Ancestry - Positionality

[SCROLL DOWN FOR DOCUMENTS. VISIT PUBLIC FAMILY TREE. SEE MY ANCESTRY.COM DNA RESULTS.] 

Because of the recent spate of identity frauds, particularly in academia and the creative world, I am preemptively posting the history and documents below to clearly prove all facets of my ancestry. In my case, I identify as a Central Californian of mixed ancestry (European, Mexican American/Tejana, and California Native descent of as-yet-unconfirmed tribal origins. ).

I welcome any and all discussions of my identity, publicly or privately. I also am happy to provide names of family members who can corroborate my ancestry claims. Additionally, while I appreciate the efforts to call out people for being fraudulent in their identities, as a person in the midst of trying to reconnect my grandfather and great-grandmother's disconnected Native story, I also recognize that there is not currently a way to preemptively clear one's name from accusations of fraudulent claims to identity. The information below strives to do that by illuminating our family story and providing evidence. 

(Scroll down to see family history, census records, and BIA documents.).

Background

Although my ancestry is largely European, with many waves of settler ancestors moving West, I was raised partially by my maternal Texan/Tejana grandmother, who often tried to pass as non-Hispanic. Additionally, my paternal Native great-grandmother raised my grandfather and his brother as a widowed single mother. She also helped to raise my father, particularly during summers. He was also raised by his father and his White maternal family. My mother, meanwhile, was raised with both her Tejana mother and her White father but he died when I was three years old, which means that I did not know him or his family well. While I am focused here on my Mexican American and Native ancestors, it's important to note that I am equally claiming my White ancestors and communities, who began arriving in California in the late 1840s as 49ers, and later came to be gold miners, US Forest Rangers, Great Depression migrants, pig and peach farmers, dairy farmers, and cowpokes.
 

California Indigenous Ancestry

For our paternal family's Native ancestry, I have been working hard for many years to figure out what happened to my paternal great-grandmother and her mother and other ancestors. To that end, I have compiled extensive documentation and reached out to several tribes and people who we are related to and who might know our family's Native history. In other words, I am currently in the process of attempting to reconnect that story. It appears, in summary, that my great-grandmother, Minnie Madeline Lewis-Fraser (married name), was identified as Native in 1900 (Her father, Benjamin Franklin Lewis, is also in the same census, a couple of pages prior.) and 1910 (She is working for the Maze-Bacigalupi family.) and then began identifying as White after the 1910 census. From the 1910s to late 1940s, she was living in Coulterville. During that time, she was again identified, along with my grandfather and his brother, as Native in the 1928-33 California "Indian" Census, which I ordered from the National Archives several years ago (Query John Seamans for confirmation.). For reasons I am still seeking, their applications were rejected, although a very recent update to Ancestry lists them as Amended, Approved (But I am not sure about the accuracy of that. Confirming it will take some more digging...). After the 1928-33 census, she again appears as White for all other records. (A small sample of these documents can be found below. I am happy to further discuss this issue.) At this point, my best assessment of her identity, especially based on family lore, is that she tried to pass as White for much of her adult life, although she did seem to share some cultural knowledge and experiences with her sons and grandchildren, including my father. 

Because I grew up with my father and grandfather's stories of Minnie being of Native ancestry, I am not someone who took on an identity late in life. Rather, official records and DNA results for my father and his cousins serve to corroborate paternal family stories of Native ancestry, particularly in the case of Minnie's identity. That said, I recognize that neither family lore nor DNA can be used to establish Native identity. Additionally, while documentation helps solidify the descent claim I know the archives do not replace community connections or lived experience. On that note, I will continue to search for the pieces of our family's fractured Native story, especially since we cannot fully account for all lineal sources at this time even though 1/8th of our combined ancestry is Native according to DNA results and lore. Furthermore, if if it turns out that Minnie's ancestral tribe determines membership via lineal descent, as many California tribes do, the forces of California history have possibly disenfranchised our family from the inheritance of tribal belonging.

I would also like to add here that attempting to reconnect has been interesting and challenging, particularly during COVID, and especially since records don't say which of several possible tribes our great-grandmother may have descended from. Minnie lived in several regions throughout her life, making it difficult to determine her mother's exact tribe. Reaching out to so many new communities as I have puts someone in an inherently vulnerable place and I have not had an instruction book to do this work. However, I have been trying my best to figure it out as I go while also trying not to be assuming, demanding, or an ignoramus. On that note, I have certainly made some mistakes in these early days of searching.

It's also important to be forthright here and to say that our White ancestors were involved on the other side of colonizing California (Those same ancestors were also on the US side of the Mexican American War.). In other words, we descend from multiple stories. Importantly, as someone who does not have lived experience of being of Native descent outside of family stories and efforts to reconnect over the past ten+ years, I am also always careful to stay in my lane and not pretend to be an expert on Native issues. That said, I maintain the right to discuss and even write about my own ancestry and to seek to resolve and reconnect the mysteries of our family origins, particularly as they relate to our identity as Westerners and Californians. I also reserve the right to change the particulars of my collective identity as a natural result of learning more via reconnection efforts. 

