Abstract
This essay takes up a core question of this issue of Pamiętnik Teatralny: how are we to think about historiography beyond a dualism, settled in time and reflective of the status quo? With respect to the California missions, historical treatments of colonization revolve around a dualism shaped by moral dimensions of the missionary enterprise—did the missions help California Indians or harm them? Theatrical representations, like the wildly successful early twentieth century pageant drama, The Mission Play, staged a version of mission history that argued for the former. As a representation of the mission past, the play conflated missions, as institutions, with the moral character of missionaries, thus edifying a fantasy and entrenching the dualism. However, attention to missionary practices, like keeping time using the mission bell, reveal how the missions were sites where indigenous and colonial realities were in constant conflict. Through practices, relations between missionaries and indios produced a space that was neither strictly colonial nor indigenous, and yet both—a borderland. As a mode of spatial dialectics, borderlands thinking can unsettle the duality underlying representations of the mission past to question how that dualism has come into being.
Highlights
Described as a stunning combination of pageant and drama, The Mission Play, written by poet and historian John Steven McGroarty in 1911, was remarkable for the ways that it brought California history to life onstage
Even though dynamics between California Indians and the Spanish, Mexican, and American colonizers produced distinct material conditions, historical narratives have generally locked the period into a dualism around the colonial legacy: did colonization constitute genocide of California Indians, or was the devastation of California Indian communities an unfortunate yet inevitable series of consequences of discovery and progress? This prevailing dualism has rendered the missions both as monuments to colonization and reminders of “Indigenous authority, memory, identity, and historical narration.”3
I take up a core question of this issue of Pamiętnik Teatralny: how are we to think about historiography beyond a dualism, settled in time and reflective of the status quo? The Critical Mission Studies’ imperative to “rewrite the history of California’s missions” presents an opportunity to address this question by drawing attention to practices that shaped everyday mission life, and to how these practices obliterated material reality of California Indians6 and infiltrated and permeated pageant plays and historical melodramas that attempted to stage that history
Summary
THERE was recently presented near Los Angeles, in its own theater, the first satisfactory combination of pageant and drama ever seen in this country. The glamour and the romance of old Spain, which was the mother of California and the mother of America, is portrayed in the Mission Play by Franciscan monks, Spanish soldiers and sailors, Indians, picturesque adventurers, singers and dancers who are to the manner born, natives of the soil with the blood of Castile in their veins, but who are actors trained to the highest degree of perfection. The Play is equipped with scenery and properties of historical accuracy and is performed in a theatre specially constructed for the purpose. The most eminent critics have declared the Mission Play to be the greatest pageant-drama of this or any other country.
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