Steven W. Hackel – författare

Spanish California - with its diverse mix of Indians, soldiers, settlers, and missionaries - provides a fascinating site for the investigation of individual and collective identity in colonial America. Through innovative methodologies and extensive archival research, the nine essays in this volume reshape our understanding of how people in the northernmost Spanish Borderlands viewed themselves and remade their worlds. Essays examine Franciscan identity and missionary tactics in Alta California, Sonora, and the Sierra Gorda; Spanish and Mexican settlers' identity as revealed in mission records, family relationships, political affiliations, and genetic origins; and Indian identity as shown in mission orchestras and choral guilds as well as in the life of Pablo Tac, a Luiseno who penned his own remembrance of the Spanish conquest of Alta California. The concluding essays examine the identity and historiography of the field of the Spanish Borderlands as it has developed over the last century in North America and Spain.

In September 2015, Junipero Serra was canonized by Pope Francis in Washington DC against the protest of many Californian Native Americans who criticized his brutal treatment of their ancestors and destruction of their culture. Like most complex historical figures, Junipero Serra has been interpreted in countless ways, often contextualized mainly in California. This book situates Serra in the context of the three major places that he lived, learned, and proselytized: Mallorca, Mexico, and Alta California and uses scholars from all three countries to create a rare glimpse into the life of the saint in three cultural dimensions. Essays on his use of music and art, and his representation in popular culture chart the life and impact of Serra, his education, and ideology, Franciscan influence, the plans and building of the missions, Native people and other important topics revolving around his life and history of Serra and the Catholic church in Mexico and California.

As one of America’s most important missionaries, Junípero Serra is widely recognized as the founding father of California’s missions.  It was for that work that he was canonized in 2015 by Pope Francis.  Less well known, however, is the degree to which Junípero Serra embodied the social, religious and artistic currents that shaped Spain and Mexico across the 18th century. Further, Serra’s reception in American culture in the 19th and 20th centuries has often been obscured by the controversies surrounding his treatment of California’s Indians. This volume situates Serra in the larger Spanish and Mexican contexts within which he lived, learned, and came of age. Offering a rare glimpse into Serra’s life, these essays capture the full complexity of cultural trends and developments that paved the way for this powerful missionary to become not only California’s most polarizing historical figure but also North America’s first Spanish colonial saint.

From precontact to the end of colonial order, recovering lost voices, and exploring issues both intimate and institutional, this sweeping examination of Spanish California illuminates Indian struggles against a confining colonial order and amidst harrowing depopulation. To capture the enormous challenges Indians confronted, Steven W. Hackel integrates textual and quantitative sources and weaves together analyses of disease and depopulation, marriage and sexuality, crime and punishment, and religious, economic, and political change. As colonization reduced their numbers and remade California, Indians congregated in missions, where they forged communities under Franciscan over-sight. Yet, missions proved disastrously unhealthful and coercive, as Franciscans sought control over Indians' beliefs and instituted unfamiliar systems of labor and punishment. Even so, remnants of Indian groups still survived when Mexican officials ended Franciscan rule in the 1830s. Many regained land and found strength in ancestral cultures that predated the Spaniards' arrival. At this study's heart are the dynamic interactions in and around Mission San Carlos Borromeo between Monterey region Indians (the Children of Coyote) and Spanish missionaries, soldiers, and settlers. Hackel places these local developments in the context of the California mission system, and draws comparisons between California and other areas of the Spanish Borderlands and colonial America. Concentrating on the experiences of the Costanoan and Esselen peoples during the colonial period, ""Children of Coyote"" concludes with an epilogue that carries the story of their survival to the present day.