Junipero Serra: California's Founding Father

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For Heidi and Anna and Gabriel

Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Maps

Preface

PART I: MALLORCA

1. Mallorca

2. Petra

3. Becoming Junípero

4. Priest and Professor

PART II: CENTRAL MEXICO

5. The Voyage So Far

6. The Sierra Gorda

7. Popular Missions and the Inquisition

PART III: CALIFORNIA

8. A Work So Holy

9. Securing Alta California

10. Building a Ladder of Missions

11. Twilight

Epilogue

Notes

Further Reading

Acknowledgments

Index

Photographs

Also by Steven W. Hackel

A Note About the Author

Copyright

Preface

In 1931, an imposing statue of a man who stood a bit taller than five feet and suffered from a chronically ulcerous leg was unveiled in the U.S. Capitol. It was of Father Junípero Serra (1713–1784), a Mallorcan-born Franciscan, who in 1749 gave up a successful career as a priest and university professor in his homeland and sailed to Mexico to begin his life there as a missionary to Indians. Twenty years later, at the age of fifty-five, Serra played a key role in the settlement and colonization of Alta—or Upper—California, most notably as the founder of the chain of Catholic missions that eventually extended from San Diego to just north of San Francisco. This is why he is one of two Californians represented in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall and why a newspaper poll, conducted in 1984, the bicentennial of Serra’s death, revealed that two-thirds of Californians considered him the most important individual in the state’s history.

Today Serra’s statue stands awkwardly alongside bronzes of George Washington, Samuel Adams, and Ethan Allen, men more commonly thought of as founding fathers and whose legacies are less divisive. While they helped the American colonies make a decisive break from England, Serra was a colonizer, and so did something of the reverse, transplanting pre-Enlightenment European institutions, ideals, and hierarchies to a distant corner of the continent. He was not alone in his mission. Spanish missionaries like Serra were enormously important—if largely forgotten today—to the history of America. They were often the ones who made first contact with the continent’s indigenous peoples and brought to them unprecedented change. They were also the ones who, both long before and decades after Washington and others were ensuring that England’s colonial rule came to an end in British North America, made it possible for Spain to assert control, not only over much of Central and South America but also over vast expanses of North America as well.

Of the thousands of Catholic missionaries like Serra who came to the Americas, nearly all have been forgotten, losers not so much in the contest for North America as in the subsequent battle for a place in American history. Pitted against the founders of Protestant New England and the signers of the Declaration of Independence, they stood little chance. Those few Catholic missionaries who have been remembered—Serra, the Jesuit Eusebio Kino, and a handful of others—are for the most part viewed today through the haze of myth, not with the clarity of historical fact and context. At the same time, only their years in North America are considered, further obscuring their lives and purposes. However, as historians reexamine the historical development of North America, reenvision the geographic and chronological boundaries of colonial America, and reconsider whose early American life is worth telling and teaching, Serra’s complete life, and his contributions to the history of California and early America, are especially worthy of study.

Compelling and instructive on its own, Serra’s life offers a view into the transformative events of his time. Serra figured centrally in Spain’s exploration and colonization of three regions of North America, in the Catholic Church’s attempts to convert Native peoples to Catholicism and instill in others a more devoted form of observance, in the rivalries between church and state in the Bourbon era, and in the frustration of Indians’ attempts to retain elements of their own culture and society in the face of a relentless onslaught of European men and the diseases they carried. Serra was a visionary, indefatigable and unyielding, who extended Spain’s imperial reach, protected the privileges of the Catholic Church against attack, and ushered in a period of dramatic and even calamitous change for many Indians, especially those of California. For the last he is regarded by some as a destructive imperialist. Yet others see in his life evidence that he was a civilizing pioneer or even a virtuous saint. This book seeks to restore Junípero Serra both to history and to his full complexity, for only by doing both can we come to understand how an island-born Spaniard became one of America’s founding fathers and why his legacy divides us like no other’s.

