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Saints and Citizens: Indigenous Histories of Colonial Missions and Mexican California

2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2802762

1527-1900

José Refugio de la Torre Curiel,

Archaeology and Natural History

In recent decades, narratives on colonial experiences throughout the Spanish borderlands have shown multilayered processes of imperial expansion and local negotiations of power between Spaniards and indigenous societies living on the empire's frontiers. Colonialism first and then the dissolution of Indian communities during the republican period have commonly appeared as the larger frameworks articulating stories of subordination, Christianization, indigenous resistance, ethnogenesis, identity formation, or cultural change.To some extent, Lisbeth Haas's book is influenced by these concerns, as she aims to explain the ways in which California Indians — Chumash, Luiseño, and Yokuts — “defended and defined themselves under new and often traumatic conditions” (p. 5). However, this book takes additional steps in reinterpreting indigenous agency and indigeneity in that not only does it explore local responses to mission life and the establishment of colonial relations, but it also focuses both on knowledge production through dance, weaving, visual images, and oral histories and on indigenous efforts to get full recognition as citizens and landowners.Haas's understanding of California as an indigenous space brings to the foreground the significance and remarkable continuity that indigenous forms of authority, knowledge, and power showed after 1769 until the mid-1840s due to the pivotal role native translators, artisans, dancers, elders, and community leaders played in mission contexts and in neighboring territories such as that of the Yokuts. Within this context, the six chapters comprising the book are structured around Haas's main argument, namely that “despite the physical dislocation and death the missions represented, they became sites of Indigenous authority, memory, identity, and historical narration” (p. 7).The first three chapters of the book offer important glimpses into the territorial, cultural, political, and economic organization of Chumash, Luiseño, and Yokuts Indians. Congregation of large populations in mission towns (among the Chumash, for instance), the relative autonomy some Luiseño villages retained while affiliated to mission life, and Yokuts' ability to remain outside Spanish control emerged as distinctive patterns of colonial settlement among those groups and in time would be related to ecological devastation and their political defeat. Life within the missions is also discussed by examining how local residents interpreted their status as indios in California; by analyzing indigenous participation in local textile production and appropriation of clothing and writing, as well as the role of dance as a means to access power and to “generate new understanding of things and transform conditions” (p. 73), Haas shows that Indians “cultivated forms of knowledge and power at the missions to seek redress for humiliating conditions and to help people survive” under their circumstances (p. 82). The usage of images in California missions is especially important in this study, as it provides evidence of the significance of a visual culture that, once imported in California, blended with local traditions and interpretations to generate new narratives of things Spanish, Catholic, and indigenous — as in the case of the Chumash paintings of the Archangel Raphael, the Stations of the Cross at San Fernando, or Luiseño decorations in the chapel at Pala.In the second part of the book, oral testimonies, petitions sent to California state authorities by mission Indians, and records and diseños of land grants in various missions speak of indigenous reinterpretation of their past during the early nineteenth century, as well as their attempts to live in their ancestors' dwelling places with official recognition of their landownership.The book situates the production of knowledge and indigenous histories in detailed local, viceregal (or Mexican), and imperial perspectives. Haas is mindful of recent local historiography — Steve Hackel, Kent Lightfoot, and James Sandos — and connections between California and borderlands history are also present, although it would have been desirable that the comparison with other frontier or mission areas referenced works in addition to those of Pekka Hämäläinen and Juliana Barr. Without this broader framework, one wonders if California Indians' active involvement in maintaining their worldviews and knowledge, in addition to the intensity of their political agenda during the postsecularization period, was in some way different or consistent with similar processes taking place in adjacent regions such as Arizona-Sonora or in more distant places such as Chihuahua, Texas, and New Mexico, where tensions related to mission experience also triggered indigenous creativity in connection with their ethnic and cultural reconstitution and where nineteenth-century politics also attempted to displace Indian communities from landownership, creating new forms of exploitation.Special consideration must be given to Haas's treatment of dance and of Chumash and Luiseño visual systems. Even when the author decided to discuss these developments vis-à-vis similar cases in the Andean world or in central New Spain, as opposed to other mission areas in northern Mexico, her conclusions about the significance of body language — through dance and corporal as well as mural painting — and her rendering of a California baroque “infused with a native sensibility” will remain powerful interpretive tools for generations to come (p. 107).