Family has a reunion, spanning two nations, languages, cultures
Wednesday, January 19, 1983
by Janet Sutter
Dr. Robert Alvarez and his relatives were watching television.
It wasn't just any program for Alvarez, an anthropologist, university
professor and second-generation Californian. It was about his family, traced back, among
others, to a certain Thomas Smith a Yankee sailor, who settled in Baja California in the
early l800s. His descendants migrated on "The Trail North."
That's the title of the television film featuring Alvarez and his son,
Luis, 10. They took the trail south, 800 miles into Baja, along with a television crew, to
search out their family's past. Last week. they watched a screening of the documentary
that airs tonight on KPBS, Channel 15 at 8 o'clock.
Some 60 members of Alvarez's "extended" family saw the
preview at the cultural center in Tijuana. Their surnames spanned two cultures as well as
two nations - surnames such as:
Smith, Castellanos, Marquez, Hollman, Allen, Alvarado and Oyos. Attentively watching three
television screens, they were appropriately seated in a section called Nuestra (Our)
Peninsula, featuring photo montages of historical Baja.
When the film ended, the good wishes spoken to Alvarez were both in
English and Spanish. One of the relatives there was Manuel Smith -- he's a big,
genial-looking San Diegan. In the documentary, he comments, "All my life they say,
'Your name is Smith. Gee whiz, you're a Mexican, how could you be a Smith?'"
For the extended Alvarez family, the event in Tijuana was a happy and
proud time.
The documentary began in San Diego with Alvarez visiting his Aunt
Martina, who came from the town of Comondu in Baja California. (She passed away last year,
at age 94.) She showed her nephew a picture of her grandfather, Antonio Smith, who was the
son of Thomas Smith, who stayed behind in Baja when his ship, bound for the Orient,
stopped there for supplies. There he met and married Maria Mesa, and in 1820, they settled
in Comondu.
So Alvarez and Luis began their trek in their four wheeled Toyota. over
dusty, rutted roads, through rugged chapparal country, a cactus here and there. "I
wanted to take Luis with me because I thought it was very important for him to see Baja
California... The very first time I went down, I was pretty young and I remember just the
harshness and some of the desert towns. But it left a real impression on me that has never
really left me."
They visited some of the missions of Baja, heard the recitation of the
Mass, watched children bring flowers to the altar. Then they came to the little town of
Comondu, where two men on horseback were herding cattle through the village. Here the
Mesa-Smith line was founded.
Alvarez talked to several people, one of them a "guy who was running a trapiche, a
sugar cane mill ... he was related to the Smiths." Aunt Martina had told Alvarez
about their only close relative still in Comondu, Fidel Mesa-Smith. He welcomed father and
son and introduced them to his family, then told of working in Tucson, and later in San
Diego in 1920.
What Alvarez said of other relatives in the film, seems also to apply
to Fidel. "Like many other Mexicans they went to the United States and came back to
their home town ... and it sort of helped to create a pattern of movement, a
back-and-forth movement -- families crossing visiting each other. And there was always
knowledge that there was family there waiting for them."
For his research to Baja, Alvarez checked baptismal, marriage and death
records, old mission records, as he tried to reconstruct a migration by looking at
different people. "Most of the records were very complete, because at the time of
birth, the priest would also record the parents, place of their birth, their residence at
the time," he said. "For example, I discovered the Castellanos had originally
come from Peru." Other than that, his family members proved excellent reference
sources.
After visiting Comondu, Alvarez and Luis went to Calmalli, an abandoned
gold mine in the desert, not even on most maps. Family members had to leave Comondu to
find jobs farther north, and some went to the mining camps of Baja. These were little
communities created by British and American companies seeking gold in the wake of the big
California gold rush of 1849.
By talking to old miners earlier, one of them Loreto Marquez, who was in his nineties,
Alvarez had learned of Calmalli. The Calmalli mine produced over $3 million worth of gold
in the late 1800s. It was the place where Alvarez's grandparents had met and fell in love.
It was here that Narcisso Castellanos, a paternal great grandfather, went into the mines
and chiseled away at the rock. A formal family photograph in the film depicts his wife,
Cleofas and their nine children in 1906 - by then, living in San Diego.
In the ghost towns of the camps, Alvarez and Luis found mining
equipment rusting in the sun. They explored the ruins of adobe buildings, one resembling
the hulk of an ancient church. Alvarez explained how the families drew close together
because of the isolation of the mines, and "when one mine dried up they would pack up
their belongings and take off. When they moved they didn't really carry a whole lot with
them. They carried basically each other and the social relationships and the closeness
that they had developed throughout the mining circuit."
Alvarez and Luis continued on their way north, building campfires at
night. "Each time we stopped I would think to myself, maybe they were here, maybe
they bad a campfire in the same spot that we did"
The living family legacy was Alvarez's doctoral dissertation (at
Stanford University) before it was a film. He and Paul Espiosa of KPBS, who is the
producer and writer of the film, knew each other as graduate students at Stanford.
Alvarez, who is from San Diego, now teaches at Sacramento State
University. The two men are working on three more programs about the Alvarez family - on
settlement of the family in Lemon Grove; a 1931 school desegregation suit brought by the
Mexican-American community, with Robert's father as a major plaintiff; and today's new
migration and current immigration policy.