favor of the Californios, the average wait-time for a case to be resolved was seventeen years. During that time, most Californio families were forced to sell portions of their property to pay their attorneys' fees. In addition, all land commission hearings were held in San Francisco, which created an additional and expensive barrier for Southern California landowners. Mexican American landowners, in general, faced often insurmountable odds in proving ownership of their lands, which some argue was the intent of the convoluted system. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo wrote, "It requires a lot of work and money that I don't have to locate [possible witnesses], and afterwards to pay for notarized affidavits and English translations for each." Some Californios, however, attempted to use their positions of influence and power to fight against the legal discrimination. Pablo de la Guerra, a Santa Barbara landowner, asserted his political influence as a state senator and then lieutenant governor to vocally critique the American legal system, which treated Mexicans as a "conquered and inferior race". De la Guerra complained that the testimony of white people was taken more seriously in the court system than that of Mexicans; he said, "A disgraceful distinction between white testimony and ours was indelicately paraded." De la Guerra would have to fight even to maintain his right to hold political office; the landmark case People v. de la Guerra decided that despite charges otherwise, De la Guerra could hold political office in the United States. Nevertheless, Anglos came to dominate the political and economic landscape of California, as not even one Mexican family retained their wealth in the early-American period. In Texas, land grants were never subject to a federally legislated commission. Because Texas had attained statehood in 1845, it retained jurisdiction over the entirety of its border regions and thus claimed exemption from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The Texas state government thus took the matter of land grants into its own hands, when governor Peter H. Bell appointed William H. Bourland and James Miller to determine the validity of Spanish and Mexican land holdings in the state. At its first hearing in Webb County, the Bourland-Miller Commission faced significant opposition from the local Mexican American landowners, who claimed that the commission had been established in order to seize the property of Tejanos and take away their full rights. Miller and Bourland were able to win over the landowning elite of