It's sad to say, but sometimes I guess I have an inferiority complex. It's not because I'm short (let's just say my stature is Alice B. Toklas-esque ), but more because of the size of my native country, El Salvador.

Don't get me wrong, I'm proud to be Salvadoran. My country is beautiful , with black sand beaches, waterfalls, great weather. And we make some delicious food . But when your nickname is El Pulgarcito de America ("The Little Thumb of America"), that's got to have an effect. At only 8400 square miles – about the size of Massachusetts – El Salvador is the smallest country in America  and one of the smallest in the world.

With the arrival of Hispanic Heritage Month , I've been thinking more about my family's heritage. Thinking about my life back in El Salvador, I asked my mom, "Why do I remember coffee beans when I think of my grandpa?"

My grandparents lived in the country and earned a living by selling fireworks . Fireworks are a very important part of any type of celebration in El Salvador. But on the side, my grandpa sold coffee from trees that grew on his property. Grandpa's parents were coffee growers , and these trees were the remnants of the labor and subsistence of preceding generations. I wish I could travel back in time to experience my great-grandparents' lives, which were so very different from mine.

Though I'm disconnected from the world they lived in, I realized this month that working with Wells Fargo's history lets me make connections with this past – connections which bring a smile to face. During the 1890s, the British built rail lines in El Salvador  to transport coffee across the country. Wells Fargo used these railroads as the infrastructure for its express business in the country. By 1916, Wells Fargo offices had appeared on most of the rail lines in El Salvador. I imagine my great-grandparents beginning their lives as coffee growers right about that time. I wonder: Did Wells Fargo express their coffee at some point?

Now I believe the name Pulgarcito is quite apt for my country. Anyone familiar with the tale of Tom Thumb  understands Pulgarcito. Though tiny, he was smart, prudent, sly, and "all he did prospered." El Salvador was not overlooked by important businesses of the time such as Wells Fargo, and it produced the family I'm happy to be a part of.

El Salvador definitely has something in common with its tiny namesake.

Posted by Ileana at 06:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)
Found in Agriculture, Coffee, Farmers, Latin America, Misc, Railroads, Wells Fargo Bank

Hispanic Heritage Month begins mañana. Keeping in the spirit of this important commemoration, I present another story from our illustrious Archives.

Esteban Ochoa was a native of Sonora, Mexico , who immigrated to Arizona Territory  in the 1850s. A pioneer businessman in Tucson , Ochoa ran a mercantile and freighting firm that delivered goods to settlements in the southwest. In those years, much of the region was still quite remote: Ochoa's services brought news and goods from the outside to isolated pioneers.

Esteban Ochoa became Wells Fargo's Agent in Pantano in 1880.

Ochoa had been elected Tucson’s third mayor five years earlier. He eventually served three distinguished terms in the Territorial government of Arizona. As an early advocate for public education in the territory, he crowned his political career by introducing legislation that established Arizona’s first public school system.

Posted by Charles at 03:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Found in Holidays, Latin America, Misc, Remember, Wells Fargo Bank

On February 15, 1898, the battleship USS Maine  exploded in Havana harbor. Cuba was in the throes of a rebellion against its Spanish overlords, and the US was concerned about its safety, as Cuba is only 90-some miles from the US border. The Maine was dispatched to Cuba to demonstrate American force and presence.

Meanwhile, Americans were itching for a fight. There are whole libraries of materials  about why this was so, but you can just start here . Mostly, historians attribute that impulse to "expansionism," the desire by Americans to get a piece of colonial action and get out in the world. Also, the world Americans knew in the 19th century was disappearing: "Local" was losing significance as the center of people's experiences, and the larger world was encroaching on daily life. Trains took people to the edge of the world, and industrial growth changed how and what they consumed. Newspapers had become a quick medium of messaging, as well as the primary medium. Like TV today, news broke fast and loud and was available almost immediately. And like TV today, the news was often suspect in its source.

On the night of February 15th, there was an explosion on the Maine, and she sank. The US was outraged, blamed Spain because the ship was in their harbor, and went to war . An era of imperial adventures began with the Maine incident. The whole thing was one big blow-up, so to speak, and got everyone into a lather. Newspapers sold copies, politicians made careers, restless boys were issued guns and given uniforms, and the nation acquired territory.

Mostly, Americans got their ya-yas out .

Posted by Charles at 05:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Found in Latin America, Misc, Perspective, Remember, Wells Fargo Bank

September brings the celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month , and I'll probably write several posts about it. My reasons are simple: there's lots to write about, and it's a topic I like. So there.

Latinos have been in America since it became America . Each region and nation has developed its own distinctiveness, which continues today as people move about, settle and live in different — sometimes multiple — areas.

In the late 18th century, Mexicans were expanding northwest into California to try and exploit the Pacific Coast. A couple generations later, Mexico got its independence from Spain — the US came soon after, in 1846. In the interim, Mexican people in California developed a short-lived, but romantic society: Californios. After annexation by the US, Californios' prominence quickly waned as their vast ranchos were broken up. Most died in sad circumstances, but one Californio was able to train his position and status.

