The Sky is Closed for California:

Reading Jesuit Sources for the “Other”:

Accommodation, Resistance

and the Decline of Native Peoples in Eighteenth Century Baja

Alison Field

“But is there a doubt, and cannot it be said, which is more covered—the land with thorns or the people with vices?”[1]

T

oday’s Baja California peninsula is striking in its emptiness, though the Mexican Government has invested millions in developing its posh seaside resorts and even a golf course in the desert, to attract the jet-set tourists who take advantage of Mexico’s devalued currency by the plane-full. Still, such developed areas are few and far between, situated as they are primarily at the northern and southern extremes of the thousand-mile long strip of land. For the most part, the ribbon of road that traverses the length of Baja stretches through hundreds and hundreds of empty miles of primarily desert landscape. Yet Baja’s great Central Desert, with its lack of rain (some years it doesn’t rain at all), sparse watering holes and delusional summer heat once supported a significant nomadic population. The material evidence -- worked chips of stone, arrowheads, sleeping circles, fire-blackened earth, ancient foot-trails and towering shell middens -- attest to the many years of prior occupation.

Sadly, with the exception of the Kiliwa, few of Baja’s indigenous peoples survived the devastating waves of eighteenth-century epidemics that arrived with European colonizers and spread rapidly out from newly established mission settlements to attack those who lacked all immunity.[2] An indigenous population estimated at some 30,000 to 50,000 or more in 1700 was reduced to less than six thousand by 1800.[3] As of 1938, fewer than fifty individuals with any distinctive cultural traits survived on the peninsula.[4] As a result, with the exception of the remnants of material evidence and a 1938 study of the few remaining Kiliwa, we have neither written nor oral historical accounts of colonial native life that come from the native peoples themselves.

What we do have are the many accounts written by the Jesuit missionaries who spearheaded the colonial occupation of Antigua California between 1697 and 1767. These sources are both invaluable and frustrating -- invaluable because many of the missionaries wrote, some prolifically, and their letters, published histories, diaries, mission records and reports of expeditions and events provide ample, richly descriptive, and sometimes even suspenseful reading. However, the Jesuits offer us a very one-sided account of eighteenth century happenings. The voices of the soldiers, craftsmen, pearl divers, miners and of the Filipino, African, Tarahumaran and other servants and slaves who accompanied the Jesuits are largely missing. The voices of the native Guaicura, Pericú, and Cochimí are completely absent, except as the missionaries describe them.[5] While these lopsided sources make colonial Baja particularly distant and difficult to understand; our ability to read and actively interpret these sources becomes that much more important. And Baja, as a Spanish “frontier” region, with its extreme desert environment and now extinct nomadic peoples, presents us with unique historical circumstances well worth exploring.

