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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520272125 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 05/05/2012 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Sales rank: | 978,694 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
El Cinco de Mayo
An American Tradition
By David E. Hayes-Bautista
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27212-5
CHAPTER 1
Before the American Civil War
WHY IS THE CINCO DE MAYO so widely celebrated in twenty-first-century California, and across the entire United States, when it is scarcely celebrated in Mexico? If the Cinco de Mayo were primarily a Mexican holiday, then the U.S. version ought to be but a pale imitation of the Mexican original, yet it is the other way around. This fact provides the key. Although the holiday celebrates a Mexican victory over the French at Puebla on May 5, 1862, the answer to the question is not to be found in Mexico. It is found instead in California, Nevada, and Oregon during the Gold Rush and the American Civil War—for the Cinco de Mayo is not, in its origins, a Mexican holiday at all but rather an American one, created by Latinos in California in the middle of the nineteenth century.
To understand why Latinos in these western states in 1862 and later responded so passionately to a battle that took place fifteen hundred miles away, first one must understand the changes that took place in their population and culture as this territory evolved from being part of the Republic of Mexico to being part of the United States. It is also vital to understand how Latinos viewed the issues of the American Civil War—freedom versus slavery, broad-based democracy versus elitist oligarchy—through the lens of their experience in Gold Rush California and neighboring territories. Most of all, it is important to understand where Latinos of the time stood on issues of language, identity, citizenship, and political participation. In short, in order to understand why the Cinco de Mayo is celebrated today all across the United States, first the experience of Latinos in California and the far West during the crucial period from 1848 to 1861 must be understood, from the announcement of the discovery of gold in California to the moment Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina.
LATINOS IN CALIFORNIA
The experience of the native-born Latinos of California, the Californios, may be exemplified by Francisco P. Ramírez, born in 1837 in the Mexican state of Alta California. On the night of February 1, 1848, when he went to bed at his parents' home on Aliso Street in Los Angeles, not far from the plaza around which that city had been founded in 1781, he was an eleven-year-old citizen of Mexico. Later, as an adult, he recalled childhood evenings at home while California was still part of Mexico. "Who does not sigh upon recalling the winter nights when, beside the hearth, we listened to the sad history of the Aztecs, the cruelty of the conquistadors, the deeds of our own parents?" He belonged to the regional variant of Mexican society and identity called Californio ("Californian"). His grandfather, Francisco Ramírez, had arrived in California from Tepic, via Sonora, in 1794. His father, Juan María Ramírez, had been born in Santa Barbara in 1801. Juan had married Petra Abila of the Abila family, who had been resident in Los Angeles since 1783; their family home, the Avila Adobe, still stands on Olvera Street. Young Francisco had Californio roots as deep as it was possible for a Latino to have in a state that had been settled by Latinos only in the late eighteenth century. But that night while he slept, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo took effect, formally ending hostilities between the United States and Mexico after the Mexican-American War and making California a territory of the United States, henceforward to be administered under U.S. law.
When Francisco Ramírez awoke on February 2, he was a citizen of the United States of America. At first, this might not have seemed to have had a significant effect on his daily life. He still spoke with his parents in Spanish, ate the same sort of morning meal—most likely including tortillas and beans—and probably learned his usual lessons and went out to play with his usual friends. The familiarity of daily life, however, changed radically later in 1848, when Sam Brannan brought to San Francisco samples of gold just discovered in the Sierra Nevada and news of the discovery spread around the world. Without leaving his native California, Ramírez would meet strange new people, learn new languages, and become acquainted with new laws, habits, and customs.
Tens of thousands of immigrants, the Forty-Niners, poured in from the Atlantic states of the United States in search of gold. Despite this relocation, they doggedly continued to define themselves in terms of the Atlantic coast. They awaited "news from the Atlantic" brought by ship and sent their correspondence back via "Mails for the Atlantic States." They complained that California did not have the amenities that "nearly every city on the Atlantic has" and shared fond "memories of omnibus riding in the cities of the Atlantic." Life in California frequently eroded their standards of behavior, leading the editor of an English-language newspaper to wonder, "Why is it that some men, when they come to California, throw off all the guards that surrounded them in Atlantic cities?" They assured themselves that they were eager to return to their "homes in the Atlantic States" when their sojourn in California was over, and indeed many of them did. Many others stayed. Their self-identification with the Atlantic region makes it logical to refer to these immigrants as Atlantic Americans, defined as people with origins in the historical experience begun by predominantly British settlers on the North Atlantic coast of the United States, which molded the socialization of people raised in that region, irrespective of race or ethnicity. Therefore, Atlantic American in this book refers to any and all non-Latinos from nonwestern states, including both Yankees and Southerners.