*   *   *

A brief explanatory note on translations and sources. Francisco Palou’s Relación histórica is a hagiographical account intended to portray Serra as heroic and saintly, but it remains the most useful source on the basic chronology and events of Serra’s life. Maynard J. Geiger’s very elegant translation of the Relación histórica from time to time glosses over or shades the meaning intended by Palou. When I disagree with Geiger’s translation, I rely on my own translation of the original 1787 version and cite it in the notes. Otherwise, I quote from and cite Geiger’s edition. Similarly, Antonine Tibesar’s translations of Serra’s letters capture Serra’s meaning most of the time. However, in some instances I felt the need to provide my own translation, and for those passages I rely on the transcriptions provided by Tibesar. Thus, my quotes from Serra’s letters sometimes depart slightly from the translation in Tibesar.

PART ONE

Mallorca

ONE

Mallorca

The man whom Californians know as Father Serra came from Mallorca, an island whose rich and complex history shaped his life and character and gave him direction and identity through all of his days. The largest island in a chain known as the Baleares and equidistant from the coasts of Spain and Africa, Mallorca was for thousands of years a center of trade and thus a place where diverse peoples came into contact with one another. Economically, religiously, and culturally, it was deeply integrated into a larger Mediterranean and European world, yet it did not share the region’s characteristic and salutary lushness. For most of its history, and in particular between Serra’s birth in 1713 and his departure for Mexico in 1749, Mallorca was in fact an arid and unforgiving land, one stalked by disease and famine and surrounded by enemies both real and imaginary. Rival imperial powers desired Mallorca for its strategic location; conquest and religious conflict marked the island and remade its peoples. Mallorcans alternated between a wary embrace of others and violent attempts to convert, enslave, or expel those with different beliefs and customs. But because of the island’s small size and history of famine, Mallorcans also came to look longingly beyond their shores, first across the Mediterranean Sea for material sustenance and then across the Atlantic Ocean for spiritual fulfillment. It is no coincidence that Junípero Serra, an ardent, crusading, and hardened Franciscan missionary, came from Mallorca.

*   *   *

Mallorcan summers are warm, and its winters are cool. Summer days stretch to nearly fifteen hours, and winter days bring just over nine hours of light. A dusting of winter snow in the mountains is not uncommon in the northwest and southeast, but it rarely snows on the agricultural plain that stretches between the ranges. In general, precipitation is light. Summer is characterized by drought, and there are no rivers that flow throughout the year. As a result agriculture is precarious: the island has more often than not failed to produce enough food for its inhabitants. Since Mallorca is relatively small, only about fourteen hundred square miles, a man on horseback or foot could traverse the island in a matter of days. Mallorca’s best natural harbor, now known as Palma, is in the southwest, away from the mountains and just to the west of the agricultural plain.

Archaeological evidence suggests that people have been living on Mallorca for more than seven thousand years.¹ A turning point in the island’s early history came in 123 B.C.E. when Rome conquered the Talaiotic peoples of the Balearic Islands; later, through the Roman Empire, Christianity came to Mallorca. By the beginning of the fifth century C.E., if not earlier, it was the island’s dominant religion.² Soon after, the Vandals and then the Byzantine emperor Justinian conquered the island. The Byzantines would abandon the Balearics in 624, and for centuries thereafter both African Muslims and European Christians raided the islands. African Muslims had taken most of the Iberian Peninsula by 711, but it was not until 902 that they arrived on Mallorca, introducing not only Islam but also windmills and waterwheels turned by animals, improving irrigation and agriculture, and in other ways helping the island prosper.³

Given the island’s importance in Mediterranean trade and the growing European commerce with Africa in the Middle Ages, rival European kingdoms desired to retake the island from the Muslims.⁴ In 1229, Catalan troops led by the Catholic king of Aragon, James I (1208–1276), the Conqueror, captured Medina Mayurqa, as Palma, Mallorca’s best natural harbor, was then known.⁵ As king of Mallorca, James I distributed land to his followers and transported Christian religious orders and mendicant priests to Mallorca. Both the Dominicans and the Franciscans arrived in the 1230s. In 1238, Franciscans received land in Palma to build a convent, but construction of the influential Convento de San Francisco did not begin until 1281.⁶ By the middle of the fourteenth century, the convent had more than sixty Franciscans.⁷

