The Many Lives of Justiniano Roxas: The Centenarian Fantasy in American History and Memory

SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA. December 1873. The sweet smell of burning redwood met the visitors as they entered the small apartment. The last rays of the winter solstice shone through the window, casting gossamer shadows across the bare pine floor. Earlier that morning, the old man had attended mass at the Holy Cross Church, one of the original twenty-one California missions. But on this cool afternoon, the elderly Justiniano Roxas sat on the floor of his twelve-by-six-foot suite at the county hospital on Mission Hill. He huddled close to the fire, surrounded by chopped wood, and he sewed a patch onto his coat.¹

Residents of the central California coastal village of Santa Cruz had known of Roxas for some time. A recent illness had forced him to seek the aid of the Sisters of Charity, who, for their own reasons, took on his care, placing him in the county hospital, which they managed. Roxas received a room, a warm fire, and regular access to food and tea. And then the sisters informed the local newspaper of their benevolence. The Sisters of Charity had saved "the oldest living inhabitant on the face of the globe!" they said. He was, they claimed, 121 years old and "the last of his race."²

The Santa Cruz Sentinel sent a reporter to interview Roxas. But when the reporter entered the room, Roxas remained quiet. The parish priest of Santa Cruz, Father Joaquin Adam, accompanied the reporter. He approached the elderly man and placed his hand upon his shoulder. He might have whispered, "Mi hijo, tienes invitados." With a jerk, the old man woke from his thoughts and, according to the reporter, "looked around and commenced jabbering in Spanish to the Father—shaking his head at every word." The reporter was convinced that the Indian, hoary and frail, was aged. But could he really be 121 years old? To prove the sisters' claim, Father Adam produced the mission's baptismal record and translated it for the reporter. As the Sentinel later reported, the entry read: "On the 4th of March, of 1792, in this church of the Mission of Santa Cruz, I [Father Isidro Salazar] solemnly baptized a man of about 40 years belonging to a ranch, who I name Justiniano Roxas now." The man who was described in the baptismal record and the man who was in the Santa Cruz hospital were, the newspaper declared, one and the same. "The testimony on this point is conclusive," it reported. In the early 1870s Santa Cruz was gaining a reputation for being a healthy town. Local boosters claimed that its "benign" climate extended life and rejuvenated the infirm. The survival of Justiniano Roxas, they now began to boast, was living proof.³

This article is the story of that old man in the county hospital. It is part archival mystery and part methodological essay. As a self-reflective examination of a joint scholarly endeavor, it is a story about how two historians worked together to unearth and discover the tale of an Indigenous man whose true-life story is far more interesting than any fictional account. But it is also a meditation on the meaning of Indigenous survival in California history. In a state notorious for its history of genocide and renowned for its famous "last" Indians, unexpected stories of survival remain hidden in plain sight. This article, then, is about what can be gained from reconstructing, piece by piece, the lives of those individuals who claimed to be centenarians. It is also about what can be gained when historians work together to look beyond the fantastical headlines and invest the time and energy necessary to understand the real person behind these fantasies. This is the story of the many lives of Justiniano Roxas.

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The story of Justiniano Roxas begins with a critical engagement with Jean O'Brien's concept of "lasting" as an analytical lens. In basic terms, "lasting" describes a practice among nineteenth-century New Englanders, especially antiquarians and local community leaders, of marking the...