CHAPTER Seven

Mission Settlement

During the colonization of New Spain, the Roman Catholic faith was an integral part of Spanish life. Spanish colonists came to America fired with religious fervor; they came with an enthusiasm-even a compulsion-to convert the non-Christians of the New World. But the Christianization of Indian America cannot be explained by religious fervor alone.

The sixteenth-century Spanish Church was an arm of the crown, as much a political as a religious institution. The experience in America magnified the political aspects of the Church. In 1508 Pope Julius II conferred on the king of Spain a patronato, or patronage, over the Church in America. Under the protection of the patronato, the crown exerted absolute authority over all ecclesiastical matters in the colonies. Nowhere was the political role of the Church more evident than in Spain's dealings with the Indians.

True, many of the more devout missionaries were oblivious to politics. They worked hard to convert the Indians, whom they considered childlike and innocent, and strove to protect them from exploitation by the conquerors. Although it was often a futile effort, the crown applauded the achievement of the missionaries. The kings of Spain, however, considered the salvation of souls to be of secondary importance. They directed a Church designed, first and foremost, to control Indian populations and turn the Indians of the Americas into loyal, taxpaying subjects of the crown. This provided the rationale behind the mission settlements of colonial America.

The mission became the primary medium for settling the northern frontiers-the so-called "borderlands"-of New Spain. The crown reasoned that if the hostile Indians of the far north were converted to Christianity-"civilized," in other words-they would stop attacking mines and haciendas (chapter 5). Furthermore, conversion would increase the size of the labor force available to the colony. This, in turn, would attract colonists to unsettled areas. Of course, Spain expected to benefit economically from all of this-from the additional taxes she could collect; from the discovery of new mines; from the profits of commercial agriculture. And the crown greedily encouraged the northward advance of the missionaries. Franciscans and Jesuits spearheaded the movement.

Missions in New Mexico

The first missionary effort on the far frontier took place in New Mexico. The mission of San Bartolomé was founded in 1581, almost two decades before Juan de Oñate led his small band of colonists into the territory (chapter 6). In that year, three Franciscan friars-Agustín Rodríguez, Francisco López, and Juan de Santa Maria-entered New Mexico. They were accompanied by eight soldiers and sixteen Indian servants (Peñuelas, p. 135). They built their mission at the edge of a village, leaving the Indian community intact and thus establishing a policy that would be followed in New Mexico for generations to come. But the first mission was doomed. The eight soldiers returned home after the buildings were finished and Indians attacked and destroyed the mission, killing the friars.

Juan de Oñate rebuilt San Bartolomé when he established the Kingdom of New Mexico. It continued to exist until 1711 when it was again destroyed by Indians. But by that time, San Bartolomé was only one of many missions in New Mexico. One, San Miguel de Santa Fe, completed in 1608, is the oldest church building still in use in the United States. Using this chain of missions as a basis for their operations, the Franciscans worked zealously to convert the Pueblo Indians. Later, friars used the "pacified" Indians to escort them into remote areas.

The power of the Roman Catholic Church in New Mexico grew steadily. No one could escape its absolute authority. The Church controlled not only the Indians but the Spanish and mestizo populations as well. It was, in part, a spiritual control-control over the souls and consciences of the people. The colonists, isolated as they were from the outside world, were especially susceptible to this control. In the villages, they relied heavily on the Church for their social contacts and recreation. The Church was the center of community life and the friars were often the only educated persons in the community. Their influence was felt perhaps even more strongly on the haciendas and farms of New Mexico. There people were cut off from the daily ministerings of the priests. The infrequent visit of a priest to the hacienda became an important spiritual highlight and, since he brought news and conversation, a social event to be talked about for weeks afterward. But Church control in colonial New Mexico is best illustrated by the economic burden imposed on the people. Exorbitant fees and tithes were extracted from church members in a land where money was scarce. The fact that few people tried to avoid the financial burden is evidence of the Church's overwhelming authority.