Moreover, tens of thousands of Latino miners and other immigrants came north at the same time, by land from Mexico or by sea up the Pacific Coast from Central and South America, bringing their own regional customs with them. For example, a little over a year after Ramírez awoke as a citizen of the United States, a young gentleman from Guadalajara, Mexico, Justo Veytia, had his first look at San Francisco from the deck of the Volante on April 1, 1849. Veytia had made the decision to travel to faraway California as a gambusino, a prospector looking for gold. He kept a diary of his journey, begun at his elegantly appointed home on the main plaza in Guadalajara. Traveling in the company of friends and relatives, he made his way through various towns in Jalisco to the seaport of San Blas, where he boarded a ship for San Francisco. After suffering four weeks of bad food and seasickness, he finally reached his destination and recorded his first glimpse of California through a traffic jam of ships. "Around ten in the morning, we anchored in the bay, where something like forty vessels, both large and small, swayed majestically up and down.... At last we had in our sight the much-desired Harbor of the Land of Gold, the object of so many hopes. We had finished that sea voyage, so arduous and never to be forgotten."
Veytia traveled in Northern California for nearly eighteen months. He never encountered Ramírez, who was then still living in Los Angeles. Yet although these two individuals never met, the presence of tens of thousands of gambusinos from Mexico and Central and South America helped shape the world of Ramírez and his Californio compatriots. Like Veytia, thousands of these Spanish-speaking gold seekers traveled from their homes to San Francisco, the international point of entry closest to the gold fields. Yet more would-be gambusinos trekked across the desert from northern Mexico to California, many motivated by economic hardship at home. Reports put their numbers in the tens of thousands. "A friend who has connections in Mexico ... says ... the crops have failed in Northern Mexico, and thousands of people have determined on leaving Sonora.... The people, to the number of twenty-five thousand, had determined on moving to this country. Eight thousand have already arrived at Los Angeles. The most of those people will settle about Sonora, near the Tuolumne, and that town will, of course, become a place of considerable importance. Many of them will settle also about the Mariposa, and perhaps farther South."
On the morning that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo took effect in 1848, there were an estimated seventy-five hundred Californios living in the new U.S. territory. Over the next thirteen years, thanks to the Gold Rush, the total number of Latinos in California increased by an estimated factor of five to ten, or possibly more. As a result of this large immigration, the Latino population changed dramatically, from being a small, culturally homogeneous, Californio population to a very large, heterogeneous one, including Latinos representing nearly every country in Latin America, as well as the New Mexico and Arizona Territories (which Mexico had also ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo). There were even immigrants from Spain. From 1848 to 1869, this mix of native Californios, Latino immigrants, and Atlantic Americans laid the foundations of Latino society and daily life in California in the centuries to come.
Several potential unifying factors served to bring this heterogeneous collection of Latinos together, but there also existed social factors working to divide them. Latinos in California between the time of Brannan's announcement in 1848 and the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861 were pulled back and forth between cohesion and division. A search for balance influenced the men and women who were to respond to the news of the first battle of Puebla in 1862 and thereby shaped what became the Cinco de Mayo holiday.
Language was an obvious unifying factor. The Californios and the immigrants who had just arrived from Mexico and Central and South America all spoke Spanish. Initially, therefore, communication among them would have been easy, even allowing for some variations in accent and vocabulary. During the Gold Rush, two developments particularly facilitated the use of Spanish as a tool of communication among far-flung settlements of Latinos: the establishment of Spanish-language newspapers and, as of 1850, the officially mandated use of the Spanish language by state and local government.
Spanish-language newspapers served to inform the Spanish-speaking public of events in California and beyond. The first publication began in 1851: the Spanish-language section of the Los Angeles Star (sometimes known by its Spanish name, La Estrella), whose pages often featured content and editorial direction independent of the English-language portion of the paper (see figure 1). The lawyer and poet Manuel Clemente Rojo, its first editor, announced that his publication was to be an advocate for Latinos against the problems besetting their community. "The press ... has inexhaustible resources for introducing reform; and when it is proper, it raises its majestic voice to petition for the redress of our ills." A year later in San Francisco, a daily French newspaper, L'Echo du Pacifique, dedicated one or two of its four pages per issue to a Spanish-language publication, called El Éco del Pacífico. As the Spanish-speaking population of the state grew, a third newspaper began in 1854: La Crónica was a four-page newspaper written entirely in Spanish, published three times a week in San Francisco. After two years, the editor of La Crónica, J. Jofre, was hired away by El Éco del Pacífico to head a new, expanded version of four pages a day in Spanish, essentially separate from the French paper. Santa Barbara also had a bilingual newspaper in English and Spanish, the Gazette or La Gazeta, begun in 1855.