Upon his death in 1276, James I divided his kingdom between his two sons, James II of Mallorca (1243–1311) and Peter III, the Great (1239–1285). Almost two decades of political unrest ensued. After swearing his allegiance to his brother’s son who had become king of Aragon, James II began to carve out a separate existence for the kingdom of Mallorca. He created a standard currency, imposed taxes on Catalan merchants, and formally recognized the governing bodies of the small agricultural communities across the island, ushering in a period of economic expansion. Because of the island’s location as a mercantile entrepôt, many Mallorcans made their living as sailors, pilots, fishermen, merchants, shipwrights, and hired hands. Palma soon rivaled Barcelona as a major port, especially after the pope granted Mallorcan merchants the special privilege to trade with non-Catholics in Africa, as long as they traded for food, something that was necessary given that the island was nearly always threatened by famine.⁸ As early as 1280, Mallorcan ships had sailed for London loaded with commodities, among the most important of which was wool. And Mallorcans, in particular Jews, cultivated a profitable and busy trade with North Africa.⁹ Mallorcan culture flourished during this period as well; Palma’s Jewish cartographers, for instance, created some of the most important and widely used atlases of the Middle Ages.

Owing to the influence of the colorful, brilliant, and ascetic Franciscan tertiary Ramon Llull (1232–c. 1315), Mallorca in these years became a center of Catholicism and a breeding ground for Catholic missionaries.¹⁰ After a series of religious visions, Llull committed himself to three pursuits: converting the unbelievers; writing a book, the best in the world, against the errors of the unbelievers; and encouraging the pope, kings, and Christian princes to support monasteries in which missionaries would learn the languages of the unbelievers. Llull espoused the belief that all non-Catholics—by which he meant primarily Jews and Muslims—could be converted, not by war, but by reason.¹¹ He traveled to Africa to preach and learned Arabic so that he could do so in the local tongue. He established a missionary college in the hills above Palma, where he trained followers, and Mallorca became a launching point for Catholic missionaries bound for Africa, the Holy Land, or the Canary Islands, off Africa’s Atlantic coast.¹² Soon destroyed by slave traders, the Canary Island missions nevertheless helped to set a pattern of Mallorcan Franciscan missionaries venturing far from their home island.¹³ Llull himself died in 1315 or 1316, most likely in Mallorca, although some have suggested that he died in Tunis at the hands of Muslims who repudiated his teachings, or on a ship sailing back to his homeland. His bones were interred in the sacristy and then the pulpit of the church of the Convento de San Francisco in Palma.¹⁴

Mallorcan independence came to an end in 1343 when Peter IV of Aragon, the Ceremonious (1319–1387), conquered the island to protect Barcelona’s supremacy.¹⁵ The attempt of James III of Mallorca (1315–1349) to liberate the island in 1349 failed, not least because the Black Death had struck the year before, thinning the ranks of his supporters.¹⁶ The island remained under the Crown of Aragon’s firm control and was governed from the mainland.¹⁷ Yet the cultural and economic achievements of its period of independence—and its political subjugation at the hands of outsiders—would long remain central to Mallorcan identity.

Loss of its independence coupled with the Black Death made the Middle Ages one of the darkest periods in Mallorca’s history. As a center of trade, the island was especially vulnerable to contagious epidemics, and the plague continued to strike, carrying off twenty thousand souls on the island in 1481 alone.¹⁸ Not until 1573 did the island’s population top sixty thousand for the first time since 1329.¹⁹ The plague also straitened Mallorca’s foreign trade; as a result, the island underwent an economic transformation, turning to the production of textiles and wool,²⁰ and so becoming ever more dependent on imported grains.²¹

