California's Past, Present Echo in Missions

By JAMES RICCI

Aug. 31, 1997 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

SAN DIEGO —

The journey begins here, where modern California began.

Here, on once barren, now verdant Presidio Hill, Junipero Serra founded the first Spanish mission in California in the summer of 1769. His companions were sick, and he faced bleak prospects, but his faith was as a mule. In time, the California missions would number 21 and stretch like beads on a rosary from San Diego to Santa Barbara to Sonoma.

To travel the chain of missions today--to finger the beads meditatively in anno Domini 1997--is to venture deep into the psyche of California, where everything from wine grapes to place names that nest so kindly in the ear derive from the mission past.

Presidio Hill is the rightful starting place.

At 5:41 on a summer morning, with dawn lightening the woolly marine layer above, two figures emerge from the darkness near the giant brick cross that commemorates the first mission’s founding. Melissa Ward, a thin, pale woman of 24 with serpentine tattoos on both arms, has come to take pictures in the earliest light. Her companion, 32-year-old Les Uptain, has brought along a bottle of water and three fabric-covered balls to practice juggling.

“I have been wanting to come up here a long time,” Ward says. “It’s kind of, like, ancient. It’s kind of, like, wow.”

In the expanding light, Ward photographs the cross. She photographs the great bronze statues of a pensive padre and a peering Indian. She photographs the ruins of the Spanish presidio.

What she cannot photograph, however, is any trace of Serra’s original church, the heart of that precarious, portentous Spanish settlement. What’s left of it has been buried beneath the grass of Presidio Hill. Nobody knows quite where that first church was.

The past is like that, hard to pin down.

People hunger, however, for what Spanish colonial historian David J. Weber calls “a usable past,” one that makes the present more livable. If there is no obviously defining past significance to draw on for this purpose, people will devise one.

Something like this happened with the California missions, four of which--San Fernando, San Miguel, San Juan Bautista and San Jose--mark their 200th anniversaries this year. San Fernando will celebrate its founding with a history symposium, entertainment and religious services next weekend.

Along the modern-day approximation of El Camino Real, which linked the missions, one encounters an array of Californians who embody the range of meanings people ascribe to these monuments: the elderly priest who crusades for Junipero Serra’s canonization. The television actor for whom the missions exude a universal sacredness. The Native American family whose relationship to the missions is a profound and contradictory mixture of sorrow, anger and love.

The journey offers some clues to where California’s missions fit amid the necessary truths and necessary myths of a society ceaselessly reinventing itself since 1769.

Remnants of a Time Long Vanished

The past doesn’t survive on its own, but through human effort, mental and physical.

Outside the oldest building in California, John Knowles is nailing replacement staves into a wooden divider with a pneumatic gun. The divider will go back into Mission San Diego’s Casa del Padre Serra, a rustic enclosure 18 feet wide by 40 feet long, where its namesake is presumed to have stayed on occasion.

In 1774, five years after its founding, Mission San Diego was moved from Presidio Hill to this site, where it prospered and grew. After its heyday, the mission all but disappeared because of earthquakes, weather and neglect. It has had to be almost entirely rebuilt this century.

Only the Serra House, which was part of the padres’ spartan quarters, somehow survived and remained in more or less continuous use. Knowles and Tom West, partners in Sun-Tek Building Contractors of Encinitas, are seismically retrofitting the old place.

The 38-year-old Knowles works shirtless in the bright sun. He is muscular and tanned. Thick yellow hair is tied in a ponytail beneath the bill of his backward-turned baseball cap.

“Our whole goal,” he says, “is to look like we were never here. It’s an art to match the craftsmanship of what was there before.”

To set the seismic supports, Knowles and his co-workers have drilled through the adobe and sucked out the dirt that Indian laborers formed into bricks 220 years ago. The old dirt is saved for refashioning into new bricks for reconstruction projects at the mission. “It sure messes up the Shop-Vac, but it’s just the best dirt,” Knowles says. “It’s the right combination of sand and clay and binders like manure and straw and blood.”

Knowles says Sun-Tek gave the diocese of San Diego an especially good price, $200,000, for the work. “We wanted to do the project,” he says. “It’s good for business--it sounds great to say, ‘We did the oldest building in California.’ ”

But working on the Serra Room also has personal meaning. It becomes clearest when his hands are soiled with materials mixed and shaped by long-vanished Indians of a hard-to-imagine past.

“I can’t help but think of the people who were here before,” Knowles says, “especially when you see a thumbprint or an old tool. Maybe someday, a long time from now, someone will find a tool in there, and say, ‘Wow, look at this knife,’ and it will turn out to be mine.”