This study, then, will first situate the eighteenth century Jesuit writers and their writings within the historical context of the conquest and colonization of the peninsula, where a close, if initial, reading of one Jesuit missionary’s letters and published history for clues about native peoples’ efforts to survive, adapt to and resist the Jesuit incursion, will begin to suggest some answers as to what might have happened and why.[6] Father Jacob Baegert’s history, Observations in Lower California, first published in the 1760s, was neither as comprehensive nor as widely read by contemporaries as some of the other Jesuit accounts of life in colonial Baja. But for our purposes it is particularly revealing.[7] Baegert served for seventeen years at San Luis Gonzaga, one of Baja’s most isolated desert missions, where he had minimal contact with other missions or secular Spanish settlements. Perhaps this explains why his history contains more frank, on-the-ground observances of native life than do the some of the other Jesuit accounts of Baja. His writing is not polished. He contradicts himself at times and it is within the space created by these contradictions that we find the most interesting clues to native life. Accommodation and resistance were contested here as both Father Baegert and the Guaicura, who lived in the vicinity, struggled to make sense of the mission settlement. Both attempted to accommodate to the new socio-ecological circumstances that came with European attempts at permanent settlement and mission agriculture in the desert environment. Both tried to understand the “Other’s” norms for gender and family relations, though the Jesuits, unlike the Gauicura, sought to control and “improve” the Other’s way of being. Many serious and sometimes devastating misunderstandings occurred, as Baegert’s (mis)representations of Guaicura life attest to. So that while Baegert describes the social and cultural activities of “his parishioners” he and the other Jesuits were simultaneously blinded -- they denied that the indigenous Americans had any culture at all. “They believe in nothing,” said Father Baegert.[8] While he admits that the Guaicura were happy and content with their way of life, he also expresses sincere joy when young children die since “only a few Indians who live longer than fourteen years go to heaven.”[9] Father Baegert saw many children die. The waves of newly introduced epidemic diseases, such as smallpox, were devastating. And the devastation both augmented and was augmented by the changes in social ecological and cultural norms. We will never know with certainty what the Guaicura, Pericú and Cochimí felt and experienced during the time of their demise. Understandably, present day scholarship tends to have more of an interest in people who survived the colonial period with their cultural integrity still intact. But the experiences of those who did not survive and the reasons for their demise are also vitally important to understand. So that, while exploring the contested changes in social ecological and cultural norms at San Luis Gonzaga, this initial reading of one Jesuit’s writings also raises important questions that beg for further exploration of a region and its lost peoples.

The Jesuits did not arrive in New Spain until the 1570s, following the earlier Franciscans, Dominicans and other holy orders. As historian Peter Bakewell says, “finding no lack of missionaries and parish priests in the colonial heartlands [they] decided to take to the frontiers.”[10] In some ways the Jesuit missionaries were particularly well suited to their task. They had the energy and enthusiasm of a newly formed and newly arrived order, whereas the Franciscans and others who had been in New Spain for a generation were already disillusioned by their decidedly partial victories in converting indigenous Americans. In addition, the Jesuits’ shunned the mass baptisms of the Franciscans in favor of a uniquely “accommodating” and thorough approach to evangelizing that would serve them quite well. The Jesuits believed in “levels of civilization” within which all individuals, even so-called barbarous savages, could be taught to ascend until they might eventually reach an apex of European Christian life.[11] As part of accomplishing this task, the Jesuits sought to “accommodate their subjects” by learning native languages, establishing missions in the midst of native settlements and isolating those missions from secular settlers who were more likely to see the native population as an inferior race of “natural slaves,” than rational, if lesser, individuals deserving of “accommodation” and “civilizing.” It is important to keep in mind however, that the Jesuit philosophy of accommodation was strictly defined within the evangelizing of the colonial period. The Jesuits did not believe that the “lower orders” of peoples had the intellectual tools they needed to decide what was best for themselves, and in this way, as we shall see, accommodation could be quite limited.

Regardless, it was with these standards that Fathers Juan María de Salvatierra and Eusebio Francisco Kino began lobbying for a California mission in 1691. They worked to secure the support of the Jesuit hierarchy and New Spain’s resident officials, establishing a pious fund that could receive the endowments they solicited from individual colonial benefactors and recruiting the soldiers, sailors, servants, ships and other personnel and supplies they needed for their California expedition. After six years of preparation, the Santa Elvira finally dropped anchor off a Baja beach in 1697, where Salvatierra went ashore to “found” Loreto, a site called Conchó by the people who already lived there.[12] The Jesuits had officially commenced Spain’s permanent colonial occupation of the Lower California frontier. During the next seventy years, the order established eighteen missions, and some sixty-five representatives from the Society of Jesus made the long trek to serve in this isolated region. As members of an enthusiastic and influential order who traveled from Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland, Bohemia, Austria, Croatia and Italy, to live in colonial California, their expectations must have been many and varied. What did they find and write about during their time there? How did this strikingly foreign landscape with its nomadic populations appear to them? And, most importantly, what can we learn from them about the now extinct Cochimí, Guaicura, and Pericú Californians? It is with these questions in mind that we now turn to an initial reading of one man’s descriptive accounts of life in eighteenth century Baja.