The combined pressures of plague, famine, and economic decline threw much of Spain, including Mallorca, into turmoil, leading many to blame the Jews among them for their hardships; a wave of anti-Jewish violence had begun earlier in Seville, and it soon swept the island. The Jewish quarter of Palma was sacked in August 1391 by a mob of some seven thousand Catholic assailants, who massacred three hundred Jews.²² In the following months, five hundred Jews converted to Catholicism. Catholic religious authorities forced the mass conversion of many of the island’s remaining Jews in 1435.²³ Public displays of Islam had already largely been rooted out of the island, and now Mallorca became among the first Spanish regions in which the open practice of Judaism disappeared.²⁴ In Mallorca some fifteen hundred conversos (Jews who had been forced to convert to Catholicism) lived apart from Catholics in Palma.²⁵

*   *   *

By the late fifteenth century, with the plague having largely finished its deadly work on the Iberian Peninsula, the kingdom of Castile was ascendant. In 1478 it conquered the Canary Islands, and then in 1492 it took Granada, the last Muslim kingdom on the peninsula, sent Columbus on his voyage across the Atlantic, and expelled from its territories all Jews who refused to convert to Christianity. Mallorca, however, was still part of the Crown of Aragon, which remained largely separate from imperial Spain even after the houses of Castile and Aragon were joined through the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469 and later during Spain’s unification under a single Hapsburg monarch in the early sixteenth century.²⁶

The persistent inability of the Mallorcan economy to feed the island’s residents was exacerbated by the Little Ice Age, a drop in temperatures that devastated agricultural production across much of Europe between 1550 and 1700.²⁷ In these years of recurrent famine, Mallorcans devoted themselves to agriculture but still had to import grains from Sardinia, Naples, Genoa, North Africa, and Castile.²⁸ The island plunged into debt.²⁹ As one astute observer noted in 1632, It is certain, that if the scarcity of Corn did not oblige them sometimes to send Money out of the Countrey, this Kingdom would be one of the richest in Europe.³⁰ The majority of the people of the countryside saw their own economic condition worsen, and more became renters or simply field hands. Meanwhile, a long period of discrimination against Mallorcan Muslims, many of whom were enslaved, culminated in 1609, when King Philip III forced all Moriscos—Muslims converted to Catholicism—to leave Spain for Muslim North Africa.³¹

*   *   *

In the seventeenth century, Spain’s trade with American colonies fell off, as did the influx of treasure from the New World, and plague once again reared its head. In 1600, Spain’s population was around 8.5 million; a century later it had been reduced to approximately 7.5 million.³² All told, over the course of the seventeenth century, more than 1.25 million people died from the disease in Spain; another 500,000 immigrated to the Americas.³³ In Mallorca, more than 20,000, or 25 percent of the population, died in the epidemic of 1652 alone.³⁴ In one of the island’s towns, Inca, about 40 percent of the population perished.³⁵ As the population declined, the burden of taxation on survivors only seemed to increase. Making matters worse, across Spain agricultural production plummeted. In the Mallorcan countryside, the dire economic situation spawned peasant unrest and banditry. Adding to the island’s woes were the periodic attacks on coastal towns by Muslim, Turkish, and even French raiders.³⁶

The only stable institution in Mallorca across these centuries was the Catholic Church. Mallorca had over three hundred parish priests and hundreds more clergymen who served in the religious orders.³⁷ The great wealth of the Church was conspicuous amid Spain’s general economic malaise. For adult males the priesthood was a common career choice. Outside the priesthood, formal education and literacy were unusual. On Mallorca basic education was limited and overseen by the Church.

