SAN DIEGO DE ALCALÁ O.F.M.
(Saint Didacus) |
THIS special issue of The Journal of San Diego History is
the result of a symposium presented at the University of California, San
Diego in October, 1976, under the title "From Lope de Vega to San Diego: The
Backgrounds of Spanish Colonization in the Californias." The symposium was made
possible through the generous assistance of the Del Amo Foundation of Los
Angeles and was presented by the Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies
of UCSD. It grew out of a suggestion of Professor Claudio Guillén for the
possible production of Lope de Vega's little known play about San Diego de
Alcalá, patron saint of Mission San Diego, as a possible UCSD contribution to
the bicentennial activities of Fronteras 1976 in San Diego. This portion of the
symposium was presented by the Dramatic Arts Department of UCSD, while the
symposium itself was organized and programmed by Professor David Ringrose of the
History Department. The special volume you are now reading has been made
possible through the combined support of the Center for Iberian and Latin
American Studies, the San Diego Historical Society, the Del Amo Foundation, and
the Chancellor's Office of the University of California, San Diego.
The purpose of the symposium and of the resultant volume of
proceedings was to go beyond the conventional narratives of missionary and
military colonization in California and place those events in the context of the
cultural assumptions and impulses of the colonizing Spaniards. This approach
illustrates their inevitable compromises with actuality, and the impact of their
efforts on the often sophisticated but always different native societies of the
Californias. This has been attempted through a combination of literary sources,
literary criticism, and historical and anthropological scholarship. The
participants included faculty from the University of California at Santa Cruz
and Berkeley, a Franciscan scholar of the mission experience, the Coordinator of
the Baja California Center for Historical Studies, and scholars from the
University of New Mexico and from the three major universities of the San Diego
area—the University of California, the University of San Diego, and San Diego
State University.
The central feature of the original symposium was a
production of the Lope de Vega play San Diego de Alcalá in its American
premiere. Translated by poet Stephen Fredman of San Francisco, it was
presented by the Dramatic Arts Department of UCSD under the supervision of Peter
Klein. It was given two performances at UCSD, played at various missions, and in
Los Angeles. No printed version of the play can recapture the vitality and
effectiveness of that dramatization, with the result that the reader must work
his way through what Professor Joseph Silverman characterizes as a mediocre and
poorly constructed example of Lope de Vega's work. With Mr. Fredman's
translation, and subsequent editing by Professor Thomas Case of San Diego State
University, we offer a version which is both reasonably readable and reasonably accurate.
For all of its flaws, and despite the brief space given the
conquest of the Canary Islands and the total lack of direct reference to
America, Lope's play offers important insights into the mentality which created
the pattern of military and religious expansion of eighteenth-century
California. Written in the early seventeenth century, San Diego de Alcalá
offers a depiction not only of religiously inspired conquest, but a portrayal of
Spanish life which reveals the tensions and pressures of Spanish society. It
places fundamentalist and traditional rural values, associated in the play with
legitimate and unquestioningly pious Catholicism, in opposition to superficial
religiosity as a mask for economic calculation and concern for prestige and
power. The popular position, that of the Old Christians with no past of Jewish
or Moorish compromise, is opposed to that of the nobleman—the practical man of
wealth and power, often descended from or related to converted Jews. The
overtones of social, religious, and ethnic tension are clear. They were an
outgrowth of a continuation of the medieval Castilian drive to reconquer Spain
from the Arabs, a spirit renewed by the conquest of the Canaries in the early
fifteenth century and the fourteen-year war of conquest against Granada finished
in 1492 on the eve of Columbus' first voyage. This archaic politico-religious
tension was perpetuated in sixteenth-century Spain by the prolonged battles of
Charles V and Philip II against the expanding empire of the Mohammedan Turks in
the Mediterranean and the rise of Protestantism in Europe. This religious and
political struggle was marked within Spain by the expulsion of the Jews in 1492,
by the sixteenth-century rise of the Inquisition and general mania for purity of
blood as a requisite for office holding, by recurrent Moorish raids on the
Spanish coasts, by the revolt of the Moorish population in southern Spain in the
1560's, and by the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Moriscos in the first
decade of the seventeenth century—the period when the play was written.
