Monjerio: The Locked Room in the Restored Mission

Somewhere in the buildings you are walking through, or approaching, is a room that the Civilian Conservation Corps reconstructed in the nineteen thirties with the same careful attention to historical accuracy they brought to every other structure on this site. The room is the monjerio, the women's dormitory. It looks like a dormitory. That is part of what it was.

Chumash girls were taken from their families and housed in the monjerio at roughly the age of seven. They remained there, separated from their parents, until they were married. The doors were locked at night. They were let out during the day for supervised work and religious instruction. They were returned to the locked room at dusk.

Governor Diego de Borica, the seventh governor of Las Californias, described mission dormitories for women as small, poorly ventilated, and infested. His observation was recorded in administrative correspondence and has been in the historical record for two centuries. The conditions he described were not a malfunction of the system. They were the system.

Mission records document corporal punishment for women and girls who violated the rules of the compound or attempted to leave. The records also document epidemic disease spreading rapidly through the confined populations of the missions; the locked, crowded dormitories were efficient vectors. Diphtheria, measles, pneumonia. The Chumash population in the missions fell from tens of thousands to a few thousand over the mission period. The monjerio was one mechanism among several.

The CCC rebuilt this room with extraordinary craft in the nineteen thirties. It is now part of a living-history site that is genuinely worth visiting. The architecture has been preserved. What the room was for is available in the historical record for anyone who looks at what the governor wrote, what the mission registers recorded, and what the room's locked door, reconstructed from original plans, actually meant.