Greenwashed: Identity and Landscape at the California Missions’
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by IUPUIScholarWorks ‘GREENWASHED: IDENTITY AND LANDSCAPE AT THE CALIFORNIA MISSIONS’ Elizabeth KRYDER-REID Indiana University, Indianapolis (IUPUI), 410 Cavanaugh Hall, 425 University Blvd., Indianapolis, IN 56202, USA [email protected] Abstract: This paper explores the relationship of place and identity in the historical and contemporary contexts of the California mission landscapes, conceiving of identity as a category of both analysis and practice (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). The missions include twenty-one sites founded along the California coast and central valley in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The missions are all currently open to the public and regularly visited as heritage sites, while many also serve as active Catholic parish churches. This paper offers a reading of the mission landscapes over time and traces the materiality of identity narratives inscribed in them, particularly in ‘mission gardens’ planted during the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. These contested places are both celebrated as sites of California's origins and decried as spaces of oppression and even genocide for its indigenous peoples. Theorized as relational settings where identity is constituted through narrative and memory (Sommers 1994; Halbwachs 1992) and experienced as staged, performed heritage, the mission landscapes bind these contested identities into a coherent postcolonial experience of a shared past by creating a conceptual metaphor of ‘mission as garden’ that encompasses their disparities of emotional resonance and ideological meaning. Keywords: California mission, garden, postcolonial, narrative, conceptual metaphor, sacred, secular, heritage, identity, cultural memory Introduction 1823 along the California coast and inland valley from San Diego to Sonoma, the twenty-one missions Archaeologists tackling questions about the relationship were the primary vehicle of Spanish colonization of of landscape and identity are challenged not only by the the western coast of North America. The mission problematic nature of identity itself, but also by the system was overseen by the Franciscan Order with complex web of human and institutional relationships support from military presidios stationed strategically inscribed in and embodied by place. These challenges are along the coast, and its purpose was the salvation exacerbated in prehistoric settings with their paucity of through baptism of California’s indigenous peoples while contextual sources, but in contemporary heritage sites the also claiming the territory for Spain. In colonial times task of seeking to understand constructed and negotiated 127 Franciscans served in Alta California, nearly all of identities is conversely almost overwhelmed by the vast whom were born and educated in Spain. A relatively amount of text, images, material culture, and small number of missionaries were posted at each ethnographic evidence, as well as the broader political mission and served as members of their religious order discourses associated with the sites. Archaeology offers under a President of the California missions. Indian valuable insight into understanding identity at officials, called alcaldes and mayordomos, who helped contemporary heritage sites, however, in the investigation oversee the social control and labor at the missions, were of the materiality of place. Not only do archaeologists selected by the padres and elected by the neophytes pay attention to the material patterning of sites, but also (Hackel 1997). The economic premise of the vast the discursive practices through which heritage sites are missions was to create self-sufficient agricultural and produced and consumed (Shackel 2001; Shackeland ranching enterprises that, in theory, would eventually be Gadsby 2011; Smith and Waterton 2009). They theorize returned to the native peoples. Mexican independence this material patterning in ways that probe the deeper (1821) followed instead, and California subsequently conceptual metaphors and narratives of sites, as well as became an American territory with the Treaty of the ideologies they reify (Meskell 2002a). This reading of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and a state in 1850. The the California mission landscapes investigates identity missions were ultimately restored to the Catholic Church mediated through heritage sites by taking a semiotic in 1865 (Hackel 2005; Monroy 1990). Today all the approach to their narrative, staging, and performance. I missions are open to the public, and some, such as San argue that the mission landscapes bind contested identi- Juan Capistrano, are among the most popular tourist sites ties into a coherent postcolonial experience of a shared in California. At present, all but two of the missions are past, despite the disparities of meaning and emotional owned by the Catholic Church; most are local parishes, resonance implicated in the missions’ colonial history. one a seminary, and one the University chapel on the campus of Santa Clara University. Two of the missions, Historical Background San Francisco Solano (in Sonoma, CA) and La Purísima, are California State Parks. Some are relatively The California missions are well-known sites and wellpreserved, others wholly reconstructed or symbols of the state’s history. Constructed from 1769- reimagined, and many a blend of the two. For example, 83 LANDSCAPE AND IDENTITY: ARCHAEOLOGY AND HUMAN GEOGRAPHY Mission Santa Clara has seen five different church Theorizing Identity and Heritage buildings in three locations. The current mission, constructed in 1929 after the 1835 structure was Bringing the question of identity into this reading of the destroyed by fire, is a loose interpretation of the earlier landscape raises several interesting theoretical issues and building (Kimbro and Costello 2009, 198-201). In offers an opportunity to explore a central question of this contrast, San Juan Bautista and Santa Barbara have much volume, namely how can landscape help us understand of their original architecture intact. In addition to the the processes and narratives of identity formation? clergy leadership and parish administrators, the missions Heritage as it is framed at the missions, however, is not have varying organizational structures for staffing and simply about identity labels or even a sense of affiliation, managing tourist experiences at the sites. Some, such as connectedness, or cohesion. Instead identity is, as San Juan Capistrano and San José, are run by private not- Brubaker and Cooper (2000) remind us, a for-profits, while other missions are operated by the parish with volunteer docents. The two California State category of practice…used by “lay” actors Park properties have professional staff as well as in…everyday settings to make sense of themselves, of affiliated friends groups. their activities, of what they share with, and how they differ from, others. It is also used by political Scholars such as Kevin Starr (1973; 1985), Phoebe Kropp entrepreneurs to persuade people to understand (2006), David Hurst Thomas (1991), Edna Kimbro and themselves, their interests, and their predicaments in a Julia Costello (2009) have argued that the missions, like certain way, to persuade certain people that they are many heritage sites, are multivalent. They are ‘symbols (for certain purposes) “identical” with one another of the heritage of California’s Native American, Spanish, and at the same time different from others, and to Mexican, and Anglo-American peoples, [that] resist any organize and justify collective action along certain simple, single interpretation. (Kimbro and Costello 2009, lines (Brubaker and Cooper 2000, 4-5). 4).’ In contrast to the complexity of this two and a half century history, the contemporary mission landscapes Furthermore, because this constitution of identity is a convey a relatively simple rendition of that history in the social process, not just an intellectual practice, its form of the mission garden. Where the colonial landscape analysis offers the opportunity ‘to explain the processes was distinctly utilitarian, the romanticized colonial and mechanisms through which what has been called the revival gardens created in the late nineteenth and “political fiction” of the “nation” -- or of the “ethnic twentieth century were patterned after the centuries-old group,” “race,” or other putative “identity” can European tradition of patio gardens, versions of which crystallize, at certain moments, as a powerful, compelling are found in monasteries, palaces, and residences around reality (Brubaker and Cooper 2000, 5).’ the Mediterranean (Brown 1988; Kryder-Reid 2010). These mission gardens are antithetical to the colonial The mission landscapes are ideal spaces in which to landscape in many regards. Where the largely arid examine this constitution of identity, particularly in the colonial mission landscape was brown and dusty unless highly controlled and interpreted spaces of the mission irrigated, today’s gardens have luxuriant green lawns, garden. Margaret Sommers’ (1994) theorizing of identity intersecting paths, and the vibrant colors of cascading and narrative is useful for deconstructing these designed vines and edged flowerbeds. Similarly, while today’s landscapes because it ‘builds from the premise that gardens appear largely empty save for the visiting narrativity and relationality are conditions of social being, tourists, the colonial missions were busy, teeming