{"id":383505,"date":"2026-07-02T12:20:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T12:20:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/383505\/"},"modified":"2026-07-02T12:20:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T12:20:15","slug":"commentary-250-years-california-was-already-going-strong-when-the-13-colonies-got-their-act-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/383505\/","title":{"rendered":"Commentary: 250 years? California was already going strong when the 13 colonies got their act together"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Don\u2019t get all cocky, you 13 original colonies.<\/p>\n

Yes, yes, 250 years, congratulations, enjoy the cake. But here on the West Coast, a whole continent away from your powdered periwigs and your Philly bell-ringing, 1776 was a banner year, too.<\/p>\n

Unbeknownst to you \u2014 and truth be told, unbeknownst to the people here \u2014 the future of these United States, the modern nation, was being shaped in California, too.<\/p>\n

Granted, it was only a seed, hardly even a seedling. In Spanish California, mission-building was on the 1776 checklist. A new San Gabriel mission was being built, five years after Franciscan missionaries had founded the original mission in a flood zone, which flooded.<\/p>\n

In the San Francisco Bay, on June 29, 1776, the same day that the Continental Congress was taking a breather to pore over Thomas Jefferson\u2019s eloquent and incendiary declaration, newcomers from Spain knelt in an arbor of rushes to celebrate the first mass of the future Mission Dolores. They\u2019d soon start building their presidio fort a few miles away, the twin foundations of Spain\u2019s God and empire.<\/p>\n

That name \u2014 \u201cdolores,\u201d meaning sorrows \u2014 \u201cseemed appropriate given what was to come,\u201d San Francisco historian Alec Scott told me. For Native Americans like the Ohlone, who watched that first mass that turned out to be the founding of San Francisco, 1776 was the first of many increasingly bad years.<\/p>\n

Get the latest from Patt Morrison <\/p>\n

Los Angeles is a complex place. Luckily, there’s someone who can provide context, history and culture.<\/p>\n

By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Service<\/a>, which include arbitration and a class action waiver. You agree that we and our third-party vendors may collect and use your information, including through cookies, pixels and similar technologies, for the purposes set forth in our Privacy Policy<\/a> such as personalizing your experience and ads. <\/p>\n

The Spanish, who had at first just flitted along the coast in their galleons, had begun marching inland and overland from Mexico with crosses and soldiers and soldiers\u2019 families. That conversion and conquest crusade brought disease and defeat to native Californians, whose numbers and ways of life would be all but exterminated by the time the United States of America celebrated its first 100 years.<\/p>\n

From that July day in 1776, it would be about 75 years \u2014 a human lifetime \u2014 before early Californians would put a constitution on paper, a document with some roots in Mexico\u2019s constitutional rights and rules and traditions.<\/p>\n

\"This <\/p>\n

This undated engraving shows the scene on July 4, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was approved by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. <\/p>\n

(Associated Press)<\/p>\n

Both constitutions were a compilation of promises intended if not always delivered, but with elements arguably more enlightened on some matters than the early governing documents drawn up in the East by the sons of the Enlightenment \u2014 among them, slavery and women\u2019s property rights.<\/p>\n

Fast-forward through many decades: Spain\u2019s Latin American empire, which had so brutally begun in the early 16th century, was breaking into independent nations by the 19th. Mexico won its independence in 1821. The long exploitation of Indigenous Americans, and the looming power of U.S. slave states on Mexico\u2019s borders, made a ban on slavery both an ethical and a strategic imperative in Mexico\u2019s new constitution.<\/p>\n

Preserving slave ownership, along with resisting political overreach from Mexico City, were principal reasons that the Mexican state of Texas fought to break free of Mexico. Texas became a U.S. state in 1845 and seceded from the union to join the Confederacy at the start of the Civil War.<\/p>\n

Father Hidalgo, the priest who raised the cry of independence in 1810, demanded that slave owners free the enslaved at once, \u201cgrant them the necessary freedom documents,\u201d or risk the death penalty.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, the loopholes and evasions of language meant that although slavery was illegal, indentured servitude and debt-bound slave wages actually left many Native Americans still ruthlessly exploited.<\/p>\n

