Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions

Abstract

In Converting California, James A. Sandos adds his interpretive touch to the literature on California missions, with the intent of providing a corrective to what he sees as a skewed, polarized historiography that favors the study of “material culture” over religion and worldview. In both cases, his categorization tends toward reductionism: scholars are either “Christophilic triumphalists” or “Christophobic nihilists,” or their explanations derive from seemingly mutually exclusive religious or material factors. What Sandos means by material culture is not entirely clear, since his use of the term goes beyond its anthropological context to include ethnohistories that consider political, economic, social, demographic, and ecological factors. Yet one could argue that ethnohistorical work by scholars such as Robert H. Jackson and Steven Hackel do not ignore religion and worldview in their analyses of mission interactions.Sandos proposes to complement ethnohistory with “theohistory,” an approach that will elucidate a “fundamentally religious struggle” (p. xvii – xviii). To get at “theohistory” of both Indians and Franciscans, Sandos draws on ethnographies and a history of the missions by Luiseño native Pablo Tac, along with printed Franciscan sources and biographies of Junípero Serra. He weaves a lively narrative, spiced with anecdotes, that analyzes the purpose and efficacy of missions as instruments for conversion and of social control, indigenous cultures at contact, Franciscan evangelization tactics (especially of the father-presidents of the California missions Junípero Serra and Fermín Francisco Lasuén), Franciscan conflicts with civil and military officials, the relationship between cultural practices and the spread of disease, and indigenous resistance as manifested in uprisings and more mundane forms.Sandos’s panorama mixes familiar interpretations with new conjecture and exploration on topics such as Serra’s worldview, the effects of disease, the impact of missionization on women, the role of music, and access to hallucinogens as a factor in cultural persistence. Protracted discussions of the use of flogging for discipline seem directed at unraveling or defusing an issue that has complicated the process of Junípero Serra’s canonization. Although Sandos does not deny that coercion was a part of the evangelical and colonizing processes, he challenges the characterization of missions as forms of slavery (he prefers debt peonage), of rape as an instrument of Spanish policy, and of the Franciscan mission enterprise as a form of genocide.In some cases (for example, in the explanation of the connections between music, language learning, and social status), Sandos’s historiographical twists are inventive and provocative. In other cases (for example, in the primacy accorded to syphilis in demographic decline), Sandos fails to convince by ignoring published demographic evidence to the contrary. His discussion of the primary influences on Serra’s thought (St. Francis of Assisi, Duns Scotus, and María de Agreda) is original, but perhaps incomplete, given the lack of reference to a rich body of literature (e.g., Robert Ricard, John Phelan, Georges Baudot) on the beliefs, millennial and otherwise, of New World Franciscans over time. The characterization of Serra’s mentality as “medieval” lacks nuance.There are other cases where the author’s seeming unfamiliarity with colonial Spanish American historiography threatens to belie his analysis or question its originality: for example, in the discussions of secularization, Bourbon/Enlightenment influences, indigenous resistance, and gender issues. This is especially true in the case of the recent fine-grained histories of the mission enterprise on the northern and southern frontiers of Spain’s empire, such as those by Cynthia Radding, James Saeger, and Barbara Ganson. Attention to these analyses could have provided a comparative dimension to enhance Sandos’s final assessment of conversion and the California missions. Yet despite its curious parochialism, Sandos’s book offers a valuable overview of the cultural and religious worldviews and conflicts that divided California Indians and Franciscans in this late colonial Spanish mission enterprise.