by Ray Suarez
Along with bringing Catholicism to the pueblos, the priests brought Indians into the new missions, communities that blended Spanish economic and religious ambitions. Native people were moved from their land and traditional systems of land tenure to live and work in complexes that included fields, factories, and churches. This system also made it easier for relatively small groups of soldiers, civil servants, and priests to govern and tax Indian populations many times their size.
In California, exposure to European microbes unintentionally brought suffering and death to long-settled Indian communities. The fact that germs benign in the mouths and guts of Europeans were deadly to Indians has long been understood. What is less remarked upon is the social chaos widespread death and illness caused, leaving many Indians prepared to give up their destabilized ways of life and move in with the priests.
The Spanish mission system no longer exists in the United States, but, remarkably, many of the largest cities in the country, and major cities across the once-Spanish lands in the American Southwest, began their existence as missions. The cities include Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego in California, and San Antonio, Texas.
Indian settlements that remained far removed from the expanding Spanish footprint maintained relatively peaceful relations with the Crown. In places where the mission system and Spanish claims for agriculture and mining impinged on existing boundaries and ways of life, the encounter was a source of growing tension. Defenders of indigenous religions deplored the growing number of priests settling in the region, and resented the forced labor used to build the churches.
In New Mexico, a religious leader from the San Juan pueblo called Popay saw the growing resentment of the Spanish colonists. At the same time, clashes between the native people of the Eastern Seaboard and British colonists were growing in frequency and ferocity, tensions were rising between Spanish colonists and native people in the West. Native people resented the system of forced labor pressed on them by the Spanish, and the pressure to abandon their religion.
In 1675, Popay was one of a group of forty-seven Indians convicted of sorcery in a trial in Santa Fe. The men had continued the rites and rituals of their own religion and refused to convert to Catholicism. Four were hanged; the remaining men were condemned to flogging and imprisonment. The Indian settlements across the colony sent a delegation to the capital to protest to Governor Juan Francisco de Treviño the treatment of Popay and the others. Fearing war, the governor released the prisoners and sent them home with a warning to stop the practices that had brought them to trial.
After a meeting of indigenous leaders in Taos, Popay emerged as a leader of the resistance to Spain. In 1680, he organized a revolt in pueblo communities across New Mexico. Unlike the struggles between the English and native nations in New England and the middle Atlantic states, this one succeeded.
Ask yourself for a moment how diverse groups speaking different languages, spread out over four hundred miles of territory, might organize a revolution. Popay sent runners to each pueblo carrying knotted deerskin strips. Each day a knot in the strip was to be untied. The revolt would begin when the last knot was undone. It was a clever plan, but the Spanish caught two runners on their way to the Tesuque Pueblo, revealing the plan. So the war began two days early, on August 10, 1680. The Spaniards were caught by surprise, and fell back to Santa Fe.
The uprising struck at the spiritual and political authority of Spain. When the uprising began, the strategy was for each pueblo to demolish its mission church and kill its resident priest. Then the rebels were to move to the surrounding areas and kill the Spanish settlers. Once those objectives were achieved, the Indian forces were to move on Santa Fe. The first phases were quickly accomplished, and by August 15, thousands of pueblo Indian fighters were massed outside the capital preparing to attack.
The Spaniards launched a counterstrike to drive the Indians back from the city. They were, however, cut off and made a careful retreat from Santa Fe, but not before destroying much of the city. They headed to El Paso del Norte, today’s El Paso and the southernmost city in New Mexico. It was the only successful revolution by native people against European colonialists anywhere in the New World. The pueblo Indian revolutionaries kept the Spaniards out of New Mexico for another twelve years.
During that time Popay tried to extinguish every sign that the Spanish had been in their country. Most of the pueblos destroyed the churches, but eighty years of Spanish rule in New Mexico had left behind an indelible deposit on the land. Some Indian families had been Christian for decades. Many spoke Spanish. Others had kinship links with Spanish settlers. The colonists had left behind European agricultural techniques, tools, and building styles.
Drought plagued Indian country. Quarrels between the different settlements and rivalries over leadership of the loose confederation marked the years of returned self-rule. When a column of Spanish soldiers arrived in 1692, the Indians were promised clemency and protection from nearby native nations if they would swear allegiance to the Spanish king and return to the Catholic faith. The pueblo leaders met in Santa Fe and agreed to terms.
Spain was back. Other attempted uprisings would follow, and were put down with uncompromising retribution by the new governor, Diego de Vargas. The process begun nearly a century earlier by Juan de Oñate would continue. Proximity and the passage of time would continue the work of melding the cultures, making modern New Mexicans. The thinly settled, arid land would become the center of the North American wool industry from the Spanish colonial era through the Mexican period into the area’s entry into the United States.
Like colonists around the world, Spaniards set multiple goals for their overseas empire. The colonial lands had to sustain themselves economically, protect the political interests of the sovereign (in this case, act as a buffer against the expansionist ambitions of other empires), and advance the cause of the Catholic faith, which could count generations of Spanish monarchs as staunch defenders.
