Discovering a Connection to California’s Roots

Beverly Hendrickson Waid is a name that holds no hint of its owner’s Hispanic roots. It belongs to a 73-year-old history buff who recalls that Spanish was spoken in her maternal grandmother’s house in Santa Maria on the Central Coast. The house belonged to the daughter of Vicenta Pico, a surname that rings loud and long in California history.

But Beverly didn’t begin to discover how directly connected she was to the state’s origins until a bureaucratic glitch threatened to hold up her trip to Europe in 1967. Her mother and traveling companion, Emma Clara Bagdon, needed a visa but couldn’t locate her birth certificate--until an uncle suggested they look at the records in Mission Santa Ynez.

“Wow, I never knew anybody in my family had a birth certificate in a mission!” thought Beverly, who was born in Santa Ana and worked as a school secretary in Anaheim until her retirement.

There’s one more thing this mother of two would discover during the next two decades of researching her ancestry: She’s a direct descendant of Antonio M. Pico, one of 48 signers of California’s first constitution.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the state’s founding document, debated, drafted and adopted from September through November of 1849. That year, 48 elected delegates gathered in Monterey to create a government for the booming, gold-rich territory that would soon become the 31st state.

Now comes a call for all descendants of the signers to come forward and be part of birthday celebrations for the Golden State. Los Amigos of Orange County, a civic group, is pushing Project 150, an effort to locate descendants of the diverse group of men who wrote the original constitution.

The delegates to the constitutional convention were carpetbaggers and Californios, newcomers and natives, foreign-born and home-grown. They spoke Spanish and English and needed a translator, a British merchant who had married a Mexican and polished his Spanish with their 18 children.

Among the delegates were a doctor, a banker, an engineer and two printers. The lawyers, recent arrivals all, outnumbered the farmers 14 to 8. One fanciful delegate listed his occupation as “elegant leisure.”

More than two-thirds, 33 of the 48 delegates, had lived in California for less than five years. Only seven--all of them Latinos--had lived here their whole lives. They included Beverly’s ancestor, Mr. Pico, a 40-year-old agriculturalist representing my hometown, San Jose.

Their work--including creation of state schools, state boundaries, a state flag and seal--is considered a remarkable achievement of bilingual and bicultural cooperation. “It’s a wonderful story about these people who argued, who misunderstood each other, who made enemies and made friends,” said Galal Kernahan, a Project 150 organizer. “And at this moment, at least, as it kind of crystallized in Monterey, they got along.”

Organizers hope to develop a directory of descendants who could be invited to sesquicentennial observances. It should include Beverly Waid’s great-grandson, Jonah Hurst, 2, a 10th-generation Californian and heir to Felipe Santiago de la Cruz Pico, a soldier with the De Anza expedition, which established the first overland supply route to Spanish outposts in California.

Project 150 won’t produce a lot of pageantry. It has no budget and no big program. All it really has is good intentions and a slogan on bumper stickers: “Californians Build Their State Together. Always Have. Always Will.”

The project’s Web site (https://users.oc-net.com/pepejose) includes a historical synopsis that highlights enlightened contributions from the Californios. Married women, for example, were allowed to own property separate from their husbands, a right carried over from Mexican rule and a first in the United States. The convention also voted unanimously against slavery, which was outlawed in Mexico and had been a source of its conflict with Texas.

Yet, divided delegates limited the right to vote to white males, a racial distinction that didn’t make sense to Californios. A delegate from Santa Barbara argued “it would be very unjust to deprive [dark-skinned residents] of the privileges of citizens merely because nature had not made them white.”

Today, racism still prevents some people from accepting the Latino presence, said Mimi Lozano Holtzman of the Society of Hispanic Historical and Ancestral Research, co-sponsor of Project 150. The effort, she said, helps show Californians how mixed our bloodlines really are.

And it sends this message to those who look at Latinos as recent arrivals or as troublemaking foreigners: “I’m your next-door neighbor and you don’t even know I’ve been here all this time.”

*

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesdays. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.