Mission San José and the Road to Secularization, Part 1: 1794

By Cristóbal López

The end of 2023 will mark the 200th anniversary of the secularization of the Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo in San Antonio, Texas.

The road to secularization for Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo was long and costly. The Spanish missions along the U.S. Southwest borderlands were never expected to be permanent settlements. In theory and law, each mission was to be handed to local secular clergy following ten years of operation, and the Indigenous residents of each mission were to be given land to sustain themselves once their conversion to Spanish citizens was complete.

Roughly ten years was how long it took Spanish missionaries to convert Indigenous peoples in Latin America, and the missionaries applied the same theory to the missions in North America.¹ However, what functioned in the Latin American missions did not apply to the missions in the U.S. Southwest. In San Antonio, missionaries found themselves in control for roughly a century.

In 1758, Jacinto Barrios, Governor of the Provence of Coahuila and Texas, conducted a survey of Mission San José that revealed how large the mission had grown and how costly it had become since its founding in 1720. According to Barrios, the mission had a total population of 281 Indigenous residents and had 3276 sheep, 1000 head of cattle, 103 horses, 80 mares, and 30 oxen. The mission also had 84 stone homes, a soldier’s quarters, carpenter shop, workshop, granary, and mill. Barrios calculated that the mission and all its holdings cost the Spanish Crown 450 pesos annually. The size of the mission and its vast holdings entitled it to receive an annual salary of more than 1300 pesos.²

Luis Antonio Menchaca’s Mapa del Presidio de San Antonio de Bexar (1764)

Towards the late 1700s, the physical state of Mission San José and the other San Antonio missions began to decline. The late Catholic historian Marion Habig attributed the decline of the missions to three key factors. The first factor was a decree issued in 1778 that declared all unbranded cattle property of the crown rather than the missions, which reduced the number of cattle owned by Mission San Jose. The second factor was the hostility of neighboring Indigenous groups. The Comanche and Apache would often lead raids into mission land, which resulted in the loss of livestock and people. Last was the constant threat of diseases such as smallpox, which reduced the population at the missions.³

The prolonged and costly control of the San Antonio missions led Fray José Rafael de la Santisima Trinidad Oliva, the President of the Texas missions during the end of the eighteenth century, to question the practicality of the missions. In 1788, Fray Oliva created a list of nine pros and cons regarding the missionaries’ management of the temporalities (property owned by the mission) and questioned whether the missionaries should distribute the temporalities to the mission’s Indigenous residents and limit themselves to secular duties. Fray Oliva argued that although the missionaries continued to convert Indigenous residents to Catholicism, the missions required substantial financial support due to their deteriorating state.⁴

The long-awaited decree for the secularization of the Spanish missions in the Interior Provinces finally came in 1794 under the order of Commandant General Pedro de Nava.⁵ In his decree, Commandant General Nava ordered all missions under his jurisdiction that had existed for more than ten years since their founding to administer the temporal possessions to the Indigenous residents of each mission.⁶ Manuel Muñoz, Lieutenant Colonel and Governor of Texas, took charge in ensuring the mission clergy obeyed Commandant General Nava’s secularization orders at the San Antonio missions. On July 16, 1794, Governor Muñoz read Commandant General Nava’s decree to the Indigenous residents of Mission San José and prepared the first detailed census of the mission’s Indigenous residents, which included their names for the first time.

Painting of Mission San José by James Gilchrist Benton, c. 1849-1857. Pictured is the north wall of the church on the left, the granary in the middle, and a dwelling on the right with possible remains of the original north wall. Courtesy of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

Courtesy of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

The 1794 census reported a total population of ninety-five Indigenous residents at the mission. Of the total residents, seventeen relocated to Mission San José in the previous year from the coastal region known as Nuevo Santander, current day Southern Texas and Northern Tamaulipas, Mexico.⁷ After creating an account of mission residents, the next step was to distribute the mission’s temporal possessions, which included the mission’s farmland, tools, livestock, and dwellings. The duty of surveying the land for distribution fell upon Pedro Huizar, who was well known for his role in assisting in the construction of the Rose Window at Mission San José.

The mission’s Indigenous residents accompanied Huizar and José Errera, the Royal Justice, to the farmlands of Mission San José, where they received ownership of twenty-eight plots of land that measured 300 varas in length and 200 varas in width. They also acquired tools such as plows, pickaxes, saws, and harrows, and acquired the mission’s livestock, which included milk cows, horses, and mules.⁸ The Indigenous residents also gained ownership of the 54 dwellings at the mission, presumably the dwellings that they resided in at the time of distribution. Of these dwellings, six of them had ruined roofs and dilapidated interiors. However, most of them were in livable condition.

With ownership of farmland, tools, farming equipment, livestock, and dwellings, the missionaries expected the mission’s Indigenous residents to be self-sufficient. However, even though the Indigenous residents gained ownership of the mission’s temporal possessions, the missionaries remained at Mission San José.

One possibility for the missionaries remaining at the mission may have been due to the outstanding debts Mission San José accumulated overtime that needed to be repaid. In 1795, the year after the mission was secularized, Fray José M. Pedrajo recorded that from 1790 until 1794, Mission San José accumulated 2,230 pesos worth of debt. According to Pedrajo, he borrowed this money to help the Indigenous residents at the mission who were in need.⁹

Nevertheless, Spanish missionaries remained at Mission San José for two more decades following the initial call for secularization. Within that time, Mission San José underwent social changes that provided glimpses into the communities that would begin to form at the mission sites after complete secularization in 1824.

[1] Herbert E. Bolton, "The Missions as a Frontier Institution in the Spanish-American Colonies," The American Historical Review 23, no. 1 (October 1917), 46.

[2] Gov. Jacinto Barrios y Jauregui, Informe del governador sobre la mision de San José, May 28, 1758, San José Papers Part 1, 1719-1791, SAMNHPL, 130-134.

[3] Marion A Habig, “Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo 1720-1824,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 71, no. 4 (1968), 508-510.

[4] Fr. José Rafael Oliva’s Views Concerning the Problems of the Temporalities in 1788, SAMNHPL, 28.

[5] The Interior Provinces of New Spain included Texas, Coahuila, New Mexico, Sinaloa, Sonora, and Baja and Alta California. See https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/provincias-internas.

[6] Decree of Commandant General Pedro de Nava, April 10, 1794, San José Papers Part 2, 1791-1809, SAMNHPL, 94.

[7] List of Indians at the Mission by fr. Padrajo, San José Papers Part 2, 1791-1809, SAMNHPL, 116-120.

[8] Inventory of possessions of the mission, and distribution of these among Indians by Gov. Munoz, July 23, 1794, San José Papers Part 2, 1791-1809, SAMNHPL, 123-129.

[9] Fr. José M. Pedrajo, List of Creditors of Mission San José, June 5, 1795, San José Papers Part 2, 1791-1809, SAMNHPL, 205.

Read more in Part 2 here: Mission San José and the Road to Secularization, Part 2: Post-1794 (U.S. National Park Service) (nps.gov)