The Spanish Mission Archive

By Michael Werner

The Instruction for the Minister of the Mission of Puríssima Concepción of the Province of Texas was written in 1787 by an anonymous Franciscan priest, ostensibly for his successor at Mission Concepción. The only known manuscript copy of the Instruction for the Minister of the Mission of Puríssima Concepción of the Province of Texas was stored for some 150 years in the archives of the Franciscan College of Our Lady of Guadalupe near Zacatecas, Mexico, and later at Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo in San Antonio, Texas.

The manuscript presently is housed at the Old Spanish Missions Historical Research Library at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. The library fittingly is located in a neighborhood that includes many descendants of the original mission community, and on a campus dedicated to serving descendants of primeros pobladores and more recent arrivals alike. Dr. María Eva Flores, C.D.P., the director of the OLLU’s Center for Mexican American Studies and Research, generously provided an electronic copy of the manuscript for this website, as well as permitting us to use the transcription, translation, and notes that the Library published in 1994.

The anonymous author of the Instruction says that it is “meant for a missionary who never has been in charge of a mission and finds himself alone, without knowing who to talk with about how to avoid errors as he gains experience.” As such, the Instruction is a window into the cycles of prayer and work, life and death, planting and harvest in Mission Concepción and the other San Antonio missions. But the view through this window is not always clear.

On the most basic level, it often is difficult to reconstruct what the words in the document are, much less how they translate into twentieth-century English (or twentieth-century Spanish for that matter). In the eighteenth-century Spanish world, official documents generally were drafted by scribes based either on the author’s notes, dictation, or earlier drafts. The scribe’s job was to ensure that the document would be intelligible for its intended audience, both by rendering it in a legible hand and making it conform to basic standards of language and rhetoric. Nonetheless, the scribe often faced scarcities of time, paper, and ink, and it was common practice for him to abbreviate words or run them together. Moreover, vocabulary, spelling, and even the shapes of letters and punctuation often varied widely from one generation and one scribe to the next.

The most fundamental task for historians and other scholars trying to make sense of hand-written documents, then, is simply to ensure that they are reading the words correctly. If at all possible, historians will try to find the earliest extant manuscript of the document, since errors presumably multiply with each successive copy. They also will cross-check the document against other “paleography” (literally, old writing) from the same general time period, location, and social milieu, which can give them a better sense of how words and letters were formed. Nonetheless, the craft of reading old writing is fraught with uncertainty. (Indeed, our sense of many foundational documents in the Western tradition often is based in no small part on unexamined assumptions, outright errors, and wild speculation about the content of old writing.)

In this website we have included a facsimile, transcription, and translation of the Instruction for the Minister of the Mission of Puríssima Concepción of the Province of Texas so that students, teachers, and the general reader can have some sense of what texts from the eighteenth century looked like, and of the challenges involved in reading them. The first scholar to transcribe and translate the document, Fr. Benedict Leutenneger, noted that the 22-page manuscript was “written in a small hand with letters close together, which makes reading quite difficult.” Completed with assistance from M. Carmelita Casso, IWBS, and M. Christine Morkovsky, C.D.P., Fr. Leutenneger’s translation was published in 1976. A second edition by Margaret Rose Warburton, C.D.P., was published in 1990, and a third edition by Howard Benoist and María Eva Flores, C.D.P., was published in 1994. We have based our transcription and translation on the Benoist and Flores edition, with some minor revisions and additional notes.

A second step in reading old writing requires us to reconstruct, to the extent possible, the worlds of the author and intended reader of the text. On the most basic level this means translating unfamiliar terms, such as religious holidays and offices, weights and measures, and the names of plants and animals. With this in mind, we have reproduced Benoist and Flores’ notes to the third edition. Even apparently familiar terms, however, often require a close eye to the historical context in which the document was written and meant to be read.