One of the principal responsibilities of Mallorcan priests was to teach young children the catechism. Every Sunday and throughout Lent and days of obligation, the rector would ring the church bell to call children to church for instruction. The catechism would be taught and recited in Mallorquí, the Mallorcan variety of the Catalan language, or in Latin, not Castilian. And most likely the children would have been instructed in a very basic catechism, either the Doctrina Christiana of Padre Diego de Ledesma or a translation of the Ripalda Catechism.³⁸

In Mallorca, the ritual calendar of the Catholic Church structured village and family life. There were more than one hundred additional Catholic feast days, not including Sundays. Church attendance was expected, if not mandated, on Sundays, and all adults were required to go to confession and receive Communion at least once a year, usually during Lent, when some adults fasted and others abstained from eating meat and all foods prepared with eggs or milk.³⁹ Church leaders considered many Mallorcans to be lax in their faith and observances, and so welcomed itinerant missionaries who periodically crisscrossed the island trying to reinvigorate the spiritual lives of the laity.⁴⁰ Typically, these missions were composed of small groups of traveling friars who spent twenty to thirty days in one of the island’s small communities trying to shore up villagers’ faith.⁴¹

During the seventeenth century, as the Hapsburg monarchs struggled to rule Spain in the shadow of the glories of an earlier age, Mallorca felt the pains of Spanish imperial decline. Mallorcans were repeatedly called upon to help defray the costs of lodging troops on their island, and many young Mallorcan men were pressed into military service.⁴² Once again, hardship and uncertainty spurred fears about insidious Jewish activity on the island. In 1677 the Inquisition arrested 237 conversos, accusing them of cryptojudaism.⁴³ Most were given jail sentences of two years or so. A decade later, though, when a group of those previously punished prepared to flee to Holland, and one Raphael Cortés de Alfonso reported to a Jesuit priest that he suspected his cousin and others of observing the Law of Moses, a cycle of devastating denunciations unfolded. Hundreds were arrested and accused of faking their conversions. In 1691—merely one generation before Junípero Serra’s birth—the Inquisition found forty-five men and women guilty of practicing cryptojudaism. Five who had already died or fled were burned in effigy. The remaining condemned were publicly ridiculed in central Palma and then paraded to the outskirts of town, where more than thirty thousand people—a huge proportion of the island’s population—thronged to watch the executions. Thirty-seven were strangled and then burned. Three, who refused to renounce their religious beliefs, were set on fire alive.⁴⁴ The Jewish community in Palma never fully recovered, and the persecutions became an important part of the island’s culture, bringing religious intolerance ever closer to the center of Mallorcan identity.⁴⁵

Despite having to support Hapsburg troops, Mallorca remained relatively free from imperial oversight—until, that is, the victory of the Bourbons over the Hapsburgs in the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714).⁴⁶ By 1710 it was clear that the Bourbon monarch Philip would prevail and consolidate his control over Spain. In 1714 the Bourbons took Barcelona; only Mallorca remained loyal to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV. To defend itself against the inevitable Bourbon invasion, Palma improved its defenses, raised taxes to pay for an army, and enlisted men from the countryside in the army. But when Philip’s massive fleet disembarked on the island in June 1715, Mallorcans’ resolve evaporated.⁴⁷ A Franco-Spanish force of twenty-two thousand easily overran the island’s Austrian garrison of one thousand men, and Mallorca once again had a new imperial overlord.⁴⁸

Philip fashioned his Spanish realm after the blueprint devised by the French king Louis XIV, which meant that Mallorca was reminded of its status as a subject land.⁴⁹ The Bourbon king introduced a host of changes that collectively altered the relations between ordinary Mallorcans and the imperial capital.⁵⁰ The Bourbons published a series of regulations in Mallorca known as the Decrets de Nova Planta on November 28, 1715, two years after Junípero Serra’s birth. These laws disassembled the previous institutional system based on local political self-determination and replaced it with one in which power emanated from Castile. Among many other repressive measures, the island was forced to support a standing imperial army.⁵¹ The Bourbons governed Mallorca as if it were a colony: the island had no meaningful political autonomy and found its culture and language under official attack. Political power resided in the hands of non-Mallorcans, and laws mandated that court cases and official documents be presented in Castilian, not Catalan or Mallorquí.

Mallorcans of Serra’s generation thus grew up with a healthy suspicion of state authority and a proud sense of Mallorca’s distinct culture and history, but also an understanding of the island’s constraints. They knew that Mallorca’s limitations would not allow a true and lasting separation from the rest of the Mediterranean or the emerging transatlantic world and that Mallorcan survival had for centuries depended upon foods produced in distant lands. For many, this translated into a firm allegiance to the Catholic Church, the only institution that at times met their spiritual and material needs. This Mallorcan worldview would only solidify during a series of devastating crises during the first half of the eighteenth century.

