Reflections on Mission San Antonio and the Salinan Language
In May 1773, my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was baptized María Ildefonsa at Mission San Antonio de Padua, in what was then the Alta California region of New Spain. She was a ~16-year-old, Salinan Indian woman that Father Miguel Pieras, a Catalan and contemporary of Junípero Serra, thought was on death's door. She recovered, however, and the next month, on June 23, she married Rafael de Jesús Villavicencio (c1750-1831), a Mexican soldier from Loreto, in Baja California. These events precipitated a period of massive loss and cultural and linguistic shift in this line of my family, and I would like to chart out some specifics of the early years of that here, as it pertains to my own family. (The reader is also referred to Randall Milliken and John R. Johnson's (2003) Salinan and Northern Chumash Communities of the Early Mission Period, a terrific source for Salinan population history.)
M. Ildefonsa was the daughter of Quecálseya (baptized José Francisco Brondo) and a woman baptized María Gabriela. Quecálseya was baptized on March 19, 1776, aged ~50, and M. Gabriela was baptized on March 25, also aged ~50. They were married (i.e., in the eyes of the Catholic Church) the same day. In M. Ildefonsa's baptismal record, she is said to have been born in Lima, a term given to the region immediately surrounding the mission itself. Her parents, however, are said to have been born in a village that (despite various orthographic variants) is often known as Caumpej Esmac, near Bradley, in the region of Sargent Canyon, which spans from San Ardo in the north to Bradley in the south, today small towns on the east side of the 101 freeway. Milliken and Johnson (2003:107) estimate a pre-contact population of 290 individuals for this region, and indicate that the inhabitants of Caumpej Esmac were baptized between 1773 and 1788.
During this period, Salinans were compelled, often against their will, to be baptized and to subsequently live, be trained, and work at Mission San Antonio (and Mission San Miguel to the south). Franciscan priests forced Salinans, and California Indians more generally, to learn traditional forms of European agriculture, animal husbandry, and to attend a rigorous set of Church-related functions, from masses to catechism classes and the like. Disease spread through the mission and surrounding countryside rapidly, and many Salinans succumbed to it. Compounded with the fact that Salinan women were often married to Mexican immigrant men who took them far afield of their traditional homeland, these factors conspired to severely disrupt traditional Salinan life ways. (For example, a story reported in Immel (2007:3) relates how, in 1804, a Salinan chief was, at the order of the priest, placed under arrest and his son held hostage by 14 soldiers until he agreed to send the young men of his village to San Antonio for conversion.)
Thus we see that M. Ildefonsa, most likely because she was a very marriageable young woman, came to the mission some 3 years before the rest of her family. Not only did her parents come in 1776, but so did a brother Metáy (b. c1751, baptized Hemeterio José on March 19) and a brother Miteúe (b. c1756, baptized Erasmo on June 2). Baptisms typically occurred soon before marriages: Metáy was married on the same day of his baptism, and Miteúe was married on July 10. But the 1770s were to be an unrelenting time for the family that came to be known as the Brondos. Metáy's first wife, María Purificación, died August 22, 1776, and their only daughter, María Gabriela, died on December 24, 1777. Metáy's mother, also M. Gabriela, died on January 9, 1778, and although Metáy remarried on September 2 of that year (to a Salinan woman baptized María del Carmen Aguilar), their only child, Lea María, died on January 16, 1780. Miteúe's eldest son, baptized Junípero on June 26, 1777, died childless in 1808; his daughter, baptized María Egipciaca on July 15, 1781 and married to Braulio Soles on June 23, 1795, was preceded in death by all four of her known children by February 15, 1806, when she herself passed away, aged approximately 25.
The only known descendants of Quecálseya and M. Gabriela, then, come through their daughter, my ancestor, M. Ildefonsa. With her husband Rafael she had 10 known children: M. Josefa (1774-1838), José Antonio (1777-1817), Francisco Pascual (1779-1814), Eleuterio José (1782-?), M. Gertrudis (1784-?), Rafael de Jesús (1787-1802), M. Ignacia (1789-1839), Ana María (1792-1820), Miguel María (1795-1821), and Gabriel Antonio (1797-1798). But Rafael was a soldier in the Spanish military, and the nearest garrison was the presidio at Monterey. That meant that his place of residence, along with that of his wife and children, was constantly alternating between Monterey and Mission San Antonio in the 1770s and 1780s, as can be gleaned by the locations of their childrens' baptisms: 1774 S.A.; 1777 S.A.; 1779 Monterey; 1782 Monterey; 1784 S.A.; 1787 S.A.; 1789 Monterey. Beginning in 1792 the family came to reside in San Jose (with baptisms at the nearby Mission Santa Clara). Here M. Ildefonsa died of complications from child birth on October 31, 1797, aged approximately 40.