For example, consider the Instruction’s introductory gloss. The anonymous author says that the instructions solamente se han puesto para un Ministro, que no haviendo governado Misión, se halla solo, y sin saber a quien consultar el methodo que debe observar, para no exponerse a errar mientras cobra experiencia de las cosas. In short, the instructions are “meant for a Missionary who, never having been in charge of a Mission, finds himself alone and without knowing who to talk with about what method he should follow in order to avoid mistakes as he gains experience.” In this light, the Instruction would seem to be a simple manual on how the new priest can avoid practical pitfalls as he learns to run the mission. Its chief usefulness for present-day historians would seem to be its detailed account of daily life in the mission.

Nonetheless, a key phrase in the introduction suggests other ways to read the document: el methodo que debe observar, para no exponerse a errar… (literally, the method that he should follow in order not to expose himself to erring). Like his ostensible intended readers, the anonymous author of the Instruction was a fraile observante, an “observant friar,” from one of the two big Franciscan colleges in north-central Mexico (or the Viceroyalty of New Spain, as it then was called). These friars used the term “observant” above all to distinguish themselves from the less radical branch of the Franciscan order, the “conventuals,” who ran a rival network of missions. For the frailes observantes, the phrase “method to observe” might have a practical aspect, preventing the priest from making “mistakes.” But it also was meant to have a spiritual side, preventing the priest from “falling into sin,” an alternate translation of the phrase exponerse a errar.

More than any other missionaries, the Observant Franciscans sought to convert by example, and they understood conversion above all to mean rigorous practice—observancia—of ritual precept. These ritual precepts did not govern only the Catholic sacraments, but also the most intimate details of daily life, such as work, food, clothing, and family relations. In the view of the Observants, the beauty of this practice was that it did not require an advanced education or intellectual sophistication (although the Observants also ran institutions of higher learning and produced their share of scholarly luminaries). It was accessible to all; indeed, it was most accessible to the poor, the marginalized, and the uneducated.

The Observants’ two colleges not only trained missionaries, but they also ran networks of missions across northern New Spain. Here, too, the spiritual and practical combined. The colleges might recruit and train missionaries, supply and provision the missions, and lobby the viceregal government—but they also provided templates for the social, spatial, and moral order of the missions. These models, in turn, were meant to reproduce the tabernacle and temple of the Hebrew bible, and anticipate the millenarian kingdom whose advent they were meant to hasten. In this light, the minutely detailed Instruction not only was meant to shed light on the practicalities of running Mission Concepción. It also was meant to clarify divine writ.

For the Observants, the conversion of unbelievers would hasten the Second Coming, but the messianic age also required a revitalized Christendom. The two colleges trained missionaries for frontier regions, but they also sent missionary friars to preach and work in Mexico City. The more remote missions were meant to convert the natives, but they also stood as an example and a rebuke to a Church and believers who had lost their way. In the late eighteenth century this notion of a revitalization from the margins had a decidedly (if generally unspoken) political edge. The two colleges recruited quite heavily from New Spain’s criollo elite—that is, people of Spanish blood born on the Americas. This occurred at a time when criollos increasingly were being excluded from powerful, potentially lucrative political offices, and when the Spanish Crown was consolidating its control over its overseas possessions, including the mission system.

In US history books, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often are remembered as the heyday of the Spanish mission system in North America. Indeed, this was the period when, under Crown sponsorship, Franciscan brothers established what are now probably the most famous missions in the present-day United States, the California missions. Nonetheless, the expansion into California was the exception rather than the rule. In most other frontier regions in Spanish America, including present-day Texas, the Crown sought to regulate missions more closely, “secularize” them (that is, place them under the aegis of diocesan or “secular” authorities, which were subject to more direct Crown control), or close them altogether.

Here too the Observants’ emphasis on redemption from the edge had a decidedly political edge. The anonymous author of the Instruction ostensibly intended it for his successor. But the mission itself was a instruction meant to be read and followed by political rivals and lapsed believers in Mexico City, Madrid, and Rome—indeed, in the whole of Christendom.