tube inserted in my throat to keep me alive. My torso had very limited ability to move if at all, my left hand was swollen due to a blood-clot, my restroom necessities were regulated by machines I didn’t even know I was plugged to. Frankly I do not remember ever feeling so vulnerable and afraid as the week I spent in the hospital after the operation. As the pain and discomfort grew so did the realization of the state I was in.

This enlightening came to me one night during dinner when my wife said it was my anniversary. I didn’t know what she was referring to so she went on to say “a day like today is when you went through the operation.” To which I responded, “so today is my birthday.” She replied “no, that’s in January.” My reasoning was that if I died and came back to life in February 7th, on that day I should celebrate my second birthday.

​Coronel was an older man severely traumatized due to his imprisonment and being far away from his family and in a strange place where he was hardly able to communicate didn’t make things any easier. We became good friends, took him out for drinks and tours, treated him with respect, and asked for his input in the radio project. That seemed to be an effective therapy since soon enough he’d be singing, telling jokes and so on. This one time the whole radio team was invited to attend a community radio broadcasters conference in New Mexico so we drove from Bakersfield to Albuquerque. After a long trip we decided to go out and celebrate so we got ready for a long night out. I remember going by Coronel’s room to pick him up but he said he didn’t want to go. I insisted every way I could and he finally said he couldn’t go because that day was his birthday to which I exclaimed “What? the better the reason brother, it’s time to party.”

Constantino replied “No, you don’t understand, it’s my second birthday,” and with tears in his eyes he said that during his imprisonment he was tortured and regularly beaten by several guards, and when he passed out, they would wake him up with a bucket of water and continue with the beatings.

This one day, he said, he was being tortured by two guards, naked and soaking wet on the floor and he just wanted to die. When the guards went out of the room for a smoke break, he reached out for a metal wire that looked like a large paper clip and with his feet and hands tied he crawled towards an electricity outlet and with extreme difficulty he tried to insert the wires into the outlet in an effort to commit suicide. At that, the guards came back in and pulling him away continued with the beatings. “I should have died that day” he said “but I didn’t, that’s why I called it my second birthday.”

During our time together, we learned a lot from him. Perhaps the best lesson was that while there is life there is hope. Coronel eventually returned to his country where he enjoys his family and continues to inspire new generations of activists.  ​

​This memoir first appeared in Democracy Chronicles, February 14, 2021.

​—Josefa, in her own defense, Downieville, July 5, 1851

These words spoken by a Mexican woman on trial for murder at the height of the California Gold Rush jumped out at me when I first read them in a newspaper dated 1851. Who was this woman who spoke in public so calmly yet forcefully, and for whom the only name we have is Josefa? The tragic circumstances of her death obsessed me for weeks, till finally, one summer day I drove out from San Francisco to visit the Mother Lode country, La Veta Madre, as the mexicanos called it, the site of this story. I crossed over the San Mateo Bridge and over the Altamont pass, then through Tracy, headed for Stockton. But way before driving out of San Francisco, I too, in my own way, had become obsessed with gold. What role does it play in my memory? All the history books praise the forty-niners, but I don’t like them or their history (I don’t even like the football team named after them). I am a victim of their arrival: the forty-niners displaced and murdered those who were already here—the Native Americans and the Californios. My Gold Rush heritage is that Chicanos are now foreigners in their own land. Yet at the start of the Gold Rush we claimed the land with our names: Hornitos, Sonora, Mariposa—names that still survive, especially in the heart of gold country.

As I drive east, I think of the events of that day in 1851, in a now insignificant town at the end of Highway 49. Of all the stories of the Gold Rush, of incredible fortunes made and lost overnight, of violent deaths that occurred in the goldfields with boring repetition, Josefa’s is the one that matters most to me, the one I choose to recover from the dustbins of history. It is a story of drunken vigilantes and ignoble patriots, and of men who stood by while a woman was lynched, and those stories are never pretty. I often ask myself what I might have done that day in Downieville. I sometimes imagine myself the hero, rushing to Josefa’s rescue wielding a shotgun, and then taking her away on my horse. But I don’t know for sure; I might have just closed my eyes, not wanting to see. Her violent death is an open wound in my memory, and yet I cannot right the wrong done to her. Perhaps the only thing I can do is recover her story, restore to her a sense of human dignity. And by telling the story, vindicate all good women and men, including myself, because if good people allow evil to go unchallenged, even if it’s an incident a hundred and fifty years old, our perceptions and attitudes of race and gender, of right and wrong, become entrenched, sometimes forever.

A casual conversation with a friend in a Mission District café, one of those conversations fueled by coffee and cigarettes, started me on this road. Had I ever heard of the Mexican woman who was lynched during the Gold Rush? I had always thought lynching occurred only in the South, to black people. I didn’t know that Mexicans were lynched in California, much less that it was a common occurrence during the Gold Rush. Our conversation drifted to other topics, and I forgot about the story. But in the coming days, at the oddest moments, I’d find myself thinking about this woman. Something about the incident infuriated me. Why was she just a mere footnote, even in Chicano history, especially when her courage is an example for all of us? Were the forty-niners really so immoral and ruthless as to have lynched a woman? Or was this just a myth, another made-up story, like the one about James Marshall’s first nugget, that had now passed into the realm of “history”? But the more I followed her trail, in microfilm newspaper accounts and journals written by eyewitnesses, the more her story seemed authentic, and not just authentic, it seemed to encapsulate the story of all Chicanos in the Gold Rush. How we were pushed aside, driven out, murdered, and lynched, and how then even our names and graves were erased from the face of the earth, so as to leave not a trace that we had been here.
​
As I drive out to the Sierras, with the back seat of my car stacked with books, pamphlets, and photocopied newspapers from 1851, I already know that killing a Mexican during the Gold Rush years was common enough, but what the forty-niners did to Josefa is the bone in the throat of California history.

​• • •

The Sierra Nevada, the matrix of the gold country, is an impressive range of burned-out volcanoes whose ice-fed streams carve the gorges and canyons of the foothills and, like a benevolent regent, nurture the San Joaquin Valley and all the main rivers in the state. It is in the Sierra Nevada that gold was created millions of years ago. The creation of gold is a metamorphic process: gold rises from deep in the earth in liquid form, usually mingled with quartz; as the gold cools it crystallizes, producing exotic filigrees embedded in the rock. The quartz, with the gold still in it, is grouted into the cracks of mountains, forming what are called veins. Some veins run for miles under the earth, others are mere pencil lines. If you know this about gold, you know where to find it. Find the quartz veins and the gold will be in it. The other place gold is found is in riverbeds. As erosion wears away the mountains, the gold, sometimes still in its quartz matrix, is washed into the gorges, where the quartz is pummeled and scraped off by the rushing rivers coming down from the mountains. Eventually, the river wears away the quartz, and what’s left is the gold, a heavy, dense metal that settles at the bottom of the creek or river. The metal has different forms: flake, nugget, sponge, wire—the latter being the rarest. Gold will not tarnish, fade, or wear out; it will lie in the heart of the mountain or in a creek bottom until a human hand picks it up.

Native Americans didn’t care for gold. It had no value to them. None. They valued gypsum and amethyst for jewelry, serpentine for charm stones. They adored abalone shell, polishing it to a bright mother of pearl, and feathers of different types of birds: condors, eagles, hawks, and hummingbirds. Once the forty-niners invaded the region, Native Americans did work in the goldfields, sometimes for wages; other times they bartered the gold for needed supplies. The Californios blew hot and cold about gold. It’s an old story in Chicano history that in 1842, in a canyon behind Mission San Fernando, Francisco López sat down to eat his lunch, pulled out a wild onion growing alongside the creek, and discovered clinging to the roots--¡Oro! Gold, compadre! His lucky find inspired some miners to trek north from Sonora, Mexico. They worked for a while around the area where López had found gold, now named Placerita Canyon, and then lost interest in the project and moved on, south to Los Angeles or north to Monterey. Another Mexicano, Pablo Gutiérrez, found gold in the Bear River of Northern California in March 1844, but he was unable to procure a batea for panning, so nothing came of it. The Californios who came to the goldfields in 1848 were casual miners; many were established rancheros, like Antonio Franco Coronel, who left as the troubles escalated, disgusted with the violence and the murders.

The forty-niners, on the other hand, hungered for gold with a sickness. They even described it as “gold fever.” They would do anything for it. They left families, homes, everything behind; they sailed for eight months aboard leaky, smelly ships to reach California; others, captains and sailors, jumped ship at San Francisco, leaving a fleet of abandoned brigs, barks, and schooners to rot by the piers. They slaughtered all the game they could find and so muddied the rivers and creeks with silt that the once plentiful salmon couldn’t survive. The herds of elk and deer, the food source for Native Americans, were practically wiped out in one summer. The miners cheated and killed each other in the goldfields. The newspaper accounts of the day are filled with their bloody deeds and grizzly frontier justice, or maybe it should be called injustice. And in 1851, after an all-day celebration for the Fourth of July, a mob of forty-niners unleashed all their venom and hatred on a Mexican woman.

Several things disturbed me about this incident when I first read about it: the misogynist and racial implications, as well as the absence of a last name for Josefa. I, who was obsessed with names, who could spend days in sterile archives searching for even a minute reference to a Lugo, Olivas, or Murguía, suddenly found myself faced with one specific person who had no full name. In general, when writing about violence toward Amerindians or Mexicans, Western historiographers tend to use incomplete names, usually just the first name or a generic one, like “José,” as if the individual didn’t matter. It made me realize that it is not names and bloodlines that hold clans together, but rather their shared experience.