For all this, New Mexico was basically a secular rather than a monastic colony. Religion was important. But the colony was not geared exclusively to religious matters, and only a small percentage of its people-the friars-concerned themselves with the conversion of the Indians. Most New Mexican colonists thought first of survival and concentrated on growing crops, building homes, and raising livestock; in short, on building a life for themselves in the wilderness.

Missions in Arizona and Texas

Even before the end of the seventeenth century, the crown could clearly see that the struggling New Mexican colony would survive only with the support of other settlements to the east and west. But the burden of expense and trouble that it had experienced over the colonization of New Mexico was too great to be repeated. This, it felt, might be avoided by using the Church as an instrument of colonization. The crown relied on the zeal of the priests to pursue Indians for conversion. Missionaries would move into an area and pacify the Indians. Civilian settlement of the region would then replace the mission at some future, undisclosed date. Thus Spain never considered mission settlements as anything more than a temporary measure. On this basis, the crown promoted missionary efforts in the North with increased energy.

However it was seldom a successful venture. The first critical areas to be pacified were those lands bordering the Kingdom of New Mexico-Arizona and Texas. An Italian-born Jesuit, Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, began moving north about 1687, establishing a chain of missions between Sonora and Arizona. He founded San Xavier del Bac (near modern Tucson) on April 28, 1700. Father Kino contributed a great deal to Spanish knowledge of the northern frontier. He explored much of Arizona and charted part of the Colorado River for the first time. But as a missionary, he was something of a failure. None of his missions survived for long. Arizona was not conducive to any kind of settlement. It was hot and arid. Its Indian population was small and scattered and, more important, extremely ferocious. Conditions in Arizona were so unfavorable that the Spaniards finally wrote it off, believing that no one would ever be able to colonize the region. And except for a few courageous hacendados, Spanish settlers avoided Arizona throughout the entire colonial period.

Missionaries in Texas met with a greater degree of success than their counterparts in Arizona-but scarcely enough to fill the crown with enthusiasm. Their effort was well underway before the end of the seventeenth century. We know that the mission of Our Lady of Guadalupe at El Paso had been founded before 1680, when New Mexican colonists sought sanctuary there following the Pueblo Indian revolt. But El Paso, on the Rio Grande, was situated directly on the road to the New Mexico colony; the mission there might easily be considered part of New Mexico, an extension of that colony rather than of Texas.
Franciscan friars moved eastward across Texas from the Rio Grande. In 1690 they founded San Francisco de los Texas, and by 1731 they had created a chain of a dozen missions. The most prosperous was San Antonio de Bejar, in the center of Texas. Generally, however, the friars faced almost insurmountable difficulty in maintaining their missions. Much of Texas, like Arizona, was rugged land. Dry and dusty plains did not attract settlers and offered the missions little reason for building a foundation for later colonization. Moreover, most Texas missions were surrounded by hostile Indians. Few of them welcomed the missionaries and most friars were too busy fighting for their lives to concentrate on Christianizing the region. Worst of all, the Spanish crown, which gave little support under the best of conditions, repeatedly abandoned the floundering Texas missions. Without this minimal support the missions had no chance of succeeding.

Missions in California

Only in California did the mission system really succeed. The California missions fulfilled the dream the crown had for all its missions in the New World. They were an economic success-profitable for both friars and the crown. They pacified the Indians as completely as anyone could have hoped. And they provided the social foundation for the colonization of the region.

The Jesuits had founded missions in Baja California by 1697. The priests gathered the Indians into mission communities, often far from their own villages; pressed the new religion on them, and turned them into loyal, if subdued, subjects of the crown. Zealous priests in Baja California, as in other areas, were often brutal in their treatment of the Indians. One nineteenth-century Indian recorded that he was dragged into captivity "lassoed as I was with their horses running; after this they roped me with my arms behind and carried me off to the Mission San Miguel" (Forbes, 1964: pp.62-63). The same Indian continued his story: "When we arrived at the mission, they locked me in a room for a week, the father... talked to me by means of an interpreter, telling me that he would make me a Christian, and he told me many things that I did not understand.... One day they threw water on my head and gave me salt to eat, and with this the interpreter told me that now I was a Christian.... I tolerated it all because in the end I was a poor Indian and did not have any recourse but to conform myself and tolerate the things they did with me" (Forbes, 1964: p.63).

