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Before Gold
California under Spain and Mexico Volume 3
By Rose Marie Beebe, Robert M. Senkewicz UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 University of Oklahoma Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4965-3
CHAPTER 1
Mallorca
Junípero Serra's life began and ended at the edge of empire. He was born on the fringes of Spain and died on the fringes of the Spanish empire. Except for an eight-year period during which he was headquartered just outside of Mexico City, the capital of the viceroyalty of New Spain, he spent his entire life as a man of the periphery.
Serra spent the first half of his life on the island of Mallorca, the largest of the Balearic Islands. Serra's life was influenced by the island's culture—a culture that was dynamic and outward looking. The island's location on a number of Mediterranean trade routes made it a center of cartography during the Middle Ages. In addition, the largely Jewish members of what came to be called the "Mallorcan school" produced some stunning masterpieces, such as the 1375 Catalán Atlas. Even though the island was small by conventional measures, with slightly over 100,000 inhabitants at the beginning of the eighteenth century, it always prized its connections to the larger world. Junípero Serra's life on Mallorca consisted of a series of moves into larger theaters. He started in a small agricultural town, then moved to the capital. He entered the Franciscan order and quickly ascended through its ranks to become one of the leading professors and preachers among Mallorcan Franciscans. But he found that he was not satisfied and, like many of his countrymen before him, was driven to leave his island home for what he hoped would be broader horizons.
BEGINNINGS
Serra was born on November 24, 1713, in the rural village of Petra, on the western side of Mallorca. His parents, Antoní Serra and Margarita Ferrer, christened him Miquel Josep. He was the third child born to the couple, who had been married six years earlier. The first two children, a boy and a girl, both died in infancy. Petra was a small agricultural village of approximately two thousand people, and its roots may have stretched back to Roman times. Serra was proud of its history. Shortly before he left for the Americas, he boasted that it was one of the four oldest villas on the island.
Serra's father owned and tended six small parcels of land scattered around the outskirts of Petra, and young Miquel worked the land with him. He thus grew up close to the land in a region where the forces of nature determined much about the quality of life. Cycles of drought had long been a fact of life on Mallorca. During the Middle Ages, Mallorca won the right to alleviate famines by trading for food among the Muslims of southern Spain and northern Africa. Engaging in such commerce made the island a center for trade and cartography. This form of commerce became one of the traditional privileges (fueros) of the island. The residents of Petra were no strangers to drought. One of the major religious devotions in the village involved the veneration of the Virgin Mary under the title of Our Lady of Bonany, which was Catalán for buen año, or "good year." The devotion dated from 1609, a year of bountiful harvests after a number of years of drought. The "good year" was attributed to the villagers' prayers to Mary. A chapel to Mary was built outside Petra to commemorate the happy result. Serra always cherished this devotion, and he always remained, at least in part, a resident of Petra. For instance, in 1782, when Serra was sixty-eight years old, the harvest at Mission San Carlos was projected to be a poor one. On September 3 of that year, Serra baptized a child at Mission San Carlos in Carmel. He recorded it in the baptismal register as follows:
On September 3, 1782, in the church of this mission, San Carlos de Monterrey, I solemnly baptized a girl, about thirteen years old, the daughter of gentile parents from Sargenta-Ruc, the same parents of the boy Leonardo, number 300 in this book. I gave her the name María de Buenaño, (in honor of Most Holy Mary of my beloved homeland). Her godmother was María del Carmen Chamorro, wife of Corporal José Marcelino Bravo. I advised her of her responsibilities. And in order for it to be on record, I signed it.
Fr. Junípero Serra
This baptismal record suggests that Serra hoped the Virgin would act in Monterey Bay as he believed she had acted in Petra.
Drought likely featured among Serra's last memories of Mallorca. In 1747, two years before he left for the Americas, the harvests began to fail. By the end of the 1740s, the island's farmers were bringing in only one-sixth of the amount of wheat they had harvested just a few years earlier. A number of the wealthier Mallorcan families left for the mainland, and their absence appears to have contributed to a significant decline in the local economy. By January 1749 special prayers for rain were ordered to be said in all of the churches of the island. The skies did not open until the second week of May. By then, Serra was in Cádiz on the Spanish mainland, where he was awaiting passage for America.
These Mallorcan agricultural catastrophes left a permanent mark on Serra. His correspondence from California repeatedly demonstrated his insatiable desire to leave no detail of the agricultural and economic development of the missions unattended. Large sections of his famous 1773 representación to the viceroy, which is mostly remembered for Serra's successful appeal to get Pedro Fages replaced as military commander of Alta California, were devoted to the issues of maintaining and supplying the struggling missions. Serra's remarks covered a range of topics, such as the necessity of immediately readying a new frigate, the best way for invoices to be drawn up, and the reasons the missions needed another forge and a blacksmith. Drought had taught Serra that agricultural enterprises could be very fragile.
