(19-minute read)

There are many Spanish-language placenames in United states. A few examples: the states of Nevada (“snowy”), Arizona (“dry area”), Colorado (“red”), Florida (“flowered”, as in “flowered holy day”, meaning Easter), and Montana (“mountain”); the cities of Las Vegas (“the meadows”) and Los Angeles (“the angels”); and Key West, which combines an Anglicized spelling of Cayo (“islet”) with the translation of Hueso (“bone”).

What about California?

Ever since I came across the answer while studying Latin American history in the 1990s, I have shared the intriguing factoid of how California got its name with many, many people. And, as much as the name’s origin story is widely documented in history books, academic journals, online articles and encyclopedias, it remains a surprise to everyone I speak to about it.

So, let’s review the quite fascinating answer—and this time explore it at some length.

Context

As many will recall from history class, it was in the watershed year of 1519, that Hernán Cortés landed on the east coast of what is now Mexico—on Cozumel Island, which was in Maya territory. Thus kicked off the conquest of Mexico by imperial Spain. By 1521 Cortés had taken control of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City). By 1522, his envoys had reached the Pacific Ocean (then called El Mar del Sur, “the southern sea”), at Tutupec in Oaxaca.

And here’s where the story of California begins in earnest. In 1524, in an update written to King Charles of Spain, Cortés mentioned that he intended to look for a fabled island of women that everyone had heard should exist somewhere in this new world. But it would end up taking him a few years to mount those next expeditions.

Meanwhile, in 1530, Nuño de Guzmán, the governor of Nueva Galicia (a section of Nueva España), mounted an expedition into the as-yet-unexplored regions west and northwest of Tenochtitlan. At the outset, he notified the Spanish king that he was going to search for amazons, which he had apparently been told should be ten days’ journey away. Six months later, in early 1531, another still-optimistic written update from him said he had heard that somewhere nearby there was a province inhabited by only women. However, in the end, Guzmán’s soldiers only found a small town containing nothing special, other than somewhat fewer men than women in their perhaps wishful estimation.

That unremarkable Aztec town was Cihuatlán, in the present-day state of Jalisco, on the west coast. It had been named after the Nahuatl[1] word cihautlampa, which denotes the cardinal direction of west and literally means “in the direction of the women”.[2] [3] Women who died in childbirth were imagined to go to where the sun disappears.

Something was comically lost in translation, as local Aztecs pointed west and seemed to say that was where the women were. For the eager and credulous Spaniards, the Aztec term happened to line up with an age-old European legend of the amazons that was very much on their minds—a textbook case of confirmation bias. The legend of warrior women living alone on an island dates all the way back to the time of Homer (i.e., some 2300 years before the Spanish conquests). Amazonism had become a big theme in medieval literature across Europe, and it was continuing to feature prominently in the fantasy novels that were wildly popular back home in Spain as the Conquest began.

WHEN California got its name

“California” was first used as a placename for some part of what is now the state of Baja California Sur in Mexico sometime between 1536 and 1540.

Cortés organized a series of four expeditions to the land we now know as the Baja California peninsula:

