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.

California Indians

Human beings have inhabited the region known as California for at least 13,000 years, or as some believe since time immemorial. By developing technologies, honing skills, and implementing stewardship practices, California Indian communities maximized the bounty of their homelands during the precolonial period. Overall, their population grew to perhaps 310,000 people. Speaking scores of different languages, they organized themselves into at least sixty major tribes. Communities were usually politically autonomous but connected to larger tribal groups by shared languages and cultures while dense networks of economic exchange also bound tribes together. Newcomers brought devastating change, but California Indians resisted and survived. During the Russo-Hispanic period (1769–1846), the Indigenous population fell to perhaps 150,000 people due to diseases, environmental transformation, and colonial policies. The organized mass violence and other policies of early United States rule (1846–1900) further reduced the population. By 1900, census takers counted only 15,377 California Indian people. Still, California Indians resisted. During the 1900–1953 period, the federal government continued its national Allotment Policy but initiated healthcare, land policy, education, and citizenship reforms for California Indians even as they continued to resist and their population grew. During the termination era (1953–1968), California Indians faced federal attempts to obliterate them as American Indians. Finally, California Indian people achieved many hard-won victories during the self-determination era (1968–present).

Sports and Community Building in California

Alta California had been claimed by the Spanish Empire since the 16th century. However, Spain professed little interest in the region until the second half of the 18th century, when North American holdings seemed threatened by European rivals. Thus, it dispatched contingents of soldiers and Franciscan missionaries into what is now the state of California in order to establish a viable presence in the region mainly by persuading indigenous Californians, through intimidation and spiritual proselytizing, to become loyal Spanish subjects. When California Indians proved difficult to convert, the Spanish established pueblos—civilian and secular municipalities in San José, Los Angeles, and Branciforté, which is now embraced by Santa Cruz. Subsequently, well-connected Spanish subjects received enormous grants of land largely in the central coast of California—grants of land that would be transformed into ranchos generally concentrating on cattle raising. When an independent Mexico took control of California in the early 1800s, the missions were secularized, the pueblos stagnated, and the ranchos relatively prospered, fueled by the labor of indigenous and mestizo/a people. Mexico’s reign in California lasted but a generation or so before the US-Mexican War ushered in American rule, soon accompanied by the Gold Rush and eventual statehood in 1850. While recognized as white by the US government, Mexican Californians quickly encountered racialized forms of political/legal discrimination, cultural oppression, and labor exploitation. Nevertheless, Mexican communities persisted in the Golden State—communities reinforced by migrants from Mexico but ever vigilant to the suspicion, hostility, and legal repression surrounding them. By the end of the 20th century, Mexican Americans in California often shared neighborhoods with migrants from Central and South America pushed from their countries of birth by poverty and political oppression. In California, as elsewhere, Latino/as have worked hard to establish and maintain community bonds. One of the more interesting and underappreciated ways they have done so is through play; that is, the formation of ethnic-based sports teams and leagues. In the process, they have cheered on individual Latino/s athletes who have garnered neighborhood, regional, national, and international fame, while maintaining sometimes tense relationships with local professional sport franchises such as the Los Angeles Dodgers and the at-present Oakland Raiders.

Native Insurgent Literacy in Colonial California

The catastrophe of Spanish colonization for California's indigenous populations has made it easy for historians to overlook the skills that some Indians learned in the missions and the ways in which those who survived the missions used these hard-won skills to resist colonial rule and advance their own interests. One such skill was alphabetic literacy, which a select few California Indians in the missions acquired and used in their own distinctive ways. Focusing on the experiences of a few heretofore obscure yet important individuals, this article briefly compares the experiences with alphabetic literacy of Indian men and women over the first few generations of contact and explores the degree to which literacy provided Indians with the means to serve their communities, reinvent themselves, and challenge missionaries’ expectations.

“These Lofty Aspirants of Fame”: The Making of the Gold Rush Legend

San Francisco constituted the epicenter of the vibrant image production and printing industry that produced visualizations of the gold rush experience for miners and their far-flung audiences around the world. This chapter examines the artist-rendered representations of the gold rush, especially in the form of illustrated letter sheets—the precursors to the modern postcard. Letter sheets, and the notes that miners scrawled on them to the folks at home, stressed the irreplaceability of direct experience through the popular metaphor of “seeing the elephant.” Gold rush illustrations crafted an archetypal (white, male) miner identity and juxtaposed it with depictions of nonwhite groups like the Chinese and California Indians, who were cast as visual exotics.