Anyone who ever wondered about pioneer life in 18th-century Alta California will find this book a treasure-trove of basic information. This hardy group of pioneers traveled on foot and horseback across thousands of miles of desert to settle California. From these transcriptions and translations of fifty-two memorias (requisitions) and facturas (invoices) for goods delivered to the Santa Barbara Presidio between 1781 and 1810, emerges the clearest picture yet obtained of these mestizo people and their everyday life on the outermost fringes of the Spanish Empire.

When in the early 1870s historian Hubert Howe Bancroft sent interviewers out to gather oral histories from the pre-statehood gentry of California, he didn’t count on one thing: the women. When the men weren’t available, the interviewers collected the stories of the women of the household—sometimes almost as an afterthought. These interviews were eventually archived at the University of California, though many were all but forgotten. Testimonios presents thirteen women’s firsthand accounts from the days when California was part of Spain and Mexico. Having lived through the gold rush and seen their country change so drastically, these women understood the need to tell the full story of the people and the places that were their California.

Music in the California missions was a pluralistic combination of voices and instruments, of liturgy and spectacle, of styles and functions - and even of cultures - in a new blend that was non-existent before the Franciscan friars' arrival in 1769. This book explores aesthetic, stylistic, historical, cultural, theoretical, liturgical, and biographical aspects of this repertoire. It contains a "Catalogue of Mission Manuscripts," 150+ facsimiles, translations of primary documents, and performance-ready music reconstructions.

This book is a compelling and balanced history of the California missions and their impact on the Indians they tried to convert. Focusing primarily on the religious conflict between the two groups, it sheds new light on the tensions, accomplishments, and limitations of the California mission experience. James A. Sandos, an eminent authority on the American West, traces the history of the Franciscan missions from the creation of the first one in 1769 until they were turned over to the public in 1836. Addressing such topics as the singular theology of the missions, the role of music in bonding Indians to Franciscan enterprises, the diseases caused by contact with the missions, and the Indian resistance to missionary activity, Sandos not only describes what happened in the California missions but offers a persuasive explanation for why it happened.

In this fascinating exploration of the development of the Spanish language from a sociohistorical perspective in the territory that has become the United States, linguists and editors Balestra, Martcop. {Uhorn}nez, and Moyna draw attention to the long tradition of multilingualism in the United States in the hope of putting to rest the myth that the U.S. was ever a monolingual nation.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, much of what is now the southwestern United States was known as Alta California, a remote part of New Spain. The presidios, missions, and pueblos of the region have yielded a rich trove of ceramics materials, though they have been sparsely analyzed in the literature. Ceramic Production in Early Hispanic California fills that lacuna and reinterprets the position of Alta California in the Spanish Colonial Empire. Using both petrography and neutron activation analysis to examine over 1,600 ceramic samples, the contributors to this volume explore the region’s ceramic production, imports, trade, and consumption. From artistic innovation to technological diffusion, a different aspect of the intricacies of everyday life and culture in the region is revealed in each essay. This book illuminates much about Spanish imperial expansion in a far corner of the colonial world. Through this research, California history has been rewritten.

In this book, the 'field' is not an exotic locale but the sometimes dusty back rooms of libraries, archives and museums. These largely untapped resources however reveal how the study of human biology through historical documents can expand the horizons of anthropological research.

Incorporated in 1886 by midwestern settlers known as the Indiana Colony, the City of Pasadena has grown into a world-famous tourist destination recognized for the beauty of its Tournament of Roses Parade, the excitement of the annual Rose Bowl, and the charm of the Old Town District. But what existed before the roses? Before it was Pasadena, this land was Hahamog’na, the ancestral lands of the Tongva people. Later, it comprised the heart of the San Gabriel Mission lands, and in the Mexican period, it became Rancho San Pascual. The 1771 Spanish conquest of this land set in motion several colonial processes that would continue into the twentieth century and beyond. In Pasadena Before the Roses, historian Yvette J. Saavedra examines a period of 120 years to illustrate the interconnectedness of power, ideas of land use, and the negotiation of identity within multiple colonial moments. By centering the San Gabriel Mission lands as the region’s economic, social, and cultural foundation, she shows how Indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, and American groups each have redefined the meanings of land use to build their homes and their lives. These visions have resulted in competing colonialisms that framed the racial, ethnic, gender, and class hierarchies of their respective societies.

“Compelling new evidence, careful documentation, and an artfully woven narrative make The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis a path-breaking book for sociocultural scholars as well as for general readers interested in the politics of identity, ethnicity, gender, and the colonial and U.S. Western history.”—Transforming Anthropology “Voss’s lucid explanations of method and theory make the book accessible to a broad range of audiences, from upper-level undergraduate and graduate students to professionals and lay audiences. . . . Its interdisciplinarity, indeed, may help to sell archaeology to audiences who do not typically consider archaeological evidence as an option for identity studies.”—Current Anthropology “The book reminds historians that other disciplines can offer fruitful methodological forays into well-trodden areas of study.”—Journal of American History “Those scholars studying various aspects of the Hispanic worldwide empire would be well advised to peruse Voss’s work.”—Historical Archaeology “[W]ell written, theoretically sophisticated, and unburdened by abstract concepts or hyper-qualified verbiage.”—H-Net Reviews “[E]ngaging. Overall, the text belongs in the library of every student of Spanish and Mexican Alta California. . . . The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis will become an anthropological standard.”—Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology “[A] must-read for all interested not only in colonial California, but for all historical archaeologists and to any archaeologist interested in the examination of identities.”—Cambridge Archaeological Journal “Shows how individuals negotiate ethnic identity through everyday objects and actions.”—SMRC Revista In this interdisciplinary study, Barbara Voss examines religious, environmental, cultural, and political differences at the Presidio of San Francisco, California, to reveal the development of social identities within the colony. Voss reconciles material culture with historical records, challenging widely held beliefs about ethnicity.