The following year, on May 12, her son, my ancestor, José Antonio Villavicencio (1777-1817), married María Serafina Espinosa (1781-1870), the daughter of Mexican immigrants from Sinaloa. One thing I would like to reflect on now is language use. To start, Rafael Villavicencio, as a native of Loreto (and with a father from Guadalajara), would have almost certainly been a monolingual Spanish speaker upon his arrival in Alta California. Yet when he was ~23 he married a woman who would have been monolingual in Salinan. Their family resided at Mission San Antonio, but also in Monterey, well outside of Salinan territory and removed from any Salinan speech community. Furthermore, Salinan was banned as a permissible language of daily use by the priests at San Antonio as it was (although of course language use would have persisted healthily in secret, especially in these early years). Relatedly, how well did M. Ildefonsa learn to speak Spanish? There would have been more Spanish speakers in Monterey than at San Antonio, but would that have provided enough language input? I suspect that M. Ildefonsa's children, at least her older children, would have received enough Salinan language input to have been considered native, fluent speakers of the language. This must have come at least from two sources: M. Ildefonsa directly, and also from her relatives during the period when the family was resident at San Antonio. Her father Quecálseya, for example, lived until 1799, and certainly his older grandchildren would have known him and spoken with him in Salinan.
By 1792, however, the Villavicencio family had permanently relocated to San Jose, most likely reducing the childrens' Salinan input to that which they received from their mother, and that only until her death in 1797. Continuing to follow my line, José Antonio (b. 1777), in marrying Serafina Espinosa, married a woman who almost certainly would have been a monolingual Spanish speaker. So then the pertinent question becomes: even if José Antonio were a native Salinan (and, presumably, Spanish) speaker, how much did he pass on to his children? I am descendant from him through his daughter María de los Ángeles (c1807-1839), and subsequently through her daughter María Gertrudis Francisca Soto (1835-1918). I would like to know if Gertrudis spoke Salinan, and, for reasons that will become clear below, it seems quite likely that she did.
Another child of José Antonio Villavicencio (1777-1817) was Rafael Villavicencio (1803-1858). He, like his sister through whom I am descendant, was one quarter Salinan, and, importantly, in 1842 he received the nearly 9,000-acre Rancho San Gerónimo, which extended from Harmony to Cayucos along modern-day Highway 1, from Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado (another relative of mine, see here). Such grants were issued in response to the glut of land that became available following the secularization of the Franciscan missions by the Mexican authorities in 1834. Secularization enabled many California Indians to live elsewhere, and in a post available here, my first cousin twice removed José Freeman, citing work by Betty Rivers, outlines how Rancho San Gerónimo, which came to be known as the Villa Ranch, became a sort of refuge for Salinans. This suggests two things to me: 1) that the children of José Antonio Villavicencio maintained ties to their Salinan relatives at San Antonio, and that, 2) given the relatively exclusive nature of the Villa Ranch, Salinan would have survived there for some time, under less threat than if its speakers had lived in ethnolinguistically more heterogeneous communities.
Returning to Gertrudis, it is notable that her father, Francisco Soto, died in Monterey in 1837 from pneumonia, at only 28 years of age. Her mother did not remarry, and it is likely that Gertrudis, her mother, and her siblings went to live with relatives of her mother's (i.e., the Villavicencios). Her mother, however, died in 1839, at which time Gertrudis and her siblings must have become solely dependent on these other relatives. Now, we know from the 1860 Census that, by that time, Gertrudis was resident in the area near the Villa Ranch, and there is no reason to not believe that she had been there for some time, perhaps since she was a girl. If that is right, then she essentially would have grown up in the Salinan speech community that was in part denied to her grandfather José Antonio, and (as far as we can tell) wholly denied to her mother M. de los Ángeles, who was born and grew up in Monterey. In this way the death of Gertrudis' parents at a young age, who most likely would have continued to live in Monterey had they lived a longer life, is perhaps the reason for which Gertrudis might have gone on to learn Salinan as a girl, perhaps natively.
