Native Alienation

Challenges the romantic portrayal of Spanish missions Sites of slavery and spiritual conquest, the California missions played a central role in the brutal subjugation of the region’s Indigenous peoples. Mainstream California history, however, still largely presents a romanticized portrait of the creation of the twenty-one Spanish missions between San Diego and Sonoma in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Providing a corrective to this benign historiography, Charles A. Sepulveda