Video
The Cultural Landscape of the San Antonio Missions
Transcript
Karen: Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to the NPS Archaeology Program speaker series. My thing is not recording. I'm not really sure why that is. Let's start over. Uh oh, this could be bad.
… Archaeology in the National Park Service . And today we are going to hear talks about archaeological projects and museum projects. I'm very excited to report that I am speaking to you from the I Street office of Stephanie Toothman who has graciously offered to let me use her desk and her speaker phone.
I've been listening to recordings of myself for the past two years and I think that the recordings are sort of outside the range of acceptable. I hope that my voice sounds a little bit more normal now and that you can hear me better.
A webinar series on climate change and archaeology will begin on the day before Halloween, with the talk by Bill Ruddiman, so I'm looking forward to that and I hope that you are, too.
I want to remind people that our webinars are being recorded and that you should set your phone to mute and not answer your phone while you are listening to our webinar. If you have to answer another line, please hang up and dial in again. If you heard about today's speaker indirectly and would like to get invitations to these webinars, please contact me and I'll add you to the mailing list.
Also I don't have my PowerPoint up today. We had a little bit of technical difficulty. I want to remind people that the 2014-2015 webinar series is going to be posted to - the Learning and Development - is being posted on the Learning and Development website rather than the Archaeology website. Next week I'll put the link up again. If you want it before next week, please contact me and I'll send it to you.
Our next webinar is going to be on October 16th, and we will have presentations by Ann Vawser and Cotter Award project winner, Katherine Birmingham. I'm very interested in Ann's presentation. She is going to be looking at site monitoring programs and the effectiveness of a project that she did in the Midwest region.
Katherine Birmingham is going to talk about the project that garnered her that Cotter Award, which is a very interesting project that she did, excavation of slave quarters associated with the plantation at Monocacy Battlefield in Maryland.
I had the pleasure of listening to Joy Beasley talk about this project last night, and if you hadn't had the opportunity to read or learn anything about it, you definitely should tune in next week. It's a great project and I anticipate that Katherine will give an excellent presentation.
Today, though, we have three very interesting talks. Susan Snow at San Antonio Mission National Historical Park is going to talk about research that she has been doing with the descendant communities of San Antonio Mission.
Josh Torres - Joshua Torres - is going to talk about placing the African diaspora in the Danish West Indies, U.S. Virgin Islands, also very interesting work having to do with descendant communities and communities that were transplanted to new environments.
Then Gwen Gallenstein of Walnut Canyon National Monument is going to talk about a museum collection project, that the Flagstaff Area National Monument has put into place with the Museum of Northern Arizona.
Let me talk a little bit about Susan's presentation. The 18th century mission complexes at San Antonio represent the most complete extant example of Spain’s efforts to use missionary systems to expand control of indigenous people.
If you've not ever been to the missions at San Antonio, you really would give yourself a treat to go. They are very, very interesting, besides being beautiful, and the interpretations there, I think, are really top notch.
Susan is going to examine the mission remains and evidence of the influence of indigenous people, and people who identify themselves as mission-descendants, varyingly identify themselves as indigenous or Spanish or both, but they all have memories of various aspects of the cultural landscape that they have associated with their mission identities.
I'm very pleased that Susan will talk to us about this today. Thank you Susan for joining us.
Susan: Thank you very much, Karen. I want to purposely talk today by saying that this presentation was part of a larger symposium on identifying the indigenous voice in the Spanish Missions of the United States. It had presentations on California missions and Southwest missions as well as Texas missions.
I prefaced it there by saying that mine is the least archaeological of any of the talks, because other than focusing on what we know from the archaeological records on what the indigenous presence was in the 18th century, I'm actually going to look at what the archaeological and standing structure remains today, for it reflects how people are continuing to connect to the missions and identifying themselves as mission descendants in the modern landscape. We'll give that as a preface there to that.
