The experiences of Mexicans who were living in California when it was annexed by the United States is a crucial element in our state’s past. These Californios, as they called themselves, made California’s identity diverse and multi-cultural from the moment it became part of the United States. But, as Kevin Starr pointed out years ago in the very first volume of his classic Americans and the California Dream series, diversity and multi-culturalism were not always appreciated in nineteenth-century California, especially northern California. Californios were often especially unwelcome.

The Vallejos of Sonoma were one of the most prominent of these Californio families. This presentation considers the experiences of this family, using more than 180 letters that Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and Francisca Benicia Carrillo de Vallejo exchanged with each other and their children between 1846 and 1888.

These letters offer an intimate glimpse of the ways in which this family, and many Californio families like them, struggled to adapt to the political, social, and cultural changes that were occurring around them, especially when they found themselves strangers in the land in which they had been born. Individually, and as a couple, Mariano Guadalupe and Francisca Benicia found themselves faced with ever-changing--and at times conflicting—demands on their public and private lives. They struggled to maintain ownership of their property, to raise their children in an environment that they did not entirely understand, and to help each other maintain their dignity and social authority in a world they had not chosen.