She was born at Mission Santa Clara, Alta California, Nueva Espana. Her mother, Maria Ana Josefa de Soto, was born at Mission San Francisco de Asis (Mission Delores). Her father, Jose Antonio Sanchez, was born in Sinaloa, Mexico, and at age 2 arrived in Alta California with his father as a member of the De Anza Expedition in March 1776.

Between 1824 and 1842, she bore 12 children, including two sets of twins. She died after giving birth to her 12th child.

She was married to Francisco de Haro, who served as the first Spanish alcalde (mayor and magistrate) of Mission San Francisco de Asis (Mission Delores) in 1834. He served a second term in 1838. After her death, two of her brothers served as Alcalde, one in 1843 and the other in 1845. Eleven of her children survived her.

In 1846, during the short-lived Bear Flag Revolt started by an ambitious American, the cold-blooded killer John C. Fremont (see Wikipedia: California genocide), her 18-year-old twin sons Francisco and Ramon de Haro, and her 62-year-old cousin Don Jose de los Reyes Berreyesa - all three of them wealthy landowners - were recognized by Fremont shortly after the three had arrived in San Rafael, having traveled by boat from Point Molate, in present-day Richmond. The two young men had been recruited in San Francisco to accompany their mother's elderly cousin during his journey to Napa, to visit his son, the elected Mayor of Napa, who was a political prisoner, having been kidnapped and jailed by Fremont. The small party of three had just spent the night at the home of their relatives -- Martina Castro Alvarado and her husband Juan Alvarado, the former governor of Alta California -- in present-day El Cerrito, at the family adobe in Rancho San Pablo.

While accompanying a group of land surveyors, Fremont and his men saw the three Californios as they were traveling unarmed and by foot, as they waited for horses to be brought to them from Mission San Rafael. Fremont recognized Don Jose de los Reyes Berreyesa and knew him to be the wealthy owner of a quicksilver (mercury) mine in San Jose.

Kit Carson oversaw Fremont's orders to kill the unarmed civilians, and later Carson stated that Fremont had a habit of ordering civilian killings.

When Fremont became the first Republican candidate for U.S. President in 1856, an eyewitness account of these murders, written by well-known American surveyor Jasper O'Farrell, was published in a Los Angeles newspaper, along with a denouncement of Fremont's tendency to murder civilians with impunity. Fremont lost the presidential election to James Buchanan.

Reference: Eldredge, Zoeth Skinner. The Beginnings of San Francisco. 1912: San Francisco. Appendix D: The Murder of Berreyesa and the De Haros.

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Dates of birth {SCL 04562 ECPP} and death {SFD 05464}. Date of burial 26 Nov 1842.