What's the deal with these missions in California anyway?

California | Mission | To Make Much of Time

UPDATED: 1/22/2023

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In our California honeymoon blog series, we described visiting three missions. You can read more about our visits to Mission San Francisco Solano , Sonoma ( blog here ), as well as both Mission San Juan Bautista (in San Juan Bautista) and Carmel Mission Basilica ( blog here ). I find the history of the missions fascinating so wanted to also explain that. And as is generally the case with history, there are multiple sides and perspectives.

I lived in California and because elementary school history tends to mainly focus on local history, I grew up visiting and learning about the missions when I lived in California and remember in particular a visit to Mission San Juan Capistrano . The mission is known for its annual Miracle of the Swallows on March 19th where massive numbers of the birds return after wintering in Argentina. The missions were developed and managed by the Spanish and often lived in and worked by the local Native American populations. Any merging of different cultures and priorities is bound to have winners, losers (however each are defined), and unintended consequences. To try to unpack both perspectives, below is a general overview and then more information on the Spanish and Native American perspectives.

An overview of the missions

The 21 missions were built over the course of half a century and run from San Diego in the south to Sonoma in the north. You can view a map of the missions here. Each mission has a unique building style, most are active churches today, most have been largely or partially rebuilt as time has taken its toll.

A brief history (from Spain’s perspective)

The Spanish began founding missions in 1769. Spain had first claimed parts of modern-day California in 1542 when Juan Cabrillo sailed from modern San Francisco to San Diego. Spain was not particularly active in its control of the region until the mid 1700s when Charles III of Spain began fearing that Spain was losing ground to Britain and Russia in America, and he had the first missions established to assert control. Father Junipero Serra, a Franciscan missionary, was responsible for leading a missionary expedition with a focus on teaching the local Native American population Catholicism. The plot was thus: convert the Native Americans to Catholicism, claim them as Spanish citizens, and maintain control of the territory through population size. Intermarriages between the Spanish and Native Americans were encouraged to further increase the population. And so the first missions were borne. The history didn’t stop there and the really short version goes like this: Mexico gained independence from Spain, Mexico worried about Spanish control of the missions, which retained Spanish loyalty, Mexico secularized the missions in a power move and basically broke up the institution.

A brief history (from the perspective of Native Americans)

Ah yes, history has at least two sides. And, of course, there were also several different Native American populations living in California with their own communities, histories, and values. The foundation of the missions was a plan straight out of the book of colonization: teach the native population in the ways, religion, and mores of the Spanish. The Native Americans moved into the missions to learn Catholicism and Spanish and then were sent to labor in the fields, kitchens, and on other building projects.

A tangible outcome is that generations were raised in the ways of a culture and religion not their own, which meant important traditions were changed or lost. At the same time, the Spanish introduced diseases for which the Native Americans lacked immunity, wrecking havoc on their health and decimating the native population. In researching to write this blog, I found a dearth of information and conflicting reports (some singing the praises of the Spanish influence on the Native Americans), which really is not all that surprising and best summarized in the quote “history is written by the victors,” (commonly mis-attributed to Churchill and of unknown origin but nevertheless a truism). One fact is certain, prior to the construction of the Spanish missions in 1769, there were an estimated 300,000 native people of California. At the end of the mission era in 1834, there were only an estimated 20,000. Armed conflicts, disease, and other minor factors had reduced the native population of California to a little less that 7% of the original population and effectively eliminated hundreds of years of culture, religion, art, and language from the area.