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  • Flights of Fancy:Using the Historical Imagination to Understand the Franciscan Missionaries of California
  • Michael J. Gonzalez (bio)

If only one of us could go there and return by air.1

"To fly." From the first mission they erected in 1769 to the last, and twenty-first, in 1823, the Franciscans in California aspired to take wing in thought and deed. They dreamed of flight, celebrated it, prayed for it, and, as one witness claimed, even did it. Thus, to fly, which, in one sense means moving from one point to another through the air, speaks to the priests' efforts to traverse any distance, and overcome any burden, to realize the spiritual and physical sides of their nature.2 For their spiritual endeavors, they claimed to heed, and uphold, God's will, a duty for which flight provided them with ways to express their devotion. When using references to flight, or reading descriptions of flight in sacred texts, they found the means to escape human frailty, if only in the mind, and embrace the divine. At the physical level, in which they used the material and substantive parts of their existence to measure progress, the priests built missions to attract Indian converts. If they failed to cross the divide between wish and fulfillment—and the Indians did not accept mission life in the manner the priests expected—the aspirations they had sent aloft remained unrealized. Frustrated, they punished Indians who refused to submit. But, to speak of flight reveals the perils of historical interpretation. When trying to educate the reader about the Franciscans, much less any other figure from the past, historians draw from their own [End Page 231] background to illuminate a period distant in time and space from the present. They call upon their training in university, or even their political sympathies, to produce a work that is as much about them as it is their subjects.3

If emotion and life experience can shape interpretation, then scholars will judge the Franciscans' spiritual and physical nature in different ways. The commentators who focus on spirituality often say the priests' faith inspired good works. A journalist argues that Father Junípero Serra, the founder of California's first nine missions, and his Franciscan compatriots, wished "to preach the Gospel" in California and "elevate" the lives of the Indians.4 A pair of historians suggests that when seeking converts in California, the Franciscans wanted to live up to a "heroic past" in which members of the order in Mexico defended Indians from rapacious "conquistadores."5 Two other scholars say that in what is now the American Southwest and northern Mexico, an area that comprises California, the Franciscans used "solar geometry," a branch of mathematics inherited from ancient Greece, to worship God's majesty. By means of precise measurement and recognizing at what points the sun sits in the sky according to the season, many priests built churches to ensure that daylight would illuminate the tabernacle or other parts of the interior on the winter solstice or religious holidays.6

The historians less inclined to study the life of the spirit present the priests as physical creatures who recruited Indians to exploit California's resources. As men fascinated by the temporal rewards of profit and glory, they resorted to extreme measures when their plans foundered. One historian explains that when baptized Indians refused to work, and thus [End Page 232] threatened the missions' prosperity, the priests whipped the malcontents. And if mission records can be believed, the priests did not mind soldiers killing baptized Indians who made trouble.7 The same historian even speculates that the Franciscans' harshness presaged the high incarceration rates that now plague California's penal system.8 To other observers, the priests committed genocide when they created the conditions that led to the death of thousands of Indians. Needing laborers to tend the crops and cattle herds, the priests forced many natives into the missions. When the recruits succumbed to disease or the stress of losing a familiar way of life, the clerics did not mourn the dead and asked the military to capture a fresh group of Indians to replenish the mission work force.9

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