The Spanish Missions in California - Case Study Example

THE SPANISH MISSIONS IN CALIFORNIA From the historical perspective, when in 1769 the first steps towards occupying California were attempted by Spain, all the institutions and strategies had been already developed by the Spanish during the previous 25 years in the occupation of Northern New Spain. For instance, the rancho, which was to be the dominant institution of Mexican California, saw its origins in New Mexico before the Spanish even occupied California. Furthermore, the problem of large scale Indian mortality was also well known to the Spanish and could be expected to re-occur in any subsequent expansion of the Spanish frontiers (Jackson, Indian Population Decline, 23-25). Therefore, the occupation of Spanish California did not represent the application of new ideas or techniques to the problem of controlling a native population, and exploiting it for the economic and political benefit of Spain. It was simply the adaptation of well-tried methods to a new situation, environment, and population. The Spanish missions in California constituted also a tested method for attracting, controlling, and acculturating of Indians, which later served a purpose of exploiting Indians’ labor for economic production and economic benefits. From the critical perspective, the long lasting impact of the Franciscan missions has been twofold: for Spain they yielded positive results as agents of economic and administrative penetration, while for Native Americans missions, along with their acculturation, religion and ideology, brought detrimental consequences. Despite the practically tested and proven strategies for occupation, in the very beginning California presented significant new problems to be solved by the Spanish. California was not an expansion of an already settled area, but was the occupation of a region isolated from other Spanish-occupied territories. Even the mission chain that was slowly creeping north in Baja California was some distance from Alta California (Robertson, Baja California, 12). The province would have to rely on supply ships, until land routes could be opened across the desert. There was no mineral wealth to draw settlers such a great distance from the more civilized areas of New Spain. As a result, great dependence would have to be placed on the California Indians to populate the province. There was little prospect of financial profit from the province, and with the Empire already short of money, the whole process had to be as inexpensive as possible. Finally, the Indians of California were hunters and gatherers, like the Seri, with whom the Spanish had had so little success. The undertaking had little to commend it, and it is no surprise that Alta California was not occupied until over two hundred years after the Spanish discovered it, and that the move towards occupation was determined by forces outside the Spanish realm Traditionally, the Spanish used three institutions to control and acculturate the peoples of Northern New Spain. The presidio or military post was designed to protect the occupied territories. The garrisons were very small in the late sixteenth century, about fourteen men being typical, in the seventeenth century, this increased to between 25 and 30. Over the years, the presidio was transformed from a defensive bastion into the nucleus of a town, attracting civilian settlers (Vigil, Colonial Institutions, 37-38). Along with the military went the missionaries, who were essentially representatives of both church and state. They spread the faith, but also were political, economic, and social agents. Their first task was to persuade the Indians to concentrate into a compact village, centered on a church. If the Indians were already living in permanent settlements, as in the pueblos of New Mexico, a church and quarters for the missionaries would be built beside the village. As Indians were converted, permanent mission establishments were constructed with Indian labor. These soon came to dominate the Indian town. At the same time, the missionaries would restructure the Indian community along Spanish lines. The principal native officials were appointed or confirmed by the missionary or a Spanish official. These Indian officials then exercised restricted judicial and administrative authority, and aided the missionaries in transforming Indian society (Vigil, Colonial Institutions, 38-39). In order to bring about the desired changes, heavy emphasis was placed on mass education. For example, in New Mexico, the Franciscans taught reading, writing, singing, music, carpentry, stock herding, as well as other crafts. In addition to functioning as preachers, teachers, farmers, cattlemen, manufacturers, traders, bankers, and innkeepers, the missionaries acted as diplomatic agents, explorers of new frontiers, and as peace emissaries (Vigil, Colonial Institutions, 39). The California mission system was only a part, indeed the last pan, of a system of land control that the Spanish had been expanding in the New World since the time of Cortes. The strategies of congregacion/ reduccion (congregation of the native populations from multiple locations and then reduction into one location) had been refined through several iterations and various Native cultures, supported by two hundred years of practical experience (Jackson, Indian Population Decline, 25). Spanish policies of exploitation were designed to completely modify the life of Native Americans in the New World in order to maximize the interests of the Old World. In this grand scheme, religious conversion was but a part, even within the missions. Historians know that Indians appeared exceptional to European observers, from the time of Cabrillo onward, and through the Mission era. Captain Alejandro Malaspina, shortly after 1786 noted that the Indians that inhabit the shores and islands of the