A Guided Tour Through a Rite of Passage

Along with skinned knees, tetherball and junk-food appetites, California’s fourth-graders often share hands-on history lessons -- with a field trip to a California mission.

Toting cellphones, snacks, cameras and iPods, three classes of 9- and 10-year-olds from Hermosa Elementary School in Alta Loma, a section of Rancho Cucamonga, took part in the annual ritual earlier this month.

Before they took the 2 1/2 -hour bus ride to Mission Basilica San Diego de Alcala, students wrote reports examining the period from the perspective of priests, soldiers and Indians.

Theresa Marti, a veteran of 21 years in the classroom and nearly that many visiting missions, gives her students a choice of projects. “They can make up board games, like Monopoly, with mission questions, or videotape a tour at a mission.”

One student even baked a cake, shaped it into a three-dimensional mission and frosted it. “We got to eat that one,” she said. “It was delicious.”

Others built missions of Styrofoam, Popsicle sticks and sugar.

One sugar-cube mission turned into a disaster when the kids started eating the courtyard walls, Marti said.

The centuries-old chain of missions was founded by Franciscan friars, including Father Junipero Serra, who is one step away from sainthood.

The 21 missions stretching along the California coast were built with Native American labor.

Mission San Diego, “the Mother of the Missions,” was founded in 1769 -- seven years before the Declaration of Independence was signed.

Docent Tony Pfoser, a retired chemist, met the children at the mission gates. “Single file,” he admonished them.

Pfoser paused in the courtyard to mention the ongoing excavation of the original mission ruins, dating to the 1770s.

Then, inside the mission church, Pfoser peeled back the layers of history and described life here more than 230 years ago.

The mission period started July 16, 1769, when Gaspar de Portola and Serra established a fort and mission on a barren hill overlooking San Diego Bay.

Back then, historians say, several bands of the Kumeyaay Nation watched as many of their people were drawn to Christianity by the clothes, food and blankets the padres gave converts. Others may have been attracted by European technology, which included gunpowder and oceangoing ships. But others banded together to resist intrusion.

Within five years, because of a water shortage, the mission moved six miles inland to its present site in Mission Valley.

The padres wanted to be closer to native villages and farther from the military camp on Presidio Hill, where historians say Spanish soldiers raped and killed Indian women.

The relocated mission, which once encompassed more than 55,000 acres, today includes nine.

Pfoser pointed to a white tiled cross on the floor of the sanctuary and weaved a simplified history of a priest who lived and died at the mission.

“This is where Father Luis Jayme and other priests are buried,” he said.

Clever and talented, Jayme devoted his earliest efforts at Mission San Diego to mastering the complexities of the local native language, according to Msgr. Francis J. Weber, chief archivist for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and author of “The California Missions,” published in 2005.

After Jayme got the hang of the language, he compiled a polyglot Christian booklet.

Using this as a tool, Jayme had converted more than 400 natives by September 1775 -- but also generated much hostility among the Kumeyaay, Weber said in an interview.

Weber describes events this way: On Nov. 4, 1775, in the moonlit morning hours, hundreds of hostile Kumeyaay scaled the mission walls and crept into the compound.

They plundered the chapel, then set fire to the wooden buildings.

The crackling flames awakened Jayme, another priest and a handful of soldiers and Christianized Indians.

With fewer than a dozen people available to defend the mission, Jayme walked toward the natives, holding up his arms in greeting.

The Indians stripped him, beat him and shot him with 18 arrows. Finally, one of the mission defenders fired a musket.

The Indians dropped their weapons and fled.

At sunrise, Jayme’s body was found among the burned-out ruins, along with those of two Indian converts.

The Spanish military investigated and identified the ringleaders. But Serra, then living in Monterey, insisted that the Indians responsible for the attack not be executed but treated leniently and taught agriculture and other useful trades, according to Weber.

More than a year later, Serra returned to Mission San Diego to rebuild atop the ruins of the old mission.

In late 1813, after the great earthquake of 1812 damaged the building, a third and final church was built on the same site. Within two decades, the number of converted Indians exceeded 6,000.

“The white cross [about 8 feet high] in front of the mission marks the spot were Jayme died,” Pfoser told the group of fourth-graders, who sat quietly until he asked for questions.

“Why doesn’t the body on the cross have arms?” asked Amy Chaney, 9, referring to the large bronze sculpture behind the altar.

When the cross was painted on the wall behind the altar in the 1930s, Pfoser replied, the parish priest “began searching for a statue that would fit the cross,” something befitting the time period of the mission.

While traveling in Italy, the priest found the perfect bronze statue, right fit and right time period. He bought it even though it had no arms. When the statue was being unpacked in San Diego, the priest explained that he planned to have arms made for it, Pfoser said.

“But a nun convinced the priest to leave it and ‘let the parish be the arms of Christ, as it is the parish that does the work of Jesus.’ ”

After leaving the mission, the group of 140 -- students, parents, grandparents and teachers -- took a boat trip around San Diego Bay, explored by Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo in 1542.

The experience left Marti pondering how times have changed. “I often wonder what Cabrillo would think of this popular tourist spot today,” she said.