Californio Voices: The Oral Memoirs of Jose Maria Amador and Lorenzo Asisara
Californio Voices: The Oral Memoirs of Jose Maria Amador and Lorenzo Asisara translated and edited by Gregorio Mora-Torres, April 2012, University of North Texas Press, http://untpress.unt.edu, Paperback ISBN 978-1-5744-438-7, $19.95
The Southwest has a brutal history much like the rest of the world. This is a story told firsthand of the Spainards, Mexicans, then Anglos who came in to pillage and dominate the land and peoples natively populating the area. This book offers an oral history of what is now Santa Clara Valley in California as told by an eighty-three-year-old Don Jose Maria Amador in 1870s California. He lived a lifetime in the area with Native Americans, Spanish, Mexican, then Anglo-American rule. Amador gives his account of growing up in the Spanish Presidios, working as a soldado de cuera and then as a “Forty-Niner” during the gold rush and of his experiences as far-removed and unsupportive governments and religious institutions dominated the landscape and peoples, propagating their own self-interests and leaving others poverty-stricken.
Photo source: sancarloscathedral.net
Amador’s voice resurrects this time and place and human experience and shows the battles humans have always waged against each other. The setting here, though, is one of the bountiful and boundless Southwest.
Amador’s Native American friend, Lorenzo Asisara, a former new convert in the Mission Santa Cruz, also describes how he and other Native Americans were treated cruelly by the parish priests, some getting flogged daily.
Ironically, Amador’s story gets told because he was going to be used as a source for telling a grander Euro-centric California history. He was interviewed by those he had learned to mistrust. This is likely why he tells only of his younger years and doesn’t go on to the point where his ranch title is voided by the newly formed California Land Commission. He knew the interviewers were free to take the information and use it how they pleased, even against him.
This book, however, takes away that framework of profit and interpretation and lets Amador’s wit, intelligence, and humor tell of his life in his own words.