The Spanish Mission Archive

http://www.spanishmissionarchive.org/node/170


Mission Concepción: A Pictorial Narrative

By Michael Werner

Aerial Image

The present-day Mission Concepción church buildings are surrounded by park grounds, which in turn are hemmed in by fences, property lines, and city streets. Readers of the Instruction for the Minister of the Mission of Puríssima Concepción of the Province of Texas, which we have reproduced, transcribed, and translated on the Spanish Mission Archive website, will have some appreciation of how different these present-day, circumscribed grounds are from the landscape of the late eighteenth-century mission.

Yet on close examination, the surviving mission buildings, too, give important clues about how the mission worked, and how it related to its surroundings. If the central buildings of the mission have outlasted the outlying structures (Indian housing, fields, etc.), it is not just because they were meant to withstand the elements. They also were built to withstand burglary or outright military attack. The mission was part of an ever-shifting landscape of conflict among Spanish, Coahuiltec, Apache, and other communities. Although the mission’s inmates were nominal allies of the Spanish against the Apaches, they did not necessary accept the authority of the friars or permanent internment at the mission. Moreover, many of the communities settled in the mission were riven by linguistic, ethnic, and factional divisions, which the friars themselves indirectly had helped fuel.

Side view of the mission

The alhóndiga (granary), arguably was the key to the friars’ power over the mission’s inmates. Readers of the Instruction will notice how much it focuses on the distribution and production of food and clothing, which was controlled by the friars and, to a lesser extent, elected Indian officials. On the one hand, the mission’s irrigated fields and the provisions shipped from central Mexico were supposed to allow the friars to feed and clothe a large population of Indians living at and around the mission. On the other, if the Indians could be confined to the mission grounds and the immediate environs, then they effectively were off from other sources of food, forcing to rely on the friars and their native lieutenants for their sustenance. Nonetheless, the friars often lacked the means to feed their charges, much less control their movements.

Mission domeThe most prominent part of these fortified structures, of course, was church itself. (Indeed, Concepción church is the oldest stone church in continuous use in the present-day United States.) The parapet and spiked projections (merlons) along the top of the church building provided cover from enemy fire. The church bells did not ring out only in celebration, but also alarm. The bell towers themselves allowed the missionary friars and their assistants to supervise the mission’s inmates and to descry from a great distance possible enemy attacks.

Mission grounds

Yet the church buildings did not simply offer a strategic vantage point. They also were meant to be seen. The eighteenth-century mission church building visually dominated its surroundings in a way that the present-day church does not. The surrounding trees and taller buildings behind the mission church in the photo above are twentieth-century additions. In the eighteenth century the church rose high above low buildings, fields, grassland, and scrub. It also was whitewashed and painted with brilliant geometrical designs, which were renewed every few years. The church would have been visible for miles around.

Perhaps more than any other missionary order, the Franciscans used theater to convey ideas, and the church building itself was their most important prop. The very visual prominence of the church was meant to signal the preeminence of the Christian god and his earthly representatives. This message was directed not only toward non-Christian Indians and new converts, but also toward the friars’ Spanish compatriots, who often competed with the missions for land, water, labor, and political authority.

The friars also used sound to emphasize the preeminence of their god and his earthly representatives. If the church’s bell towers were the most visually prominent part of surround landscape, the mission bells were the loudest sound. The bells carried for miles around, competing only with the bells of the neighboring missions and the guns of the nearby military settlement (presidio) of San Antonio Bexar—ostensibly the mission’s protector, but also sometimes its political rival. At regular intervals, the church bells rang out across the landscape, signaling the hours of work and religious observance, as well as important moments in the Catholic liturgical calendar.

Indeed, the first two items of the Instruction speak of how the bells should signal the seasonal cycles of the Catholic calendar.

On all feast days, whether of two crosses, which bind the Indians, or of one cross, Mass is offered and all should attend, with this difference: on the eve of a major feast day, the bells are rung at noon, in the evening, and before mass; while on a minor feast day the bells are not rung at noon, but only in the evening and before Mass.

On all Sabbaths of the year, it also is customary to say Mass, and the bell is rung just before it….

The Mission Concepción bells were the center of strictly ordered cycles of time, but they also were also were part of a spatial order. The bell pull emerges from a compass rose painted on the ceiling of the mission church.