1. In June 1532, Cortés sent two ships out of the port of Acapulco to see what could be discovered out in the ocean. But one ship disappeared and was never heard from again, and the other ship ended up losing all but three of the people on board before ever leaving the coastal waters.
2. In October 1533, Cortés tried again, sending out an expedition from the port of Santiago de Buena Esperanza (now called Manzanillo). But the pilot mutinied and sailed off for unknown parts. When the ship returned back to port in early 1534—minus the mutinous pilot and most of the crew, who had been killed by natives—it brought tantalizing stories that it had encountered land and a bay somewhere off to the northwest . . .
3. In April 1535, Cortés tried again—this time joining and leading the expedition himself to avoid another calamity. He sailed from the port of Chiametla (by Mazatlán), heading northwest into the open sea, toward where the last failed expedition had reportedly discovered land a year and a half prior.
   • On May 3, the Day of the Holy Cross in the Catholic church, Cortés encountered land and a large bay with an island its entrance. He named the bay—thought to have been the Bay of La Paz–and surrounding area La Santa Cruz (“the holy cross”).
   • The expedition’s pilot was killed in the very first interaction with the locals. Nonetheless, Cortés established a colony of 320 men, women, and children that he had brought on board for that express purpose. It is thought that the colony would have most likely been located by the fresh water source on the northeastern end of what is now downtown La Paz city (where the Molinito windmill statue is located today).
   • While the colony was getting set up, during the summer and fall of 1535, Cortés led excursions to explore the area, both overland and up and down the coast of the newly-discovered land mass. Reports are contradictory about how far they traveled and what they found. According to historian Bernal Diaz, writing retrospectively three decades later in 1568, they “ran into California, which is a valley”. However, a map of these excursions, drawn in 1539, depicts the southeast coastline and tip of the peninsula without any part of it labeled “California”.
   • Meanwhile, during the course of 1535, some soldiers sailed back to mainland Mexico for supplies. Their writings variously reported that the tenuous new colony was in a place called either “Tarsis”, or “Santa Cruz”, or a name they couldn’t recall, or that it hadn’t yet been named at all.
   • The colony quickly failed from starvation. Cortés returned to mainland Mexico at the beginning of 1536, and soon thereafter that year he recalled the last of the remaining settlers back to the mainland as well. That was the end of Spaniards trying to live on the Baja peninsula for some time.
4. In early July 1539, Cortés sent out another expedition to more fully explore the region. Three ships sailed out of the port of Acapulco, made a pit stop at the mainland port of Santiago de Buena Esperanza, and then crossed the gulf to arrive at Santa Cruz in the beginning of September (minus one ship lost at sea along the way). The remaining two ships then crossed back over to the mainland and sailed up along the west coast of Mexico all the way to the mouth of the Colorado River, then down along the east coast of the peninsula back to Santa Cruz (arriving on October 29). Next, they continued south, rounded the tip of the peninsula, and sailed halfway up the west coast of the peninsula as far as Isla de Cedros (arriving April 5, 1540). As we Baja kiteboarders know, they would have been sailing into strong north winds through the winter to get up that coastline! From there, they turned around and arrived back home in Acapulco by the end of May 1540. In 1541, Cortés returned to Spain for good.

The upshot of this fourth expedition was twofold.

First, it became clear that the new landmass was a peninsula rather than an island. That Cortés knew this is evidenced by a 1540 letter where he states that Santa Cruz is part of the “same coastline” as New Spain. Even so, confusion (and wishful speculation) that the new landmass was an island would persist in some quarters for a very long time. Some 16^th– and early 17^th-century maps depict the Baja California peninsula as an island. The matter was only definitively put to rest in 1774-1776 by a Spanish overland expedition from Sonora to the west coast of present-day Southern California.

Second, it was this fourth expedition that produced the first documentation of a place in the New World called “California”:

• A Franciscan friar on the crew wrote a trip description in 1541, which mentions “la isla de la California”. In context, this appears to refer to the island (now called Espiritu Santo) at the entrance to the Bay of La Paz.
• The pilot from this expedition drew a map in 1541, on which he labeled the peninsula in general as “California”.
• Another crew member wrote a trip description in 1542, in which he mentions “California”. In context, this appears to refer to the entire land area of the southern part of the peninsula.
• And, later on, other crew members boasted (in written requests back home to the monarchy for some type of support) that they had “gone in the service of your majesty to la California” and “gone with the Marqués [Cortés] to the island California”.

So, it seems likely that the name “California” was first applied to just the Isla of Espiritu Santo, then quickly extended to some area around the Bay of La Paz, and soon thereafter to the whole southern portion of the peninsula. And all of that seems to have happened sometime within the five years from 1536 to 1540.

