Aztlán and Arcadia: Religion, Ethnicity, and the Creation of Place by Roberto Ramón Lint Sagarena (review)

The development of a distinct regional identity in Southern California during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been studied from a variety of perspectives over the last few years. Works such as William Deverell’s Whitewashed Adobe (2005) and Phoebe Kropp’s California Vieja (2008) have shown how the mission revival movement led to the celebration of a Spanish fantasy past. This invented tradition celebrated the region’s alleged European roots and denied Indians and Mexicans meaningful participation in the history and development of the area. Roberto Ramón Lint Sagarena’s important and impressive new book builds upon this analysis in two novel ways. First, he elevates religion into a primary category of investigation. Second, he places the Anglo version of Southern California as an “Arcadia” next to a parallel regional view articulated by Mexicans both before and after the American occupation. In that view, the region was “Aztlán,” the mythical ancestral home of the Aztecs who established their hegemony over central Mexico in the fourteenth century.

In foregrounding religion, Lint Sagarena makes two major points. He first analyzes the arguments made by Anglo Catholic Californians in the Pious Fund case. This fund was an endowment established by the Jesuits to support their work in Baja California. It had been used partially to fund the missions in Alta California, as well. The government of Santa Anna eventually seized it and used it for Mexico’s general financial needs. In the 1850s the Bishop of California sued to have it returned to the church. Lint Sagarena demonstrates that the argument used by the California Catholic Church before the International Claims Commission falsely claimed that the missionary work in California had been exclusively religious and entirely disconnected from Spanish colonialism. This interpretation was vigorously contested by old Californios, such as Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, but it quickly became normative. This way of looking at the Spanish era gave California a past untouched by a non-republican monarchy. Thus Anglo Protestants could celebrate the heroic effort of the self-sacrificing missionary pioneers in settling California. Lint Sagarena argues that this marked an important milestone in the Americanization of Catholicism.

Secondly, as Catholicism became more American, it became possible for Anglo Californians of any religious stripe, or none at all, to participate in the spread of this heritage. The wildly popular novel Ramona offered a version of Manifest Destiny tailored for the Catholic Southwest. The California missions were restored as civic institutions and their architecture was rendered more familiar to Americans. This new mission style was prominent in in the California building at the 1893 Columbian exposition and it came to something of a climax in the 1920s rebuilding of Santa Barbara as a pseudo-Spanish city after a devastating earthquake.

The other novel part of Lint Sagarena’s analysis lies in his recognition that Anglos were not the only ones inventing a fantasy past for the region. The criollos who spearheaded the drive for Mexican independence in the early nineteenth century developed a national narrative which privileged the indigenous past over the Spanish past, and this narrative entered California when it became part of the Mexican Republic. There was a brief attempt in the 1820s to replace the name California with the name Moctezuma and the map that was used in negotiations at the end of the Mexican-American war located the ancestral home of the Aztecs somewhere north of the present international border.

The notion of an indigenous ancestral Mexican homeland outside of the boundaries of Mexico itself picked up momentum after World War II. This was partially in response to racist practices in the Southwest, but also in response to the derogatory characterizations of Mexicans living in the United States that became prevalent in some circles in Mexico. So Mexicans living in the Southwest, including Southern California, established their own heritage by...