The Franciscans established Mission San Francisco de Asís on the San Francisco peninsula in 1776 as the sixth mission in the Alta California network. In a discussion of Native births and deaths that took place inside and outside the mission, Quincy Newell argues that “Mission San Francisco was a place in which Indians and priests expressed and accommodated a range of positions regarding the reach and authority of Catholicism in the San Francisco Bay Area” (152). Newell provides abundant evidence to support this conclusion on a much broader basis in a welcome new study of a California mission and its Indian inhabitants. The title of the book is particularly well chosen in this regard. The author's attention to labor regimes in the mission demonstrates that priestly dependence on Indian labor “let the Indians labor in Indian ways, rather than enforcing Hispanic custom” as they built and maintained the physical environment in which they lived and worshipped (53). Newell's detailed reconstruction of life histories and kinship networks using the sacramental registers of the mission offers even more support for her contention that this was a community that Indians and missionaries made together.

The six thematic chapters in the book examine the routines, rituals, and lifestyles that emerged in the mission during the Spanish colonial era. The first chapter considers how the priests communicated Catholicism to Indians through the catechism and the mass and how Indians in turn might have interpreted Christian ideas, ceremonies, and the church itself. In the second chapter, Newell examines the “theology of labor” by which the Franciscans hoped to Christianize and Hispanicize the Indians (51). Here she finds that Indian workers often resisted missionary efforts to control their labor and continued with traditional tasks, techniques, and seasonal schedules. The next three chapters focus on family and kinship. The first of these chapters shows how the priests exerted control over marriage rites, prioritized the nuclear family, and disrupted Indian patrilineages. The next two chapters record Native responses to these challenges. Bay Area Indians had in the past viewed marriage as an important part of social and political alliances, and they continued to do so. They incorporated mission marriages into this pattern. They also started to use godparenting as an additional way of creating alliances between families. The final chapter looks at ongoing ties between the people inside and outside the mission. Baptized Indians still visited relatives in home villages, left to gather food or attend ceremonies, and sometimes returned home to give birth or to die. Newell reveals a complex spiritual, social, and economic world that connected Mission San Francisco and surrounding Native villages. She emphasizes Native adaptability and resistance without denying the negative effects of colonization.

This book is a model of careful and attentive scholarship. Throughout, Newell relies on the technique of family reconstitution to recover the hidden stories of individuals and families. No first person accounts of native people are known to have survived from this mission, but the entries in the sacramental registers allow the author to follow some people from baptism through marriage and death. The records provide details on Native and Christian names, parents and godparents, home villages, status markers, age, and more, and they can be cross-referenced to reproduce large family networks. Seven figures in the book show the promise of this technique and the research behind them forms the substance of the chapters. The figures display the families of people like Uichase, a young man of high status who accepted baptism in 1790. Long associated with the mission, he buried four wives and all ten of his children before his own death in 1831. Although in the end we see only the bare outlines of individual lives and community experiences in the kinship networks Newell reconstructs, this effort combines well with the ethnographic data on Bay Area Indian culture and Alta California missiology to produce useful new insights into the history of the California missions.

It is probably inevitable that this work will be compared to Steven Hackel's Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Hackel's book is the most sophisticated study yet of one of the Alta California missions, in this case Mission San Carlos Borromeo in Monterey. Newell makes the comparison herself in her chapter on labor and identifies some potentially significant differences in the ways that priests in the two missions organized Native leadership structures. Although Hackel had access to more complete records and takes a more thorough, diverse, and creative analytical approach to his work on Mission San Carlos Borromeo, Newell's achievement is real. She has discovered stories in the spare entries of the Mission San Francisco sacramental registers. In doing so, Newell has contributed to the growing historiography of California's missions and native peoples and demonstrated the promise of her method of family reconstitution.