A Quiet Disturbed

Down in the quiet solitude of the tile lavanderia of Mission San Luis Rey near Oceanside, it is easy to envision Indian women of two centuries ago hard at work. Here they scrubbed clothes while water diverted from the surrounding hills poured from the stone mouths of gargoyles and made its way toward the sunken orchards of what was by all accounts one of the most prosperous missions.

From high above comes a faint droning. It swells and fades and swells again, now persistently.

It’s no celestially intoned blessing of the memory of Indian washerwomen, however.

It’s the Goodyear blimp, and what it has come to bless is ESPN 2’s X-Games street luge competition.

Across the street from the mission, leather-clad racers careen down a hill at 50-plus mph on overgrown skateboards. Sun-hatted spectators, more curious than enthusiastic, aim video cameras. A public address announcer spurs the undemonstrative crowd and plugs event sponsors such as Mountain Dew.

“Nothin’s more intense than slammin’ a Dew!” he booms.

High above the scene, ignored, old Mission San Luis Rey glows white as a Communion wafer.

Spiritual Experience

The next day, 66 miles to the northwest, Mission San Juan Capistrano is overrun by tourists and attendees at the mission’s Flower and Garden Festival and Fashion Show.

Capistrano is the most famous of the California missions. It accounts for more than a fourth of the estimated 2 million people who visit all the missions combined each year. The visitors come to Capistrano to look for the celebrated swallows. They come to stare into the maw of the ruin of the great stone mission church with its orthodontia of scaffolding.

The church, the most ambitious structure ever undertaken at a mission, stood just six years before collapsing in the great earthquake of December 1812 and killing 40 Indian worshipers. Now, at a cost of $7 million, grout is being injected into the cavities left by age, weather and quake-loosened stones, to preserve the ruin.

The sunlit gaiety and recorded rock music contrast sharply with the dim, cool interior of the mission’s original chapel. The little church is the oldest in California. It’s called “Father Serra’s Church” because it is the only one in existence where Serra is known to have said Mass.

As the fashion show announcer’s voice bubbles into the church--”Helen is wearing a pastel pink suit with a scooped neckline . . . “--Gloria San Jose lights a votive candle.

San Jose, a 35-year-old Los Angeles social worker, was raised in Madrid. Although not religious, she says she believes in personal growth and in respecting all cultures, and something about the mission moves her spiritually.

She lights the candle in remembrance of what her fellow Spaniards wrought at San Juan Capistrano, both good and bad. “I think the people who came here from Spain, they thought they were doing good. I’m not so sure,” she says. “In Spain, people always criticize Americans for what they did to the Indians, but I don’t think they realize what we did here.”

Role in Cultural Change

Because of its fame and popularity among tourists, San Juan Capistrano vividly reflects the transformed role the missions have played in California’s cultural transition from Native American to Spanish to Mexican to American.

From the start, the missions were anachronisms, the last colonizing spasms of a dying Spanish empire. They operated briefly, the first for about 70 years, the last for 30. Judged by their original purpose, which was to Christianize the Indians and turn them into productive colonial citizens, thus holding the land for Spain, they failed impressively.

Yet many, notably San Fernando, San Luis Rey and San Gabriel, flourished as giant agricultural trading preserves with armies of unpaid Indians providing the back muscle. Others, such as San Francisco and Soledad, had to struggle against bad weather, bad luck and local Indians’ resistant to regimentation and Christian ways.

At all the missions, agricultural and religious practices gradually displaced the Indians’ hunter-gatherer culture. Moreover, smallpox, measles and other diseases brought by the Spaniards cut like giant scythes through the Indian populations. The padres’ passion for souls came with a microbiological embrace as deadly as it was unintended.

The mission era ended in the 1830s, when independent Mexico “secularized” the missions, and their lands were absorbed into private ranchos. Most of these were lost to Americans after the United States seized California in 1848.

During this time and for 3 1/2 decades afterward, the mission buildings went largely to ruin. Settlers carried off the roof tiles and scraped the gold leaf from the altar reredos. Missions became taverns, stables, hog barns.

By the final decades of the 19th century, with the Mexicans and Indians marginalized or dying out, the missions could be safely idealized as the Americans went in search of a usable history for their new home. The romanticization of the missions began.

Helen Hunt Jackson’s best-selling novel “Ramona,” first published in 1884, much imitated and still in print, was the most influential re-imagining of the California missions and the Spanish past. It traced the melodramatic fate of the beautiful half-Indian Ramona and her Indian lover as humane Spanish traditions succumbed to crass Yankee ways. A Ramona pageant has been staged at Hemet every year since 1921.

