Gregory Orfalea - Journey to the Sun: Junipero Serra’s Dream and the Founding of California

A LSO BY G REGORY O RFALEA

The Man Who Guarded the Bomb:
Stories

Angeleno Days:
An Arab American Writer on Family, Place, and Politics

The Arab Americans:
A History

Messengers of the Lost Battalion:
The Heroic 551st and the Turning of the Tide at the Battle of the Bulge

The Capital of Solitude

Before the Flames:
A Quest for the History of Arab Americans

Edited by Gregory Orfalea

with Barbara Rosewicz:
Up All Night:
Practical Wisdom from Mothers and Fathers

with Sharif Elmusa:
Grape Leaves:
A Century of Arab-American Poetry

SCRIBNER

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Copyright 2014 by Gregory Orfalea

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First Scribner hardcover edition January 2014

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Jacket design by Marlyn Dantes and Tal Goretsky

Jacket photograph by Mark Schoen

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013040181

ISBN 978-1-4516-4272-8

ISBN 978-1-4516-4275-9 (ebook)

To Sister Mary Mark Schoenstein, O.P.

And in memory of Father John Columba Fogarty, O. Carm.

Anna Seiles map of The Americas: A New Description, with outsized dagger-shaped California as island, 1663.

W ho is Gods companion?

Junpero Serra might have contemplated this thought on the road in the Salinas Valley of California, where in 1771 he met an Indian woman who offered him a present. When he asked her name, she murmured Soledad, Spanish for solitude. Or at least that is what he heard: I was astonished, and turning to my companions said, Here, gentlemen, you have Mara de la Soledad. He gave her glass beads for seeds; she nodded. As the name stuck to the place, Serra made a note to found a mission in that desolate, treeless spot. Soledad later became the most hard-luck mission of all those that were built on the coast.

Serra had undergone plenty of solitude, the soledad of the trail, the one that surrounded your neck like water at night, a soledad to conquer by singing Matins before first light. Not English or American solitude, which celebrated being on ones own, without others; Spanish soledad , which longed for them.

Serra was not about soledad ; neither were the Franciscan fathers. Hed swallowed his fill of it as a boy, losing two sisters and a brother, working the quiet fields of Petra, his home village on the Spanish island of Mallorca. But his fathers leather hand was always on his shoulder, and later his confreres abrazos ; even those strangers in the confessional cut soledad with their pain. Serra respected the solitude Christ felt in the garden that last night of his life when the apostles slept. But Serra wasnt Simon of the Desert, standing on his pillar alone. He loved community, loved performing marriages. He traveled as much as he could in a pair or group, because outside the mission walls lay a solitude so vast only the sun could disperse it.

Now the dew was on the leaf, the earth shorn briefly of dust. Dark and lovely and cool. The sun began its climb of the Santa Lucia Mountains, casting them in gray outline. As his mule snorted, taking him north in the early morning, the sun regarded Serra; he dared not look back. The sun warm on his forehead, rising over the crown of the forest, now arched in his mind above the Tramuntana range of his old island and its olive groves to the sea, the Mediterranean waded into the Pacific, the sun wrapping the world in its arms.

Who was Gods companion?

He was.

For a second, he looked at the sun; God put a white spot in his eye.

PART ONE

Nicolas Sansons map of The Isle of California and New Mexico, 1657.

CHAPTER ONE

I, the one who hugs you,

I am not alone!

GABRIELA MISTRAL

Sancturi de Cura on Mount Randa, Mallorca.

A t the darkest point of night, the point at which the light begins to grow, Miquel Jos Serre was born at 1 A.M. by the flickering of an olive oil lamp on November 24, 1713, in the little farming village of Petra, slightly east of dead center of the island of Mallorca, one of three Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain in the northwest Mediterranean. His father, Antonio, put a sprig of laurel on the door, indicating the baby was a boy; a myrtle branch would have meant a girl. Petra was a village of two thousand then, and it is barely larger today.

With a population of about seventy thousand, Mallorca had a climate of dry heat and white light. But it was no resort. In the eighteenth century, the island traffic consisted of horse and mule carts and men hoisting shovels. The nineteenth-century writer George Sand, visiting Mallorca to care for the sickly Frdric Chopin, called the Mallorcan peasant a gentle, kind creature, with peaceful habits... he has no love of evil and knowledge of good... you can no more hate him than you could an ox or a sheep, for he is close to the savage whose soul is lulled in animal innocence.

With its whiff of Gallic superiority, this perception missed a key element: community. Peasant farmers in the Petra area who tended sheep, olive and almond groves, and citrus trees lived not in isolated huts in the field, but in town in seamlessly attached Santany sandstone homes situated along narrow, labyrinthine streets. They lived in close proximity, hearing each others coughs and moans and prayers through the clay walls and screenless windows. Though in our world these conditions would be taken as a sign of poverty, the peasant farming village community of eighteenth-century Spain was hardly downtrodden. People worked hard and were proud of it. Mallorcan peasant homes were sturdily madeclay, stone, tiled, or wattled roofsand when little Miguel (the Castilian spelling of the Mallorqun Miquel) put his head out the window of his second-story bedroom he stared right across the narrow street at his double, a boyhood friend who put his own head out the window, and the signals of boys and girls heads and their calls down the street brought them to work in the field, to play, and to attend Mass on Sunday.