Building California's past: Mission revival architecture and regional identity

Abstract

The development of Southern California's regional character was directly influenced by the United States' encounter with established civic centers and architectural forms in the far west after the Mexican American War (1846-1848). Before the occupation and conquest of the West, annexed territories had, for the most part, been inhabited by nomadic and seminomadic Native American tribes. Historical narratives describing the nature of American expansion had not had to confront massive indigenous cities such as the Aztecs' Tenochtitlán or the Incas' Cuzco. And as long as American historiography did not come into contact with recognizable architectural monuments that marked a place as inhabited, it could still portray westward advance as a legitimate occupation of fallow territory. In the far Southwest, however, the presence of Mexican towns and missionary outposts required the logic of Manifest Destiny to perform a radical reordering and restructuring of the narratives associated with the architectural landscape. By the late nineteenth century, as southwestern regionalism began to be codified, California's public history focused largely on the Spanish past and most explicitly on the Catholic missions.