Californio Portraits: Baja California’s Vanishing Culture (Before Gold: California under Spain and Mexico Series)

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Description


First published in 1981, Harry W. Crosby’s Last of the Californios captured the history of the mountain people of Baja California all over a critical moment of transition, when the 1974 completion of the transpeninsular highway increased the Californios’ contact with the out of doors world and profoundly affected their traditional way of living. This up to date and expanded version of that now-classic work comprises the fruits of further investigation into the Californios’ lives and history, by Crosby and others. The result is the most thorough and extensive account of the people of Baja California from the time of the peninsula’s occupation by the Spaniards in the seventeenth century to the present. Californio Portraits combines history and sociology to provide an in-depth view of a culture that has managed to continue to exist dramatic changes.

Having ridden hundreds of miles by mule to visit with quite a lot of Californio families and gain their confidence, Crosby provides an unparalleled view of their unique way of life. Beginning with the story of the first Californios—the eighteenth-century presidio soldiers who accompanied Jesuit missionaries, followed by miners and independent ranchers—Crosby provides personal accounts of their modern-day descendants and the ways they build their homes, prepare their food, find their water, and tan their cowhides. Augmenting his previous work with significant new sources, material, and photographs, he draws a richly textured portrait of a people unlike any other—families cultivating skills from an earlier century, living in semi-isolation for decades and, even after completion of the transpeninsular highway, reachable only by mule and horseback.

Combining a revised and up to date text with a new foreword, introduction, and up to date bibliography, Californio Portraits offers the clearest and most detailed portrait imaginable of a captivating, unique, and inaccessible people and culture.

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