Californio - Californios in Literature

Californios in Literature

• Richard Henry Dana, Jr., recounted aspects of Californio culture which he saw during his 1834 visit as a sailor in Two Years Before the Mast.
• Joseph Chapman, a land realtor noted as the first Yankee to reside in the old Pueblo de Los Angeles in 1831, described Southern California as a paradise yet to be developed. He mentions a civilization of Spanish-speaking colonists, "Californios", who thrived in the pueblos, the missions, and ranchos.
• Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don, a novel set in 1880s California, depicts a very wealthy Californio family's legal struggles with immigrant squatters on their land. The novel was based on the legal struggles of General Mariano G. Vallejo, a friend of the author. The novel depicts the legal process by which Californios were often "relieved" of their land. This process was long (most Californios spent up to 15 years defending their grants before the courts), and the legal fees were enough to make many Californios landless. Californios resented having to pay land taxes to United States officials, because the principle of paying taxes for land ownership did not exist in Mexican law. In some cases Californios had little available capital, because their economy had operated on a barter system; they often lost land because of the inability to pay the taxes. They could not compete economically with the European and Anglo-American immigrants who arrived in the region with large amounts of cash.

A portrayal of Californio culture is depicted in the novel Ramona (1884), written by Helen Hunt Jackson.

The fictional character of Zorro has become the most identifiable Californio due to short stories, motion pictures and the 1950s television series. The historical facts of the era are sometimes lost in the story-telling.