Father Jacob Baegert, who was born into a farming family in Alsace in 1717, was accepted into the Society of Jesus and in 1748 was assigned to “somewhere in the West Indies.” In 1751, more than two years after commencing his journey to colonial Mexico, Baegert was finally transported in a hollowed-out-tree canoe from the Jesuits’ already well-established missions in Sonora, across the gulf to Loreto, where he waited three more weeks before travelling through the desert on the back of a mule for thirty hours to his mission, San Luis Gonzaga. While Father Baegert initially expressed pleasure at finding out that he had been assigned to California (he relished the idea of serving in an area that had few of the troublesome secular settlers that hampered Jesuit civilizing efforts elsewhere) he was, upon his long-delayed arrival there, disappointed to find himself alone with one Spanish soldier in the middle of a desert with “only 360 Guaicura parishioners to tend to.”[13] Like other Jesuits assigned to Baja, he was particularly stricken by the landscape, which he blamed at least in part for the “backwardness” of the native inhabitants, and the severity of which was incomprehensible to someone from the farmlands of Western Europe. His own words best exemplify his strong feelings:

Now then! Those who have ears listen! What is California? Nothing but innumerable stones and these you find in all four directions. It is a pile of stones full of thorns – because this is the whole of California, that means that besides stones and thorn-bushes you find nothing else in California; or to quote the scripture, a pathless, waterless thornful rock, sticking up between two oceans.[14]

It appears to be certain that in the beginning God did not create California… My suspicion is that California arose long after the great flood out of the salty ocean water by and through the force of an underground fire.[15]

If the Jesuits believed, as they did, that there were “levels of civilization,” in California some of them, such as Baegert, also discovered a lower order of landscape. Amenable locations for growing crops were few and far between and those few plots were very limited in size and scope by the constant short supply of water and complete dependence on irrigation. Although all the missions were founded where there was water and some small patch of tenuously fertile earth, they remained reliant on food imports from the Sonoran missions for the duration of their existence. This conundrum between the California desert reality and the Jesuits’ unrealizable quest for a settled Christian civilization meant to blossom forth within wheat fields and vineyards is one of the themes in colonial Baja that deserves more attention.

As Cynthia Radding defines it in her book about the Sonoran mission settlements, each society had its own “social ecology,” or a complex set of relationships that developed between any given social group and the land they occupied, a set of relationships that included a political relationship based on control of natural resources, as well as a customary set of practices for utilizing those resources to obtain food and other necessities.[16] The extreme contrast between the social ecological norms for the European Jesuits and the native Californians is particularly noteworthy. For example, as the eighteenth century Jesuit historian, Francisco Javier de Clavigero pointed out, the missionaries insisted that their converts should cease to eat insects, which were plentiful and easily obtained. Instead they sought to provide their parishioners with beef, which was outrageously expensive and always in short supply. Clavigero admits that this was not, economically speaking, logical. At the same time he was incapable of legitimizing the insects as food fit for humans.[17] However, the day-to-day reality, as expressed by Father Baegert, was that he dined most days on pitahaya dulce (cactus fruit), corn tortillas and water, not bread and wine, a hardship that he complained about and chided himself for, yet importantly, he found such food “agreeable.”

One gets used to everything. Several times I left bread alone and ate what the Spaniards called tortillas, not because I liked them better, but because they are agreeable to eat. I have them in my mission, though I could have bread. However, I do not want to take the trouble for this one item. In the future I will take care to have some wheat. That is a better plant and the proper food for man.[18]

In theory, Jesuit “accommodation” absolutely did not apply to social ecology and dietary habits; these were characteristics that they sought to transform. Yet this transformation was an impossibility given the physical environment and in fact, there was accommodation on all sides. The Jesuits were often forced to eat native foodstuffs or go hungry. Yet, in their writings they do not recognize the Californians’ food as fit for humans. The Jesuits’ social ecology was interrupted, and as the above quote seems to suggest, Baegert may have suffered not so much from hunger, but from a guilty conscience. His language seems to imply remorse as he reprimands himself for not taking the time to procure “proper food.” “In the future,” he says, “I will take care to have some wheat.”

