“Junipero Serra: California’s Founding Father”
Steven W. Hackel
Hill and Wang; 352 pages; $27
For those of us who grew up in California and attended public school, Father Junipero Serra dominated our fourth-grade social studies lessons.
While we built cardboard replicas of our favorite missions and learned how the native peoples of California gathered acorns and built oceangoing canoes, the tale of Serra and his leadership role in founding those missions — and opening the doors to the Spanish colonization of our state — took center stage.
Yet other than the fact that Serra was the founder of the missions, what else did we learn about the man? Not much. To most of us, he’s a one-dimensional figure from history. We know more about those three-dimensional cardboard replicas of the missions of Carmel, Santa Barbara or San Juan Capistrano than we do of Serra.
Historian and author Steven W. Hackel has given us a much more nuanced and revealing portrait of Serra in his new book, “Junipero Serra: California’s Founding Father.”
Hackel, an associate professor of history at the University of California Riverside who wrote a previous book about the relationship between California’s Indians and Spanish missionaries, pored over journals and documents from Mallorca, Spain, Mexico and California to tell the story of Serra’s long and eventful life.
Like the other missionaries of his era, writes Hackel, Serra is viewed “through the haze of myth, not with the clarity of historical fact and context.”
In “Junipero Serra,” Hackel works hard to give us that context and strip away the myth.
He paints a picture of a man of flesh and bones who did both good and bad, played politics to get what he wanted, and was known as an often-theatrical preacher in Mexico, where he would sometimes whip himself with chains in public in an attempt to do penance for the sins of others.
Hackel shows us that Serra’s life was long and complex before he ever came to Alta California. Serra helped expand a series of Franciscan missions in northern Mexico in the early 1750s, and later was in charge of the missions in Baja California. He was almost 56 by the time he set foot in San Diego in 1769, having spent nearly four decades as a Franciscan teacher and missionary.
By the time he died in 1784 in Carmel, Serra had established the chain of missions that would make him famous, yet also left a legacy of mistreatment and cruelty toward native people. Hackel also describes how he made lasting enemies among the Spanish governors of California and military for his irascible nature, his failure to follow orders, and his belief that he always knew what was best.
As Hackel notes, he was a man, “replete with tensions and ironies, even paradoxes.” Yet Hackel tries to put Serra’s actions in context.
Always, Serra followed his belief that he was doing God’s work. It was a foundation of faith that was built on Mallorca, an island under Spanish control in the Mediterranean where Serra was born in 1713. By 16, Serra had begun his life with the Franciscans. Soon, he became enthralled by the tales of Franciscan missionaries traveling the world to bring nonbelievers to Christianity. Eventually, he took the name Junipero (he was born as Miquel Joseph Serre) in honor of Brother Juniper, a 13th-century lay brother and follower of Saint Francis whom Serra admired for his “holy simplicity.”
Today, notes Hackel, our vision of Serra is much different than it was 50 or 100 years ago. Now, he says, Serra is viewed in one of three ways: “as a pioneer, as a religious icon or as a colonial imperialist.”
After reading “Junipero Serra,” readers are likely to see him as all three.
Doug Williams is a San Diego freelance writer.