Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,665

This is the grave of Juan Bandini.

Born in 1800 in Lima, Peru, Bandini grew up the son of a Spanish ship captain. His father moved the family to California in 1819 and he immediately got involved in the independence movement from Spain there. He wasn’t involved in Peru it doesn’t seem and given the father was born in Cadiz, I am not sure why he revolted against Spain anyway. But in the middle of a revolution, things get complicated and choices get made, especially back then, when California was really far from Spain and communication took a long time.

In any case, Juan Bandini built a huge home in San Diego (today it is the Cosmopolitan Hotel) and became part of the new Californian elite. Under Mexican rule, he had a large land grant. Among his holdings was Rancho Tecate, a grant of over 4,000 acres granted to him in 1834. It didn’t go well. Groups from the interior, some Native and some outlaws, sacked the ranch in 1836, burned it all to the ground, stole all the horses, etc. Bandini never rebuilt it and was compensated in 1838 by a new land grant. This was Rancho Jurupa, which was 41,000 acres and basically is modern-day Riverside.

Bandini got attention from his appearance in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years before the Mast. Dana remembered in his influential travel narrative of Bandini:

He had a slight and elegant figure, moved gracefully, danced and waltzed beautifully, spoke the best of Castilian, with a pleasant and refined voice and accent, and had throughout the bearing of a man of high birth and figure….He gave us the most graceful dancing that I had ever seen. He was dressed in white pantaloons, neatly made, a short jacket of dark silk gaily figured, white stockings and thin Morocco slippers upon his very small feet.

Then the Americans came to stay. For a guy like Bandini, with a Spanish background and all, the arrival of Americans wasn’t per se a bad thing. He didn’t have any overwhelming allegiance to Mexico City or anything and whatever best served his interest or the interest of the California elites was probably going to be OK. So he was fine with the U.S. side of the Mexican War. In fact, he urged other Spanish Californians to side with the U.S. in the war, or at least not resist American occupation.

In the aftermath of the Mexican War, Bandini became key to working out the land grant issue. Spanish and Mexican land grants had no parallel in American law. The idea of a big piece of land given out to some grandee to effectively lord over the people and do whatever he wanted with didn’t make a lot of sense in American property law. Moreover, these grants could not be sold, which was the real issue. One of the things Mexico stuck to in what passed for the negotiations that created the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, where that nation gave half of its land to the United States so the latter could expand slavery, was for the land grants to be recognized. Bandini was a key part of that in California, largely for self-interested reasons.

But then the U.S. simply ignored the land grants. What was Mexico going to do, go to war again? So in 1851, Congress passed the Land Act that allowed the grants to be challenged in the courts. This would prove a complete disaster for the rest of the 19th century for those who lived on those grants. See, the grants had large amounts of “unused” property. People used the land collectively. For example, in New Mexico, where I know the details of the land grants and their history more than I do California, you had the people living in the little town or on small ranches. That wasn’t very much of the grant. But then you had all this undeveloped land people used to graze their sheep, hunt, fish, gather food, for religious rituals, etc. For white Americans, this was unacceptable. “Proper” land use was a major part of the justification for stealing land from the tribes. Indians were lazy, whites worked hard, therefore it was God’s will. That logic, such as it was, easily could be transitioned to take land from Mexican Catholics too. And it was. Shady lawyers showed up, often connected to the Gilded Age Republican elite, such as Thomas Catron. They found ways to break the grant, usually by convincing one person to sell for pennies, then challenge the whole thing in court. Then the courts would grant the people living there 160 acres or something and then allow the rest to be sold off. Basically, the entirety of the national forests of northern New Mexico is ex-land grant property stolen from the people guaranteed it in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. And a lot of locals are still pissed about it today.

This is what Bandini was dealing with. He was so disgusted about the treatment of the old elite by the Americans that he left San Diego and moved back to Mexico for awhile. He did end up in Los Angeles, broke. He still lived in some kind of comfortable poverty, but his lifestyle was largely held up by his children, who seem to have managed the transition to American rule a bit better than he. What shocked and outraged these Californio elites such as Bandini was that they were not allowed to share in the wealth. They assumed that since they were Spanish (or made whiteness claims in that direction), that they would be equal to white America. That was, to say the least, a miscalculation. White Americans quickly turned from a brief romanticizing of the rich Spanish in California to calling them Mexicans and taking their land grants. Only later, in the early 20th century, once those wealthy were no longer a threat, would you see a return to romanticization, with the Spanish Revival in architecture and the protection of the old missions and the like.

So Bandini died in Los Angeles in 1859, a bitter, broken man, having seen everything he built destroyed by the Americans. He was 59 years old.

Juan Bandini is buried in Calvary Cemetery, East Los Angeles, California.

If you would like this series to visit other figures associated with 19th century California, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. George Alonzo Johnson is in San Diego and Isaac Lankershim is in Los Angeles. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.