A Look into Las Misiones Antiquas – Tia Blassingame

A Look into Las Misiones Antiquas

Tia Blassingame

While a number of books have been written about and a myriad bus tours organized around the twenty-one California missions, Las Misiones Antiquas serves to enlighten its readers on the thirty-five Mexican missions in Baja California. After providing a cursory review of early Baja history, Vernon details the Jesuit, two Franciscan and Dominican missions in Baja from El Descanso to San Jose in San Jose del Cabo. He presents textual and graphic descriptions of a beautiful and layered history that has largely been unpreserved and unacknowledged. The book benefits from the inclusion of historical as well as contemporary images.

Prior to depicting the missions’ history and present condition, Vernon commences with a brief history of Baja California in order to put the missions and the missionary’s progress into historical context. In the section on Mision Santa Maria de Los Angeles at Cabujakaamuy, for example, Vernon portrays the 2-year history of the last Jesuit mission. He notes this short-lived mission was doomed by the scarcity of water as well as its remoteness. Pictures show the ruins of the site as the author notes its role in the development of California missions. The author, in his section on San Fernando Rey (1769-1818), describes the history of the first of two Franciscan missions. Founded by Father Junipero Serra. San Fernando was the site from which Serra and Governor Caspar de Portola’s expedition began their journey north to establish Mission San Diego Ascala. Photos of the mission ruins and the petroglyphs in the surrounding canyons serve to articulate the written descriptions. In his discussion of El Descanso where the tile floor of the destroyed original building remains, Vernon utilizes this technique of allowing his site photographs to intensify that which his writing conveys to strong effect. In this case, the new church was built partly upon this original floor. Vernon’s Las Misiones Antiquas supplies the reader with a strong introduction to Baja mission history.