The Recovery of the First History of Alta California: Antonio María Osio’s La historia de Alta California

The transformation of Alta California was as sudden as it was unexpected. From a population of less than 15,000 gente de razón [literally, people with the capacity to reason, meaning people born into Christianity; that is, any non-Indian people] in the mid-1840s, it contained over 100,000 inhabitants in 1850 and almost a quarter of a million two years later. Swarming over the landscape, hostile to the system of land ownership and use that had developed over the previous half century, the newcomers, imbued with their longstanding belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority, went where they willed and took what they wanted. The Californios [any Mexican raised, or later, born and raised in California] adopted various strategies to meet this invasion. Some participated in the institutions set up by the conquerors, sitting in the 1849 Constitutional Convention and in the early state legislatures. Others prepared to defend themselves through North American courts and land commissions. Others withdrew from public life and public view, in the hope that they would be left alone. Others left and returned to Mexico. This paper tells the story of another strategy, one man\u27s attempt to preserve a world through the creation of history and autobiography. On April 4, 1851, in the city of Santa Clara, Antonio María Osio, who had been a bureaucratic functionary and officeholder in Mexican California for two decades, presented Father José María Suárez del Real with a densely written one hundred and ten page manuscript. In a cover letter, Osio told Suarez del Real that what the priest had asked him to do, write the history of California, was beyond his ability. But he had decided, Osio said, to write a letter, a relación of events since 1815 and especially of what I have known and seen since 1825

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Revolt at Mission San Gabriel, October 25, 1785: Judicial Proceedings and Related Documents

In this section, we present English translations of the Spanish documents which relate to the planned Mission San Gabriel uprising in 1785. The documents come from two sources, the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City and the Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library. The documents from the Archivo General are located in ramo Provincias Intern.as, tomo 120, expediente 2. Our translation follows the order in which the documents are presented in this source. The first paragraph is the title page of the expediente. The documents follow as they are arranged, with one exception: the questions which the interrogator posed to the four witnesses are only listed once in the documents. The witnesses\u27 answers are preceded by a brief phrase, a la primera, (to the first [question]), a la segunda (to the second [question]), and so forth. For ease of reading, we decided to repeat the questions before each answer given by each of the witnesses. The Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library documents are taken from the California Mission Documents collection. The numbering of these documents has changed since the 1947 publication of Fr. Maynard Geiger\u27s volume Calendar of Documents in the Santa Barbara Mission Archives. Archive-Library Director Lynn Bremer has posted new finding guides with the updated numbers online at http://www.sbmal.org/ histdocs.html. We regret that space limitations make it impossible for us to present the Spanish text along side our English translation. We are working to make the Spanish text available online, and, if we are successful, we will provide you with the web link by way of the Correo, the CMSA electronic newsletter

What They Brought: the Alta California Franciscans Before 1769

For a long period beginning in the nineteenth century, historians of California generally characterized missionaries during the Spanish and Mexican eras in one of two ways: as heroic agents of civilization or nefarious purveyors of destruction. The heroic interpretation became dominant in works influenced by the Spanish Revival movement, and it was also evident in the writings of the great Franciscan historians Zephryn Engelhardt, Maynard J. Geiger, and Francis F. Guest, all of whom based their work on the trove of documents at the Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library. In the 1980s and 1990s, the nefarious interpretation became especially pronounced, due to a number of books that appeared in connection with the controversies surrounding the proposed canonization of Junipero Serra and the commemoration of the Columbus quincentenary.1 In the past fifteen years, however, mission historians have consciously shifted their perspective to focus on Indians. ln this new framework, the missionaries have been, very properly, de-centered. They tend to be regarded as an important set of people who-along with soldiers and settlers-made up part of the context and shaped part of the environment in which native Californians were active agents. As one set of actors among many, they were shaped in complex ways by all those with whom they interacted. Thus it is possible to see them in a more nuanced light.2 This essay is in that vein, for we endeavor to move beyond celebration or condemnation. Using Junipero Serra as an exemplar, we seek to determine how a person\u27s identity as a Spanish Franciscan might affect both his choice to become a missionary in New Spain and how he lived out that choice. For Serra and his religious brothers, one of the most exciting things about Alta California was that they were in the first group of Spanish colonists to arrive there. They believed that elsewhere in New Spain, settlers, soldiers, and officials had oppressed the native peoples and inhibited the spread of the gospel. They thought that Alta California offered them a chance to set things right. They idealized Alta California as a fertile and inviting field. These missionaries did not realize that their assessment was deeply colored by the militant religious suppositions they had brought from early modern Spain and by their struggles with other Spanish colonists over how to treat indigenous peoples, a question that had divided religious and civil authorities in New Spain since the early sixteenth century. They viewed Alta California and its inhabitants through a lens that owed far more to the history of Spain and central Mexico than to anything or anyone that actually existed in Alta California. What Junipero Serra wanted to accomplish with the native peoples of Alta California was shaped by what he and his order had learned from their experiences in Mallorca, Mexico City, the Sierra Gorda, and Baja California. We chose to focus on Serra because he was father president of the Alta California missions, because his activities produced a rich documentary record, and because he has come to symbolize the entire California missionary enterprise. However, a cautionary note is in order. Serra\u27s voice was not the only missionary voice. Indeed, even during his lifetime, his views were far from unchallenged. In 1771 his former student and closest missionary companion, Francisco Pal6u, wrote to Mexico City to criticize Serra for wanting to establish too many missions too quickly. In 1775 his religious superior in Mexico City, exasperated by Serra\u27s tendency to act without sufficient consultation, publicly chastised him and severely limited his powers in a strongly worded letter that he sent to all the California missionaries. We can learn much about the missionary experience by examining Serra- but not everything. His fellow missionaries could and did disagree with him. Tensions within the missionary community were more common than is often realized.

