2025 Conference Speakers

2025 Conference Speakers

Presented by California Missions Foundation

Saturday, February 15, 2025

Session I

Brother Sun, Sister Moon: The Role of the Lunisolar Calendar in the Solar and Sacred Geometry of the California and Southwest Missions
Rubén G. Mendoza, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, CSU, Monterey Bay

Societies across the globe have long deployed the Metonic, or Lunisolar, Calendar for calibrating and correcting the solar year, and it has an antiquity extending to ancient Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BCE. Consisting of a 19-year cycle, the Persians, like the ancient Maya, tracked the circa 29.530-day-long duration of the lunar or synodic month relative to the sun's transit, thereby permitting the ongoing correction and recalibration of the solar year. Given that the Hebrew calendar constituted a lunisolar calendar at the time of the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of the Christ, the Roman Catholic Church has maintained observatories, charts, and almanacs for tracking the lunisolar calendar relative to the Paschal computus and the moveable feasts of the Church. In this way, Roman Catholicism has integrated various methods and devices for tracking the sun and moon in its churches and monuments on a global scale for nearly 1,700 years. This presentation will, as such, review the evidence for deploying the lunisolar calendar in the California and southwestern missions and, further afield, the Americas.

Fishing and Shellfish Exploitation during the Spanish Colonial Era in the San Francisco Bay Area
Linda Hylkema, Santa Clara University

Fishing played a major role among aboriginal groups in California for thousands of years. Numerous published sources indicate that ethnographically, groups in the San Francisco Bay region fished for coastal and freshwater fishes. They continued these practices during the Spanish Colonial period in California (AD1769-1834), despite being subjected to the many strictures imposed on them by mission life. During recent archaeological excavations at the Native American Ranchería (Indian Village) associated with Mission Santa Clara de Asís, thirty-nine species of fish, from multiple subterranean pit features, were recovered. Also identified were forty-four different invertebrate taxa, including both freshwater and marine varieties. The fishes from this faunal assemblage represent a diverse set of habitats requiring different recovery methods: nets, hook/line, and Tule reed boats. Shellfish represent sandy shore or sandy substrate habitats and rocky environments, requiring digging sticks or implements to pry mollusks off rocks. This required travel to and from a diverse set of habitats at varying distances from the mission settlement, implying a permeable colonial setting in which residents were highly mobile and native food sources were still highly desirable.

More Than a Soldier's Wife: Indigenous/Californiana Women and Social Agency in Alta California (1773-1840)
April Farnham, California State Parks, Sonoma, CA

Recent scholarship has looked more closely at how women acted both as partners and as individual agents in the colonization of Alta California.  Professors Jennifer Lucido and Scott E Lydon, for example, applied a historical landscape framework in a microscale analysis of Maria Feliciana Arballo and her daughter Maria Ignacia de la Candelaria López (mother-in-law to General Vallejo) to illustrate how colonial women used their agency to negotiate gender hierarchy and colonial authorities on the Alta California frontier.  Using the life story of Doña Maria de Jesus "Vibiana" Juarez as a case study, my presentation will investigate how certain women of mixed Indigenous/Californiana ancestry on the frontier also demonstrated this agency through marriage, language, and cultural kinship. My examination applies an ethnohistoric approach utilizing letters from the Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library, narratives from Hubert Howe Bancroft’s Testimonio project, and ethnographic material from the Pheobe Hearst Museum and the California State Indian Museum/California Indian Heritage Center’s collection of Native basketry. This examination will also highlight the importance of women in the soldier and missionary encounters with Native peoples that specifically took place during Juan Bautista de Anza's expedition.  

