ENLIGHTENMENT IN THE SHADOWS: CALIFORNIOS ON THE BORDERLANDS OF EXPERIENCE, 1697-1821

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on two subjects. Firstly, I examine the development of the Californio identity under Spanish imperial rule in Baja and Alta California. This occurred through repeated encounters, conflicts, reversals, resistance and negotiation between Native Americans in California and Hispanic colonists, some born in Mexico, “creoles” and some in Europe, “peninsulares.” I argue that this identity was at its essence a borderland identity: specifically, California was not New Spain, and after the coming of the Spanish, it was no longer “Indian country” either. Both Native and Hispanic Californios contributed to the development of Californio identity. This identity was derived from the ambiguous and syncretic nature of the borderlands: when neither Hispanic nor Native Californios fully recognized their land as the ordered home of their society’s worldview. The tumult of frontier life created a borderlands society that informed all members’ identities.Secondly, I offer a method of interpreting life on the frontier and engaging in the conversation of borderlands historiography. What I term “the experiential borderlands” is an approach that emphasizes the individual routines and events unique to those residents of the borderlands society in question. While the attitudes, commands, funding, and social engineering attempts of the metropolitan authorities were critical to the geopolitical advance of empires, it was the individual members living on and fighting over the frontier that gave the borderlands their social character. When the Jesuits, Franciscans, soldiers and rancheros came to the Californias, they did so with the intention of saving souls, taming the wild, and converting the uncivilized. When they encountered the Native tribes and harsh realities of California, their designs were challenged, rebuked, or even thwarted. With their California entrada, the Spaniards conceived of a civilizing mission to create little Spaniards. Instead, their baptism by fire on the experiential borderlands made them Californios.