Thus the Spaniards who conquered America were the product of
a tension-ridden society in which religion and very real international and
internal threats were inextricably mingled. It is little wonder that religion
became a major element in the Hispanicization of America, that various religious
approaches came into conflict there, and that the Christianization of the
Amerindians came into conflict with the practical
considerations of political control, power, and diplomacy. The imagery, popular
figures, and cultural assumptions articulated by Lope de Vega in the seventeenth
century were thus part of the cultural baggage which the Spaniards of the
eighteenth century brought with them when they began to revive Spanish expansion
in what is now Northern Mexico and the American Southwest during the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The play itself, and the discussion of its significance by
Professor Silverman are designed to offer something more than the assertion that
Spaniards were motivated by Greed and Faith in varying proportions depending on
the individual. They are intended to provide a link—a pattern of
understanding—between the heart of Spanish culture in the Golden Age and the
expanding Spanish frontier in California at the end of the eighteenth century.
The efforts of Spain to consolidate her control in Lower and
Upper California have always been part of conventional California history. The
arguments between missionaries and governors, the distance between Indian
culture and interests and those of the Hispano-Mexican immigrants, and the
ambiguous record of the mission treatment of the native population have all
received considerable attention. To a degree, the papers and commentaries which
follow the play in this volume re-examine this familiar ground. Hopefully,
however, they do so in such a way as to offer renewed interest and insight.
To establish a bridge between the home country and the
frontier in the eighteenth century, Professor Donald Cutter of the University of
New Mexico was asked to discuss the political and diplomatic context of Spanish
expansion in the period. He offers a lively narrative of the process whereby
military penetration and international spheres of influence were developed in
the area. In her commentary, Professor Iris Engstrand of the University of San
Diego elaborates on important aspects of that development and provides a more
detailed orientation to its relationship with the San Diego area.
The dominant feature of actual Spanish occupation of the
region was the long chain of Franciscan missions which reached from San Diego to
the San Francisco Bay area. Father Francis Guest O.F.M., currently Archivist for
the Santa Barbara Mission Archives, offers a perceptive analysis of the pattern
of mission colonization. He refers to experiments being attempted by
eighteenth-century civil authorities, and discusses the attempt to acculturate
the Indians while also coercing them into providing sustenance for the new
settlements. As a member of the order which staffed the early missions, Father
Guest offers a refreshing and surprisingly objective analysis of the evolving
"system," if such it was, and of the growing tension between religious and
civil/political methods and objectives in imperial expansion. As an invaluable
counterpoint, Sr. David Piñera Ramírez of the Baja California Center for
Historical Studies examines the same
topic from a more secular point of departure, and broadens the framework with an
interesting summary of the Jesuit experiences in Lower California—an episode
which provided much of the experience and lay personnel for the expansion
northward. The two presentations offer a lively analysis of the inner workings
of expansion and complement the broader narrative framework of the preceding
paper and commentary.
Finally, through the work of the eminent Berkeley
anthropologist, Professor Robert Heizer, we conclude with an analysis of what
happened to the people in the middle. Caught between economic and political
motives of Spanish political authority, soldiers, and settlers, and the policy
of Christianization and acculturation of the missionaries, were the California
Indians themselves. Consisting of a sizeable population, in tribal societies
with considerable sophistication, the natives understood neither of the forces
impinging on them. Professor Heizer examines the internal organization of the
missions—their economic bases, the patterns of conversion and discipline, and
the personal and collective fortunes of the Indians drawn into the system. It is
a dismal picture, relieved only by the good intentions of the missionaries and
by the benevolence of their system when compared with the aggressive
extermination practiced by the North Americans who subsequently seized the area.
The volume closes with the comments of Dr. Lucy Killea, Executive Secretary of
Fronteras in San Diego. Drawing on her extensive research on early San Diego,
Dr. Killea elaborates on and questions aspects of Professor Heizer's treatment
of California in general, in part by focusing upon the questions he raises as
they apply to the San Diego area. Much of Heizer's presentation stands, some
aspects are challenged, and the specifics of dealing with the Indians of this
region are laid out as thoroughly as the sources permit.
With the last three papers and their commentaries, the
cultural and literary insights of the first paper and the play can be traced
through the context of Spanish expansion, the institutions which were used to
carry it out, and their impact on the existing societies of the area.
Geographically, the focus shifts from the Hispanic world and Spain to California
and ultimately to San Diego. Thus the reader is carried almost literally, from
Lope de Vega to San Diego in a way which we hope will deepen his perception of
the Hispanic backgrounds of the colonization of the region.
Professor David Ringrose
University of California, San Diego
