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Title
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Mexican Loss of Land, 1850-1880, continued
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Description
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In Santa Clara County, the experience of Marie de Los Angeles Castro’s family is an example of the corrupt legal process during that time. Prominent as a founder of Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe and part of the De Anza Expedition in the 18th century, Joaquín Ysidro Castro served at the San Francisco Presidio. His family moved into Mission Santa Clara and was given one the few Spanish land grants: Rancho Buena Vista. During the Mexican period, Joaquín’s son José Mariana Castro acquired Rancho Las Animas and Rancho La Brea, near Gilroy, which was inherited by María Dolores del Carmen Castro and later María de Los Angeles Castro. In Castro’s words:
“Today I am old and poor. The young men who were my friends who made the papers for me to sign are all very rich. They have hundreds of acres of land and much money while I sit here like an old owl in the dark corner and tell the few who ask that these men have robbed me of all that was mine by their crooked talk and their crooked laws. They smile and tap their heads and say “dreaming.” And maybe it is so that I am dreaming. Maybe old age and sickness and sorrow have climbed into my eyes and brain just as ivy climbed into the broken window of my old Casa Adobe and shut out the light of reason. But this! If this is dreaming, tell me why these men once so poor are now so rich and I am now so poor? Hold my hands Señor, look into my old eyes and tell me, if you can, why it is that out of my vast inheritance I have nothing but poverty.” From Peter Ostroske Family Archive
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Identifier
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B4SV Exhibit Topic One: Slide 014
