Marking Time in San Gabriel Mission Garden

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Funding

This research was supported by an AAUW Publication Grant and a Sabbatical Leave grant from the IU School of Liberal Arts, IUPUI.

Notes

1. Martha Nelson McCan, ‘Mission Garden Restored’, The Clubwoman, XVI/4, 1924, p. 10.

2. As I have argued, the mission garden designers took as their model the courtyard garden of Mission Santa Barbara which had been constructed in 1872. Elizabeth Kryder-Reid, ‘Perennially New: Santa Barbara and the Origins of the California Mission Garden’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 69/3, 2010, pp. 378–405.

3. Carey McWilliams, Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pierce, 1946). For a critical analysis of the landscapes of California’s romanticized history, see Phoebe S. Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Dydia De Lyser, Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); and William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

4. The California mission ruins share many of the same formal and associative aspects of ruins in other designed landscapes. See, for example, John Dixon Hunt, ‘Picturesque Mirrors and the Ruins of the Distant Past’, in Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 171–191, and Julia King on fabricated ruins in the nineteenth-century southern Maryland landscape in Archaeology, Narrative, and the Politics of the Past: The View From Southern Maryland (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012).

5. Mission records indicate neophyte populations of 452 (in 1780), 843 (in 1785), and a peak of 1701 (in 1817). The growth was due to an increasing number of Indians who came to the mission from an ever widening region, rather than the birth rate among neophytes (Steven Hackel, Children of the Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian–Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), p. 266.

6. Edna E. Kimbro and Julia G. Costello, with Tevvy Ball, The California Missions: History, Art, and Preservation (Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2009), p. 182.

7. An elementary school was established in 1912, a seminary in 1923, and a high school in 1949. Zephyrin Engelhardt, San Gabriel Mission and the Beginnings of Los Angeles (San Gabriel: San Gabriel Mission, 1927), pp. 317–319. The seminary, designed by A. B. Benton and constructed in 1922, included its own garden. An anonymous account published in the diocesan newspaper The Tidings (25 August 1922) describes the brick and cement building as ‘of typical Spanish Mission style … encircled by a large cloister, adorned by heavy arches in typical Mission style. The interior patio and fountain will be enclosed by an adobe wall thus separating the monastery from all worldly affairs. The patio and cloister will be exceedingly beautiful by the “Old Grape Vine”, planted by the Franciscan Fathers’. (Tidings article reprinted in Francis J. Weber, comp. and ed., The Pride of the Missions: A Documentary History of San Gabriel Mission (Los Angeles: F. J. Weber, 1979), p. 198.

8. Henry Chapman Ford, ‘Some Detached Notes by Henry Chapman Ford on the Missions of California’, California Historical Society Quarterly, 3/3, 1924, pp. 240–241.

9. Ford, ‘Some Detached Notes’, p. 240.

10. Dwinelle Benthold, Los Angeles Sunday Times, 6 February 1921, reprinted in Francis J. Weber, The Pride of the Missions, p. 187.

11. Engelhardt, San Gabriel Mission, pp. 320–321.

12. Anonymous, ‘Old Mission Will Boast New Garden: Natives of California Plan Restoration and Will Have Benefit at San Gabriel’, Los Angeles Times, 6 March 1930.

13. For example, a ‘memory garden’ was constructed at Mission San Fernando in 1922–23 and a mission garden was laid out in 1936 as part of the CCC restoration of Mission La Purisima in Lompoc.

14. This description is based on site visits by the author in 1994, 2008, and 2013.

15. The complex practices associated with touristic spaces are implicated in this study, but not fully explored. For examples of other, closer readings of tourism geographies, see Carolyn Cartier and Alan A. Lew (eds), Seductions of Place: Geographical Perspectives on Globalization and Touristed Landscapes (London: Routledge, 2005).

16. Historian David J. Weber offers an historiography of the mission history and characterizes the range of approaches from the ‘Christophalic Triumphalism’, of Catholic apologists to activist anthropologists, indigenous scholars, and radicals who frame the missions as sites of genocide. David J. Weber, ‘Blood of Martyrs, Blood of Indians: Toward a More Balanced View of Spanish Missions in Seventeenth Century North America’, in David Hurst Thomas (ed.), Columbian Consequences, Vol. 2, Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), pp. 428–448, and David J. Weber, ‘The Spanish Legacy in North America and the Historical Imagination’, The Western Historical Quarterly, 23/1, 1992, pp. 5–24).

