The First Mission, and the Argument About It

Mission San Diego de Alcala was founded in July 1769, the first of the twenty one Franciscan missions of Alta California and the beginning of permanent European settlement on that coast. Its early years were hard: the site was moved inland to better water and land, and in 1775 a large Kumeyaay force attacked and burned it, killing the priest Luis Jayme, who is counted the first Christian martyr of California. It was rebuilt.

What the mission system did is the substance of the modern argument. Indigenous people who accepted baptism were not free to leave, were housed in crowded quarters, worked the fields and herds, and were subject to corporal punishment for absence or disobedience. Mortality from introduced disease was severe, and the indigenous population of coastal California fell catastrophically during the mission period and the decades after secularisation in 1834.

Junipero Serra, who founded the mission and led the system, was canonised in 2015. The Vatican and his defenders presented him as a man who defended indigenous people against soldiers and civil officials and who wrote a formal representation on their behalf. Many descendants of the mission communities and many historians answered that whatever his intentions, he built and defended an institution of coerced labour and cultural destruction. Statues of him were removed from several Californian sites in 2020. The atlas records both positions rather than choosing.