To the Sonoran Desert, on a Mission

San Diego de Alcala, San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo, San Antonio de Padua.

So begins the list of missions founded along the Pacific Coast in the late 18th century, reminders of California’s Spanish colonial past. But they were not the first outposts of European civilization at the edge of the Spanish Empire. Almost 100 years before Father Junipero Serra, the renowned Franciscan colonizer of California, reached San Diego in 1769, another Catholic priest and explorer, Father Eusebio Kino, was working to establish missions in the Sonoran desert of southern Arizona and northwestern Mexico.

I first learned about Kino, a Jesuit, years ago when I visited Mission San Xavier del Bac, about 10 miles southwest of Tucson. The gorgeously restored and much-photographed church, started by the peripatetic Kino in 1700, looks like a dove nesting among paloverde trees, with two mismatched towers, reminiscent of those at Chartres, France. The interior of the church, which still serves descendants of the Piman Indians among whom Kino evangelized (known today as the Tohono O’odham), is a folkloric Baroque fiesta, with wise-looking cherubs plastered into the walls, nattily dressed saints in niches and well-worn wooden pews.

Seeing San Xavier del Bac whetted my appetite to explore the other simple, soulful Kino missions in the sparsely populated northern reaches of the Mexican state of Sonora, a region called the Pimeria Alta (for the indigenous Piman people), at the time of Spanish colonization. Some of these little-known churches are the pride of the villages over which they preside; others are lonely desert ruins roasting under the Sonoran sun. Good highways reach them, and the best-preserved of the two dozen missions he founded, like the one in the town of Caborca, are within 100 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, so it would be relatively easy to undertake a Kino pilgrimage on your own.

But last April, I found the Southwestern Mission Research Center (SMRC), a Tucson-based group of historians, archeologists and Kino devotees that has been leading tours for the last two decades. The group, which contributes to the restoration of some of these missions, runs bus tours four times a year--twice in the spring during wildflower season and twice in the fall. (The price for the three-day tour is $250 per person, based on double occupancy, including transportation, accommodations for two nights, three lunches, drinks aboard the bus and nightly margarita parties.)

Groups of no more than 36 depart in a comfortable bus on a Friday morning from the InnSuites Hotel, cross the border at Nogales about two hours later, have a picnic lunch at the isolated ruins of the Cocospera mission on the eastern edge of the Pimeria Alta and wind up at the Hotel El Camino in Caborca for dinner and rest. The Saturday itinerary includes nearby missions followed by a sunset visit to beautiful La Purisima Concepcion de Nuestra Senora in Caborca. On Sunday, the tour heads east again to the little mission church at San Ignacio. If there’s time on the way back to Tucson, groups stop for one last encounter with Kino at San Xavier del Bac (though my group didn’t manage to fit it in).

I got my brother, John, a desert backpacking enthusiast, to join me by promising a post-tour camping trip to some of the starkly beautiful Sonoran desert places Kino explored, including Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in southern Arizona. John also wanted to visit the Pinacate World Biosphere Preserve, 30 miles south of Organ Pipe in Sonora, where Kino climbed to the top of an extinct volcano, scanned the western horizon and saw the head of the Gulf of California, proving that Baja was a peninsula, not an island. (Older Spanish maps had correctly charted the geography of the Baja, but they were lost by the time Kino reached the New World.) To Kino, the discovery meant there had to be an overland route from Mexico City to California, and finding it became one of his primary goals.

At the same time, he never neglected his mandate to convert the native people to Catholicism. Though Kino’s Sonoran missions depended on the labor of indigenous populations, he was deeply committed to the Piman people, defending their rights when Spanish ranchers and soldiers encroached on their land. Nor did terrifying tales of Indian tribes in what is now northern Arizona and southern Utah stop him from riding there to meet them and make peaceful overtures.

