Title: Mexican California | Early California History: An Overview | Articles and Essays | California as I Saw It: First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900 | Digital Collections | Library of Congress
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California as I Saw It: First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849 to 1900

Collection California as I Saw It: First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849 to 1900
Mexican California
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Content: Under Mexican rule, however, governors were encouraged to make more grants for individual ranchos, and these grants were to be outright. Most important, the new Mexican republic was determined to move to "secularize" the missions, to remove the natives and the mission property from the control of the Franciscan missionaries. This process began in California in 1834. In theory, the Franciscans had administered the mission lands in trust for the natives living there when the missionaries arrived, but few Native Americans benefited from the end of the mission system: although each family was to receive a small allotment from the former mission lands, the few who tried to make a living from these plots gave up after few years. Most of the missions' adobe churches and outbuildings soon fell into disrepair, although priests at some missions struggled to continue their ministry to the Mission Indians. Most of the missions' lands were disposed of in large grants to white Californians or recently-arrived, well-connected immigrants from Mexico. In the ten years before the missions were dismantled, the Mexican government had issued only 50 grants for large ranchos. In the dozen years after the missions were secularized, 600 new grants were made. A new culture sprang up now in California: