Isidora Filomena

INTRODUCTION

When he arrived in Sonoma for the first time, at the end of March 1874, Henry Cerruti took a room at the Union Hotel on the plaza. He spent his first few weeks visiting Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo at his home, attempting to gradually charm him into cooperating with Hubert Howe Bancroft. During his free time Cerruti wandered through the town looking for people to interview. He also struck up a friendship with Mariano's brother Salvador.

Over these first few weeks, Vallejo appeared alternately accommodating and resistant. Around April 8, Cerruti went to interview Isidora Filomena, accompanied by Salvador Vallejo and Captain M. A. McLaughlin. Isidora was the widow of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo's important ally during the 1830s and 1840s, Suisun chief Sem-Yeto. The chief was better known among the Mexicans by his baptismal name of Francisco Solano. He had been dead for over two decades, and Isidora was living close to the Vallejo residence in a house lent to her by the family. Cerruti did not indicate in his memoirs whether he or one of the Vallejo brothers had first suggested interviewing Isidora. Nor did he state what he intended to try to learn from her.

Cerruti knew two things about Isidora. First, she was less than friendly to the Americans who had taken over the land in 1846. Their arrival had meant the end of the system under which her husband had become one of the most powerful men in northern California. Second, she was widely reported to have a weakness for alcohol. Cerruti therefore made sure to equip himself with a bottle of brandy. His belief that alcohol would enable him to control the conversation and wrest secrets from his interviewees was especially strong when he was talking to Indians and to those he considered to be lower-class Californios.

We do not know what her house looked like. Cerruti called it a "hut." When she let them in, Cerruti reported, "I did my best to engage her in conversation, but to no purpose. She was rather shy." Vallejo spoke up and inaccurately assured her that Cerruti was "one of her people, and an innate enemy" of the North Americans. That seemed to lessen her apprehension, and Cerruti immediately offered her some of the brandy.

Isidora frankly admitted that she was living in very poor conditions. Cerruti noted this and took advantage of it. Fascinated by her accessories and wardrobe, he determined to obtain parts of it cheaply. At one point during the interview, as Isidora was describing the jewelry the Indian women wore before the arrival of the Europeans, he convinced her, through means he did not disclose, to sell some of her jewelry to him. At the conclusion of the interview, he saw an opportunity to come away with an even larger prize. He stated:

When we were about to depart, the Princess Solano went to her sleeping room and presently came forth holding in her hand a bag containing several strings of beads made out of bones and shells, a belt about six inches wide made from the same material, and many other articles of adornment worn by Indian women in ancient days. She assured me that those things constituted the whole of her wedding dress. I offered to purchase the whole and laid a ten-dollar gold piece on the table, but she laughed at me and felt indignant at my presumption. Nothing daunted, I offered her another drink and begged her to introduce me to her son, who happened to be in the courtyard cleaning fish. She called Bill — the name of the young prince — and he came forward. I had the opportunity of conversing with him, and I found him an intelligent man about thirty years of age, well learned in the art of reading and writing, tolerably well versed in the mysteries of the Catholic Church, of which he is a constant attendant, strongly in favor of local option, and always ready to censure his mother, who is a decided worshiper of Bacchus. Bill has a few thousand dollars deposited in the San Francisco banks, but being very fond of his aged mother, he prefers to remain by her and watch over her in her old age. He greatly deprecates the drunken habits of the Princess but is powerless in effecting a reform.

When Bill returned to his fish-cleaning business I offered the Princess another drink and again broached the subject of selling me her wedding dress. I offered her twenty-four dollars and the rest of the brandy contained in the bottle. She accepted my offer, and I thus became the happy possessor of a sacred relic of days gone by. Having paid the cash and noted in my portfolio the story of the Princess, I retraced my steps towards the residence of Salvador Vallejo, thanked him for having been so condescending with me, and then went home, where I wrote down in an intelligible style the record of my interview with Isidora and her son.

In the midst of such a set of intrusions, with three men crowding her house, deceiving her about the purpose of the visit, plying her with brandy, and casting greedy eyes over the few prized possessions that remained to her, Isidora gave her interview. As was the case with all Cerruti's interviews, her words were embedded within a larger narrative composed by the interviewer. The last two paragraphs are openly Cerruti's own. In them he described her appearance and implicated Salvador Vallejo in her "sale" of the wedding dress to him. He also rendered explicit the judgment which no doubt guided him during the encounter: that she was not a "woman of esteem" and that the respect which she did deserve stemmed mainly from the deeds of her husband.

Faced with such an inhospitable environment, Isidora's performance was truly remarkable. Cerruti's major interest was the career and exploits of Solano, who had helped Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo bring "civilization" to north-central California. At points in the interview we can hear Isidora responding to specific questions about her husband: How were Solano's warriors armed when they went out to fight? What game did the men hunt? What were your people's celebrations like? Yet time and again, Isidora turned the conversation in directions she chose. She described her own influence on her husband's decisions. She placed the experiences of the female members of her group in the foreground as she recounted what the women...