The Worlds of Junípero Serra engages an academic and political landscape in which questions of colonial inheritance, national identity, immigration, and indigeneity have become increasingly fraught. Editor Steven W. Hackel evokes three contemporary moments that frame this collected volume: the 2013 tercentennial of Junípero Serra's birth, which inspired this project; Serra's contentious canonization in 2015; and the anti-Latinx and Trumpian fervor that grips political and historical discourse in the United States today. Hackel positions the text as an antidote to the rise of polarizing rhetoric, positing that celebratory and denunciatory representations of Serra unmoor him from both his historical and geographical “worlds” and his varied nineteenth- and twentieth-century legacies. Over the course of 12 essays, which largely adhere to the chronologies of Serra's life and afterlives, the contributing authors reconstruct the contexts that shaped the saint's famous missionary career in Alta California and informed his subsequent prominence in the United...

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