Thrown Among Strangers
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€36.50
A01=Douglas Monroy
alta california
american history
american studies
anthropology
Author_Douglas Monroy
burials
california
california missions
californian history
Category=JBCC
Category=JBSL
Category=NHTB
christianity
civilization
conversion
cultural studies
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
father serra
frontier california
hispanic american demographic studies
history
indigenous cultures
indigenous peoples
labor crisis
los angeles
memory
mexican culture
mexico
missionization
missions
mural decorating
native americans
native peoples
pueblo life
san fernando valley
united states of america
yang na
Product details
- ISBN 9780520082755
- Weight: 590g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 25 May 1993
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Every California schoolchild's first interaction with history begins with the missions and Indians. It is the pastoralist image, of course, and it is a lasting one. Children in elementary school hear how Father Serra and the priests brought civilization to the groveling, lizard- and acorn-eating Indians of such communities as Yang-na, now Los Angeles. So edified by history, many of those children drag their parents to as many missions as they can. Then there is the other side of the missions, one that a mural decorating a savings and loan office in the San Fernando Valley first showed to me as a child. On it a kindly priest holds a large cross over a kneeling Indian. For some reason, though, the padre apparently aims not to bless the Indian but rather to bludgeon him with the emblem of Christianity. This portrait, too, clings to the memory, capturing the critical view of the missionization of California's indigenous inhabitants. I carried the two childhood images with me both when I went to libraries as I researched the missions and when I revisited several missions thirty years after those family trips.
In this work I proceed neither to dubunk nor to reconcile these contrary notions of the missions and Indians but to present a new and, I hope, deeper understanding of the complex interaction of the two antithetical cultures.
Douglas Monroy is Professor of History at The Colorado College. He is author of Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression.