I will say that we've been doing a lot of new research on our mission here in San Antonio and have been able to identify a link between the prehistoric ceramics and stone tool technology and stone tool technology and the ceramics of the mission period, which is the first time that we've really been able to make that material culture leap between the pre-Hispanic and the Spanish colonial period.
That's not my research, so I'm not going to tell you about that today. New interest in how our mission descendants identify and create their identity from the structures here in San Antonio is launched out of our long standing project to inscribe their five missions to San Antonio as a World Heritage Site -
As part of that, we have been doing a lot of outreach in the local community, and that has really surprised us or hit a nerve in who identified as mission descendants and has sort of reawakened in people that had not traditionally identified themselves as mission descendants, who suddenly wanting to be part of this new cultural landscape that it’s sort of an reawakening of indigenous identity.
Yeah, but we can see [inaudible 00:10:16].
Susan: For those of you, this may be old news, but for those of you who don't know the five missions of San Antonio, are on schedule to be voted on as a World Heritage Site in 2015. I'm going to start by going through a brief briefing summary of that.
They are five mission complexes in extraordinarily close proximity to each other.
Karen: Susan?
Susan: Yes?
Karen: I'm sorry to interrupt. Are you in a room with other people?
Susan: I am not, but somebody is!
Karen: Somebody in the audience needs to put their phone on mute so that we don't hear this background music or this background noise. Could you please do that? Thank you very much. Susan go ahead.
Susan: The five missions of San Antonio are all within seven miles of each other as the crow flies. This was due to a request back in 1720 by Father Marhilo to break the laws of Indies which said that a mission had to be at least a day's ride between each mission, in order to take advantage of the San Antonio River Basin location.
After the second mission was established then in 1720, in 1731 they were able to bring the three eastern missions into the San Antonio River Basin. They exist on either side of the river in a very close proximity. Nowhere in the world will you find five missions in this close a proximity.
In addition, the cultural landscape here in San Antonio, allows one to see, within that short proximity, every aspect that was required to be a Spanish colonial mission.
The churches, the granary, the acequias, or irrigation systems, the labores, the workshops, the conventos, and other features that are not required but unique such as the perimeter walls, grist mills, lime kilns, and stone quarries.
This complete complex then represents what we want to view, as outstanding universal value, is the interchange of human values. These five missions represent the last wave of missions that were established in this northern corner of New Spain, and embodies Spain’s, attempt to keep their claim on land in the New World and keep it from encroachment from the French here in Texas, and then, of course, from the Russians in California, and then from the English and Americans that are coming in from the East.
The cultural landscape that exists today represents those many cultures that came here in the 18th century. When the Spanish came to the new world in Mexico, they already were bringing with them 700 years of Moorish influence.
Then the friars and craftsmen that came to San Antonio from the college of Coratro in the 1700s, brought with them 200 years of cultural blending of Spain and Central Mexican indigenous cultures. Here in South Texas, they encountered various bands of indigenous groups. They themselves had often represented mixing between 200 years of changes of Spanish influence through the disease vector and the shifting of population pressures in this area. They get many different bands from south Texas that bring their ideas together.
Then the Apache and Comanches that had been, being pushed from the west into this area, provide that population pressure that brings things like perimeter defense walls that you see in these missions that you don't see in missions further south.
Then, finally, you see indigenous groups from east Texas such as the Caddo that come to San Antonio when the three missions of east Texas are moved to the San Antonio River Valley. You see all of these influences represented in the architecture and in the layout of the compounds and of the use of the labores and acequias that you see on the landscape throughout the system.
Then, secondly, the missions are considered an outstanding universal value for the uniqueness of the irrigation system that is here in the San Antonio River Valley. We have 2 extant acequia systems that are over 300 years old. The Espada acequia in San Antonio, and
the Espada acequia continues to exist in operation as a ditch company with a Major Domo and then we are but a member of that ditch company and farmers still draw water from this original mission acequia to grow crops today here at the southern end of San Antonio.
