Jeanne Farr McDonnell. Juana Briones of Nineteenth-Century California. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008. xiii + 258 pp. $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8165-2586-7; $22.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8165-2587-4.

Reviewed by Carmen Nava
Published on H-California (June, 2010)
Commissioned by Eileen V. Wallis (Cal Poly Pomona)

Juana Briones

With this biography, Jeanne Farr McDonnell attempts to set the record straight about the role Juana Briones played as a founder of Spanish San Francisco and thereby influence the narrative of early California history. This biography of Juana de la Trinidad Briones y Tapia de Miranda (1802-89) illustrates the sometimes quotidian, sometimes unusual, ways in which the life of an ordinary person crosses the written record. McDonnell contributes a biography of an ordinary Californian woman who lived a remarkable life.

While all indications are that Juana Briones was illiterate, McDonnell finds that she “survived and even flourished” as a mother, wife, businesswoman, and landowner living in turbulent times (p. 17). McDonnell finds clear evidence that on occasion Briones hired people to do her writing for her, and she appears in a variety of Spanish, Mexican, and American documents, including as late as her eighty-second year, when she testified in a case supporting the canonization of Padre Magín de Catala (p. 207). In some instances, when evidence is lacking, McDonnell goes beyond the realm of evidence-based induction to “amplify” from “small clues about Juana’s life” and “elaborate on her experience” (p. 4). At the outset, McDonnell acknowledges such a technique is potentially problematic, but assures the reader that such elaborations would be based on her “deep knowledge” of Briones based on years of preservation work on the Briones house in Mayfield, California, and archival research. Though McDonnell’s sympathy for Briones plays a part here, these elaborations are infrequent, and for the most part do not distract.

McDonnell uses a loosely chronological approach. Parts 1, 2, and 4 trace the arrival of her ancestors in California and Briones’s childhood during the period of Spanish settlement in the Monterey/San Francisco Bay area (1769-1810), her adulthood in the Mexican period (1810-48), and her mature years in the American period (1848-89), respectively. In part 3, “Persistent Struggles Across Regimes,” McDonnell departs from chronology and presents two chapters that discuss Briones’s work as a curandera (healer) and her interactions with Indians who were neighbors and landowners in the Santa Clara Valley. McDonnell explains that she inserts these two chapters in part 3 because of their significance “in a period of disconnect” in Juana’s life, when she was adjusting to “new system, a new language, and a new social hierarchy” under the Americans (p. 5). For example, in “This Woman Who Cured Me: Nineteenth-Century Medicine,” McDonnell considers the evidence and lore about Briones’s work as a healer, and reflects on the integral value of such service in the community, the different medical traditions with which she was familiar, and her work teaching other healers.

Throughout the biography, McDonnell explores the theme of Briones’s ability to navigate a culturally diverse and changing society. She argues that Indian culture was “deeply imprinted” on Briones, her family, and “all the non-Indian people of her childhood and youth” (p. 22). Similarly, she asserts that “the egalitarian nature of Indian society, particularly in regard to women, could have been a model for Juana’s later refusal to bow under patriarchal directives” (p. 43). Later, during the transition from Spanish to Mexican authority, McDonnell explains Briones’s entry into business during the first decade of her marriage by emphasizing her “ease in relating to people of many backgrounds and languages” (pp. 63-64). And elsewhere, McDonnell argues that Briones and her husband Apolinario Miranda held divergent views about property ownership, which sprung from their complex backgrounds. Although they were both described as mestizo, and Briones had African as well as Indian ancestry, McDonnell explains Apolinario’s belated and almost reluctant approach to petitioning for land grants by saying that “he favored the Indian outlook” whereas Juana “preferred a more acquisitive style” (pp. 69-70). McDonnell’s attempt to describe these complex social perceptions, relationships, and experiences may have called for a larger framework for analysis. Scholars such as Lisbeth Hass, Antonia Hernandez, Virginia Bouvier, and most recently, Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, have contributed to our understanding of women and gender in the Spanish, Mexican, and American periods by investigating how gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, power and violence interface in similar social contexts.[1] Though McDonnell’s methodology does not rely on a gender analysis, the biography illustrates the subject’s historical agency. McDonnell shows that although she was illiterate, Briones’s life and agency are visible in the written record not only because of her endeavors as a businesswoman and landowner but also because of her indefatigable efforts to separate herself physically and legally from an abusive husband.  

This biography does not attempt to innovate methodologically, but nevertheless contributes to our understanding of women and gender in California history and it should also resonate in borderlands history and Chicana/o studies. Geographically, McDonnell’s study of Briones in the San Francisco Bay area complements Haas’s research into the San Juan Capistrano and Santa Ana areas, and Chavez-Garcia’s work on the greater Los Angeles region. The book, with an interesting collection of visual documents such as land-grant maps and photographic portraits, should be a welcome addition in the college classroom as well as for general readers. Jean Farr McDonnell believes that Juana Briones’s is a life worth knowing. Significantly, McDonnell has mustered the evidence and constructed a biography that is worth reading.

Note

[1]. Virginia M. Bouvier, Women and the Conquest of California, 1542-1840: Codes of Silence (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001); Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004); Antonia I. Hernandez, “Engendering the History of Alta California, 1769-1848,” California History 76, nos. 2-3 (1997): 230-259; and Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California 1769-1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

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Citation: Carmen Nava. Review of McDonnell, Jeanne Farr, Juana Briones of Nineteenth-Century California. H-California, H-Net Reviews. June, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=29662

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