Quest for Honor : Victor Sepulveda contends that his ancestors were swindled out of an enormous land grant encompassing much of the county, or even the state. But he does not want to take back the property; he just wants respect, recognition and maybe some money.

Victor Sepulveda is a big man with a gentle handshake, a large turquoise ring and a small ponytail. In manner he seems soft-spoken, sincere and thoroughly exasperating.

In 15 years of researching his family history, he has amassed so much information and speculation about the Sepulvedas that when we spoke last Tuesday and in a follow-up call Sunday, his views came out in ungoverned torrents, often unrelated to the question at hand.

Yet the 42-year-old, part-time security guard expects government, both state and federal, to pay attention to him in court one day. It is Sepulveda’s contention that more than a century ago his ancestors were swindled out of a land grant that includes at least the 48,800 acres of the historic Rancho San Joaquin, encompassing Newport Beach and much of the other land that became the Irvine Ranch. According to another interpretation Sepulveda applies to ancient documents he says he’s unearthed, his family should actually have custody of all of Alta California--this entire state, not to mention Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico.

“The U.S. and the state of California, they have to answer to a lot of things,” he insists. “But I’m not looking to oust anybody off the land. I joke about this with a woman who works with me and lives on Balboa. She says, ‘You know, Victor, I just got a loan, and if you want to take over this loan, you can have this property.’

“I’m not looking forward to taking back our land. We cannot take people off the Balboa Peninsula.” Rather, he says he wants respect, recognition and maybe some money. He also wouldn’t mind getting the El Toro Marine base, since it’s up for grabs, though he also suggests that land should be ceded to the Juaneno Band of mission Indians, to which he is remotely related.

He first remembers hearing about his family history when he was 4, on drives the family would take through the county to visit grandparents living off Ortega Canyon. Passing the fields where the Sepulveda’s rancho had been, “I remember asking my father quite a lot of questions. He would talk about the cattle, the agriculture. He said a lot of things in regard to land that was ours and to land that was taken from us. I remember that--and the fig jam my grandma would make.”

He didn’t seriously take up tracing his family history until he was 28, following a difficult divorce. “I started looking inward, through meditation, in sorrow and pain. I think that spiritually, if you will, an inner voice started talking to me, saying, ‘Well, do you want to know who you are and where you come from?’ And I said, ‘Most definitely. Surely.’ From that time on my life has been what I refer to as a spiritual uplifting.”

He began looking up Sepulveda history in local libraries and continued his paper chase when he moved for a time to Sacramento in the mid-’80s, checking the archives of the Bureau of Land Management. On visits back to Orange County, he would often catch buses to Los Angeles to scour libraries there. Further searches led him to query the Library of Congress.

We met in the Santa Ana offices of the advertising agency he has hired to help spread his story. In the seven-page press release they assembled, there is a somewhat ordered tale centering on Don Jose Andres Sepulveda, Victor’s great-great-grandfather, who was granted Rancho San Joaquin by the Mexican government in two parcels in 1837 and 1842.

The release goes on to reiterate a fate shared by many other California ranchers: High living on the ranchos buoyed by the Gold Rush’s boost to the beef market went crashing into a five-year drought in the 1860s. Ranchers borrowed money at usurious rates--often 5% a month--and had to either sell their property or face foreclosure.

In 1852 Don Jose won a $25,000 purse in a famed horse race with other ranch-holders. A mere 12 years later he had to sell his entire rancho for $18,000. The press release alludes to the land being illegally transferred, and to a charter from Spanish monarchy to the Sepulvedas that should have superseded other laws in preserving their claim.

Fascinating stuff, but in trying to get Sepulveda to elucidate any of these assertions, his arguments came rolling out like something from a fever dream or a labyrinthine Borges tale. Asked numerous times what evidence he would take to the court trials he anticipates, he responded with a flurry of long but often incomplete sentences touching on conspiracy theories, Roman law, destiny, ecclesiastical jurisdiction, “the perfect number seven,” the sepulcher of Christ and the Spanish-American War.

Among the more cogent points to partially emerge are his beliefs: that Don Jose’s signature on the title transfer doesn’t match his other known signatures; that, rather, he had a gun placed to his head and was forced to flee to Mexico; that--contradicting the account repeated in Sepulveda’s own press release--California history has perhaps been fudged to fabricate the story of a drought; and that the Sepulvedas were a royal and holy people with a charter granted by King Alfonso VI of Spain in 1046 that somehow extended their dominion over these parts of the as-yet-undiscovered New World.

