Telling Identities

The Californios were the original Spanish-speaking settlers of Alta California. By the 1870s they had become a conquered and dominated population as a result of the westward expansion of the United States. In that same decade the Californios were approached by agents of Hubert Howe Bancroft, a wealthy San Francisco book dealer and publisher, asking them to narrate recollections of their past in Alta California as part of a research project seeking to assemble all available information and documentation on California history. These dictated recollections are known today as testimonios.



Sánchez offers the first pointed historical and literary analysis of thirty of these testimonios from the 1870s along with additional narratives, diaries, and documents from the nineteenth century. Most of the materials she examines have never before been published and are accessible only in their original handwritten form at the Bancroft Library housed at the University of California at Berkeley. Telling Identities scrutinizes the role of gender, class, race, language, and ethnicity in group identity formation as it looks into history to help articulate the cultural politics of contemporary Chicano and Latino culture in the United States.