Californio Voices: The Oral Memoirs of Jose Maria Amador and Lorenzo Asisara (review)

Given the dearth of private diaries, letters and journals from the hardy, but largely illiterate, early Spanish-Mexican Alta California pioneers, information about their everyday lives is scant, often leading to conjecture and misleading interpretations of the period. Californio Voices is therefore a very welcome addition to the fortunately growing bibliography of the period.

The voices of a great many californios are indeed present in California history, but they have been muted, intervened and mediated by questionable translations of the original Spanish, in turn, dictated and consequently edited by the interviewer. Californio Voices is a bilingual edition of a testimonial narrative in Spanish dictated to Thomas Savage in 1877, when José María Amador was 96 years old, living in abject poverty near Watsonville, California. Savage claims that Amador was of sound mind, but questions his age, stating that he was born in 1793 and not in 1781, at the San Francisco Presidio. Throughout the narrative Savage points out many other factual inaccuracies. Important as these may be, Amador, a true product of the frontier in that he was the son of a Presidio soldier and himself served as a Presidio soldier, provides a lively recounting of his life and that of his extended family, full of revealing details that are valuable in reconstructing the ethnography and language of the time. It is hard to know, of course, how extensively Savage "edited" the oral dictation, but the testimonial certainly comes through as fluid and spontaneous, even though it is also obvious that Savage—keeping in mind his employer Hubert H. Bancroft—was more interested in eliciting historical data than the personal vicissitudes of the Amador family. Alongside Amador's narration of the military sorties, one also finds some humorous episodes, such as when a soldier shoots his own foot while another calls for his last rites, mistaking fear for being mortally wounded. But such lighthearted episodes are obscured by the reality of rifles and cannons against arrows.

Chapter 2 is an account by Lorenzo Asisara of the events leading to the abduction and murder of Padre Andrés Quintana by the Mission Indians, as passed on to him by his father, Venancio Azar. The plotting, the repeated failed attempts, the murder itself and the aftermath culminating in the apprehension of the guilty individuals years after the fact are narrated in extraordinary detail, offering a rare glimpse into the feelings of the Indians with respect to the often harsh treatment by the padres. The remaining chapters record events following the independence of Mexico from Spain and how it affected the far province of California. Amador reviews the various protagonists of the early Mexican period and is therefore an important source for validating—or questioning—the several other accounts of the period, which the editor dutifully footnotes.

This edition and translation is carefully footnoted, with the notes (perhaps unnecessarily) written in both English and Spanish. It is also enhanced by a substantial bibliography and a glossary of useful terms. The Index is mostly of toponyms and patronyms, but also contains the common words boldfaced in the English text. One could question words such as desayuno, almuerzo, borrachitos, metate, as warranting inclusion, since they are very common words in Spanish and translated in the English version, but the non-Spanish speaker will benefit from the Glossary. The Spanish transcription is on the whole good, with only minor editorial interventions in the spelling. The misprints are also few and probably attributable to the typesetter rather than the editor. However, the Spanish comes through as that of a poorly educated but alert speaker who indulges in colloquialisms, while at the same time narrating complicated events and describing the material culture without losing the thread of his story.

This extremely rich text is more than a welcome addition to the stock of testimonials for the history of California...