The social ecology of the Californians was, of course, also upset and like the Jesuits, they both adapted to the new reality and resisted the change. The Guaicura lacked any context within which to understand “rationing” their consumption and preserving foodstuffs, a constant frustration for Baegert. Instead they feasted when food was readily available and grew thin and hungry when it was not. Father Baegert, for example, complained that the Guaicuras were constantly “stealing” food, helping themselves to “his” fruits and vegetables as they ripened. Initially some of the Californians may well have seen the mission as a temporary stopover that fit quite nicely within their nomadic lifestyle as one of a number of locations within their “gathering” circuit. Eventually however the alterations in diet and increasing reliance on mission food sources may have exacerbated their vulnerability to European diseases.

As the Jesuits’ writings reveal, the native Californians were organized into small groups (called rancherías by the missionaries) of fifty to eighty individuals who claimed access to the resources of a particular territory or territories. Thus organized, they were accustomed to moving in a cyclical pattern based on the harvest time of specific fruits, seeds and nuts. During the pitahaya season, food was plentiful enough for several rancherías to gather in one location, where they had their largest and most important social gatherings. Marriages were often enjoined during these seasonal festivals and important political and social alliances were formed. These customs, which facilitated both physical and cultural reproduction, were disrupted and ultimately destroyed through population loss and subsequent relocation and congregation into mission settlements. Here, epidemics made deadly in-roads, not just because of increased vulnerability due to the sedentary nature of the settlement, but also because the population was, surely, weakened by the disruption in their dietary practices and political – social relationships, both of which were defined, at least in part, by their nomadic relationship to the environment. Further, as the existing social networks deteriorated, the stability and sociability of the mission may have become more appealing, thus perpetuating the disparaging loss of life. This of course, is an untested claim, but as some scholars have already suggested for other similar areas, such a hypothesis would be well worth testing and flushing out. [19]

Other aspects of colonial Baja that deserve more attention are indigenous gender and family relations. We know that the Jesuits launched regular crusades against native Californians’ sexual practices, especially what the Jesuits saw as polygamous and adulterous relations by individuals whose marriages the missionaries had sanctioned. However, unfortunately, even Baja’s best historians may not have paid close enough attention to all the sources as this passage by Harry Crosby reveals.

In 1733… the southern missionaries stepped up their campaign against polygamy. This attack seems to have created a rallying point among the Pericú, an issue that stimulated organized resistance to mission life.

Diseases, mostly syphilis, were disproportionately reducing the female population. Neophytes in the South were deeply disturbed by a growing lack of mates. In any of the native peninsular groups, women traditionally gathered most of the food. Chiefs, shamans, and other important men among the Pericú had long been accustomed to acquiring extra wives as practical status symbols. Sensing an opportunity to challenge these local leaders, the padres redoubled their efforts to attract young women as converts, a conscious campaign to frustrate the influence of shamans and chiefs… Fear gripped nearly everyone as emotions were battered by sickness, the death of kinsmen, and the ideological battle between medicine men and missionaries.[20]

The women in this account were alternately “acquired” by “important men” or else “attracted” to the mission to be used by the Jesuits in a campaign against shamans and chiefs. While these things certainly may have taken place, there was potentially a lot more at stake here for the women when we consider them as actors in their own right. For example, the discussion of male-female relationships becomes more complicated when we examine Baegert’s writings closely and look for the cracks in the ideological and literary conventions of both eighteenth and twentieth century scholars. Baegert may have revealed more than he intended to about the position of women in native society.