But however imperfect in practice, Mexico\u2019s constitution explicitly banned slavery, while the original United States constitution, without ever using the word \u201dslave,\u201d upheld slavery and enforced slave owners\u2019 rights over persons \u201cheld to service or labor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s where David Hayes-Bautista weighs in. He\u2019s a professor of medicine and director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at UCLA\u2019s medical school. He\u2019s also written books about early California, among them \u201cEl Cinco de Mayo\u201d and \u201cThe Latino Big Bang in California.\u201d<\/p>\n

As he put it, did East Coast Americans ever think \u201ca bunch of Mexicans on the Pacific Coast have anything to do with America? Yes, we did \u2014 a lot!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

Flores Adobe in South Pasadena was built between 1838 and 1845.<\/p>\n

(Patt Morrison \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

He connects the dots between Spanish and Mexican laws and traditions that stood in marked contrast with U.S. laws and traditions, but which made their way into California\u2019s first constitution, in 1849, and influence the state to this day.<\/p>\n

When it was adopted, California\u2019s<\/a> Article I, Section 18 decreed: \u201cNeither slavery, nor involuntary servitude, unless for the punishment of crimes, shall ever be tolerated in this State.\u201d A year later, California entered the union as a free state, resetting the national debate on free versus slave states, eleven years before the Civil War.<\/p>\n

California\u2019s new Anglo power brokers wrangled over who would have the right to vote. Not Black people, and not Native Americans \u2014 who were, at that moment and for the last time, the most populous group in California. This, as you\u2019ll read, was a matter for debate.<\/p>\n

And not women. The California constitution didn\u2019t use the word \u201cwoman,\u201d only \u201cwife.\u201d Still, they were given rights that many Mexican and Spanish women enjoyed, but no woman under the original U.S. constitution had.<\/p>\n

\"Black <\/p>\n

The San Gabriel Mission\u2019s cemetery on a vintage postcard from Patt Morrison\u2019s collection.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s California Article XI, Section 14: \u201cAll property, both real and personal, of the wife, owned or claimed by marriage, and that acquired afterwards by gift, devise, or descent, shall be her separate property; and laws shall be passed more clearly defining the rights of the wife, in relation as well to her separate property as to that held in common with her husband. Laws shall also be passed providing for the registration of the wife\u2019s separate property.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was radical stuff in 1776, when Abigail Adams, the redoubtable wife of John, the founding father and future president, was pleading with her husband to \u201cremember the ladies.\u201d It was still controversial in 1849, when only a few U.S. states were just beginning to catch up with California in married women\u2019s property rights.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat women have property rights independent of husbands is an old Iberian tradition,\u201d Hayes-Bautista told me. \u201cWhen a woman married under Iberian law, she didn\u2019t lose anything \u2014 she kept her own property.\u201d<\/p>\n

A year after the 1849 constitution, the state legislature created the groundwork of today\u2019s \u201ccommunity property\u201d law by defining anything acquired during marriage as \u201ccommon property.\u201d<\/p>\n

That \u201cwas an important contribution,\u201d Hayes-Bautista said, and it was in striking contrast to the English law that original American laws had copied. \u201cCoverture\u201d essentially erased a married woman\u2019s legal identity, including any right to her own property. As an 18th century English jurist wrote, \u201c\u2026 the husband and wife are one person in law\u201d \u2014 and that one was the husband.<\/p>\n

The male-female suffrage distinction was easy, but in California, who, exactly, was a white male?<\/p>\n

Both the 1789 U.S. Constitution and the 1849 California constitution extended the right to vote only to white men \u2014 but the definition of \u201cwhite\u201d included Mexican Californians who chose to become U.S. citizens.<\/p>\n

In the United States, the savage arithmetic of the \u201cone-drop rule\u201d practice, codified in the early 20th century, decreed that anyone with ascertainable traces of Black African heritage \u2014 even to the hyperbolic single drop \u2014 was legally Black.<\/p>\n

\""Goldseekers <\/p>\n

A vintage postcard from Patt Morrison\u2019s collection imagines a Gold Rush-era Thanksgiving in California.<\/p>\n

In Latin America, as Hayes-Bautista explained, after centuries of Indigenous and Spanish intermingling, racial and ethnic lines were fluid, with myriad, subtle gradations of color, lineage and heritage. An absolute definition of \u201cwhite\u201d was practicably impossible, and the white Anglos flooding into California in 1849 also knew better than to alienate the settled \u201cCalifornio\u201d population by disenfranchising it, even when most of those \u201cCalifornios\u201d of old Mexican families had Native American and sometimes Black family roots.<\/p>\n

