MAY 5, 1864: SINCE THE FIRST BATTLE OF PUEBLA two years earlier, Mexican and French armies had fought about a dozen pitched battles, and Mexican irregulars harassed French and collaborationist Mexicans on an almost daily basis. Despite all that effort, the gods of war seemed to have turned their faces away from the democratically elected government of Mexico, and the French had occupied the major population centers of the country. Dozen of battles lay in the future, as did hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller skirmishes. Emperor Maximilian was steaming across the Atlantic to establish a monarchy in Mexico and create a dynasty that he expected to set an example of stability and growth for the rest of the Western Hemisphere (see figure 11). And in the United States, the Confederacy had just won a major victory at Chickamauga. How was it, then, that the date of the first battle at Puebla was to be celebrated in California for the next 150 years, while other battles and skirmishes slipped from the public’s memory?
The first battle of Puebla is remembered today in California and elsewhere in the United States largely thanks to the efforts of a remarkable network of community-based organizations, the juntas patrióticas mexicanas (Mexican patriotic assemblies), whose members went to deliberate lengths to create and maintain the public memory of the Cinco de Mayo. During the American Civil War and the French Intervention, this network functioned in at least 129 locations in California, Nevada, and Oregon, encouraging Latinos in the American West to support the defense of freedom and democracy in both the United States and Mexico. Their efforts to whip up enthusiasm went beyond an annual commemoration of the battle. Many juntas held monthly meetings, at which speakers often invoked the memory of the Cinco de Mayo, imprinting it on the minds of their audiences. Furthermore, Spanish-language newspapers regularly carried news of junta activities and frequently printed these speeches, enabling them to reach a much wider audience.
FIGURE 11. Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. Napoleon III convinced him to accept the results of a rigged 1863 plebiscite, held while the French occupied Mexico City, which offered him the crown of Mexico. He arrived in May 1864 with his wife, Charlotte. His reign lasted barely three years, ending in his execution for treason against the Mexican state on June 19, 1867. (Percy F. Martin, Maximilian in Mexico: The Story of the French Intervention, 1861–1867, plate between pages 24 and 25)
These memories of the first battle of Puebla were invoked not only to rouse emotions but also to channel resources in Latino communities, particularly money and political support, toward a variety of causes and activities. Thanks to the juntas, the public memory of the Cinco de Mayo was invested with a poder convocatorio (“summoning power”), the ability to convene and motivate Latino communities to pursue particular ends.1 During the war years of the 1860s, the objective was clear: to defend freedom and democracy from the Confederacy in the United States and from the French invaders and home-grown imperialists in Mexico. Yet the juntas patrióticas did not spring fully formed from the brow of any one individual. They were the product of the vigorous new Latino society that had been developing in the western United States ever since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.
On May 5, 1864, the editor of San Francisco’s La Voz de Méjico, Antonio Mancillas, set out to convince his readers that the Cinco de Mayo was worth remembering by linking it with September 16, Mexico’s Independence Day: “The day that we commemorate today, for the second time, is not a vain empty show; rather, let us celebrate, in the same way that we celebrate the anniversary of our independence, the remembrance of the glories by which our independence will be definitively consolidated.”2
In the gold-mining town of Sonora in Tuolumne County, a crowd invited by the local junta patriótica gathered on the morning of that same May 5, drawn by the ceremonial firing of a cannon to witness the raising of the Mexican flag amid enthusiastic cheers, after which Eugenio Cárdenas made “an eloquent speech,” which he began by acknowledging his audience’s patriotism, the junta’s role in organizing the proceedings, and “the honorable charge that the Patriotic Society has been so good as to confer on me, with the intent that I should say something to you in remembrance of the glorious triumph that our national forces obtained at the city of Puebla on the 5th of May, 1862.” That night, the junta sponsored a dance in the Greenwood Theater, which had been decorated with a portrait of the late General Ignacio Zaragoza, the hero of Puebla, adorned with the simple date “5 de Mayo de 1862” and flanked by the flags of the Americas’ leading republics: Mexico, the United States, Chile, and Peru. A short program began the evening. First, a woman and a girl, Dolores R. de Cuevas and Rosaura Soto, sang the Mexican national anthem, accompanied by Cárdenas and Amado Cuevas. The crowd demanded that they repeat the performance several times. Señorita Soto then read a poem “that merited several rounds of applause.” These formalities completed, the dance began; it lasted for hours and was followed by a late-night supper, with toasts proposed by, among others, Paula A. de Tapia, the president of the Junta Patriótica de Señoras.3
The junta in the mercury-mining town of New Almaden, just south of San José, organized nearly twenty-four hours of commemorative activities. The celebration got under way on the evening of May 4, when a marching band paraded through the streets of “Spanishtown,” past houses decorated with laurel arches and illuminations; it carried an inscribed banner or placard in the Mexican national colors of red, green, and white, as well as portraits of President Benito Juárez and Zaragoza. A “military company” fired rifle salvos. The next morning, the firing of a signal cannon called the townspeople out into the streets, where they formed another parade and marched to the town’s theater with the portraits of Juárez and Zaragoza and flags of Mexico and the United States. A young man, Saturnino Ayón, gave the first speech, followed by a nine-year-old boy, Carlos Aguiar, with his prompter, and then the theatrical impresario Gerardo López del Castillo (see chapter 2). After singing the “Zaragoza Anthem,” the audience proceeded without incident to a bullfight. In the evening, the crowd returned to the theater, where a comedy was presented.4
Meanwhile, in San Francisco at six that evening, a signal cannon reminded “the Mexican population”—and indeed, the entire city—of the events that had occurred two years earlier at Puebla and summoned them to celebrate. The Mexican flag was raised atop Russian Hill, floating above a crowd of “Mexicans and South Americans” cheering for Zaragoza and Mexico. A 101-gun salute was fired off, and after it finally concluded, the crowd made its way to Dashaway Hall for a formal program of speeches and poetical recitals, followed by a dance. The principal speaker was the writer José María Vigil, who had arrived from Jalisco only three months earlier. He had been chosen for “his liberal ideas, his patriotism, and his civic merit,” several expressions of which already had been published in La Voz de Méjico’s columns.5 The Mexican poet Aurelio Gallardo, who had just arrived in San Francisco, recited a poem of his own composition, “Ode to the Homeland,” which began by evoking the situation of many refugees recently arrived in California, fleeing the French in Mexico:
Exiled from the homeland and its altars,
Today we celebrate, upon distant shores,
The great deeds that history has kept
For illustrious heroes.