Not many of [the men] enter the state of matrimony as God intended it. They simply wanted to have a partner. Besides, the husband wants a servant whom he can command, although his authority does not reach far; the women are not particularly anxious to obey.[21]

Baegert assumes that “the husband wants a servant,” but then has trouble reconciling the fact that the women do not cooperate.

As soon as the ceremony is over, the husband will go in one direction, the wife in another, each for himself, in search of something to eat.

Just as they acted on their wedding day, so they will act on the following and every day in the future. For many weeks they will not live together without previous understanding or mutual permission. As far as food for their support is concerned, the husband does not provide for his wife, nor the wife for her husband…

Concerning the kitchen, each person is his own cook, and all, men and women, young and old, concentrate on cooking as soon as they are able to move about and to stir a fire… all natives, big and small of both sexes, do nothing else all year long but search for food, consume it, sleep, chatter, and be idle.[22]

In these passages Baegert elaborates on the “husbands” and “wives” who clearly did not act their proscribed parts, but rather went on about their business in their customary and seemingly rather egalitarian fashion. Baegert persists in describing male-female relationships with the only terms he has at his disposal, “husband,” “wife,” and “marriage,” terms whose meanings were clearly altered in translation.

They did not even have a word for “to marry,” which now is expressed quite ingeniously in their language by the words tikére undiri, that is, to touch each other’s arms or hands.

The word “husband,” which they had and still use, is, according to its meaning and etymology, applicable to any man abusing a woman.[23]

As is evident, the closest Guaicura equivalent of “to marry” lacks the sense of permanence required by the Jesuits, while Baegert’s understanding of the Guaicura equivalent for “husband” vividly reflects the Jesuits’ insistence on female subservience and stands in stark contrast to the touching of each others’ arms and hands described by the Guaicura expression, tikére undiri. Finally, Baegert contradicts himself by attempting to maintain a male-centered point of view, which by its very nature could only reveal part of the story. Compare, for example, his statement that “Before they were baptized, each man took as many wives as he liked and wished,”[24] versus:

Nobody lived … who did not daily commit adultery without fear or shame; thus their living together resembled anything but a true matrimonial state. Basically, it was a common affair of all with all… jealousy remained an unknown beast to them.[25]

There is enough evidence here to suggest that polygamy, as defined by the Jesuits, may have borne little resemblance to actual native experience, “a common affair of all,” which may have been incomprehensible and therefore indescribable for the missionaries. Further, as we saw in the Crosby passage, some of these misunderstandings and inaccuracies may have persisted to the present. In short, Jesuit sources, such as Baegert’s history, are rich with the raw material that feminist historians have used elsewhere to refute the conventions of a patriarchal inheritance.[26] Further, in the case of Baja, this question may have special significance, since we find repeatedly that the differences between Jesuit and native Californians’ understanding and practice of gender and family relationships was cause for some of the most persistent efforts, on the part of the Californians, to actively resist Jesuit “civilization.” As Harry Crosby only begins to suggest, “The subject of women was particularly sensitive.”[27] In this case, Crosby is referring to the fact that an incident involving a dispute over a “second wife” sparked a two-year long armed uprising by the Pericú that forced the Jesuits to abandon several missions and entrench themselves in Loreto while the outcome of the battles was determined. Similar incidents involving women incited violence elsewhere, suggesting that native gender relationships had a larger political or cultural significance, entirely missed by the Jesuits, who perceived that the natives lacked all political organization and culture.[28]

The Californians were not, according to the missionaries, differently cultured, and by extension differently gendered, but rather, “they [were] uncultured, very limited in their knowledge through lack of ideas.”[29]

The stupidity of their mind, which originates in no small part from the regrettable lack of suitable words in the Californian language and the necessary shortcoming in application.[30]

I again intended to write about superstitions and customs by the local inhabitants. However, after much questioning and imploring I did not get anything out of them. Most likely it is because they believe in nothing because they thought of nothing. One Indian, to be sure, told me after many questions that the Emma – the devil, and when you ask how and what this Emma is everybody is astonished – that the Emma met a bird, Joeminini Generis, and from this marriage arose human beings…[31]

The Californians, according to Baegert, lacked the words, ideas and beliefs that were necessary for culture, yet in the second passage he clearly begins to describe the foundational beliefs of the Guaicura. Similarly the Jesuit historian, Clavigero, denies the Californians any culture or “the many arts useful to human life.”