The eyewitness account published in The Steamer Pacific Star dated July 15, 1851, lists the full names of the judge, the jury, the witnesses—all of them white males—and four names for the victim, also white, a first name, a middle name, and two last names. Yet with Josefa, not even the reporter who was present records her last name, nor does it appear in any of the forty-niner journals that describe the event. Sure, no one takes notes at a lynching, but there was a pretense of a trial, with a judge and jury sworn in. All the accounts state that she testified in her own defense, and, therefore, must have been sworn in too. So what happened that her last name was never recorded, an important detail in any judicial hearing, even at a kangaroo court? Didn’t anyone ask “What’s your full name?”

Without a doubt, the California Gold Rush is the most written about event in the West. Yet not a single historian has questioned why Josefa has no last name. It seems that a Mexican woman in the goldfields was insignificant, not even worthy of a last name, just another “greaser.” And then, over the course of many decades, historians like Hubert Howe Bancroft changed her name to fit the stereotypical Mexican image: she is now referred to as “Juanita of Downieville,” which just adds insult to injury. In some accounts she’s even called “Juanita, the Spanish woman.” So even her single name and her nationality have been distorted.

At other times, Josefa is portrayed in all sorts of romantic images, including the ridiculous, such as she “cheerfully passed away.” But no one has ever stood up for her. No one has ever asked why she was given such a harsh sentence, carried out so brutally, or where she learned the poise to defend herself before a kangaroo court and a frenzied mob. Where did she find the corazón to stand on the gallows and show more bravery than any man that day?
​
These questions were what set me on the road to Downieville.

​• • •

In the history of Mexico and Latin America, gold has always been a double-edged sword. The Europeans, the Spaniards, and the North Americans invaded our lands, driven by their desire to acquire the precious metal. Latin Americans, Mexicans, and Californios have always, by a quirk of fate, occupied land rich in gold deposits, but we have never looked upon this metal with the obsessive avarice of Europeans. Gold might be decorative and beautiful, but in pre-Columbian America it was never the coin of the realm, and never something worth killing for.

As a young boy, I’d heard the stories of gold-crazed Spaniards: Cortés melting to ingots the intricate gifts Moctezuma had offered him, completely disregarding their beauty; his only concern was their monetary value. Or the story of the Inca, Atahualpa, who offered to fill one room with gold and one with silver if Pizarro would release him; but when the ransom was paid, Atahualpa was hung. And somewhere I have seen an old engraving of Indians pouring molten gold down a Spaniard’s throat in the belief that only that remedy would cure them of their gold sickness.

So for me, gold has always been suspicious. And in spite of its allure, within my lifetime, I’ve seen gold lose much of its luster. As I write this, an ounce of gold on the London market is worth much less than an ounce of Humboldt green on any barrio street. So gold has an arbitrary value that is relative, depending on the importance you put on it, much like the value of a human life in the Gold Rush. But how can we compare a human life to a fistful of gold dust? I can’t. I suspect few of us can. For the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians, gold was precious, but with no monetary value. For others, it’s the engine that drives the wheel. And that wheel has always crushed us.

When I first started writing about Josefa, I too became obsessed with gold; it seemed that to understand what precipitated the events of that day in 1851, I had to know gold. I had to feel gold fever in my veins to understand what drove men to such frenzy over it. Is it that beautiful?

In terms of appearance, in its natural state gold is totally unimpressive. The nuggets on exhibit at the Oakland Museum as part of the California Gold Rush Sesquicentennial Project left me feeling a bit like the Native Americans. So what’s the big deal here? I was looking at the very same nugget that James Marshall supposedly found in Coloma and brought to John Sutter. The nondescript nugget was on loan from the Smithsonian and sat in a glass case. It was this nugget that had started the Gold Rush, but I was completely unfazed. First of all, I couldn’t see any beauty in the metal itself. It looked to me a bit like calcified dog turd that I might hose from my sidewalk on any given morning. Secondly, I was suspicious as to how this nugget on display could possibly be the same one that Marshall found that January morning in 1848. This business of the nugget sounded to me a bit like wishful thinking, much like the early Christians believing in slivers of the True Cross. Regardless of what the Smithsonian Institute claims, the chances of this glass-encased nugget being the first one that Marshall found are in the realm of a billion to one, in other words, nil. But 190,000 people went through the exhibit, and they all believed it was the true nugget. Gold, in the California imagination, can make people believe the implausible. It is the stuff that dreams are made of.

At the beginning of the Gold Rush, in 1848, the gold was literally lying about in the creeks and streams. A person didn’t even have to pan for it. You could walk along a stream and maybe pick up several nuggets wedged between the rocks. The biggest nugget found was the size of a cantaloupe, cubic in form, and nearly pure—a twenty-three-pound gold nugget just sitting in the riverbed waiting to be picked up.

At first, it was mostly locals who were in the goldfields, but by 1849 the word had spread and thousands started arriving from all over the world, from Chile and Peru, China, even Malaysia and points east. Soon, approximately one hundred thousand miners were roaming the Sierra foothills, and 7 million dollars’ worth of gold was coming out every month. The totals are staggering: in 1851, the year of this story, 75 million dollars’ worth of gold flowed out of California. By the end of the decade, 594 million dollars’ worth of gold had enriched the treasury of the United States. And the gold kept coming, year after year. During the Civil War, California gold poured into the financial center of New York at the rate of 5 to 6 million dollars’ worth a month, and thereby prevented a total collapse of Lincoln’s government. Without that gold to feed, clothe, and maintain the Northern armies, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation might not have been worth the paper it was written on. Heinrich Schliemann, a young German adventurer, made his fortune in the California goldfields and thus financed his childhood dream—to discover the site of ancient Troy. The list is endless. With California gold, dreams were possible. Without California gold, I wouldn’t be writing this, and life would be much different for all of us.

Nowadays, if you travel Highway 49, you will find the towns freshly painted, the main streets lined with boutiques and cafés, and tourists in khaki shorts drinking at hotel bars and paying with credit cards. But once upon a time, these same towns were ruthless, drinks were paid with gold dust, and life was worth less than an ounce of gold. Behind the present-day tourist-trap façade lies a history that is both ugly and violent.

East of Modesto, I take Highway 26 into the Sierra foothills, over Mokelumne Hill, into the town of Mokelumne, a thumb print of history, with its narrow winding streets and abandoned ruins. Here I hook up with Highway 49. The story goes that during the Gold Rush the trail from Mokelumne to Jackson was marked with empty bottles; perhaps it’s just a story, but the original name of Jackson is Botellas, Spanish for “bottles.”

When I reach Jackson, I stop to get a feel for the gold country towns. Jackson is typical of restored Gold Rush towns: bed and breakfast inns, antique stores—the tourist business is booming. It’s the past they are selling here, not the present. And like everything else that is sold to tourists, it must be squeaky clean. The foot-high sidewalks are spotless, hundred-year-old buildings are juxtaposed with modern storefronts, and history is kept behind a glass case. Garibaldi’s Camera Shop in the center of town features old photographs of Jackson in the 1880s. One photo shows Jackson in the 1930s, all lit up with Saturday night traffic. It’s like looking at photos of your grandmother when she was twenty—you know it’s her, but the resemblance is hard to see.

At the end of Main Street stands the National Hotel, built in 1863. The hotel bar is damp and smoky, with red globe Victorian lamps on the ceiling and the odor of spilled beer thick as a curtain. I imagine it looks much like it did in its heyday. An ornate mirror hangs behind the bar, the wooden floor is warped, and, though it is barely two in the afternoon, customers are sitting around drinking beers and shots of whisky. I’m still several hours from my destination, so I don’t stay long, but I take notice of a plaque behind the bar—fifty yards east of the hotel, Botilla’s (a misspelling of Botellas [Bottles]) Bordello flourished well into this century. Before leaving the National Hotel, the tattooed bartender tells me that Jackson had legalized prostitution, with several bordellos operating around Main Street until 1956, when Governor Pat Brown decided that enough was enough and outlawed the oldest game in town. This reminds me that Oscar Zeta Acosta, in his Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, recounts stories of himself as a teenager, driving into Jamestown, just down the road from Jackson, to hang out with the women at Ruby’s Banana Ranch. So with the last sip of my mineral water I toast the memory of the old Brown Buffalo. Here in the Sierra foothills the Old West died hard—and not too long ago.

After leaving Jackson, I head north. The landscape of the gold country is beautiful: rolling hills, majestic oaks, wildflowers bursting forth in bright colors from the red earth. The present Highway 49 follows the original stagecoach route carved out of the Sierra Nevada, and it runs for a hundred miles along the foothills in a north-south trajectory. It is known as the Gold Country Highway, and the string of small towns spaced along the route form the background of many stories. One hundred and fifty years ago, the Wells Fargo stagecoaches linked the towns of the Mother Lode, bringing newcomers to the rough-and-tumble world of the goldfields and collecting gold dust for shipment to the port of San Francisco. During the Gold Rush, each of these towns was a miniature booming city. Some of them, like Nevada City, were, in their heyday, the biggest and richest cities in California. But they were cities without substance, built to slake the thirst of miners, and when the rivers of gold dried up, or it became too expensive to operate the mines, the reason for their existence ceased, and these towns were abandoned almost overnight.