FIGURE 12. Filomeno Ibarra was the president of the Los Angeles junta in 1864. At the Cinco de Mayo celebrations that year, he recited a lengthy patriotic poem (La Voz de Méjico, June 4, 1864, p. 2). (Courtesy Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History)
After the formal program ended, the dance commenced, lasting until past two in the morning. Altogether it was “such a happy day of grateful remembrance for the Mexicans and other children of the American continent, fair judges of the glories acquired by their brethren.”6
In Los Angeles, the celebration was postponed until May 8, a Sunday, so that working people would have the leisure to attend. At dawn on the appointed day, the Mexican and the United States flags were raised side by side to a twenty-one gun salute. At three in the afternoon, the officers and principal guests of the local junta met at the house of its president, Filomeno Ibarra (see figure 12). Accompanied by musicians, the group proceeded to the venue selected for the formal program, the German Garden. The anonymous correspondent who described the event in a letter to La Voz de Méjico emphasized the cosmopolitan nature of the crowd. “The Mexicans, native Californios, North Americans, and Spanish Americans who represented nearly all the republics of the Americas fraternized on this day, conscious of all having a common cause; and they united their robust voices in shouts of ‘Hurrah for the Cinco de Mayo! Hurrah for immortal Zaragoza! Hurrah for the free peoples of the Americas!’ “More than five hundred people were estimated to be in attendance. Salvos were fired off all afternoon, and musicians played both pleasant tunes and rousing national anthems. Finally the designated speakers took their seats on the platform, to applause and cheers.7
The first speaker, Ibarra, was echoing the sentiment of La Voz de Méjico’s Mancillas, four hundred miles to the north, when he compared the newly minted memory of the Cinco de Mayo to Mexico’s Independence Day. “Until now, we only used to expect public festivities relating to the era in which our homeland threw off the yoke of slavery with which the old Spanish conquistadors had oppressed her. But today we count among them a glorious day for Mexico, now that we read in the pages of our history this line, written in indelible characters: THE MEMORABLE 5TH OF MAY, 1862!”8 The following speaker, Francisco P. Ramírez, was already part of the history of the Cinco de Mayo; he had had the honor of being the speaker a year earlier at the first official commemoration of the Cinco de Mayo in Los Angeles (see chapter 3).9 In 1864’s address, he built on a theme he had introduced then, that Mexico’s fight against the French Intervention was a struggle for freedom and democracy in the Western Hemisphere, in the face of European attempts to spread autocratic government. He declared, “The present war is not directed only against Mexico. . . . It is a threat to all the republics of the Americas: to the United States, to Colombia, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, etc. Brothers from Spanish-speaking America! We all have a common cause; we all have the sacred duty to preserve, pure and strong, the wise institutions of Washington, of Bolívar, and of Hidalgo. Children of America! Are you so base that you will let yourselves be dominated?”10
A form of junta patriótica had existed in Mexico decades before the American Civil War. Four years after Mexico won her final independence from Spain, the planning and implementation of the annual celebrations of Mexican independence in Mexico City were entrusted to a nongovernmental group, the Junta Patriótica (Patriotic Assembly), first organized in 1825.11 Beginning in the summer of that year, a group of citizens came together annually, elected a president and a set of other officers to plan the event, then collected funds to underwrite the costs of music, a parade, fireworks, temporary stands for orators, flags and decorations, food, drink, perhaps a bullfight, and inevitably a ball. After publishing a summary of expenses and funds received, the junta went dormant until the next year. The custom of a voluntary junta organizing the annual Independence Day celebrations spread throughout Mexico, and most large cities came to have one.
While the earliest documented existence of a junta in California dates from the 1840s, the idea of having a junta patriótica for the purpose of planning celebrations may have arrived in Alta California with the 1834 Hijar-Padrés colonial expedition.12 In 1845, the president of the junta patriótica in Los Angeles, José Antonio Carrillo, and his fellow junta member Narciso Botello sent an invitation to Antonio F. Coronel—who originally had come to California with the Hijar-Padrés colony—to serve as the chairman of the dance committee, which included Botello and Abel Stearns.13
The institution of the junta patriótica received a boost from the Gold Rush–induced Latino immigration to California that began in 1848. These new immigrants brought Latino society into the Central Valley and Sierra foothills. The earliest documented celebration of Mexican Independence Day outside the coastal towns was the 1851 celebration in Sonora, in Tuolumne County.14 The first fraternal lodge in the mining town of Hornitos, in Mariposa County, reportedly was built in 1850 to house the local junta.15
While there were juntas in California prior to the American Civil War, they appear to have functioned much as they did in Mexico, as single-purpose organizations dedicated to the annual celebration of Mexican Independence Day. The unexpected Mexican victory at the first battle of Puebla, however, spurred the juntas in California to a new level of activity, beginning one of the most fertile periods in Latino community organization, matched in magnitude perhaps only by the heady days of the Chicano movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
When Manuel E. Rodríguez, the editor of La Voz de Méjico, announced the closing of fund-raising for the Latino sword of honor on August 9, 1862, this did not put an end to California Latinos’ participation in the events in Mexico.16 Instead, it marked the onset of expansion into new areas of endeavor. Latinos across the state, excited by the unexpected victory at Puebla, one of the first major victories of freedom and democracy during the dark early years of the American Civil War and the French Intervention, had responded enthusiastically to the call issued in the summer of 1862 to create a sword of honor for Zaragoza. By financing the sword, they had stepped forward to show the world that they too were part of Mexico’s momentous struggle. Organizing groups around the state to donate money for the sword sparked interest in participation on a wider scale. As the fund-raising for the sword of honor ended, groups of Latinos in California began to raise money to assist both the Mexican government and Mexican civilians affected by the war.17 Their combination of seeking inspiration in the Cinco de Mayo and transforming that inspiration into fund-raising efforts mediated by the Spanish-language press in California would prove central to the blossoming of the juntas patrióticas.