Eleven major new historical findings about Cabrilho and other Portuguese and Genoese sailors in California’s maritime discovery, 1542-1543
Paulo Afonso, American River College, Sacramento, CA

After clarifying why being natural of place-X does not require being born in place-X (questioning premature fallacious pseudo-conclusions about a Spanish-born Cabrilho), many important historical discoveries will be presented focusing on 1 – Juan Rodriguez(s) Portugués as Cabrilho in Nicaragua and Honduras 2 – Alvar Nunes, Portuguese pilot, co-owner of Cabrilho’s fleet second largest ship 3 – All three ships in Cabrilho’s fleet were Portuguese mariners’ property? Luis Gonçales (not Gonzalez), perhaps Portuguese too, as San Miguel’s owner and pilot (fleet’s small pinnace) 4 – António Fernandes, Portuguese ship-owner of the Anton Hernandez (Cabrilho-Alvarado-Mendoça’s 1540-1543 fleet) 5 – Gaspar Rico, Portuguese, pilot-major of Villalobos’ Philippines 1542 baptism expedition (prepared by Cabrilho) 6 – Bartolome Ferrer’s 1547 testament – Cabrilho’s pilot-major and other Genoese mariners 7 – Cabrilho’s own testament – first evidence for its existence 8 – Cabrilho’s Portuguese Rodrigues family crucifix Carbon-14 data (Lapela de Cabril, north of Portugal) 9 – Mount Cabrilho’s existence, near Lapela. 10 – Bay of Cabrilho (spelled the Portuguese way) – a California’s extraordinary 1604 Florentine map. 11 – Other Cabrilho related California Portuguese-language cartographic toponyms. The mysterious G. de S. Denio solution, as Los Angeles/Santa Monica Bay.

Session II

Reconstructing the Vital Rates of the Neophyte Population of San Jose Mission
Robert H. Jackson, Mexico City, Mexico

The process of the formation of the California mission communities entailed a process of congregating or relocating indigenous peoples to the missions. Living conditions on the missions, however, created health risks, and contributed to a pattern of demographic collapse of the mission populations. The mission populations expanded during periods of the resettlement of non-Christian “gentiles,” but did not experience growth through natural reproduction. However, the number of people living on the missions declined during periods when the Franciscans did not resettle “gentiles.” The mission registers of baptisms and burials can be used to reconstruct the vital rates of the mission populations, and thus give a clear picture of the process of demographic collapse. This paper presents a reconstruction of the vital rates of Mission San Jose, established in 1797.

Mapping Chumash Communities: From Early Contacts through the Mission Period
John R. Johnson, Ph.D., Curator Emeritus of Anthropology, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History

Following Cabrillo’s voyage of 1542, certain Chumash towns and villages made their appearance on Spanish maps. Explorers’ diaries and mission records document the locations of rancherías occupied during the Spanish colonial period.  Land grant expedientes and diseños provide additional clues. Testimonies of Chumash Indians, recorded by anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, supply settlement names and locations. Since the 1960s, systematic analyses mission register data, combined with archaeological evidence of mission period occupation, make possible the mapping of regional settlement patterns, the geography of the missionization process, population distributions and densities, and intervillage social relationships. 

The Struggles of the Last Bay Area Franciscan During U.S. Occupation
Damian Bacich, Ph.D., San José State University

In March 1847, Fr. Jose Maria Suárez del Real, the Franciscan missionary in charge of Mission San Jose, wrote a letter to John Burton, American alcalde of the Pueblo of San Jose. According to the padre, immigrants the U.S. had occupied the mission buildings, causing extensive damage and impeding him from entering the priest's quarters. His letter was one of a series of often tense interactions with authorities during the U.S. occupation of California. This and other correspondence illustrate the challenges that Real and members of his Zacatecan cohort faced during the turbulent 1840s, including mission deterioration, struggles between political factions, and a massive influx of Anglophone immigrants. Drawing on archival sources, my paper will examine Real's struggle to negotiate his dual outsider identity as a Mexican-born Franciscan in the San Francisco Bay area during the years after secularization and U.S. annexation.

Triumph, Permanence, and Continuity: Ohlones and Mission San Jose
Vincent Medina, Ohlone Indian

The East Bay Ohlone people have a continuous, unbroken presence in their homeland and have maintained their rich cultural heritage despite colonial and assimilationist efforts by three successive waves of colonization by new comers. In this talk from the hosts of Mission San Jose, incoming President of the Ohlone Indian Tribe Vincent Medina, and fellow tribal members, will educate of the continuous presence of Ohlones in mak-warép—the East Bay and highlight the inter-generational work to sustain culture and their proud Ohlone Indian identity. Incoming President Medina and fellow Ohlone Indian tribal members will emphasize their elegant, traditional culture, as well as acknowledge their relationship with Mission San Jose, founded in the pre-contact Ohlone village of ‘oroysom. In addition, the hosts of Mission San Jose will speak of their current efforts to celebrate and acknowledge Ohlone culture and people, and to see repair happen in their homeland.