I’d have to look at a map to check where Highway 49 begins—somewhere near Yosemite Valley, I suppose—but I know quite well where it ends: in the little town of Downieville. 

​• • •

When exactly Josefa arrives in the goldfields is unknown. Most likely she is from Sonora, one of 10,000 other Sonoran miners who worked and lived in the gold country. The Sonorans from northern Mexico, and other Latin Americans, had a long history of gold mining, and they brought with them the tools and techniques to extract the gold once the easy pickings were over. The Sonorans brought the wooden sluices called bateas for panning gold. And the Chileans introduced the arrastra, a heavy stone boulder that a mule drags over quartz to crush it and release the gold. They brought with them not just the culture of gold mining but the language as well; and as I’m driving down Highway 49, the Spanish names crop up like ghosts from the past—El Dorado, Placer, Campo Seco.

But the experience and success of the Sonoran miners were used against them. In 1849, the newcomers arriving from New England did not know the technique for panning or mining gold, and they felt envious of the Sonorans, who knew where to find the quartz veins. The United States had just taken California from Mexico, and the forty-niners believed they were the only ones who had a right to the gold—everyone else, especially nonwhites or those who spoke Spanish, was an interloper, a trespasser, an enemy. As it was, the camps were tense, tough, dirty places. Men survived the best they could, and the weak, those who couldn’t protect their claims, didn’t last long in the goldfields. Moreover, the laws were heavily stacked against foreigners, men and women. For instance, nonwhites could not testify in a court of law against whites. Then, adding further tension to the situation, California passed the Foreign Miners Tax of 1850, a monthly fee of twenty dollars levied on all nonwhite miners, with the explicit purpose of running the Sonorans, the Latinos, and the Chinese out of the goldfields.

The Sonorans were caught in an ironic situation. Many had been in California before the newly arrived forty-niners, and yet they were being taxed as foreigners. They were the founders of the town of Sonora, one of the richest in the gold country, and now they were being chased out. It wasn’t lost on them that other foreigners, the Irish or the English, for example, were not taxed. And if the Sonorans refused to pay the taxes, the forty-niners encouraged each other to jump their claims. The Chinese turned to vegetable growing to survive, while many of the Sonorans left the goldfields disillusioned, or were run out by mobs of forty-niners. Towns they had founded, like Sonora, were abandoned; others, like Columbia, were left with but a handful of miners. But other Sonorans stayed, out of pride perhaps or out of stubbornness. Some were killed; some became outlaws. Out of such conditions arose Joaquín Murieta, the legendary Robin Hood of the Gold Rush era, the hero of a tale so twisted it will take a determined scholar to unravel it.

With a typical mix of the multiple nationalities in the goldfields, Downieville, originally a camp, was founded in 1850 by a Major Downie, with his crew of ten black sailors, one Irishman, one Indian, and one Kanaka, a native Hawaiian. Although the Foreign Miners Tax was repealed in March of 1851, mostly because of complaints by merchants that they were losing business, the damage had been done. By mid-1851, the once plentiful Sonorans were rare in the Sierra foothills. So for Josefa, or any Mexican woman, to have reached the gold country, she had to be resilient, brave, and determined. The last fifty miles of the road to Downieville deteriorated into a winding mule trail cut out of steep ravines along the Yuba River. The journey was not only hard; it was dangerous, whether on foot or on horseback. It was not uncommon for travelers to lose their footing and plunge into the ravine, mules and all. The living conditions along the fork of the river where the camp had sprouted were primitive at best: tents, lean-tos, shanties, and ankle-deep mud everywhere. But Downieville also had two-story wooden buildings, fifteen hotels and gambling houses, butcher shops and bakeries, a theater, and plenty of saloons.

An Argentine miner named Ramón Gil Navarro came to the Gold Rush in 1849 and spent the following three years living and working in the Sierras, alternating with travels to Stockton and San Francisco. He kept a detailed diary that offers some interesting observations about the milieu in which Josefa lived. I quote Navarro because, as a Latin American, he gives a different perspective than the white-authored first-person narratives of that period, which tend to be prejudiced toward everyone of color. Navarro shows himself to be an astute observer, willing to change his own prejudices—about Indian women, for instance—if proven wrong. He also looks at the various races in the goldfields through a humanist lens; his description of black slaves in the goldfields is an example. The scarcity of women in the goldfields is mentioned by every writer in the field, and Navarro is no exception. He recounts in his diary the burial of a white woman, Miss Sheldon, whose horse-drawn casket is followed by well-dressed men because, as Navarro puts it: “The female sex around here sure has a lot of value.” Their value is not just emotional (for comfort, physical and otherwise) but also monetary, as he mentions later in his diary when he’s at Sonora: “In each one of them [the hotels] there is a beautiful girl at the bar and another one at the gambling table, attempting to attract people and crowds to the hotel. Without a girl there can be no hotel, without a beautiful one there can be no business, without a woman there can be no business or anything else.”

Navarro also recounts the rumors that abounded of how Yankee bandits, called “The Forty,” were planning to rally other miners to exterminate all Chileans, Mexicans, or Peruvians on July Fourth, 1849. He goes on to state that threats against foreigners are common on this day, causing many Mexicans to leave the towns and mines of the region. Considering the Foreign Miners Tax of 1850 and the open violence toward Mexicans and Latin Americans between 1849 and 1851, also detailed by Navarro, I’d suspect that the mood of the forty-niners two years later, on July 4, 1851, had become even more patriotically belligerent.

​For Josefa to have lived in Downieville during this unsettled period was an accomplishment in itself. But her courage in the face of an angry mob of forty-niners is the stuff of legend, in the same league with Joan of Arc or whatever woman warrior you want to compare her to. A hundred years from now, all the names involved in this story, including that of the writer, will be forgotten, but Josefa’s name will live on. In my eyes, Josefa is an amazing woman who, through great sacrifice and courage, claims her rights as a human being on the very edge of the goldfields, in a primitive camp twenty miles from the summit of the Sierra Nevada, a place where only the toughest arrived.

​• • •

After 1851, when the easy pickings were over, when the work of sluicing and panning, standing all day in frigid water, stopped being profitable, the gold business changed. More gold had to be produced to quench the thirst for wealth and profit. So hydraulic mining developed, and powerful hoses carved the mountains as if they were cakes. You can still see the sad shells of those washed-away mountains, the bleached boulders piled like dinosaur eggs along the rivers and streams near Highway 49. The debris from the hydraulic mining—mud, sand, and gravel—caused the tributaries flowing into the Sacramento River to turn into sludge channels that ruined the farmlands of the Sacramento Valley. In particular, just south of Grass Valley, the Malakoff Diggings make a lunar landscape look fertile. These operations so fouled the rivers that laws were enacted in 1884 to halt hydraulic mining, but other means of getting at the gold continued to flourish. The biggest and grandest operation was the Empire Mine, outside Nevada City, right on Highway 49.

About three in the afternoon I stop at the Empire Mine, an impressive network of mine tunnels that stretches for 367 miles under the earth. It’s now a park run by the state of California. You pay three bucks and get a tour of the mine. During the eighty years the mine was in operation, 5.8 million ounces of gold, worth over two billion dollars, were produced. The owners had a fancy house built by Willis Polk two hundred yards from the mouth of the mine; they also owned several residences in San Francisco and often traveled to Europe. The eighteen stamps, huge hydraulic pistons that crushed the ore, worked 24/7 and could be heard fifteen miles away. The crushed ore was then slaked with cyanide to release the gold. Four thousand Cornish miners from Wales, known as “Cousin Jacks,” worked the Empire Mine and its subsidiary, the North Star Mine. They were required to change clothes before entering the mines to prevent highgrading, the pilfering of a bit of gold dust, on their way out of the mines. One nugget was worth two weeks’ wages, so everyone highgraded a little.

The literature at the Empire Mine State Park claims that these miners loved their work, their six days a week at the mine, their three dollars a day, and their little pasty lunches of meat and vegetable pies. Romantic perhaps, but I don’t believe a word of it. Their lives were little better than those of the mules that were sedated, then lowered into the mine, where they spent the rest of their lives hauling ore carts in the darkness, without ever seeing the sun again. But even the mules refused to be abused; if they were hitched to more than seven ore carts, they would not budge. The miners, because they had families, had no choice. They descended into the bowels of the mine in train cars that carried sixty men at a time. They blasted and drilled through rock and hauled out the ore under clouds of black dust that filtered into their lungs. No one wore a mask. This is what they’d been raised to do in the coal mines of Wales, and that’s why they’d been brought to work at the Empire Mine. And they worked and kept on working. Throughout the nineteenth century half of these miners were struck with fatal lung diseases. When they mixed the mercury, then the cyanide, no one wore gloves or protective clothing. In those days no one thought of safety issues. During the life of the Empire Mine, before it was closed in 1954, twenty-six men were killed and countless others died of silicosis, their lungs scarred by the quartz dust. The average life span of a miner was forty years. When looked at from a distance, the head frame of the mine, towering hundreds of feet in the air, looks like a giant gallows suitable for men of mythic proportions.

