Striking Gold in Mexico’s Unplumbed Past

Each summer over the past decade, Jorge Vargas has donned a white apron and surgical mask to rummage through the uncatalogued national archives of Mexico on a hunt for historical treasure-troves.

Blowing the dust from long-forgotten volumes--whose pages might crumble with the careless touch of the hand--the University of San Diego law professor plays sleuth in tracking down nuggets of information about Alta California in its days first as a Spanish settlement, then as a Mexican territory.

His hands tingle with excitement when an unexamined book--beautifully bound centuries ago with lacquered wood--reveals the flowing penmanship of Fray Antonio de la Ascension. The 17th-Century Carmelite priest and cosmologist chronicled the sailings of Spanish navigator Sebastian Vizcaino, who set anchor in San Diego Bay as part of a 1602 scientific exploration of the California coast.

From another musty box, Vargas comes forth with the 1831 statistical survey of Alta California--a definitive “what-was-what” of the area that today’s state of California--compiled in the flowing hand of Juan Bandini, a wealthy Peruvian businessman and politician who served as mayor of San Diego.

Back 160 years ago--back even to Ascension almost four centuries ago--explorers and settlers proclaimed California the land of milk and honey, a paradise ripe for the picking--little different from the way it has been subsequently marketed as the Golden State to generations of Americans, Europeans and Asians.

“I’m particularly fascinated by Ascension,” said Vargas, an authority on international law and diplomacy, with expertise in technology and marine issues. “To me, he is the hero of Vizcaino’s voyages; he was the one promoting California by writing about navigational currents, the magnificent plants and animals, the favorable harbors, the Indians.”

Similarly, Bandini penned a “very promotional document” in 1831, painting the beauty and wealth of California.

“They needed people to populate the area,” Vargas said. Exclusive of Indians, California had a population of just 7,000 priests, soldiers and settlers in 1830. “Bandini tells of the most beautiful ports, the most wonderful weather, the most fabulous trees loaded with fruits----a Garden of Eden.”

Even then, only 10 years after Mexico had gained its independence from Spain, the Californios who had emigrated northward to farm on mission ranches were keenly aware of the territory’s allure.

“The message to Mexico City from reports filed by people like Bandini was clearly to colonize California or lose it” to Americans or even Russians beginning to encroach from the East and North, Vargas said. “Given all of its natural resources, California was an interesting piece of candy” for would-be immigrants.

Ironically, it would be the discovery of gold in 1848, a year after Californians wrested the state away from Mexico, that spurred the first population wave to the West Coast from the eastern United States.

The existence of gold and silver in California was known to Spanish priests by the early 1800s, who learned about it from Indians. But that information was never passed on to merchants like Bandini, perhaps because religious leaders feared the temporal influences that would result from a vast army of prospectors, Mexican or foreign, Vargas speculated.

For Vargas, interest in early California began almost as a hobby, an offshoot from his work in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a member of the Mexican delegation to the long-running United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea.

“I first visited the archives to look into maritime explorers in the Pacific,” Vargas, a native of Juarez, said. Document by document, Vargas built a fascination with the past, beyond his natural interest as a legal scholar trained to explore the history behind creation of a law. Today, his bookcases are lined with almost as many maps and historical papers as with legal tomes.

He has taught courses on Mexican and international law at USD for 10 years after first coming to America as a research fellow at the UC San Diego’s U.S. Mexican Studies Center.

Now Vargas plans to teach a course at USD on the legal history of Alta California, to show how the area’s transition from Spanish- to Mexican- to English-style jurisprudence affected economics and social relations. “It follows in a way from courses I’ve done on international law, and on immigration law. And there’s a wealth of documents around.”

Vargas estimates that less than 40% of Mexico’s archives have been catalogued, in large part because, until recently, they were scattered throughout the country and government ministries.

They were consolidated after the nation’s most notorious prison, Lecumberri, also known as the “Black Palace,” was closed and its open-to-the-elements cellblocks remodeled with glass-covered ceilings and marble floors to hold the material.

“The galleries are full of natural light, and you get the feeling of sitting in a church or being in a monastery as you take a volume out of a box and carefully turn a page,” Vargas said. “And you’re amidst the symbols of Mexico: the flag, the gold eagle.”

The early Spanish explorers in California had excellent reputations, were well-educated and had comprehensive ideas on how to carry out colonization, Vargas said.

“And Carmelites like Ascension were along on almost every ship because the Virgin del Carmen has long been the traditional patron of Spanish seamen,” Vargas said. A small cloth bookmark that Vargas uses to mark copied pages of archival documents features the Carmelite coat of arms and the virgin.

Each report of a voyage would be laboriously copied over and over by Indian scribes taught to reproduce the writing of priests, even though they understood little or nothing of the Spanish language, so that there would be one copy stored in Mexico City and at least one set sent back to Spain.

Vargas shudders with excitement in describing the luck involved in coming across such documents several hundred years after they were written.

The 1831 statistical work by Bandini, in noting that Mexico could someday lose California unless it populated the land, would resonate with many modern-day Mexicans because of the country’s loss of half its territory in the 1848 war with the United States, Vargas said.

There’s been a love-hate relationship ever since between Mexico and the U.S. which affects all Mexicans, said Vargas.

“That’s why I like doing this (archival) research,” said Vargas, who plans to publish a translated edition of Bandini’s work with his own introduction. And he will also write a book about Ascension’s New World travels.

“I want to disseminate information about Mexico as a slice of history to show the country in a stance” different from the negative way many Americans view their neighbor to the south. “I want to enhance the view of Mexico.”