The old family movie shows my sister, Victoria, astride a tall, white horse. She sits easily and trots around, the envy of the other family-gathering of children, sometimes giving them rides under her tutelage. At this time -- the early 1950s -- my sister is about eleven years old, already a horsewoman. And why not, it in her heritage.
I think we tend to lose sight of the fact that many of our women ancestors were not simply fiesta ornaments, sparkling or demure in their mantillas, flashing their fans and turning heads. Some of them were accomplished at all the skills of the vaquero.
As Gloria Miranda reminds us in her article, "Hispano-Mexican Childrearing Practices in Pre-American Santa Barbara," (Southern California Quarterly 65, no. 4, 1983), Foreign visitors marveled at California women's horseback riding skills and expertise with the lasso.
One man named Edward Vischer wrote about seeing a mother and her daughter riding herd by the side of the river where he was washing his clothes.The wife and daughter of a ranchero came out to assist in getting in the cattle. Well mounted, they managed their horses superbly, and just as I was up to my elbows in soapsuds, along they came, with a herd of several hundred cattle, back from the hills Vischer blushed and reflected on the doctrine of women's rights. a stout man, washing my shirt, and those ladies practicing the art of vaqueros..
Kathy Hughart cited Miranda and others in her online work, Women and Power in Alta California:1790-1835 (1998) and continues with:Mauricio Gonzalez, in his Memorias , recalled a California woman named Fermina Espinosa, owner of the Santa Rita Rancho. She did all the ranch work like a man, riding horses, roping steers. . .
Too, we shouldn't forget that these were not the passive, cud-chewing, somewhat lazy cows we see hanging out on dairyland pastures, but descendants of the Iberian longhorns who were semi-feral, and were noted on several occasions to be able to hold their own in a fight with the once populous Grizzly bears of Alta California.
There is an old family photograph of my gr.gr-grandmother, Rosa Modesta Avila Pryor, sitting on a horse. She is resplendent in ornate Spanish riding gear and was a very accomplished horsewoman. She, no doubt, practiced her skills in the old Santa Ana rancho canyons and the semi-wild lands between there and San Juan Capistrano. She was the daughter of Juan Avila and Soledad Yorba (daughter of Jose Antonio Yorba
II). Rosa Modestas lifetime (1835 - 1915) saw the end of the old ranchero life and the spread of metropolitan Orange County cities, oil wells, and factories. The time of the women vaqueros was swiftly passing, but their skill with horses remained.
The Yorba women and their many descendents were prominent socially. Quite a few married Anglos and helped equip their new husbands and families with sophisticated graces, adding a genteel quality to Southern California society.
They married among the Kraemers, Smythes, Landells, Tuffrees, and Rimpaus who would build up the cities financial and municipal heritage.
I like to think that although the age of the automobile and the oil well would change the face of the land, a lingering feel of the old life remains. The life of the women on the rancho when the women would ride and rope and herd the cranky longhorns in the daylight hours and, at night, still have the energy and grace to make the fandango a whirling, musical nocturne of flirtatious glances and laughter.