What the Welsh miners have in common with Josefa is that no one recorded their names either. You can see their photographs on display at the Empire Mine, their eyes peering out of the dust that covered their roughhewn faces, but their names do not appear. The only names mentioned are those of the owners and the superintendent. The same is true throughout the gold country: you hear about the Chinese, about the blacks, the Swedes, the Indians, the Kanakas, but you seldom find their names.
I ponder the absence of names, what happens when they are left out of history, when they are erased or ignored, or worse, distorted and stereotyped. History needs names, the names of working people, the plebe as it were, those who are truly the backbone of history. Without names, history is as worthless as pyrite.

By the time I reach Nevada City, the queen of the Mother Lode, the sun is setting in the west, so I hurry on without stopping. This gaudy city, the pearl of the restored towns along Highway 49, epitomizes what the wealth of the Gold Rush bought: saloons, hotels, grand Victorian houses. But there are no colleges built with Gold Rush money, no hospitals, no significant public parks; the truth is that the incredible wealth produced by the Gold Rush didn’t benefit the average person. Wealth never trickles down that far. And once the gold stopped flowing, Nevada City and all the other Gold Rush towns were discarded like worn-out shoes, no longer useful to cover the feet of their owner.

Going through Nevada City, I (re)construct Josefa’s story. I am driving next to the Yuba River, and the road curves and seems to double back, twisting, drawing me into the past.

​There’s one point about which no one argues—in the gold country, perceived crimes were dealt with swiftly and seldom with mercy. The punishment was often a public flogging or whipping, or a branding on the face, or sometimes the clipping off of an ear, any of which was then followed by expulsion from the goldfields. Nearly all the crimes had to do with claim jumping, a very serious offense (unless it was a forty-niner jumping a Mexican’s claim, then it was acceptable), or sluice stealing or mule stealing. Occasionally the vigilante spirit demanded a hanging, in which case the accused were lynched and their bodies were left dangling from a tree or unceremoniously dumped in ravines. Lynching, especially of Mexicans, was quite common in Gold Rush days. At the crossing of Highway 49 and 50, in present-day Placerville—once known as Hangtown—a lifelike dummy swings from a noose outside a local saloon. This might be funny, until I discover that the first multiple lynching in California occurred right in that spot: three men, at least one or two of whom were Mexicanos or Latinos, were lynched here after being flogged to unconsciousness, based on an accusation by a total stranger that they had committed a robbery in another part of the Sierra.

• • •

In the early morning darkness of July 5, 1851, while the streets of Downieville were littered with red-white-and-blue trash and the fervor of patriotic speeches still hung thick as Sierra fog, a white man was stabbed to death for abusing a Mexican woman. The day before, Downieville had celebrated the Fourth of July with a massive patriotic orgy. Hundreds of miners, would-be miners, merchants, travelers, gamblers, politicians, and even a few lawyers and other denizens of the Sierras had come together in a raucous party in honor of California joining the Union. There’d been patriotic speeches, shooting of guns, heavy drinking, several fights, even a stabbing and a flogging. Except for the speeches, it had been a typical day.

Shortly after the murder, a Mexican couple fled to Craycroft’s Saloon, next to the Jersey Bridge. It is possible that the man worked there as a monte dealer, which may have been why they sought this as a place to hide. But the word had already spread like venom among the miners, many of whom now gathered in front of the saloon talking excitedly, many of them urging a quick hanging. When the accused Mexicans were brought out under guard, one of them was a quiet, timid man, the other, a woman named Josefa, whom many of the miners knew. She was small, about twenty-five years old, dark and attractive, with small white teeth and thick black hair that reached her shoulders.

The general attitude of the miners (and popular historians) toward women in the goldfields, unless they were married or merchants, was that they were morally suspect. But Mexican women were even more so. Antonia Castañeda, who has written extensively on gender in frontier California, points out that popular historians stereotyped Mexican women, casting them as “fandango dancing, monte dealing prostitutes, the consorts of Mexican bandits” and as “morally, sexually, and racially impure.” It would be logical that the forty-niners, who were less educated than popular historians, held the same biases.

Now let’s see how the broad generalities of race and gender, class and sexuality were brought to bear on a Mexican woman, alone, in the middle of nowhere.

Picture yourself as Josefa. You’re trying to make a living in this town, scraping by as best you can and staying out of people’s way. You live your life clean; you live with a man, therefore you’re not naïve sexually, but you’re not a prostitute. (It is important to note here that men who personally knew Josefa all state that she was not a prostitute, that her life—in the language of the time—was without the stain of moral turpitude.) Now picture your door being busted down in the middle of the night by a large intruder, a beefy man over six feet tall and weighing some 230 pounds. You yell at him, and he goes away. A few hours later there’s a knock on your door. Perhaps you shouldn’t answer, but you do. It’s the same Americano and his friends. It’s still dark outside, and the man who lives with you tells them to go away. The Americano insults you, calls you a whore. You tell him to repeat his insult inside your house. You believe he won’t do it, but he does. The Americano steps inside; he is belligerent and aggressive, and shouts a demeaning slur in your face. The word whore, puta, is a highly charged epithet.

Now stop for a moment and think—what does the word puta imply at this juncture? It is both racially (because she’s Mexican) and sexually (supposedly she’s a whore) charged, but also infused with class prejudice (a whore works for a living by selling her body) and gender prejudice (Mexican women are whores). Furthermore, the white man says the word in Spanish (puta) to make the insult intimate and clearly understood, therefore metaphorically if not physically (the threat of which was obvious) violating Josefa, verbally and emotionally.

I don’t believe Josefa thought in this way, nor did language exist then to describe violence of this sort, but I’m sure neither the implicit nor the explicit connotations of the word escaped her.

Josefa knew there was no man or law that would defend her if she was raped or even killed. It was just herself. Perhaps now you can explain why Josefa did what she did. 

​• • •

Before you judge Josefa, remember that in 1851, up and down California but especially in the gold country, a virtual war was being waged against Mexicans and Latin Americans. Josefa most certainly knew of the lynchings in Hangtown, most certainly had heard of the violence against Mexicanos, and perhaps even knew some of the Sonorans who’d been run out of the gold country with only a few hours’ warning, forced to leave everything behind. She’d maybe even seen a lynching or two, or known someone who’d been lynched. And the general ambience of the camp, with thousands of single men living in a lawless state, spewing lewd comments everywhere she went, surely generated the sense of injustice and fear that kept her door locked and a knife by her bed. Everything must have been building inside her, like a trip wire just waiting to set off an explosion.

Josefa’s trial unfolded like a bloody finale to the Fourth of July. When Josefa and her male friend emerged from Craycroft’s Saloon, a mob of some six hundred miners, fueled on patriotism and whisky, were ready to lynch them both right then and there. But others in the mob wanted more formality, so they named a judge and a prosecutor and selected a jury, all of them white males. When a lawyer who was present—one of the few times in history a lawyer appears in a favorable light—tried to talk the miners out of their rage, he was shouted down and pummeled by the mob. After these preliminaries, the trial commenced on the same platform where the day before the speakers had praised the United States for taking California from Mexico. The judge was seated, witnesses interrogated, and declarations duly noted. At least one reporter, from the Pacific Star, was present, and his is one of several eyewitness accounts of what happened at the so-called trial.

After several miners claimed the deceased was of good character and was just trying to make amends for earlier breaking down the couple’s door, Josefa’s companion testified. His version is somewhat different; he said the Americano was abusive, and that their door was knocked down with such force as to rip it from its hinges. He also stated that the Americano threatened him with violence, but since he was small, Josefa stepped in and told the Americano to strike her instead. Then the Americano heaped abuse on Josefa, first calling her a whore in English, then in Spanish. She told him to say that in her own house and left him in the street. When the Americano followed her and was about to enter, Josefa stabbed him.

Josefa, who’d laughed at some of the white men’s testimony, appears as the final witness. What happened in private and in the dark, she now declaims in public and in daylight.

Here’s her version of the incident: At about 4:00 a.m. on the morning of July 5, the Americano had arrived at the cabin that she shared with her man. The Americano was drunk and had no reason for disturbing them. He’d knocked down the door and, after an angry exchange of words, had gone away—only to return a few hours later. This time the Americano insulted her, calling her bad names.

Her own words have come down to us, describing that fateful moment: “I took the knife to defend myself. I had been told that some of the boys wanted to get into my room and sleep with me. A Mexican boy told me so and it frightened me so that I used to fasten the door and take a knife with me to bed. I told deceased that was no place to call me bad names, come in and call me so, and as he was coming in I stabbed him.” It was that simple. Josefa hadn’t gone out looking for trouble; trouble had come to her house. She felt threatened, sexually and otherwise, verbally abused, and her male companion wouldn’t help her, so she defended herself as best she could.

Josefa told the truth, and it didn’t go down well. After her testimony, the judge adjourned the trial till 1:30 p.m., and Josefa was taken away under guard to a log cabin behind the speaker’s platform. During the break, the mob grew to well over two thousand angry miners, whose sense of justice, as it was later explained by apologists,
demanded a hanging as some sort of revenge.

But more likely the miners were incensed to see a Mexican woman speak forcefully and openly, especially after having just taken the life of one of their own. In this sense, she speaks sin pelos en la lengua, holding nothing back, an attitude not unusual of Mexican women in pre- and post-1846 California, who, contrary to stereotypes, did act upon history, controlling their fate as much as possible within the confines of those times.

