An Outpost of Globalization Reimagined As a Sustainable Urban Homestead

by Ken Layne

Outside the still-closed entrance gate at the Mission San Juan Capistrano, I wait with my camera and notebook, alone on an overcast Sunday morning. A Spanish-speaking family joins me in line just a minute before the mission opens for business—its business these days is to serve as a cultural and historic park with a little Catholicism thrown in. There’s a bland, shiny new cathedral up the block for parish locals to actually celebrate Mass. It was completed in 1986 and that’s what it looks like, a high-end Orange County mall of 1986.

The old Spanish missions exist this way, as small worn compounds of deep beauty and resonance stranded in the banal surroundings of today’s California. They are pathetically outnumbered by buildings from the 1980s, the 1970s, all the building booms and property bubbles going back to the mid-1800s. And unlike the castles of Prague or the Alhambra of Granada or the Tower of London, the missions rarely fit into their modern surroundings. California planners and builders and other scam artists lack the ability to mesh old and new, maybe because the “new” of the American Southwest is so cheap and ugly and fundamentally separate from both its natural surroundings and intended occupants. Despite all the renowned architects who made their stands in California, the cities still lack a defining vernacular—with the exception of Santa Barbara’s enforced Spanish Colonial Revival and the mid-century modern clusters of Palm Springs.

San Juan Capistrano is a rare spot where a small walkable village has been allowed around the Mission walls. The cement river of Interstate 5 is just a block away, but there’s a shady street of cafes and plant nurseries and antique stores across the train tracks on the opposite side. And the mission itself opens up for weekend concerts and art shows, lending its image to this wealthy little enclave up the road from Doheny State Beach. I’ve come here by train because I want space around this three-day trip and the usual driving a hundred miles to do anything in Southern California, which is a terrible habit. I want it to be romantic, and even Amtrak trains offer more romance than sitting in a car listening to mattress commercials until the traffic report comes on.

Because of a hit 1940 pop song about the migratory swallows that nest around this mission, San Juan Capistrano developed a kind of Hollywood glamor for tourists who were never compelled to visit the other missions. It’s the only landmark with a history of colonial genocide that’s got a glassed-in museum room dedicated to the composer of a 1940s schmaltzy love ballad. And it’s freeway close to Disneyland.

For all that, or maybe because of all that, this mission is the most pleasing of the Southern California stops on El Camino Real. The gardens are luxuriant, the walls and walkways in elegant ruin, and it’s hard to walk through the native plants and perfectly proportioned vegetable and herb rows without wanting to rip out your own yard and bring it all home to whitewashed adobe walls and pathways of plain California sand. Sunset magazine had a low-water “Mediterranean Sun Garden” on its cover last month, and it looked just like the garden at the west side of the Mission San Juan Capistrano. Even “Mission Revival” can be endlessly recycled, this time as xeriscaping and earth-friendly energy efficiency and urban homesteading. What is more sustainable than building from the mud beneath your feet? It works for the cliff swallows, and it worked for the padres—and while earthquakes will knock it down the taller adobe buildings, this fact of nature offers a good incentive to build homes with a low profile.

Despite the once massive mission lands being squeezed down to a walled block between the interstate and the train tracks, San Juan Capistrano maintains the feel of mission as factory, with its unearthed brick tallow pits where the corpses of the cattle were rendered into everything from candles to bedsprings. The rangeland for the longhorns has long been converted to Orange County suburbia, but there’s still plenty of room for growing food within the quadrangle’s walls.

But even in the 1700s, long before the era of Trader Joe’s and discount warehouses full of stuff manufactured in Asia, the missions were not completely self sufficient. It took decades to get the vineyards producing, and the wine was reportedly awful enough to only use when the good stuff from Spain and Mexico ran out. Junipero Serra’s vestments currently displayed behind glass in the museum rooms are made of fine dyed and embroidered silk brought from Manila by Spanish galleons. Rifles and swords and bibles came from Europe, as did the Spanish clergyman’s diet of a little bit of vegetables to go with the bowlful of meat. The native population was reportedly appalled by these endless meals of cow parts.

There’s a mural in the museum that purportedly shows the “Mission Indians” as they were when the padres arrived. The wild San Juan River is seen surrounded by riparian forest and thick stands of reeds, the green mountains rising behind it, and three lean, smiling men fishing in briny water. It looks like the Earthly Paradise that Columbus and his pious brethren were supposedly seeking along with a shortcut to those Asian trade goods, but whether on Hispaniola or here in San Juan Capistrano, the explorers and friars and soldiers and treasure-seekers couldn’t comprehend the paradise, even if they recognized it from medieval mythology. They couldn’t reconcile their real mission -- conquest and global trade—with cultures not driven by commerce, where there was plenty enough for all and no need for land to be chopped into 6,000-acre ranchos or 6,000-square-foot lots. Both the coastal peoples of Southern California and the Carib tribes to first encounter the Europeans lacked consumer and militaristic habits. This is why Columbus was so frustrated in the West Indies and the Spaniards just left California alone for two entire centuries after first finding it: There was nothing much to steal, and few heathens to convert.

I sit in Father Serra’s chapel—the oldest building in California—and admire the curving walls and off-kilter Mesoamerican designs that substituted for the stained glass and delicate carvings of the churches back in Spain. The air is thick with the weird smoke of prayer candles; this room does not breathe well. I retreat to the gardens, a far better place to meditate, those famous cliff swallows busily feeding their young in mud nests hanging from the corridor rafters. Somebody should serve up a meal of historic pozole, to fill the courtyards with the smells of a mission kitchen in the 1780s, but instead I cross the street and have the next best thing at Pedro’s Tacos, under its plywood simulation of the mission arches. And then it’s time for the train to the Mission San Luis Rey de Francia in Oceanside, a honky tonk Marine Base town that seems to have grown up with complete disregard for its stately Spanish icon.

Previously: San Bernardino to Los Angeles to San Juan Capistrano—Mission Revival railroad temples, Asistencia sanctuaries for Central American refugees from Washington’s wars, and a wealthy Orange County enclave built around a haunted ruin.

Comments

Comments closed.