The Jesuit missions in Baja California were well established by the time Franciscan friars moved into upper California. In 1769 Father Junipero Serra, a Franciscan from the island of Mallorca in the Mediterranean, founded Mission San Diego de Alcala, the first of twenty-one California missions stretching north as far as Sonoma. These were to be the most successful (and profitable) of all the Spanish settlements on the far northern frontier. But then, California had the supreme advantage, with its fertile soil, its mild climate, and its docile coastal Indian tribes. In this atmosphere the friars became one of the most powerful forces in colonial Spanish America.

The Franciscan missions were as totalitarian as the Jesuit missions of Baja California. The friars gathered the Indians about them in tightly controlled mission communities. Each mission, simple and austere, was built around a large central courtyard. The church was the prominent feature of this structure. All the other structures of the mission faced the plaza: quarters for both Indians and friars, stables and coach houses, laundry facilities and kitchens, and a variety of workshops. Some-Mission San Carlos Borromeo at modern Carmel, for instance-were closed communities, all buildings adjoining one another, like the villages of New Mexico. Others-like San Juan Bautista, the largest of the missions-were open, their buildings separate.

Most of the missionaries were apolitical. The crown's main motive in promoting the missions may have been to create a peaceful corps of Indian taxpayers and laborers, but the friar's main purpose was to support and protect the Indians. They would do so even at the risk of defying the crown. The friars loudly protested the exploitation of Indians in the mines and fields of Spanish America. They even went as far as excommunicating civil servants who robbed Indians or forced them to work.

Yet the friars themselves were often not totally exemplary. They were often guilty of working the Indians of their missions too hard. And in many instances they whipped Indians who objected or were too slow at their work. If an Indian found a way to escape, the friars tracked him down and punished him severely. Torture was not uncommon. And the death rate in the California missions was exceedingly high.

Between 1769 and 1835 the Indian population of coastal California dropped from about 70,000 to about 15,000 (Forbes, 1964: p.76). Part of this can be attributed to the Indians' susceptibility to European diseases, part to the fact that they were worked beyond the limits of human tolerance.

The California missions, to the joy of the crown, developed into elaborate economic complexes. The friars began by building each mission into a self-sustaining operation. The mission was built by the Indians, under the direction of friars. The Indians constructed all the buildings, cultivated the land, and made the mission self-sufficient. Whatever the community needed, it provided for itself. All the cloth the mission used was woven by the Indians, who made clothes, sheets, table linens, and blankets. They made their own shoes, soap, and candles. The blacksmith's shop was one of the busiest places in the mission complex. Laundries and kitchens hummed with activity all day long. From the time it was established, a mission was a busy place.

The California missions grew quickly to extremely profitable corporations. The mild climate of coastal California is ideally suited to large-scale agriculture. Within a few years the friars had planted orchards; the fruits they grew were far in excess of the needs of the missions and the surplus could be sold at a profit in New Spain and even in Spain itself The friars imported grape vines; soon vineyards dotted the countryside and a thriving wine industry developed. The crops of the friars foreshadowed twentieth century commercial agriculture that has made California the prime producer of fruits and vegetables in the United States. By 1834 the mission holdings were valued at about $78 million-an incredible sum in those days-although the total area farmed by the Franciscans probably did not exceed 10,000 acres (McWiiams, 1949: p.33).

