Kino and the Mission Frontier

Legend has it that, centuries ago, Indians used the area around Magdalena de Kino, formerly Santa María de Buquibava, for harvest festivals. Today, the beautiful mission church, which now occupies the site, left, and the nearby domed crypt of Father Kino, are the goal of a 270-year-old Sonoran religious pilgrimage in honor of St. Francis Xavier, Kino's patron saint.... Beginning about a week before October 4th, the feast of St. Francis, Sonorans begin their long trek, eventually standing for hours in the courtyard of the mission church, waiting to pay tribute to St. Francis, top, right.... Pastor F. Santos Saenz, top, left, has served at the mission for the past 50 years. While at Magdalena, pilgrims also make devotions to other favorite saints of Mexico, like St. Martin, right. Jeff Kida text continued from page 22 and newer mysteries replace the old. The National Park Service has erected a splendid museum that tells more, and more truly, than a dozen books. NPS engineers, architects, and technicians have done more for the preservation of Tumacacori's crumbling adobes than can be told in words. Previous superintendents and interested friends have tried to expand the protective mantle of the National Monument to other sites along the Santa Cruz. But ignorance and apathy so far have won out. Mandated by the courts and fueled by self-interest, bulldozers continue to rip open the gentle slopes of San Cayetano; the middle Santa Cruz has become a labyrinth of law guaranteeing a legacy of lunacy. And San José del Tumacacori will remain like Schubert's symphony - unfinished.

To find the spirit of this place, its inner core, you go to the patio garden, a small pastoral retreat off an alcove to the rear of the office. The enclosure is an oasis of shining walls. Deep patches of aromatic plants grow thickly along its cobbled walkways.

Tumacacori's actual Franciscan garden is thought to have been directly off the sacristy on the east side of the church. But you imagine it to be much like this reconstruction with perhaps a broader scattering of highly prized medicinal herbs. You scan the worked and greening fields outside, much like the padres must have done as managers of an earthly estate which at its height governed some 52,000 acres and dealt with such worldly concerns as building construction and maintenance, irrigation, land and labor use, profits, losses, clan rivalries an infinite number of communal responsibilities.

Massive and silent, the sun-baked church across the plaza radiates a serenity so austere and yet so sacred that you enter it with a profound sense of intrusion.

The nave is cool. A soft watercolor wash of light slips in from several highplaced windows. The once whitened walls, now fractured and scarred, long ago turned a pale cream. Yet here and there, on the uppermost portions directly below the pine-planked ceiling, and scattered in the brighter ruins of the sanctuary like colored pebbles in a pond, are fragments of color - brown, and rust and ocher.

Immediately to the right a short tunnel-like passage leads to the baptistry. Here the walls thicken to nine feet and, closed off in the rear, a dark and shallow staircase leads to the bell tower. These same steps have also been used to reach the choir loft, a railed balcony above the vestibule, which has long since collapsed.

Returning to the nave and leaving through the sacristy you enter the walled Campo Sancto directly north. Like the bell tower above the baptistry, the circular mortuary chapel was never completed. It stands plastered and patched in the center of the cemetery. Graves from the mission period have long ago been obliterated by wind and rain, by milling cattle, and fortune hunters. The few that remain belong to more recent times.

Across the eastern wall, archeologists have uncovered fragments of the past, foundations of storerooms, granaries, classrooms, living quarters, and the roots of an enclosed courtyard garden.

In the museum is the tangible evidence of those lives the games they played, the music they made, the books they read; their spindles and sandals, baskets and brass bells; the armour of their Spanish protectors, the weapons of their Apache enemies; even their battered but stately altar statues, returned in 1873 from San Xavier del Bac after an absence of 125 years.

You gather in these images, like pieces of a puzzle, knowing that before long you'll impose them on Cocóspera.

A little below Tumacacori, the Santa Cruz bends gradually eastward, so that at Nogales all that is left is one of its small, chiselled side canyons draining north. Just out of town, you pick up Highway 15, Mexico's Carretera Internacional, and begin the descent to the drainage of the Magdalena River.

The land, at first rippling with lanky grasses studded with an occasional thicket, gradually turns itself into rounded hills, baked and dusty, bristling with ocotillo, like mounds of dried sticks. Some forty miles below the border, at the outskirts of Imuris, Highway 2 takes off eastward across a dry and bushy plateau towards Cananea, and although never mentioned on either highway, to Cocóspera 20 miles ahead.

