4—
The Non-Indian Population

Accompanying the missionaries at the beginning of Christianization came numerous military and civilian personnel: the officials of the civil government, the garrisons of the missions and presidios, the artisans who helped the missionaries teach the Indians new crafts, settlers in the new land, and their families. A few of these individuals migrated from Spain, mostly army officers and administrators. The majority were of Mexican origin and already the products of the very considerable mixing of races in central and northern Mexico. They were known collectively as the gente de razón , a term which set them apart from the native Indian population. The process of mestization should be regarded as an ongoing one, for with the Hispanic gente de razón there also arrived a small number of Indians from the missions of Baja California, who might be counted among the Indians or among the gente de razón and increasingly moved into the gente de razón. Later in the nineteenth century there began a new stream of immigration, at first very small in comparison with the continuing one from Mexico, but by the later 1840's becoming a torrent. This new group was, for the area of the eight missions, almost entirely white and predominantly British, Irish, and Anglo-American, but had contingents from France, Germany, Portugal, and Italy. Despite some immigration from Mexico, Latin America, and Spain during the years of the Gold Rush, which tended to reinforce the existing Hispanic population, the new immigration quickly submerged the Indian and the Hispanic components both socially and demographically. After the missions disintegrated, there comes a time when it is difficult if not impossible to follow the fortunes of the Indians in the era of American settlement until the emergence of the Federal reservation system again provides information. The Hispanic population, on the other hand, may be studied to some extent by means of Church records throughout the nineteenth century and until the introduction of the California state registration system.

We make no attempt here to pursue the Mexican Californians through the nineteenth century, except insofar as information concerning them may be obtained from mission registers. Some data are available because all baptisms, burials, and marriages which involved the gente de razón were entered in the mission registers. Until after 1834 there were no secular priests or

parishes in a province that, as far as the gente de razón were concerned, was completely Catholic. Even after 1834 the erection of new parishes came slowly. Two missions of the eight here under study have the bulk of entries on the gente de razón. They are San Carlos Borromeo and Santa Clara. Mission San Carlos has more than half the entries for gente de razón down to 1834, because its priests ministered to the spiritual needs of the military at the presidio of Monterey, the administrative staff at the provincial capital, and the citizens of the growing community that formed around the presidio, the capital, and the port. Mission Santa Clara ministered to the Hispanic population at the pueblo of San Jose, a short distance away. Registers at other missions have few entries; those that there are arose from the presence of the garrisons and artisans, increasingly of Mexican settlers on ranches, and, in the instance of Mission Santa Cruz, the existence of the small Mexican settlement of Branciforte. Begun in 1797 with 9 settlers and their families, 17 persons in all,^[35] it remained minute for some decades and generated few entries in the Santa Cruz mission registers.

Entries for the gente de razón in the mission registers resemble those made for the Indians, but tend to be more extensive. For baptisms, in the earlier years, the missionary included, if he knew, the names and places of origin of the parents along with the name and birthplace of the infant. For many individuals a small family history is to be found. Ages frequently are not given, even for deaths and marriages. We must keep in mind that initially deaths and marriages were recorded for all the gente de razón, since all were Catholic, but that baptisms would be only of the newborn, for everyone else among the gente de razón had already been baptized. When Anglo-American and European immigrants began to arrive, there were Protestants among them, to be sure. During the Mexican period, they had to become Catholics in order to secure permission to remain, to become Mexican citizens, or to marry. The baptismal registers record these conversions. With the opening of the American period, the coverage of the Catholic parish registry rapidly became less than universal.

The facts that ages are frequently not given and that some mission registers are deficient in cross-references, such as those

[35] Bancroft, History of California , I, p. 560, esp. n. 44.

of San Carlos Borromeo, in which no baptismal numbers occur in the death notices prior to 1830, make it difficult to evaluate the relationship between births and deaths among the gente de razón. There is also the additional complication that most deaths in the early years were of adults who had migrated to California. On the other hand, almost all the baptisms were of newborn. A schedule may be formulated, but it is very rough, as may be appreciated by examining Table 3.8A. Here the births and deaths of the gente de razón are summarized by decades from 1774 to 1834 for the two missions of San Carlos de Borromeo and Santa Clara. We have also incorporated a tabulation of such data for Mission Santa Cruz, but have not included it in the summary, since the data are too meager for any meaningful analysis. Information on numbers of baptisms for gente de razón at the other missions, but not on numbers of deaths, may be found by 5-year periods in Table 3.8B. The categories for age at death consist only of division into the two broad categories of párvulo and adulto . We cannot go beyond 1834, because thereafter the priests at Mission San Carlos condensed the death records to a mere notation of the name and omitted any reference to age, even the broad categories of párvulo and adulto.