Kino was born in the north of Italy in 1645 and became a Jesuit in 1665. He sailed for Mexico in 1670 and was sent to the Pimeria Alta in 1687. “Rim of Christendom,” Herbert Eugene Bolton’s 1936 biography of Kino, portrays the priest as an energetic man and an iconoclast, best suited to the far extremes of the civilized world, where there were no bureaucrats to hold him back. Baptizing Indians was his mission, of course. But during his 24 years in northern Sonora, he also mapped the area, started ranches (he was a masterful rider and stock handler) and made 50 exploratory forays across the Sonoran desert toward the Colorado River, ever in search of new souls to bring to Christ and an overland passage west.

John and I drove to Tucson in about eight hours, arriving in time to attend the Thursday night orientation meeting at the InnSuites Hotel. There, we discovered that most of our travel companions were golden-agers from Arizona, though six of the participants--all Californians--were in their 30s and 40s.

Some wanted to see the villages where their Mexican parents and grandparents were born. But everyone shared an interest in Kino, especially the six guides, among them rangy Steve Bauman, a national park archeologist stationed in Tucson, and Nick Fontana, the son of an Arizona historian and co-founder of the SMRC. John and I took a special liking to Al Gonzales, a Tucson bookseller and lecturer, who had considerable knowledge about Sonora.

The flexibility of the schedule set this tour apart from others I’ve taken, though we always stayed together as a group. If we missed a mission one day, we could make time to see it the next. The guides were in it for love and fun, not money. They were paid, but marginally: Two were Tucson lawyers who likely made more by the hour litigating than they earned for the whole Kino weekend.

Kino was wise about where he founded his missions, recognizing that the Piman established villages and seasonal camps near the trickling rivers of Sonora. But I saw only the most meager stream in the valley below our first mission stop, the mesa-top ruins of Nuestra Senora del Pilar y Santiago de Cocospera, about an hour’s drive southeast of Nogales on Mexico’s Highway 2.

Kino founded Cocospera on an isolated aerie at the extreme northeastern corner of the Pimeria Alta around 1689. Apache marauders burned Cocospera numerous times, but it was persistently rebuilt. Now it is a beautiful earth-brown ruin, held in place by scaffolding (for support, not because it’s currently being restored).

Still, at Cocospera, where a handsome fired brick facade built in the 1780s has begun to peel away from the church’s older adobe front, you can clearly see the difference between Kino’s simple approach to building and the elaborate construction style of the Franciscans. They took charge of the Sonoran missions after 1767, when the Jesuits were expelled from the New World, largely for political reasons.

Many of Father Kino’s first missions were little more than huts, gradually replaced by flat-roofed adobe churches without transepts or ornamentation. The Franciscans, however, were master builders. They gave Kino’s churches domes, barrel vaults, scallop-framed entryways, tile work and courtyards--familiar touches to those who know the California missions.

About an hour later, our bus pulled into the town of Magdalena, just off Highway 15 southwest of Cocospera, where Father Kino died of natural causes in 1711. In 1966, Mexican archeologists, using old documents and maps, found Kino’s skeleton buried in what is now the town square. His bones are in a glass-topped case, near a bronze equestrian statue of the priest dedicated in 1965.

That afternoon, as we traveled west on Highway 2, the road crossed wide desert valleys covered with saguaro and organ pipe cactus. It had been a dry winter so there were few wildflowers, but the paloverdes were wreathed in yellow and the spindly tops of the blooming ocotillo shrubs looked as if they’d been dipped in red paint. Desolate mountains, where Sonoran miners learned the skills they took with them to the gold fields of California in 1849, rimmed the horizon on all sides.

At sunset, we reached the Motel El Camino on the outskirts of Caborca, our headquarters for the next two days as we toured more Kino missions, never more than a 90-minute drive away. In the evenings we returned to El Camino for margarita parties on the motel patio, followed by dinner at a restaurant in town on one night and a delicious carne asada barbecue at the motel the next.

