The brand-new governor-elect, Xavier Becerra, will not be the first Latino governor of the state of California.
The asterisk is a teeny one: He’ll be the first elected Latino governor of California.
The first Latino governor of the state was a swashbuckling old-school Californio who stepped up from being lieutenant governor into the governorship in 1875, after the governor at the time was elected to the U.S. Senate.
Romualdo Pacheco’s term lasted just a shade over nine months, and his person and heritage left a more durable impression than any politics he espoused during his short tenure.
For one thing, he was the first governor of the state of California to be born in California, in 1831, when it was still part of Mexico, but he served after California joined the union.
He was also a legendary hunter and sailor and — so said the Los Angeles Examiner — the “handsomest man in California.”
Throughout a life in politics, he racked up offices and distinctions: state treasurer, judge, state senator and Assembly member, and the first Latino that California sent to Congress, after his governorship.
He bestrode both the old California and the new. His mother was a member of the august Carrillo family, and his father was a captain in the Mexican army, killed in the Cahuenga Pass when his namesake son was just a few weeks old.
The senior Pacheco rode in the service of Manuel Victoria, the governor of Mexican California, and on Dec.r 5, 1831, the forces of sundry wealthy Californios who wanted political reforms were arrayed in the Cahuenga Pass against the governor’s.
It was a kind of theatrical, fraternal, saber-rattling episode until Pacheco, perhaps misinterpreting some shouted orders, charged ahead alone with his long lance lowered, startling both sides.
The leader of the “rebels,” a onetime Los Angeles mayor named Jose Maria Avila, impulsively fired at Pacheco and killed him. Gov. Victoria then shot Avila, and an Avila ally in turn skewered the governor in the face with the point of a lance. Victoria survived, but resigned the next day.
That’s a lot of dramatic legacy for a newborn.
When Romualdo Jr. was about 5, his mother married a Scottish-born sea captain who had prospered in California. John D. Wilson sent his stepson to a school in Oahu run by a fellow Scotsman and missionary. The young man was reported to have returned to California speaking nimble English, French, and Hawaiian — but he had to relearn Spanish. It was perhaps that schooling that later decided Pacheco to become a Protestant, and a Freemason.
Pacheco was still a teenager when he went to sea on one of his stepfather’s merchant ships, and he was aboard one of them when it was captured in California waters by an American ship during the 1846 U.S.-Mexico war. On his pledge of his allegiance to the U.S., Pacheco was released, and by the time he was 17, he was managing work on his stepfather’s estates around San Luis Obispo.
The California socialite and author Gertrude Atherton wrote about a fictionalized Pacheco welcoming a visitor to his family rancho, in an episode that typifies the legendary largesse and hospitality of old Californio families. The young Pacheco character showed the visitor to his guest room, and kicked some saddle bags out of the way. They popped open and $20 gold pieces fell out. “Help yourself,” the host said. “The house is yours. Burn it if you will.”
He was elected a judge in 1854, at age 23, and a state senator, then state treasurer, and state senator again, all in the 1850s and ‘60s, a pivotal period for any politician but especially for a man born in what was officially Mexico, and entering politics as the United States fractured over slavery.
As the fuse to the Civil War burned, Pacheco cut his ties with Democrats and became a member of the short-lived National Union party, an anti-slavery coalition, before becoming a full-fledged Republican. This was not a surprise; Mexico’s Constitution banned slavery, and so, too, did the California state Constitution.
It was as a Republican that he held legislative office thereafter. He became lieutenant governor in 1871 as the running mate of Newton Booth.
Booth won a Senate seat, and on Feb. 27, 1875, resigned to go to Washington. At about 2 p.m. that day, among California’s political leaders assembled in the governor’s office, Booth announced, “Gentlemen, I have the honor to present to you the governor of California.”
Pacheco left office on Dec. 9, 1875. He tried to keep the job but his party turned him down. So back he went as a candidate for lieutenant governor, his old job, on something called the People’s Independent ticket, but that flamed out.
So in 1876, Pacheco ran for Congress. He won by one vote. His opponent challenged the result. The Democratic Congress sided with the opponent and ousted Pacheco from the seat he had barely occupied.
When he ran again, in 1880, he won. His campaign was bilingual, and “the Spanish vote” was credited — or blamed — for his victory. The district he represented was massive: from below San Francisco to the Nevada border, and 500 miles south to the Mexican border.