John S. McGroarty’s epic “The Mission Play” debuted at Mission San Gabriel on April 29, 1912, and played there for 16 consecutive years. Said to have been the most attended American theater work before World War II, it further tenderized California’s early history for easy mastication by the Anglo-American imagination.

The missions became associated not with dusty agricultural tedium, religious asceticism or sick Indians, but with a slower, more spiritual and sensuous way of life--a Mediterranean way of life more in harmony with the climate and geography than were the traditions the Anglos brought with them from the east.

“They didn’t become Catholics,” says California historian and state librarian Kevin Starr, “but they learned to drink a little wine and became enamored of a less pressured, less puritanical way of life.”

The fanciful Spanish past became a principal selling point for land developers who lured great masses of Americans to come live the good life in what many an advertising circular called “The Land of Ramona.”

Perspective That Comes From Age

Three times during 9 a.m. Sunday Mass at Mission San Gabriel, nine miles from downtown Los Angeles, the ritual murmurs rising to the old ceiling beams have to be suspended while a train rumbles down the railroad tracks just on the other side of what used to be El Camino Real. The parishioners of San Gabriel are used to the noise. They call it “the Southern Pacific blessing.”

The historical significance of the missions may be subject to differing perspectives, but their continuing everyday relevance abides in the fact that 18 of the 21 are, or are attached to, functioning parishes. “The enduring meaning of the missions,” says Caltech history professor William Deverell, “has got to be on the individual level, among the people who go to them to worship.”

After Mass, 57-year-old Gene Rapp pauses during his walk home to explain what it is that impels him to attend Mass at the old mission rather than the modern church next door.

“Going to a church that’s been around a couple of hundred years gives you a better sense of what you’re really doing,” he says. “You think, gosh, how many people have been here, and what have they been through over the years.”

One Man’s Crusade

El Camino Real threads through expansive Mission San Fernando and abbreviated, city-bound Mission San Buenaventura in Ventura, and winds to Mission Santa Barbara, the second most visited in the chain.

On a corridor along the mission’s exquisitely gardened exterior quadrangle is a doorway beneath a sign that reads, “Postulation.” It leads to Father Noel Moholy’s large, one-room office, the nerve center of an arduous, single-minded crusade.

For nearly 40 years, Moholy has led a struggle against Vatican bureaucracy, scant resources and outspoken opposition from some Native Americans to have Junipero Serra declared a saint.

Moholy is a small, pale, white-haired Franciscan of 81. The atmosphere of his office, with its gleaming mahogany desk and Oriental rug, is one of civility and graciousness. It belies the nature of his work, which, he says, is “strenuous and demanding and tedious. There is no end of the tedium.”

Through his efforts, Serra was declared “venerable” in 1983 and beatified two years later. Beatification, the last step before canonization, required proof of a miracle; in this case, that of a St. Louis nun adjudged to have been cured of a terminal illness by praying to Serra.

For canonization, however, “we need another miracle, and it has to be another miracle that took place after beatification,” Moholy says. “We have any number of cases in which people are praying to Serra for a variety of help.”

On the wall behind his desk is a large painting of Serra. It is a work of pure fancy. No one knows what the “apostle of California” looked like, except that he was 5-foot-2 and suffered from a recurrent leg malady. Although he can’t picture Serra, Moholy feels as though he knows him. Having lived 11 years longer than Serra did, he still refers to the missionary as “Old Man,” as did the mission Indians, who called Serra “El Viejo.”

“The more I live with him, the more I enjoy him and the more I think we’re soul mates,” Moholy says. “I talk very bluntly to him. I tell him, ‘Look, Old Man, I’m not getting any younger and if you plan to see this through, you’d better get going.’ ”

A Child’s Footprint

At Mission Santa Ines, which clings by Spanish fingernails to the edge of the Danish-dominated town of Solvang, the urban slickness of the redone missions of Southern California falls away.

The mission, overlooking a swath of the pastoral Santa Ynez Valley, is roughhewn and human-scale. The church’s pine beams are original to 1814. So are the nicked, wear-scooped floor tiles and the altar decorations, painted by Indians who used pigments from the juices of berries, cactus and roots.

On the floor of a chapel off the old church lies perhaps the simplest, most evocative memento of the mission past. It is an 1814-vintage floor tile bearing the imprint, not more than three inches long, of an Indian baby’s foot.

No one knows who the baby was. No one knows if he or she was carried off by disease soon after a fond mother or a smiling padre pressed the foot into the still-wet clay, or lived to a scarred old age. All modern visitors have to go on is the mute, eloquent little footprint, and their own musings about what it means to be forgotten.