From Table 3.8A we see that in the jurisdiction of the two missions of San Carlos and Santa Clara, during the decades up to 1835, there had been baptized 1,778 members of the gente de razón, almost exclusively of Hispano-Mexican descent. Because of the proximity of the Hispanic population to the mission, the baptisms are likely to be close to the number of actual births, although we cannot be sure that they coincide with that number. The Hispanic population was under somewhat looser control than the Indians, so that the delay between birth and baptism may have been somewhat longer and the chance of death in the intervening period, with its need for hasty baptism by any Christian, somewhat greater. Despite this lack of complete coincidence, we shall consider that baptisms do equal births for the purposes of our discussion. During the years covered in the table, there died 648 members of the gente de razón. The gross ratio of births to deaths is 2.74; that at Santa Clara 2.99, and that at San Carlos 2.54. The ratios by decade are also shown in the table, in the summary sheet and those for each mission. Although there is a good deal of variation, the range is not extreme and the ratios show a steady rise in population through natural increase. Similar data for Mission Santa Cruz show a level of unity but cover only a few individuals (11 baptisms and 11 deaths). We are unable to link the 372 recorded births of gente de razón at the remaining missions with deaths of gente de razón for any meaningful analysis, but suggest that the fairly steady rise in births with passage of time must have come at least in part from natural increase as well as immigration. The values we have for ratios of births to deaths are in marked contrast to the ratios for movement of population among the mission Indians. For the latter, there was a consistent excess of deaths over births.

Of the recorded deaths at the two missions, 281 are designated párvulos. A párvulo was a person up to the age of 7 or 8 years and is the nearest we can approach numerically to an infant in the data as they come to us. We tried to relate the párvulo deaths to the baptisms, but found that a check by name in the records of Mission San Carlos Borromeo indicated that only about 60% of the children who died had been born in the mission jurisdiction. It follows that the closest we can come to establishing an infant death rate is to equate the deaths of

párvulos to the total baptisms of gente de razón. The ratios by decade for the two missions are shown in the summary of Table 3.8A and for the three missions—that is, including the meager data for Santa Cruz—in the individual tabulations that follow. They indicate for the two missions a range of 128 to 176 párvulo deaths per 1,000 baptisms. Those are averages of somewhat greater variation in the two missions, for which the range is from 122 to 208. Mission Santa Clara, which had somewhat higher ratios of baptisms to burials than Mission San Carlos—that is, a more favorable ratio of net increase—also shows lower, i.e., more favorable, ratios of párvulo deaths to 1,000 births. Since it is clear from an examination of individual cases that most, but not all, of the párvulos actually died in the first year of existence, the probability is high that the true infant mortality lay somewhere between 100 to 150 deaths per 1,000 births. That range is far below the range of rates demonstrated by the mission-born Indians. It compares most favorably with the rates calculated for the Mexico of the Diaz regime, already benefitting from some influence of the new medical knowledge. (See the discussion on the neophytes born in the missions, in Part 3 of this essay.)

We may also compare the experience of the Hispanic population as recorded at the two missions with the data afforded by the excellent historical demographic studies for France which show infant mortality rates for localities in southwestern France, western France, and the Beauvaisis ranging from 156 to 288 per 1,000 births. They cover periods of time of variable length from the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century. Further, although the Spanish definition of parvulo does not cover years of age 8–9, relatively few deaths usually occur in those years, so that we may compare the rates for párvulo deaths per 1,000 baptisms directly to the rates computed in the French studies for deaths before age 10, that is, for ages 0–9. For the localities studied in Brittany, as we have already mentioned, roughly half of the children did not reach their tenth year. Similarly, for the Beauvaisis, during the period 1656–1735, 47.1% of children died before age 10, a rate of 471 child deaths per 1,000 births. For localities in the southwest of France and in Normandy, French experience was better in that nearly two-thirds of the children reached their tenth year—that

is, slightly more than one-third died.^[36] Studies of English parishes show rates of mortality even more favorable than those of eighteenth-century France. For one of the most thoroughly studied towns, Colyton, life-table treatment indicates that in the years from 1538 to 1837, of 1,000 people born, from 175 to 258 would die before their tenth year. The most favorable values are for 1750–1837 (175) and 1700–1749 (203), the least favorable one for 1650–1699 (258).^[37] These proportions should be compared with the average rate of 158 párvulo deaths per 1,000 baptisms for the Hispanic population at the two missions during the years 1774–1834. Even with adjustment for deaths in ages 8–9, the average of the rates for the entire period would not reach 170 deaths per 1,000 births, that is, 83% of those born survived to the tenth year of life. Clearly the environment of Alta California was extraordinarily favorable to the Hispanic population.