Decades later, in the far west of New Spain, more pioneer columns would come north, and begin our next story.
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A LONG, THIN line of missions threaded its way up the California coast by the end of the eighteenth century. From San Diego in the south to San Francisco Solano in the north, more than twenty communities under the administration of the king were built by Indians and run by priests. Many of them planted the seed that continues to thrive today as a modern city. Others are archeological or historical sites, tucked away in less welcoming or less developed parts of the massive state.
It had been centuries since Mexico City was built on the foundations of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán. California was called “the last corner of the Spanish Empire,” according to Trinity University historian Arturo Madrid. Again, it was worries about the encroachment of other European empires that drove Spain to put a more permanent stamp on land it had claimed for generations.
The eighteenth-century Franciscan brother Junipero Serra is known as the founder of the California missions, and as such is one of the founders of modern California. “Part of Father Serra’s mission was to Christianize, evangelize the peninsula all the way up,” says historian Rose Marie Beebe, of Santa Clara University in California. “The missions in the presidios [fortified military bases] were founded to stop incursion from the Russians and the British. So there was a military reason and a religious reason for establishing presidios with the missions. They would have an escolta, a squad to protect the padres.”
From this distance in time, it might seem odd that aside from Popay and similar anticolonial leaders, the indigenous people, living in old and established communities, would willingly submit themselves to the mission system, or could have been easily forced to do so by numerically smaller groups of priests and soldiers. Many of the Indian communities were collapsing from the effects of diseases brought by the Spaniards against which Indians had no immune defense. Stephen Pitti describes the t
ribes as “struggling to hunt, to collect acorns, to fish, to keep themselves going as communities that had lasted for centuries. The missions offered something which is not just spiritual but material. They offered Indian communities the opportunity to have bread on the table. Indians entered the missions with their own ideas about what they wanted out of those places.”
The very priests who came offering a new way of life and a new way of belief unwittingly brought death and suffering in the diseases they transported in their bodies. The survivors found structure, comfort, and safety in the proselytizing and unpaid labor of the priests.
As the nineteenth century began, these young communities, constantly under construction, must have seemed like they sat at the end of the world. “These are still very small places that seemed rustic, like backwaters to visitors coming from Europe or Mexico City,” writes Professor Pitti. “These are places in which Spanish-Mexicans feel themselves to be isolated, vulnerable.” To Pitti, there is another important consideration. “Spanish-Mexican men in Alta California looking for partners find themselves partnering with indigenous women in these regions in part because there are so few Spanish-Mexican women who are coming from Mexico or coming from Spain in this period. So what happens in the frontier area is much more racial mixing than we see in some other parts of New Spain.”
Even with the archipelago of missions strung along the California coast, few Mexicans took the chance to move to the northern colonies. Some new arrivals did not make the trip voluntarily. In 1800, twenty-one youngsters, many of them illegitimate children who made their way to a home established for that purpose, were transported to California from Mexico City. During the journey—first by land, then by ship—one of the children died. Two of the girls were married to Spanish settlers before the end of the year. The others, who ranged in age from early childhood to adolescence, were distributed among California Spanish families. As an old woman, Apolinaria Lorenzana, the youngest of the children, dictated her memoirs and recalled, “On our arrival, the governor distributed the children like little dogs among various families.” Life on the edge of the empire was hardscrabble enough to allow women to rise by being useful. Many of the diaries of nineteenth-century Spanish women in California revealed a society made more open by the chronic shortage of labor.
Lorenzana was to make a life that defied the restrictions colonial life elsewhere in New Spain normally held for women. She started out as one of the niños expósitos, abandoned children, and over her long life saw Alta California, Upper California, move from its days as a network of Catholic missions to a booming state in the expanding United States.
She tells the man who recorded her memories toward the end of her life, “When I was a very young girl, before coming from Mexico, I had been taught to read. And so when I was a young woman in California, I taught myself to write, and encouraged by the books I saw, I imitated letters on any piece of paper I could find—such as empty cigarette packets, or any sheet of blank paper I found discarded. In that manner I learned enough to make myself understood in writing when I needed something.”
The young girl who arrived in the California missions was further schooled in the domestic arts—child care, cooking, sewing—and became a diligent worker in missions up and down the coast. “This is a child who is expected to contribute to Alta California society, to be useful in the society,” Professor Beebe writes. “How is a seven-year-old child supposed to understand what the future holds? She must have been terrified in her heart, but she was a very strong child as is evidenced by all the things she did after she moved from Monterey to Santa Barbara to San Diego.”
Professor Pitti reminds us that even for a foundling child, the move would have been bewildering. “Mexico City by the end of the eighteenth century is a major hub of urban life in the Americas, and for anybody to have moved from a place like that, a place that has real commercial life, that has various class strata, the sort of a city one could get lost in during this period the way one could have gotten lost in London or any of the great metropolises of that period . . . to move from that setting to the furthest remove of the Spanish Empire must have been a tremendous shock for a young girl.”
