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The History of Alta California: A Memoir of Mexican California. By Antonio Maria Osio. Translated, edited, and annotated by Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz. (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.1996. Pp. xii, 388. $45.00 hardcover, $19.95 paperback.)
This work is a solid contribution to the continuing effort to understand Mexican California and the experience of the Hispanic californio population as it struggled through the transition from Spanish to Mexican to U.S. rule in less than three decades. While this period in California history often has been treated from the governmental and ecclesiastical perspectives, the memoirs used to narrate the experiences of the general californio population previously have dated from a full quarter of a century after the U.S. conquest, and even longer after many of the events related.
Antonio Maria Osio came from Baja California and was a resident of Alta California from 1825 until 1852. In 1851, he composed this history, which...