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Prologue San Diego and the Spanish Colonial Inheritance “Fages would not give this mission more than one-half of half a cuartillo of corn for the Indians from the Californias,” complained Fray Luís Jayme to Fray Rafael Verger, O.F.M., guardian of the College of San Fernando in Mexico City in October 1772. Jayme was head cleric of the San Diego mission. He experienced difficulty bringing new Indian converts into the mission since the military commander of Alta California, Lieutenant Pedro Fages, drew liberally on its supplies. “We cannot make the natives around here work, and often we cannot teach them the doctrine [Catholicism],” he explained, “because they have to go hunting for food every day.”1 “Thus little progress will be made under present conditions ,” said Jayme, “for the example to be set by the soldiers—some are good exemplars—but very many of them deserve to be hanged on account of the continuous outrages which they are committing in seizing and raping the [Indian] women.” Father Jayme believed it scandalous that Pedro Fages considered unimportant the sexual transgressions of soldiers. He had become chagrined that the commander had drafted mission livestock and Indians toward the pursuit of his own riches.2 In his letter to Verger, Jayme spoke of incidents at the Kumeyaay village at the end of Mission Valley, which was located along the coastal plain near False Bay on the road to Monterey. “The gentiles therein many times have been on the point of coming here to kill us all,” said Jayme with great concern, “and the reason for this is that some soldiers went there and raped their women, and other soldiers turned their animals into their fields and they ate up their crops.” After the incidents, Jayme recommended to Fray Junípero Serra in 1773 that the mission and the gentile village near it be removed from the presidio, following town planning codes from the Laws of the Indies. At the new location east of the presidio (now in Mission Valley), he believed the immoral influences of the lowercaste Spanish soldiers could be minimized for both neophyte and gentile —1— 2 Prologue Indians alike.3 Dismayed with the actions of Fages’s soldiers, Serra wrote to Antonio María de Bucareli y Ursua, viceroy of New Spain, and described the terrible incidents. He related how a party of soldiers would visit the Kumeyaay villages, which sent men and women into hiding, and “lasso Indian women—who then became prey for their unbridled lust. Several Indian men who tried to defend the women were shot to death.”4 The incidents most likely lay at the heart of Indian resistance to the Spanish colonization effort in San Diego and all of California. Despite the obvious sense of Christian morality and sympathy in Father Jayme’s intriguing letter, in 1775 he paid for these sexual transgressions at the heart of Spanish-Indian relations with his life.5 Thus began the difficult task undertaken by the Spanish Crown to colonize the territory known as Alta California in order to halt English and Russian expansion into sovereign territory. The Bourbon Reforms of 1768 redesigned New Spain as defensive and economic territories that limited the power of the Catholic orders in the colonization endeavor. The reforms were meant to make New Spain’s northern provinces selfsuf ficient. However, provincial officials often carried out reforms differently on the frontier of empire. Conversion of the Indians, known as the Kumeyaay, or Digueños to the Spanish, in the San Diego region proved trying because the colonial imperative consisted of civil, military, and spiritual conquest. Often divided over policies for the administration of Native Californians, provincial governors, military commanders, and Catholic missionary orders thought only their special care for the Indians would make good Catholics of the indigenous people, transforming them into tax-paying Spanish citizens. Indians themselves participated in church-state controversies, although somewhat indirectly and without clear articulation of intent. Native Californians wielded much influence for a conquered people to shape colonial policy. From the Spanish period (1769–1821) and Mexican Independence (1822–48), authorities pursued a number of policies aimed to address the plight of Native Californians, sometimes with great compassion but mostly through violent coercion.6 Therefore, Anglo Americans were not the first group in California and the West to empower the region with sentimental promise. During the sixteenth , seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Dominican, Franciscan, and [3.19.56.45] Project MUSE...

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