Three Latino residents of Placerville—Rafael H. González, Ignacio Salazar, and Matías Galindo—invited “all the Mexican citizens” in their town to Salazar’s house on the evening of August 28, 1862, “to contribute, each with what he could manage, to help the well-deserving Army of the East” then defending Mexico. At this meeting, González made a speech, citing as the inspiration behind the proposal an article from Mexico City’s El Monitor that La Voz de Méjico had reprinted on August 26. This article informed readers that “an association of good patriots” had been formed in Mexico City for the purpose of collecting money to support the Army of the East, which sorely needed it, given the parlous state of the Juárez government’s finances. The article had directly invited El Monitor’s readers to do likewise, and González, Salazar, and Galindo saw no reason why Mexicans in California should not do their part as well. Accordingly, those attending the Placerville meeting that night organized themselves into a junta patriótica for this purpose. They elected González as president, Salazar as treasurer, and Vidal Salinas as secretary. A subscription was instituted to begin raising funds, but whereas the donation drive for the sword of honor had been a onetime event, now the Latinos of Placerville pledged to give what they could every month, “as long as the invader may remain in the Mexican Republic.” Every month or so, the funds collected were to be sent to La Voz de Méjico, whose editor would be responsible for figuring out how best to convey the money to Juárez’s government. Salinas recorded all this in a letter to the newspaper, which he asked Rodríguez to print “so that all our fellow countrymen living in California may do what it should belong to them to do, to help our government in defense of the independence of our country.”18
Shortly after this challenge was issued, a correspondent in Mexico City identified by his initials, I.M.A., wrote to La Voz de Méjico describing the Army of the East, just a few months after its victory at Puebla, as in a miserable state for lack of supplies, unable to undertake any action against the French. “The troops have no provisions and are naked. . . . Now then, the army gives as a reason for justifying its inaction that it has no bread or any sort of assistance, which is an extremely serious reason. . . . All the people ask for weapons. Why hasn’t it been arranged to buy them? There is no money. . . . In such cases, governments have no other rule than public rescue.”19
Outraged by these reports of the miserable condition of the victors of Puebla, a group identifying themselves only as Varios Mejicanos (“Some Mexicans”) wrote to La Voz de Méjico, urging all their countrymen, who had donated so generously to create the sword of honor, to meet in San Francisco and form an association to be called the Sociedad Patriótica Mejicana (Mexican Patriotic Society). Sheer geographical distance making them unable to serve in their country’s armed forces in person, they proposed instead to collect funds “to alleviate, to some extent, the ills which our army suffers.” They estimated that there were more than five thousand Mexicans presently in California, nearly all of them able and willing to donate at least a dollar a month. “Let us make an effort,” they urged, “for perhaps we will do good for more than one person. We have a duty, as sons of Mexico.”20
Latinos in Los Angeles came up with their own variation on this theme. On September 21, 1862, a group met there and voted to establish a junta patriótica whose goals were to raise not only a monthly donation but also funds to equip and send volunteers to join the Mexican army. At the junta’s second meeting, on September 28, Agustín Somosa and Pascual Ramírez, both originally from Jalisco; Manuel Garfias, a Oaxacan; Ygnacio Varela, a Sonoran; and Francisco de P. N. Guerrero, a Californio, volunteered their services as soldiers for the cause.21 Latinos in the neighboring port town of New San Pedro (shortly to be renamed Wilmington) also formed a junta, on September 22, and seven of its members, all originally from Jalisco, volunteered to go fight.22 On publishing the minutes of these groups’ organizational meetings in his paper, Rodríguez noted that similar juntas had been formed in New Almaden and San Luis Obispo, in addition to Placerville, Los Angeles, and New San Pedro. He urged Latinos in San Francisco to follow their example and announced a meeting to be held for that purpose at La Voz de Méjico’s offices on October 12.23
Latinos up and down the state responded, and nearly every week thereafter La Voz de Méjico published announcements of juntas being organized. The processes involved in setting up a junta were similar in all cases. The organization of the one in Marysville, in Yuba County, was typical. On October 19, 1862, less than two months after the Placerville junta was formed, a number of Mexican citizens met at the house of Martín Murillo in Marysville. Pablo Solorzano addressed the group, inviting his countrymen to contribute money to Mexico’s defense, “since, due to the distance at which we find ourselves, it is nearly impossible for us to personally take part in the defense of our nationhood.” By a voice vote, Juan Nepomuceno Leal was elected president of the junta. Thereafter taking charge of the meeting, Leal oversaw the election of the other officers: secretary, first and second board members, and treasurer, all elected by a voice vote. The newly elected first board member, Carlos Granizón, moved that all members “proceed to sign up for their monthly dues for the purposes already proposed, which was put into effect straightaway.” Leal asked those present to bring their donations to the next meeting so that they could be sent to the Junta Central Directiva (Central Managing Junta) in San Francisco, which had been formally constituted following the meeting called by Rodríguez on October 12. It was the Junta Central’s responsibility to forward the funds to Juárez’s government in Mexico. These arrangements having been made, the first meeting of the Marysville junta was adjourned.24
A newly established junta usually announced its foundation by communicating its acta de organización (record of organization) in a letter to La Voz de Méjico or, after June 1864, to La Voz and El Nuevo Mundo, both of which became semiofficial organs of the juntas patrióticas in California, Nevada, and Oregon. So numerous did the juntas grow in a very short time that the newspapers had to print apologies for their inability to publish the full texts of all these letters. When one of these Spanish-language newspapers published the bylaws of a junta, other juntas could comment on them. Certainly the papers’ editors did not hesitate to do so. For example, Rodríguez considered Article 4 of the bylaws of the junta in Chinese Camp too coercive. He commented, “The fourth [article] states that payment of dues is mandatory for members; we assume that this mandate is merely moral, for otherwise it does not seem proper to us to insist that they be compelled by urging them too strongly.”25
One variation in this basic organizing process concerned what role women played in a community’s junta. Some juntas elected female officers to interact with other women (see figure 13). The one in Sacramento elected an all-male board but “immediately decided to commission two ladies to collect voluntary donations among the women of this capital . . . and Doña Josefa Cienfuegos and Doña Altagracia Liceo were chosen.”26 As will be seen, however, the Latina women of some communities chose to form their own juntas de señoras (ladies’ assemblies), separate from the men’s.
FIGURE 13. Hipólita Orendain collected donations from fellow female members of the San Francisco junta. (Courtesy California Historical Society, FN-29127/CHS2011.519.tif, Gift of F. V. Brigante Est.)
Map 3 shows 129 locations mentioned in the Spanish-language press as having a junta patriótica in the years 1862–1867. It indicates a strong Latino presence in the gold-mining areas of the Sierra foothills. In fact, those foothills had the greatest number of juntas, ranging from Downieville in the northern mining district to Hornitos in the southern mining district, with a preponderance of juntas in the southern district. There was a string of juntas in the large towns that served as jumping-off points for miners going farther into the mountains: Yreka, Red Bluff, Marysville, Sacramento, Stockton, and French Camp. Juntas ringed the San Francisco Bay Area, from Sonoma and Napa in the north to Mount Diablo, Pinole, San Leandro, and Alvarado in the east, down to San José and San Juan Bautista in the south. Southern California had juntas in San Luis Obispo, New San Pedro/Wilmington, and Los Angeles. There were also seven juntas in locations outside California: Virginia City, Silver City, Carson City, Gullimoque, Reese River, and Austin in Nevada, and The Dalles in Oregon.
MAP 3. Junta patriótica mejicana locations in California, Nevada, and Oregon, 1862–1867. (Werner Schink)
These juntas had at least 13,831 members during this period.27 They were a cosmopolitan lot. Although the juntas were established specifically to contribute to the Mexican effort against the French and much of their initial rhetoric addressed “brother Mexicans” or “Mexican patriots,” their membership certainly was not limited to Mexican citizens. Indeed, the Los Angeles junta announced at its foundation that “this junta . . . will not be made up exclusively of Mexican citizens; rather, all the children of the other American republics will be invited . . . because their national identities are equally threatened and because they are opposed to any European intervention which has as its objective changing our republican form of government.”28 Píoquinto Dávila, an immigrant from Colombia, was a leading figure in this junta.29 Felipe Fierro, a Chilean immigrant, was prominent in the San Francisco junta.30 A Salvadoran, Juan Vicente Martorell, was a frequent contributor to the junta in Hornitos.31 In concluding his September 16 speech in Placerville, Rafael H. González went to pains to include all possible Latin Americans in his call to action: “Yes, Mexicans, Chileans, Peruvians, Colombians, New Grenadeans, and all the children of Latin America, the heroes and martyrs of our independence call to us from the tomb: To arms, all republicans, lovers of their liberty!”32
So careful were most juntas to be inclusive in their membership that when La Voz de Méjico accidentally printed an invitation addressed only to Mexicans, the editor Antonio Mancillas quickly offered an apology and reworded the invitation. “Inadvertently, we invited only Mexicans, in the notice we published in our last number. We publish it [again] today, for the same day, to Mexicans and all other Hispanic Americans in general. . . . In this country, when we say Hispanic American, we don’t notice where someone was born, but rather we embrace each other as brothers. . . . We are very sorry for our oversight.”33
A number of Californios—Latinos born in California who, after 1848, became citizens of the United States—were also junta members. As far as can be ascertained, the Los Angeles and Wilmington juntas had the largest Californio presence. For instance, a subscription list from Los Angeles in 1863 identifies 35 of the 114 Latina women it includes (31 percent) specifically as either Californios or California Indians.34 The percentage of Californio participants in the juntas was lower in most other communities, especially San Francisco and the mining camps, both of which tended to have much higher concentrations of immigrants. Some Californios, such as Francisco P. Ramírez, played active roles in the juntas. Others, such as Mariano G. Vallejo of Sonoma, had high-profile but less active roles. The Los Angeles junta listed Yaqui and California Indians as members, as well as Atlantic Americans (usually listed as Americano) and the occasional French, German, Portuguese, or Belgian immigrant.
