Junipero Serra Quotes

Detention. That’s what you get at the Junipero Serra Mission Academy when you sucker punch your stepbrother on school grounds and a teacher happens to notice.

It is but another instance of injustice, Fray Felipe said. For twenty years we, of the missions, have been subjected to it, and it grows. The sainted Junipero Serra invaded this land when other men feared, and at San Diego de Alcala he built the first mission of what became a chain, thus giving an empire to the world. Our mistake was that we prospered. We did the work, and others reap the advantages. They began taking out mission-lands from us, lands we had cultivated, which had formed a wilderness and which my brothers had turned into gardens and orchards. They robbed us of worldly goods. And not content with that they now are persecuting us. The mission-empire is doomed, caballero. The time is not far distant when mission roofs will fall in and walls crumble away. Some day people will look at the ruins and wonder how such a thing could come to pass.

Some 310,000 Indians lived within the boundaries of the present state in 1769. Approximately 60,000 lived in the coastal region between San Diego and San Francisco where Serra hoped to establish a series of missions.84 The Luiseño and then the Acjachemen resided to the immediate north of the Kumeyaay. The Gabrielino occupied the coastal plain of Los Angeles, the Chumash inhabited an expanse from Malibu to San Luis Obispo, the Yokuts lived in the Central Valley, and the Salinan and Ohlone settled the central coast between Santa Barbara and the Golden Gate. The Pomo, Coast Miwok, Wappo, Patwin, and Eastern Miwok lived in the regions immediately north and east of the San Francisco Bay Area.85 Although Alta California successfully supported a large human population, it was hardly disease-free. Even before the Spaniards arrived, a wide variety of infections were common, all of which led to high mortality

Serra was a mix of light and darkness; he was a man of great vision and great blindness, of immense zeal and immense stubbornness. In his own mind, his goals justified his treatment of the Indians, whom he loved as the children he did not have and whom he disciplined with the same ardor with which he disciplined himself. His vision, like that of many of his eighteenth century contemporaries, demanded intolerance against those with different ideas about this world and the next. These qualities do not make him an angel or a devil; they simply make him a man of his time and place. His time and place were, like ours, far from perfect.”26

Always forward, never back

Serra, no matter how emblematic he was, though, was also replete with tensions and ironies, even paradoxes. He stated that he was always obedient to his superiors, but as he grew in stature and seniority, he did largely as he pleased, with few checks on his own authority and actions beyond the narrow confines of his own order and mission. He believed in the nearly absolute powers of the Church yet lived at a time when the Bourbon state was consolidating its authority over that institution. He had a domineering personality but was bereft of an individual self: he was opinionated, strong-willed, determined, and passionately devoted to his life’s work but was typical of his age in that he had no real identity of his own beyond his order. As a deeply religious Catholic of the eighteenth century, he fervently distrusted his own intuition or inner voice, and he chose to follow his God’s will as best he could discern it. Finally, and

as “a general endorsement of the exploitative colonization tactics of the Spanish. Though Junipero Serra was known to have argued on behalf of the property rights and economic entitlement of converted Native Americans, he consistently advocated against their right to self-governance, and was a staunch supporter of corporal punishment, appealing to the Spanish government for the right to flog Indians.” When Doc had finished this particular lecture, I just looked at him and went, “Photographic memory much?” He looked embarrassed. “Well,” he said. “It’s good to know the history of the place where you’re living.” I filed this away for future reference. Doc might be just the person I needed if Jesse showed up again. Now, standing in the cool office of the ancient building Junipero Serra had constructed for the betterment of the natives in the area, I wondered

The labors of Father Junipero Serra and other Franciscans on the coast, nearly a couple of centuries later, were heroic, but in no way comparable to the incredible achievements of the devoted frailes who penetrated and subdued the incomparable deserts of the Southwest with their ferocious savage tribes.