After the recess, a doctor came forth who stated that Josefa was enciente, pregnant, in other words, approximately three months along. By all moral standards, this should have prevented her hanging. Instead, what happens next is a symbolic rape of her by the miners via three white male doctors from Marysville who, in conjunction with the previous doctor, take Josefa into a makeshift shack and reexamine her for signs of pregnancy. Since it was pretty clear to everyone that the miners wanted revenge, from my point of view, this action was meant to humiliate her. How else to interpret this? Perhaps Josefa felt that if she submitted to this degrading body exam, her life might be saved. While the so-called doctors toyed with Josefa, the forty-niners grew more enraged and were about to storm the platform when the three doctors emerged and declared that, in their opinion, Josefa wasn’t pregnant. The jury retired and within minutes announced its verdict: Josefa was guilty of murder, and she should suffer death in two hours. Her male companion was acquitted but advised to leave town within twenty-four hours. It was about two in the afternoon when Josefa was led off under guard to the cabin. During the next two hours, Josefa received visitors and perhaps prayed or made her peace with God.

But why, if women were so rare, cherished, and valuable, would a mob of womanless men condemn Josefa to the gallows? Only by looking at the context of those times can we perhaps understand the reasons. Antonia Castañeda provides the framework: “The woman who is defined out of social legitimacy because of the abrogation of her primary value to patriarchal society, that of producing heirs, is therefore without value, without honor.” Josefa, as a Mexican woman living with a man, was outside the scope of patriarchal society, and as Castañeda goes on to say, “A woman (women) thus devalued may not lay claim to the rights and protection the society affords to the woman who does have socio-political and sexual value” (emphasis mine).

It goes without saying that the men who clamored for Josefa’s lynching were not thinking this way (if a mob can be said to think), but this is exactly how they behaved. A woman, Josefa (read valuable), who is Mexican (of no value) can be lynched, because without value (i.e., suitability for reproducing heirs), society (read men) would not grant her the rights and protection usually accorded women, thus they would not save her from the gallows.

Josefa is lynched because she is a Mexican and a woman considered “without value” to the white male patriarchal society. If all the doctors in the world had said she was pregnant, it would not have increased her value to white society, since she wasn’t pregnant with a white man’s child. The miners were not even obligated to follow a civilized code of moral conduct, since Josefa was considered outside “moral” society and therefore without any rights.

Around four o’clock, Josefa was escorted to the scaffold that had been slapped together over the river, an awkward affair of timbers strapped to the bridge with heavy rope. She was tastefully dressed, and her hair flowed freely over her neck and shoulders. She appeared calm and unrepentant. By then, two thousand miners had gathered around the Jersey Bridge and along the Yuba River, waiting impatiently for the finale, as if it was some patriotic celebration.

It’s hard to imagine this tiny woman walking toward the scaffold through the mob of jeering miners. What was she thinking about as she took her last walk—her home in Sonora, or the dogwoods along the river, or, if she was pregnant, that her child would also die? Perhaps she recalled the day she arrived in the gold country, her head filled with wild dreams of fortune. She might also have considered the weird fate that had brought her to this town by the river. Perhaps she cursed all the Americanos, or forgave them. But somewhere along that final walk she made peace with herself, and she strode through the mob showing no fear. Like other California women of the time (I’m thinking of María de las Angustias de la Guerra at Monterey, California, during the war of 1846), when confronted by white male violence, Josefa showed cool-headed grace under life-or-death pressure.

Once on the platform, she turned to the few Mexicans who’d gathered by her side and told them that she’d killed the man and expected to pay for it. She shook hands with each of them and offered them a few words of goodbye and asked her friends to take her body so that she might be decently buried.

It was perhaps here that she decided on the act of bravery and defiance that has immortalized her. Unassisted, without fear or hesitation, she walked up the little ladder to the scaffold, where two vigilantes stood beside the noose, hoping to intimidate her. To the astonishment of the mob, she took the thick rope knotted into an awkward noose and slipped it around her neck, then arranged her hair so it would flow over her shoulders. It was more than an unmistakable gesture of courage, something every man that day would remember as long as they lived. It was Josefa’s last defiant statement.
​
The two vigilantes pinioned her arms behind her back, which she protested. They ignored her. In their eyes, she had stopped being human the moment she stepped onto the scaffold—if indeed she’d ever been human in their eyes. They tied her dress down and slipped a hood over her head, then jumped free of the scaffold. At that point, two men axed the rope propping up the scaffold.

​• • •

I reach Downieville at dusk and check into the Sierra Shangri-La Motel along the river’s edge. The river cuts a deep ravine through the mountains that seem to rise up angrily out of the earth. There’s nothing unique about the town; it consists merely of a few cheap motels and bars and the usual shops along the main drag. There’s a bridge, and next to it a white brick building, which is the modern-day Craycroft’s Saloon. Here, a small bronze plaque marks the occasion of Josefa’s lynching with typical inaccuracy: “In memory of Juanita, the Spanish woman, lynched by mob from original bridge on this site, July 5, 1851.” Thank god there are no souvenir stands offering little scaffolds with dolls in Mexican dresses hanging from them.

I’ve driven for nearly eight hours, but I’m not tired, so I wander around town. I know where I’m going, but I pretend it’s an aimless walk. On Highway 49, the traffic is almost dead. There’s a tense quiet in Downieville, as if I am disturbing something. I know Josefa was originally buried behind the theater, and that later her body was reinterred, but I don’t know where. Tomorrow I will make inquiries, but I don’t have much hope of finding her final resting place. The story goes that when she was reinterred, her skull was removed and used by a local secret society in an initiation ritual of some sort. Though hard to believe, it’s not totally implausible, especially if one considers the fate of Joaquín Murieta’s own head. But I don’t believe in ghosts, so I’m not sure what I expect to find here in this mean little town. By now I despise not just the forty-niners, but the Fourth of July, patriotic speeches, the American flag, and that cursed gold. I will never wear gold jewelry; I will never own so much as a grain of it.

I’ve read so many accounts of lynchings in which the victims were nameless Mexicans, or blacks, or Chinese, even Anglos, that perhaps I merely want to pay homage to all the nameless dead of the Gold Rush, to all those who perished here in the majestic foothills of the Sierra Nevada, yes, even to the Cornish miners who died in the bowels of this red earth so that others could become rich. Perhaps I just don’t want Josefa to go into eternity so nameless, so insignificant, that not even her last name is recorded, because I despise the anonymity that is handed out to us like nooses with which to hang ourselves. Perhaps I just want to give one of these nameless dead a sense of closure. After all, every human being is worthy of at least that much. Every human life is more valuable than a mountain of gold.

In the quiet of the Sierra night, the Yuba River is rushing through the gorge. I come to the bridge, which looks dark, ominous. I know the original bridge where Josefa was lynched was washed away by the flood of 1852. I also know that this Craycroft’s Saloon is not the original, since the whole town was destroyed by a conflagration less than a year after Josefa’s lynching, as if the gods had brought down the divine hand of retribution on this place. It doesn’t matter. I stand on the bridge and look over the railing, and I can almost see her face in the water, surrounded by her long hair. I want to do the natural thing and give her a last name, my last name, make her part of my clan, so her spirit will always have a home. But she deserves the honor of her single name, because she represents all the nameless ones who lived and died here and never made it rich, all the nameless faces in the photographs. In some way, perhaps, she is the Saint of the Mother Lode, martyr and inspiration to all Mexicas, symbol of our courage. No matter how hard they have tried to erase our names from history, our stories have endured.

​There’s no place on the bridge for a cross of flowers with her name on it, but the river is eternal. I toss a sprig of wildflowers that I’ve picked along the road into the frothy currents. It floats for a moment before it disappears beneath the roiling water. I am finished. I have told her story. I have returned her name to the dark mountains, buried it in La Veta Madre, like ancient gold returned to its matrix, undisturbed. I say her name one last time—Josefa. And I walk away from the bridge.

​Alejandro Murguía is the author of ​Southern Front and This War Called Love (both winners of the American Book Award). His non-fiction book, ​​The Medicine of Memory, highlights the Mission District in the 1970s during the Nicaraguan Solidarity movement. He is a founding member and the first director of the Mission Cultural Center. He was a founder of The Roque Dalton Cultural Brigade, and co-editor of Volcán: Poetry from Central America. Currently, he is a professor in Latina Latino Studies at San Francisco State University. He is the author of the short story “The Other Barrio” which first appeared in the anthology San Francisco Noir and recently filmed in the streets of the Mission District. In poetry he has published Spare Poems and Native Tongue. He was the Sixth San Francisco Poet Laureate and the first Latino poet to hold the position.

​​Mapping Violence:
The Numbers Reveal More of the Truth

We share this link below as a public service to introduce our readers to a detailed mapping project that tracks death at the hands of police and provides graphic depictions of the date collected as well as breakdowns of the data by various factors.
https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/
 
The section below, titled Police Violence Report, further breaks down the data, providing details of the victims by race or ethnicity (“Hispanic”).
https://policeviolencereport.org/


​CALL FOR MORE TESTIMONIES
We open the Somos en escrito pages to receive other writings on the history of violence experienced by Mexican Americans. We are interested in particular to hear testimony from individuals about incidents going back in their family history. If you have written declarations such as memoirs, even better. Send your information to [email protected] so we can respond.