I would like to conclude by highlighting the swiftness of all of the events described above. Gertrudis' great-grandmother, M. Ildefonsa, was a monolingual Salinan who did not enter into sustained contact with non-indigenous outsiders until she was 16 years old. In the 62 year separating her baptism and the birth of her great-granddaughter Gertrudis, Salinan came to survive as a language of daily life only in the settlements that sprang up in various parts of northern San Luis Obispo and southern Monterey counties following the secularization of the missions. By modern standards, Gertrudis could have easily known her great-grandmother: she would have been only ~78 at the time of her birth. Yet she had died 38 years before it. Nevertheless, the community that formed on the Villa Ranch would have in many ways connected Gertrudis to a time that she was unable to experience by contact with her eldest relatives. And Gertrude lived until 1918, dying in downtown San Luis Obispo, at a time and place that, superficially, would have been incredibly distant from the earliest mission days, let alone the pre-contact period. Yet Gertrudis would have had an immense exposure to what those latter times were like, both culturally and linguistically. I wonder how many people, people like my great-grandfather, knew that about her.
References:
-Immel, Diana L. 2007. Ethnobotany of Salinan Indians, California: Based on the Papers of John P. Harrington and C. Hart Merriam. University of California, Davis, Draft Report.
M. Ildefonsa was the daughter of Quecálseya (baptized José Francisco Brondo) and a woman baptized María Gabriela. Quecálseya was baptized on March 19, 1776, aged ~50, and M. Gabriela was baptized on March 25, also aged ~50. They were married (i.e., in the eyes of the Catholic Church) the same day. In M. Ildefonsa's baptismal record, she is said to have been born in Lima, a term given to the region immediately surrounding the mission itself. Her parents, however, are said to have been born in a village that (despite various orthographic variants) is often known as Caumpej Esmac, near Bradley, in the region of Sargent Canyon, which spans from San Ardo in the north to Bradley in the south, today small towns on the east side of the 101 freeway. Milliken and Johnson (2003:107) estimate a pre-contact population of 290 individuals for this region, and indicate that the inhabitants of Caumpej Esmac were baptized between 1773 and 1788.
During this period, Salinans were compelled, often against their will, to be baptized and to subsequently live, be trained, and work at Mission San Antonio (and Mission San Miguel to the south). Franciscan priests forced Salinans, and California Indians more generally, to learn traditional forms of European agriculture, animal husbandry, and to attend a rigorous set of Church-related functions, from masses to catechism classes and the like. Disease spread through the mission and surrounding countryside rapidly, and many Salinans succumbed to it. Compounded with the fact that Salinan women were often married to Mexican immigrant men who took them far afield of their traditional homeland, these factors conspired to severely disrupt traditional Salinan life ways. (For example, a story reported in Immel (2007:3) relates how, in 1804, a Salinan chief was, at the order of the priest, placed under arrest and his son held hostage by 14 soldiers until he agreed to send the young men of his village to San Antonio for conversion.)
Thus we see that M. Ildefonsa, most likely because she was a very marriageable young woman, came to the mission some 3 years before the rest of her family. Not only did her parents come in 1776, but so did a brother Metáy (b. c1751, baptized Hemeterio José on March 19) and a brother Miteúe (b. c1756, baptized Erasmo on June 2). Baptisms typically occurred soon before marriages: Metáy was married on the same day of his baptism, and Miteúe was married on July 10. But the 1770s were to be an unrelenting time for the family that came to be known as the Brondos. Metáy's first wife, María Purificación, died August 22, 1776, and their only daughter, María Gabriela, died on December 24, 1777. Metáy's mother, also M. Gabriela, died on January 9, 1778, and although Metáy remarried on September 2 of that year (to a Salinan woman baptized María del Carmen Aguilar), their only child, Lea María, died on January 16, 1780. Miteúe's eldest son, baptized Junípero on June 26, 1777, died childless in 1808; his daughter, baptized María Egipciaca on July 15, 1781 and married to Braulio Soles on June 23, 1795, was preceded in death by all four of her known children by February 15, 1806, when she herself passed away, aged approximately 25.
The only known descendants of Quecálseya and M. Gabriela, then, come through their daughter, my ancestor, M. Ildefonsa. With her husband Rafael she had 10 known children: M. Josefa (1774-1838), José Antonio (1777-1817), Francisco Pascual (1779-1814), Eleuterio José (1782-?), M. Gertrudis (1784-?), Rafael de Jesús (1787-1802), M. Ignacia (1789-1839), Ana María (1792-1820), Miguel María (1795-1821), and Gabriel Antonio (1797-1798). But Rafael was a soldier in the Spanish military, and the nearest garrison was the presidio at Monterey. That meant that his place of residence, along with that of his wife and children, was constantly alternating between Monterey and Mission San Antonio in the 1770s and 1780s, as can be gleaned by the locations of their childrens' baptisms: 1774 S.A.; 1777 S.A.; 1779 Monterey; 1782 Monterey; 1784 S.A.; 1787 S.A.; 1789 Monterey. Beginning in 1792 the family came to reside in San Jose (with baptisms at the nearby Mission Santa Clara). Here M. Ildefonsa died of complications from child birth on October 31, 1797, aged approximately 40.
