Indians and California Missions

The California missions, whose original church spaces and visual programs were produced by Iberian, Mexican, and Native artisans between 1769 and 1823, occupy an ambiguous chronological, geographical, and political space. They occupy lands that have pertained to conflicting territorialities: from Native nations, to New Spain, to Mexico, to the modern multicultural California. The physical and visual landscapes of the missions have been sites of complex and often incongruous religious experiences; historical trauma and romantic vision; Indigenous genocide, exploitation, resistance, and survivance; state building and global enterprise. This Dialogues section brings together critical voices, including especially the voices of California Indian scholars, to interrogate received models for thinking about the art historical legacies of the California missions. Together, the contributing authors move beyond and across borders and promote new decolonial strategies that strive to be responsive to the experience of California Indian communities and nations. This conversation emerges from cross-disciplinary relationships established at a two-day conference, “‘American’ Art and the Legacy of Conquest: Art at California’s Missions in the Global 18th–20th Centuries,” sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art and held at the University of California, Los Angeles, in November 2019.

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Review: Architecture of the California Missions by Kurt Baer, Hugo Rudinger

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians ◽

10.2307/987971 ◽

1960 ◽

Vol 19 (1) ◽

pp. 42-43

Author(s):

Ernest Allen Connally

Keyword(s):

California Missions

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Left Coast Catholicism: The Tradition of Dissent in the California Church

Roman Catholicism in the United States ◽

10.5422/fordham/9780823282760.003.0004 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 63-85

Author(s):

Jeffrey M. Burns

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Social Justice ◽

Local Church ◽

Concerted Action ◽

Openness To Change ◽

California Missions ◽

Social Teachings ◽

The Church

This chapter argues that independence, innovation, bold action, and openness to change—traditions uniquely nurtured in California from its beginnings—shaped Catholic experience in the Golden State. It presents a treatment of the formative California missions that focuses on the “first dissenter,” Fray José Maria Fernandez, a critic of the exploitation of Indians in the late 1790s who was persecuted by enemies (and later by many historians) as mad or brain-damaged, yet endured in his advocacy work. In the twentieth century, California Catholics engaged issues of great importance for the whole church; the local church engaged in vigorous dialogue that addressed questions of work and social justice with a directness and intensity rarely witnessed in eastern cities, where ethnic tribalism so often undermined concerted action, especially action that called the church to account for failures to practice its own social teachings.

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Important California Missionary Dates Determined

The Americas A Quarterly Review of Latin American History ◽

10.1017/s0003161500039341 ◽

1948 ◽

Vol 4 (03) ◽

pp. 287-293

Author(s):

Maynard Geiger

Keyword(s):

Los Angeles ◽

San Francisco ◽

Early Life ◽

Research Work ◽

Vital Statistics ◽

California History ◽

Santa Barbara ◽

California Missions ◽

Biographical Sketches ◽

Junipero Serra

Lacking in the standard histories of the California missions as well as in several excellent biographical sketches, are long-sought, important vital statistics with regard to two among California’s greatest missionaries, Fray Francisco Palóu, O.F.M., and Fray Fermín Francisco Lasuén, O.F.M., respectively California’s first historian and the California missions’ second regularly appointed presidente. Why the chronological niche of the two missionaries in the facade of California history has stood unfinished is due to peculiar circumstances of recording and the hideout that certain necessary documents have maintained. Other missionaries, less prominent, are often much better outlined in Franciscan chronology. With regard to Palóu, our interest centers on the exact day and year of his death. Even that of his birth was made known only in 1924 through the combined efforts of the Rev. LeRoy Callahan of the diocesan clergy of Los Angeles, and the Rev. Zephyrin Engelhardt, O.F.M., of Mission Santa Barbara. Father Callahan was in Mallorca doing research work on the early life of Junípero Serra while Father Engelhardt was composing his San Francisco Mission.

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