Jamie has felt the connection to the past when her family moved to the epicenter of her mothers’ ancestral land known to them as Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana. Drawn to better understand her family’s buried legacy, she has spent a lifetime researching in order to share their stories. What began in 1976 as a bike ride through Olive to find evidence of her long-lost family turned into decades of research, reading dozens of books, perusing primary documents, letters, and legal documents at libraries, and visiting museums, missions, adobes, churches, cemeteries, battle sites, rancho boundaries, pow wows, and Bear Dances throughout California.
The result of her devotion to the full story of being Mexican Californio and Acjachemen Indigenous has become fourth grade curriculum, a living education, an academic research project, and a historical fiction novel, Daughters of Santa Ana, based on true events, legal documentation, and stories. It is a story about the matriarchy who held family together through death, disease, disasters, and decline. This novel will be Jamie's debut fiction and eleventh book.
