the top were the landed elite, who owned huge ranchos, many of which had been granted by the Spanish colonial empire and turned into haciendas. The elite retained their economic dominance through cattle ranching. Small landowners occupied the second rung of the South Texas economic and social ladder. These landowners lived in one-room adobe houses and spent most of their time caring for their horses and cattle. Finally, South Texas had a third lower class composed primarily of peóns, vaqueros, and cartmen. Peóns had a status above slaves in antebellum Texas but below that of free men. Peóns worked at the direction of the patróns—planting and harvesting crops, herding goats, digging wells, and doing any sort of manual labor necessary. They lived in tiny one-room jacales, huts with walls of mud or any other material available and thatched roofs. Anglo migrants to Texas believed the jacales were evidence of the Tejanos' "sub-human" and "primitive" nature. In California, native-born californios mostly lived in small farming and ranching communities in the south. The two largest cities in 1850 were Los Ángeles, with a population of 3,500, and Santa Barbara, where 1,185 people lived. While elite Californios, such as Pablo de la Guerra and Luis María Peralta, held political and economic power in the state, they represented only 3 percent of the population in 1850. The vast majority of landed Californios were subsistence farmers who based their livelihood on their small plots of land. In the southern coastal regions, business-ownership and manual labor were also common occupations for general Californios. For the Indigenous peoples of California, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo's failure to ensure full citizenship and protections had dire consequences. They were subjected to a systematic genocide, funded by the state of California. The California Genocide killed around 90% of California's Native population during the early-American period, clearing the way for full-scale Anglo colonization. Government Over time, the social, economic, and legal position of the Spanish Mexicans diminished, largely through political disenfranchisement and large-scale land loss. These two processes were facilitated through the elimination of political, linguistic, and property rights. In two decades, Anglo Americans seized complete control over the apparatuses of political power across the U.S. Southwest. José Manuel Gallegos was sworn into Congress in 1853 as the first nuevomexicano territorial representative to Congress. He spoke only Spanish, which was not a problem for his first two terms. After he successfully