In addition, there is the San Juan acequia which had gone dry. We worked for about 20 years and restored water to it in 2011, so now we have both of those systems in place and up and running. If you come to San Antonio today, you can now see our farming on the original San Juan labores or farmlands, as they would have been farmed 260 years ago.
Finally, and this is what we are really going to focus on today is the third area in the testimony to a thriving cultural traditional. Missions today are not a state archaeological site or a building museum. They are, in fact, a living part of the city of San Antonio.
Four of the five missions are still active Catholic charities. The National Park Service manages these 4 missions in a cooperative agreement with the archdiocese of San Antonio.
Descendants families still live within the vicinity of these missions and play an active part, not only in the parishes but also in programs and things that the National Park Service does. Then, the city still very much identifies itself with the mission, the modern city. Many of the city events and activities evolve around the missions themselves and the landscape which the missions has - which the city has - which the missions helped to form.
How do we identify mission descendants? It's been something that we traditionally have looked to members of the parishes to identify themselves as descendants. Many of them have been member of those parishes for years. Almost all of them forced other missions to hold services continuously since Spanish colonial time.
The only one of those that has had a significant period where it was not a parish is , Mission Concepcion. Even while it had been downgraded to a sub-parish, many individual members and neighborhood resident still claim that Mission Concepcion as their home church,
and since the National Parks Service had come in and helped to restore the grounds of that, it has now become a full parish in itself. In addition, one of the oldest school districts in San Antonio claims Mission San Jose as the first school in its school district, and still has many of its celebrations starting at Mission San Jose, including the wreath-laying ceremony. Every year their homecoming parade starts at Mission San Jose.
We still identify what we call the first families of Mission San Jose. The Hernandez, the Bustios, the Pachecos and the Wizars, some of whom you see represented in the photographs that are in this picture here, that continue to play an active role in the community.
In addition, at Mission Espada, the school there continued into the 1960s, and they recently had a school reunion with several hundred people that still come - to come back and remember their school days there.
Then in the 1980s and '90s, two of these groups, the Mission San Juan men's groups, and then parishioners from Mission San Jose, re-identified themselves as indigenous and formed two indigenous groups out of those parish communities, one called Tap Tulamon Nation at Mission San Juan, and one called the San Antonio River Mission Indians at Mission San Jose.
We have no federally-recognized tribes in this area, so we have traditionally allowed this self identification, some of the ways that we have worked on identifying and collecting these individual stories. (I realize I have a typo in that!)
Anyway, we have had oral history-gathering projects. We've asked for photo sessions where people bring in their photos and share them with the park and we take copies of them. We have an annual history and genealogy day where anybody who wants to come and bring their family memories and histories, comes and displays them.
The National Park Service does not ... We are not the arbitrators of their genealogy. We do not judge who is indigenous or who is a mission-descendant. We allow them to come and tell their stories.
What features - we talked a little bit about what features are in continuous use. Which of these features really help to shape how people identify with the missions?
The first of these are the churches, the acequias, and the labores. These are things that have continued to have been used, that people relate to when they talk about stories of what they remember. People come in and remember swimming in the acequias. They remember farming, the farm fields, and going to church and having their first communion, and quinceneras, and their weddings, and funerals.
All of these things are still actively used in memories that they link to, that the cultural landscape links them to the area that they, and the memories that they associate with being mission descendants.
Here are some examples of some of their church activities, and then the acequias. People still bring us copies of their ditch company certificates. The San Juan ditch company evolved out of the original Major Domo system. In fact, we just re-incorporated the San Juan ditch corporation this last year, and we are now the official the Major Domo for the San Juan ditch company.
San Antonio Missions National Historical Park holds two of the oldest water rights in the state of Texas. We own the water rights to the San Juan acequia and the water rights to the Espada ditch. We still are cleaning these ditches just the way they did in Spanish colonial times.
In 2012, we actually asked the neighborhood residents of the Espada ditch, if they would help to clean their sections of the ditch, as we had a larger project where we brought in American Youthworks to actually go in and clean the dirt out of the ditch as much as they would have done originally.