Later in the 16^th century, the name “California” stretched northward along the west coast. In 1804, Spain divided that expansive area into separate provinces of “Alta” or “Nueva” California (present-day California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah) and “Baja” California (the peninsula). In 1821, newly-independent Mexico preserved those names. After the United States waged a two-year war to seize Alta California, it incorporated the territory by treaty in 1848 and promptly admitted it as a state simply called “California” in 1850. No other words every vied for the name of the region.

From WHERE the conquistadors got the word California

At the turn of the 16^th century, the Spanish people were in a frenzy over chivalric romance novels. The public’s obsession with these fantasy books was such that the Spanish government saw fit to enact a prohibition against taking books of “history and profane things” to the New World. The explorers and colonists were to focus their minds on gold, Christian conversions, and navigable passages to India.

One of those trendy novels was Las Sergas de Esplandian (“The Exploits of Esplandián”), published sometime between 1496 and 1508. (The last surviving copy is from 1510.) Depending on the edition, its title was expanded to things like: Las Sergas del Virtuoso Caballero Esplandian Hijo de Amadis de Gaula (“The Exploits of the Virtuous Knight Esplandián, Son of Amadís of Gaul”), or Las Sergas del Muy Esforzado Caballero Esplandian, Hijo del Excelente Réy Amadis de Gaula (“The Exploits of the Very Brave Knight Esplandián, Son of the Excellent King Amadís of Gaul”).

The author, Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, had begun by translating into Spanish, adapting, and re-publishing a series of four 14^th-century Portuguese chivalric romance novels about a fictional King Amadís of Gaul. Then, Montalvo wrote Las Sergas himself as a fifth installment in the series, using as his protagonist the king’s son from the Portuguese originals. Montalvo’s sequel is not as well written as the earlier four books, but that did not dampen its reception at the time. Las Sergas was republished many times over the remainder of the 16^th century, including translations into French, Italian, German, and English. (And the four original Amadis books were translated even further afield at that time, including into Hebrew.) The novel Don Quijote (1605) calls out Las Sergas, by name, as one of the books in the protagonist’s library to be burned because such fantasies had driven him mad.

Toward the end of the book (in Chapter 157 out of 184), the reader is introduced to “California” as an island of amazons ruled by Queen “Calafia”:

Sabed que a la diestra mano de las Indias hubo una isla llamada California, muy llegada a la parte del Paraíso terrenal, la cual fue poblada de mujeres negras, sin que algun varon entre ellas hubiese, que casi como las Amazonas era su estilo de vivir.

Know that on the right-hand side of the Indies[4] there was an island called California, very close to the earthly Paradise, which was populated by black women, without there being any male among them, as their lifestyle was almost like the Amazons.

The plot: Esplandián engages in various battles against giants, monsters, Turks, and Persians, saving Constantinople [which in real life had just fallen out of Christian control to the Muslim Ottoman Empire in 1453]. Queen Calafia brings her army of amazon women and gryphons from her island of California to join up with the Turks after she hears that most of the world has turned against the Christians. But Esplandián heroically defeats everyone, marries the Roman Emperor’s daughter, and becomes the new Emperor. In the end, he presides over the happy marriage of his cousin Talanque to the newly-Christianized Calafia.

While it is now accepted that Las Sergas is the source from which California got its name, this was apparently forgotten until American historian Edward Hale pointed it out in 1862. Until then, there had been many speculative hypotheses about the source of the word:

• Maybe it was the union of calida (“hot” in Latin) and fornax (“oven” in Latin)—because it was very hot there, or as a reference to the natives’ underground sweat lodges (temescal) common on the peninsula. Or maybe it was the union of cala (“cove” in Spanish) and fornix (“cow” in Latin)—because of the rock arch shaped like a cow in Cabo San Lucas that is still visible today. But the conquistadors never used Latin terms to name anything else in the region. . .
• Or maybe it was some corrupted indigenous term.  But there were no meaningful suggestions as to on what particular Aztec word it could have been based. . .
• Or maybe it came directly from the Arabic kalifat (plus the Spanish ending for “big” to yield kalifatón, then latinized as California). But it is unclear why the Christian conquistadors would have wanted to directly name part of their newfound territory as if it were under Islamic rule. . .