There was another aspect of life in Petra that continued to influence Serra. After around 1720, it appears that the production of textiles increased notably in the rural areas of the island. In Mallorca, as elsewhere in Europe, most of this work was done by women. Figures are hard to come by, but it appears that between 1720 and 1755, when Serra was growing up in Petra, studying and teaching in Palma, and traveling widely throughout the Mallorcan countryside as a preacher, textile exports from the island almost tripled. Women therefore played an especially important economic role in the communities in which Serra lived and worked during this period. For Serra and the Mallorcans who accompanied him to the New World, the well-ordered rural community included women who were engaged in weaving and other forms of domestic production. In his laudatory biography of Serra, his fellow Franciscan Francisco Palóu described his and Serra's missionary activities in the Sierra Gorda from 1750 to 1758 in terms that harked back to their experiences in the Balearic Islands. Under Serra's leadership, he said, "the harvests increased and became so abundant that some was left over," and the native women were employed "in tasks befitting their sex, such as spinning, weaving, making stockings, knitting, sewing, and so forth." In some ways, Serra's journey to the New World represented a continuity of his traditions in Petra.
FRANCISCAN STUDENT
Serra attended a primary school in Petra that was run by the Franciscans. He left his home village when he was fifteen years old and spent a year studying with one of the canons of the cathedral in Palma. He was most likely encouraged to do so by the Franciscans in Petra, who were always on the lookout for bright young boys who might join the order. Indeed, between 1607 and 1835 a total of seventy-nine boys from the town became Franciscans. Serra did not disappoint them. He applied for admission to the Franciscans soon after he celebrated his sixteenth birthday, but his petition was denied. The reason may have been that people named "Serra" had been identified and punished by the Mallorcan Inquisition from the end of the fifteenth century until at least the beginning of the seventeenth century. Serra's paternal grandmother was named Juana Avram [Abraham] Salom, and this perhaps increased suspicions about the possibility of Jewish roots somewhere in the family history. An ecclesiastical investigation into his background may have ensued. However, Serra was able to reapply about six months later and was accepted. He spent a year as a novice; during this period he lived in a Franciscan community and studied Franciscan spirituality. In September 1731, he formally became a Franciscan by taking solemn vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. On this occasion, he changed his given name to Junípero.
It was not unusual for young religious to take the name of a favorite saint or a holy person when they took their vows. In this way they were expressing their devotion to a significant figure in their religious development. The young religious might add that name to their given name, as a type of middle name. However, it was unusual for them to use that new name in place of their given name. Of all the Mallorcan Franciscans who came to the New World, Serra seems to have been the only one to have done that.
What was the significance of this choice? Brother Junípero was one of the companions of Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan order. The stories about Brother Junípero in the Franciscan tradition Serra imbibed as a novice also emphasized the brother's simplicity. This trait could easily come across to various audiences, even to his fellow religious, as foolishness. In one story Junípero gave away half his cloak to a beggar and was then viewed with "contempt and indignity" by a group of young men. On another occasion, he so rejoiced to suffer for the love of God that he refused to defend himself when he was unjustly accused of being a low criminal. Brother Junípero was saved only when recognized at the last minute by another friar as a companion of Francis. Another story recounted how he was so embarrassed by people's devotion to him as a saintly man that he began to play seesaw with some children and continued to do so until all his admirers left in confusion. Other Franciscan sources emphasized Brother Junípero's patience and humility. One thirteenth-century Franciscan author said of him, "Brother Junípero shone with such a gift of patience that no one ever saw him disturbed even when he was experiencing many difficulties." Another early Franciscan author said that Junípero "achieved the perfect state of patience because he always kept in mind the perfect truth of his low state and the ardent desire to imitate Christ through the way of the cross." In the early Franciscan tradition, Brother Junípero was, in short, a man of patience, humility, and simplicity. None of these are qualities that one spontaneously associates with Junípero Serra. Perhaps Serra knew himself well enough to realize that these were qualities that he would always have to struggle to attain. If so, then his choice of name suggests that he anticipated that life as a member of a religious order would be a challenging struggle to reach a series of ideals.
Brother Junípero also appeared in the second part of a fourteenth-century devotional work, The Little Flowers of St. Francis. This volume was one of the most widely read books about St. Francis, and Serra undoubtedly read it. The account of the life of Brother Junípero in this volume stretched over fourteen chapters, each of which recounted an episode from his life. The first story contained most of the themes that animated the rest. The story recounted that Brother Junípero was ministering to a sick brother, who asked Junípero if he could find a pig's foot for him to eat. Brother Junípero went out and saw a herd of swine, caught one, cut off one of its feet, and ran off with it. When he got back home, he cooked it and gave it to the sick brother.