Junipero Serra

Junipero Serra (1713-1784), known as the Apostle of California, was a Franciscan priest who came to Mexico from Spain in 1750 to work among the Indians. After spending nearly 20 years in Mexico, he founded a mission near present-day San Diego, California. This was the first mission of many he established in California, some of which are still manned by Franciscans such as Mission Santa Barbara and Mission San Antonio (near King City, California).

With sixteen other missionaries he converted over 3,000 Indians. Father Serra, as Father Las Casas, was a vigorous protector of the Indians. He helped them to raise livestock, such as sheep and cattle, and to farm their lands, raising grains and growing fruit.

Decline of the Mission System

Despite the apparent financial success of the California missions, the power and status of the Church on the far northern frontier declined steadily during the final years of the colonial period. Its defenses and its authority crumbled. The crown began to fear the California missions because they were becoming too wealthy and, consequently, too independent. The Franciscan order, tasting success, became greedy. The friars cheerfully defied the crown and began trading with nations other than Spain. Soon ships out of Boston began calling in California ports to load the produce of the missions and to drop off cargoes of luxury items from the Far East. The friars ignored the rules of Spanish mercantilism and in so doing undermined the absolute authority of the crown.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the king viewed the missions as a threat to his own position. Later, after independence in 1821, Mexico felt that the missions were representative of the hated Spanish crown and completed the destruction of the system, which had begun when Spain chose to follow a course of ignoring the northern Church. (During the seventy years between 1760 and 1830, not one bishop visited the New Mexico colony [Horgan, 1954: p.547].) Then too, since many settlers lived far from the villages and the churches, they relied less on the Church for their spiritual and social needs. Besides these factors, the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment had begun to gain favor in America: the scientific approach to life began to displace the spiritual.
The early independence era was marked by conflict, often violent, between Church and state. As a result, the Church in Mexico was separated from the state, and the political strength of the Church collapsed. The missions of the northern frontier provinces were secularized by 1835. Secularization resulted in the ouster of the friars and the loss of their power. All mission possessions came under civil authority and a large share of mission landholdings fell into private hands. Some civil servants made fortunes for themselves by selling off the mission lands. It was a chaotic time for all, but the disintegration of the mission system had its greatest effect on the Indians. They were declared free and independent and turned out of the missions that had protected them for so long. Many Indians reverted to their old religions. Most, unprepared to fend for themselves after being overprotected by the friars, were reduced to a state of poverty and despair. Their only chance of survival, in many cases, was to join the throngs who sought the protection of the haciendas, ready to trade their new-found independence for a life of debt peonage.

The secular priests who replaced the friars came to the northern frontier in fewer numbers than their predecessors. They were less zealous than the friars and generally less willing to devote themselves to the needs of Indians and the small number of colonists. After the last Franciscan friars had been expelled from the missions, a handful of priests remained to provide for religious needs of many. Only a few parishes-generally the wealthier ones-had resident priests; most communities were lucky if a priest visited them two or three times a year. The priests could hardly be blamed for not wanting to serve on the isolated frontier. Whereas the friars had been cared for by their orders, the secular priests had to live on what their parishioners could contribute, which was very little. Thus most frontier priests ended their lives as paupers.

After secularization, the status of the Church on the frontier declined rapidly. The churches and abandoned missions decayed and no one bothered to repair them. This, at the end of Spain's American colonial experience, was the fate of the greatest medium of Spanish culture.

In one respect, however, the missions had succeeded. They did provide a basis for colonization, especially in California. Settlers, moving north in small numbers, gravitated to the missions and built their own colonies nearby. Even after the missions had been abandoned and the Church's power declined, these little colonies remained. And they formed a core for the continued settlement and growth of the region.

REFERENCES

Forbes, Jack D. The Indians in America's Past. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1964.

Horgan, Paul. Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History. 2 vols. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1954.

McWilliams, Carey. North from Mexico. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1949.

Peñuelas, Marcelino C. Lo Espanol en el Suroeste de los Estados Unidos. Madrid:
Ediciones Cultura Hispanica, 1964.