The old mission buildings of California will, so long as a vestige of them remains, furnish inspiration for writers of fiction and history, poetry and song. For there were built into their very walls stories that can never be completely told; stories that can only be guessed at. And so the subject is ever new, never ending.

Over twenty years ago the writer began a serious study of the old establishments as of the mission day period, feeling that there was need of a better, fuller understanding of them and of the part they had played in the early history of our State. There has been too much of romantic, fanciful, even prejudiced writing and too little that is sanely historical.

To understand the setting of the discovery and of the early voyages to Brazil we must go back to some of the circumstances which preceded, and review the conditions in Europe at that time. The discoveries of the Portuguese navigators mark an epoch in world history. Had Columbus not persuaded the Spaniards to finance his voyage to the Spice Islands by a western route, the Portuguese might easily have claimed the discovery of both North and South America within a decade following Columbus’ landfall. Both continents would probably have been visited in 1500 when Gaspar Corte-Real reached Newfoundland and Pedro Alvares Cabral, Brazil. The former voyage was but a continuation of others westward over the Atlantic and the latter was only an incident in the Voyages to India. Furthermore, the delusion of reaching Asia would have been avoided. The exploration of the Americas would then have been carried on in an orderly manner with the realization that a new world had been found. However, the Portuguese are not best known for their voyages to America, but for the first accurate knowledge of both the West and East coasts of Africa, of the Indian Ocean and of the Spice Islands. They continued these voyages even farther, up the coast of China, and in 1542 they were the first Europeans to set foot in Japan. These achievements, of which any nation might justly be proud, were made by a country which then numbered between one and two million people.

Whereas proper classification presents no difficulty in the case of Peón y Contreras, who was primarily a poet, it is not so apparent in which group of writers one should place José María Roa Bárcena. That he was a poet of real merit is recognized, for instance, by González Peña, who treats of him in the chapter on poetry. In the present study, following the plan originally adopted, he will be considered now only as a poet and later in the study be given attention as a prose writer.

José María Roa Bárcena was born in 1827 in Jalapa, State of Veracruz, and he breathed his last in 1908 in Mexico City at the ripe old age of eighty-one. Thus his devotion to letters was yielding fruit long before the collapse of the Second Empire and continued to do so during the transition period and most of the Díaz era that followed. In this respect he ranks with the two bishops, Pagaza and Montes de Oca, whose contributions to Mexican literature will be dealt with presently. To the vigilant care with which his deeply religious parents watched over his childhood and early youth and also to the beneficent influence of a private tutor who combined learning with piety must be ascribed the fact that throughout his long life José María not only clung tenaciously to the Catholic faith but also exemplified in his private life and fearlessly upheld in his writings the religious and social principles which this faith stood for.

The first Franciscan to enter the present Ecuador was the well known Fray Marcos de Niza, who accompanied the conqueror Benalcázar from Caxamarca, Peru, to Quito in 1533, and thence returned to Mexico. There, it seems, he was instrumental in sending the first Franciscan missionaries not only to Peru but also to Ecuador. In 1534, the year in which the city of Quito was founded, the Father Commissary Fr. Juan de Granada sent three friars from Mexico to Ecuador: Fr. Jodoco Ricke (de Rycke) de Marselaer, Fr. Pedro de Gosseal, and Fr. Pedro Roqueñas.

In the same year Fr. Jodoco began the founding of the famous Franciscan church and friary in Quito. They were only small and poor structures then, and it took more than a century before the present church and friary were completed. The first doctrinas to be founded outside of Quito were Santa Clara de Pomasqui, San Juan de Cotocollao, and San Jorge de Perucho. Additional friars soon joined the original group, and under Fr. Jodoco’s direction friaries were founded also at Cotocollao, Guano, Pasto in southern Colombia (probably in 1549), Cuenca, and Loja.

Much has been written about New Mexico, but few of those who have described its unique heritage and character have fully understood its true spirit and appreciated what it represents as a part of the present-day United States.

New Mexico has a personality all of its own. Three cultural groups have been most important in forming the American way of life to be found there: the Pueblo Indians, who were the first permanent settlers of the region; the Spanish, who made it a part of Western civilization; and the Anglo-Americans, who have brought it into the current of modern American life. Today, New Mexico is neither Indian, nor Spanish, nor Anglo, but a harmonious combination of all three; and in the persistance and, generally speaking, local appreciation of the permanent values of each of the dominant cultural heritages, it has been for the past one hundred years a significant laboratory of the Good-Neighbor Policy. I speak as one whose ancestors were among the pioneers of both the Anglo and Hispano-American frontiers of settlement who, advancing from northeast and southwest, met and joined hands in what is now the state of New Mexico during the first half of the nineteenth century.