Martin Rizzo-Martinez's book is about nineteenth-century Indigenous politics and much more (3). The author seeks to write a history of Santa Cruz, California, through centering the “Indigenous experiences, politics, and defiance” of Native people in the region over the nineteenth century in relation to Spanish missions (14).
Rizzo-Martinez shows his reader through early-to-late-1800s Santa Cruz's colonial world, which featured “colonizers from throughout Mexico and the Pacific Rim, along with Mutsun-speaking Indigenous communities” (70). The author maintains that this region was much more complex than the social binary (Indians and Spaniards) missionaries sought to enforce at the time (70). Through seven chapters filled with a rich diversity of sources, Rizzo-Martinez—alongside other historians such as Ben Madley, William Bauer, and Kat Whiteley—shows how integral a study of Indigenous California is to understanding settler colonialism, racial geographies, and violence in the North American pasts.
Even though readers might be familiar with the mission system as it is taught in California grade schools, Rizzo-Martinez shows us how these colonial institutions structured epistemic violence and society on a case-study level. The author illustrates why missions were both successful and unsuccessful in colonizing Indigenous peoples. He finds that missionaries “targeted Indigenous youth and tempted villagers with Spanish material trade goods such as blankets and glass beads” (66). In addition to some of the alleged guarantees that the theocratic institution offered, these material bribes, “availability of food resources, and the loss of trade partners and kin networks” entrapped many California Indians (67). He explains that influxes of different peoples—indigenous, autochthonous, and settler—created shifting alliances and networks in the area. The author reasons, therefore, that the “mission-based community made sense of their changing circumstances by relying on traditional ways to form bonds and connection,” such as serving as interlocutors and playing games and sports (96).
Some Native people also helped surveil for the missions as interlocutors. Rizzo-Martinez writes that these Indian interlocutors, whom he calls “auxiliaries,” helped track down Native runaways to try to convince them to return to the mission system. The author believes that in establishing these roles, “the padres elevated the status of these auxiliaries, who gained favors and privileges, creat[ing] social stratification within the growing Indigenous community at the mission” (89).
Furthermore, the Spanish mission system greatly affected gender relations in Santa Cruz. The author explains how Catholic padres separated Indigenous boys and girls into different dormitories (monjeríos for girls and jayuntes for boys) and locked these facilities at night to enforce “tight social control” (53). Furthermore, the monjeríos were poorly kept up, and the isolation of young Native women led to situations where padres entered and selected women they “wished to violate” (53). Alas, the missions engineered a colonial system that facilitated conditions that allowed for state-sanctioned sexual violence and abuse. Over the last decade, several scholars have published on Black, Indigenous, and Black sexual ecologies.
Another field of study that Rizzo-Martinez enters is ecology. The author contributes to the study of humans in an environment by showing his work is informed by “Native land-management practices, often referred to as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)” (5). In doing so, he effectively demonstrates how each of the California missions in his study was “shaped by the local ecology and resources, proximity to other Spanish settlements . . . and most important, by the specific histories and cultural realities of local Indigenous peoples” (12). This makes his study applicable to scholars who study presidios, US army forts, detention centers, and other incarcerating institutions.
Rizzo-Martinez's book shows us the world Spanish missions wrought, but more importantly, it shows how Indigenous Californians survived these missions.