Then the labores of Mission Espada and Mission San Juan still maintain the same suertes, or divisions of fields, as they did at the end of the Spanish colonial period. If you would have come here to San Antonio today, you would see the same division lines on the fields as you would have seen if you had been here on horseback in 1823. We still, as you can see in the center picture, we are using the same flood style irrigation that they used in Spanish colonial times. New to us, our demonstration form on the original San Juan labore. (I got that.)
Other features that people come and tell us are part of their built-environment memory that link them to the missions here are, particularly, the school houses at Mission Espada, where as I said they had school here until the 1960s. Let's see if I can actually use the pointer. This is one of the old school ruins at Mission Espada where they actually had plays in the 1920s and '30s, and we have photographs of those plays that took place.
One of the descendants who is in his mid-90s now, has brought us his wife's photograph. It was a mixed relationship of the time. He was from Mission San Juan and she was from Mission Espada, and yet they courted and married. I'm making a joke about that now but we find that, just like they did in Spanish colonial times, all through the years, many different families had intermarried between the mission sides and they claimed descendancy to not just one of the missions but all four of the southern missions.
This is the other part of the Espada school. The picture in the middle shows you the first and second grade class from, I think, the 1930s. Sorry, I've covered up part of it. Then here in the right hand corner you see the Tufa House.
It's everyone from Mission San Juan who is a descendant there, that claims to have lived in the Tufa House, lived in the Tufa House. It's kind of like the who slept in the Lincoln bedroom in the White House, because almost every person that claims descendancy to San Juan, told me they lived in that house at one time. It would have been a very crowded house at that time!
It's a very significant piece on the landscape for people when they come to visit and remember their times here at Mission San Juan.
Then the granary at Mission San Jose that's in this corner. We remember it in a preservation sense. It's an important piece of the built environment because it was the first building that the San Antonio Conservation Society bought in order to preserve Mission San Jose.
The Wizar family whose seventh generation descendants can often be seen sitting on the benches at Mission San Jose and telling the stories of this family, actually lived in the granary in the 1920s, and sold the granary to the Conservation Society.
The Wizars are one of the most active families and they spend a lot of time here at Mission San Jose. We recently had them record part of our cellphone tours, telling the story of their family, so that when visitors come, they can hear the story of the Wizar family from the Wizars themselves.
Who are these people of the missions? Are they mission descendants? Are they indigenous descendants? Is that something that we should worry about? Is it something that we should be concerned about as we try to tell the indigenous story?
Spanish colonial record is often first to identify these as indigenous or neophytes. That identification was not so much as we think now - racial - as it was indicating that they hadn’t all of the lessons to become good Spanish citizens. Later, in a later record, they might report those people are Spanish because they had completed the training to be good Spanish citizens.
The documents don't really tell us definitively who is indigenous or who was not indigenous. We have not traditionally asked people to identify as indigenous or not. We simply taken their word that they are descendants of the missions and they've shown us their genealogy.
People who have started - these same people, like Ruby in the middle picture there - they have started to return to looking at some of their indigenous identity and they have looked to other Native American traditions to do that.
If you would were to come to San Antonio and see some of our Native American dances or ceremonies that take place within the missions today, they often have borrowed from those cultures, from the Plains or other areas, as they worked to try to figure out themselves, exactly what it means to be an indigenous mission descendant.
We have started lineal descent studies. We've done them at 2 of the missions but neither one has identified anything that in terms of NAGPRA standards would prove lineal descent to any one individual.
The world heritage process has been interesting in that when we identified one of our Mission San Jose descendant to represent the mission descendants in our world heritage process, we were just thinking mission descendants, but then we had a public about this, wow, we were overwhelmed because all of a sudden, everyone wanted to be identified as indigenous and from the mission. It wasn't enough for them to be identified. They didn't want anyone else to be identified. They wanted to be the most indigenous descendants that we had.