(Read about the California Genocide. See family documents below. I have hundreds of pages of documents of evidence of my reconnection journey.)

Mexican American/Tejano Ancestry

On our maternal side, my grandmother's family mostly came from the extended borderlands between Northern Mexico and what is now Southern Texas. The family has extensive records in both places. Our Garza and Valdez ancestors represented early families in Brownsville, although EC's father, Telesforo Garza, may have actually been born in the area when it was still considered to be part of Mexico. My great-grandmother, Clelia Garza Valdez, gave my grandmother the Anglicized name of Yvonne Joan Smith, with the surname coming from her father, who was a White man named Virgil Smith. Because Virgil Smith abandoned his wife and infant daughter in Southern Texas when my grandmother was six months old, she was not raised by the White side of her family. In fact, my grandmother was raised in a bilingual household by her grandfather, Oelogio "EC" Casas Garza and his five daughters: Juanita (Jane), Josefina (Josephine), Agnelia (Nela), Consuelo (Chelo), and her mother, Clelia. Most of the family moved to California by the 1940s or to Nevada a short time later. 

Despite my grandmother's clear Mexico-Texas border origins, my grandmother's identity has vacillated at times between identifying as a Texan, a Mexican, a Hollywood girl, an Okie, and being White-passing, depending upon which part of her 90+ year history she is referencing. Additionally, like her mother and aunts (and anyone, for that matter), her identity cannot be flattened to just her origins. By all accounts, the Garza women were career-minded, fashionable, funny, "with it", outspoken, and outrageous. My grandmother, the longtime matriarch of our family, is no exception. 

(Documents can be found below. VISIT PUBLIC FAMILY TREE. Other info available upon request. Also, note that many older American censuses list people of Mexican descent as "White".)
 

Longterm and Persistent Presence in the Americas

Adding to the Garza women's story, our haplogroup on our maternal side is C1C2, which is most commonly found in Mexico. This hapologroup represents a maternal lineage that has been in the Americas for about 20,000 years. (Haplogroup results available upon request.) While we have many European ancestors, we are nonetheless directly descended from women who have been in the Americas since long before colonization. In other words, the women in our unbroken maternal line have been from the Americas and nowhere else for millennia upon millennia. According to our maternal grandmother's results, we have clear Indigenous ancestry on this side, as well, but we are not presently able to document the origins, which may be of Mexican or American Indigenous origin or a mix of both.  

I recognize that this claim does not mean we have intact heritage, a particular moral authority, or tribal identity, but it does complicate our story and affects our family's relationship to the history of the US, particularly in territories that were formerly Mexican and/or Indigenous. In fact, our indigenous history in the Americas on both our maternal and paternal sides, fractured as those stories are at this time, has always made it feel very reductive to identify as solely White, especially given the historic pressures to conform to Eurocentric standards of identity and the safety that passing as White promised some of my ancestors. In other words, I am, in some ways, resurrecting my collective family identity from past erasure by embracing all of the threads.

I would like to note here that some folks may disagree with my explanation of identity, especially because of what I look like and that is OK. I also recognize that some members of my family might discuss their identity differently, and that is also OK. Discussions about identity are often complex, fraught, and personal. But it is a political and social statement to own our family identity in its complex entirety and to not willingly erase it further just to conform to historic forces or to the identity discussions of our social media-saturated moment. In fact, much of the erasure I am in the process of undoing is a result of my ancestors' needs to change their identities to fit the social, political, and cultural pressures of their times. That said, family members will confirm the facts presented here, even if they discuss their own identities differently. In any case, this all likely means a lot more to me than it does to anyone else.

To further complicate the story, I was raised in a trilingual and multicultural neighborhood in Turlock, California, with many of my early childhood community experiences occurring in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. (I was in bilingual Spanish and English classes in first and second grade, as a result.) Additionally, my early caretakers were predominantly Hispanic/Latinx. And many members of our extended family, including some whom have married into our family or to whom we are related by marriage or extended degrees of cousinhood, come with similarly complex family origin stories. In other words, many of my early community and familial experiences in the world have been multilingual and multicultural. Additionally, since the late 1800s, many of our experiences of community and caretaking involved women of color, even if they were sometimes trying to pass as White. While I recognize that proximity and lateral relationships do not equal identity, they do significantly affect one's experience of place and people, particularly one's understanding of what it means to be home. 

As a result of these factors explicated above, contemporary American identity binaries are ill-fitting for me and insufficiently nuanced, at best. A Central California Mixed/Historically Southwestern Mestiza identity, therefore, is the best fit.

Questions? Reach Out!
On that note, in addition to the details and documents provided here, I am willing to discuss my family history and research in depth with anyone who asks. Additionally, I can easily provide more proof to substantiate these claims and can even connect you with family members who can corroborate these claims. I also encourage anyone who is curious to VISIT OUR PUBLIC FAMILY TREE, which has corroborating documents (and relevant questions) attached for many of the claims made here. 

(Family member contact information available upon request.)