La arquitectura de las misiones de Alta California. Una herramienta al servicio del control productivo y espiritual

Las veintiuna misiones de Alta California constituyeron el primer ensayo de convivencia entre españoles e indígenas en este territorio. Su presencia contribuyó a la aparición de un nuevo orden arquitectónico y desencadenó un importante cambio social. El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar los elementos más significativos que caracterizan a esta arquitectura y que, en mayor medida, inciden en su valor como herramienta de evangelización y control de la población indígena. Apoyada en numerosa bibliografía y fuentes documentales, la metodología se ha centrado en el análisis de planos, pinturas y fotografías de distintas épocas, unido al trabajo de campo desarrollado en algunas misiones. Entre los resultados, destacamos la idea de que la actividad religiosa y productiva determinó el diseño de las misiones, priorizando, por un lado, el bienestar de los religiosos sobre el de los nativos y, por el otro, el uso de espacios interiores frente a los exteriores. La secularización de 1833 paralizó su actividad y las sumió en un deterioro que se alargó hasta el inicio de las restauraciones en el siglo XX. En la actualidad, se han convertido en iconos turístico-culturales frecuentados por turistas y estudiantes que interpretan la historia temprana del estado definida por la colonización.

Missionaries and Borderlands: «The Mission Play» and Missionary Practices in Alta California

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.

Zooarchaeology of Mission Santa Clara de Asìs: Bone Fragmentation, Stew Production, and Commensality

Through the analysis of faunal remains from refuse features associated with the Native Californian living quarters at Mission Santa Clara de Asìs, the article examines Indigenous diet within this colonial mission settlement. In Alta California, Native Californians from differing sociolinguistic groups were relocated to Spanish missions, creating an ever shifting pluralistic society. Within these mission settlements, Native Californians were tasked with maintaining the vast agricultural fields for which they received ingredients for two Spanish-style meals, atole and pozole. This study examines the diet of Native Californian families living within Mission Santa Clara, specifically focusing on the breakage patterns of cattle bones and the communal preparation, cooking, and consumption of these daily meals. These results illustrate change and continuity of foodway practices, expanding our understanding of mission political economies and Native Californian persistence within this colonial system.

Voyages Through Literary Space: Mapping Globe and Nation in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast

In his youth, Richard Henry Dana Jr. rebelled against the conventions of his upper-class New England upbringing when he signed on as a common sailor on a merchant ship bound for Alta California. The notes of his travels describe the strenuous life at sea, a captain’s sadistic streak, a crew’s mutinous tendencies, and California’s multicultural fur trade economy. First published in 1840, Dana’s travelogue Two Years Before the Mast became an unofficial guide for emigrants traversing the largely unmapped far western territories in the wake of the Mexican-American War. Connecting Dana’s widely-read narrative to current developments in the discipline, this article discusses strategies of visualizing literature and includes an exercise in ‘discursively mapping’ actual and imagined spaces and mobilities of the text. Considering strategies and toolsets from the digital humanities as well as theories such as Lefebvre’s concept of representational space, the article reflects on the methodological and practical pitfalls brought about by the visualization.