THE THEATRE OF CONVERSION, PART 5

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San Gabriel was founded in 1771 to reduce (sic) and evangelize the large populations of Tongva peoples scattered in numerous rancherias across what is today the LA Basin. Remember in particular Yangna, the big rancheria under El Aliso, the sycamore in the bed of the LA River, which became the eventual site of LA; most of Yangna’s Tongva were moved to San Gabriel.

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Recall the founding myth of the settlement: how the wandering friars were set upon by a Tongva war-band, then in desperation, they laid out the image of the Virgin, which, beguiled and pacified the Indians enough to accept baptism. Painting-as-inspiration thus features in the mythos of the place, which gives these Stations of the Cross a deeper resonance.

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https://escholarship.org/content/qt355609rf/qt355609rf.pdf

Reliable information on these images is as scarce as facts about San Fernando’s rich interiors. The received story is that a remarkable prodigy at San Fernando, Juan, presumably one of the boys trained in the arts of painting there, executed these, as a kind of guild masterpiece, in the 1820s or 1830s. Then somebody, possibly Andres Pico, who moved his family into the Convento after secularization, took the stations to La Placita Church downtown, where they were displayed for a time, then (after 1850? When the Yankees came in, in 1847?), they were hidden in the attic and only discovered in 1892, at which point they went on to be exhibited at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Then they disappeared again, and suddenly reappear at Mission San Gabriel sometime in the mid-twentieth century, where they are hanging on the wall to this day, almost invisible in the sickly green Victorian light that surreally pervades the church.

The whole Tongva prodigy story has been called into question, and it seems very reasonable at least to suppose that more than one artistic hand is responsible for the sequence. A conjectural possibility for the provenance of these paintings is New Mexico. San Gabriel is, in fact, the end of the Santa Fe Trail, a valuable trade route to the Spanish settlements and missions there. Or a native artist or group of artists in what is now Southern Arizona, Tumacacori and Tubac, could have visited California, once or many times, then later gone home and done the artwork, and later still, presented them to San Gabriel. But there’s no evidence for that, either, and it is at least AS plausible that they came from San Fernando, where we know there was an intensive artistic program, and there were plenty of Tongva neophytes there who would have been very familiar with the sister mission just beyond the Verdugo Hills, where their relatives might be. San Fernando also had a more than adequate economic basis for producing fine decoration.

The features of some of the figures do appear to be Spanish, and other figures appear to be Native American. The Moorish style of the some of the buildings strongly resembles the unmistakably Moorish facade of Mission San Gabriel itself. People have read subversive intent in portraying both the cruel figures, and the sympathetic figures, as either Spanish or Indian. This approach scans the whole sequence for political meanings that may not even be there. But these are by far the most fascinating works of art in any California mission.

[Recall, Patient Reader, that the Franciscans introduced this form of worship for Holy Week observance into the greater church, as they also introduced the Nativity creche. Ritually enacting the Stations of the Cross carries much devotional import in the Franciscan evangel.]