Your go-to guide for exploring the missions
What do you know about California’s missions? As another school year begins, another generation of teachers, parents and students prepares to confront that question.
Plenty more questions are likely to follow, including some tough ones you’ll find in our online video quiz (three minutes, ticking clock, multiple choice). You can find it at www.lat.ms/missionsquiz.
If you score more than two right on this video quiz, you’re probably not a fourthgrader anymore.
More than five right? You’re probably a lifelong Californian.
If you get all eight questions right, you probably have tenure somewhere, a tribal membership card or a vow of chastity in your history.
As millions of Californians remember from their own school careers, thousands of fourth-graders in the months ahead will wade into this state’s history by making models and delivering reports on the 21 Spanish missions that introduced European culture to native Californians.
The Los Angeles Times California Missions Database (www.lat.ms/missions database) is here to help teachers, parents and students tackle them. (Travelers, too, of course.) Those missions, begun in 1769, are why mission pioneer Father Junípero Serra was canonized as a Catholic saint a year ago.
But the missions’ arrival also signaled a health crisis (imported diseases) and the biggest land grab and cultural conquest in state history. Many teachers and parents still struggle to understand and tell those parts of the story.
To see how deep the critiques of the mission era and its aftermath can run, read Elias Castillo’s 2015 book “A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions,” or Benjamin Madley’s 2016 book “An American Genocide, which argues that the greatest damage to Native Americans in California was done by California’s elected officials from the 1840s through the 1880s.
With students in mind, the Los Angeles Times California Missions Database gathers new and old articles and photographs of the missions, offers histories of each site, a map, timeline and tips for visitors. It also shows how textbook and newspaper coverage of the missions has changed. And it points to other excellent sources — good preparation before making a mission visit.
If you do make a mission visit, remember that the Catholic Church operates 19 of the 21 missions and relies on volunteers to lead tours giving the church’s point of view. The two other mission sites (La Purísima in Lompoc and Sonoma State Historic Park) are operated by the state park system, whose rangers try to balance church and native perspectives.