Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions by James A. Sandos

Book Review by Alina Mattison

The Author of this book is James A. Sandos. Sandos has a real passion for the Franciscan missions. He currently teachers various history classes at the University of Redlands. This book was published in 2004 by the Yale University Press. This tells us this book is intended for students and teachers to read. He has researched and done studies from the first mission in 1769 and the end when the missions were turned over to the public in 1836. He has dedicated his time into researching how the Spanish tried to come over and convert the Indians to Catholicism in order to take over California.

The book Converting California is about converting the Indians of California to Catholicism in order to control the land. In order to show this, Sandos has a certain way of setting up the book. The first part is about a man named Serra. Sandos did a lot of research in order to be able to tell the people reading the book about Serra. Serra was the main missionary in the book. He came from Spain and had over twenty three years of experience. Sandos also talks about how dedicated Serra was to converting the Indians. Serra was a very likable person. When the Indians were studying under him, it says they were comfortable and really enjoyed their time with Serra. I thought this was an interesting part of the book because while Serra was very likable, he also flogged himself and the Indians who misbehaved. I thought it was weird the Indians enjoyed their time with Serra so much when he was practicing. The first part of the book has a lot of information pertaining to setting up the missions.

In this book, Sandos has a different way of describing the Indians. He portrays them as very sexual and uncivilized. This was interesting because not all Indian are like this. We have learned there are some Indians who are uncivilized but not all of them were crazy sexual people. Much of the time, the Indian were separated to protect their virginity until marriage and this was not how Sandos portrayed the Indians in California at all. He portrayed them more on the contrary. He was always talking about how they were very open with their sexuality and would perform sexual dances. In the dances, Sandos said the Indians would be naked and have sexual relations with more then one person during the dance. He also talked about how some of the Indians in different tribes had homosexual member in it. In his book, he uses this information to make a bigger statement of why the priest of the missions wanted to convert the Indians. Sandos said the missions did nor believe in this kind of behavior and they were appalled by it. This was one of the main factor of why the missions wanted to convert the Indians so badly. The missions were there for the Indians to help them find the “ true” God. Because of the way Indians were open with there sexuality the priest believed they were sinning and should not be doing this. Sandos uses this as one of the big reason why the missions were so adamant about converting the Indians.

This was a scholarly book. There fore this meant the Author, Sandos, set it up differently then many books are set up. He never had a climax in the book. All of the stories were set up with in themselves never did a story build from another story. Each chapter of the book dealt with different information explaining the Spanish trying to convert the Indians. As well as being a scholarly, it was writing with a lot of different types of language then is known to most people. There was a ton of different words for example shaman, Shipek, and Kotzebue. In order to find out what these words mean, you have to go to the back of the book and look it up depending upon what chapter you are in. This is a typical way many writers write when they are dealing with scholarly books. However it was hard for me to keep all the different words straight when reading the book.

Sandos wrote this book to show how and why the Spanish wanted to convert the Indians of California. He did this by proving a ton of information about the Indians and the missions. His book is like reading a giant essay and having an accumulation of information for people to determine if the missions were a success of if they were a flop. In my opinion, after reading the book, the missions were a success for the time they were going on. After the 1830’s however, they definitely failed at completing the task. I believe this because Sandos says the public took over and secularization took over therefore ruining the whole point of the missions.

I chose to read this book because I did not know a lot about the Indians and what happened to them in California. I wanted to know more about the Indians and their life when they were being intervened by the Spanish during the attempt to convert them to Catholicism. I thought some of the information Sandos provided was interesting but I did not really like how he set up the book. Yes, he provided a ton of information about the Indians and the missions, but I did not enjoy his style of writing. I did not like how he set the book up in more of an essay form then an actual story. I found this hard to stay in tuned with what was going on in the book with out getting utterly bored. There was nothing that caught your attention and kept you really interested in the book. There was a lot of information in the book but no continuous stories to keep the reader interesting in the book. Overall, I did not enjoy the book and think the author should have written it differently if he wanted to keep his readers interested with out getting bored with the book.