The Public Consumption of Junípero Serra

As Michael Komanecky reveals in Chapter 12, Serra’s notoriety was embodied and spread through a proliferation of largely laudatory images. Public representations of Serra and Spanish culture abounded after the late 19th century with the most notable examples being Bierstadt’s monumental landscape of the Spanish landing in Monterey that now hangs in the grand stairwell of the East Front of the Capital, McGroarty’s “Mission Play” that played before millions in San Gabriel, and the monumental statue of Serra placed in the U.S. Statuary Hall in 1931.

Serra among the Faithful

As Karen Melvin shows in Chapter 6, the Fernandino missionaries, as those from the College of San Fernando were known, wore at least two hats: they proselytized among Indians who had not yet heard the gospel and they preached among Catholics in an attempt to encourage them to a more devoted religious practice. In her illuminating view of Serra’s work carrying out “popular missions,” Melvin captures the rhythm and goals of Serra’s work in the small villages and isolated towns of New Spain. This was a Serra who was familiar to legions of Catholics in his own day but one that is all but unknown today, as most people see him as exclusively a missionary to California Indians.

Inside the Cloister

As David Rex Galindo shows in Chapter 5, by 1750 the College of San Fernando, which recruited Serra to New Spain and oversaw the missions of California, was an institution with a rich institutional life and a large contingent of Spanish friars. Rex Galindo’s careful study of the records of the college yields insight into Serra’s place atop the college hierarchy and the ways in which a regimented daily schedule was intended to impart among missionaries the discipline they needed for life in the field.

Between Worlds

As Cynthia Lewis argues in Chapter 10, it was the Mexican artist, José de Páez, who Serra leaned on most to fill his missions with beautiful and edifying paintings. Through the patronage of the College of San Fernando, Serra, and other California missionaries, Páez’s works would eventually hang on the walls of many if not all of the early California missions.

Junípero Serra’s Tastes and the Art and Architecture of the California Missions

As art historians Clara Bargellini and Pamela Huckins show in Chapter 9, the missions, at least in Serra’s mind, were to be held together not just by violence but by a common devotion to Catholicism that was reinforced by architecture and art. Bargellini and Huckins show that Serra had a clear sense of how he wanted to adorn the missions in the Sierra Gorda and those of Alta California, and he saw architecture and liturgical art as an important tool in the conversion of Indians. Images of the Virgin, Christ’s Passion, and Franciscan saints all took center stage in the churches of the California missions, and Serra favored an older Baroque style over the emerging Neoclassicism.

Within the Confessional

As José Refugio de la Torre shows in chapter 7, by the time Serra established missions in Alta California, Franciscans had long experience with missions in the Mexican North, but they continued to wrestle with the gap between their utopian goals and the realization of what they could and could not accomplish.

Junípero Serra’s Mission Muse

As Anna Nogar shows in her essay, “Junípero Serra’s Muse,” María de Jesús de Ágreda’s influence on Serra was profound, and her writings and seemingly countless bilocations to New Spain, where she preached to Indians in their own language, were never far from the minds of Franciscan missionaries in New Spain. As Nogar argues, Serra and other missionaries carried copies of her writings to Alta California when they embarked on the colonization of the region and were spurred on by their deep faith in her revelations.

The Invention of Junípero Serra and the “Spanish Craze”

As Richard Kagan shows in Chapter 11, in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, a “Spanish Craze” captured the imagination of boosters and developers from California to Florida. This craze was manifested not only in an embrace of Spanish-like architecture but a growing sense that Spanish colonists and their descendants were somehow integral to the American experience. Serra himself was among the historical figures whose reputation most benefitted from this period’s reappraisal of Spaniards and the wane of the “Black Legend,” the belief that Spanish colonization was uniquely cruel and destructive.

Junípero Serra’s Approach to the Native Peoples of the Californias

As Rose Marie Beebe and Robert Senkewicz reveal in Chapter 8, Serra the missionary not only struggled with and against those around him but he battled with internal tensions and inconsistencies within his own policy prescriptions. Thus, Serra and his fellow missionaries were far more complicated figures than most scholars have acknowledged.

Father Junípero Serra’s Education and Ideology

As Antoni Picazo Muntaner shows, Serra’s intense interest in a missionary life was deeply Mallorcan, and it can be traced to the career of another Mallorcan, Antoni Llinás, the Franciscan who founded a missionary college in Querétaro, Mexico, in the late 17th century. Perhaps more than Bourbon rule and the life of Llinás, it was the Mallorcan philosopher, missionary, and polymath Ramón Llull, and the philosopher theologian Duns Scotus, who most shaped the scholarly mind of Serra during his years as a student and professor.