Mission San Xavier del Bac: White Dove, Long Shadow

About ten miles south of downtown Tucson, a white stucco church rises from the desert floor with a brightness that seems impossible under the full Arizona sun. The Tohono O'odham call the mission Wa:k, a name that predates the Spanish and refers to the spring that once bubbled here. The Spanish called it San Xavier del Bac. Visitors have been calling it the White Dove of the Desert for a long time, and the name fits.

The site's history begins before the building. Father Eusebio Kino, a Jesuit priest from northern Italy working in New Spain, visited the Sobaipuri O'odham village at this spring in sixteen ninety-two. He found a settlement already established, already agricultural. He returned in seventeen hundred and formally established a mission here, naming it for Saint Francis Xavier. Kino died in seventeen eleven before the mission church was completed, and the original structure was destroyed in an Apache raid in seventeen seventy. The church you see today was built between seventeen eighty-three and seventeen ninety-seven by the Franciscan order, who had replaced the Jesuits after Rome expelled them from New Spain.

What the tourist materials rarely say is who built it. The labor was O'odham. The artisans who carved the elaborate interior, the figure-filled facades, the churrigueresque ornamentation that covers nearly every surface, many of them were local craftsmen. The church's interior contains a reclining figure of Saint Francis Xavier whose foot pilgrims still touch, and a small cat-like figure tucked high in the facade whose meaning has never been definitively established.

The mission today remains an active Catholic parish, served by Franciscans, on land of the Tohono O'odham San Xavier District. The O'odham did not abandon the mission when the Spanish left, or when Mexico gained independence, or when the Gadsden Purchase transferred sovereignty to the United States. They have run a church on their land, which also happens to be the most visited site in southern Arizona, for more than three centuries.