Uncertainty on the Mission Frontier: Missionary Recruitment and Institutional Stability in Alta California in the 1790s

The Alta California missions have been at the center of the historiography of Spanish California for over a century. The history of Alta California, for instance, has often been presented as beginning with a sacred expedition and the expansion of the mission system served as a convenient symbol to chart the spread of the Spanish colonial presence along the Pacific coast. 1 In the 1980s, the combination of two controversial events, the beatification and potential canonization of Fray Junipero Serra and preparations for the 500th anniversary of Columbus\u27s voyage, intensified public interest in the effects of the missions in California and elsewhere. The literature that ensued, often impassioned and both polemical and scholarly in nature, has benefitted the study of colonial California in a number of ways.2 For example, since the quincentennial touched both North and South America, it imbued the study of the California missions with a much greater realization that these institutions were a part of a wider evangeli cal enterprise in the New World in general and New Spain in particular.3 Bolton\u27s concept of the borderlands has been revived in a more sophisticated form and it offers new ways of conceptualizing and understanding the encounters among Europeans, mestizos, and indigenous peoples throughout the U.S. Southwest and elsewhere.4 Also, all throughout the region, detailed study of the mission records, combined with a close sensitivity to oral traditions, has allowed anthropologists, ethnographers, and historians to reconstruct the lives and experiences of Native Americans, including Native Californians, with much greater precision and nuance than ever before.5 California scholars are now themselves engaging in the type of family reconstitution that has enlivened and enriched the study of colonial New England over the past three decades.

Improving Convergence and Generalization Using Parameter Symmetries

In overparametrized models, different values of the parameters may result in the same loss value. Parameter space symmetries are transformations that change the model parameters but leave the loss invariant. Teleportation applies such transformations to accelerate optimization. However, the exact mechanism behind this algorithm's success is not well understood. In this paper, we show that teleportation not only speeds up optimization in the short-term, but gives overall faster time to convergence. Additionally, we show that teleporting to minima with different curvatures improves generalization and provide insights on the connection between the curvature of the minima and generalization ability. Finally, we show that integrating teleportation into a wide range of optimization algorithms and optimization-based meta-learning improves convergence.Comment: 29 pages, 13 figure

Seasonal Changes in Brown Fat and Pelage in Southern Short-Tailed Shrews

We examined cellular changes in interscapular brown adipose tissue and pelage characteristics in Blarina carolinensis collected throughout the year in eastern Virginia. Cellular volume occupied by mitochondria and maximum mitochondrial size were significantly greater in the brown adipose tissue of winter shrews than in summer shrews. Lipid droplets occupied greater volume and were larger in shrews in summer than winter shrews. There were no seasonal differences in hair density; Type I and Type II guard hairs were significantly longer in winter than summer by a factor of 1.3. Woolly hairs were 1.2 times longer in winter than summer, a non-significant difference

Additional Comments on Reproductive Strategies and Population Fluctuations in Microtine Rodents

Recently, Schaffer and Tamarin (1973) proposed a model relating changes in reproductive effort (RE) to fluctuating densities in microtine rodents (lemmings and voles). They assumed (and presented data supporting this assumption) that the major effect of increased crowding would be a reduction in survival among prereproductives, thereby lowering the effective fecundity (Schaffer and Rosenzweig 1977) of their parents. As a consequence, Schaffer and Tamarin argued that the optimal reproductive expenditure, E(N), should decline with increasing population size, N. They also deduced the shape of the zero-growth isocline, N*(E), for differing levels of RE and plotted both E(N) and N*(E) on a graph whose axes are reproductive expenditure and population density (Fig1 a)