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Juana Briones, A Woman of the Ages

Studying the life of Juana Briones — ranch owner, businesswoman, humanitarian, and folk healer — opens a fascinating window into the changes that transformed 19th century California. The daughter of a soldier with the Anza Expedition, Juana Briones lived at the Presidio settlers of the Pueblo of Yerba Buena; she eventually sold her farm and moved to a rancho in the hills of Palo Alto. Albert Camarillo discusses the life and times of Juana Briones in the San Francisco Bay Area from the 1820s through the 1880s and places her story within the changing contexts of California under three flags — Spain, Mexico, and the United States.

Albert Camarillo is the President of the Organization of American Historians for 2012–13, the nation’s largest membership association for historians of the United States. A member of the Stanford University History Department since 1975, Camarillo is widely regarded as one of the founding scholars of the field of Mexican American history and Chicano Studies.

He was born and raised in the South Central Los Angeles community of Compton where he attended Compton public schools before entering the University of California at Los Angeles. He is the only faculty member in the history of Stanford University to receive six of the highest and most prestigious awards for excellence in teaching, service to undergraduate education, and contributions to the University and its alumni association. At Stanford’s commencements in 1988 and in 1994, he received the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Outstanding Service to Undergraduate Education and the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 1997, he was awarded the Bing Teaching Fellowship Award for Excellence and Innovation in Undergraduate Teaching.

His newest book is Mexican Americans and Ethnic/Racial Borderhoods in American Cities, 1850–2000 (Oxford University Press, 2013). He is currently working on a book titled, Going Back to Compton: Reflections of a Native Son on Life in an Infamous American City, an autobiographical and historical account of Compton from the 1950s to 2010.

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