Rancho Quito was among the larger grants in the Santa Clara Valley, its 13,310 acres stretching from the foothills to the valley floor. The grant recipients, Fernandez and Noriega, used the land for cattle ranching in the traditional Californio manner -- open-range grazing on unfenced grasslands, with vaqueros managing herds that roamed freely across the property. The rancho's productivity depended on the seasonal grasses that covered the valley and the creeks that provided water during California's dry summers.

The transformation of Rancho Quito's territory is among the most complete in Silicon Valley. Saratoga developed as a resort and agricultural community in the late nineteenth century, then became an affluent suburb. Cupertino remained agricultural longer, its orchards giving way to suburban development in the postwar decades. The construction of Apple Park in 2017, on the site of the former Hewlett-Packard campus, placed the headquarters of a $3 trillion company on land that Jose Zenon Fernandez once surveyed from horseback. The gap between 1841 and the present is measured not in years but in civilizational epochs.

Quito survives as a neighborhood name and in Quito Road, which runs through the area. Most residents who use the name have no idea it refers to a Mexican land grant or that the territory they inhabit was once a single property managed by two men. The name's persistence, like so many California place names from the rancho era, is accidental -- preserved by cartographers and postal officials who recorded it before the landscape it described was entirely erased.