Where and when the legend of California originated

The author of Las Sergas did not invent the fantasyland of “California” out of the blue for his sequel. Montalvo tapped into literary history for both the name and the plot:

• The first known mention of “California” in any text comes from about the year 1100. In the famous Old French epic poem La Chanson de Roland, Charlemagne is depicted as fighting the Muslims in early 9^th-century Spain. After the martyr death of his nephew, Roland, the French king and first Roman Emperor laments that opposition forces may now rise up against him from “Affrike and Califerne”. Here “califa” means “caliphate” and “-erne” is a toponymic suffix.
• Next, in La Morte de Aymeri de Narbonne, written in Old French by Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube in the late 12^th century, we find what seems to be the precursor of the Sergas plot: a Persian king attacks a French city with an army of 14,000 amazon women; when the French win, the amazon army captain converts to Christianity and marries a French soldier.
• Also around the same time, the early 13^th-century Old French epic poem Le Roman d’Alexandre features an Arab villain named “Califer”, and a character from Baghdad mentions the existence of a town of amazon women–thus linking in one text the amazon motif with what may be a variant of “California”.  

WHY the conquistadors associated the legend of California with this peninsula

So, we have seen when “California” was first used as a placename in Baja. 

And we have seen where the word “California” came from (and also where the legend behind the word originated).

The remaining question–and I think the most interesting one—is why the name “California” was applied to this particular land, among all the places the Spanish conquistadors roamed across the vast New World.

The seed idea of amazons in the New World—as opposed to in the Middle East–may have first been planted by Christopher Columbus. After famously first encountering land on October 12, 1492 (at San Salvador Island in the Bahamas), he explored Cuba and then Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). At one point during that first trip he journaled that “many people” had told him there was an island, east of present-day Jamaica, inhabited by only women. A week later he added that the women-only island was called Matinino and reportedly close to present-day Puerto Rico (which was said to be full of copper and cannibals). It turns out that Matinino means “without-men” in the Taino language dominant on Hispaniola. So, the Taino natives may have had their own mythology about a woman-only island [5] . . . or they may have been trying to communicate that the Carib people of the Lesser Antilles had been taking away Taino women in raids. Meanwhile, on the island now known as Martinique, the Iñeri-speaking Carib residents called their home Jouanacaera (“iguana-island”).

But Columbus did not have time to check out these reports of a woman-only island on this first voyage. And he did not end up visiting Martinique until his fourth voyage to the New World, in 1502. And at that point, his quick stop there did not even warrant a mention in his recap letter to his patrons, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain, given that Columbus’ sole mandate for the fourth voyage had been to find an ocean straight through Central America to India.

Nonetheless, the amazon legend lived on. Eventually (in 1542), the Spanish did encounter some warrior women—which occurred far upstream along the mighty Marañón River, which they renamed “the Amazon”. Before that, in 1518, Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, governor of Cuba, ordered Cortés to mount a trading expedition to the west. In those written orders, Cortés was instructed to find the amazons that the Indians had said should be . . . somewhere. As noted above, Cortés and Guzmán subsequently wrote multiple updates to the Spanish throne, over time, confirming that they were trying to look for those amazons.

In addition to an imperial mandate to find amazons, another reason why amazons would have been on the minds of the conquistadors exploring northwestern Mexico was that region’s geography:

• Consider that the legendary town of amazon women in La Roman d’Alexandre was named “Femenia”. And in the contemporaneous early 13^th-century Old French epic poem Huon de Bordeaux, we learn that Femenia was located near the Red Sea. Other literary works corroborated this association between the amazons and the Red Sea, such as one from the early 14^th century claiming that, between Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea) and India, there existed two islands: one with only women and one with only men.
• Meanwhile, the gulf between mainland Mexico and the newfound peninsula was initially dubbed the Mar Bermejo (“reddish sea”)—by Francisco de Ulloa, who led the fourth Cortés-sponsored voyage, in 1539. Ulloa wrote he chose the name simply because of the sea’s color (near the mouth of the Colorado River, where the water presumably would have been muddy). But the name may have also made sense and stuck because the sea’s shape—a long, narrow gulf—was reminiscent of the shape of the Red Sea in the Middle East.
• Therefore, given the existing association of amazons with the Red Sea, the conquistadors could have, by extension, associated amazons with their newfound Reddish Sea in Mexico.

