[Kenny Bunk]

One of the best descriptions of Mexican California was written by Richard Henry Dana in "Two Years Before the Mast." A Harvard man taking a break in his education for health reasons, Dana worked as an ordinary seaman. His ship traded goods from the United States with the California missions' and ranchos for cow hides. They traded at the all the ports, calling at San Diego Bay, San Pedro Bay, Santa Barbara Channel, Monterey Bay, San Francisco Bay and the chain of missions in between. Written in the late 1830's it describes a California with perhaps about 5,000 non-Indian Mexicans, that is to say more or less "European-type Mexicans" in the whole territory. San Francisco, Monterrey, San Diego, and LA were not much more than crossroads villages.

Modern development of California began in 1849's Gold Rush and was an American, not a Mexican phenomenon. Like Texas, it broke from Mexico and became a Republic before joining the Union.

Aztlán is a Mexican fairy story. Neither the Mexicans or the Spaniards before them had more than the barest scattering of settlers in the Southwest they sold to the US and barely scratched the surface of its potential.

BTW, you'd be hard-pressed to find any group more opposed to massive immigration from Mexico than the descendants of the few original Spanish settlers in places like New Mexico. The Spaniards ... and then the Mexicans after them neglected the settlers and left them to wither on the vine, crushing any attempt they made to assert their rights. The Mexicans even crushed the missions, a key economic engine of their colonies.

Return? Bullshiite.

[Regulator]

The numbers from Spanish Colonial California are fascinating:

Approximate number of aboriginal natives: about 300,000

Approximate number of Spanish colonists: about 7000

The colonist number was stable up to the Bear Flag Republic rebellion. By that time, the native population was down to about 150,000 thanks to smallpox and slaughter.

But they were still by far the majority. If you wanted to find Spaniards, you needed to know where they were, since there were so few of them.

But by that time there were upwards of 30,000 Anglo settlers around Sacramento, and moving into the Bay Area slowly.

What happened next is that the Anglos moved to establish their form of popular government and land ownership in place of the system based on the Spanish Crown, and inherited by the revolutionary Mexican government.

At no time were the Californios a majority of human population here, and their claim to political control was certainly no more meritorious then the Anglo-Protestants, based as it was on the Papal decrees of 1495 and 1529.

The American government understood that the remnant Mexican population represented a failed attempt at solidifying the original Papal claim that was ridiculous in its scope. Polk had the same issue going in Texas, and the solution to who would control the land was decided at the end of the war in 1848.

Mexico is trying to reverse that verdict to this day. This time they think they have the people, if not the arms, to do it.

But it was never their land. Just like us, it was someplace they had to win, and hold, which they didn’t.

So we have to decide if we plan to keep it.