King of the Missions, and What That Cost

The building you are looking at was the largest mission in California by acreage, and the Spanish called it the King of the Missions. They were not wrong about the scale. At its peak, Mission San Luis Rey de Francia held nearly three thousand converts and grazed fifty-seven thousand animals across its surrounding ranges. Priests from Mexico to Madrid cited it as a model of the mission system's success. What they meant by success is worth examining carefully.

The mission was founded on June thirteenth, seventeen ninety-eight, the eighteenth in the chain that eventually stretched the length of coastal California. The people the Spanish called Luiseno had a name for themselves: Payomkowishum, the people of the west. They had lived on this coastal plain for thousands of years before Father Fermin Lasuen arrived with soldiers and began construction. By the early eighteen hundreds, Payomkowishum people were living inside the mission compound under conditions that historians describe as coerced residence. Conversion was rarely voluntary. Departure was not permitted. Disease moved through the mission population with catastrophic efficiency; a substantial portion of the three thousand converts who appear in the mission's records did not survive their time there.

The fifty-seven thousand animals grazing the ranges by eighteen thirty-two did not tend themselves. The vaqueros who managed them, the masons who built the church walls, the women who wove the textiles that made this mission wealthy enough to sustain three thousand souls, were Payomkowishum. They received food, shelter, and baptism. They did not receive wages. The mission system treated indigenous labor as the property of the Church and the Crown, which is to say it treated indigenous people as a means to an end.

After secularization in the eighteen thirties, the mission fell into disrepair and was eventually restored to the Franciscans. It functions as an active parish church and museum today, and the Crown of the Missions framing is still prominently featured in its tourism materials.

The descendants of the Payomkowishum are the Pala and Rincon bands of Luiseno people. They hold federally recognized reservations in the San Diego interior. They are still here. The mission that was built on their land and labor is still here too. Both things are true at the same time.