Manifesto to the Mexican Republic, which Brigadier General
José Figueroa, Commandant and Political Chief of Upper California presents on
his conduct and on that of José María de Híjar and José María Padrés as
Directors of Colonization in 1834 and 1835. Translated, with an Introduction
and Notes by C. Alan Hutchinson. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University
of California Press, 1978. Bibliography. Index. 156 pages. $15.75.
Reviewed by David Johnson, Lecturer in History at the University of
California, Los Angeles.
In this handsomely designed and intelligently conceived
volume, C. Alan Hutchinson has made available an important document concerning
California's Mexican period. Governor José Figueroa's Manifesto
to the Mexican Republic was the first book length imprint published in
California (1835). It is here presented in Spanish as well as Hutchinson's
English translation, along with an introduction that gives the pertinent
background and introduces the cast of characters. Editor Hutchinson has already
told the story of the Híjar-Padrés colony (Frontier Settlement in Mexican
California (1969) ), and while the Figueroa Manifesto serves the
purpose of further enlightening the specifics of that episode, its major
significance rests with the information it includes about politics and society
during California's poorly understood Mexican era.
Shortly before his death in 1835, Calfornia's Governor
Figueroa wrote the Manifesto to explain his obstruction and expulsion of
the leaders of the Híjar-Padrés colony. This colony, the brainchild of Mexico's
vice president, Gomez Farias, arrived in Upper California at the close of 1834
counting 239 farmers, artisans, and professionals in its ranks. Farias hoped to
reform and strengthen the small, weak, and distant province from internal decay
and external (Russian, American) incursions, and he chose the colonists
carefully, sending those with skills sorely lacking in California. Most
importantly (and ominously), he provided the colony with large powers, commissioning
its leaders, José María de Híjar and José María Padrés, as
California's governor and military commandant, and authorizing them to
secularize the province's twenty-one missions. Essentially, these newcomers were
given control of the California government and the power to distribute, to whom
they saw fit, the province's only substantial source of wealth.
Of course, the colony never began, much less completed, its task, and the
obvious question is why not? Why did Figueroa place such formidable barriers in
front of them, refusing supplies promised by the central government, accusing Híjar
and Padrés of treason and treachery, and ultimately
expelling them on flimsy evidence? Most historians have repeated the argument
found in Figueroa's Manifesto: the colony had questionable authority
(Santa Anna revoked Híjar's commission as governor shortly after his departure
for California), they meant to steal mission land rightfully owned by Indians,
Híjar and Padrés did indeed intend to overthrow Figueroa, by violence if
necessary. Hutchinson, in his notes and introduction, argues that Híjar and
Padrés were innocent of the governor's most damning charges. He only hints,
however, at what the major issues between the two parties were: "Perhaps the
controversy may be set to rest by reflecting that there were honest differences
of opinion separating Figueroa and Híjar, which were sufficient in themselves to
explain their mutual animosity." (15)
A reading of Figueroa's Manifesto suggests that the
"honest difference of opinion" involved crucial questions of power and authority
in provincial California. While Figueroa couched his attack on Híjar and Padrés
in a defense of Indian rights to mission lands (with one telling exception, p.
83, where he referred to the missions as the property of
Californians), one sees from the arguments of both parties that the issue
was which group of Mexicans-Californian or colonist-would oversee the
distribution process. The local elite of landholders in control of California's
territorial diputación, a small but growing group who coveted the
missions' property because they realized that wealth, prestige, and power rested
upon land ownership, believed that the Híjar-Padrés colony intended to keep them
from acquiring additional land. For them, that meant an end to power, position, and prominence.
In short, the differences between the two parties, as set out
by Governor Figueroa, went to the heart of Calfifornia politics and society.
Indian rights were not a serious concern of the Californios, as revealed by the
ultimate disposition of mission property. At the center of the argument, rather,
was the local elite's effort to control the province's only substantial
resource, and to protect their prerogatives against the pretenses of the
colonists. Insofar as the Manifesto gives us a look at this class,
through its able ally Figueroa, acting to defend access to property-to power-it
has substantially added to our knowledge of society in Mexico's farthest
frontier.
