Pictured above: Antonio Francisco Coronel, wife Mariana (left), and unidentified young woman and man, 1887. | Photographer unknown. Albumen print. California Historical Society.​​

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Though it lasted less than three decades, California’s Mexican period (1822–1846) helped shape the distribution of land, wealth, and power after California officially entered the union in 1850. Telling Stories of Mexican California reflects on this past, and how romanticized retellings made lasting impacts on the state’s culture and popular understandings of its history.  

 

Telling Stories of Mexican California: Real Life & Myth Making broadly outlines California’s history leading up to statehood as a backdrop to the factual and fictional stories that emerged after the US takeover. It considers nineteenth-century Mexican American individuals and families who told their stories and looks at some of the early narratives that helped create an enduring California mythos, as well as the stories that were ignored in favor of this new, often exaggerated or fictionalized lore. 

 

Telling Stories of Mexican California: Real Life & Myth Making was organized by the California Historical Society, features the CHS Collection at Stanford, and tours through Exhibit Envoy.