And, for 16^th-century Spaniards with amazon fever, the placename that most easily came to mind would undoubtedly have been . . . the one in the wildly-popular Sergas: the amazon-inhabited island of “California”!

What message was intended by assigning the name California to that peninsula?

So, we understand that the Spanish conquistadors would have had the legend of California and the amazons very much on their minds. And we understand why they could have associated that legend with the newfound Baja peninsula in particular.

But the remaining mystery is: What message was intended in naming the peninsula “California”?

The answer is:  We do not know. And we never will (unless some lost journal by a crew member one day surfaces, reflecting philosophically on “what angle I had in mind when I first blurted out to my shipmates ‘hey, how about we call this place California!?’”).

On one hand, it could be that, in 1536-1540, with so much still unknown about what lay beyond the peninsula’s eastern and southwestern coasts, some still dreamed that legendary riches might eventually be discovered. 

Or, on the other hand, it could be that, in 1536-1540, after the first colony on that arid, bleak peninsula had been a dismal failure, the idea of looking for a fantasyland had become a bitter joke. Indeed, those who came from Santa Cruz back to Mexico for supplies in 1535 had described:

una tierra estéril y salvaje que solo había traído muertes y desgracias

a sterile and savage land that had only brought death and misfortune

la tierra la mas mala del mundo […] no habia hallado agua ni caminos, ni aun árbol verde

the worst land in the world […] neither water nor roads had been found, nor any green tree

la dicha tierra era inhabitable, y que los indios, además de no traer oro, plata o perlas, eran salvajes, bestiales, sodomitas y sucios, pues ingerían sus propios excrementos

the land was uninhabitable, and that the indians, in addition to not having gold, silver or pearls, were savage, bestial, sodomites and dirty, as they ingested their own excrement

So, at the time it got its name, “California” represented either enduring fantasy or rank disillusionment—either earnest idealism or sarcastic realism.

I believe the former is more likely what was originally intended: California as an aspirational land of wealth and beauty that still might exist over the next horizon. The conquistador mentality was endlessly optimistic as well as hubristic.

Either way that it started, once the name “California” extended into what is now the United States, it certainly wound up signifying a promised land of gold, fertile land, and the fulfillment of manifest destiny. This attracted the dreamers and desperate risk-takers willing to make the trek, which produced a culture of disruptive innovation that persists today. California did not turn out to be the homeland of the amazons, but it did turn out to be the planet’s spawning ground of the Internet, Hollywood, gay rights, Disney, skateboarding, wetsuits, jet engines, fast food, electric guitars, Google search, vehicle emissions regulations, online payment systems, peer-to-peer ride- and home-sharing, virtual reality, recombinant DNA and molecular genetics, and myriad other contributions not invented there but taken to a whole next level of sophistication and mass adoption there (e.g., silicon semiconductors, social media, smartphones, computers). Among the United States, California led the way—sometimes by many decades–in deciding to start protecting wilderness areas, legalize medical marijuana, control air pollution, care about energy efficiency in appliances and buildings, and take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In many ways, it did pan out to be “very close to the earthly Paradise”, just like the legend and the novel had said.

Some voices today proclaim that California is “over”: a victim of its own success, a business monoculture that is no longer as innovative as it has been, a government weighed down by the moral responsibility of being the nation’s long-standing first-mover on social and environmental issues. They point out a recent multi-year trend of net migration of people and businesses out of the state. (I sometimes join that chorus. I don’t live there.) To the extent that is true, such a reality in California would also be in keeping with its origin story from 500 years ago.