​Interview of John Morán Gonzales, Professor, Department of English, and Director, Center for Mexican American Studies, UT Austin
 
Host: Joan Neuberger, Professor, Department of History, UT Austin; Editor of “Not Even Past”
 
In the early part of the 20th century, Texas became more integrated into the United States with the arrival of the railroad. With easier connections to the country, its population began to shift away from reflecting its origins as a breakaway part of Mexico toward a more Anglo demographic, one less inclined to adapt to existing Texican culture and more inclined to view it through a lens of white racial superiority. Between 1915 and 1920, an undeclared war broke out that featured some of the worst racial violence in American history; an outbreak that’s become known as the Borderlands War.
 
John Morán Gonzales, from UT’s Department of English and Center for Mexican American Studies has curated an exhibition on the Borderlands War called, “Life and Death on the Border, 1910-1920,” and tells us about this little-known episode in Mexican American history.
 
The transcription follows:
 
Q: Our topic today is the Borderlands War that took place between 1915 and 1920 approximately, on the border between Texas and Mexico. Could you start with a definition or outline of what happened?
 
A: Essentially it was a period of violence, in which there was an undeclared war between the Anglo Texan and Mexican American communities, in which there was violence perpetrated by both sides, but the brunt of the violence was directed by the state and local authorities against the Mexican American population.
 
Q: What made this period so violent? What was the situation at the time?
 
A: The context for this was the rapid change in the economy — a ranching economy dominated by Mexican Americans into a farming economy dominated by newcomer Anglo Texans. The rapid change during the previous 10-20 years had resulted in a displacement of the old order, the old Mexican American order along the border, with the new Jim Crow style segregation.
 
Q: Under the ranching economy, was there more cooperation, or were there fewer Anglos?
 
A: There were certainly fewer Anglos coming to the border region prior to the turn of the century, prior to the arrival of the railroad in this region in 1904. And so those Anglos who did come in tended to inter-marry into established Mexican American ranching families and became essentially Mexicanized. After that, the number of newcomers coming in with decidedly different views about Mexican racial inferiority went there to exploit cheap land and cheap labor.
 
Q: Who were the main targets of the violence?
 
A: The main targets of the violence were the general Mexican American population of the area who were often perceived to be in cahoots with raiders and other guerilla fighters who were against the changes that occurred.
 
Q: About how many were killed during this violence?
 
A: Estimates are very hard to come by precisely because many of the incidents were covered up by those who perpetrated them, particularly those of law enforcement. The estimates range from a low of 300-500 to 3,000-5,000, which was a figure that Walter Prescott Webb, the hagiographer of the Texas rangers, came up with in his 1935 history of the rangers.
 
Q: Why did the violence escalate at this point?
 
A: The violence escalated because the Mexican Americans of that region who had been displaced from their place with the society and economy of the region very much resented the new racial order imposed upon them by the Anglo newcomers.
They were disenfranchised in terms of their social status, they were disenfranchised literally in terms of their votes as white only primaries became the norm and therefore they saw their power ebbing away. So this built up a great deal of resentment with the new order.
 
Q: Did the state of Texas play a role in supporting or trying to limit the violence? Were they on a particular side?
 
A: The state authorities, particularly as embodied by the Rangers, were perpetrators of some of the worst violence of this period. Extra judicial killings of Mexican Americans by the Rangers was quite common in this period, often taking the form of “shot dead attempting to flee” kind of scenarios. So the Rangers were very much part of the problem rather than an attempt to ameliorate the situation.
 
And certain segments of the newcomer community very much welcomed what they saw as putting the local Mexican American population in their place. There were lynchings, shootings in the back, decapitations, mutilation of bodies. There was one instance in which bottles were inserted into the mouths of those who were executed. The violence was extreme and the kind of symbolism attached to it was equally extreme.
 
Q: One Texas newspaper you quote as saying that this was a good thing because there was a serious surplus population that needed eliminating. Was that a widespread sentiment?
 
A: It was to the extent that the Mexican population was viewed as a kind of necessary evil. That is, on one hand, many newcomers came to that region of Texas expecting to be able to use a cheap labor force for their economic endeavors. On the other hand, they represented a threat because of their ability to vote and hence the idea of a surplus population that needed trimming is an expression of this latter sentiment.
 
Q: Can you give us some examples of some of the things that happened?
 
A: Yes, the summer of 1915, particularly the months of August through October, saw the height, the most intense violence in the region. In one instance, in late September of 1915, there was a clash between Texas Rangers and about 40 Mexican Americans in Hidalgo County, where Rangers took a dozen prisoners and promptly hung them and their bodies were left to rot for days.
 
In another instance that same month, Texas Ranger captain Henry Ransom shot landowners Jesús Bazan and Antonio Longoria once again leaving their bodies out in the open to rot. And at one point, Ransom reported to Ranger headquarters in Austin that: “I drove all the Mexicans from three ranches.”
 
Q: Did state officials just turn a blind eye to the violence in the sense that they supported it? Or were there investigations? What was the state role here?
 
A: The Rangers had received clear signals from the Governor’s office and other authorities that they had a free rein to handle or control the situation as they saw fit. That is, a clear sign that no one would be prosecuted for any extra judicial killings. The depredations only came to a stop when Brownsville State Representative José Tomás Canales initiated an investigation of the Ranger force and their actions over the previous decade in 1919.
 
Q: So why would the Rangers, a force that was created to protect the residents of Texas, commit this violence against Mexican Americans?
 
A: Essentially, they were in the service of consolidating the new, white, supremacist order in south Texas. That is, essentially, the purpose of the violence was to send a clear signal that Mexican Americans would be dealt with harshly if they attempted any opposition to this new order, whether through the ballot box or other means.
 
Q: Did the Mexican government play any role in what was going on?
 
A: The Mexican government did not have a direct role in this, because the country was in the middle of a revolution. There was constant instability over which faction controlled which parts of the border. It was more the climate of instability that allowed raiders to cross back and forth across the Rio Grande with impunity and created a sense of siege by the Anglo community in this part of south Texas.
 
Q: Can you say anything about the raiders themselves, that is, the people who were resisting changes taking place in the economy and then eventually the violence being perpetrated on them by the Rangers and other forces?
 
A: This group is often referred to as Los Sediciosos or seditious ones and they attempted to essentially oust the new Anglo order by these guerrilla raids upon ranches, the derailing of a train near Brownsville, and these sorts of actions, but they were very much constrained by the small number of raiders as well as the state’s overwhelming use of force against them.
 
Q: So you said that the violence finally subsided when State Representative Canales called for an investigation of the Rangers in 1919. And that’s the conventional ending of the violence. Did it continue after that?
 
A: Well, in fact, it did. I think the most egregious episode was the Porvenir Massacre in West Texas in 1918 when Rangers executed 15 Mexican men, separated them from their families, and then executed them. Now I have to say the role of the U.S. Army was crucial here in beginning to tamp down the extra-judicial actions of the Rangers and local vigilantes.

​Q: What did they do?
 
A: Essentially, they very much saw the Rangers and the local sheriffs as part of the problem, as continuing the violence rather than defusing it. Mexican Americans began to see the federal government, in the guise of the US Army, as being on their side in some respects.
 
Q: So, we have this very complicated picture where we have a changing economy, we have a revolution going on south of the border, we have people trying to make a living, a small group of people violently resisting the changes, and the representatives of the state of Texas trying to suppress them but also carrying out violence against people randomly as well. What was the response of other people? Was there any sort of peace movement? Was there any cooperation among newcomers, Anglos, other European settlers, and the Mexican Americans there? How did other people respond?
 
A: Yes, it was a complicated picture because certainly there were Tejanos who were aiding the Rangers and other parties in the suppression of the Mexican American community and, on the other hand, there were Anglo settlers who were very much appalled at the violence being perpetrated against local communities. One of them was Brownsville lawyer and historian Frank Cushman Pierce who compiled a list of 102 victims, entirely on his own time. Then he also confronted Lon C Hill who was one of the major developers of Harlingen, Texas, about his role in these incidents.
 
Q: In supporting the Rangers, in supporting the violence?
 
A: Yes.
 
Q: What then are some of the short-term consequences of this violence? It must have been incredibly disruptive.
 
A: Absolutely. The violence in the lower Rio Grande Valley in particular resulted in the depopulation of rural areas as Mexican American residents fled to the relative safety of border towns or crossed into Mexico for safety. This only accelerated the transfer of land to newcomer Anglos as Mexican Americans abandoned their lands.
 
This also had implications for Mexican Americans from this area as they were drafted into military service for the First World War. They resisted the summons to serve precisely because they could not reconcile the violence visited upon them by the U.S. with service in the same military that they saw as part of the problem. And they were termed slackers in the language of the day for allegedly slacking off their duty as patriotic citizens.
 
One other implication was that Walter Prescott Webb essentially launched his career, his academic career, in reaction to the Canales investigation. He wrote his 1922 Master’s thesis as an apology for the role of Rangers during this period and later transformed that piece into his hagiography of the Rangers, the 1935 Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense, which is still a perennial best seller for the University of Texas Press.
 
Q: What are some of the long-term consequences of the violence?
 
