Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans

Epilogue: Auto/ethnographic Observations of Race and History

Epilogue Auto/ethnographic Observations of Race and History Auto/ethnography is a method that has been used in anthropology since the mid-1970s (Reed-Donahay 1997), combining autobiography or biography with ethnography. In a traditional ethnography an anthropologist interviews people, conducts observations, collects documents, and often reviews newspapers. When autobiography or biography is interjected in an ethnographic study, the field research becomes more personal and the anthropologist also becomes a subject of study. In writing the conclusion of this book I chose to use auto/ethnography as a means of continuing to personalize my narrative. As I stated in the Introduction, the racial history of the Mexican Americans is about ‘‘a people,’’ but it is also about myself.While I have written an objective history, I recognize that I chose which historical scenes to stage in my drama. This is a subjective writing process that does not differ in the production of any type of historical text—all authors select the scenes they stage (Said 1979; White 1992).The use of auto/ethnography allows me to end my book with commentaries on the present and in this way to illuminate some dark shadows in history that can only be clarified by sharing personal stories. I have chosen to focus on the history of my husband, Richard Valencia, because many stories of his relatives illustrate how California’s midnineteenth -century racial policies unfolded and eventually had an impact on the federal government’s classification of people of Chumash descent . Likewise, his family history shows how the government’s racial categories influenced his relatives’ racial identity. Some members of Richard’s family have been classified by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as Native Americans, while others with a similar blood quantum are not classified as such. Currently two of Richard’s brothers and sisters consider themselves to be full-blooded Chumash, while the others believe they are racially 297 mixed and share a similar blood quantum with most Mexicans—Indian and White. Of Richard’s ten brothers and sisters only Betty Valencia-Cruz and Manuel Valencia consider themselves to be full-blooded Chumash. Based on my conversations with his family, it is my belief that the difference in their racial identification is largely because their mother married more than once. One of her husbands was a Chumash Indian, while the others were Mexicans of Chumash descent. In the interviews I held with my husband Richard, his sisters, Betty Valencia-Cruz and Martha Gonzalez, and his niece, Elena Gonzalez, as well as past conversations I have had with his relatives, I was told that their family was raised in a bicultural Mexican-Chumash environment. Family members heatedly disagree about whether the Chumash or Mexican culture predominated , however. They only concur on the fact that their community was racially segregated and their neighborhood was multicultural and multiracial : Mexican American, Chumash, and Black. As adults, however, four chose to identify as Chumash, while the rest preferred to identify as Mexican American. Only Betty and Manuel are officially registered on the BIA Native American registry. Richard’s family’s racial history is based on oral narratives supplemented by anthropological and historical studies written about his relatives . I conducted the oral narratives in several visits during the mid1990s and spent ten days with his family in 1999. During my last trip, I conducted several life-history interviews with Betty and Martha and also interviewed Elena, Martha’s daughter. The setting is California, specifically the cities of Montecito, Santa Barbara, and Santa Inés. The main characters of my account are Evarista Romero, Richard’s great-grandmother , and Rafael Solares, the great-grandfather of Raymond Gonzalez, who is Martha’s husband, Elena’s father, and Richard’s brother-in-law. I have selected to focus on Evarista and Rafael because Evarista’s account informs us why many Chumash ranchería people chose to fade into the Mexican community after the Mexican American War, while Rafael’s account illustrates the experiences of many mission Indians who did not abandon their native customs and their tribal political identification. Evarista Romero: Cultural Strategies of Self-Defense Richard’s great-grandmother Evarista Romero lived to be 103 years old (Santa Barbara News Press, 29 November 1959, p. 2). She lived in Monte298 Recovering History, Constructing Race cito, California, her entire life and died in 1959. Montecito is a small...