The Californians were entirely barbarous and savage. Neither architecture, agriculture, nor the many arts useful to human life were known to them. In all that peninsula there was not a house, nor the vestige of one; not even a hut, nor an earthen jar, nor an instrument of metal, nor a piece of cloth.[32]

Six pages later, Clavigero admires the workmanship and usefulness of the Cochimi’s lightweight, watertight, multipurpose woven trays, which negated any need for an “earthen jar.”

The tray, called batea by the Spaniards, is round, somewhat deep, and varies in its size; it is usually a foot and a half in diameter. It is made from the twigs of a certain plant, flexible as the willow after they have flattened it and cut it lengthwise. They make it in a spiral form, beginning in the center, and fasten it strongly with strips of the same material. The spirals are held together so closely and the tray is so solid that it holds water without even a drop being able to get out.[33]

These recurring contradictions create the space within which we find numerous clues to indigenous life, but they also tell us something more about the tensions and contradictions within the Jesuits’ mindset, which seems to alternate between a sort of medieval determinism and an enlightenment era interest in describing and explaining things “scientifically,” as in Clavigero’s descriptive passage above about the batea.

In fact this is a typical characteristic of the eighteenth century Jesuit texts, which alternate between “anthropological” details and description, and the dramatic language of the great adventure stories so popular at the time, interweaving praise-filled hagiographical accounts of the extraordinary bravery and commitment of the Jesuit protagonists, with God and the Devil actively battling for the souls of the “barbarous” Californians.[34] Contrast the following passage by Father Sigismundo Taraval, to the above passage by Clavigero.

Thus the devil plied his trade on every hand, exerting through the winds and seas new and greater cunning, and attempting by more dangerous storms to overwhelm this new and tiny offspring of the church and Christian faith… Our one hope of succor was to say the more fervently, “God save us, lest we perish,” so that these wretched skies might know that we are all His subjects, and that relief must be forthcoming.[35]

While most of the accounts end with a positive outcome (Taraval and his crew, who waited out the storm referred to above, were saved through prayer and vigilance), Father Baegert’s history is an exception. Baegert lived in isolation at San Luis Gonzaga for seventeen years and, importantly, the end of his history coincides with the 1767 expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain and its colonies. God was not victorious this time, rather “everything [was] in vain,” and the contradictions remained unanswered, except in death and abandonment.

So it is and so it will remain until the people finally die out or the Final Judgement begins, rather will the Indian become white, rather will California cease to be California before they will start another way of life concerning their food, clothes, and dwelling habits.[36]

It also must be admitted that in truth they are really happy because they are content as they believe they do not miss anything. Everything depends on education and habits, which is another nature, and theirs is of a different kind.[37]

Baegert recognizes the Guaicura’s contentment with their way of life, but happiness is not enough to save them from their “barbarous” state of being. His only hope for his parishioners is found in early death.

Before confession they [do] not have the slightest idea through what means they could improve themselves. This is the cause of my joy when little children die. Only a few Indians who live longer than fourteen years go to heaven.[38]

In 1767, the crown ordered Father Baegert and the other Jesuits out of California (and all of Spain), and Father Baegert joined the eighteen other remaining Jesuits gathered at Loreto for the long trip back to Europe. Their few remaining native charges were, one last time, ordered to relocate and consolidate so that the newly arriving ranchers and farmers could utilize their labor more “efficiently.” Thus the native population, already reduced in number by some eighty per cent, suffered further, as they were forced onto ranches and into permanent settlements to labor in ever-closer proximity to the newly secularized Spanish society.

