Last summer, I was fortunate enough to travel to Austria and visit Mauthousen, a concentration camp that my grandfather helped liberate during the Second World War. That experience contributed infinitely to my understanding of history and the terror that the Mauthousen prisoners endured. I found the expedition to Mission San Luis Rey de Francia equally interesting and enlightening in its own way. While the WWII concentration camp’s horrors were well documented and profusely displayed, the mission’s most revealing qualities were revealed in the opposite manor. Most of the evil deeds of the mission system were omitted, allowing the public to assume the best of the padres. The concentration camp’s historical approach to the material was one of a horrible education that might lead to future peace; the mission’s approach was one of falsehoods and of a utopian institution conducting necessary reforms.
The modern Catholic system of power has led to many hidden horrors and tweaked memories. While the mission’s displayed documents and artifacts are necessary clues to understand the mission’s historical message, a greater clue lies in the architecture of the mission itself. The mission had the functional setup of an all inclusive village, with walls all around, up to 6 feet thick. Other buildings that have a similar architectural structure are prison camps, fortresses and prisons. The mission is more accurately a combination of all three. Though the pristine white walls do not immediately signal a feeling of enclosure, one has only to look at the gates that lye within the mission, with their dagger sharp points and the mood surely changes.
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The thick walls protect small linking rooms that surround the gardens and cemeteries. These small rooms are where the Indians live and worked, unless they were farming crops outside the walls under the padre’s command. The church is in the shape of the cross. It was colorful and extravagant, as most cathedrals are. The tall ceiling inspires a sense of awe and can make any man who steps foot inside feel small. I can only imagine the star-struck Indians being herded into the large room, full of candles, gold, statues and music.
It must have been a curious and also hideous event. I can imagine a native marveling at the structure and still regretful that he / she would spend most of their life being forced into it. Inside the mission grounds there were very few representations of natives or symbols of Indians culture. One room was dedicated to salute the Luiseno’s culture, ironically the same culture that mission system tried to eradicate. This building was poorly maintained, sparely decorated or educationally equipped.
The educational documentary film was not even running. The building merely housed a few pictures of recent events were Luiseno natives planted trees on the mission grounds. It had a few tidbits about the culture and a couple artifacts. There was only one portrait of a native. This portrait was of a native woman in an American flag dress.
The audacity of the missions struck me, in the way a native must have felt after being whipped by a padre. The fact that they put a picture of a native woman already assimilated into American life, speaks volumes on the message they wanted to portray. They wanted to portray that the missions were successful in conquering the Luiseno and bringing them into modern life. I found other pictures of natives, located in a hall next to the church. These pictures were mostly of the padres sitting and the natives were laboring under the padre’s rule. In contrast, one could hardly miss the representations of the priests, saints, martyrs that adorned the church.
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The American History was built under several wars, people suffering, and religious conflicts. Starting with Christopher Columbus’ first voyage to the Asian continent in 1492, his plans were to find a huge amount of wealth to make Spain rich, and also bring the Christianity to the new land. Frustrated in fail while trying to find Asian, instead he found the American continent. Such fact Columbus ...
I waltz amongst many visitors that had arrived only to pay homage to the westerly roots of the Catholic Church. There were many statues and representatives saluting the saints, priests and Virgin Mary. Individual overhead lighting provided a heavenly light amongst the figures that were displayed in a room of their own. It was obvious that great care had been taken in that room.
Each artifact had an engraved informational plate below, to tell the history. Because of the glorified version of the mission visitors never got a grasp of the negative omens the mission produced. The “guides” did not help either. My guide said that the reason that the Indians had a monument and not grave stones was to prevent the Indians from knowledge of the graves locations, which would lead to possible “theft.” He also proudly cheered that the mission was the only one that was never burned down. He implied a utopian agrarian society where the “Indians free to come and go.” And that they were happy even though they had in habited the area for “hundreds of years.” One educated in these matters would assert a longer stay of inhabitancy of the land. They would also reject the notion that the Indians were free to come and go.
They were indeed not free and were required to attend church and work the land in a manor similar to prisoners do in a modern day correctional facility. They were in a preverbal chain gang, managed by an overseer, similar to the slaves that managed plantations in early the American South. The fact that the natives actually did the all the work in the mission system was not mentioned, even though the church was very proud of its great wealth and agriculture. The Indians were forced to work without any reward, accept the removal of their culture and less physical abuse. The church leaves out the accounts of the spread of European disease to the Indians, the reason that most Indians were driven to the mission.
The mission also regretfully omitted the purpose of the missions as places of reform, to assimilate the natives and eliminate their “heathen, devilish” culture. The mission does not present a historical portrayal of events. One only receives a manifest-destine Eurocentric glimpse at the past. Visitors walk a way with a sense of one-sided history that only reveals its implied horrors to the educated eye. There is a sense of reverence and pride in the Church, rather than remorse. On the church walls it even quotes St.
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Francis as saying, “Lord, Make me and instrument of your peace.” It is a shame that only visitors that enter the mission with a base knowledge of the Californian history can read between the lines and see the unmentioned horrors. I believe the Mission San Luis Rey does more harm than good in a historical sense. This mission allows the church a medium to excuse and pervert past misdeeds and even gives the Catholic visitors a sense of pride to attend, when they should be in morning for the horrible actions predicated against the natives.
