Las Misiones Antiguas: The Spanish Missions of Baja California 1683-1855. Edward W. Vernon

por James E. Ivey

Santa Barbara, Viejo Press, 2002

The rough, dry, forbidding extension of the Baja California peninsula along the west side of Mexico was once home to thousands of Indian inhabitants and eighteen Jesuit missions. After the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, Franciscan missionaries took over this group of missions in early 1768, but added only one mission and a visita to the Baja California system. Most of their energies went into expanding the missions into Alta California. The Franciscans continued to operate the Baja California missions until 1773, when these missions were turned over to the Dominicans and the Franciscans focused on Alta California. The Dominicans established ten missions and a visita, all in the northern third of the peninsula.

Vernon eventually visited the final site of every Baja California mission, several of the visitas, and many of the earlier sites of those missions that had been moved. For each of these missions he gives the location using GPS coordinates. He describes the surviving principle mission structures, as well as corrals, acequias, reservoirs, lime kilns, and other, less easily identifiable buildings. Excellent color photographs document the condition of the structures today, and in many cases Vernon includes historical photographs, site plans, and architectural drawings as well.

Probably the most striking of Vernon's descriptions is that of San José de Comondú, about thirty miles west of Loreto. The Jesuits built the largest of their churches for this mission, but the structure fell into ruins and was demolished in 1936. A vaulted structure, which had served as a side chapel, and the sacristy survived, and is in use as the church today.

Vernon took his site plan of the mission church, combined it with information from historical photographs made when the ruined building was still standing, and produced a computer-generated reconstruction of the now-vanished church. He includes several views of the reconstructed church superimposed on the site itself, as well as some of the historical photographs that allowed the reconstruction. The large church was the only three-aisled mission church in Baja California.

Vernon consistently describes how much decay has occurred to the surviving ruined and still-standing mission churches of Baja California just in the last one hundred and fifty years, and makes it clear that unless steps are taken soon to protect and preserve these sites, more will join the list of those that have fallen to leave nothing but rubble and the faint outlines of foundations.

Las Misiones Antiguas is a useful guidebook in that it gets us to the sites of the missions and gives us a good description and fine photographs of the missions as they are today, but it should be remembered that this is the work of an enthusiastic but avocational historian/antiquarian, not a trained architectural historian, or a professional historian, for that matter. Vernon has a tendency to make some basic scholarly errors, such as including quotations without giving a citation for their sources. The book has no foot- or endnotes.

Vernon follows a general "triumphalist" approach to the Spanish mission effort in his discussions of the broad events of the Jesuit, Franciscan and Dominican occupations of the peninsula. This approach begins with the assumption that the mission program was designed "not only to save the souls of the heathen, but also to teach them to survive in the modern world" (Introduction, p. xiv). This results in apologist statements such as: "Many of the Christian religious believe that this tremendous undertaking was necessary and worthwhile because the missionaries' self-sacrificing work, while not successful in a material way, did insure that thousands of heathens would be admitted to the Kingdom of Heaven" (Introduction, p. XIV). Vernon includes modern estimates that the population of the peninsula dropped from perhaps 30,000 natives at the beginning of the Jesuit missionization program in 1697 to less than 7,000 in 1767.

Las Misiones Antiguas is best used in conjunction with Harry Crosby's Antigua California: Mission and Colony on the Peninsular Frontier, 1697-1768, a detailed history of the Jesuit mission program in Baja California. Crosby's work provides the exacting historical detail, and Vernon's book gives beautiful pictures and thumbnail written sketches of the individual missions mentioned in Crosby's text. Used in this way, or as an explorer's guide for trips around the peninsula, Vernon's book is an excellent companion.