Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California

In this volume, fourteen interdisciplinary scholars of southwestern U.S. borderlands examine the communities formed by the European incursion into Alta California from initial colonization in 1769 to the U.S. take-over in 1849. Their focus is on the short-lived and well-documented Spanish Franciscan missions, where the invaders (including indigenous Mexicans, Africans, Russians, and Anglos) initiated contact with diverse native peoples. How did the indigenes face the challenges of being overrun by the aliens, resettled into proselytizing institutions, controlled by foreign powers, stricken by contagious diseases, and undermined by despoiled environments? The authors problematize rather than essentialize the concept of “communities”—regarding them as “dynamic,” i.e., “unstable” (p. 270) “entities of belonging, ... continuously in the process of becoming and ... constantly forged and reformulated” (p. 3). By examining material remains of these communities and written sources, the authors emphasize social relations among these peoples. Before contact the indigenous peoples of the region lived in “orderly anarchy” (p. 193). The hegemonic disruption forced them to refashion their communities and identities. Tens of thousands of native peoples were recruited from over a thousand villages to the several dozen missions, asistencias, and presidios. The communities they entered and produced were multicultural, housing many far-flung native peoples at a single location among friars, soldiers, settlers, and traders. Settled into “overlapping or nested” settlements—“imagined communities based on religious faith”—the indigenes tried to establish new social arrangements grounded in old paradigms, with their “sense of belonging” enhanced through rituals and feasting created by “blending” traditional and imported religious institutions (pp. 18, 19, 23, 35). Mourning ceremonies were especially important in fostering and maintaining a sense of shared identity under the jealous eyes of Catholic authorities. Native responses to missions included many patterns: “accommodation, apparent conversion, persistence, passive resistance, withdrawal from the mission, and even active resistance through violent rebellion” (p. 62). Native inhabitants displayed their agency by moving back and forth from missions to indigenous settlements, obtaining furloughs to attend fiestas, marriages, births, and deaths. When passes could not be acquired, natives became fugitives, seeking refuge among their own kind, with whom they maintained economic and political ties. Marriages were paramount in creating networks among Indian peoples, especially with people of shared language and territory

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