On Saturday, we saw the peaceful whitewashed church in the village of Pitiquito, begun in 1706, where the interior walls bear lugubrious frescoes of skeletons painted by native Piman artists, and the beautifully restored house of worship in Oquitoa, architecturally the most Jesuit of those that remain, with no transept and a roof made of rustic mesquite beams and saguaro cactus ribs.

We also visited the Mission San Pedro y San Pablo del Tubutama, which served as the administrative center for both Jesuits and Franciscans in the Pimeria Alta. It has impressive plasterwork decorations inside and a little museum containing statues of sorrowful-looking saints. Afterward, we sat by the Altar river and ate a lunch of homemade wheat tortillas and beans as a blizzard of cottonwood spores drifted down upon us.

At sunset on Saturday, we stopped at the old Caborca church, which looms over a tiled plaza on the banks of the Concepcion River. Kino and his Jesuit colleague, Father Xavier Saeta, started the mission in 1694. The present building, however, is of sophisticated Franciscan inspiration, reminiscent of San Xavier del Bac, with a pair of lovely bell towers and three-tiered facade. If you look closely you can see bullet holes in the walls, put there in 1857 when a lawless band of Americans who sought to turn Sonora into their own private kingdom were apprehended and executed.

On Sunday, we visited the little church at San Ignacio, just a few miles north of Magdalena, and it turned out to be my favorite. The restless Father Kino visited the Indian settlement there the day after he arrived in northern Sonora in 1687. In a quiet farming community surrounded by marigold fields, it seemed locked in eternal siesta on a pretty plaza shaded by chinaberry trees.

This mission was served for 42 years by Father Agustin Campos, one of Kino’s closest compadres. The Piman Indians revolted in 1695 and again in 1751, and some of the far-flung missions survived only because the native people needed Spanish allies to defend themselves against relentless Apache attacks.

By the time the tour ended back in Tucson, we’d visited parts of northern Sonora that casual travelers don’t get to see, learned about Spanish colonial architecture and become Kino devotees, like our guides. John was impressed by Kino’s dauntlessness as an explorer and his will to find an overland route to California. I was deeply moved by his human touch, evident in every simple, hard-working, poetic mission he founded.

But our pilgrimage didn’t end there. The next night we found a campsite in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, near the trail head for Kino Peak, and later drove back across the border to the Pinacate World Biosphere Preserve, about 100 miles west of Caborca. We stood on the flank of Pinacate Peak, looking west toward the Gulf of California, as Kino once did.

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GUIDEBOOK

Following in Father Kino’s Footsteps

Getting there: From LAX, Southwest and United fly nonstop to Tucson, and America West offers connecting service. Restricted round-trip air fares begin at $68. The drive from L.A. to Tucson takes about eight hours.

Mission tours: The Southwestern Mission Research Center, P.O. Box 27823, Tucson, AZ 85726; telephone and fax (520) 628-1269, Internet https://www.smrc-missiontours.com, leads Father Kino mission tours in the spring and fall. Upcoming trips are scheduled for Oct. 27-29 and Nov. 3-5, and March 30-April 1 and April 6-8 next year. The price is $250 per person (double occupancy), including transportation, accommodations, three lunches, drinks on board the bus and cocktail parties.

Where to stay: SMRC tours begin at the InnSuites Hotel, 475 N. Granada Ave., Tucson; tel. (520) 622-3000 or (800) 446-6589, fax (520) 623-8922, Internet https://www.innsuites.com. The motel complex has a restaurant, whirlpool and pool. Doubles (called studio suites) begin at $79.

The Motel El Camino in Caborca, Mexico; tel. 011-52-637-20466, fax 011-52-637-20627, has simple air-conditioned rooms with TV and private baths for about $47.

Where to eat: For drinks and light entrees, try the Cup Cafe in the historic Hotel Congress, 311 E. Congress St., downtown Tucson; local tel. 798-1618. In Caborca, our tour group dined one night at Restaurant las Taunas, Lamberto Hernandez No. 238 and Calle 10; tel. 637-20970. It serves excellent chicken, fish and shrimp.