Victoria Reid

Victoria Reid (c. 1809 – December 23, 1868), also known as Bartolomea Comicrabit, was an indigenous Tongva woman from the village of Comicranga, at what is now Santa Monica, California.

[2][3] Bartolomea was taken as a child to Mission San Gabriel, where she was educated in Hispanic culture and converted to Christianity.

[2] These were known as monjeríos, where young girls, and single and widowed women, were kept in locked rooms to "safeguard their virginity and help them to prepare for Christian marriage.

"[6]Eulalia Pérez de Guillén Mariné, keeper of the keys at the mission, paid special attention by making Bartolomea her assistant at a young age.

[1] In this marriage, Bartolomea bore four children, recorded as Felipe, Jose Delores, Maria Ygnacía, and Carlitos.

Hugo Reid's status in Mexico became elevated by "being the husband of Victoria, a connected mission Indian and well-respected" in the region.

She was a descendant of a landowning family in Los Angeles who had settled in the area with the first wave of Spanish colonization in California.

The beds which were furnished us to sleep in where exquisitely neat, with coverlet of satin, the sheets and pillowcases trimmed with lace and highly ornamented."

Davis regularly spoke of his low opinions of Indigenous peoples, and this account shows that he viewed Victoria as an exception to this perspective.

[1] The influx of white settlers resulted in changes in attitudes toward her marriage to Reid and to her status as a respected Indigenous woman.

"[1] When Maria Ygnacía, Victoria's daughter, was around 18 years old, she was admired for her beauty by Euro-Americans yet was mischaracterized as being "half-English, half-Indian," based on Hugo Reid's ancestry.

One commentator suggested that Americans had to create psychological and social distance rather than accept that a "full-blooded Indian" was beautiful.

Benjamin Davis Wilson believed that Reid was a highly viable candidate because of his "opportunities of knowing the Indians perhaps exceeded those of any in the State.

[1] In 1854, Wilson produced a deed to the Huerta de Cuati that claimed he paid Victoria US$8,000 (equivalent to about $271,290 in 2023) for the property.

King described Reid as wearing a common cotton cloth and wrapped in a quilt, attended to by a single Indigenous servant.

[2] Victoria Reid/Bartolomea is historically noted as one of the few Indigenous persons to be granted land following the secularization of the Missions by the First Mexican Republic.

[1] Helen Hunt Jackson's novel Ramona (1884),[4] in part a romantic myth about elite Californio society, used the Reid marriage as a motif.