Un Ligar: Alta California
California History
California is known for its diverse culture, civil rights movements, technological innovation, and glamorous film industry. The state’s abundant resources and favorable weather facilitated the growth of these sectors — and others — including mining during the gold rush, the oil industry, and the expansion of the automotive, aviation, and fast-food industries. In the early years of the state, cheap land and varied landscapes attracted people from the deepest corners of the world. From the towering Redwoods of the Sierra Mountains to the fertile soils that sustain the state’s thriving agricultural sector, California has long been defined by its natural abundance.
That abundance, however, has never been without consequence. California’s frequent earthquakes — occurring more often than in any other part of the world — are themselves a byproduct of the same geological forces that created its wealth. The state rests upon the collision of twenty massive tectonic plates, forming mountains that cover nearly a fifth of California’s surface and contain rich mineral deposits of gold, silver, copper, lead, and tungsten.
California, the third-largest state in the United States, has drawn people precisely because of this vastness and the power of its geography. Its coastline stretches 1,264 miles, and its land area approaches 100 million acres. Mount Whitney rises to 14,495 feet, while Badwater Basin sinks 282 feet below sea level — the lowest point in the United States. These two extremes lie a mere eighty miles apart, a striking illustration of the rapid shifts in California’s terrain and climate.
California encompasses four of the world’s five major climate types, lacking only the tropical. Long before the American occupation in the late 1840s, this environmental diversity positioned California as a future conduit of global agriculture. Citrus, wine, and cattle production had already taken root well before U.S. control, introduced by the Spanish during their colonization, which began in 1768, and formalized with the Portolá expedition of 1769.
This series traces the history of Old California—Alta California, as the Spanish named it — from its pre-Columbian origins to the close of the nineteenth century. We begin with European discovery and myth, then turn to the Native peoples whose worlds predated conquest. From there, we examine Spanish colonization and the many individuals and groups who shaped the territory’s destiny. The interactions among these people were often volatile, frequently tragic, and always consequential.
By the eighteenth century, Alta California had become a coveted frontier. The English, Russians, and later Americans sought the territory, drawn by its beauty, resources, and strategic proximity to Asia and Latin America. From this convergence of ambition emerged California’s enduring mythos — a land suspended between dream and damnation. For some, California fulfilled its promise. For others, it proved harsh, isolating, and unforgiving.
That mythology fueled two centuries of sporadic expeditions, many of which ended in violence or failure. Figures such as Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, Francis Drake, and Junípero Serra sought to claim the land, only to discover that California’s promise was elusive. The Portolá and de Anza expeditions ultimately enabled Serra’s territorial advance, giving rise to Spanish colonization and the California mission system.
Conquest was neither swift nor easy, yet the missions proved the most effective Old World mechanism for extracting California’s agricultural wealth. Hide and tallow industries flourished alongside imported farming practices, while explorers and entrepreneurs developed fur, whaling, and later gold industries — each wave drawing new people and reshaping the land over three centuries.
Central to this story is the Hispano population. “Hispano” refers to people of Spanish descent in the American Southwest prior to American control. More specifically, this work employs the term “Californio” — denoting those of Spanish heritage born in Alta California. Cultural identity, however, often blurred strict definitions. Figures such as Juan Bandini, born in Peru, and Agustín Olvera, born in Mexico, were Californios by identification rather than birthplace.
Early migrants from New Spain, primarily from Sonora and Sinaloa, arrived with ambitions of wealth and status through loyalty to the Spanish Crown. These aspirations were rarely realized. From their disappointment emerged a distinct Californio identity — descendants of the first settlers who developed a deep resentment toward centralized authority, whether Spanish or Mexican. Californios saw themselves as hijos del país — sons of another branch — culturally distinct from Mexico City and the Mexican interior.
This identity was shaped by resistance. Californios rejected the rigid caste system of New Spain, which threatened to relegate them to a lower status due to African or Native ancestry. Yet they simultaneously used their social power to subordinate Native peoples as laborers on their ranchos. Fiercely independent, politically shrewd, and unapologetically capitalistic, Californios believed Alta California belonged to them — not to distant governments. Economic gain superseded nationalism, and colonial rules of race and governance were bent to their advantage.
Their opposition to centralized authority placed them in direct conflict with the mission system, the Church serving as the fourth arm of colonial governance. Through rebellion against governors and clergy alike, Californios emerged as a powerful rancho elite, slowly dismantling institutional control. Their disdain for government stemmed from inherited frustration — young Californios watched their forefathers die with unrealized potential and vowed not to repeat that fate. The upheavals of the Mexican Empire, coupled with the republican vision of José María Echeandía, accelerated Californio political and economic dominance until the outbreak of war in 1846.
The Mexican War — often mislabeled in my view, the Mexican-American War — was, in Alta California, a war against the Mexican people themselves. Californios fought largely defensive campaigns, divided by ideology and self-interest. Some resisted American occupation outright. Others aligned with U.S. forces or remained neutral in pursuit of economic advantage. The Treaty of Cahuenga and the subsequent Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the conflict in California and gave rise to a new population — Mexican Americans.
Ironically, the economic foundations that empowered Californios during Mexican rule proved disastrous under American expansion. The same calculus applied to certain Indigenous groups, who found American trade more advantageous and thus aided U.S. forces. With the war’s end, the United States acquired 529,000 square miles of territory — second only to the Louisiana Purchase — fulfilling Manifest Destiny, unleashing the Gold Rush, enabling the Transcontinental Railroad, and intensifying congressional conflict over slavery.
The most revolutionary consequence of the war lay not in territory, but in citizenship. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo granted full civil rights to people of color (even if by accident or political expedience) — the first fracture in America’s racial hierarchy. More than two decades before the Fifteenth Amendment extended voting rights to African Americans, Hispanos gained legal access to citizenship, land ownership, and political participation. Yet this victory went largely uncelebrated for over a century.
California’s early American period is essential to understanding the broader U.S. narrative. Californio political participation challenged Anglo-exceptionalism and reshaped the meaning of citizenship, while also showing the true strength of the United States’ founding principles. Excluding the Mexican War from American historiography obscures its role in the road to the Civil War and raises unsettling questions. Would the Civil War have unfolded without Mexican territory? Would slavery have endured longer? Would the Union have prevailed without California gold and Comstock silver? These questions demand exploration of how the impact of the Mexican War shaped the United States’ history after the war’s end.
Our story begins with Spain and the mythologies of the Aztec and European worlds of the early sixteenth century. The remnants of Hispano California remain etched across the landscape — in place names, agriculture, cattle culture, and adobe architecture born of the Portolá expedition. For many Californians, their final encounter with this history came as children constructing mission replicas from cardboard or clay — projects that rarely captured the craftsmanship of Native Californians or the labor that built those walls. Yet Alta California endures, not as a school assignment, but as a living foundation of California’s past and present.
Here are the articles of this series:
Bibliography | Notes
Rawls, James J., and Walton Bean. California: An Interpretive History. New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2011, 3–10.
Pico, Carlos Manuel Salomon. Pío Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011.