Picturing Mexican America in the Age of Realism

Charles Nahl's "The Elopement" (1875) depicts the 1829 marriage of Henry Fitch and Josefa Carrillo. In the painting, a smiling vaquero sits astride a galloping horse before which a duck, bill open in an angry squawk, flees. The vaquero places a protective, possessive arm around a young woman in a white dress, her head and shoulders covered in a yellow shawl. Her ruffled skirts blow in the same wind billowing her lover's jacket and tossing the horse's mane. The couple looks boldly at the viewer, smiling from within this scene of high-speed, romantic adventure and suffused with the lush colors of sunset. (Figure 1)

The same year Nahl painted "The Elopement," Josefa Carrillo spoke to Enrique Cerruti about the real life events depicted in the painting. Carrillo's rendition is light on adventure and heavy on business. Cerruti writes dispassionately that Carrillo accepted Fitch's proposal because she found him handsome and well-mannered.¹ The wedding, which was to have taken place in the Carrillo family home, was halted by the authorities who had some concerns over Fitch's citizenship and anger around Fitch's engaging in what Rose Marie Beebe and Robert Senkewicz, editors of the volume in which Carrillo's recollections appear, call "the very common practice of smuggling."² The wedding thwarted, Carrillo later snuck out of her house in the dead of night to board a small boat that took her to Fitch's larger vessel upon which they sailed to Valparaiso to be married in Chile. She did ride a horse to that small boat, but apart from that one detail, there is a vast distance between the transactional union run aground by legal details and the breathtaking escapade Nahl's painting intimates.

Figure 1.

Charles Christian Nahl, "The Elopement" (Courtesy The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, BAnC PIC 1963.002:1380-FR).

Nahl, a German émigré, became known as a painter of early California, especially mining life, and enjoyed the patronage of wealthy Californians.³ Carrillo, the story of whose marriage was well known throughout the state and provided fodder for cultural production such as Nahl's, came from a large and prominent family of interest to the historian and publisher Hubert Bancroft, for whom Cerruti was working when he sought Carrillo out in Healdsburg, California. In Bancroft's employ, Cerruti traveled throughout California looking for official and personal documents pertaining to the state during the time of Spanish and Mexican rule. He was also tasked, along with Thomas Savage and Vicente Gómez, with collecting oral histories of prominent Mexican Californians—or californios—for Bancroft's use in compiling his histories of the Americas and the western United States.⁴

It was largely men, though, with whom Cerruti, Savage, and Gómez were interested in speaking. Women, as Beebe and Senkewicz note in their introduction, were "often an afterthought."⁵ Only thirteen of the seventy-eight interviews Bancroft and his staff conducted were with women. This relative disregard speaks to an enduring, if slowly evolving truth about how scholars perceive the significance of women's stories, but it also parallels a similarly evolving truth about the visibility of Latinxs in studies of the American nineteenth century. Ongoing publication ventures like Arte Público's Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project and volumes like Jesse Alemán and Rodrigo Lazo's co-edited The Latino Nineteenth Century (2016) are making increasingly clear, however, that latinidad is central to the founding, the evolution, and the future of the United States. It is still generally the case, nevertheless, that we are not always seeing nineteenth-century Latinxs clearly even when they are visible. On display are either romanticized figures in a Spanish fantasy heritage tableau, as we see in Nahl's painting, or idealized, resistant subjects read as precursors to twentieth-century models of oppositional politics.⁶

In the hopes of seeing around these ideological barriers to clear vision, here I read a small selection of testimonios, including Carrillo's, through a photographic...