A Distance Forever Seen--and Lost

Few of the missions have escaped being girdled tight by the cities and towns that grew up around them. Yet even the most urbanized is haunted by the ghost of vastness, the shade of grand-scale enterprise lost forever. From the high ground on which they typically were built, the missions seem to be gazing into a far distance, even when their view is obstructed at the tips of their noses.

Today, this sense of vastness is most apparent at Mission San Antonio de Padua, near Jolon in Monterey County. North of Missions La Purisima, San Luis Obispo and San Miguel, it stands with its back against tall hills and looks out on a wide, flat, empty valley that gives the wind a long running start.

The evocative openness has been preserved because the mission is within the boundaries of the U.S. Army’s Ft. Hunter Liggett, a 165,000-acre preserve used over the years for large-scale training and weapons testing.

Its remoteness makes San Antonio one of the less-visited missions. It has the dusty, ad hoc look of an abandoned place of work. Things seem to have been left where they were last used. Ancient purple still stains its brick wine vat. In the mission’s bare dirt quadrangle, a fountain trickles listlessly, and high sparse weeds vie with rosebushes. No one would think of having a fashion show here.

Long gone are the 1,300 Indian workers and the 17,000 head of livestock they tended. The very spaciousness of the setting makes their absence more palpable. On a broiling summer afternoon, insects skirling under the convento’s eaves and trees pitching in the unobstructed wind seem to call after them still.

Meaning Rings True Today

People who have visited many of the California missions often pick Mission San Carlos Borromeo in Carmel, Junipero Serra’s eventual headquarters, as the most beautiful. It is a gorgeous, fussed-over contrast to its closest neighbor to the south, the ghostly forlorn and unreconstructed Mission Soledad.

Like many of the old missions, San Carlos Borromeo is much in demand for weddings. The waiting list runs to 18 months.

On wedding days at Carmel, a curious thing happens. As the mission bells peal and the sound of the wedding march swells from the open church doors, tourists begin to gather like starlings in the courtyard. And when the bridal party emerges into sunlight, the tourists--total strangers--lapse into wedding day smiles and take photographs and sometimes weep.

On a Saturday afternoon, with a completed wedding dissipating in the courtyard and a second wedding marshaling in the adjacent mission buildings, 35-year-old Brian Thomas surveys the scene from a discreet distance. He is a teacher and actor who lives in Petaluma. Now head of the English department at Marin Academy in San Rafael, he played the character Robert in “The Cosby Show” spinoff, “A Different World.”

“I always get a certain sense at any place that has a spiritual component to it,” he says with a shrug, explaining why he is standing in this place, watching these strangers and their ceremony.

“Black churches are like that for me too. I always get really weepy at them. These missions, even though probably a lot of strange things went on at them, have that special appeal that comes from being sacred to someone. I know that people will try to create sacred rituals anywhere they are, but ritualization here--because this has been here so long--just has more authority.”

A bit later, inside the old church, the wedding of Kirsten Sebok and Clint Faria is in full ceremonial unfurl. It’s a very traditional affair. Classical music plays as seven bridesmaids precede Kirsten down the aisle.

And standing a few feet from the bones of Serra, who is buried in the church’s sanctuary, 22-year-old Kirsten and 23-year-old Clint vow to love each other and to stay together until they die.

Neither Clint, who is a corrections officer at Soledad State Prison, nor Kirsten, who has just graduated from Cal State Chico and will begin training as an elementary schoolteacher, would have considered any other church for their wedding.

To begin with, it’s their home parish. Clint was baptized here during this year’s Easter vigil ceremony. Kirsten hopes their marriage will “last a long time and be strong and happy and wonderful and fun.”

That was the most important reason for choosing the mission church. Somehow its sheer historical weight might imprint their union with a permanence that will withstand all of the dissolvent powers of life in present-day California.

Monday: The journey along El Camino Real continues.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

El Camino Real (‘The Royal Road’)

El Camino Real started as a dirt road in the 1700s connecting the 21 missions. It eventually became a stagecoach route, and today roughly parallels U.S. Highway 101.

Order Founded

1. San Diego de Alcala, 1769

2. San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo, 1770

3. San Antonia de Padua, 1771

4. San Gabriel Arcangel, 1771

5. San Luis Obispo de Tolosa, 1772

6. San Francisco de Asis, 1776

7. San Juan Capistrano, 1776

8. Santa Clara de Asis, 1777

9. San Buenaventura, 1782

10. Santa Barbara, 1786

11. La Purisma Concepcion, 1787