Bell pullCompass rose

On European maps of the period, compass roses showed the cardinal directions. Like the bell tower of the church, the compass rose of a map could serve as an aid to navigation. But it also marked a spatial grid that could be superimposed on the natural features of the landscape, as well as other cultural understandings of space. The regularity of this spatial order echoed the strict regularity of the daily and seasonal cycles marked by the mission bells.
Mappa Mundi

The compass rose echoed the schematic world maps of medieval Christianity, whose center was ancient Hebrew temple in Jerusalem. Like the heart of the rose in Christian mysticism, Catholic churches were meant to be temples in miniature. Catholic theology, in turn, understood the Roman Catholic Church as a whole to be the biblical temple’s successor—although eighteenth-century Catholics, like their present-day counterparts, might have some basic disagreements about the nature and mission of the Church.

Front door of the missionThe sound of the church bells and the prominence of the bell towers made the façade the visual focus of the church exterior. Like the compass rose inside, the columns on either side of the front door were meant to recall the Temple in the Hebrew bible. The braided cord at the top edge of the portico recalled the simple rope cord that the friars belted around their waists, a sign of the their submission to the Christian god, the Catholic church, and the Rule of the Franciscan order. The triangular pediment represented the what Catholics termed the Holy Trinity, the triune nature of their god.

Remember that in the eighteenth century the church was brilliantly whitewashed and painted in brightly colored geometric designs. The carved stonework, too, was painted in brilliant colors, drawing the eye in way that the muted colors of the present-day church portico (however beautiful) do not.

When the bells were rung on Sundays or feast days, the front doors of the church were opened and the courtyard (patio) outside became an extension of the interior of the church. Who sat in front and who in back, who was inside the relatively well-ordered interior of the church and who crowded in the patio outside— On these days, more than any others, the church became a visible sign of the social order of the Spanish missionary frontier.

Front door of the mission open

Whatever their place in this social order, however, all except the priests themselves were separated from altar at front. Illuminated by high windows set in the dome above, the altar was the visual as well as ritual focus of the church. Like the prominence of the Concepción church in the landscape outside, the placement of the altar was meant to underscore the preeminence of the Christian god and his earthly representatives.

Portrait above the altarYet the eye also was drawn beyond the altar to the painting beyond, which created the illusion of a tunnel of light extending beyond the wall of the church. (The canvass still is in the Concepción church, making it one of the oldest paintings done in the Americas displayed in the present-day United States.) Standing between the congregation and this trompe l’oeil heaven was the mission’s namesake, the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. A focus of theological controversy in the eighteenth century, the idea of the Mary’s Immaculate Conception made her a full partner with her son in the divine work of redemption. Drawing on Medieval traditions, the Franciscans regarded the Virgin Mary as a personal intercessor for individuals, much as her son’s sacrifice redeemed mankind as a whole. Indeed, the Franciscans believed that Mary was the particular intercessor of los miserables—the poor and powerless—the very people who were relegated to the patio and back of the church.

Cross Close up of the Virgin of the Immaculate ConceptionCross

The pallor and emaciation of the Virgin in this painting recalls the endlessly reproduced images of her son’s agonies. The Franciscans believed that it was precisely the suffering of los miserables gave them a particularly intimate connection to a divine mother and son who suffered with them and for them.

The friars also made much of their own physical suffering—hunger, exhaustion, disease, martyrdom. On the one hand, they believed that this suffering would help them transcend the appetites and limitations of the flesh. On the other, their visibly suffering bodies were as much ritual props as the architectural elements of the church, recalling the suffering of their god and their charges.

The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception long had been identified with the Franciscan missions. In the early seventeenth century, a Franciscan nun by the name of María de Jesús was said to have engaged in a series of “bilocations,” physically traveling among the Indians of New Mexico and Texas even as her body remained in a trance state in her convent in Spain. María de Jesús later wrote of another series of trance journeys in the celestial realms, where the Virgin Mary dictated her life story to her. In the following decades, efforts to achieve papal recognition of the Franciscan nun’s sainthood (a process known as “canonization”) were entangled with debates about the divinity of Mary and the Immaculate Conception.

