First published in 1981, Harry W. Crosby’s Last of the Californios captured the history of the mountain people of Baja California during a critical moment of transition, when the 1974 completion of the transpeninsular highway increased the Californios’ contact with the outside world and profoundly affected their traditional way of life. This updated and expanded version of that now-classic work incorporates the fruits of further investigation into the Californios’ lives and history, by Crosby and others. The result is the most thorough and extensive account of the people of Baja California from the time of the peninsula’s occupation by the Spaniards in the seventeenth century to the present. Californio Portraits combines history and sociology to provide an in-depth view of a culture that has managed to survive dramatic changes. Having ridden hundreds of miles by mule to visit with various Californio families and gain their confidence, Crosby provides an unparalleled view of their unique lifestyle. Beginning with the story of the first Californios—the eighteenth-century presidio soldiers who accompanied Jesuit missionaries, followed by miners and independent ranchers—Crosby provides personal accounts of their modern-day descendants and the ways they build their homes, prepare their food, find their water, and tan their cowhides. Augmenting his previous work with significant new sources, material, and photographs, he draws a richly textured portrait of a people unlike any other—families cultivating skills from an earlier century, living in semi-isolation for decades and, even after completion of the transpeninsular highway, reachable only by mule and horseback. Combining a revised and updated text with a new foreword, introduction, and updated bibliography, Californio Portraits offers the clearest and most detailed portrait possible of a fascinating, unique, and inaccessible people and culture.

Californio Portraits: Baja California's Vanishing Culture (Volume 4) (Before Gold: California under Spain and Mexico Series)

History

Crosby, Harry W.

Americas

University of Oklahoma Press

First published in 1994 and now available again, this Spanish Borderlands classic recounts Jesuit colonization of the Old California, the peninsula now known as Baja California. Jesuit missionaries founded their first settlement in 1697 and unintentionally created a Hispanic society that outlived the missions and their Indian converts. The author brings to light Jesuit missionization and culture, European-Indian contacts, mission and presidio operations, family social life, the unique peninsular economy, and the Jesuit expulsion. Four appendices provide data on Spanish kings, royal officials, Jesuit personnel and visitors, and founders of pre-1768 peninsular California families.

Antigua California: Mission and Colony on the Peninsular Frontier, 1697-1768 (University of Arizona Southwest Centre)

University of New Mexico Press

A chance encounter at a coffee shop door — a young woman of unusual promise and haunting problems, a widower grieving and lonely in the wake of a forty-year marriage — strange candidates for romance and adventure? Not necessarily. From this casual meeting springs a May-November odyssey into distant lands, dark corners of the soul, and high places of the human spirit.Exploring a man’s reactions, both base and noble, as the passion he feels conflicts with the path he knows he must take, Portrait of Paloma is a compelling story of lust and loyalty, friendship and survival, an intimate look at a woman’s quest to conquer her past, and an older man’s need to help her do so. 
“…I’d divided Paloma into alter egos. One I’d bought, and I was getting my money’s worth…But the other persona attracted me more, the friend with whom I shared so many enthusiasms. She was the one I was courting—and sighing over—even as I guiltily made love to the first…” 
An engaging debut novel that is at heart a love story, Portrait of Paloma is also a provocative tale of gender, generation, and what two people can learn when they trust each other enough to bridge the divides of both.

Portrait of Paloma

Literature & Fiction

Sunbelt Pubns

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Books by Crosby, Harry W.