Nevertheless, there sometimes was tension between those with a more inclusive view and those who preferred a limited ethnic or political definition for the juntas’ membership and aims. One such conflict grew heated in 1865 when the junta in San Francisco voted to exclude from membership any Mexican who had taken U.S. citizenship, on the grounds that a true Mexican patriot would never renounce Mexican citizenship. One of its members, Tomás Jewett, objected to this restriction on the grounds that although he had been born in Mexico, he was a U.S. citizen, thanks to his father’s U.S. citizenship. While he was assured that the new rule was not aimed at him, he and his brother nonetheless resigned from the junta, in protest at its exclusion of those of their Mexican friends who had become U.S. citizens.35 Francisco P. Ramírez, who had moved to immigrant-dominated San Francisco from Californio-dominated Los Angeles, argued successfully at a subsequent junta meeting for the revocation of this exclusion, noting that it unfairly singled out Mexicans who had become U.S. citizens but did not exclude those who had become citizens of other countries, which could be construed as an insult to the United States. One of his key points was that most of the Mexicans who had taken U.S. citizenship recently had done so to be able to vote—the implication was, for Lincoln—in the 1864 presidential election. So closely identified were the Union and Juarist causes by this time that this could be seen as an act of Mexican patriotism. Passions ran so high over the issue that Ramírez and General Plácido Vega, the major proponent of the restriction and a recently arrived special emissary of Juárez’s government, got into an unseemly public brawl after the meeting and were arrested by the San Francisco police.36
While the San Francisco and Los Angeles juntas could boast of a number of relatively elite officers and members—foreign consuls, businessmen, physicians, artists, editors, writers, and the like—most members of any junta were ordinary Latinos of the 1860s: miners, mule skinners, cowboys, laborers, cooks, and housewives. Even the San Francisco junta said of its membership, “We Mexicans who live here now are poor, for we earn our bread by the sweat of our labor; but we have organized ourselves into Patriotic Societies.”37
The participants’ lack of education occasionally affected junta proceedings but did not stop them. When women living at the Guadalupe mine in Santa Clara County met to establish a women’s junta, they elected one of their number, Donaciana Diocio de García, as president. But nominations for a secretary were brought up short when they discovered that “there was not one of the ladies who knew how to write.” Undaunted, they turned to a man in the room, Facundo Orosco y Castelo, the secretary of the Guadalupe men’s junta, and persuaded him to act as their secretary also, “in the interim, until there should be another person who might fulfill the office.”38 Only six members of the junta in Napa signed a letter published in El Nuevo Mundo in January 1866, but a postscript added, “I place below the names of those who don’t know how to sign, but who are in agreement,” followed by the names of twenty-one illiterate members.39
During the year following the excitement of the victory at Puebla on May 5, 1862, juntas patrióticas sprang up throughout California and in neighboring states. First and foremost, they were a fund-raising mechanism, able to gather respectable sums quickly and get the money into the hands of designated causes. Yet they served a number of social functions as well. They became a training ground for Latino leaders, in their election of officers and in providing forums for decision making and public speaking. They were also, thanks to the Spanish-language press in California, an important communications network that could spread word of events from one end of the state to the other in a matter of days.
This network quickly communicated the news of the military disaster at Puebla in 1863 to Latinos in California, Nevada, and Oregon. The intelligence must have been especially bitter, as only a short time before there had been hope that the 1862 miracle of Puebla would be repeated and confirmed. But rather than being dismissed or forgotten as a failed hope, that first, successful battle of Puebla instead came to represent to Latinos in California the importance of the struggle and the goals for which it stood, much as the fall of the Alamo has come to mean for modern Anglo Texans.
To remove any doubt about Puebla’s fall, the Central Managing Junta in San Francisco published an official pronouncement. “News of the loss of Puebla de Zaragoza has been confirmed by the last steamer. The only sure details of this disaster . . . can be summed up by the laconic words of a letter written by an impartial foreigner: ‘Puebla has yielded on account of hunger. Her heroic defenders refused all offers of surrender; they disabled their armaments; some commanders and officers committed suicide, so as not to become prisoners.’” Nonetheless, in the Junta Central’s view, the fall of Puebla changed nothing. Mexico was still at war with the French, and Mexicans (and others) living in California still had a valuable role to play. “Although, at this distance, we cannot offer our blood to the homeland, let us redouble our efforts to help her with our financial resources, with our moral support.”40
The juntas responded to the call. They held emergency meetings, which their largely working-class members, although dependent on their daily wages to sustain their families, took leave of their jobs to attend. In Virginia City, Nevada; at the New Almaden mine in Santa Clara County; in the gold country towns of Hornitos, Chinese Camp, and San Andrés; in Los Angeles and other communities too numerous for the editor Mancillas of La Voz de Méjico to list individually, Latinos gathered to decide what to do in the wake of the Mexican defeat at Puebla. The Spanish-language press portrayed a near-religious fervor as sweeping through those attending junta meetings: “The zeal that the juntas of the hinterland have displayed after the disaster at Puebla is praiseworthy; it does honor to the Mexican nation.” Emotional demonstrations ensued, and as a tangible sign of their adherence to Mexico’s cause, junta supporters donated even greater sums of money than before. Their resolution in the face of the setback at Puebla led Mancillas to exclaim proudly, “Communities who love their liberty so much cannot be conquered!!”41
Some individuals and small groups went even further. In San Francisco, a group of Mexican women organized a boycott of the city’s French merchants. Mancillas urged Latinos in the rest of the state to follow suit.42 Near the San Francisco waterfront, Marcos Meléndez and an unnamed Frenchman came to blows in a Pacific Street saloon. “In accordance with the testimony of the Hispanic Americans who witnessed the event, the Frenchman was found to be the aggressor; and Marcos Meléndez is a free man again, and proud to have done something, for his part, that could avenge the misdeeds that the invaders are committing in his country, and thus erase the memory of Puebla.”43 Latinos voiced their defiance of the French to one another in poems and letters published in the Spanish-language press. An anonymous Mexican “from the hinterland” sent in a poem about the French Intervention and the recent fall of Puebla mere days after the official notice was received. He concluded hopefully:
The worker of unfulfilled desires;
Thus will Napoleon [III] die,
Dreaming of the income and treasury
Of Mexico. . . . The Nation.44
A South American who signed himself “an old Brazilian” exhorted, “Mexicans: Now is the time to demonstrate your courage. Run, with pleasure and enthusiasm, to defend your freedom.”45 Nor, taking a leaf from the Los Angeles junta’s book, was the editor Mancillas slow to encourage Latinos in California to go to Mexico to fight the French. He urged those unable to go in person to pay the travel costs of those who were willing. Mancillas admitted that the number of volunteer soldiers from California might not be great but insisted that the moral effect of even a few Mexicans returning from abroad to defend their country would be tremendous and would encourage others to do the same.46
Thanks to efforts by the juntas patrióticas in California, Nevada, and Oregon, the memory of the first battle of Puebla was becoming institutionalized, as evidenced by the Cinco de Mayo celebrations described at the beginning of this chapter. But as time went on, the activities and interests of the juntas expanded beyond efforts to resist the French Intervention in Mexico. The organized voice of the juntas sought justice for California’s Latinos, especially the least advantaged among them, when other institutions rarely heeded them. As justice was sometimes in short supply in nineteenth-century California, the bylaws of a number of juntas included a degree of civil rights protection as one of the benefits of being a member. For example, the junta in the mining town of Hornitos specified, of a portion of the money it raised, “Article 5. These funds are assigned exclusively to help those of its members made unfortunate by illness, imprisonment, or death. . . . Article 8. . . . If any of its members should happen to end up in prison, the Club will try to obtain his liberty.”47
In the town of Sonora in 1864, when Ramón Velázquez was sentenced to die for killing a Chinese immigrant, he turned to the local junta for legal aid, as “his friends had refused to succor or help him because he was an Indian, giving people to understand by his words that the death penalty had been given him so that other, worse criminals might go unpunished.” He insisted, moreover, that he was innocent. The junta determined that $250 would secure the services of a good lawyer, who might be able to get Velázquez a new trial, but this sum was beyond the means of a single junta in a small mining community. The Sonora junta’s president, Gregorio Contreras, therefore wrote to La Voz de Méjico, asking the paper to bring Velázquez’s case to the public’s attention, “by virtue of the fact that the accused had directed a petition to the said junta, asking its members, in the interests of justice, to contribute in some way to saving him from the unmerited penalty that the law, poorly administered, had imposed upon him.” The juntas in Hornitos, Merced River, Martinez, and San Francisco donated to Velázquez’s appeal. They not only raised the $250 but also pressed Mexican emissary Plácido Vega and the state treasurer, Romualdo Pacheco, a U.S.-citizen scion of an old Californio family, to intercede with the governor on Velázquez’s behalf. The latter’s appeal was particularly effective, as the editor Mancillas recognized, obtaining a stay of execution while the case was reviewed. “Such effectiveness on the part of Señor Pacheco will be appreciated by all Mexicans to whose attention this notice may come.” Unfortunately for Velázquez, the state’s examiner found that the trial had been conducted impartially and justice served, and despite his continuing protestations of innocence, the convicted man was executed. After reprinting a local paper’s report of the execution, Mancillas thanked those who had come to Velázquez’s assistance. “In the name of our fellow countrymen, we thank Señor General Vega and the other friends and gentlemen who, from the moment they learned that a Mexican was suffering under the terrible weight of a death sentence, have not omitted any sacrifice in order to have the satisfaction of saving him—or at least so that a ray of comfort should penetrate the dark prison of Ramón Velázquez!”48
Juntas sometimes engaged in other philanthropy, raising money not just for Juárez’s government but also for distressed Latinos in the United States. “The juntas patrióticas can do much good, even for the Mexicans who live in this country,” Francisco P. Ramírez opined in 1865. He had in mind mostly political benefits, envisioning the juntas as interest groups whose numbers would command attention even from the federal government.49 An 1864 editorial in La Voz de Méjico reminded readers that “the patriotic associations are, for Mexicans, simply of a private and national interest. We cannot regard them as established exclusively for giving donations . . . but rather for lending us mutual aid, so that in a strange land we may act as a strong and solid nationality; so that in each and every one of the members may be seen not just a friend, but a brother.”50 Such local benefits could take various forms.
Given the complete lack of public support and health insurance in 1860s California, people out of work due to illness could run the risk of literally starving to death. For this reason, sometimes the juntas provided basic necessities like food and shelter to sick members so they could avoid the humiliation of public charity. In 1865, the statutes of the Club Patriótico Mejicano (Mexican Patriotic Club) in San Francisco stated explicitly, “The purpose of the Club Patriótico Mejicano is political and charitable. Political, because it must occupy itself with affairs that bear a relation to the defense of the Mexican Republic. . . . Charitable, because its funds will serve to benefit its less fortunate members in cases of illness, imprisonment, or death.” They provided that “as soon as news is received that any member is sick, the president will name a commission composed of three individuals, who must go to the sufferer’s house, not just to visit him in the name of the Club, but also to offer the services of the Society.”51 That same year, the Chileans’ junta in Mokelumne Hill, in Calaveras County, bought a house from Juana Ureta de Berna for $750 to provide a shelter for the disadvantaged, “so that the said property . . . may be the first step toward the development of the great idea and a realization of mutual benefits, and so that it may serve as a refuge from misfortune, misery, and poverty.”52
The final benefit a mutual aid society could provide, of course, was a proper funeral. During the tumultuous days of the Gold Rush, it was not unknown for recent arrivals stricken by some mortal illness—cholera, typhus, smallpox—to suffer the indignity of an anonymous, unmourned burial. Being a member of a junta insured against the potter’s field and promised a dignified, ceremonious funeral and a grave in a recognized location. San Francisco’s Club Patriótico Mejicano furthermore declared that “in the case of death, all the members of the Club will accompany the body to its final home.”53
The juntas did not always limit their philanthropy and benefits to their members. From the Gold Rush onward, Latinos had organized subscription lists to provide assistance to other Latinos who had fallen on hard times.54 As the juntas developed, however, they provided a more efficient way of practicing intra-Latino philanthropy. For example, in 1866 a Latina in San Francisco ran an advertisement in El Nuevo Mundo, addressed “To Philanthropic Persons,” imploring their assistance. “Doña Rosalía Bernales de Sánchez finds herself prostrated by sickness and without resources; she begs the Christian pity of all feeling people who might wish to help her in her sad condition, [thereby] exercising one of the most sublime virtues—charity.”55 In Calaveras County, the junta in San Andrés, after collecting its usual subscriptions for Juárez’s troops, took up a special collection and was able to provide her the sum of $3.85.56 Before the advent of the juntas and their intimate relationship with the Spanish-language press, Latinos in the mining camps almost certainly never would have learned of the plight of a poor countrywoman in San Francisco, much less have been able to come to her aid like this.
While the Mexican juntas patrióticas formed the largest, most highly structured Latino network, they were by no means the only Latino community-based organizations established during the American Civil War and French Intervention. Following their example, other groups formed associated or imitative organizations and networks. Perhaps most notable among these were the various women’s juntas and the Chilean juntas.