Today, there are no Guaicura, Pericú or Cochimí descendents with an interest in searching for their ancestors’ lost cultures and lifeways, yet their histories are well worth searching for. Few scholars have so far been tempted, though Homer Aschmann’s insightful 1959 study, The Central Desert of Baja California: Demography and Ecology, is a beginning.[39] Aschmann, before most other scholars paid any attention, integrated a study of the environment with a study of the people residing there. However, it remains for other environmental historians to begin to apply more elaborate, creative, comparative and theoretically adventuresome interpretations, such as that conducted by Cynthia Radding for the Sonoran missions.[40] And, while Harry Crosby’s mammoth 1994 history, Antigua California, presents a reader-friendly, comprehensive history of the Jesuit occupation, it tells a decidedly male-centered version of that story, one that unnecessarily parallels the Jesuits’ own male-centered texts.[41] And though the missionaries’ writings may be skewed with bias, they reveal more than their authors intended, providing plenty of raw material for fresh feminist re-readings that could add immeasurably to our understanding of native Californians in colonial Baja.

Unfortunately however, the peninsula remains quite isolated, not just geographically but also in our current historiography, which largely ignores it. Today’s historians have collected their area studies into manageable categories, such as Latin America, California, and the American Southwest. These categories are certainly useful, but not complete, since the Baja peninsula and its people are rarely considered within these parameters. Even the new “Borderlands” studies rarely include much about Baja, whose border-zone is limited and whose lands extend a thousand miles south to parallel central Mexico. Though no native peninsular peoples survive to lobby for their lost past, even this brief reading of one eighteenth century Jesuit’s writings demonstrates that the sources are rich, if one-sided, and well worth exploring. Important questions, asked by today’s environmental and feminist historians about indigenous accommodation and resistance, have challenged our ideas about social ecology and gender and family relations for other, more accessible, regions. While Baja, with its stark desert landscape emptied of its original human inhabitants, continues to bear silent witness to the devastation wrought within the colonial period’s “Columbian Exchange.”

---

[1] Jacob Baegert, The Letters of Jacob Baegert, 1749 – 1761: Jesuit Missionary in Baja California, translated by Elsbeth Schulz-Bischof and introduced and edited by Doyce B. Nunis, Jr. (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1982), 217.

[2] The Kiliwa, who lived in Baja’s northeast corner, successfully rebelled against the establishment of a mission there, and so remained isolated enough to survive into the twentieth century when UC Berkeley anthropologist, Peveril Meigs, was able to conduct a study of the fifty or so individuals who still lived in the area (see 2:n3 above).

[3] Population estimates vary somewhat and are difficult to determine given the scanty evidence. There may have been a much larger population prior to 1500, before the early Spanish expeditions, which may or may not have introduced European diseases to portions of the peninsula. Peter Gerhard estimates that there was a population of 48,000 in 1533, with a decline of approximately 15 percent on the gulf coast between 1533 and 1697. He estimates the 1800 population was 5,000 with fewer that 1,300 individuals still residing south of Mulege (mid-peninsula). Peter Gerhard, The North Frontier of New Spain (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982), 295.

[4] Anthropologist Peveril Meigs searched the peninsula in 1938, finding only a single band of surviving Kiliwa living in the east-facing canyons of northern Baja’s mountains. Peveril Meigs, The Kiliwa Indians of Lower California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1939).

[5] The Guaicura, Pericú and Cochimí encompassed the three broad linguistic groups of Californians that occupied Baja, with the exception of the Diegeños in the far north. These Peninsular peoples shared many cultural and linguistic traits, though individual bands had widely varying dialects.

[6] This reading is “initial” because it is based on English translations of the original documents published by Dawson’s Book Shop in Los Angeles, California.

