Constructing lives at Mission San Francisco: Native Californians and Hispanic colonists, 1776-1821

Tracy Neal Leavelle

doi:10.5860/choice.47-7063

Abstract

Located at the tip of the San Francisco peninsula in the heart of what is now the city's Mission District, the Mission of San Francisco de Asis, established in 1776, was the sixth to be founded in the Alta California mission system. Northern California was home to many small tribal communities when the Franciscans began developing missions in the area in 1769. While no firsthand written accounts exist of Bay Area Indians' experiences at Mission San Francisco, there is evidence that, just as Hispanic colonists introduced Hispanic cultural customs to California, Bay Area Indians retained their own cultural traditions as they entered the missions. In this finely crafted study Quincy Newell examines the complexity of cultural contact between Franciscans and the native populations at Mission San Francisco. Records of traditional rituals and lifeways taking place alongside introduced doctrines and practices reveal the various ways California Indians adopted, adapted, and rejected aspects of mission life. Using baptismal, marriage, and death records to tell the history of these colonized people, Newell demonstrates that the priests' conversion and Hispanicization of the Bay Area Indians remained partial at best.

Highlights

Newell marshals convincing proof that many furloughs away from the mission were deliberately timed to coincide with births and deaths, indicating only a partial commitment to Catholicism and a preference for Native life-passage ceremonies
One strength of Constructing Lives is its framing within contemporary scholarship on colonialism and gender.The book is a careful case study contextualized within the current literature on settler-indigenous relations in the larger Spanish colonial world
Newell says colonial power was weaker than earlier scholars projected and indigenous agency more pronounced: the Spanish intent to convert Natives was never fully realized, the result being a syncretic blend of indigenous spirituality and Catholicism

Summary

Introduction

Constructing Lives at Mission San Francisco: Native Californians and Hispanic Colonists, 1776–1821. This important new methodology, pioneered by Randall Milliken and others, has yielded many important insights about Native political organization, heterogeneous mission populations, and timing of conversion. Native Californians at Mission San Francisco continued to exercise choice once baptized, she argues: Native responses to Catholicism were “partial, contingent, and variegated”

Results

Conclusion