David E. Hayes-Bautista is a Distinguished Professor of Medicine and the director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He is also the author of El Cinco de Mayo: An American Tradition.Cynthia L. Chamberlin is the historian, editor, and translator at the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She is also the coauthor of a number of CESLAC's publications on the history of Latinos in California.Paul Bryan Gray is a California lawyer and historian and the author of A Clamor for Equality: Emergence and Exile of Californio Activist Francisco P. Ramírez.

David E. Hayes-Bautista and Cynthia L. Chamberlin convincingly contest the fable of a California emptied of Latinos in the wake of the 1849 Gold Rush. The book's recovery of Mexican prospector Justo Veytia's diary gives voice to a population of historical actors rarely acknowledged in previous studies of the US West."—Anna M. Nogar, coeditor of El feliz ingenio neomexicano: Felipe M. Chacón and Poesía y prosa