Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

homes of its survivors, and a few loyal neofitos who
tried to keep an eye on things in case the padres ever
came back. Just one year after Cruz Jr.’s birth, it
finally became illegal to buy and sell California
Indians as slaves. Cruz’s older brother, my greatgreat-grandfather
Tranquilino, was nineteen years
old.
In 1871, at the age of twenty-two, Tranquilino
married Severiana Ramírez, age eighteen, a
“Carmeleño” woman, an Esselen Indian from the
local area. Her parents had been residents of the
mission in its final days; born in 1836, her mother,
Sacramento, was of the generation immediately
post-secularization. Severiana was, in fact, the only
one of her mother’s twenty children (all born during
the final two decades of the Mission era) to survive,
but was marked by disfigurement of her hands—only
three fingers on each—a mutation most likely due to
the chronic syphilis that plagued California Indians,
a “legacy” of soldiers that also decimated Indian
women’s fertility.
Six years later, Severiana and Tranquilino’s son
Tomás Santos was born in nearby Monterey.
Around this time, Father Angelo Casanova,
appointed in 1863 to the parish of San Carlos Church