TWO

Petra

Like Mallorca, Petra, the village where Serra was born, has a long and complex history shaped by local and international developments. Situated in the middle of the island’s agricultural plain, Petra was a day’s travel—about twenty-five miles—from Palma but far enough inland that it was spared the pirate attacks and invasions that periodically imperiled coastal towns. Little is known about the village’s early history, though in Serra’s time its residents were known to take pride in its ancient origins; Serra himself boasted that Petra was among the oldest communities on the island.¹ By 1251, Petra had its own municipal government, and by 1338 it was officially a Catholic parish within the larger organization of the Catholic Church across the island.² The grid of streets that formed the center of Petra, still known today as the Barracar, had some 800 residents by 1329. By 1591, Petra’s population had reached 1,882, making it the eleventh-largest village on the island.³

Immediately after James I conquered the island in 1229, he redistributed Petra’s land to fifty-five of his followers, who sold off their holdings bit by bit for annual payments or agricultural produce. These payments both enriched the seigneur and affirmed the supremacy of the landed elite over commoners, and as subsequent generations of Petrans inherited these small plots of land, their obligations to the descendants of the seigneur persisted. The names of the lands they took possession of, however, echoed the previous era, when Muslims had ruled the island. Such was the case with Son Maimó, Son Homar, and Ca’n Mora, small pieces of land just outside Petra whose names can be loosely translated as Place of Muhammad, Place of Omar, and House of the Moors.

Petrans, when the weather cooperated, specialized in the production of flour; they grew wheat in the fields surrounding the village and then refined it in the town’s wind-powered mills. In many years Petra produced more flour than nearly every other community on the island.⁴ In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Petrans also grew a wide variety of cereals—wheat, barley, and oats—as well as legumes, carob, and figs. The last was especially important as a subsistence crop when all others failed and as a substitute for flour.⁵ Petra was quintessentially Mallorcan in the frequency with which it was hit by disease and famine. For example, the 1652 epidemic killed some twenty-four thousand people across Mallorca; in Petra the death toll was nearly four hundred, or a fifth of the town’s population. Whole families were wiped out; others fled the pestilence and the deepening poverty that followed in its wake.⁶

In search of a defining and stabilizing institution, town leaders tried to entice one of the religious orders to establish a convent in Petra. In 1607, after the Augustinians had declined, one of the town’s officials contacted his brother-in-law and fellow Petran, a friar in the Convento de San Francisco in Palma; later that year some sixteen Franciscans took up residence in Petra. These men found inspiration in the life of Saint Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226), the son of a wealthy Italian cloth merchant who as an adult endured deep spiritual and emotional crises that led him to renounce the high living and concern for social status that had characterized his youth. Francis repudiated his own biological father and family for what he saw as the Heavenly Father and the brotherhood of like-minded believers, and even as he struggled against physical infirmities, he founded a religious order in 1209 that would be among the most influential religious movements of the early modern period. The Order of Saint Francis did not cloister friars in monasteries as monks even as its members devoted themselves to self-mortification and prayerful contemplation of Christ’s crucifixion. Rather, followers of Saint Francis sought to engage the world and reform it through exemplary behavior and evangelical missions. By assuming vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, Franciscans rejected all that was material, corporeal, and individual in an attempt to critique the excesses of the world and lead society to repentance and salvation.⁷

The nascent Franciscan Convento de San Bernardino de Siena soon became one of Petra’s most important institutions, a center of activity in the Barracar, and a magnet that drew in people from the surrounding communities of Sineu, Lloret, San Juan, and Villafranca. The convento brought to the town learned Franciscans who had been educated at Palma’s Convento de San Francisco, and it tied the religious life and education of Petrans to the mother convent. Formal religious instruction of some of Petra’s children must have commenced soon after the Franciscans arrived, for by 1610 the padres had successfully petitioned the town for two tables for their school.⁸ Twenty years later they were raising funds and organizing labor to complete a cistern that would afford the town’s residents freshwater year-round.⁹ With their school and cistern completed, the Franciscans raised a new building and completed the church edifice and their living quarters by the 1670s.¹⁰

