We have been wanting to go to Tucson for a while. It seemed like a neat town when we passed through back when we were on our way to California. Plus, there’s a lot of interesting stuff down in the south-east corner of Arizona which can all be reached from Tucson. We made a start toward seeing it all in early February. We headed south for an overnight to Tucson and the surrounding area.
Our first stop was at
Mission San Xavier del Bac. The mission is on the very southern outskirts of town on some reservation land. It still serves the descendants of the original people it was built to serve. As you come down I-19 (marked in kilometers!) you can see this huge white building seeming out in the middle of the nowhere. Some call it the White Dove of the Desert. It’s a really lovely building. It’s particularly striking because it’s so white against all that red and dusky Arizona soil. There’s also not much else around it to remind you that it isn’t the 18th Century. That’s how old the place is. A Jesuit named Fr. Eusebio Kino established the mission in 1700 at the Tohono O'odham village of Wa׃k (which he heard as “bac”). The present church was not begun until 1783 but that’s
still older than most of the California missions. The architecture is Baroque with a few Byzantine and Mexican Renaissance flourishes. The artisans that did all the painting and sculpting in San Xavier (at least the folks in charge of the look) are supposed to have come directly from Mexico City so it looks a lot more like a big Mexican city church than a frontier one. They are just finishing up a restoration, so it looks today like everything has just been in stasis since it was built.
The whole look and feel is quite different than the missions we visited in California. Unlike the relatively isolated missions of California, San Xavier is just the northern-most of the rather thicker-on-the-ground Mexican mission system. These Pimería Alta missions were much more closely connected to the New Spain heartland. That’s why the got the artists they did and why they didn’t have to rely so much on producing everything themselves. There
were regular commerce routes through northern Mexico. Unlike Tejas and California, where the presence of American settlers made the question “whose land is this anyway?” open for discussion, the southern third of today’s Arizona really was Mexican. The whole area is so Mexican that it was only added to the United States in 1853 when (almost as an afterthought) the Gadsden Purchase was negotiated. This last U.S. territorial acquisition on the continent was made so that a southern trans-continental railroad could be built.
We have been wanting to go to Tucson for a while. It seemed like a neat town when we passed through back when we were on our way to California. Plus, there’s a lot of interesting stuff down in the south-east corner of Arizona which can all be reached from Tucson. We made a start toward seeing it all in early February. We headed south for an overnight to Tucson and the surrounding area.
Our first stop was at Mission San Xavier del Bac. The mission is on the very southern outskirts of town on some reservation land. It still serves the descendants of the original people it was built to serve. As you come down I-19 (marked in kilometers!) you can see this huge white building seeming out in the middle of the nowhere. Some call it the White Dove of the Desert. It’s a really lovely building. It’s particularly striking because it’s so white against all that red and dusky Arizona soil. There’s also not much else around it to remind you that it isn’t the 18th Century. That’s how old the place is. A Jesuit named Fr. Eusebio Kino established the mission in 1700 at the Tohono O'odham village of Wa׃k (which he heard as “bac”). The present church was not begun until 1783 but that’s still older than most of the California missions. The architecture is Baroque with a few Byzantine and Mexican Renaissance flourishes. The artisans that did all the painting and sculpting in San Xavier (at least the folks in charge of the look) are supposed to have come directly from Mexico City so it looks a lot more like a big Mexican city church than a frontier one. They are just finishing up a restoration, so it looks today like everything has just been in stasis since it was built.
The whole look and feel is quite different than the missions we visited in California. Unlike the relatively isolated missions of California, San Xavier is just the northern-most of the rather thicker-on-the-ground Mexican mission system. These Pimería Alta missions were much more closely connected to the New Spain heartland. That’s why the got the artists they did and why they didn’t have to rely so much on producing everything themselves. There were regular commerce routes through northern Mexico. Unlike Tejas and California, where the presence of American settlers made the question “whose land is this anyway?” open for discussion, the southern third of today’s Arizona really was Mexican. The whole area is so Mexican that it was only added to the United States in 1853 when (almost as an afterthought) the Gadsden Purchase was negotiated. This last U.S. territorial acquisition on the continent was made so that a southern trans-continental railroad could be built.
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