San Antonio and Its Missions: Three Centuries of History, Memory, and Heritage

Characterizing San Antonio’s five Spanish colonial–era missions as “sites of memory,” author and historian Joel Daniel Kitchens explores how and why Spain built the missions, what happened to the missions after the Spanish colonizers left, and how and why the missions came to weigh so heavily in American imagination and identity, even into the twenty-first century.

While the Alamo figures prominently in these discussions, nonetheless all five missions collectively are an enduring and deep...