Saints and Citizens: Indigenous Histories of Colonial Missions and Mexican California

In recent decades, narratives on colonial experiences throughout the Spanish borderlands have shown multilayered processes of imperial expansion and local negotiations of power between Spaniards and indigenous societies living on the empire's frontiers. Colonialism first and then the dissolution of Indian communities during the republican period have commonly appeared as the larger frameworks articulating stories of subordination, Christianization, indigenous resistance, ethnogenesis, identity formation, or cultural change.

To some extent, Lisbeth Haas's book is influenced by these concerns, as she aims to explain the ways in which California Indians — Chumash, Luiseño, and Yokuts — “defended and defined themselves under new and often traumatic conditions” (p. 5). However, this book takes additional steps in reinterpreting indigenous agency and indigeneity in that not only does it explore local responses to mission life and the establishment of colonial relations, but it also focuses both on...