Let us turn now to interethnic and interracial marriage as it shows up in the mission registers. The aggregate number of non-Indians who were born under mission auspices is found in Table 3.8B. From the foundation of the missions until 1855, some 5,354 infants were baptized. Of these, 4,726 were the children of parents of Spanish or Mexican stock. For varying periods of years it is possible to segregate the infants baptized into three categories, according to the birthplace of the parents. In the first years, all the gente de razón had been born in Mexico or had come through Mexico from Spain; we designate these people M. They gave way statistically to persons born in California (C) as migration attenuated and births increased in the new colony. For periods of years between 1818 and 1834, some missionaries designated the parents as californios . After 1834 the failure of the priests at some missions to include information on locality of origin of the parents—a failure that varies in highly erratic fashion from mission to mission—makes it necessary to indicate only the general Hispanic ancestry, regardless of birthplace; that is, we revert to classification M in Table 3.8B. Accordingly, the classification C in the table covers only a fraction of the Californio parents, so that only the

[36] Goubert, "Legitimate Fecundity," pp. 599–600, and Henry, "Historical Demography," pp. 392–393; Pierre Goubert, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis , pp. 39–41.

[37] E. A. Wrigley, "Mortality in Pre-Industrial England," pp. 552–560.

subtotal for all infants born to parents of Hispanic culture is accurate. We should also warn that in terms of our classification a parent of Portuguese origin would not count as M, but that a parent of Spanish or Latin American origin would, regardless of the year of migration to California.^[38]

In the 1820's the first non-Spanish-speaking immigrants arrived in California. Some were Catholics; all who wished to settle and become Mexican citizens were required to convert to the Catholic form of Christianity. Many, if not most, men coming in the years of the Mexican period married California women. We have designated this group of immigrants A. In the years 1820–1824, 2 children of such couples were baptized; in 1825–1829, 16. In general, in the succeeding 5-year periods the number rose steadily. Up to the end of 1854, the total number was 440. Their weight among the newly-born can be appreciated if we express their number as a percentage of the total children born to all parents who were both of M and C culture, plus those who are listed as AM. (We omit AA, MN, and AN—that is, children of European and Anglo-American parents on both sides, and the product of unions in which one parent was a California Indian.) This value is shown in Table 3.8B and is seen to increase from 0.7% in 1820–1824 to 17.8% in 1850–1854. In other words, by 1854 close to one-fifth of the gente de razón infants baptized at the parish churches directly succeeding the eight missions were derived from mixed Mexican or Californio parentage on one side and non-Hispanic parentage of Caucasian stock on the other. The latter were predominantly Anglo-American, British, and Irish, and almost invariably the fathers. Again, there was wide variation from mission to mission, the highest proportion of such mixing being evident at Santa Cruz and the next highest at San Carlos Borromeo.

At the same time, there was considerable mixing between the Hispanic and the native Indian components, and later between the new migrants and the Indians. Some of the effects can be localized in the mission registers. We have found 83 children of mixed MN parentage and 8 children of AN parentage. These children were the offspring of marriages; invariably the mother was N. They represent 1.7% of the gente de razón births. There

[38] By accident, we are following here the idea of Hispano in the general Latin American usage of Hispanoamericano, which includes only people from Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America but excludes Brazilians.

must have taken place, in addition, a great deal of less formal mixing in which men of Hispanic or other European stock begot children upon native women. Extramarital coupling of native men with women of Hispanic, European, or Anglo-American origin would have been exceedingly rare, as was marriage. The mission registers give us almost no direct data on illegitimate children of such mixed origin, nor are clues easy to find. The mission registers do record a small number of baptisms of illegitimate and abandoned (exposito ) infants among the gente de razón. For San Jose (i.e., registers of Mission Santa Clara), the baptisms are largely associated with certain mothers, who may have been genuinely promiscuous or in the later years may have been living in common-law unions with long-term partners. We have carried such children as M on the assumption that the father was almost certainly M or C. That assumption is fully justified for the earlier years, but less so after 1846–1848.