Rose Marie Beebe

Junípero Serra in His Own Words

This book presents St. Junípero Serra by using his own letters, journals and sermons. Instead of hearing what others think of Serra, this book allows one to meet the man and form one's own opinion. All texts are from the original and have the authors' own translations.

The book ende, "...Serra’s struggle was his own. His attempt to live out his religious ideals as a missionary among the peoples of America gave his own life its deepest meaning. He profoundly believed that encounters with missionaries would prove more advantageous to eighteenth-century indigenous peoples than the other possibilities that he thought were realistically available to them, specifically domination by soldiers or settlers. In the New Spain of the mid-eighteenth century, this belief was quite reasonable."… (meer)

(Excerpt from longer published review)

Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz's Lands of Promise and Despair is a fascinating collection of primary sources that reveal the texture of daily life in Hispanic California. These sources run the gamut from documents describing the initial contact between Europeans and indigenous peoples to illustrations of native animals by explorers to recollections of life in Californio society. Despite the wide range of source material, the collection is remarkably focused and informative. I recommend it to both scholars of early California and interested members of the general public.… (meer)