Description:
Explores how heritage discourses and local publics interact at Catholic mission sites in the southwestern United States, northern Mexico, and the Southern Cone
Interdisciplinary in scope and classed under the name "critical heritage studies," Heritage and Its Missions makes extensive use of ethnographic perspectives to examine heritage not as a collection of inert things upon which a general historical interest is centered, but as a series of active meanings that have consequences in the social, political, and economic arenas. This approach considers the places of interaction between heritage discourses and local publics as constructed spaces where the very materiality of the social and the political unfolds. Heritage and Its Missions brings together researchers from several countries interested in the pre-republican Catholic missions in the Americas as heritage. Each essay discusses the past and current heritage meanings applied to a specific mission by national and multicultural states, local Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, international heritage institutions, and scholars. They then address how heritage actors produce knowledge from their positioned perspectives; how dif-ferent actors, collectives, communities, and publics relate to them; how heritage representations are deployed and contested as social facts; and how different conceptions of "heritage" collide, collaborate, and intersperse to produce the meanings around which heritage struggles unfold.Brief description: Lisbeth Haas is a Professor Emeritus and Research Professor in history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has written three books on Indigenous California, all of which place Native knowledge and political ideas to the foreground of colonial history. Her first book, Conquests and Historical Identities in California (1995), examined the Spanish, Mexican, and American eras in two places and how Indigenous, Mexican, Anglo, and European immigrants defined their histories and sets of rights through conflict and settlement. More recently, in Pablo Tac, Indigenous Scholar writing on Luiseño History and Grammar (2011), she examines the history of Pablo Tac, born at Mission San Luis Rey in 1821, on the land of his father's tribe, and the manuscript he wrote in Rome; Tac's writing reveals how Luiseños understood and survived a drastic colonization. Her book Saints and Citizens (2014) similarly works from Native sources and colonial and national archives to render the significance of tribal history in California under Spain, Mexico, and the United States. She is currently co-editing the book Indigenous Archives (University of Nebraska Press) and cooperating with tribal Chair Valentin Lopez on his book concerning Amah Mutsun history.
Review Quotes: Cristóbal Gnecco and Adriana Dias have gathered a distinguished group of international scholars, providing innovative, sensitive, and provocative insights about the Spanish and Portuguese Catholic Missions in the Americas. Through a critical heritage approach, the volume reveals the plethora of meanings that constitute these memorial landscapes, and shows that their persistent physicality has a vivid agency in the present. The book presents a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective and is of interest to a wide range of fields.---Marcia Bezerra, Professor of Archaeology at the Universidade Federal do Pará, Brazil.