On taking up his editorship of El Éco, Jofre reaffirmed the view of the role of a Spanish-language newspaper as being an advocate for a community, which in typical nineteenth-century language he termed "our race": "As Americans and as members of the noble Spanish-speaking race to which we belong, we believe it to be our duty ... to denounce before the supreme tribunal of public opinion the injustices, the abuses, and the outrages to which individuals of our race too often have been, and continue to be, victim. We believe it our duty to station ourselves constantly as a watchtower, which may give our Spanish-speaking countries warning against those illegal aggressions by which people have tried, and are trying, to engulf them."
Francisco Ramírez had a role in the birth of the Spanish-language press in California. Shortly after his fourteenth birthday, he was employed by Rojo as an assistant at the Star, where he learned the basics of running a small newspaper. Ramírez later moved to San Francisco, where in 1853 he worked for the Catholic Standard, a religiously affiliated paper. When that paper declared bankruptcy in 1854, Ramírez traveled to the gold country and worked for an English-language paper, the Weekly California Express, for some months. He returned to Los Angeles later that year, an experienced newspaperman at the tender age of seventeen. He took over the editorship of the Star's Spanish-language pages, recently vacated by Rojo. In the spring of 1855, however, Ramírez decided it was time for him to become independent. He established a weekly four-page Spanish-language paper in his native Los Angeles, El Clamor Público ("The Public Outcry"). When he was criticized as being too young to run a paper, he answered proudly, "We are old enough to discover the needs of our brethren, to defend their interests, and to make them see what is best for them by maintaining the rights and privileges that the laws of this country give them."
While editors' voices were strong in frontier Spanish-language newspapers, the newspapers did not limit themselves entirely to those editors' perceptions of events in the state and the country. The nature of local journalism in the mid-nineteenth century meant they could not do so; most provincial newspapers, such as El Clamor Público, had too small a circulation to afford to employ reporters or even much in the way of staff. Most editors wrote articles, composed editorials, set type, and administered subscriptions singlehanded, or nearly so—and often had to maintain a sideline as job printers, to make ends meet. Consequently, they filled gaps by reprinting articles from other journals, especially to supply national and international news, and by soliciting material from just about anyone who wished to contribute. As a result, multiple voices spoke from the pages, at the editors' invitation. In keeping with this practice, Ramírez proclaimed in his inaugural edition that his paper was open to the general public, with a section titled Comunicados ("Communications")—an early form of a letters to the editor column—in which he would publish letters and other reader submissions. He added, however, the disclaimer that "here, each person expresses his own sentiments, and it will be obvious that we are not responsible for articles that appear under this heading." Communications poured in. A number of contributors were self-appointed, unpaid, semiregular correspondents writing from various locations, giving accounts of events that caught their attention. Most often these correspondents used pseudonyms, although they did occasionally sign their own names. In addition, there were plenty of letters from individuals who wrote only once or twice to the paper, seeking to bring specific matters to public attention; they sometimes signed their own names but not infrequently also resorted to pen names.
Although their absolute numbers of subscriptions were small by today's standards, such newspapers nonetheless circulated widely, in geographic terms, throughout California. One indication of this widespread circulation was the network of newspaper agents each paper used to recruit subscribers and distribute copies. Map 1 shows the location of agents for the Star, El Éco del Pacifico, La Crónica, La Gazeta, and El Clamor Público, from Shasta to San Diego and from Sonoma to Columbia.
When California was admitted as a state of the United States in 1850, its first constitution mandated the use of Spanish along with English. Even while the constitutional convention was meeting, the delegates had resolved to make the proceedings available in both languages. In the original state constitution, Article XI, Section 21, specified, "All laws, decrees, regulations and provisions, which from their nature require publication, shall be published in English and Spanish." In September 1849, provisions were made for both the Spanish and the English version of the state's constitution to be printed and distributed, along with the proceedings of the entire convention leading up to the writing of the bilingual constitution. Once the state legislature began meeting in 1850, its proceedings were printed in both English and Spanish.
For the newspapers just beginning in California, a contract to publish laws and legislative proceedings in Spanish represented a sought-after steady source of income for those fortunate enough to secure it. The Los Angeles Star was among them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from El Cinco de Mayo by David E. Hayes-Bautista. Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Introduction 1. Before the American Civil War 2. The First Battle of Puebla, 1862 3. The American Civil War and the Second Battle of Puebla 4. The Juntas Patrióticas Mejicanas Blossom 5. One War, Three Fronts 6. Shaping and Reshaping the Cinco de Mayo, 1868-2011 Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments IndexWhat People are Saying About This
"El Cinco de Mayo does what I once thought impossible: explain the relevance and the importance of commemorating this day."—Washington
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