Let me introduce to you, or rather reintroduce, the two great characters, the dramatis personae about whose dreams and achievements I invite you to a brief reflection.

The action begins in July 1768. The Majorcan Father Serra had spent already twenty years working as a missionary in various places on the Mexican mainland. Of all of his accomplishments, the best known were his achievements in the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro where, accompanied by his former student and always active assistant Francisco Palou, he had established five missions. Serra certainly deserved the reputation he had of being not only a sincere and religious friar but also a distinguished theologian, indeed a scholar, and besides a man who knew how to carry out what he considered ought to be done. Now at the age of fifty five, he had a new and difficult task as president of the California missions, replacing the just-expelled Jesuits. There, at the old mission headquarters of Loreto, he was learning about the demographic collapse of the natives and the general situation of the peninsula. Before him lay the task of reorganizing those missions whose future appeared to him so uncertain.

The Enlightenment in Spain defies definition. In certain respects it was a viable force opening up new vistas of knowledge and understanding, while in others it was a mild breeze rustling some leaves of insight into the possibility of human equality. For certain of Spain's royal officials, the ideas of the eighteenth century philosophes were refreshing and undeniably sound; for others even the gathering of knowledge in the new encyclopedias was a dangerously democratic trend. In some areas of national life, reforms gained immediate acceptance, in others the old ways remained entrenched.

Spain has always been a country of extremes, of absolute alternatives. Spaniards strive to achieve impossible goals or they remain incredibly inert. With the discovery of America their ambitious undertakings excelled those of England or France, but subsequent neglect brought about failures of equal magnitude. In the sixteenth century they thought to conquer the world; in the next their weakened Hapsburg monarchs squandered the wealth of the New World while the country fell into economic ruin.

The evolution of the historical literature on land tenure in northern New Spain has closely paralleled general historiographical trends of New Spain's far northern frontier. For many years, “borderlands” history focused almost exclusively upon the study of those institutions which have been stereotyped as peculiar to the frontier, the mission and the presidio; upon political and administrative history; or upon biographies of notable figures. These studies laid important foundations, but, in general, borderlands historians were slow to adopt the social science methodologies of the new social and economic history which became popular in the 1960s in most fields of historical inquiry. Well after both its Anglo and Hispanic progenitors began to be studied from a perspective which emphasized social and economic structures and relationships, did the geographical area which corresponds to the Provincias Internas (all of today's border states plus Sinaloa, Durango and Baja California) begin to receive similar attention. Thus, our understanding of the social and economic history of the region is still rudimentary, and this is nowhere more evident than in the area of landholding patterns and agrarian development.

The process of Spanish colonization in Northwestern New Spain, here roughly defined as Sonora and the Californias, set into motion a complex set of factors that contributed to demographic change; absolute population decline among the Indian groups involved, the growth of a largely mestizo settler population, and a number of different types of social and economic interactions between the two populations. Scholars in recent years have debated the causes and the nature of change. Alfred Crosby established a framework for the debate in his provocative book entitled The Columbian Exchange, which discusses, as the sub-title implies, the consequences of interaction between the Old and New Worlds after 1492. In a recent study Henry Dobyns elaborated on one of Crosby's principal themes, the introduction and impact of Euro-Asiatic diseases, and prepared a chronology of epidemics between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries that affected Native American populations. Dobyns applied his “epidemic mortality” model to Florida and calculated both a high contact population and the rate of population loss due to each of the major epidemics. The model when applied to all of North America has major implications for our understanding of the course of Native American history. In a recent bibliographic article historical demographer Shelia Johansson cast doubt on the high contact population estimates and the degree of demographic collapse.

The entrance of the Spanish into California and the founding of the Franciscan mission system has been described in many books both by those sympathetic apologists for the missions and the Spanish as bringing “civilization” to barbarous rude savages lacking any knowledge of God (Englehardt 1912, and others) and by those who disapproved of the mission system but approved of the Spanish conquest of California (Bancroft 1884, 1886, and others). The Indian cultures which were destroyed by the Spanish and later American settlers have also been described many times, first by those who unquestioningly accepted the Spanish view of these people as simply taking what nature produced. This viewpoint gives justification to the conquerors because “they could use the land better.” More recently a number of researchers have been reading the Spanish descriptions of what they actually saw and have ignored the Spanish assumptions, but read the descriptions of the environment with the ecological knowledge necessary to recognize the existence of a man-made environment, not a “natural” environment. They have discovered evidence of complex hierarchical stratified social Systems which were ignored because the Spanish assumed they were not present (Kehoe 1981, Shipek 1981a). Others interviewed surviving Indians and have explored areas of Indian knowledge never explored before simply because it was assumed that they had no such knowledge. For example, it has been discovered that all groups had the knowledge of and worshipped a high creator God whose name was so sacred that it must not be mentioned except in the proper sacred areas and during the sacred ceremonies dedicated to the Creator.

When the first European visitors arrived on the shores of California, they found the Indians to be poor and the country sparsely settled. The natives lived in semi-permanent villages of brush shelters and huts. Though hunters and gatherers, they sometimes practiced a form of protoagriculture. Social groups were fragmented by complex language differences. Often extremely hostile and suspicious of strangers, they were nonetheless attracted to the culture brought in by the newcomers.

In most cases the Europeans discovered that the Indians fit their own preconceptions. Missionaries found them eager for conversion. Sophisticates saw them as ignorant and brutish. Kindly people considered them to be warm and friendly. To soldiers they seemed fierce and hostile. Catholic visitors to the missions were frequently impressed with their piety. Protestants often thought their faith was but a thin veneer overlying an undiminished paganism. It is nearly impossible to generalize about the observations of Europeans. Indians in the same place were often described in totally contradictory ways by successive parties of visitors. And this same diversity of opinion exists among historians today.

The missionary effort of the Church has been sometimes judged rather harshly and often quite unfairly. This is not to deny that missionaries have somehow always shared with their contemporaries not only the human goodness, idealism, and heroism of their times but also the ignorance, paternalism, racism, and imperialism that happened to be a part of the age itself. Above all, missionaries have been repeatedly caught in the questionable marriage between Church and State. It is, of course, easy to pass judgment on past mistakes in light of our present-day knowledge, attitudes, opportunities, and general cultural and social context and to forget that a generation or two from now it will be our turn to be similarly criticized and condemned for what is impossible for us to know or to appreciate in our times. Junípero Serra, despite the shortcomings that might be pointed out regarding his missionary methods, was certainly one of the greatest frontiersmen the Americas have ever seen, one of the greatest friends the American Indians have ever known, and one of the greatest missionary saints the Church has ever produced.