Ranchos, Mexican California and the World It Made

When Mexico won independence from Spain in eighteen twenty-one, California became a Mexican territory and the mission system began to unravel. Secularization arrived officially in eighteen thirty-three. The church lands were supposed to pass to the neophyte communities that had worked them.

Instead, most ended up in the hands of a small class of well-connected Mexican families through a system called the ranchos. By eighteen forty-five, the Mexican government had granted roughly eight million acres of California land in parcels ranging from a few thousand to over one hundred thousand acres. Names still on the California map, Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas became Beverly Hills, Rancho San Pedro became Palos Verdes, Rancho Petaluma was the great adobe estate of General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, all trace back to this era.

The rancho economy ran on cattle hides and tallow. Ships from Boston and New England rounded Cape Horn to trade manufactured goods for dried hides, which New England factories turned into shoes and leather goods. The writer Richard Henry Dana sailed these waters in eighteen thirty-five and thirty-six and described watching hides flung off cliff edges at San Juan Capistrano, two at a time, to be caught by boats below.

His account, published as Two Years Before the Mast in eighteen forty, gave the eastern United States its first detailed portrait of California life. The ranchero world was not democratic. It depended on the labor of dispossessed Indigenous workers and indebted servants.

But it was also genuinely cosmopolitan, Yankee merchants married into Californio families, became Mexican citizens, and took Spanish names. The mixing of cultures was already complicated long before the United States arrived to complicate it further.