Boom Hurtado

“CULTURE IN OLD CALIFORNIA”

NATHANIEL WEBB

HIST 101-1007

Albert Hurtado’s Intimate Frontiers suggests that mission history is one of dominance and subjection. By looking at sex between the Spanish and Indians in eighteenth-century California, Hurtado claims that the West became more than a geographic frontier, but also one of intimacy—“frontiers of the heart, frontiers of the mind and frontiers of difference”—in which people interacted in discreet ways that complicated the basic religious and economic exchanges associated with the missions. Furthermore, sex was a way to determine power relationships, whether by attempting to reform it in order to “civilize and Hispanicize” native populations as in the Franciscans’ case or by rape due to “stress, anger, and fear” as in the Spanish soldiers’ case. Franciscans are presented as both benevolent and cruel, providing for neophytes (albeit in a parental sense) as well as imposing strict regulations and punishments. Despite these assertions, Hurtado states that Indians largely maintained their traditional sexual identities; identities that treated marital, premarital and extramarital relationships (as well as male homosexual transvestism) much differently than Spanish expectation, and for this reason, the missionaries’ efforts can be interpreted as unsuccessful in having a lasting, authentic impact. Historical treatment of California’s population groups colors subsequent interpretations of how those groups interacted. Hurtado’s depiction presents them as the antagonists of the narrative. He views the missionaries as the “monsters” in the vein of Christophilic Nihilists, at worst acting unreasonably brutish and at best merely being blinded by cultural misunderstanding. The Spanish soldiers, too, are determined by Hurtado to act beastly, but this notion is common among historians and will be illustrated in a later discussion of their interactions with Indians.

Hurtado makes careful note of ways in which Indian groups...