Missions, Myth, and Memory in the Making of Modern Southern California
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In California, fourth graders get introduced to the history of their state. For generations, the construction of a mission diorama served as a centerpiece of that initiation. These projects, which commonly utilized sugar cubes, popsicle sticks, egg cartons, and Styrofoam™ containers, tested the ingenuity of ten year olds—and the patience of their parents (especially those without degrees in architecture and engineering). For beleaguered mission dioramists, some relief is now available on the web. At www.createamission.com, consumers can buy "everything you need . . . to complete your 4th grade mission project," including miniature crosses, monks, wheelbarrows, trees, hay bales, straw bundles, farm animals, and Indians.
What these projects taught (and teach) students about the history of California in the mission era is less clear. Few representations demonstrated any understanding of the colonial context in which the missions were built. Indians, who were the objects of missionization, rarely appeared in the dioramas (though createamission.com does now make them available). And the architectural reproductions created by the most diligent students, featuring what looked like white-washed adobe walls and red-tiled roofs, bore little resemblance to the ramshackle structures that were the original Franciscan missions dotting the landscape in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century California.
In fact, the dioramas tell us more about the imaginations of early-twentieth-century "Anglos" than they reveal about what life was really like in Spanish or Mexican California. These imaginings, of which the reconstruction and celebration of missions was a signature, are the subject of Phoebe Kropp's monograph. Her illuminating book explains, if not for fourth graders, then at least for their parents, why those dioramas (and the reconstructed missions upon which they are based) look the way they do. Of broader significance, Kropp's study explores how Anglo "memory promoters" in the half-century from the 1880s to the 1930s used public commemorations and built environments [End Page 83] to revise the past, redesign the present, and reshape the future of Southern California.
In many respects, Kropp's explanation follows the interpretation of Carey McWilliams, who in 1946 gave the label "Spanish fantasy heritage" to the reconstruction of missions and the proliferation of "mission revival" private homes and public buildings. As McWilliams, Kropp, and numerous scholars in between have observed, this fixation with missions and fascination for what came to be called "Spanish colonial style" took hold in the early twentieth century. This was not what an earlier generation of California boosters had foreseen. In the first decades after Americans took control of the region, Anglo newcomers to Southern California showed little interest in the region's prior history. A half-century after their secularization, California's missions, never that impressive to begin with, had fallen into a state of advanced disrepair. In the 1880s, during Southern California's first great boom, Protestant boosters found nothing worth promoting about these deteriorating structures that when still in operation served Spanish-speaking Catholics. Promoters preferred to tout examples of newly constructed hotels and resorts that suggested how much their region was coming to look (and be) like the eastern United States. Modern amenities, it was assumed, appealed to tourists and transplants, who supposedly came to Southern California for climate and comfort, not history, especially since that history was not seen as their own. Over the next fifty years, however, the focus of promotion and the development of the built landscape shifted dramatically. Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century and gathering momentum in the first decades of the twentieth century, boosters increasingly romanticized the era of Spanish missions and Mexican ranchos. In public memory, this pre-American past came to be seen as "an idyllic golden age . . . a picturesque land of pious padres and placid Indians, of dashing caballeros and sultry senoritas" (p. 2). By the 1930s, idealized visions of "Spanish California" directed a range of historical commemorations, determined the itinerary of tourists, dominated the region's architecture...