A: This event tremendously impacted the development of Mexican American civil rights organizations. During the 1920s, Mexican Americans began to organize in new ways, in new kinds of political and civic organizations devoted to the promotion of Mexican American civil rights. The exemplary one from this period would be the League of United Latin American Citizens, which formed in 1929. LULAC emphasized the idea that Mexican Americans had to cement their political allegiance to the United States rather than to Mexico because the United States would be the nation that would protect them from any future violence directed against them. This was the cultural project of this civil rights organization.
 
Q: This is a really fascinating history that people don’t know much about. You got involved because you’re part of a group that is putting on an exhibit about the Borderlands War at the Bullock Museum of Texas History, is that right? Can you tell us a little about that exhibit and what its purpose is?
 
A: The exhibit is called, “Life on the Border, 1910-1920,” and the purpose is to raise the public’s awareness of this incident and the major role it’s had in shaping Mexican American life in Texas. The role of the state in perpetrating this violence is something that we as a group have wanted specifically to highlight with this project with the goal of making connections with questions of policing communities of color, which are obviously relevant today.
 
Q: We’re looking forward to that exhibit and you’re hoping to have the exhibit, after its run at the Bullock, travel around Texas to the Borderland region but also to the rest of Texas to bring this story to the population?
 
A: We’re hoping to take it nationally.
 
Even better.

John Morán Gonzales, a Brownsville, Texas, native, is the J. Frank Dobie Regents Professor of American and English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin and serves as Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies. His works include Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature (University of Texas Press, 2009), The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels, (Ohio State University Press, 2010), and is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Latina/o Literature and co-editing (with Laura Lomas) The Cambridge History of Latina/o Literature.

​Joan Neuberger, professor in the UT Austin Department of History, studies modern Russian culture in social and political context. She is the author of an eclectic range of books, from Hooliganism: Crime and Culture in St Petersburg, 1900-1914 (California: 1993) to Ivan the Terrible: The Film Companion (Palgrave: 2003); and co-editor of Imitations of Life: Melodrama in Russia (Duke: 2001) and Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (Yale: 2008). She is Editor of the History Department's website, Not Even Past, and co-host, with Christopher Rose, of the podcast series, 15 Minute History. The interview was podcast as Episode 73 on October 7, 2015.

​DESPITE GLOBALIZATION
 
By Álvaro Ramirez
 
18 JANUARY, 2019

Many Mexicans who grew up in the sixties and seventies remember when Las Ardillitas (Alvin and The Chipmunks) used to sing Christmas songs in Spanish and Pánfilo, the bad ardillita, was always making funny comments that undermined the Christmas message of the songs. The manager, Lalo Guerrero, considered his comments improper and admonished him: “I’m absolutely certain that Santa Claus will not bring you anything.” To which Pánfilo responded: “Who cares, I’m not a client of that man; the Three Kings bring me my toys.” Back then, many people sympathized with Pánfilo and saw Santa Claus as an exotic American foreigner, nowadays it seems that sentiment has gone by the wayside, but is this really the case?
​
Any way you look at it, the Mexican holiday season has taken an American turn, especially during the NAFTA epoch, every year we can see the spirit of an American Christmas gaining ground in Mexico and giving the old Mexican yuletide traditions a run for their money.

You can find Christmas trees (fake and not too attractive) in most downtown areas of big cities, surrounded lately by an ice rink in an attempt to recreate the festive ambiance of cities like New York. Colorful lights and decorations, made easily available through COSTCO and Walmart hang uneasily from roofs, walls, and around windows or adorn artificial trees in many homes. Walk through any Galerías Mall or Supermarket and you can merrily shop along isles trimmed with wreaths, mistletoe, silver bells, and Christmas carols (sung in English) swirling all around, seducing you to shop for the perfect gift for your loved ones. Television programs and movies like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer also stir up the holiday cheer, American style. And of course, you will find a Mexican Santa Claus somewhere in a Plaza Galerías ready to take a picture with you so you can post it on your Instagram and Facebook and relieve the memory forever.

Yet, far away from downtown areas, malls, and transnational stores, in the barrios one can still hear the beautiful sounds of Las Posadas with their ancient Spanish Christmas songs, piñatas, aguinaldos (gifts of candies), and great food. Christmas Eve (La Noche Buena sounds better, the words strike a beautiful chord within us) still brings the family together to share a special meal of tamales and other traditional foods. Many people attend the midnight church mass to witness the birth of Baby Jesus (almost always a little too white, but who cares) to Mary and Joseph in a manger surrounded by shepherds, sheep, an ox, and a mule; overlooking it all a beautiful angel. It is a ritual that reinforces the bonds of family and community.
​
Even more far away, over in the Orient Three Magic Kings, Melchor, Gaspar, and Baltazar, get ready to do battle with the laughing, merry, old Nordic Man. In the days before Santa Claus invaded their territory, the kings began their trip around the world early to arrive and deliver gifts in every home during the magical morning hours of January 6. Throughout the previous afternoon and night, radio disc jockeys announced their regal whereabouts: a plane spotted The Three Kings over the Pacific Ocean; they have just passed the islands of Hawaii, soon they’ll arrive at the Baja California Coast. Go to sleep children and leave hay for the camels that the Three Wise Men are riding laden with gifts, which they’ll stuff into millions of shoes. The excitement of the anticipation made it difficult for children to restfully sleep on this enchanting night.

​Nowadays, the situation is a little tough for these wise men from the Orient. Santa Claus is a hard act to follow but the Three Kings still have their magic. In the old days, children used to imagine them loading up somewhere in the Orient even though it was popularly thought that Melchor was Spanish, Gaspar an Arab, and Balthazar an African (religious authorities saw them as learned men; Melchor as king of Persia, Balthazar king of Arabia, and Gaspar king of India). The star they now follow takes them through the Far East and they make a stop in China. That’s where they pick up the toys probably put together by underpaid Chinese children for Mexican children. The toys may have a little too much lead content, but who cares, they’re cheap, and this is all the Three Kings can afford to deliver to many households in Mexico. The same toys you can find being sold on the sidewalks surrounding town centers and public markets, teeming with people on January 5th. These are the gifts that will find their way into many shoes throughout Mexico, with the help of the Three Wise Men, to bring happiness to millions of children.

Yes, Pánfilo, despite the fact that globalization helps Santa Claus gain followers by leaps and bounds, there are still many Mexicans like you who are faithful clients of The Three Kings. These Mexicans are not as separated as it might seem, some may look toward the mall and others toward the sidewalk and public market vendors to celebrate the birth of Jesus, still they are united by the magic of the magi when both groups buy the yummy rosca de reyes (a sort of oversized pastry donut or bagel) to share with family. In this way, the Three Kings bring together Mexicans on January 6, as they gather round “la rosca” to break bread literarily and figuratively as a nation.
It does not end there; inside those oversized donuts are several, tiny plastic Baby Jesus. If you get one in your slice you are obliged to continue the harmony brought by the Magi. You will gather everyone again on February 2, Día de la Candelaría (Candlemas), to eat tasty tamales, paid by you.
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In spite of globalization and the expansion of Santa’s influence, the visitors from the Orient are still quite relevant in our lives: The Three Magic Kings still rule!
 

​Álvaro Ramírez is from Michoacán, México. He migrated with his family to Ohio as an adolescent. He obtained a BA in Spanish and Education at Youngtown State University, and an MA and PhD in Literature from the University of Southern California. He has taught at various institutions including the University of Southern California, Occidental College, and California State University, Long Beach. Since 1993, he has worked at Saint Mary’s College of California where he is a Professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures. He specializes in Spanish Golden Age and Latin American literature as well as Mexican Film and Chicano Cultural Studies. He recently published the book, Postcards from a PostMexican on the swiftly evolving transnationalization of both cultural and political characters of the U.S. and Mexico. 

If you have traveled abroad lately, you may have noticed that national identities are becoming a bit vague. The cultural uniqueness that used to distinguish one nation from another has been quickly disappearing thanks to the accelerated pace of cultural contact brought about by globalization. Mexico and the USA illustrate this well as we go through the holiday season.
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Millions of Mexican immigrants, legal and undocumented, as well as tourism between both countries have created cultural contact zones unlike any in human history. As they have settled in these areas of the United States, Mexicans have adopted American habits even as they have maintained much of the cultural heritage they brought with them. For example, they love Thanksgiving turkey and on Black Friday you can find them shopping like crazy across the malls alongside Americans.

December, however, is a Mexican fiesta north of the border. Los americanos are growing accustomed to seeing and joining the solemn Virgen de Guadalupe celebrations around December 12th and breaking piñatas in the noisy, colorful Posadas on December 15th-24th. Moreover, Mexicans have fused seamlessly La Noche Buena (Christmas Eve) and Christmas Day, so they can have their tasty tamaladas and receive the birth of Jesus with tons of gifts the good old American way.
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As many Mexican immigrants return to visit family in Mexico, they bring along these new cultural customs, especially their sons and daughters who were born and raised in the United States. You can see the influence of these new cultural ways in small towns and cities across the country. Mexicans now have their Buen Fin, a clone of Black Friday, and on Thanksgiving more and more people are preparing a turkey dinner a la americana or go to restaurants that offer a similar menu. As for Santa Claus, Christmas trees and carols, they are the norm everywhere. It may seem strange, but in Mexico City and Cuernavaca, you can even go ice-skating downtown!
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You could say Cinco de Mayo was the first cultural celebration to bring Americans and Mexicans together, and that lately Día de los Muertos and Halloween have provided more cultural glue that binds people on both side of the border. But it is the long holyday season at the end of the year that is having the biggest impact on our identities and how we see ourselves in Mexico and the United States. Mexicans who visit the U.S. and Americans who travel to Mexico are bewildered by this turn of events. National identities may still be around, but the unique cultural elements that separated them are blending fast and, in some cases, disappearing and becoming a thing of the past.