— December 2021

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[1] The Aztecs spoke a variety of languages in what we now call the Uto-Aztecan language family. Nahuatl (aka Mexicano) was the Aztec lingua franca at the time of the Spanish conquests. (By the way, note that Nahuatl and Mayan (spoken by the Maya people, living nearby in the Yucatán) belong to different language families; they are mutually unintelligible, featuring different syntax and grammar and using different sounds and vowels.)

[2] The other three cardinal directions in Nahuatl are: mictlampa (“in the direction of the elders/spirits/dead”, denoting north), tlahuizcalpan or tonalquizayampa (“house of the light” or “where the sun rises”, denoting east), and huitztlampa (“in the direction of the thorns”, denoting south).

The Spaniards can be forgiven for not imagining that “in the direction of the women” could denote a compass point. In fact, most human languages around the globe use cardinal direction terms that directly associate east and west with where the sun comes up and goes down. But some communicate the direction of west using other associations. For example, in Simbiti (a Bantu language spoken northeast of Lake Victoria, in Kenya), west is communicated by the word nyanza, literally “lake”; and in Sukuma (a Bantu language spoken southeast of Lake Victoria, in Tanzania), the word ng’weli denotes both “west” and the name of the tribe living to the west the Sukuma-speaking tribe. There is more diversity across global languages when it comes to how the directions of “north” and “south” are expressed. For example: in Osage, north can be denoted by the word ba’-goll, literally “from the cedars”; in Thai, the word neuua means both “north” and “above”; in Zulu, south is denoted by the word iningizimu, literally “many-cannibals”; in Choctaw, south is denoted by the term oka mahli, literally “water wind”.

[3] The town of Zihuatenejo, not too far south from Cihuatlán along the west coast of Mexico, is similarly named:  cihuatan + the toponymic suffix -ejo.

[4] In Las Sergas, Montalvo situated the fantasy island of California on the right-hand side of, i.e., east of, the “Indies” (Indonesia and the Philippines).

Around the same time, Spanish explorers had become motivated to find a new route to sail to the Indies. The traditional overland route through the Middle East had suddenly become difficult in 1453 when Christian Constantinople fell to the Ottomans; and the new ocean route established around the Africa’s Cape of Good Hope starting in 1488 was controlled by the Portuguese.

At that time, there was zero doubt that one could sail west around the earth to get to the Indies (the ancient Greeks had known the earth was round, and medieval European navigation was actually based on the curvature of the earth). But the Spanish explorers were using a miscalculation of the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan as only about 2,400 miles . . . when in fact it is some 10,400 miles.

In 1492, Columbus was the first to try it, sailing directly west until he hit land at the Bahamas. By 1498, enough exploration had occurred to verify that the findings were in fact a New World and not the Indies. In 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa had set eyes upon the ocean between the New World and the Indies (i.e., the Pacific Ocean), after a relatively short trek overland across the isthmus of Panama (where a canal would be built four centuries later, in 1914). In 1522, Ferdinand Magellan accomplished the first circumnavigation by sailing around South America’s Cape Horn and across the Pacific Ocean on a difficult four-year voyage. Explorers continued to hope for an ocean passage through the New World, searching further and further northward until finally executing a boat crossing of the Arctic Ocean in 1906. (Sadly, due to a warming climate, the Northwest Passage became ice-free in 2007 and has thus become navigable both by commercial ships and previously-separated species of marine life.)

Therefore, at the turn of the 16^th century in Spain, when Montalvo included in Las Sergas that little detail of California’s location being “on the right-hand side of the Indies”, he was surrounded by news of real-world discoveries of land on the right-hand side of the Indies. And, in 1532-1540 in northwest Mexico, members of the Cortés expeditions knew full well that they were charting new lands situated “on the right-hand side of the Indies”.

[5] In the 20^th century, it was documented that indigenous people of Guyana (on the South American mainland) also had a legend of an unspecified Caribbean village or island called Niboyuni, meaning “man-without”. However, we do not know whether this was a pre-Colombian belief.