Thursday, May 18, 2006

They were NOT failures!

Being the lover of history that I am, the story of the founding and progression thru the years of the city of San Antonio is a dear subject, and has been for a couple of decades. And here & there in my reading of various documents -- mostly those for popular, quick reading -- I've stumbled upon statements about San Antonio's history which are inaccurate and aggravating. One of these is that "San Antonio has been a military city from the beginning". as tho' this explains its current US Army post and two Air Force bases, the Veterans Hospital and the popularity of S.A. with retired veterans. Well, "official" military presence here goes back to 5 May 1718 -- and the mission that was the raison d'etre for this city was founded four days before that! And indeed the presidio (fort) of four days later was founded TO PROTECT the mission! In other words, the Spaniards probably wouldn't have erected a military post here if the mission hadn't existed!

The other item of popular literature and urban legend, concerning the Spanish missions, that "gets my goat" is that the five missions were "failures". The basis for this evaluation seems to be that the missions were all "secularized" in the last years of the Eighteenth Century or the first decades of the Nineteenth, and then fell into disuse or other use, and the native Coahuiltecan converts vanished leaving no trace.

My guess is that the authors who focus on "secularization" are interpreting the term by the current popular understanding of the word "secular" v. "religious". They do not understand that in Catholic terminology "secular" is applied to clergy and sacred buildings, and means "general church" as opposed to religious orders like the Franciscans or the Jesuits. The goal of missionary effort in the Spanish Empire was for the religious-order missionaries to found a mission, get it flourishing and self-sustainable, and in (ideally) ten years "secularize" it, that is, turn the property over to the converts and the church building and its functions over to the "secular" clergy -- and move on to found a new mission.

True, the five San Antonio missions didn't follow the ideal timetable of ten years. There were many problems on this northern frontier of Nueva España that didn't occur in missions among the more settled natives of central Mexico. The Coahuiltecans were unaccustomed to settled life, the Apaches and later the Comanches attacked often and fiercely, and the Spaniards introduced diseases for which the Coahuiltecans had no immunity. When this latter struck in the form of a plague, the surviving converts would flee into the wilds to escape the disease(s), and then have to be persuaded by the Franciscan friars to return to the missions. For this and other reasons it took considerably longer to reach the goal of transforming these nomadic Coahuiltecans into solid, practicing Catholics, settled agrarians and secure, loyal subjects of the King of Spain.

And. . . while the friars persisted in their efforts among the natives, outsiders kept showing up to reside in or near San Antonio. Most notably, in March of 1731 it was the settlers sent by royal order from Spain's Canary Islands. Living on a remote frontier of the far-flung Spanish Empire and facing the continuous hostility of Apaches and then Comanches, I would theorize that the inhabitants of the three distinct "districts" that made up the settlement generally known as "Bexar" in the final years of the1700ss -- the Canary Islanders' San Fernando de Béjar, the mission of San Antonio de Valero (along with the other four missions nearby), and El Presidio y la Villa de San Antonio de Béjar - - even tho' squabbling about such matters as water rights, felt a need to band together and support one another. And in this process of mutual support on a wild frontier, there was much intermarriage between the Hispanics and the natives. Thus, when San Antonio de Valero was secularized in the 1790s the residents of the mission were in process of blending into the populace of the Béxar community. The parish priest of San Fernando Church took over the providing of religious services for them. Indeed, it is an established FACT that records from the mission were simply added to the archives of the parish church that later became San Fernando Cathedral.

Much the same was occurring at the other four missions. True, population was dwindling away in the early 1800s. But was this entirely due to the natives dying of disease or Apache attack? Or was there also intermarriage of the natives with Spaniards or Mexican mestizos who were settling the area and taking up ranching and farming. (Let's not forget, BTW, that the very FIRST cowboys in Texas were the Coahuiltecan Indians whom the friars encouraged to take up livestock raising.) And again, it's an established FACT that some residents in the mission area of S.A.'s south side trace their ancestry back to the original inhabitants of San José or Espada, etc.

And some of these residents are worshiping today in the mission churches -- where their ancestors were converted to the faith! Furthermore, S.A. may have its prominent military aspect, but I also find it to exhibit a strong spiritual ingredient in its community life. A spirituality that I affirm leads to the remarkable unity, neighborliness and lack of overt racism in this eighth largest city of these United States!

No, these five old Spanish Franciscan missions were not failures! They weren't smashing successes either, but the spiritual legacy lives on!

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