The debate around the early constitution was over whether \u201cwhite\u201d meant actual skin color, or ethnic origin, or family heritage. Pio Pico, the last governor of Mexican California, was \u2014 like many of the settlers who had founded the city of Los Angeles in 1781 \u2014 probably a man with Afro Mexican origins.<\/p>\n

What was practiced in Spanish and Mexican America, says Hayes-Bautista, was a class distinction that he called \u201ccolorism.\u201d It was a social and cultural observance, he noted, versus \u201cracism,\u201d where laws and regulations enforce race divisions and status.<\/p>\n

\u201cLatinos are what I call racially ambiguous,\u201d he remarked, and continue to be right down to the present day, defying definition by pollsters, census-takers and others.<\/p>\n

In his medical research, Hayes-Bautista has studied every census since the first one, in 1790. Race and ethnicity definitions were always changing, he said \u2014 sometimes based only on what the census taker concluded based on the appearance of who opened the household\u2019s door to him.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the 1960 census, the census takers [alone] determined race \u2014 they didn\u2019t ask,\u201d said Hayes-Bautista. As an example, \u201cif Obama\u2019s mother opened the door\u201d to the census taker, baby Obama would have been entered as white. \u201cIf his father opened the door \u2014 Black.\u201d <\/p>\n

In 1970, the father\u2019s race was applied to children, and in 1980, the mother\u2019s, he said. \u201cSo how scientific is this concept? It\u2019s crazy \u2026 and they\u2019re always trying to stuff \u2018Latino\u2019 into the race category,\u201d as opposed to ethnicity.<\/p>\n

And the census is still trying to figure out how to ask questions to sort out race, ethnicity and origins.<\/p>\n

\"Vintage <\/p>\n

The Avila Adobe on Olvera Street is the oldest home in Los Angeles still standing.<\/p>\n

(Patt Morrison \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

One more California legal and constitutional regulation \u2014 a very disputatious, valuable and complicated one \u2014 derived from Spanish and Mexican practices, very different from East Coast ones: water.<\/p>\n

Part-time rivers and waterways, and the meager rainfall in Baja and in California, gave form to what are called riparian water rights. As the state\u2019s Water Resources Control Board defines it, riparian rights let landowners use some of the water flowing past their property, but they can\u2019t divert it from the stream or river to dam it up for future use \u2014 \u201cuse it or lose it.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the gold seekers, the \u201849ers, immediately set to digging ditches and canals to divert water, and so the new state soon allowed that practice, too. It was called \u201cappropriative rights,\u201d but was sometimes subject to earlier water use claims called \u201cfirst in time, first in right\u201d that went back to the days of pueblos. To this day, cities like L.A. retain water rights from those pueblo days.<\/p>\n

In the 19th century, Californians fought over water rights with guns; today, they fight over them with lawsuits. Eastern Seaboard states often use an English-based version of riparian rights, but while there\u2019s rarely enough water to satisfy all of California\u2019s needs and demands, those other states have an abundance that hasn\u2019t often put their water rules to the test. But climate change might soon have something to say about that.<\/p>\n

The state\u2019s 1849 constitution has been altered a lot over the years. Its requirement that California be officially bilingual, with its official proceedings recorded in English and Spanish, was removed 30 years later.<\/p>\n

But its original progressive elements have not only lasted, but become the law of the entire land \u2014 from sea to shining sea. As Hayes-Bautista asks, which constitution \u201clooks more like the America we have today?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Patt <\/a> <\/p>\n

Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison<\/p>\n

Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t get all cocky, you 13 original colonies. Yes, yes, 250 years, congratulations, enjoy the cake. But here…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":383506,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,23600,27304,9983,4264,154923,721,2457,2211,3750,35345,435,4609,1557,72],"class_list":["post-383505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-census","tag-constitution","tag-constitutional-right","tag-husband","tag-latino-health","tag-law","tag-mexico","tag-race","tag-slavery","tag-spain","tag-united-states","tag-wife","tag-woman","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383505\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/383506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}