It is unlikely that the young girl came to California expecting a life of greater ease and comfort. The abandoned children’s home was an austere place to live. The day began early with prayers, breakfast, and then instruction, followed by more prayers, classes, and prayers again. Life in the home turned out to be good preparation for life in the missions, which ran on a similar schedule of bells, meals, and prayers.
She looked up at mission society just one rung removed from the very bottom. As a girl, she was even more vulnerable than a woman. As an orphan, she was even more exposed to the fragility and potential cruelty to which children could be exposed, because there were no family associations to give her status or promise her protection. She had no existing attachment to land, family, or tenure as both an orphan and an outsider, born elsewhere and transported to Alta California. The only weaker members of society in mission California were the longest tenured and most numerous, the native peoples of the North American coast.
Young Apolinaria Lorenzana’s life was built on a series of accidents. After the children came north, she was placed with one of California’s leading families, that of soldier and presidio leader Raymundo Carrillo.
Even her new protector was not so sure transporting the foundlings was good policy. He wrote the viceroy’s court in Mexico City and asked that no more be sent: “I do not believe that there are any advantages to be gained by sending more children as these. The inhabitants do not want to take them in, because they have growing families of their own. These children are so unhappy, it seems pointless to take them away from the capital and expose them to hardship. They are too young.”
Lorenzana followed the Carrillos from Santa Barbara to San Diego, and over time began teaching children to read. During a long illness, she was taken in by a priest at the San Diego mission, a Father Sanchez. From teaching she moved on to nursing, and then to teaching Indian women to sew.
“She becomes the glue that keeps mission San Diego together. The fathers trust her so much. They love this young woman,” Professor Beebe writes.
She became so useful and so beloved at the San Diego mission, she was eventually called La Beata, the Blessed One. Professor Beebe’s work with Lorenzana’s own diaries, and those of her friends and coworkers in San Diego, reveals that “Apolinaria was so well trusted the fathers would allow her to go to the ships when they docked in San Diego harbor. She would go to the ships with the list of goods that the fathers felt were needed at the mission. But she had the permission to buy anything that she thought they needed.”
By acquiring skills, working steadily, and, critically, by not marrying, Lorenzana attained a usefulness and independence rare for women in Spanish colonial societies of the day, who were often defined by their roles as mothers, wives, or religious sisters.
Lorenzana tells her chronicler she dodged the marital bullet: “When I was a girl, there was a young man who often entreated me to marry him. But I did not feel inclined toward matrimony [knowing full well the requirements of that sacred institution], and so I refused his offer. He then told me that since I wouldn’t marry him, he was leaving for Mexico.”
Try to imagine a tiny, elderly woman telling this story to an American man decades later, and adding, almost with a shrug, “Well, so he left.” There is no regret expressed anywhere in the story she tells of her life that she had no children or husband. Over time, she would go on to have a hundred godchildren.
Apolinaria Lorenzana’s long life covered California’s decades of transition from Spanish colony to part of Mexico’s independent nationhood to the arrival of the Stars and Stripes. As California sped into modern America, fewer and fewer people in the state had personally experienced the early, hardscrabble days of the mission system. Scholars began to collect oral
histories, and historian and author Thomas Savage notes that he was steered to Lorenzana again and again.
“On my visit to San Diego this year [1878], many of the native Californians of both sexes spoke of [Lorenzana] in the highest terms of praise. She was known by many as Apolinaria la Cuna [the foundling] and by most as La Beata. She appears to be a good old soul, cheerful and resigned to her sad fate, for in her old age and stone blind she is a charge on the country and on her friends, having by some means or other lost all her property. She was loath to speak on this subject, assuring me she didn’t want even to think of it.”
Lorenzana remained in service to the mission friars for decades after her arrival, through the end of the Spanish colonial period and into the early years of Mexican independence, which was achieved in 1821. Her industriousness and compassion won her many friends and admirers, but little in the way of material possessions. In middle age, she asked the church for land at a time when the Alta California missions were being secularized—that is, taken from church control—by the young Mexican government.
The mission lands were first promised to Indians—to the neophytes—the people who had converted to Catholicism and become acculturated subjects. The Indians were stiffed, and instead the land transfers created a new aristocracy among the settler descendants, the Spanish families who had come north with the priests and soldiers to set down roots in this imperial backwater. Instead of becoming farmers and ranchers cultivating their own land, the Indians became a landless workforce for the new gentry.
The mission priests saw secularization as a simple land grab, in which the government in Mexico City would reward the often anticlerical new aristocracy. Some missions stopped maintaining their buildings in anticipation of a seizure; others started to slaughter the large herds accumulated over decades and sell the hides and rendered cattle fat to brokers from the United States.