Furnishing the church interior proceeded slowly and would not be finished for another half century. But by the early eighteenth century the Convento de San Bernardino had become a major center of Catholic worship in Petra, overtaking San Pedro de Petra, the parish church of Petra, which was in a state of continuous disrepair. Serra’s ancestors lived in Petra during the community’s earlier years and therefore witnessed, and may have participated in, the hard work of building the convento. In 1577, Antonio Abram—Serra’s great-great-grandfather—purchased a house in the Barracar.¹¹ In 1625, Serra’s grandfather would inherit this house from his father, and by then the Convento de San Bernardino, located just up the block, was well established.

*   *   *

Serra’s most visible ancestor in the early records of Petra is his paternal grandmother, Juana Serra y Abram.¹² She was the daughter of Antonio Abram and Juana Abram y Salom. Their surnames—Abram and Salom, derived from the lineage of their parents—suggest a complicated and layered history. The name Abram (Serra’s paternal great-grandfather) is Hebrew for Abraham, and Salom (Serra’s paternal great-grandmother) means father in Hebrew. Serra’s grandparents and parents were indisputably practicing Catholics, but the names Abram and Salom suggest that some of Serra’s distant ancestors might have been Jews or conversos.¹³

In 1689, Juana Serra y Abram died a widow and was buried in the Convento de San Bernardino, as was typical.¹⁴ She had lived out her final years of illness in the Barracar with the help of her adult daughters, Juana, Esperanza, and Sebastiana, with whom she shared her home. She was by no means wealthy but left a small gift—five sueldos—to the parish rector. She also asked that thirty Masses be said in her honor, ten at the parish church and the remaining twenty in the convento. Juana divided her possessions and property among her seven children, giving each of them small parcels of land that she and her husband, Miguel, had acquired during their lives.¹⁵

Juana’s bequests to her children reveal the seigneurial relationships and financial obligations that structured economic and political life in Petra during Serra’s life. To Juana Serra, her eldest child, and to Juan, her youngest child, she left half of her house and its small yard. But along with this inheritance came the responsibility of giving annually ten sueldos to the Reverendo Común. To her daughter Margarita, Juana left a small plot of land near the Moli Vell—the old mill—but Margarita was charged with paying each year four barcillas of wheat to the descendants of Don Gregorio Villalonga, one of the few families that owned substantial tracts of land in and around Petra; the family was likely one that had received land in the distribution just after the conquest.¹⁶ Miguel, the oldest son, and sister Esperanza also inherited small pieces of land; each was required to make annual payments to descendants of the Villalongas. Sebastiana and Antonio, Serra’s father, received half of a small plot along the road to Palma. Their annual payment: one barcilla and three almudes of wheat and five sueldos to the town. Juana divided a final piece of her land—a small field and vineyard in Son Maimó—into two sections, with one going to her daughters and the other to her sons. All of the children had the obligation to pay each year two sueldos and ten dineros to one Jaime Riutort, the notary who had drawn up the will. These inheritances may have marginally improved the lives of Juana’s seven surviving children, but they also enmeshed them in a system of obligations that drained their wealth and made any sort of economic advancement difficult.