PANEL DISCUSSION
Fr. Jack Clark Robinson, OFM, Santa Barbara Mission Archive Library

SBMAL will highlight their range of objects and resources relating to the history of the California Mission System. Thematic inclusions will focus on the scope of our collection, as well as the Bay Area, in addition to the Anza expedition of 1775, and the colonization of the San Francisco Bay Area in the 18th century. These resources are accessible by appointment for academics, historians, and the public. Through these original documents, rare books, treasured art & artifacts, and an extensive non-circulating library, SBMAL can be a resource for all mission-related inquiries. We hope to illustrate the importance of these materials in a format which will encourage further scholarship and inspire folks from all over the world to utilize our materials (in person or remotely) for their future research endeavors.

  • Executive Director: Jack Clark Robinson, OFM, PhD | Director@sbmal.org
  • Collections Manager: Andrew Walsh | Collections@sbmal.org
  • Archivist: Laura Bang, MLS | Research@sbmal.org
  • Research Assistant: Lee Noemí Leal-Ramírez MLS | Assistant@sbmal.o

Session III

Was Juan Bautista de Anza, Sr. Seeking a Pacific Port in 1737?
Marie Christine Duggan, Keene State College, New Hampshire

In 1736, a Native American man working for Juan Bautista de Anza Sr. discovered refined silver slabs in Arizona. The discovery may have been staged by Anza and Fr. Agostín Campos, allies who sought permission and funds to explore the region. The request might have been ignored, if it were not for the sudden appearance in 1742 of a British threat to New Spain’s Pacific. Elites in Guadalajara funded coastal defenses to counter the threat of Admiral Anson to the Manila galleon. The actions put the Crown in their debt, leading them to request a supply line to the Colorado River from Acapulco in 1743.  Cheap Asian goods would make silver mining profitable.  King Philip V of Spain responded in 1744 to both Anza and the Guadalajara elite with a decree ordering missions between San Diego and the Colorado River, supplied from Guadalajara.  Asian goods were excluded from this plan.  While neither Anza's petition nor the King's decree mentioned a port in San Diego, the King's decree included a line of missions between the Colorado River and the coast, and the Anza petition is filed under ‘search for a port in northern California,’ which is intriguing.

The Spanish State and the Discovery of San Francisco Bay: 1769-1776
Lloyd Wagstaff

This presentation analyzes the unexpected discovery of San Francisco Bay in 1769, through the eyes of the Spanish bureaucracy in faraway Mexico City and Madrid. From its discovery in that year until de Anza’s exploration in 1776, the viceroy and the Council of Indies received a procession of diaries from soldiers and Franciscans describing what they saw. The presentation summarizes this raw data in the context of maps and commentaries also from this time. It then evaluates how this geographic resource was integrated into Spain’s on-going concern of foreign invasion of its empire.  This study acknowledges the nimbleness of the Spanish bureaucracy in both understanding the significance of this discovery and responding with a funded plan to display Spanish sovereignty through permanent settlements.

Uniformly Different: Some Surprising Facts About Military Dress in Alta California
David W. Rickman

If your idea of military dress during California’s Spanish and Mexican eras includes only blue uniforms with red facings and black sombreros, you may be in for a surprise. Think also of soldados de cuera dressed all in red, or black, or in blue velvet. Imagine them sporting red and black two-tone shoes. How about artillerymen in white, with Turkish trousers and Polish caps? Can you picture presidial cavalry in scarlet tailcoats faced with green, yellow cloaks, and crested black helmets?  This last uniform is known to have been worn at Mission San Jose, the site of next year’s conference. Through a combination of factors, including lax enforcement of official regulations, the preferences of governors and presidial commanders, the arrival of new units from Mexico, and the use of military surplus, these and other unexpectedly different uniforms were used by Alta California’s soldiers from 1769 to 1847. This presentation will give an overview of the uniforms worn, and not worn, in Alta California through official documents, eyewitness images and descriptions, and some of the author’s own illustrations. 

* Presenter schedule subject to change.