Somos en escrito Literary Foundation Press published a compilation of Álvaro Ramírez’s observations on changing cultural traditions: Postcards from a PostMexican. Click the cover above or visit Amazon to buy a copy. 

This postcard first appeared on Álvaro Ramírez’s Postcards from a PostMexican blog on December 24, 2019. This postcard was published under the title “How the Holiday Season is Changing Mexican and American Cultural Identities” in Cultura Colectiva, a Mexican online magazine, on January 2, 2020. 

Álvaro Ramírez is from Michoacán, México. He migrated with his family to Ohio as an adolescent. He obtained a BA in Spanish and Education at Youngtown State University, and an MA and PhD in Literature from the University of Southern California. He has taught at various institutions including the University of Southern California, Occidental College, and California State University, Long Beach.
Since 1993, he has worked at Saint Mary’s College of California where he is a Professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures. He specializes in Spanish Golden Age and Latin American literature as well as Mexican Film and Chicano Cultural Studies. He also serves as Resident Director for the Saint Mary’s College Semester Program in Cuernavaca, México.
In 2016, Prof. Ramírez published a collection of short stories, Los norteados, which received an Honorable Mention Award at the 2017 International Latino Book Awards. In addition, he has edited two online publications of Conference Proceedings: Imágenes de postlatinoamérica, volumen 1 (2018) and Imágenes de postlatinoamérica, volumen 2 (2019). He has also published articles on Don Quixote, Mexican film, and Chicano Studies in several academic journals.

​“Anti-Mexicanism is a form of nativism practiced by colonialists and their inheritors.”

​—​​Dr. Juan Gómez-Quiñones (2017)

​“My father’s land / is crossed / ribbon like / by stone fences / the wither in the sun / White stones that glisten in the sun, / Stones that ballast a sea of brown hills. / My father whip laid them, / My mother’s tribe fed them.”
 
—Dr. Juan Gómez-Quiñones, 5th and GRANDE VISTA (Poems, 1960-1973), Colección Mensaje, New York, 1973, p. 61.

​One word: brilliant!
 
Like in the case of another brilliant Mexican in el norte, Gloria Anzaldúa, JGQ provided us with a powerful voice against a racist American system that has attempted (and failed!) to erase our history. JGQ took the ashes of our once burnt history by the European colonists (and their inheritors) and created scholarly books, peer-reviewed articles, essays and eloquent poems in elite spaces limited to the best and the brightest Western Civilization has to offer. He has done so—and continues to do so—through his publications, speeches and memories without succumbing to fear or forgetting where he came from.

​As I reflect on JGQ, there are no words that I can conjure to heal the immense pain that I’m feeling. I cried when I first heard the terrible news on Tuesday morning and have been struggling to maintain my East Los Angeles composure ever since. I think I lost my street cred! I’m sad because I won’t be getting random calls from JGQ at odd hours when he has something on his mind. I’m sad because I won’t be receiving mail packets of his latest manuscripts for me to review or help get published.
 
“No worries, Juan, I’ll make sure that the last two manuscripts you sent me will see the light of day!”
 
Given all that he has done for me, I’ve always heeded his friendly and warm requests. That’s what familia is all about.
 
I first met JGQ in 1985, when I started UCLA as a freshman, majoring in mathematics, from East Los Angeles—a place where JGQ also hails from. I must say that I was originally shocked to see a Chicano professor at an elite university. Since most of my K-12 teachers were White, I never knew that Chicana/o professors even existed. I was equally shocked when JGQ assigned us books written by brown scholars. Many moons later, I’m following the example of the great Chicana and Chicano authors that I read in JGQ’s classes, especially his fine works.
 
Speaking of historians, I’ve always wondered why history professors assign at least 5-6 books—300+ pages per book without pictures!—to read in a quarter or semester? I only read one book—John Steinbeck’s The Pearl—throughout my dysfunctional K-12 education! While JGQ practiced this norm, he made it clear to us that the study of history represents a serious subject. When he walked around North Campus at UCLA, he was always carrying several books on one hand and numerous student papers to grade on his other hand.
 
Constantly thinking, reading and writing, he was oblivious and impervious of his surroundings. One day, for instance, while taking a small seminar on historiography with JGQ, I, along with my classmates, waited for him to teach and lead us in discussion/dialogue for about 30 minutes after class started. We then formed a posse to rescue him from his office, where we found him in a deep state of writing.
 
As I’ve said before, while JGQ was stoic, like my late Mexican father, once you scratched beneath the surface, he was a sweet and caring teddy bear. That said, during my initial encounters with JGQ, I was intimidated. Over 30 years later, I can still recall knocking on his office door on the 6th floor of  Bunche Hall, where he would gruffly say, “Yes!”
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My response? “Hello, Mr. Quiñones…I mean, Professor Quiñones, I want to talk to you about my paper. I’ve never written a 10-page paper and don’t know how to start. Heck, I’ve only written one 2-page paper, triple spaced, in my entire life!”
 
Once I got to know him, I learned to announce myself. “Hello, Quiñones, this is Álvaro.  I need to ask you some questions about the readings.” Often, I would go with my fellow student activists or MEChistas, where we minored in “JGQ Studies,” just to hang out and talk about politics or sports. He wasn’t fond of small talk or chisme. Also, he rarely talked about himself or how he grew up, especially as one of the first Chicanas/os to pursue higher education when he first entered the university. He never took credit for all of his accomplishments. Instead, he would always credit the collective efforts of the committed educators, youth, activists and other agents of social change throughout the Chicana/o movement and beyond.
 
In terms of MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicana/o de Aztlán) at UCLA during the mid-1980s, whenever we organized a protest on campus or in the community, we could always count on JGQ for his unconditional support. For example, when we organized a hunger strike at UCLA—one of the first, if not the first at UCLA and at any UC campus—in defense of undocumented immigrants (November 11-19, 1987), we knew that JGQ had our back. When we didn’t show up to class, he didn’t scold or hector us. He encouraged us, teaching us a key lesson that I pass on to my students and colleagues: knowledge comes from practice!
 
Later, when several of us, as former UCLA students, became community activists and organized Latino gardeners against the City of Los Angeles’s draconian leaf blower ban during the mid-1990s. (City penalties for Latino gardeners caught using a leaf blower? Misdemeanor charge, $1,000 fine and up to 6 months in jail). To challenge this racist law, we sought help from JGQ to lobby Council Members—like Mark Ridley Thomas, Jackie Goldberg and others—who voted for the ban on December 3, 1996.
 
On a more personal level, when I got married to Antonia Montes—fellow MEChista, educator, activist—in 1992, I invited JGQ. To my surprise, he showed up. Since then, we became homeboys (and later colleagues), where he counseled me throughout my graduate studies at UCLA (M.A.) and UC Berkeley (Ph.D.). He supported me without reservations when I was on the academic job market. Whenever I experienced racial micro-aggressions or academic hazing or pinche bullying by senior faculty, I never flinched since I knew that I could count on my academic homeboy, JGQ, like in the case of the late Dr. Leo Estrada. 
 
In short, JGQ was/is my professor, mentor, homeboy, fellow activist and colleague. He taught me/us that we, as Chicanas and Chicanos, also have history—a proud history that must be taught in K-12, higher education and our communities.

​“The point of learning about Indigenous past is not to relive past practices, or to propose one essentialization over another, or to be immobilized by history. The first stone to demolish the old presidio is our own consciousness.”
 
—Dr. Juan Gómez-Quiñones, Indigenous Quotient/Stalking Words: American Indian History as Future, Aztlan Libre Press, San Antonio, Texas, 2012, p. 39. 

Despite our generational divide, we shared many similarities: Mexican roots; native sons of East Los Angeles; doctorates from the University of California; veteran activists; practitioners of respect and confianza (something absent in the academy); lovers of music (e.g., oldies), art (e.g., Mexican/Chicana/o art), food (anything Mexican), drink (e.g., mezcal), culture (our own) and sports (e.g., boxing); readers of poetry; educators and mentors; and, our defense of los de abajo, where he paved the road for me and countless others to emulate…

“Human issues can be resolved with humanistic solutions. Immigrants are not strangers; they are family.”
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 --Dr. Juan Gómez-Quiñones (Reframing the Latino Immigration Debate Towards a Humanistic Paradigm 2013, foreword, p. 14)

​Moving forward, while I’ll humbly do my part to maintain and expand his shining legacy through my lectures, writings and musings, I only wish that I was able to tell him in person four magic words before his passing: “I love you, Juan!”
 
¡Viva JGQ!

Dr. Álvaro Huerta is an Associate Professor in Urban & Regional Planning and Ethnic & Women’s Studies at California State Polytechnic University. Among other scholarly publications, he’s the author of Reframing the Latino Immigration Debate: Towards a Humanistic Paradigm and Defending Latina/o Immigrant Communities: The Xenophobic Era of Trump and Beyond. He holds a Ph.D. in city and regional planning from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.A. in urban planning and a B.A. in history from the University of California, Los Angeles.