Shortly after the fall of Puebla in 1863, the Mexican refugee Francisca Manzo de Cavazos invited Latina women in Los Angeles to discuss the situation in her homeland. As she later expressed it, “I developed the idea of bringing together the Mexican women of this city, for the purpose of forming a new junta patriótica, of ladies. . . . I immediately sent out a call to all my countrywomen . . . and in consequence, for the justness of our cause, they all attended in great numbers on June 28, to name a junta and gather donations for our brave Mexican army.” Once the interested women—and evidently some men as well—had assembled, Manzo de Cavazos delivered an inspiring speech, beginning, “I am a Mexican. I am a woman. And my heart has not been able to help but be shaken, upon considering the sacrifices that the Mexican people are making to defend the independence, liberty, and honor of my homeland.” She did not deny the limitations women then faced when venturing into public political activity but urged her audience not to let those barriers stand in their way.
Mexican women! Although our weak constitutions do not permit us to bear arms with which to defend public liberty, this does not exempt us from the suffering and humiliation that tyranny brings with it. Although our sex keeps us apart from political life, or from debating the important interests of the State, we do not for that reason lack the common sense to know how to value liberty and to sacrifice our lives, rather than drag about the chains of despotism. For these reasons, ladies . . . we must cooperate, with all the power of our will, in reaching the noble goal that the junta patriótica of Los Angeles has proposed: that of contributing, every month, with our donations, to helping our brothers who so gloriously know how to die for the homeland.
FIGURE 14. The 1860 U.S. Census listed María Noriega as a fifty-year-old dressmaker from Mexico living in Sonora, California. On September 30, 1863, she invited Latinas to her house, where she gave a speech asking them to organize a ladies’ junta in their town. The women responded enthusiastically and established the junta on the spot. (Courtesy California Historical Society, FN-36621/CHS2010.374.tif)
In concluding her speech, she invited the audience to take a solemn oath to defend freedom and democracy. The male editor of La Voz de Méjico noted, “All the women in the crowd stood up, and raising their hands, they swore; but in such an angry manner that the men were left astonished.”57
Not long after, Latina women in other communities took up the Los Angeles women’s challenge and established ladies’ juntas in San José, Marysville, Sonora, Virginia City, Hornitos, and the New Almaden and Guadalupe mines in Santa Clara County (see figure 14).58 These were not mere auxiliaries to the previously established, male-dominated juntas patrióticas. The members of a ladies’ junta elected their own officers, ran their own meetings, collected donations, and decided how to use the funds. Like the male- dominated juntas, though, they sent most of the funds they raised to Mexico to help Juárez’s government in its struggle against the French.
In February 1865, a somewhat different sort of community organization appeared in Los Angeles, also created and run entirely by Latina women. The primary purpose of the Club Zaragoza, as outlined in its bylaws, was different from the main raison d’être of the juntas patrióticas during this decade, although certainly not outside one of the secondary functions juntas frequently adopted, of providing mutual assistance. Membership was not limited to Latinas but open to all women who wished to aid Mexico. Each member was to pay monthly dues of fifty cents to a dollar, depending on her ability, and “the funds will be assigned exclusively to helping sick women who belong to this society. . . . When one of the members shall fall ill, the assembly will name a committee of three persons to take on the responsibility of obtaining for her the necessary aid . . . and in case of death, it will be the duty of the Club to accompany her remains to her grave, where a cross will be placed.” In short, this group of Latinas had organized a mutual benefits society of, by, and for women.59 The membership of the Los Angeles ladies’ junta and the Club Zaragoza overlapped considerably, but the primary purpose of each was sufficiently different that two organizations seemed to be needed.
Most Latinos in California lived in the same neighborhoods, with Mexicans, Chileans, Peruvians, Colombians, Ecuadorians, Argentines, and Salvadorans all populating a local “Spanishtown.” After the Mexican immigrants who came to California during the Gold Rush, Chileans seem to have been the next largest Latino population group.60 As a result of the Chileans’ numbers and economic influence, Chilean Independence Day, on September 18, was celebrated in San Francisco as early as 1851.61 As the original Mexican juntas had, during the 1850s the few juntas patrióticas chilenas (Chilean patriotic assemblies) in existence confined their activities to celebrating their Independence Day. When the Mexican juntas took on new life and a new purpose after the first battle of Puebla, a number of sympathetic Chileans assumed active roles in those organizations. For example, Manuel Silva was one of the principal orators at the Mexican Independence Day celebration in Los Angeles in 1865.62 That same year, Juan V. Villalón gave a Mexican Independence Day address at the New Almaden mine.63
Just a few weeks later, Villalón was among the nearly three dozen individuals who sent a letter to the editor Ramírez of El Nuevo Mundo on behalf of the Sociedad Patriótica Chilena of New Almaden, whose secretary Villalón was. They were protesting “the unjust war that Spain is conducting against our homeland” in a sideshow to the Chincha Islands War between Peru and Spain. Outraged at what they suspected (incorrectly) to be Spanish designs on their country’s independence, the Chilean juntas in California, as their Mexican counterparts had done just three years earlier, reinvented themselves as grassroots political organizations of immigrants in the United States.64
Recognizing the power of organized community effort, the Sociedad Patriótica Chilena of Forest Hill, in Placer County, quickly announced that, like its counterpart in New Almaden, it was reorganizing to solicit monthly donations to support the Chilean government against Spain.65 As the New Almaden junta had suggested and the Forest Hill junta seconded, a central junta soon was organized in San Francisco, with Felipe Fierro as its president, more or less on the model of the Mexican juntas’ Junta Central Directiva.66 It was not long before Chilean juntas were sending in their donations from a number of locations, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento, New Almaden, Forest Hill, Sutter Creek, San Pablo in Contra Costa County, San Juan Bautista and Vallecito in San Benito County, Mokelumne Hill, Placerville, Jackson, and Murphy’s Camp.67
As a number of Chileans had been active in the Mexican juntas, Mexicans began to return the favor. The Chilean junta in Los Angeles, like the Mexican junta there, boasted a pan-Latino membership, including the Californio Cristóbal Aguilar, the Mexican Jacinto Haro, the Peruvian Pedro Blanco, the Colombian Píoquinto Dávila (who was also an officer of Los Angeles’ Mexican junta), the Central American Benito Valle, and the Atlantic American William C. Warren (see figure 15).68 Furthermore, in November of 1865, Mexican consul José A. Godoy made an address to the Club Patriótico Mejicano in San Francisco explicitly comparing the Spanish invasion of Chile to the French invasion of Mexico, as another foreign intervention attempting to subject, by force of arms, an American republic to European autocracy. He also reminded his audience of the particular sympathy and support Chileans showed for the Juarist cause in Mexico and outlined several ways in which Mexicans now were ready to reciprocate:
1st. That Mexicans declare that the war that Spain is making on our sister republic of Chile is unjust and barbarous.
2nd. That they consider that war as criminal an act as the one that the French are committing by making war on the republic of Mexico. . . .