17. The theoretical project of poscolonialism spans disciplines and encompasses a vast literature. See, for example, Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan (eds), Postcolonial Geographies (London: Continuum, 2002); Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978); Lynn Meskell, ‘Ethnographic Interventions’, in Jane Lydon and Uzma Z. Rizvi (eds), Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2010), pp. 445–457.

18. David Lowenthal, ‘Past Time, Present Time: Landscape and Memory’, Geographical Review, 65/1, January 1975, pp. 1–35; David Lowenthal, ‘Fabricating Heritage’, History & Memory, 10/1, 1998, pp. 5–24; Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 1997); Mark P. Leone, ‘Interpreting Ideology in Historical Archaeology: Using Rules of Perspective in the William Paca Garden in Annapolis, Maryland’, in Christopher C. Tilley, C. and Daniel Miller (eds), Ideology, Representation and Power in Prehistory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 25–35; Mary-Catherine E. Garden, ‘The Heritagescape: Looking at Landscapes of the Past’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 12/5, 2006, pp. 394–411.

19. Elizabeth Kryder-Reid, ‘Sites of Power and the Power of Sight: Vision in the California Mission Landscapes’, in Dianne Harris and D. Fairchild Ruggles (eds), Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), pp. 181–212. In Kryder-Reid, ‘Perennially New’ I expand this argument and suggest that the racialized connotations of this Mediterranean Revival history was one reason the missions adopted the mission garden design at a time when California’s social and political structures were shifting from an Hispanic to an Anglo-American power base.

20. Recent attention to the public interpretation and ideologies of colonial heritage sites and other sites of conscience includes scholars of tourism, archaeology, heritage, museums, architecture, and cultural geography. For example, Lynne M. Dearborn and John C. Stallmeyer, Inconvenient Heritage: Erasure and Global Tourism in Luang Prabang (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2010); Derek Alderman and Owen Dwyer, Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory (Chicago: The Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2008); Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer (eds), Contested Histories in Public Space: Memory, Race, and Nation, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Jodi A. Barnes (ed.), The Materiality of Freedom: Archaeologies of Postemancipation Life (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2011).

21. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 200.

22. Harry Downie, Mission San Carlos Borromeodel Rio Carmelo (Carmel: Carmel Press, 1940), pp. 1–2.

23. Maude Robson Gunthorp, With a Sketch Book Along the Old Mission Trail (Caldwell, ID: The Caxton Printers, 1940), p. 94.

24. These interpretations of mission history in the San Gabriel Mission garden are consistent with the main messages and underlying ideologies in other mission museums as has been demonstrated by Deanna Dartt-Newton’s insightful analysis, ‘Negotiating the Master Narrative: Museums and the Indian/California Community of California’s Central Coast’, PhD diss., Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon, 2009.

25. The plaque is mounted on the wall of the winery to the right of the McGurrin mural.

26. Interpretive signage, Mission San Gabriel, recorded 2008.

27. Engelhardt, San Gabriel Mission, p. 354. For a more comprehensive study of the missions’ system of punishment and justice, including corporal punishment, see also Hackel, Children of the Coyote, pp. 321–366 and Kent G. Lightfoot, Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 82–113.

28. Richard Hill, ‘The Museum Indian: Still Frozen in Time and Mind’, Museum News, May–June, 2000, pp. 40–44, 58–63, 66–67, 74; Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

29. Anonymous, ‘100 Years of Claretian Service At San Gabriel Mission’ Claretian Web site, available at: http://www.claretian.com/SanGabrielMissionCentennialCelebration.php (accessed October 2012).

30. Benthold, in Weber, The Pride of the Missions, p. 187.

31. While the San Gabriel sundial is modern, sundials were used in the colonial era as time-keeping devices. Msgr. Francis J. Weber, ‘Sundials at the Missions’, in The California Missions (Strasbourg, France: Editions du Signes, 2005), p. 126.

32. The Label posted next to the mural credits it to Buckley McGurrin, unveiled in 1939 ‘practically disappeared by 1950; Reconstructed and elaborated mural by Hendrick Keyzer and Vivian Flores (600 hours).’

33. Interpretive signage, Mission San Gabriel, recorded 2008.