Lands of Promise and Despair: Chronicles of Early California, 1535-1846 (review)

The editors of this book (both professors at Santa Clara University) have assembled an interlocking series of documents that concern Spanish and Mexican California. These include more than 60 items by explorers and colonizers. Among them are letters, journals, official reports, proclamations, and interrogations. Some are translated into the English language for the first time. The annotations that accompany each document are first-rate.

Among these manuscripts are Juan Cabrillo's official 1542 report describing conditions in Ensenada (today's Baja California) and also at San Diego, further to the north. This account is followed by a translation of Sebastián Vizcaíno's 1602 sea voyage to California. Other representative documents include a 1697 account by Italian Jesuit Juan (Giovanni) María de Salvatierra entitled "A Permanent Spanish Presence in California." A number of such European priests came to Spain's North American frontier from Europe. The famous Fray Eusebio Kino traveled from his native province of Ticino, in today's Italy, first to China before his assignment to the North American wilds.

The settlement of California is chronicled by Governor Pedro Fages's 1773 description of conditions at the provincial capital, Monterey. Other accounts carry the story into the Mexican era. Life on the ranchos during the 1840s is the subject of José del Carmen Lugo's revealing memoir. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo describes the American invasion posed by the arrival of the first overland wagon trains. These are only a few such testimonios selected by the editors.

What emerges is a documentary portrayal of a far-from-static colonial society. Early California is usually chronicled as a backward pastoral colony. However, daily conditions there were far from sleepy. Though isolated (even from the rest of Spain's New World empire), the conflicts between its Franciscan missionaries and soldier garrisons were incessant.

The editors of this book have created a superb product. Its 85 illustrations (some in color), and accompanying maps, are drawn from sources as far away as the National Library of the Czech Republic and the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid.

In our age of political correctness, scholars have sidelined the history of exploration and colonization in favor of gender, race, and class. The editors of this book provide an important alternative. Their selections concern such wider issues as the politics and economics of imperial and colonial governance.