Situating Mission Santa Clara de Asís: 1776-1851, Documentary and Material Evidence of Life on the Alta California Frontier: A Timeline (review)

Mission Santa Clara was one of the most important and prominent of the twenty-one Franciscan missions in Alta California. Because it was continuously staffed from its founding in 1777 until it was transferred to the Jesuits in 1851, a relatively complete documentary record has survived. In this book, Russell K. Skowronek has combined these documents with his own extensive archaeological research at Santa Clara. The result is one of the most detailed examinations ever presented of any Alta California mission.

Skowronek presents chronologically arranged translations of the voluminous textual record produced by the Franciscans. He also includes narrative accounts produced by visitors to the mission. In addition, he offers his interpretations of the archaeological findings at points in the book where they most appropriately illuminate the documents.

Four large themes emerge from this volume. First, the book details the transformation of the Santa Clara Valley from an indigenous to a more European-influenced landscape. Skowronek summarizes the environmental changes, which, along with the related tragic native population decline, thoroughly altered the Santa Clara Valley.

Second, Skowronek chronicles the inexorable expansion of the mission territory. For a variety of reasons, tribal life collapsed in the 1790s, and by the early 1800s, there were no indigenous communities left in the Santa Clara Valley. The mission reached farther into California's central valley to gather converts. Native people often entered the mission because it presented the only reasonable option, because the transformation of the landscape and the spread of introduced diseases made a continuance of traditional life impossible. By the time of secularization in 1834, only one-third of the Indians living at Mission Santa Clara spoke the language of the surrounding area. The rest had been recruited from native population centers many miles to the east.

Third, Skowronek demonstrates how indigenous values and folkways survived in the face of these environmental and demographic constraints. The missionaries were deeply frustrated by the persistence of indigenous habits. In response to an 1814 government questionnaire, Santa Clara missionaries expressed their great irritation that a number of native behaviors were still widespread among the indigenous peoples. Skowronek's analysis of burial patterns, especially the continued practice of burying the dead with traditional shell beads, also indicates the persistence of traditional worldviews throughout the mission period.

Fourth, the documents are notable not only for what they contain but also for what is omitted. As Skowronek admits, the native voice is almost entirely lacking. But in this collection many other people who were important to Santa Clara's development, such as soldiers and civilian settlers, are also absent. The mission and the neighboring pueblo of San José engaged in a long-running series of controversies. Yet in this volume, we hear only the missionary complaints about the town, not the townspeople's point of view. And when one priest was accused of cruelty, we read the results of the investigation undertaken by the religious authorities, but not what military officials were saying.

Most striking in these documents is the apparent lack of interest among the Santa Clara missionaries in native religion. This lack is particularly notable in the light of the great ethnographic writings penned by Franciscans in central Mexico and Jesuits in Sonora and Baja California. Such writings are entirely absent in the Santa Clara records. This may be because its nineteenth-century missionaries had little direct encounter with native culture. Also, the demands of parochial and economic record keeping consumed an enormous amount of time. As a result, we learn much about the physical world of the mission in this volume, but little of the dynamics of conversion, which was central to the missionary enterprise.

This book also contains an excellent index...