While most Mexican land grants bore Spanish or religious names, Rancho Posolmi preserved a word from the indigenous languages spoken in the Santa Clara Valley before Spanish colonization. The Ohlone people had inhabited this region for thousands of years before the missions arrived, and their place names survived in some of the rancho designations. Ynigo himself was an Ohlone Indian who had served as an alcalde at Mission Santa Clara -- one of the rare cases where a Native person received a land grant in his own name.

At 1,696 acres, Rancho Posolmi was modest compared to the sprawling grants of 10,000 or 20,000 acres that some Californio families received. But its location on the valley floor proved strategically valuable in ways that no one in 1844 could have anticipated. The flat terrain that Ynigo used for grazing would become some of the most developable land in the Bay Area, suitable for roads, buildings, and the infrastructure of a technology economy.

Today, virtually nothing remains of Rancho Posolmi's physical landscape. The creeks have been channelized, the grasslands paved, the rancho's boundaries erased by subdivision and development. Mountain View's streets, office parks, and residential neighborhoods occupy every acre. But the name persists in historical records, a linguistic artifact of the moment when an indigenous place name was captured in a Mexican legal document, preserving a word that might otherwise have been lost entirely.