3rd. That Mexicans are prepared to give all the helps that lie in their power to the Chileans in the present fight.69
FIGURE 15. Jacinto Haro (center), a post-1848 immigrant from Mexico, was a member of the Los Angeles junta from 1863 to 1866. Julián Valdez (right), a Californio, was a member of the same junta in 1863. Nothing is known about the background of José López (left). (Courtesy Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History)
When the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter in 1861, California had been part of the United States for thirteen years. The Californios, along with tens of thousands of immigrants attracted to the state’s gold fields from Mexico, Central America, and South America, had begun to create a new society during that period. The members of this suddenly heterogeneous Latino population had some social characteristics in common, such as language, religion, and some cultural traits, but the potential dividers of class, race, and national origin threatened to keep Latinos from forming a single community. Yet a set of similar conflicts with Atlantic Americans, ranging from the Foreign Miners’ Tax to lynchings, helped to shape a sense of Latino community in California. While Californio and immigrant parents struggled to speak English and learn about Atlantic American ways, their United States–born children were growing up almost naturally bilingual and bicultural, at home in both English and Spanish.
This new society continued to evolve after Abraham Lincoln’s election, but now a new common experience was added, namely living through the American Civil War and the French Intervention. The latter event caused a new wave of immigration from Mexico to California, primarily of refugees unable or unwilling to live under French rule. Once there, the new arrivals tended to settle in already-established Latino communities around the state, adding their activities and energies to the society emerging there. A thorough study of Latino social and cultural life in California during this time would require a book in itself. Until that book is written, brief observations of developments in several areas of social life, as revealed through the lens of the lively Spanish-language press of the day, may serve to show that the upheavals of the 1860s had far-reaching effects on Latino society, culture, and politics in California.
Catholic worship had been a feature of Latino life in California since the first Spanish settlement in 1769, and by the war years of 1861 to 1867, the majority of Latinos were still Catholics, and Catholic practices were prominent in their social life. Formal participation by the Catholic church, such as the celebration of a mass, sometimes also was part of junta-sponsored civic ceremonies.70 During Holy Week of 1863, almost a year after the first battle of Puebla and while the protracted second battle of Puebla was going on, Latino San Franciscans satirically adapted the centuries-old Catholic folk tradition, practiced in Mexico and California, of burning Judas in effigy just before Easter.71 The account in La Voz de Méjico began unremarkably enough, noting that “on Holy Saturday, the Mexican boys of the city burned the customary Judas.” But in the next sentence, with mock solemnity, the editor claimed that he was in possession of Judas’s last will and testament, and it had proved to be that of “Juan N. Almonte (alias the Mexican Judas Iscariot).” In Almonte’s self-serving declaration in Orizaba in 1862, he had denied the constitutionality of Juárez’s government and declared himself the nation’s rightful chief executive, allying himself with the French invaders (see chapter 2). The satirical last will and testament depicted Almonte as complaining to Napoleon III that he had been shunted aside by General Élie-Frédéric Forey and therefore intended to commit suicide, out of pique. He bequeathed the French emperor a country, Mexico, filled with inhabitants who “are very stupid, for they have had the temerity to form a numerous army to oppose themselves to bowing to the gentle yoke of the most powerful monarch on earth” (italics in original). He also asked that Napoleon award tin medals for outstanding conduct such as the violation of the Preliminaries of Soledad by the French ambassador to Mexico Count Alphonse Dubois de Saligny and General Charles Ferdinand Latrille, comte de Lorencez. “Also, the most excellent General Lorencez deserves another medal of the same class, and the title of marquess of Puebla, for the famous battle of May 5, with an inscription that ought to say: ‘He ran away at Puebla, May 5, 1862.’ ” The mock testament concluded by wishing the emperor, “God preserve your Majesty for many centuries, for I believe years alone are not sufficient for so great an enterprise” as the conquest of Mexico.72 The practice of burning effigies of French or reactionary Mexican figures in place of Judas Iscariot grew, until Holy Week of 1866 included four mannequins, representing Emperor Maximilian, his wife, and two particularly disliked imperial officials. These were paraded through the streets of San Francisco in a boisterous procession to the top of Telegraph Hill, where a jeering crowd tore them apart and burned them to ashes.73
Latino communities in California during the war years continued to build their lives around other time-honored customs as well, reflected in tastes in food, recreation, and music. As a result, they constituted a distinct market, and commercial advertising in the Spanish- and English-language presses reflected the robust continuation of their traditional practices. In particular, the provision of food provided business opportunities for those attuned to Latino customs. In 1862, for example, Hipólito Jurado was the proprietor of the Restaurante Mejicano on Dupont Street in San Francisco, “well known to the Spanish-speaking population,” which he advertised as offering “everything that may be Mexican-style food.”74 Less than a year later, however, he had sold the establishment to Antonio J. Domínguez, who renamed it the Restaurante del Aguila de Oro (Golden Eagle Restaurant) and made some adjustments to its menu that he hoped would bring in a wider clientele of “Hispanic Americans and the general public.”75 By 1864, a patriotically themed Mexican restaurant had opened, La Libertad (Liberty), owned by Gerardo Dávila, which advertised meals with a choice of tortillas or bread on the side, with or without wine, and enchiladas or chicken dishes on request.76
Latina women were also active in small business concerns, and the restaurateur’s trade seemed a particularly fertile field for female entrepreneurship. Early in 1862, Isabel González opened a restaurant called La Mejicana (The Mexican Girl) on Dupont Street in San Francisco, which featured, among other things, “Mexican-style hot chocolate.”77 In 1866, Petra Rodríguez opened yet another new Mexican restaurant, on Broadway, offering meals with or without wine, or with tortillas on the side. Enchiladas, chicken, and hot chocolate were extra. The establishment’s private dining parlor for ladies was proof of its respectability.78 By the autumn of 1863, a business concern run by a Chilean woman, Estéfana Abello y Compañía, had purchased the Restaurante del Aguila de Oro, formerly owned by Antonio J. Domínguez. Abello, who was also a member of San Francisco’s junta, advertised, “The undersigned, having taken charge of the said establishment, announces to Mexicans and Hispanic Americans that they will find good food here from eight o’clock in the morning on.”79
While the bulk of Latino-owned businesses were in urban areas such as San Francisco, San José, or Los Angeles, some opened in smaller towns and villages. In the mining town of Placerville, in 1864, Francisco Silvia was running a restaurant named, patriotically, the Zaragoza Restaurant; its cuisine was immediately identifiable from its subtitle, Casa Mejicana (Mexican House). Silvia advertised to “people of the Spanish-speaking race and to the general public” that he offered meals “in the preferred Mexican style.” Not wanting to limit his business opportunities, he helpfully added, “English and Portuguese spoken.”80 In the town of Sonora, José María Cabezut advertised his Sonora Restaurant and Pablo Laviaga his Illyrien Restaurant in English in the Sonora Union Democrat.81 Both proprietors were leading members of the junta patriótica in Sonora.