General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo  rose through army ranks to become commander of the Northern Frontier. Vallejo deftly handled relations with the Russian outpost at Fort Ross , and kept an uneasy balance with John Sutter  to the east. He personally financed northern forces when the Mexican and Californian governments were unwilling to do so.

Vallejo determined that annexation by the US was the best way to resolve all the problems he had to control . But in an unfortunate paradox, Vallejo's holdings in Northern California were lost to title challenges soon after he participated in the constitutional convention as California neared statehood. This was a fate shared by many of the Rancheros from Californio days.

Vallejo's son, Platón Vallejo, was educated in the East and became California's first native-born medical doctor. In 1872, Gen. Vallejo was in San Francisco on business. He wrote to Platón and asked him to send along money by Wells Fargo Express because "aquí cuesta mucho vivir" ("it is expensive to live here"). A year later, Dr. Platón Vallejo transferred funds again, this time from Vallejo, California — the city named for his illustrious family — to the General at his home in Sonoma.

Posted by Charles at 03:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Found in Artifacts, First-hand Accounts, Gold, Holidays, Independence Day, Latin America, Misc, Perspective, Remember, San Francisco, Wells Fargo Bank

The history of the American West  is a changing field, which makes sense if you follow the history of the environmental West. That is directly concerned with the changes in landscape from human actions. But the West as history has several interesting dimensions.

First, the West is a place that is hard to accurately plot: Minnesota was way out there in the 1830s. Daniel Boone  made a name for himself leading pioneers West—to Kentucky. St. Jo  was the edge of the earth for most Americans in the 1840s and California was, well, another country entirely, seen only by sailors as a sort of high seas rest stop. California and the Pacific Northwest have their own coastal distinction, and Texas is it's own thing entirely. But all are the West. Count in the Dakotas and the Great Plains, too. And how many of you thought of Nebraska as the West?

Western historians have been arguing for a generation about where the West "begins." One operating consensus is the 100th Meridian , which marks the western reach of moist air. (See also the contentious 98th Meridian .) Westward from there, agriculture relies heavily on irrigation.

After the Civil War, industry in the United States developed rapidly. Corporations, transportation and technologies moved people westward, along with their schemes for getting rich. The West urbanized rather quickly due to the huge migration. The "wide-open spaces" of our national myth is in truth the most urbanized region , and much of the expanse is federally controlled land or possessed by large-scale resource extraction—mining, agriculture, water projects, etc.

The West has experienced the effects of several layers of people and cultures. Effects as real as layers of geography in shaping the region. Humans apparently arrived in the West  between 10,000 and more than 40,000 years ago, following megafauna . These people evolved across the continent; there was a great variety of cultures when Europeans arrived. The West had indigenous empires, French mountain men, British trading outposts, Russian forts, and flourishing Spanish and Mexican colonies. Anglo and African American populations of the United States pressed west from the original colonies. The California Gold Rush  brought the whole dang world to the West. Asian populations crossed the Pacific to the Wild, Wild East.

Many people still imagine the West as a mythic thing, a point in fancy where white men ride tall and silent, women long to serve them, and diverse peoples don't exist unless they're outlaws or corrupt officials. But it ain't so and, frankly, never was. Even Western stories have changed, from simplistic cowboy heroes on the silver screen to the trenchant cowboy fiction of Cormac McCarthy . The West is still in transition because it's a vital, changing place.

Posted by Charles at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Found in Animals, Experts, Hollywood, Latin America, Misc, Movies, Perspective, Remember, Westerns

This morning I find a plaque on my desk with a note, "Blog?" That's an easy question, because the answer is always "Yes"—if it exists, it's as good as blogged about. Which is both existential philosophy  and grammaticide . Whatever.

Anyway, the plaque commemorates a partnership between Wells Fargo and TIME Magazine , "40 Years of Partnership in LATIN AMERICA."

In 1941, Wells Fargo Bank & Union Trust Co. ran an ad in TIME that showed booming levels of trade with Latin America. Much of Latin America enjoyed recovery from the worldwide Great Depression  of the 1930s, thanks to better prices for their exports and a nicer exchange rate of international money. Some nations were able to settle their debts, stimulate internal economies and meet demands for their products in world markets. Industry in Latin America  had reached maturity, and with the Depression affecting the whole world, that maturity came at a good time. Things were looking up.

World War II  broke out in Europe in 1939, and industry became the vital component of alliances. Combatants needed stuff and lots of it. Latin American industries were ready, but as with every business, they wanted cash. North American and European banks stood in line to invest, and Wells Fargo Bank & Union Trust was one.

The Company established representative firms and correspondent relationships throughout the region, and—after other institutions moved on to other business—Wells Fargo stuck around. By 1981, Wells Fargo's Interamerican Bank was able to boast of a long and stable history of business in the hemisphere.

Presently, Wells Fargo has bustling foreign exchange and international operations that span geographies and commodities. Wells Fargo has had correspondent international offices since the first day of business in 1852—because a wider field of business is a wider field of opportunity.

Posted by Charles at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Found in Artifacts, Experts, Latin America, Misc, Perspective, Remember, Wells Fargo Bank