Missions Accomplished
San Antonio’s eighteenth-century churches.
When visitors come to San Antonio to see the Alamo, the most common reaction is surprise. “It looks so small!” the tourists say. The reason, of course, is that San Antonio has grown up around the Alamo. City streets and an abandoned post office encroach on the ancient mission’s boundaries. The Alamo is a shrine to heroes, but it has lost its heroic dimensions.
Fortunately, you can discover the sense of space and history just a few miles to the south, at the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. The park consists of four secluded eighteenth-century missions, at intervals of about two miles, that still represent the vastness and grandeur of the Texas frontier at the height of the Spanish empire. The churches stand in spacious fields, most of them surrounded by stone walls. The two northern missions, Concepción and San José, are larger and more ornate than their southern counterparts, San Juan Capistrano and San Francisco de la Espada. The Christmas season is the best time to discover the missions. The churches are decorated with red and green banners, and many of the grounds are lit by luminarias.
The farther south of downtown you go, following the vexing twists and turns of the San Antonio River, the more the feeling of isolation increases and the more you begin to feel lost—in geography as well as in time. San Juan and Espada are bounded on one side by the river and on the other by rambling cemeteries and a pre-World War II airfield. By the time you make your way through the narrow streets and past the dilapidated houses leading up to Espada, you have lost all touch with urban San Antonio and the late twentieth century.
Texas, the predominantly Anglo Texas that we know today, has only existed for 158 years. For 145 years before that, Texas belonged to Spain. What an afternoon’s tour of the four San Antonio missions reveals is the hidden truth of all history, which is simply this: The past is with us yet.
Judged by their original purpose—to train Indians to become citizens of Spain—there is no question that the missions were political failures. By the late eighteenth century only a handful of Indians were left. The rest either had died from measles or smallpox, had been killed in Apache or Comanche raids, or had run for their lives. The Franciscans had abandoned the missions by the mid-1790s, and Spain turned them over to the surviving Indians. If you could look at the missions through the eyes of a Spanish colonial official, you would see the ruins of a failed adventure.
But there are other ways to view the missions. As religious, agricultural, and educational centers, the missions are symbols of triumph. San Antonio today is predominantly Roman Catholic, thanks to the missions. Much of what we think of as native Texas law and lore was actually imported to these old missions by the Franciscans. Our Texas water laws aren’t English; they were derived from Spanish law. Indian vaqueros who worked at the mission compounds were the first cowboys. The mission Indian’s galón was the forerunner to the Texas ten-gallon hat. His chaparreras became chaps.
The four missions are once again active churches. They were taken over by the Archdiocese of San Antonio between 1870 and 1930 and are staffed by priests who say mass every Sunday. Many of their parishioners are descendants of the original Spaniards and Indians who built the missions starting in 1720. In the whispers of the prayers and immutability of the mission stones, New Spain lives on.
Mission Concepción
The mission was built for wandering bands of Indians, who camped on this spot in the 1720s. After repeated raids by Apaches, who occupied the hill country northwest of San Antonio, they pleaded with the Spanish for protection. The cornerstone for Concepción was laid on March 5, 1731. The church took 24 years to build, 14 years behind the king of Spain’s schedule. Other tribes moved into the compound, also to escape the Apaches, and were put to work building the church you now see.
The odds were good that if the Apaches didn’t kill the mission Indians, diseases like measles and smallpox would. From 1731 to 1762, 792 Indians were baptized at Concepción, but 588 were buried. Considering those gloomy statistics, the work done by the Indians and their Spanish supervisors was understandably slow.
What you see now is the same church that existed in the mid-eighteenth century, but without the brilliant red and blue crosses and yellow and orange squares that originally brightened its exterior. (The faded paintings are still visible.) To a rider approaching by horseback on the dusty frontier, the colorful church on the banks of the San Antonio River must have looked like a technicolor oasis.
What to see: The church itself was built in the shape of a cross with Moorish dome above the altar and two towers at the base of the cross. Concepción is the only San Antonio mission built with two towers, which some say symbolize that it was dedicated to a female saint—Mary, the mother of Jesus. The towers have belfries, and the bells still work. During the mission period the bells were used to teach the concept of linear time to the Indians, who ordered their days by the moon and the sun. The bells rang at predawn, calling the Indians to mass. Then, following a breakfast of gruel and stone-ground bread, the bells signaled the beginning of the workday, either in the fields, on various construction sites, or in any of the mission shops. The bells rang to signal lunch and midday rest period; to summon the Indians back to work; and again at sunset to mark the end of the workday.
The missionaries’ attention to detail and the Indians’ talent for making art out of stoenting the five wounds of Jesus’ crucifixion.
Among the Christian symbols, however, is a tiny Indian idol delicately carved into the lower part of the archway. The Indians believed in two gods: the new one that the Spanish priests had introduced to them, who provided clothing, hatchets, and above-ground beds, as well as their old god who gave them corn, acorns, and other crops. This carving is a bow to their old god, and an enduring cry of rebellion.
The inside of the church has clean, simple lines and the finest acoustics of any of the missions. Even a mediocre choir sounds like a chorus of angels during Sunday morning mass. Notice that the prayer candles have electric wicks to prevent soot damage to the old walls. I suppose this is a sign of progress, although it’s a pity not to hear the hissing of tallow candles in a nave as fine as this one.
As you tour the church, don’t look for a federal park ranger to explain what you are seeing. The laws that established the missions as a park called for the gounds to be maintained by the National Park Service and the churches to be maintained by the Roman Catholic archdiocese. The line between church and state is drawn at the front door of the church.
Be sure to see two paintings that have survived the centuries. One is the painting of the Crucifixion in the baptistery. The other—my favorite thing to see at Concepción—can be found in the library, located downstairs from a room that is identified as the infirmary but was probably an office for the two priests who served the church. The center of the library’s vaulted ceiling is dominated by a painting of a man’s face imprinted on the sun. Until 1987, this painting was covered with soot, and only a single eye was visible. Since this is San Antonio, where all events are interpreted through the lens of religion, the eye was known for years as the Eye of God. Yet when the painting was cleaned up, the image that emerged was not a divine one but a man with an Indian face and a Spanish moustache. The painting represents the face of the original San Antonian: part Indian, part Spanish, the reality of New Spain.
Mission Concepción is located at 807 Mission Road, San Antonio, Texas, 78210. Click here to plan a visit.
Mission San José
San José was founded in 1720 by Father Antonio Margil de Jesus, a Franciscan who was to New Spain what Stephen F. Austin was to Texas: the patriarch. Margil also founded four missions in East Texas, which did not endure. To keep his vow of humility, he walked barefoot everywhere he went, including from present-day Nicaragua to Texas. His nickname for himself was God’s Donkey, because he could walk faster than a mule. He died in 1726 and was beatified by the Vatican in 1836. Currently he is under consideration for canonization as the apostle of Texas. In San Antonio Father Margil is already regarded as the patron saint of Texas. Some old-timers believe that the staff he used as a walking stick sprouted miraculous vines, a sign that he was preaching the true word of God. By 1768 San José was booming. The compound was the size you see now: a huge open plaza surrounded by four walls approximately six hundred feet long, which enclosed a frontier empire of stone houses, barracks, a granary, shops, and, looming above it all, the church. There were 281 Indians living in barracks-style housing (which you see restored along the eastern wall of the compound). While the big church was being built, mass was said in another small church that was then on the grounds. Thirty miles to the south, the Indians worked the mission ranch, which had 1,000 head of branded cattle, 3,276 head of sheep, 103 horses for the vaqueros, 30 yoke of oxen, as well as farming equipment and fields of crops.
My Library
