The actual number of Spaniards in California between 1769 and 1846 never exceeded 7500.
Compare that to the number of Indians in 1846: 150,000. And in 1769 that number was 300,000. You don’t hear Ohlone last names all that much today, and yet they were by far a much larger group of people.
The Spanish - later Mexicans because of the 1821 revolution - were a tiny band of nobodies. The number of Americans in the Sacramento valley by 1848 was around 30,000. The Spanish were an even more irrelevant group.
The actual number of descendants from people like Pio Pico, Mariano Vallejo, Francisco Sepulveda and other Californios is exceedingly small and wouldn’t fill a neighborhood in San Jose now. The possibility that some woman in Fresno living in a flea bag apartment complex is a 6th generation Californio is near zero.
Something like half the “hispanics” in California descend from either an immediate illegal alien or are one generation away from an illegal alien.
That is an immense number, in the millions. Virtually all since 1970 when “hispanics” were only 4% of the population of California.
So no, hispanic surnames haven’t been all that common in California until recently. I can remember walking the streets of San Diego in the mid-1960s and seeing virutally none of them.
Good points. I knew that there were very few Spaniards in the early years and their claim to the state was very flimsy during the gold rush and Bear Flag Republic days due to very low populations. The Spaniards essentially did nothing with California during that time — few scattered ranchos (many Spanish land grant ranches here in the Bay Area).
I arrived in CA in 1973. It’s easy to forget how things were back then.
You wrote “Something like half the “hispanics” in California descend from either an immediate illegal alien or are one generation away from an illegal alien.” I haven’t heard that (but it’s not surprising). Is that documented? I just spent a few minutes looking for data and it sure is obfuscated, almost as if the data collectors and reporters don’t want you to see the truth.