One recreation Latinos had a particular taste for was bullfighting, which often seemed to mystify or repel Atlantic Americans. Bullfights often featured in Latino civic events, such as the Cinco de Mayo commemoration organized by the junta at the New Almaden mine in 1864. As a spectator sport, bullfighting offered business opportunities to shrewd entrepreneurs.82 In 1866, a novelty from Mexico appeared on the California bullfighting scene: a female bullfighter. On February 3, the “young and beautiful female bull-fighter” Rosa Medrano, recently arrived from Mexico City, was scheduled to face a “wild bull” in the ring at the Willows, an entertainment park outside San Francisco. Medrano, who was going to wear “a beautiful Andalusian outfit,” evidently was to perform in a corrida mixta that also would feature three male toreros— Nicolás Martínez, Ramón Núñez, and Guadalupe Cervantes—and a picador, Francisco Naranjo. The show also promised acrobats and a clown bilingual in English and Spanish.83
A number of musicians from Mexico and Latin America arrived in this period, adding their voices and instruments to the harmonies of Spanish-speaking California. The Spanish-language press made their presence known, through advertisements, reviews, and the occasional puff piece.84 In December 1862, four musicians from Mexico came to San Francisco aboard the Neva and advertised their services to the public via La Voz de Méjico. Apolinario Calderón played flute and guitar and gave lessons in both; Andrés Berroa played the cello; Emiliano Medián played the cornet; and Matías Sigala played the tenor horn.85 In the summer of 1863, the violinist and conductor Paz Martínez arrived from Mexico City, making the final leg of his journey aboard the steamship Orizaba. La Voz de Méjico reported that he wished to give a concert to introduce himself to the public and hoped other musicians in San Francisco would help him achieve this goal.86
The major languages used in California, Spanish and English, continued to vie with and influence each other throughout this period. California’s legislature followed the state’s constitutional mandate for bilingual governance by allocating money to translate all laws and regulations into Spanish. The results, however, were not always satisfactory.87 In 1866, Francisco P. Ramírez of El Nuevo Mundo received copies of official state documents printed in both English and Spanish and was so disgusted at the poor quality of the Spanish translation, not to mention the overall print quality, that he felt compelled to object. “We have regretted to see that the Spanish translation, besides being entirely different than the original, contains many errors in proofreading, and even in common sense. We hope that the legislature may have more care henceforward in its nomination of a State Translator, for the carelessness that is obvious in the translation of the documents to which we refer is lamentable.”88 Ramírez’s complaint evidently had some effect; just a few weeks later, a state commission selected him to be one of the official state translators for the next two years. Named to the post along with him was T. R. Eldredge, whom Ramírez characterized as a capable translator from English into Spanish, as well as a friend of his.89
But if the government’s use of Spanish appeared to be halfhearted, business interests in California quickly learned that the ability to communicate in Spanish conferred an advantage, in profiting from the Latino market. For example, the West End Hotel on Brannan Place in San Francisco announced in its advertising, Se Habla Español (“Spanish spoken”). The Empire State Restaurant declared that it served delicious meals and also Se habla Español. The stonemason John Daniel included in his services se graban rotulos, en español, con toda propiedad (“lettering engraved in Spanish, with complete correctness”).90
While children picked up languages naturally, adults had to work at it. The editors of Spanish-language newspapers occasionally could not resist the temptation to point out common English-speaker mispronunciations. “The American Flag says that Spanish-speakers pronounce the word Mexico, Mayhee-co. We suppose it may sound that way to English speakers.” Some could not quite master the spoken language but could read Spanish. One M. J. Freeman in Unionville, Nevada, was a regular reader of La Voz de Méjico. “I have subscribed to your excellent newspaper La Voz de Méjico for some time. . . . I love your language, although I cannot speak it.”91
Yet language was a two-way street in California in this era. Not only did some Atlantic Americans learn Spanish, but many Latinos learned English.92 A letter writer who identified himself only as “A friend of universal education” pointed out to his fellow Spanish speakers in San Francisco in 1866 the advisability of learning English. He noted that “there being many Mexicans in this city desirous of learning the English tongue,” night classes had been offered for the past two years by the public schools, “and one hopes that that portion of our community will take advantage of this nearly cost-free opportunity that our city’s Board of Education offers.”93
Continuing a trend that had begun with the advent of massive numbers of English-speaking settlers during the Gold Rush, the Spanish vocabulary used in California during the 1860s was diverging from that of the Spanish spoken in Mexico and elsewhere as English words increasingly found their way into common use. In warning his readers against an apparently fraudulent organization called the Sociedad Voluntaria del 4 de Septiembre de 1861, the editor Rodríguez of La Voz de Méjico wrote in 1862, confident that his readers would understand the locution, “Esto suena a humbug muy decididamente” (“This sounds very decidedly like a humbug”).94 Some of the anglicisms common in twenty-first-century Spanglish were first heard among Latinos in Civil War–era California. Then as now, purists sniffed that only ignorant people used such terms when Spanish had perfectly good words already for the objects or concepts in question. Defining anglicismos (“anglicisms”) for his readers in 1863, Rodríguez commented, “This is what the terms can be called that many of our fellow countrymen—ill-versed in their own language and not completely enthusiastic about its exactness and purity—have caused to be introduced into the tongue. Thus we see . . . that, from the English word market, they give us marketa; as if mercado (which is its meaning) were not pure, chaste Spanish.” In a similar vein, the English word grocery was hispanized to grocería and used to mean “a grocery store.” The problem in this case was that a Spanish homonym existed, grosería, which meant “a coarse or vulgar word.” “Also, from another English word, grocery, they with wonderful naivety and ease give us grocería—as if it were very agreeable for them to foist off on us a dirty word in exchange for our money, instead of food items.” In a vain effort to put a stop to the growing use of such anglicisms, Rodríguez offered a number of Spanish terms used in various parts of Latin America to mean “a store where one bought food.” “In some parts of Mexico, they call this kind of shop a pulpería; in other parts, a tendajón; in Cuba, a bodega, etc., etc. It scarcely can be doubted that any one of these names is better than grocería.” But Rodríguez and other defenders of the Spanish language’s purity were trying to turn back the tide in California, where the new regional Latino culture taking shape was vigorously borrowing English vocabulary, as well as other aspects of Atlantic American culture. Even Rodríguez was forced to acknowledge wearily, “There are many other anglicisms, which it would be too tedious to recount.”95
From 1769 to 1848, Spanish-speaking residents of California developed a regional variant of Mexican identity and society. After being annexed by the United States in 1848, they—and especially their children—developed a society that was neither simply a variant of Mexican society nor an exact replica of Atlantic American society. It was something new and different, which continues to the present day: a bilingual and bicultural society of Latinos living in the United States.
The juntas patrióticas were a creation of this new hybrid society in the 1860s, and in turn they created a new public memory for it, in the commemoration of the first battle of Puebla. The celebration of this new public memory invested the juntas with a degree of summoning power they had not had before. They used this power to excite the energies and channel the resources of Latino communities in the American West to support both political activity—especially the raising of funds to aid the Juarist cause in Mexico—and pragmatic local civic action, such as poor relief and the defense of Latinos’ civil rights. In the latter respect, the juntas served as an early form of the mutualista organizations that became prominent in Latino communities in the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the juntas served as a sort of unofficial academy for Latino leadership, providing political and administrative experience for a number of individuals who assumed the leadership of subsequent organizations, including perhaps the largest and most renowned of twentieth-century mutualista organizations, the Alianza Hispano-Americana, which operated in California from 1915 to 1955.96
Although the juntas patrióticas were superseded and died out in the early twentieth century, their efforts during the American Civil War and the French Intervention to create a motivational and unifying public memory around the unexpected victory of the forces of freedom and democracy at Puebla on May 5, 1862, were extremely successful. The memory of the event not only has outlived them but also has grown beyond their wildest dreams, and it is celebrated on a grander scale than ever in the twenty-first century.