The marital histories of Juana’s children also reveal the straitened circumstances of Serra’s extended family. Of Juana and Miguel’s seven adult children, three—Juana, Miguel, and Esperanza—and perhaps a fourth—Juan—never married.¹⁷ This fact suggests that the family’s resources were too limited for them to secure marriage partners.¹⁸ And those who did marry married relatively late, only after it appeared that the couple could sustain themselves. Junípero’s father, Antonio, did not marry until he was thirty-one years old and his bride, Margarita, was twenty-nine; by then, both of Antonio’s parents were dead, and he could rely on his modest inheritance.¹⁹

When Antonio Nadal Serra married Margarita Rosa Ferrer in 1707, they took up residence with Margarita’s ailing and widowed mother.²⁰ It was in that home, on the Calle Segona in the heart of the Barracar, that they passed their first dozen years together. In 1719, a mere four weeks after Margarita’s mother died, the couple moved to the Serra family home in the Barracar, a move that was made possible by Miguel Serra’s giving his brother Antonio his part ownership of the house.

Personal tragedies and the general deterioration of conditions in Mallorca in the early eighteenth century turned the early years of the marriage into ones of hardship. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, food shortages were felt especially keenly in Petra. The 1702 and 1703 harvests were meager. In 1710, late rain destroyed much of the crop of cereals, and grain had to be imported at great expense.²¹ Bad harvests followed in 1711 and 1712, and the War of Spanish Succession brought many families to Mallorca from Sardinia, placing even more pressure on the island’s limited food supply.

The agricultural crisis that threatened Mallorca in the early eighteenth century was a legacy of the island’s social and economic structure. After James I’s original land distribution in the thirteenth century, few people actually owned the land on which they lived.²² Most was owned by a few rich families and worked by those who leased it or worked it as day laborers. There was little if any incentive for anyone to increase agricultural production. In a majority of years across the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries the island did not produce enough food to feed its own population. For most people in the Mallorcan countryside hunger became the norm. While starvation was rare, hunger was common in the Barracar in the early eighteenth century, especially during the years when Antonio and Margarita were just getting settled.

Sixteen months after they exchanged marriage vows, Antonio and Margarita welcomed their first child into the world. Baptized on January 4, 1709, he was named Miquel Joseph Serre in honor of Saint Michael and Saint Joseph.²³ In Catholic belief Michael played many roles. He was esteemed as the heavenly leader of Christian forces against Satan and the powers of hell, as the angel who carries the souls of the dead to heaven for judgment, as the angel who actually weighs the souls of the dead, and finally, as the champion of Christian people and the patron of the Catholic Church. Given the importance of Saint Michael in Catholic tradition and belief, it is little wonder in the final decades of the eighteenth century that nearly one in five male heads of households in Petra was named Miquel.²⁴ Joseph, meanwhile, was the husband of Mary, who Catholics believe is the mother of Jesus Christ. In early modern Spain, Joseph was venerated as a good and just man.

Despite the hopeful names that Antonio and Margarita gave their firstborn, the infant Miquel Joseph died soon after baptism.²⁵ The baby’s death may have been followed in the coming years by failed pregnancies, for it was not until three years later that Margarita gave birth to another child, a daughter, Juana Rosa María. Named in honor of John the Baptist—the prophetic itinerant preacher who foretold the coming of Christ and later baptized him—and the Virgin Mary, Juana Rosa María Serra also died in infancy.²⁶

Antonio and Margarita must have despaired at the loss of their first two children.²⁷ They might have found consolation among family and friends who had also lost young ones, an all-too-common event in Petra during the early modern period. In a typical year in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between 25 and 35 percent of all newborns in Petra died within their first twelve months of life. Surprisingly, from 1709 to 1711—when Miquel Joseph and Juana Rosa María were born and died—nearly nine in ten newborns lived at least one year.²⁸ So, the couple’s grief may have been sharpened by the apparent unusualness of their misfortune.

It was the couple’s third child, born just after midnight on November 24, 1713, who would grow up to become the famous Franciscan missionary. At his birth the future Catholic icon and California pioneer was, like his brother, given the widely adopted names of Miquel and Joseph. The second Miquel Joseph Serre was baptized the same day as his birth, in the parish church, according to the custom in Petra.²⁹ A little more than three years later, Margarita gave birth to a daughter who, like her older brother, would survive to adulthood. She was named Juana María, essentially the same name as her deceased older sister. In 1720, at the age of forty-four, Margarita gave birth to a baby girl who died soon thereafter.³⁰

In