[7] Jacob Baegert, Observations in Lower California, translated with introduction and notes by M. M. Brandenburg and Carl L. Baumann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

[8] Ibid., 201.

[9] Ibid., 217.

[10] Peter Bakewell, A History of Latin America: Empires and Sequels, 1450 – 1930, The Blackwell History of the World (Malden, Massachusetts and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 135.

[11] Jennifer D. Selwyn, ‘“Procur[ing] in the Common People These Better Behaviors’: The Jesuits’ Civilizing Mission in Early Modern Naples 1550 – 1620” (Radical History Review 67: 4 – 34, 1997), 22.

[12] Father Kino had done such a good job impressing the Jesuit hierarchy that they promoted him and he was unable to join Salvatierra on the California expedition.

[13] Jacob Baegert (1982), 135.

[14] Ibid., 128.

[15] Ibid., 163.

[16] Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700 – 1850 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 3.

[17] “Under the instruction of the missionary the Indian was induced to give up the eating of many kinds of insects and worms, and to eat beef. From an economic point of view this was a mistake…” Francisco Javier de Clavigero, The History of [Lower] California, translated by Sara E. Lake and edited by A. A. Gray (Riverside: Manassier Publishing Co., 1971), 93n195.

[18] Jacob Baegert (1982), 121.

[19] Brenda J. Baker and Lisa Kealhofer, eds. Bioarcheology of Native American Adaptation in the Spanish Borderlands. “The editors call for a research program that would explore the full spectrum of native conditions that preceded European arrival and may have predisposed some groups to higher rates of infection. They also want scholars to investigate other causes of Native American mortality, as well as the biological and cultural adjustments of survivors.” As quoted by Ann F. Ramenofsky in a book review of Bioarcheology of Native American Adaptation in the Spanish Borderlands (Hispanic American Historical Review, February, 1999), 116.

[20] Harry W. Crosby (1994), 111.

[21] Jacob Baegert (1979), 72.

[22] Ibid., 73.

[23] Ibid., 73.

[24] Ibid., 73.

[25] Ibid., 74.

[26] Albert Hurtado’s exploration of sexuality and Edward Castillo’s study of the decline of women’s status in the Alta California missions present two excellent examples of related feminist arguments, which suggest differently organized kin-based social systems, based on more egalitarian gender relationships. Such differences in organization, in turn, suggest the possibility of differences in the significance of various sexual relationships. Edward D. Castillo, “Gender Status Decline, Resistance, and Accommodation among Female Neophytes in the Missions of California: A San Gabriel Case Study” (American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 18:1, 1994, 67–93). Albert L. Hurtado, “Sexuality in California’s Franciscan Missions: Cultural Perceptions and Sad Realities” (California History, Fall 1992: 371–453).

[27] Harry W. Crosby (1994), 111.

[28] For other incidents of violence resulting from incidents involving women, see Clavigero (1971), 189-90.

[29] Francisco Javier de Clavigero (1971), 91.

[30] Jacob Baegert (1982), 218.

[31] Ibid., 200-1.

[32] Ibid., 92.

[33] Ibid., 98.

[34] Daniel T. Roff provides a very insightful “Critical Introduction” to reading colonial Jesuit sources, p 12-45 in Andrés Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs of our Holy Faith amongst the most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World, edited and with an introduction by Daniel T. Roff (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999).

[35] Sigismundo Taraval, The Indian Uprising in Lower California, 1734 – 1737, as described by Father Sigismundo Taraval, translated, with an introduction and notes by Marguerite Eyer Wilbur (Los Angeles: Quivira Society,

1931), 110.

[36] Jacob Baegert (1982), 195.

[37] Ibid., 196.

[38] Ibid., 217.

[39] Homer Aschmann, The Central Desert of Baja California: Demography and Ecology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959).

[40] Cynthia Radding (1997).

[41] Harry W. Crosby (1994).