The following year, on May 12, her son, my ancestor, José Antonio Villavicencio (1777-1817), married María Serafina Espinosa (1781-1870), the daughter of Mexican immigrants from Sinaloa. One thing I would like to reflect on now is language use. To start, Rafael Villavicencio, as a native of Loreto (and with a father from Guadalajara), would have almost certainly been a monolingual Spanish speaker upon his arrival in Alta California. Yet when he was ~23 he married a woman who would have been monolingual in Salinan. Their family resided at Mission San Antonio, but also in Monterey, well outside of Salinan territory and removed from any Salinan speech community. Furthermore, Salinan was banned as a permissible language of daily use by the priests at San Antonio as it was (although of course language use would have persisted healthily in secret, especially in these early years). Relatedly, how well did M. Ildefonsa learn to speak Spanish? There would have been more Spanish speakers in Monterey than at San Antonio, but would that have provided enough language input? I suspect that M. Ildefonsa's children, at least her older children, would have received enough Salinan language input to have been considered native, fluent speakers of the language. This must have come at least from two sources: M. Ildefonsa directly, and also from her relatives during the period when the family was resident at San Antonio. Her father Quecálseya, for example, lived until 1799, and certainly his older grandchildren would have known him and spoken with him in Salinan.
By 1792, however, the Villavicencio family had permanently relocated to San Jose, most likely reducing the childrens' Salinan input to that which they received from their mother, and that only until her death in 1797. Continuing to follow my line, José Antonio (b. 1777), in marrying Serafina Espinosa, married a woman who almost certainly would have been a monolingual Spanish speaker. So then the pertinent question becomes: even if José Antonio were a native Salinan (and, presumably, Spanish) speaker, how much did he pass on to his children? I am descendant from him through his daughter María de los Ángeles (c1807-1839), and subsequently through her daughter María Gertrudis Francisca Soto (1835-1918). I would like to know if Gertrudis spoke Salinan, and, for reasons that will become clear below, it seems quite likely that she did.
 |
| Gertrudis Soto Villavicencio (1835-1918) with grandchildren, circa 1912 (photo courtesy of Gerald Armenta) |
Returning to Gertrudis, it is notable that her father, Francisco Soto, died in Monterey in 1837 from pneumonia, at only 28 years of age. Her mother did not remarry, and it is likely that Gertrudis, her mother, and her siblings went to live with relatives of her mother's (i.e., the Villavicencios). Her mother, however, died in 1839, at which time Gertrudis and her siblings must have become solely dependent on these other relatives. Now, we know from the 1860 Census that, by that time, Gertrudis was resident in the area near the Villa Ranch, and there is no reason to not believe that she had been there for some time, perhaps since she was a girl. If that is right, then she essentially would have grown up in the Salinan speech community that was in part denied to her grandfather José Antonio, and (as far as we can tell) wholly denied to her mother M. de los Ángeles, who was born and grew up in Monterey. In this way the death of Gertrudis' parents at a young age, who most likely would have continued to live in Monterey had they lived a longer life, is perhaps the reason for which Gertrudis might have gone on to learn Salinan as a girl, perhaps natively.
I would like to conclude by highlighting the swiftness of all of the events described above. Gertrudis' great-grandmother, M. Ildefonsa, was a monolingual Salinan who did not enter into sustained contact with non-indigenous outsiders until she was 16 years old. In the 62 year separating her baptism and the birth of her great-granddaughter Gertrudis, Salinan came to survive as a language of daily life only in the settlements that sprang up in various parts of northern San Luis Obispo and southern Monterey counties following the secularization of the missions. By modern standards, Gertrudis could have easily known her great-grandmother: she would have been only ~78 at the time of her birth. Yet she had died 38 years before it. Nevertheless, the community that formed on the Villa Ranch would have in many ways connected Gertrudis to a time that she was unable to experience by contact with her eldest relatives. And Gertrude lived until 1918, dying in downtown San Luis Obispo, at a time and place that, superficially, would have been incredibly distant from the earliest mission days, let alone the pre-contact period. Yet Gertrudis would have had an immense exposure to what those latter times were like, both culturally and linguistically. I wonder how many people, people like my great-grandfather, knew that about her.
References:
-Immel, Diana L. 2007. Ethnobotany of Salinan Indians, California: Based on the Papers of John P. Harrington and C. Hart Merriam. University of California, Davis, Draft Report.
Comments
Post a Comment