In the eighteenth century, however, debates about the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception had nationalist overtones, with Spanish theologians defending Mary’s divinity against French detractors. The Spanish Crown also used these debates in its drive to centralize political power in its hands. When King Fernando VI took control of the military and religious Order of Alcantará, a centuries-old bastion of aristocratic privilege, he had its members swear both to obey his commands and to defend the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. His successor, Carlos III, spearheaded a drive to have María de Jesús canonized—even as he also moved to secularize Franciscan missions across New Spain (that is, place them under the authority of “secular,” or diocesan authorities, which were subject to much tighter royal control). Even as the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception was regarded as the special patroness of los miserables, then, powerful interests also jostled for her attention.

mary_hebrew_lettersOne of the most striking features of the painting are the four Hebrew letters above the figure of Mary. The Spanish Crown infamously had expelled all Jews from its realms at the close of the fifteenth century, after all, and it continued to exclude Jews in the eighteenth century. Yet Spanish Catholic scholars of the Renaissance continued to study the Hebrew language and texts, which they believed prefigured the events and ideas in the Gospels and other Christian textual traditions. If in Jewish texts and traditions the four Hebrew letters correspond to the ineffable name of God, in the Concepción painting they occupy the position that conventionally would be held by a descending white dove, corresponding to the Holy Spirit (the third person of the Christian Trinity).

The surviving mission buildings give few clues about what other mistranslations and misunderstandings occurred as Concepción’s friars and the mission’s inmates sought to communicate across differences of language and culture. Indeed, we know next to nothing about the individual identities of most of the people who built and occupied the mission, much less their ideas, struggles, and histories. The painted sun on the ceiling of the alhóndiga: does it reflect Indian cosmology, Spanish folk beliefs, the fancy of an individual artist?

Ceiling painting

What survived the friar’s rigorous ordering of mission life? How was this order itself obligated to change? In the years following the 1492 expulsion, many Jews (known as conversos) outwardly converted to Catholicism but continued to practice their traditions in secret, particularly in remote frontier regions of Spain’s overseas possessions, where the Spanish Inquisition (the Crown’s system of religious police and courts) was relatively weak. In recent years, many of these conversos have begun to reconstruct identities and practices that they had been forced to keep underground.

In the 1960s and 1970s many members of the Chicano movement called themselves los aztecas del norte, seeking to reclaim indigenous traditions of central Mexico. Suggesting that Aztlan, the ancestral homeland of the Aztecs, was in the present-day United States, they insisted that in crossing the frontera they were neither vendepatrias (people who had sold out their country) nor ilegales (illegal aliens): they were exiles coming home.

Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the language, culture, and identities of the Coahuiltec peoples around the San Antonio missions either were extinguished or forced deep underground. In recent years, however, some members of the communities around the missions have sought to reclaim Coahuiltec language and identity—and assert some measure of control over the missions themselves.

Whatever we make of these claims, they do bring home an important point: the history of Mission Concepción is a living history, intimately bound up with the living history of the neighborhoods and city to which it belongs.

Images courtesy of:

1. Google Maps.
2. arahsae. Keyhole. 6 November 2006. Flickr.
3. TooHotty. Mission Concepcion. 27 May 2007. Flickr.
4. Lisa Percival. Mission Concepcion. 1 November 2003. Flickr.
5. Brian Frederickson. Mission Concepción (Front). 12 October 2006. Flickr.
6. Saveena. Bell Pull. 14 February 2004. Flickr.
7. Mappaemundi from the Etymologia of Saint Isidore of Seville. 1472. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
8. Le Perou Grand Pays de l'Amerique Meridionale. 1700. Benson Latin American Collection, The University of Texas Libraries.
9. Sean McMains. Mission Door. 4 June 2005. Flickr.
10. David Kozlowski. Bienvenidos! 6 November 2006. Flickr. dallasphotoworks.com
11. photowino. Mission Concepcion, San Antonio, Texas. 12 April 2007. Flickr.
12. Rod Morris. Reconciliation. 13 March 2007. Flickr.
13. Mark Florence. The Virgin Mary. 26 May 2007. Flickr.
14. Terry Shuck. Interior Mission Concepcion Wall in San Antonio. 30 July 2007. Flickr.
15. Mark Florence. The Virgin Mary. 26 May 2007. Flickr.
16. Haydan Barry. Mission Concepción Ceiling Art. 13 July 2006. Flickr.

more, with photos: http://www.spanishmissionarchive.org/node/170

Our Lady of the Lake University | © 2007