Join us as we celebrate the opening of our new exhibition, “Telling Stories of Mexican California: Real Life & Myth Making.”

Thursday, September 12, 2024
5:00 – 7:00 PM
Petaluma Historical Library & Museum
20 4th Street (Corner of 4th & B Street)
Cost:  Free – Please Reserve Space Here

Join us for the opening of Telling Stories of Mexican California: Real Life &Myth Making, a revealing new exhibition that highlights the true stories of California’s Mexican period, which lasted from 1822-1846. The exhibit holds these facts up alongside the fantasy depictions used by early stakeholders, who viewed California’s history through the lenses of their own experiences and chose to present narratives that suited their purposes. One of the most pervasive narratives was a picture of an idyllic bygone era of ranchos where dons and doñas enjoyed lives of abundance. These romanticized memories fail to include Native peoples, Franciscan friars, and the hard scrabble facts of early settlements.

Through powerful photographs, stories, and artifacts, Telling Stories of Mexican California: Real Life & Myth Making broadly outlines California’s history leading up to statehood as a backdrop to the factual and fictional stories that emerged after the US takeover. It considers nineteenth-century Mexican American individuals and families who told their stories and looks at some of the early narratives that helped create an enduring California mythos, as well as the stories that were ignored in favor of this new, often exaggerated or fictionalized lore. When California became a state, these tales were used by boosters to draw new visitors and settlers, successfully reconfiguring a fearful foreignness into a charming regional identity, one that persists even today.

Though it lasted less than three decades, California’s Mexican period helped shape the distribution of land, wealth, and power after California officially entered the union in 1850. Telling Stories of Mexican California reflects on this past, and how romanticized retellings made lasting impacts on the state’s culture and popular understandings of its history.