نبذة مختصرة : The history of California and of Californians before 1848 falls into a historiographical blind spot that can be explained on the one hand by Mexican national history’s abandonment of what, for Mexico, was a lost territory, and on the other by a general ignorance by American historians of historical processes in the era before US annexation. While North American historiography, studying the frontier—or, in its Hispanic counterpart, the “borderlands”—explored this region during the Spanish and Mexican periods, it often failed to connect it to the larger history of the Spanish Empire and the new Mexican nation. Adopting a perspective beyond the horizons of these two national historiographies offers a way out of the impasse, while taking them both into account provides an opportunity to connect them, even outside of their respective national contexts. This is what I attempt to do by bringing together two themes that are central to each of the two historiographies: the frontier on the one hand, and the socialization of new, post-independence political practices on the other. This geographical connection goes hand in hand with a comparative history that makes it possible to understand the nature of the encounter between populations arriving in California from Mexico and--in particular--from New England, by understanding their initial political culture, practices, and objectives.
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