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| Carmen Lomas Garza, The Missionaries, 1984. |
I found Carmen Lomas Garza’s painting The Missionaries (Fig. 28, P. 42) extremely interesting because of its depiction of life in the missions during the Spanish colonial period. The painting is part of a series called History of California Water: The Everyday Use of Water created as part of Garza’s first public art commission from the San Francisco Water Department (39). The painting centers the Mission San Francisco de Asis in the background, drawing attention to its pristine white color and towering front columns that guide the eyes upward to the center cross on its roof. A Franciscan missionary stands outside of the church, while another missionary rides a horse while pulling a tied calve behind him. In contrast, in the foreground, you see two vignettes of Native Americans toiling away on agricultural fields and making adobe bricks while another missionary supervises them.
The painting simultaneously depicts a true but romanticized view of life for Native Americans inside the California Missions. The labor Native Americans provided was crucial for all aspects of life in the mission. Native American labor built the missions, created irrigation systems, cultivated and harvested their fields, and took care of the cattle that made the missions the wealthiest institutions in the state. Yet despite their contributions, the brutal treatment of Native Americans by the Franciscan missionaries is often left out or deemphasized in historical narratives about the Mission system. Carmen Lomas Garza’s The Missionaries manages to capture the exploitative aspect of mission life but does not critique it. Nevertheless, as Constance Cortez points out because these paintings were part of a series produced for the San Francisco Water Department, “it can be understood that the artist has deliberately forgone the autonomy associated with earlier canvases” (Cortez, 40-41), instead choosing to focus on water and its vital usage in Northern California.
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