Testimonios: Early California through the Eyes of Women, 1815-1848 (review)

This is an amazing work of painstaking research, sensitive translation, and clear writing that has given us the gift of understanding California's Mexican history in a new way. The oral testimonies of thirteen California women who lived through the first half of the nineteenth century and who remembered details of daily life, the complexities of politics and private affairs that shaped this period are an invaluable resource—one that has been largely inaccessible to the public because most of the transcriptions of their oral histories have remained in manuscript form in Spanish located in the Bancroft Library.

In the introduction, the historians Beebe and Senkewicz provide a sophisticated background for reading these histories by alerting us to the ways in which the testimonios were gathered. The women's histories were collected as an afterthought by Bancroft's assistants, Thomas Savage and Henri Cerruti, as they traveled around California copying documents and trying to interview Californios who had participated in the political history of the Mexican period. The women's voices were filtered by the interview questions and the exclusively political history agenda of Cerruti and Savage. The women demonstrated amazing memory for the many details of political history but also interjected their own concerns for family and personal life that gave a more human face to the remembered histories. We are cautioned by the authors to remember that the testimonies were not word for word transcriptions and that the interviewers often interjected their own voices into the transcript, or in the case of Cerruti, reconstructed the interview from notes. The process of copying notes, polishing them, and then recopying them later and now translating them from Spanish runs the risk of altering their original intentions.

Aware of all these problems, Beebe and Senkewicz have re-translated these testimonies, provided a family tree, and an introduction telling of how the interview originated, details of what happened during the process, and a summary of the later life of each woman. This background material gives us a good background for understanding the testimonio.

The book has translations of thirteen women's oral histories arranged chronologically covering the period 1818 to 1848. Each woman presents a different perspective on this Mexican period in California's history. Some of the women, like Rosalia Vallejo, Teresa de la Guerra, Maria Inocente Pico, and Angustias de la Guerra were married to influential men in California and they had first hand accounts of some of Alta California's public history. Many of the women were related by blood to the leading families of California and so had deeply personal memories of political events. Their collective story is one of women who were knowledgeable and involved in public affairs—not a traditional view of Mexican wives and mothers. Thus Rosalia Vallejo, wife of Mariano Vallejo saw the Bear Flag rebels the night they took over their home and, thirty years later, still was seething at the way they were treated. She regarded these "heroes" as "mauraders," and "horse thieves," and had little good to say about their leaders, the main one being Lieutenant John C. Fremont. Several of the women were involved in the U.S. Mexican War in California, as was Felipa Osuna who helped a member of the Californio government evade capture by the Americans. Angustias de la Guerra had just given birth but she traveled to meet with her brothers who were prisoners and helped hide a Californio soldier from the Americans by putting him in bed with her baby.

The most unusual testimonies, for my mind, are those of Eulalia Perez and Apolinaria Lorenzana. Both worked in the missions taking care of the padres as well as administering the details of daily life. They both gave first hand accounts of the realities of mission life. The two women were owners and managers of large ranchos and they...