James Jakes had a simple trick. He told the Berreyesa family they could protect their land claim by building four new homes on the edges of their property, mimicking what the American squatters were doing. When the Berreyesas moved out of their adobe to do so, Jakes walked in, bolted the door, and claimed the entire 4,458-acre Rancho Milpitas for himself. It was 1852, California had been American territory for just four years, and the Californio families who had worked this land for decades were about to learn that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo's promise to honor Mexican land grants meant very little in practice.
The name Milpitas comes from the Nahuatl word "milpan," meaning "in the field" -- so Milpitas translates roughly to "little fields." On May 6, 1834, the alcalde of San Jose, Pedro Chaboya, granted the land to Nicolas Tolantino Antonio Berreyesa. A year later, Governor Jose Castro granted a neighboring parcel to Jose Maria Alviso, who built an adobe ranch house on the northeast corner and moved his family in. These were working ranchos in the foothills of Santa Clara County, part of the patchwork of Mexican land grants that divided Alta California into vast pastoral estates. The Berreyesa and Alviso families raised cattle and lived the measured life of Californio ranchers, their claims recorded in the Spanish and Mexican legal systems that had governed the region for generations.
The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was supposed to protect these families. When California passed from Mexico to the United States after the Mexican-American War, the treaty explicitly guaranteed that existing land grants would be honored. But the Land Act of 1851 required every grantee to prove their claim before the Public Land Commission, a process that demanded English-language legal proceedings, expensive attorneys, and years of patience. Berreyesa filed his claim in 1853. The commission rejected it. The grant was eventually patented -- not to Berreyesa, but to the Alviso family, in 1871. By then, the damage was catastrophic. Some members of the Berreyesa family, ground down by decades of legal struggle, lost their sanity. One son fled into the hills. Another died in an asylum.
Even before the legal system failed the Berreyesas, the squatters arrived. In 1852, a rush of American settlers simply moved onto both Californio-held parcels and dared anyone to remove them. Jakes's deception of the Berreyesa family was particularly cruel in its cunning -- he used the family's own desire to fight for their land as the mechanism to steal it. After Jose Maria Alviso died in 1853, his widow Juana Galindo Alviso tried to hold things together. She rented a home to two of the Berreyesa sons, a small act of solidarity between the two grant families. But when she married the rancho manager, Jose Urridias, he evicted the Berreyesa tenants. Eventually, even the Alviso family had to sell off most of their land just to pay the court fees required to defend what remained from American squatters.
The Jose Maria Alviso Adobe, built in 1835, still stands near the intersection of Piedmont Road and Calaveras Road at the edge of modern Milpitas. It is one of the oldest surviving structures in the area, a tangible link to the family that received the grant nearly two centuries ago. The adobe connects the present directly to the rancho era: the same walls that sheltered the Alviso family through the Gold Rush and the legal battles now sit at the edge of a suburban grid, a quiet monument to the landscape those families once held. The little fields that became a city have paved over almost everything -- but the adobe remains.
Located at 37.43N, 121.87W in Santa Clara County, California, at the southeastern edge of San Francisco Bay. The former rancho lands are now the city of Milpitas, identifiable from the air by its grid of suburban development bordered by the East Bay hills to the east. The Alviso Adobe sits near Piedmont and Calaveras Roads. Nearest airports: Reid-Hillview (KRHV, 5nm SW), San Jose International (KSJC, 7nm W), Moffett Federal Airfield (KNUQ, 10nm NW). Best viewed at 2,000-3,000 feet AGL to appreciate how the rancho footprint maps onto the modern city.