Law Professor Hunts Down State’s History : Research: The University of San Diego scholar pursues a hobby of uncovering details about California’s past by poring through the national archives of Mexico.

SAN DIEGO —  Each summer over the past decade, Jorge Vargas has donned a white apron and surgical mask to rummage through the uncatalogued national archives of Mexico on a hunt for historical treasures.

Blowing the dust from long-forgotten volumes--whose pages might crumble from a careless touch--the University of San Diego law professor plays sleuth in tracking down nuggets of information about California in its days as a Spanish settlement and then as a Mexican territory.

For Vargas, interest in early California began almost as a hobby, an offshoot of his work in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a member of the Mexican delegation to the long-running United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea.

“I first visited the archives to look into maritime explorers in the Pacific,” said Vargas, an authority on international law and diplomacy whose expertise is technology and marine issues. Document by document, Vargas developed a fascination for the past that went beyond his natural interest as a legal scholar. Today, his bookcases are lined with almost as many maps and historical papers as with legal tomes.

Vargas, who has taught courses on Mexican and international law at USD for 10 years, estimates that less than 40% of Mexico’s archives have been catalogued, in large part because, until recently, they were scattered throughout the country and in various government ministries.

They were consolidated after the nation’s most notorious prison, Lecumberri Palace--also known as the “Black Palace”--was closed and its cellblocks remodeled with glass-covered ceilings and marble floors to hold the historical material.

Poking through the musty documents, Vargas has felt the thrill of discovery again and again, whether the find is an 1831 statistical survey of Alta California (which encompassed all of modern-day California) compiled by the Peruvian-born businessman and San Diego politician Juan Bandini, or a centuries-old book, beautifully bound with lacquered wood, which reveals the flowing penmanship of Fray Antonio de la Ascension, the 17th-Century Carmelite priest and cosmologist.

As far back as Ascension’s time, explorers and settlers were proclaiming California as the land of milk and honey, a paradise ripe for the picking--little different from the way it has been marketed as the Golden State to generations of Americans, Europeans and Asians.

“I’m particularly fascinated by Ascension,” Vargas said. Ascension chronicled the voyages of Spanish navigator Sebastian Vizcaino, who dropped anchor in San Diego Bay as part of a 1602 scientific exploration of the California coast.

“To me, he is the hero of Vizcaino’s voyages; he was the one promoting California by writing about navigational currents, the magnificent plants and animals, the favorable harbors, the Indians.”

Similarly, Bandini, who served as mayor of San Diego in the mid-1830s, penned a “very promotional document” in 1831 that painted the beauty and wealth of California. Exclusive of Indians, California then had a population of just 7,000 priests, soldiers and settlers.

“Bandini tells of the most beautiful ports, the most wonderful weather, the most fabulous trees loaded with fruits--a Garden of Eden,” Vargas said.

“The message to Mexico City from reports filed by people like Bandini was clearly to colonize California or lose it” to Americans or even Russians beginning to encroach from the East and North, Vargas said. “Given all of its natural resources, California was an interesting piece of candy” for would-be immigrants.

Ironically, it would be the discovery of gold in 1848--a year after Californians wrestled the state away from Mexico--that spurred the first population wave to the West Coast from the eastern United States.

The existence of gold and silver in California was known to Spanish priests by the early 1800s, who learned about it from Indians. But that information was never passed on to merchants like Bandini, perhaps because religious leaders feared the temporal influences that would result from a vast army of prospectors, Mexican or foreign, Vargas said.

The early Spanish explorers in California had excellent reputations, were well educated and had comprehensive ideas on how to carry out colonization, Vargas said.

“And Carmelites like Ascension were along on almost every ship because the Virgin del Carmen has long been the traditional patron of Spanish seamen,” he said.

Even though they understood little Spanish, Indian scribes were taught to reproduce the priests’ writing, so that copies of reports on the voyages could be kept in Mexico City and Spain.

The 1831 statistical work by Bandini, which predicted that Mexico could some day lose California unless it populated the land, would resonate with many modern-day Mexicans because of Mexico’s loss of half its territory in the 1846-48 war with the United States, Vargas said.

Ever since, Mexico and the United States have had a love-hate relationship that affects all Mexicans, said Vargas, who hopes that his scholarly efforts will help change the negative image many Americans have of their neighbors to the south.

“That’s why I like doing this (archival) research,” said Vargas, who plans to publish a translation of Bandini’s work as well as write a book about Ascension’s New World travels.