California Missions

In anticipation of a possible visit to several of the northern California missions I'm reading up.  On my shelf I had some old stuff, purchased years ago when I went to San Juan Capistrano; this was intended for the tourist trade and presented a rather rosy picture along with the some old photographs.  There is however more recent scholarship, such as Steven W. Hackel's Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis, that I'm finding informative and fascinating.

Converting California by James Sandos offers this useful characterization of earlier portrayals as either Christocentric Triumphalism or Christophobic Nihilism.  He attempts to steer a third course that gives credibility to both the Franciscans and the people they encountered.  This approach parallels recent developments in mission history more globally and will be useful to my teaching about missions and Christianity in the India those explorers were looking for.   Of particular interest for my courses on Christianity is his highlighting the differing meanings members of these two groups attributed to baptism and the distortions that arise from assumptions that baptism was a sign of total conversion. (I also learned quite a lot about venereal disease and the development of musical notation.)

I'm also interested in the function of the missions in the mythos of California.  Sandos points out that once California became part of the United States the history of the missions provided a past for the region, a past that was neither British nor Protestant but that nonetheless could be told as a romantic encounter between Europeans and Native People.  Helen Hunt Jackson's novel, Ramona, did this work.  So too efforts to restore the ruins of the missions in the early 20th century, sometimes from practically nothing, provided Californians and other Americans with cultural destinations akin to other historical sites.   Hence that Sunset Magazine book I bought at San Juan Capistrano and what I suppose that I would have learned about the missions if I'd been an elementary school student in California in the early 1960s. 

Are these also sacred sites either in some universal sense or for American public/civil religion?  Along with the effort to canonize Juniperro Serra, the founder of the first nine missions, that is a provocative issue but one I'm fascinated by as I ruminate on what would constitute a sacred site in the USA.  Certainly these are locations were Franciscans intended to do holy work and there are spaces there designated for religious ritual.  The question, however, is a larger one about how these places are regarded a century-and-a-half after their secularization.  Are they analogous to battlefields?  Certainly some sort of battle was done.  Are they places that enshrine our national values?  Which ones?  Are they places where we are still brought face-to-face with the transcendent or with the realities of our own humanity which is both noble and limited?  Even harder to answer but well worth contemplating if we are to have a way of thinking of our past (and our future) that is neither triumphalist nor nihilistic.  

Free spaces

Back from ten days in southern California including several in a part of the west San Fernando Valley developed about the time I was born.  Walks around the neighborhood gave me opportunity to see how the classic suburb has developed: the landscaping in some yards is out-of-control, way beyond what anyone anticipated; most houses are altered so that the original similarity is hidden behind new garages, changed roof lines, expanded pavement, distinctive plantings, and the like.  The basic grid pattern, interrupted by a few curves, is there, but it provides a big structure that one follows to other neighborhoods.  Inside this one, there is something closer to cozy.

I know that the ideal of the fifties was a sort of free life that included a single family house, a car, a citrus tree in the yard, etc.  We'll read more about this is later chapters of Jim Cullen's American Dream: A Short History of An Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2004).  It is a dream that is easy to deride as trivial or shallow.  What I saw reminded me that over time people put down roots and make a place their own.  Also that over time cracks can appear.  In fact, since I was near Northridge, many of these houses were rebuilt following a major earthquake about 20 years ago. 

Another foundation of the Southern California suburb was the automobile.  (Foreshadowing Am Con 201 and the model-T Ford.)  Nonetheless, I spent a great day taking the growing LA public transit system from the West Valley to Union Station downtown and then to Venice Beach.  Yeah, it took all day and I got to see lots of people.  And I was not caught in a traffic jam as I was the next day when my brother and I drove to SanDiego, down the 5 at about 30 miles an hour.

Of interest to us: a 60+ woman on the Orange Line rapid transit bus.  She told me that she would never have known about this great system if she had not had had her driver's license revoked.  Then she mentioned that she is interested in learning more about how government works.  "All those John Birch folks," she said, "understand all of that."  I pointed her toward the League of Women Voters.

so . . . freedom to belong in a space and make it your own; freedom of movement; and freedom to participate.  How do these line up with Foner's categories?

DeAne