Join us for conversations that inspire, recognize, and encourage innovation and best practices in the education profession.
Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and more.
The Franciscan empire in California was the product of the Spanish colonial project in the New World. Catholic priests of the Franciscan order were sent to California to Christianize the local Native Americans, claiming their land and turning them into laborers for the missions in the process. Because Franciscan Christianization involved compelling the Indians to give up their lands, culture, native religious practices, and independence, it often could not be accomplished by voluntary conversion and instead necessitated the use of military force. Once the Native Americans were baptized at the missions they became unpaid laborers who were not free to leave–that is, they essentially became slaves. Between 1770 and 1834 over 90,000 California Indians (a third of the pre-contact population) were enslaved within the Franciscan missions. Rampant disease and high rates of mortality ravaged the mission Indian populations.
Understandably, many Indians resisted Spanish domination, and that resistance took a variety of forms. Some natives opted to sabotage the missions by laboring slowly and performing tasks poorly, while others resisted more actively by running away, assassinating priests, or even leading large-scale revolts. By the 1830s, the mission system had become untenable. The Mexican government passed a series of “secularization laws” designed to break up the Franciscan estates and distribute the property to surviving Native Americans. In practice, few Indians were granted land or resources from the missions because corrupt civil administrators plundered most of the wealth.
Lorenzo Asisara’s narrative details the abuses of the priests at the Santa Cruz Mission, exposing their fraudulent financial dealings, sexual exploitation of mission Indians, and reliance on harsh physical punishments such as whipping and beating. “Punishment” also provides a unique first-hand account of a riot among young Indian men in defiance of Padre Ramon Olbes. Asisara’s participation in this riot was not unprecedented within his family; in fact, his father, Venancio Llenco, also had a history of resisting Spanish domination, conspiring in the assassination of a priest in the Santa Cruz Mission in 1812.
Asisara was raised in the mission from birth, eventually serving as a sacristan, or assistant to the priests during church services. Once the mission was broken up, he married and found work as a shepherd and cattle herder. Widowed in 1845, he moved to Yerba Buena (San Francisco), where he was conscripted into the Mexican militia until Mexico surrendered California to the United States in 1846. Returning to Santa Cruz, Asisara joined his friend Jose Ricardo and moved onto a homestead that had been granted to the Indians upon the divestiture of the Santa Cruz Mission. In 1866, Asisara and Ricardo were driven off by whites anxious to claim possession of the land. Despite over fourteen years of service to the mission, Asisara received no lands or remuneration for his labor. He spent the rest of his life working as a ranch hand in Santa Cruz.
[1279] Edward Vischer, Indian Rancheria of José Antonio Venado, At San Luis Rey Mission, Near the Zanja. Caicha-Tribe, Quechumas (1868),
courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library.
Made about a decade before the first recording of Asisara’s testimony, this drawing illustrates the material circumstances of Native Americans on former California mission lands after secularization.
[1891] Rand McNally & Co., New Enlarged Scale Railroad and County Map of California Showing Every Railroad Station and Office in the State (1883),
courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division [LC Railroad Maps, 189].
Building railroads required extensive mapping of natural geographical features. Later maps such as this one showed industrial transportation and government communications outposts.
[5228] Anonymous, Montgomery Street, San Francisco, 1852 (n.d.),
courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-55762].
Rapid, mainly white immigration during the Gold Rush brought California to statehood in 1850, as a “free state” that forbade slavery. Yet demand for land and forced labor caused genocidal-scale population decline among California Indians.
[6856] Anonymous, San Gabriel Mission (1832),
courtesy of the California Historical Society.
Missions often maintained large herds of cattle as a reliable source of meat.
[7048] Lorenzo Asisara, “Punishment” [Narrative By Lorenzo Asisara, Translated And Edited By Edward D. Castillo] (1877).
Asisara’s narrative details abuses by the priests at the Santa Cruz Mission, exposing their fraudulent financial dealings, sexual exploitation of mission Indians, and reliance on harsh physical punishments.