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This might be a good point at which to remind the reader that the title of this column is Fixations, and that it has dealt at times with people who worship the late Vic Morrow or who think demons stole their teeth. One can appreciate the unique road these people tread without necessarily buying into the veracity of their destinations.

Sepulveda describes his quest as “obsessed.” It concerns a part of Orange County history that was undoubtedly full of injustice, propelled by the Manifest Destiny by which the expanding United States obtained its new lands through a variety of unsavory means. But Sepulveda’s story flies in the face of numerous state and local histories, and even one local expert Sepulveda claims as a supporter disputes his claims.

Retired Villa Park real estate attorney Charles Parker is a descendant of C.E. Parker, who founded the Orange County Title Co. (later the First American Title Insurance Co.) a century ago, and he’s made a study of local title claims. Sepulveda describes him as a “staunch ally.”

Parker says he likes Sepulveda and is “inclined to humor him,” but says, “He has this dream world, I guess, based on the Sepulveda claim. I certainly wouldn’t want to tell him he’d go into court with it and have much hope of prevailing. He could talk himself silly, but a judge would throw it out in a minute.”

If the Sepulvedas did have an ancient charter, he said, that would have been nullified by the Mexican Independence in 1821.

According to local histories, the Sepulvedas didn’t have a Spanish land grant, but were one of 11 families to receive grants in what is now Orange County under the years of Mexican government. Don Jose prospered and grew wealthy with the demand for beef brought on by the 1848 Gold Rush that soon overran the state.

When the United States helped itself to California that same year, at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War, the government was bound by treaty to respect the Mexican land grants, which it did in 604 or 794 claims, including Don Jose’s.

It was a long, expensive process, however, and it was still draining the dons when drought hit the state in the 1860s. Despite Sepulveda’s assertions of fraud, there are numerous historical accounts of many ranchers, Hispanic and white, who were brought to ruin by the drought. As Woody Guthrie was later to remark of bankers during the Dust Bowl days, it can be easier to rob with a fountain pen than a gun, and it’s likely Don Jose lost Rancho San Joaquin through legal means, just or no.

Sepulveda says he’ll press on, looking for recognition of the wrongs done his family. He does admit that it might be hard to root his beliefs.

“People look on me as a kook,” he said. “I’m glad to have that title. I think personally I dream and I fantasize way too much. I know at times I’m too unreal. I get confused sometimes myself. But as long as I live on this earth, I’m going to be gathering all the information I can. I’m not just going to put my sombrero on and take a siesta under a tree. I know that David did slay Goliath, and the (current landowners) may have millions and billions, but I have faith to go forward.”

In the meantime, the money Sepulveda spends researching and promoting his views comes from his $6-an-hour job as a security guard at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. One can see where it might be galling to see those who do have millions passing by on land where a Sepulveda was once master of all he surveyed.

Victor has seen the painting of Don Jose in the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, showing him on horseback with the finery and proud visage or a feudal lord. He has seen the blue cape embroidered with gold and silver. He’s read of Don Jose’s generosity and the lavish parties at his Newport Bay home that helped create the legend of California’s “pastoral” period (which wasn’t so pastoral, perhaps, for the captive grizzly bears and bulls Don Jose would pit in vicious fights for the entertainment of his guests).

To be disenfranchised from such a legacy has to hurt. But the depth of his obsession with it can make it exasperating talking to Sepulveda. It was hard not to think of Bosnia, the Middle East and other areas where people have sustained bloody grudges for decades over issues that boil down to a playground-like squabble over who hit who first.

Justice has been lacking in many things this nation has done and may well have been in short supply when the ranchos were absorbed 130 years ago. But it was no less lacking when the Spanish seized the land from the Native Americans and enslaved them in the 1700s.

Victor Sepulveda claims his struggle uplifts him, that it doesn’t keep him from living in the here and now.

He said, “I go up to the third tier of the Performing Arts Center, and I can see the rolling San Joaquin Hills my family once rode over. I reflect spiritually and thank God for the grace to know where I come from.”

As to where that knowledge may lead, he seems unperturbed that history and his own sources dispute him. “It’s like Doris Day sang, ‘Que sera sera, whatever will be will be.’ ”