Comprising a series of studies, this book contains abundant information on the social, political, and architectural history surrounding the early missions to Alta California, beginning with the arrival of Spanish authorities and Franciscan friars at San Diego de Alcalá in 1769. The coverage continues through Mexican rule (1821-46) and ends when California was admitted to the Union as a state in 1850.
A unified story of building during this time is fragmented, however, by the book’s organization. Its first part includes historical events and personages, social observations about the builders, and building procedures. The central and largest part of the book outlines biographical information on all the known craftsmen, dividing them into “Spanish,” Indian, and foreign artisans. The final part presents the history of actual buildings, fragmented again into four political jurisdictions, even though the same artisans frequently traveled among them.
Mardith K. Schuetz-Miller has acquired excellent information through her archival research in Mexico and California, but the reader can reassemble the whole story only from information scattered and even duplicated in separate chapters. To focus on a few “heroes” involved in many building projects, such as José Antonio Ramírez (1762/3-1827), a master carpenter and stonecutter from Jalisco, Mexico, would make a much more interesting book. Such a book could bring together the author’s disparate information on guild training, artisans’ relationships with civil and clerical authorities, and instruction of Christianized mission Indians —some of whom became significant builders in their own right. While such a presentation might verge on a historical novel, the information assembled here could flesh out the careers of several other important builders.
Visual evidence makes me question the author’s conclusion that Ramírez brilliantly designed the awkward Neoclassical facade of Santa Barbara. Some educated friar must have instructed him to modify a temple facade in the Vitruvius handbook now in the mission library, although Ramírez clearly did not understand Classical proportions.
More and better-quality illustrations would assist the reader in making such judgments. Except for the author’s own beautiful cover photo of a mission doorway, all the grainy black-and-white illustrations are eighteenth-century line drawings or nineteenth-century sketches. A map is badly needed to place the missions in their jurisdictions. Better editing should have eliminated small typos, misspellings (“custesies,” p. xiii), and flippant phrases like “attaché case” of an eighteenth-century administrator (p. 4); and should have clarified meanings (“A Te Deum was sung, followed by Compline and all the altars were brilliantly illuminated,” p. 194). Let us hope that Schuetz’s frequently cited “work in progress” will bring the rich information together more seamlessly and compellingly.