Washington was quite curious about the Latino grandee from the Golden State, and his wife, the Kentucky-born Mary McIntire. She was a witty and well-read hostess, and an acclaimed author of plays and books. One of her stories — “Incog,” a classic Victorian tale of mistaken romantic identities — was turned into a popular Broadway musical, “Three Twins.”
When one Washingtonian asked him whether it was true that he had killed grizzly bears, and had he used explosives to do it, Pacheco estimated that he had killed “several hundred” of them — but never with a gun, only a lasso and knife, and the help of some fellow huntsmen.
In the candied phrasemaking of the day, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner proclaimed, early in Pacheco’s brief governorship, that he “has been upright among the upright and honorable among the honorable. No act has ever been attributed to him that would have held to blur an Hidalgo’s shield in the days before Spain’s chivalry was laughed away.”
But there was a dent or two in that shining shield. Triflingly, a San Francisco minister took Pacheco to task because his gubernatorial declaration of the date for Thanksgiving “had not the remotest acknowledgement of Almighty God.”
His supporters and opponents alike, Latino and Yankee, complained that Pacheco did not, contrary to the practice of the day, hand out plum political jobs to his supporters. Nor did he pardon a convicted embezzler, a San Francisco harbor commissioner, when the prospect of a $20,000 payoff was floated by the convict. (The next governor pardoned the man, terms unknown.)
It was Pacheco’s relationship with Southern Pacific, the massive railroad with a stranglehold on California’s economy and politics, that banged up his shield.
In August 1875, a few months into Pacheco’s governorship, the Morning Times in Oakland flat-out called him “the railroad candidate.” It referred to a bill in Sacramento in 1870, when Pacheco was a state legislator. The measure proposed some public funding for Southern Pacific projects, but one amendment would have voided that support “if said railroad company employ any Chinese or Mongolian” workers.
Pachecho voted against the amendment — but maybe not for the same noble reasons that prompted his flight from the pro-slavery Democrats. In 1870, Southern Pacific was employing thousands of Chinese railroad workers to do more dangerous work for longer hours and less pay than white railway workers.
A few years later, when Pachuco was in Congress, the Los Angeles Herald called him “the pliable dupe of the Southern Pacific Railroad company,” who showed “contempt and disregard for the rights of white workingmen.”
By 1882, the railroads had pretty much gotten what they could from their Chinese labor, and as a nasty national recession took hold, anti-Chinese sentiment did, too. Congress found it timely and popular to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act.
In February 1882, Pacheco took to the floor of the House to endorse the act. He argued that Chinese workers were taking white men’s jobs, but more than that — they were a cultural peril to the country. “It is necessary,” he said, “to see with our own eyes the insidious encroachments of the Mongolian upon every branch of labor, every avenue of industry … they are taking in our factories and workshops, at the plow, beside the loom, yea, yea, in our very kitchens and laundries, the place of the white laborer.”
Californians, he said, “ask merely that the evil already done to them shall be restricted to its present proportions.” Pacheco’s “yes” vote joined the Democrats’ majority and the six other Western congressmen.
He left politics after that, and for a couple of years enjoyed one of those political plums, appointed by President Benjamin Harrison to be envoy and then minister plenipotentiary in Central America.
Thereafter, Pacheco came back to California, dabbled in stockbroking, and retired. He died in 1899. The Times’ obituary was as flattering as most: “We have public men who might well copy in some measure the pose of mind, the calm dignity, the graceful honesty and gentle manliness of Romualdo Pacheco.”
One thread runs through Pacheco’s political career. He was written and spoken of as a man of “pure Spanish” heritage. The Spanish-language newspaper the Two Republics wrote fulsomely of his parents of “pure Spanish” heritage, born in what was then Spanish imperial Mexico.
In this day and age, it reads like coding for white, a “one of us” inclusion. The renowned 20th century California writer Carey McWilliams later labeled it the “fantasy heritage,” a rewriting of California history that glamorized and romanticized the Mission era and the European Spanish “hacendado” grandees with their vast ranchos, like Pacheco’s family’s, at the same time marginalizing and erasing the authentic “Mexicanism” of California.
Now, 151 years after Pacheco’s spell as governor, Xavier Becerra puts his Mexican lineage front and center: his mother born in Jalisco, and his father born in Sacramento and raised in Tijuana. It was Becerra’s father, Manuel Guerrero Becerra, who told his son what it was like back when he’d steer clear of businesses that put up the signs right out front: “No dogs, Negros, or Mexicans allowed.”
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