canal of Santa Barbara…seem to be a race of people quite distinct from the other aboriginals of the country. Their intelligence, beauty, ingenuity, arts. canoes, wicker, and stone work all evoked praise from Shaler. The reason for their relative superiority, he speculated, might be found in a native legend that a race of white men had long ago been shipwrecked along the coast (Rawls, Indians of California, 47). Conversely, Native Americans must have viewed the Spanish as something more than exceptional with their possession of metal, glass, firearms and great ships, not to mention their seeming imperviousness to the diseases which Indians eventually learned to fear in the extreme. One by one as quickly as money and military support could manage it, Spanish Franciscan missions were eventually founded throughout Californian territory: Mission San Diego de Alcalá founded in 1769, Mission Santa Barbara in 1786, Mission La Purisima. in 1787, and many others totaling in 21 missions, four presidios, and three pueblos founded in Alta California. At the height of their prosperity, the missions were extremely successful economic enterprises. The missionaries functioned not only as proselytizing protectors of the Catholic faith and spiritual fathers to their flocks but also increasingly as managerial heads of large labor forces. Practically, as historical evidence suggests, the priests created a labor hierarchy, with Native Americans at the bottom. As Tac describes it, the Father is like a king. He has his pages, alcaldes, majordomos, musicians, soldiers, gardens, ranchos, livestock, horses by the thousand, cows, bulls by the thousand, oxen, mules….The pages are for him and for the Spanish and Mexican, English and Anglo-American travelers. The alcaldes to help him govern all the people of the Mission…Soldiers so that nobody does injury to Spaniard or to Indian (Tac, Indian Life and Customs, 14). While the missionaries always states that they had taken oaths of poverty, and that all the wealth of the missions belonged to the neophytes and the King of Spain, Tac cut through this rhetoric to state, simply, who really owned and controlled the wealth and labor at the missions. Assisting the mission priest, who was Spanish, might be another Spanish priest and a Spanish majordomo, or overseer. Far below these educated Spaniards were poor Spanish and Mexican soldiers, who provided the military force, and the Native Californian alcaldes and laborers. Indian recruitment was a skillful blend of coercion and bribery, a delicate manipulation of fears and desires that was, in essence, performed by trained professionals. Although remarkably superficial in some respects, the missionaries’ understanding of Native American culture enabled them to capitalize on the ritual calendar, public dances, and other communal practices, allowing them to pitch their own religious message in the best light, using song, music, and even holy water, all familiar to the Indians. The feast of Corpus Christi fell four days later, on June 18, very close to the Summer Solstice. There, in the wilderness, the Indians constructed an arbor and sang the Christian songs of praise and thanksgiving while Sarria and Ripoll celebrated the mass. All of the mission singers chose to return. This return had tested the strength of their conversion; one who had vacillated most, Andres, now came back to his new faith. For some of the fugitives that year [1824] Christian prayer replaced ‘antap solstice ceremonies (Sandos, Christianization Among the Chumash, 83). There was also a technique wherein older Native children were baptized and kept in mission dormitories. The mothers would then also consent to baptism in order to be with their children and similarly the husbands would follow. But all was not well in the mission system, neither before nor after the reunion noted above. Death rates in the missions were chronically high. The forced congregation into crowded and squalid living conditions, inadequate protection from dampness and cold, and the division of family units into separate locked dormitories served not only to foster stress and the spread of disease but it simultaneously lowered resistance and contributed to a high infant mortality rate. In the adults, respiratory ailments were common, as were the debilitating effects of syphilis, including the deadly effects of its supposed cure - mercury. Among the children, dehydration caused by diarrhea was the greatest danger in the first two years of life. While statistics for child morbidity and “mortality vary over time and from mission to mission, the average Indian child born into the missions simply did not survive into adulthood” (Jackson and Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization, 43-44). The missionaries themselves were anxious about the obvious population decline and continual recruitment was part of the solution. It was also part of the solution to the chronic problem of fugitivism, which tended to average about ten percent among the “converts” throughout the system but reached a high in Santa Barbara of fifteen percent (Sandos, Levantamiento, 114). In coordination with civil-military authorities, the Franciscans imposed penalties for fugitivism with the standard physical punishments of their culture, which generally included flogging, imprisonment, shackles, stocks, public ridicule, or hard labor. Historical evidence suggests that despite this situation caused by the mission system, traditional culture did continue. The constant infusion of new adults into the mission system, to counter the high mortality rate, kept up a constant stream of people who had been exposed to traditional culture. In 1803, a sudden recruitment effort began as the California missions reacted to a decision by the Viceroy Iturrigaray that the neophytes no longer be permitted to reside in their native villages (Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest, 38) . As subsequent relocation was enforced, Native Americans began to arrive in greater numbers and the missionaries became overwhelmed and unable to control them. If brought into the mission system as children, and presumably if they survived for a reasonable length of time, they were heavily indoctrinated. Adults, however, frequently acquired only a veneer of Christianity and at best simply addended some Christian concepts to traditional ones (Jackson and Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization, 51-52). The high mortality rates thus contributed to the mission population being constantly exposed to people who were practicing a traditional way of life, including religion, outside the system. When the missions were established in California, one goal of the priests was to “civilize” the native peoples sufficiently so that in ten years, there would no longer be a need for the missions. Once “civilized,” the people were supposed to become the owners of the mission lands and o a share of the materials and artifacts they had produced. After the Mexican war for independence ended in 1821, the new government gave formal recognition to the ideas that land of Alta California belonged mainly to the native peoples, and that native peoples had been virtually enslaved by missionaries. At the same time, the new government wanted to limit the political and economic power of the Catholic Church. The Mexican government sought to accomplish both of these goals by the twin policies of secularization and emancipation. As a new nation, Mexico quickly implemented laws that increased individual rights while decreasing the right and power of the Catholic Church. A law ordering the secularization of the mission was already in effect when Mexico won its independence from Spain, and the new government retained it. Secularization was a form of separation of church and state: it would make missions into voluntary organizations, supported by their members and would return mission lands and other property to Native Americans who had labored on them. In addition, between 1822 and 1829, social status based on racial or national background and slavery were both abolished, and indigenous people were granted citizenship (Weber, The Mexican Frontier 1821-1846, 45-47). The Catholic Church’s representatives in California blocked the implementation of Mexican secularization and emancipation decrees until the 1830s; they were able to accomplish this because California was so distant from the government bureaucracy in Mexico City. Alta California during the Mexican period (1821-1846) was virtually self-governing, and the Catholic Church retained great power in the region despite the Mexican government’s efforts to limit its power throughout the new republic (Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest, 223). While secularization eventually succeeded in breaking the power of the Catholic Church in California, it did not return land and property to Native Californians. The Mexican governors of Alta California during the 1830s and 1840s granted little land to neophytes or other Native Californians. Instead, most of the land that could be used for livestock grazing and agriculture throughout California was granted to Californios and Anglos who were Mexican citizens. Mission in Alta California acted as the advance guard of Spanish colonial society. The mission helped Spain hold California against the incursions of European powers. But Alta California was too far and too isolated from the centers of Spanish population in Mexico to attract much interest from Spanish or Mexican settlers or adventurers. Because of this, settlement in California by Europeans or Mexican was slow to occur. From the critical perspective, the mission occupying portions of indigenous land affected indigenous life more by using Native Californians as laborers than by taking their land. The missions were not primarily “settlements” created to attract new Spanish populations, but rather were established to transform the indigenous people. In training Native Californians to perform all the manual labor necessary to sustain life in Spanish fashion, the Spanish mission system laid the basis for the soon-to-be-realized racial labor hierarchy of the rancho period. BIBLIOGRAPHY Barrera, Mario. Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1979. Jackson, Robert Howard. Indian Population Decline : the Missions ofNonhwestern New Spain, 1687-1840. University of New Mexico Press. Albuquerque, 1994 Jackson. Robert Howard and Edward Castillo. Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: the Impact of the Mission System on California Indians. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1995 Rawls, James J. Indians of California: The Changing Image. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1984 Robertson, Tomas. Baja California and its Mission. La Siesta Press, Glendale, CA, 1978. Sandos, James A. Christianization Among the Chumash: An Ethnohistoric Perspective. America Indian Quarterly, 15(1) (1991):65-89. Sandos, James. Levantamiento!: The 1824 Chumash Uprising Reconsidered. Southern California Quaterly, 67 (1985):109-133 Tac, Pablo. Indian Life and Customs at Mission San Louis Rey. Ed. And Trans. Minna Hewes and Gordon Hewes. Misison San Louis Rey, n.d. First published in The Americas, a Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History (July 1952). Vigil, Ralph. H. Colonial Institutions. In Borderlands Sourcebook: A Guide to the Literature on Northern Mexico and the American Southwest, ed. Ellwyn R. Stoddard, Richard L. Nostrand, and Jonathan P. West (University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), pp.36-41. Weber, David J. The Mexican Frontier 1821-1846: The American Southwest under Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1982. Read More