Whittier park offers a visit to the past

Out in Whittier, tucked between the concrete channel of the San Gabriel River and the roar of the 605 Freeway, there’s a little adobe house you might like to visit.

Pio Pico’s ranch, purchased in 1848, has the quaint warmth of a long-departed era. There’s a horse corral, fruit trees, grapevines and an old wine cellar. The canopy of an enormous ash tree shades the old porch.

“It’s like a little hidden hideaway here,” said Carolyn Schoff, an Orange County anthropologist who is president of Friends of Pio Pico, a group dedicated to preserving the state historic park.

Pico was the last governor of Mexican California. He led the state during a period of intense ethnic conflict whose divisions are a mirror image of those today, when the words immigrant, illegal and Mexico can get the California blood boiling.

“The North American nation can never be our friend,” Pico wrote in an official gubernatorial proclamation, drafted as U.S. troops headed toward California in 1846. “She has laws, religion, language and customs totally opposed to ours.”

Earlier this month, Latino voters overwhelmingly backed a Democrat for governor, helping Jerry Brown win a decisive victory. If Pico could be awakened from the dead to receive the news at his old ranch, he would be surprised — because after the war, he became a founder of the California Republican Party.

History is always turning things upside down. And rarely more so than in California, where the newcomers of one age are the natives of the next. This state of ours has always been a land of opportunity and natural beauty, beloved by locals who feel under siege from outsiders.

That’s what I learned last week when I visited Pico’s ranch and read a new book dedicated to his turbulent life.

“Back in the 19th century, the Republican Party gave the Californios a chance to regroup and fight back,” said Carlos Manuel Salomon, a professor at Cal State East Bay and the author of “Pio Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California.”

In the 1856 U.S. presidential election, Pico threw his support behind a man who had invaded his country a decade earlier: John C. Fremont. Like countless Californians who lived after him, Pico found a way to live with people who at first seemed alien to him.

Change and eventual accommodation are another recurring theme in California history.

Pico was a man of African roots, born at the San Gabriel Mission without wealth or status, who rose to become the defining figure of 19th century California. His ranch on the San Gabriel River was the smallest of the many he owned — a mere 8,880 acres — so he called it “El Ranchito.”

“This was another world apart from Los Angeles,” said Schoff. L.A. was an often-violent frontier town in Pico’s day, but it was a day’s ride away. At El Ranchito, you can still see the European furnishings Pico collected. And in Salomon’s book, he comes to life as California’s original social climber.

His father was a humble foot soldier in the military of the Spanish Empire. Under Mexican rule, Pico intermarried with influential Californio families and became a political leader.

“He had a tremendous ego and was a gifted politician who knew how to put himself at the center of controversy,” Salomon said.

As a local administrator for the Mexican government, Pico’s harsh policies earned the wrath of the native Indians. Pico’s generation of Californios, in turn, resented the arrival of settlers from other provinces of Mexico.

After the U.S. victory in the Mexican-American war, Pico became famous for the genteel manner with which he treated Anglos, who remained a minority in Southern California for decades. The early Times, then with openly Republican sympathies, always referred to him with the honorific Spanish title of “Don.”

The Californios eventually united behind the Republicans because they thought the Democrats’ policies would lead to their extinction. For Salomon, this too is a constant in California history — a similar dynamic, he says, played out in the recent gubernatorial elections, when GOP candidates embraced an immigration rhetoric that many Latinos found offensive.

“These days, you can’t really say what a Latino voter looks like,” he said. “They’re Republicans, Democrats, native born, immigrants. But when they’re stereotyped and scapegoated, they have a tendency to vote as a bloc.”

It was true in the 19th century, and it’s true in the 21st.

Under U.S. rule, Pico was a living symbol of Californio pride. Many American newcomers attacked him, with one calling him a “corrupt, non-English-speaking, negroid, dwarfist.”

Like other rich Californios, he eventually lost nearly everything. Historians have often portrayed him as the hapless victim of Yankee swindlers, but that’s a far from accurate picture.

“If he failed, it was partly due to his own ambition,” Salomon said.

Pico was done in because he incurred enormous debts while trying to hold on to symbols of wealth and power he could no longer afford. That too is a story with many echoes in modern California.

“His phaeton [buggy] and sorrel horse were a familiar sight,” read his 1894 obituary in the Times, describing his final days in downtown L.A., after losing a legal battle to keep El Ranchito. “Don Pico was the courtly Spanish gentleman of the old school up to the last…”

Ironically enough, our current governor—a Republican—has proposed closing Pio Pico State Historic Park three times in the last three years.

In these days of austerity, the park’s doors are closed more days (five) than they’re open (two). But the fact that Pico’s home has survived at all is a bit of a miracle, given more than a century of earthquakes, floods and real estate booms.

“It’s never going to be the Hearst Castle,” said Schoff, who has testified before legislative committees and circulated petitions to keep the park open. The remaining five-acre parcel of Pio Pico’s old ranch is “the poor stepchild of the state park system,” she said.

But it’s worth visiting that small park, and learning about the man who lived there, just to see and feel the strange and often circular paths of our history.

hector.tobar@latimes.com