Junipero Serra: California’s Founding Father by Steven W. Hackel (review)

Junipero Serra is one of the most controversial figures in California history and historiography, a figure who still inspires passion from his supporters and his detractors. Until the 1960s, Serra was the hero in the California story. In 1931 the State of California sent a statue of Serra to the National Statuary Hall in Washington, DC, as one of the state’s two representative statues. By the late 1960s the civil rights movement and the new social history inspired a new, critical look at Serra. Increasingly critics blamed him for the destruction of the indigenous people and their culture. Passions intensified during the 1980s when Pope John Paul II visited Serra’s mission headquarters, Mission San Carlos Borromeo at Carmel, amidst rumors that he was going to canonize Serra. Discussion of Serra’s canonization remains contentious.

Enter Steven Hackel, professor of history at the University of California, Riverside, who has written the first scholarly biography of Serra since Maynard Geiger, OFM’s two volume The Life and Times of Junipero Serra, published by the Academy of American Franciscan History in 1959. Hackel heroically straddles the fine line between acknowledging Serra and his achievements and denouncing the devastating effects of the Spanish enterprise on indigenous culture. Hackel attempts to depict Serra in all his complexity, neither total saint nor total sinner.

Hackel’s greatest achievement is rooting Serra firmly in the culture from which he came, Petra and Mallorca. The Mallorcan worldview and the Franciscan evangelical tradition cherished there formed Serra. We are introduced to Serra’s early life as a professor of theology, and as a popular mission preacher. We see his decision to become a missionary at the rather late age of 36, his journey to the new world, and his work in Central Mexico. More than half the book covers material prior to Serra’s arrival in California.

Hackel’s Serra is a tenacious, single-minded apostle, “burning with zeal,” who will brook no opposition to his vision of spreading the Gospel among the indigenous peoples of California. Hackel notes Serra’s “impatience” with others and his “desire for complete control” (223). Serra is extreme, committed to obsessive disciplines and physical punishments of himself and others. Hackel depicts a severe, unyielding Serra, who is “oblivious” to the damage he is bringing to indigenous culture. Hackel points out the irony, that in seeking to serve as a bridge between native and Spanish culture, “the bridge led to a graveyard” (238).

While I believe that Hackel’s interpretation of Serra is legitimate, I believe it is too severe. Hackel often takes the darkest interpretation of the evidence. Repeatedly he uses terms such as “probably”(18), “must have,”(103) “would most likely” (136), to introduce conclusions that may or may not reflect Serra. In describing Serra’s involvement with the Inquisition, Hackel is unrelenting in his negative depiction of Serra, but we really know very little about Serra and the Inquisition. Hackel does not give enough emphasis to the central element behind Serra’s missionary activity. To wit: after the revolt at Mission San Diego, where a Franciscan was killed, Serra asks pardon for the murderers (209). Though Hackel acknowledges the episode, he underplays its significance. In his letter to the Viceroy asking pardon Serra is almost rhapsodic: “Give him [the murderer] to understand . . . that he is being pardoned in accordance with our law, which commands us to forgive injuries, and let us prepare him, not for death, but for eternal life.” Eternal life was the great gift Serra believed he brought to the indigenous people and was the engine that drove him. As he put it, “of all things in life [it] is our principal concern. For if we attain it, it matters little if we lose all the rest. And if we do not obtain it, all the rest is of no value”(221).

Hackel has done a great service in painting a complex picture of Serra and furthering the ongoing debate...