One Mother’s Mission

Three dusty California missions have sat near my desk for years. One has corrugated cardboard for a roof, one has sturdy plywood painted red, and one has magenta-tinted lasagna tiles that have taken quite a beating. By all rights, I should clean my office and get rid of those childhood memories. But instead, I’ve decided to relive what those long days meant.

Many fourth-graders in California elementary schools build replicas of missions. I’m talking about our famous California missions, strung as if on a flung rosary throughout much of the state. During that fourth-grade year, students replicate a mission of their choice, and the week that they soldier through the playgrounds carrying their buildings is one of my favorites.

I made a mission, with my dad, in 1970. He mixed plaster of Paris with me, for the whitewashed adobe walls, and then helped me fashion a vineyard with twigs. I placed moss on the plywood base, for grass. But it was the visit to the mission itself, San Gabriel Arcangel, that formed much of my vision of history and life in California. It was the beginning of my desire to travel every year, to touch history and feel its grandeur and poverty and injustices.

When each of my daughters reached the fourth grade, I turned the mission project into something that lasted for months. I could do that, as I was already a single mother and ran things back then. Each child picked three missions to visit, so we could decide on the one we’d make, and getting out the map of California was the first thrill. Gaila, my eldest, chose San Juan Bautista, San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo and La Purisima.

During spring break, we loaded up the van and headed north on the 101. The April rain-fed grasses were lush, the oaks looked like dark-green parachutes landing on the distant hills. (Our soundtrack that first year was the Spice Girls, if you need a timeline.) Gaila was 9, Delphine 7, and Rosette 3.

San Juan Bautista was a lovely small town, and the mission was beautifully preserved. The square form appealed to Gaila. She took notes, drew sketches, and we admired the garden. But then we wandered to the rear of the property and saw the faint remains of the original El Camino Real. The four of us found a dirt path and we walked on that trail. We imagined how hard the journeys must have been, even with the beauty of wild mustard in clouds of yellow all around us. When we entered the mission grounds again, we saw the cemetery.

Days later, outside Lompoc, we saw La Purisima. That mission was more isolated, standing not in a pretty town like Carmel or San Juan Capistrano, but alone on a windswept plain. The walls were rosy buff, and the chapel looked much as it must have earlier in the century--stark, with a wooden altar and cross. In the soldiers’ quarters were small rope beds. We stopped at the infirmary, where many Indians died of smallpox in the spare, dark room. We walked outside the mission boundaries because Delphine had seen small crosses in a barren field.

Many Indians were buried here, outside the mission grounds. Delphine’s face changed. “This is where I would have been buried,” she said.

She and her sisters are part Cherokee, African and Irish, from their father. She was right.

As we stood there, the romance of fig trees and bougainvillea shading plaster walls, and gilt decorations in ornate chapels, began to fade.

We did not hate the missions then, or our California history. But we got back into our van changed by history. We began to talk about our family’s heritage as immigrants and slaves and military veterans and builders and survivors. From then on, our landscapes--the walls of tumbleweeds that line chain-link fences in winter near Glen Avon, where I was born amid migrants from the Dust Bowl; the fields near the Santa Ana riverbed where friends originally from Georgia raised pigs; the street near our house called Wong Way, after the original neighborhood of Chinese men who owned laundries and shops--seemed overlaid with a patina of history.

That was partly because our California past was being erased so quickly and thoroughly by housing developments and freeways and shopping malls. But it also was because I was lucky enough to have three kids who loved to drive and tell stories and stop with me to look around, to find beach glass and iridescent fig beetles and even a fossil now and then.

Gaila’s San Juan Bautista and Delphine’s San Juan Capistrano (with accessories found at a wedding place--tiny white doves perched on the lasagna tiles to represent the famed swallows) already were part of our living room decor when it was Rosette’s turn two years ago. She was a much more thoughtful, less innocent fourth-grader. She had heard me talk about visiting Mission San Luis Rey, in Oceanside, not with my children but with a friend from the Pala reservation; we had lingered at the large outdoor lavanderia, where women had washed mission laundry on stone steps around a pool, and my friend speculated that some of his ancestors had probably been made to wash clothes there, perhaps unhappily. Did Rosette remember the small, unloved crosses near La Purisima?

She wanted to spend more time at a mission that had seemed less glorified and touristy than some others, where we’d stopped only briefly before--San Miguel Arcangel, tucked into a hollow off the 101 between Paso Robles and King City. Women from the small community had actually been praying in that chapel when we were there before.

The older girls grumbled. They had basketball and friends, high school and junior high importances during spring break. But I prevailed, stubborn and already afraid that our own history was slipping away. We got into the same van (by now, only Rosette and I listened to her musical choice--S Club 7--as the older girls listened to their headphones).

Headed north to San Miguel, they were all old enough to hear our family’s 101 stories: how when I was a freshman at USC and their dad was a junior college basketball star at Monterey Peninsula College, we drove back and forth, or rode the bus, on this long highway to see each other. How we went to so many small towns like San Miguel, tucked off that highway, for junior college games and tournaments, and met so many farming kids who saw sports as a ticket to a bigger life. How we stopped at Grover Beach and fell asleep in the car, how we were so poor we shared one steak at Sizzler.

When we left the iconic highway and pulled up in front of the mission, we were shocked. The heavy winter rains and neglect had left the mission closed, and large patches of whitewashed plaster had exposed adobe bricks to the elements. We paced around the chain-link fence, wondering where the parishioners worshipped, sad at the weeds and rusting construction materials.

Rosette was crushed. She briefly did that third-kid nothing’s-ever-as-good-for-me soliloquy. It was late afternoon, and we needed a place to sleep, so I decided to cut across the hills to Cambria.

The winding two-lane highway passed through the old landscape once wandered by the Native Americans of this area, and the trappers and hunters, and the padres who wanted to enclose them in adobe walls on Sundays to pray. We saw a flock of wild turkeys moving through high grass, and then deer, with two spotted fawns studying us from the trees. We pulled off the road near Templeton to study them back, in silence.

That is the moment my daughters talk about now, their most recent favorite history. And now that fourth grade is behind us, but history is not, I vow that even as my daughters get older and prepare to leave for college, and wonder becomes harder to find, that we will keep looking back when we can. Maybe someday we’ll go to Calexico, where legend has it that paternal ancestors settled when their car broke down on the way from Mississippi; maybe to Echo Park to Angelus Temple, where my great-aunt learned to preach from Aimee Semple McPherson; maybe back toward Templeton, where we can look for wild turkeys and deer and silence.