That was a real eye opener to what it means to - what does academic research and heritage tourism mean in terms of cultural identify. Every time we do a study, we are actually influencing the way people self-identify and how they determine their identity to not only the missions but also to research.
Suddenly we have relative newcomers, 20th and 21st century newcomers to San Antonio, claiming that they had a stake in the missions because they were from indigenous groups of the greater area of northern Mexico or south Texas, where the missionaries may have brought indigenous people from.
We've worked with a lot of these people to see how we can tell their stories. Many of them rely on academic research to prove their legitimacy as indigenous.
It's an interesting phenomena to see how they've used our historical research or other’s prehistorical research to reclaim their identity. Another interesting phenomenon that has happened with academic research is that Dr. Ruben Mendoza from Cal State, Monterey, has been doing similar phenomena research at Mission Concepcion and Mission Espada. Since his academic research is done, the Corpus archdiocese has started to reinstate Spanish colonial ceremonies into their regular church calendar.
It's interesting to see how we as academics and as heritage tourism professionals can actually influence the important features of the built environment in terms of modern cultural identity.
Just to wrap up, some of the next steps that we've been looking at in terms of how we continue to work with these various people is, to continue do research on [inaudible] records, probate, et cetera, to try to identify similarities in the built environment, and culture and how people moved post-colonially.
Looking at archaeological profiles of standing original walls, to look at different building episodes, and individual style within construction, and to continue to collect oral history, letters used in other documents that bridge that gap between Spanish colonial times, and modern historical research.
Finally, I'll conclude in saying, that identifying indigenous process is more than just an academic exercise, it's a responsibility that our research may, indeed, impact the day-to-day lives of people that live in the community, and how they understand themselves, and the people around them. One of those things that reinforces, that the missions continue to contribute to cultures that came together here to south Texas to and to continue to form that cultural identity of Tehana or South Texas culture, and that's it, thanks.
Karen: Susan, thank you very much! Are there any questions for Susan?
Susan: I should end with my final slide which is, like us on Facebook World Heritage Areas - there you go - or to our website. That's it. That's my sales point. Like us on our webpage, we're looking for 25,000 supporters for our world heritage nomination, between now and June.
Karen: Oh, my goodness.
Speaker 3: I have a trivial question for you. Is it just an accident that the shadow on the floor of your last slide looks like Texas?
Susan: Photoshop! It was an accident when they took the picture, it looked almost like Texas, so we photo shopped it a little bit, sorry.
Karen: I was amazed! Are there questions for Susan? Or comments? I think the questions that you’re asking within this study are more current than ever, as the Parj Service tries to include the diversity of the American populations in the stories that we tell.
I also wanted to comment that, the Native American history at the missions, as you very briefly went over it, it has a lot of parallel to Eastern groups, and perhaps for similar reasons, because they'd cultural disruptions so early. People have thought to rebuild their cultural practices, they do borrow from other groups.
Susan: One of the things is that we need to try to define ... I know it's there, but the way people borrow from other cultures is culturally distinct as well, and trying to figure out how to describe that or to understand that, I think is really a challenge, but I think it’s a challenge we need to look at.
Karen: I'm thinking that Josh might have some information or another perspective on that in his talk as well, today. Susan, do you have the very large archive?
Susan: We have a series of microfilms from the college of Zacatecas de Culturos of that we have gathered over the years. We're a relatively young park, so we don't have a large archive that way. We have a few hundred photographs that we've collected over the 35 years we've been a park, but the larger collections we still use the community.
The Daughters of The Republic of Texas and the Institute of Texan Cultures has the largest collections of photographs of the missions. Then, archival collections, the largest are University of Texas, Austin, and the Behar County archive, and then, of course, the archives in Mexico and Spain still have the majority of our archives.
Speaker 5: Are there any more questions? Or comments? Susan, thanks again for coming and talking with us today.
Susan: Thank you.
Description
Susan Snow, 10/9/2014, ArcheoThursday
Duration
29 minutes, 11 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
10/09/2014
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