The owner of the swine had seen what had occurred and came to the friars' residence denouncing Brother Junípero as a hypocrite and a thief. Saint Francis and the other friars came together and made excuses for Brother Junípero, who they already knew was possessed of "indiscreet zeal," but they failed to assuage the owner of the swine. Francis then confronted Junípero, who freely admitted what he had done and said he had done so out of charity for the sick brother. Junípero volunteered that God would certainly be pleased by his action. Francis told Junípero to go find the man, apologize, and offer to make amends. Brother Junípero, even though he thought temporal things such as the swine possessed no value in and of themselves, agreed to do so. He found the man, but failed to move him. He told his story over and over again and finally flung himself on the man, who then came to understand that Junípero had done what he had done because of charity and love. At this point the man's heart changed; he agreed with Brother Junípero, went and killed the swine, cut it up, and brought it to the friars. This moved Francis, noting Junípero's simplicity and patience under such great adversity, to say, "Would to God, my brothers, that I had a forest of such junipers!"
The qualities exhibited by Junípero in the story—a single-mindedness to do what the protagonist regarded as good, a conviction that social rules were of less importance than religious motivation, the belief that good intentions will eventually triumph over the stubbornness and short-sightedness that is rooted in social conventions—would come to characterize the actions of Junípero Serra in Alta California.
Serra may very well have also been attracted by the general connotation of strength in Francis's statement about the forest of junipers. Perhaps this aspiration was also personal, for Serra himself was small and slight and always seemed to be pushing himself to compensate for a lack of physical prowess. As a novice, he was embarrassed that he was too short to reach a lectern to perform a regular duty of the novices—turning the pages of the book for the friar who was leading the chant. Finally, a local variety of the juniper plant, ginebró, flourished in the Mallorcan countryside. The choice of the name thus may also be another reference to his childhood and his place of birth—Serra's way of saying that his new identity as a Franciscan would incorporate his older one as a resident of rural Mallorca.
For centuries Spaniards and other Europeans had been changing indigenous names of people and places in the Americas to European names as an expression of the new colonial relationship. As we have already seen, Serra did the same thing in California in connection with the sacrament of baptism, but he first did this to himself. Serra was a man for whom adopting a new name to express a new identity and a new relationship was a normal part of life.
After Serra finished his novitiate on the outskirts of Palma, he moved into the city. He spent the next eighteen years studying and teaching at the university named for one of the most famous Mallorcans, Ramón Llull. Theologian, philosopher, mystic, poet, scholar, and the author of over one hundred works, Llull was born in Mallorca in 1232 and died in 1315. He was a member of the third order of Saint Francis, a group designed for those who wished to cultivate Franciscan spirituality in their lives without becoming priests, brothers, or sisters. Llull's tomb was in the great Franciscan Church of San Francisco in Palma, in whose residence Serra lived for almost twenty years.
Llull was very interested in missionary work to the Muslims of North Africa. He traveled there a number of times to engage Muslim scholars and leaders in conversation and to preach there. In 1276, Llull even started a school on Mallorca to train missionaries in Arabic. Llull's reputation in official church circles waxed and waned over the centuries after his death, but in Mallorca he was always regarded very favorably. The university in Palma, founded in 1483, was named the Estudio General Lulliano. Even after its name was officially changed in 1526 to the Imperial and Royal University, it continued to be called the "Lullian University." In 1721 a definitive edition of Llull's works was completed in Germany, and this gave rise to what one Llull scholar has termed a "flurry" of publications in Mallorca. Between 1720 and 1750, at least forty-three editions of various Llull works were published on the island.
This growing interest in Llull was part of a larger cultural development in Mallorca in the first decades of the eighteenth century. Since being conquered by King Jaime I of Aragón in 1229, Mallorca's primary association with the Spanish mainland had been with that northeastern region of the Iberian Peninsula. Like most Aragón-related jurisdictions, in the succession controversy at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Mallorca favored the claim of the Hapsburg Archduke Charles to the Spanish throne over that of Philip, the Bourbon Duke of Anjou. Mallorca felt that the Hapsburgs would be more likely than the Bourbons to retain the traditional local fueros that the island had enjoyed. When the War of Spanish Succession (1701–13) ended with Philip on the throne, the victorious monarch was quick to extend his control over Mallorca. In 1714 the royal fleet appeared off Palma and an army landed on the eastern coast. In 1715 the army entered Felanitx, about ten miles south of Petra. The conquest was achieved in short order, and the traditional fueros were superseded by a decree known as the Nueva Planta, issued in 1715. This was one of a series of edicts propagated in a number of localities by which the Bourbons imposed their central authority. The Mallorcan version of the Nueva Planta reduced local power, including the power of the Church.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Before Gold by Rose Marie Beebe, Robert M. Senkewicz. Copyright © 2015 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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