After a distance, the hills, peppered with oak, roll away from the road like water. These become increasingly barren until at last the road makes a winding descent, settles in lush Cocóspera Valley, and moves north along the Rio Babasac, a fertile arm of the Magdalena River.In this narrow stretch of cottonwoods and sycamores, of fresh fields and farflung hidden rancherías, Cocóspera materializes as suddenly as a vision, lonely and defiant, surveying the valley from a high and rocky bluff off the road to the west.

For centuries, the springs that seeped from the slopes of the Sierra de Pinitos sustained the dwellers of the Cocóspera Valley. Recognizing the potential of the Sobaipuri settlement, Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino designated it a mission site in 1687. Over the next decade a parade of priests struggled to make Nuestra Señora del Pilar y Santiago de Cocóspera flourish. But even a litany of patrons could not protect the exposed pueblo from marauding Apaches.

Kino's sheer determination made Cocóspera succeed. Despite ravaging by rains, sacking by hostile Indians, and a declining population, Cocóspera attained its moment of glory in 1704 when hundreds of Indians converged from across the deserts and mountains to dedicate "the two best churches in all the Northwest." Everyone, it seemed, was thrilled with the accomplishment of the Piman craftsmen. Cocóspera and its architectural twin, Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, assumed a prominent role as showplace and sanctuary at least until breakdowns in frontier defense once again opened on a period of perilous survival. More than once the pine timbers of floor and ceiling were scorched by flaming arrows.

Gradually the grandeur of Cocóspera gave way to the demands of survival. After the neighboring mission of Santa María Suamca was obliterated in a ferocious Apache attack in 1768, the surviving Pimas broken, wounded, and fearful assembled at Cocóspera to rebuild their threatened lives. More than a half-century had now passed since Kino's carpenters had fashioned the elegant temple of hope in the wilderness. Under Franciscan successors Cocóspera experienced a renovation.

Padre Fray Juan Antonio Sanesteban strengthened the old church inside and out. Brick and plaster grew around the fragile adobes encasing a monument from a bygone era. Cocóspera found a new pride as it maintained its vigil over the older part of El Camino Real. But changes in the winds of political fortune dried up the support that had kept the mission churches strong. Mexico gained its independence but a part of the cost was the collapse of farflung frontier communities. Cocóspera was no exception. In 1850, a French colony was granted title to the fields below the mission bluff. Under Charles de Pindray the newcomers to the Sonora frontier tried to exploit the fertile valley, but Indian hostilities and a lack of supplies forced them to abandon the effort in 1852. Cocóspera was in its last decline. Those who sketched the mission on the hill in the late 1800's recorded the crumbling death of a magnificent monument. The real coup de grace came when the Tucson-Guaymas railroad bypassed the mountain route to the north.

Cocóspera was left abandoned to guard a road that went nowhere with a community that had dispersed everywhere. We are only left with its haunting memories. Mexico's famed Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia has confronted the problem of Cocóspera, but even that powerful agency has been frustrated in its attempts to preserve the fast falling walls. A caretaker's house has been tucked against the hillside in the hope of discouraging vandals and treasure hunters. Restoration is unaffordable; preservation unattractive. So it seems that Nuestra Señora del Pilar y Santiago de Cocóspera will melt back into the earth from which it sprang, awaiting a future generation to reopen an old frontier. Today the sagging shoulders of Cocóspera stand, a shattered shell, which seems at first gaunt and tragic. It had once been so much more. Where Tumacacori had been resurrected, Cocóspera had just quietly died. A traveller back in 1864 said of Cocóspera that "A more desolate looking place does not perhaps exist in all Sonora." Superficially, this may be true, but you find there instead, a place which defies desolation, one for which "primitive charm" seems only a shallow understatement.

Mission San José del Tumacacori stands on a scarred promontory known for three centuries as San Cayetano. Today, massive, silent and empty, the sun-baked church radiates a serenity so austere and yet so sacred the visitor enters with a profound sense of intrusion. James Tallon The mission, half-hidden by a tangle of mesquite bushes, is hauntingly beautiful, the stuff of legends. The fired brick which lined the large adobe facade leans forward ominously, kept in place by a precarious snarl of barbed wire, and the pockmarked walls show not the slightest trace of any stately chapel or bell tower.

Tree branches are fastened across the entrance which lays behind a low wall of tumbleweeds. Gold seekers long ago dug up the nave, leaving it, heaped together with the fallen ceiling and loft, in a weedgrown pile of packed earth which half-covered the inner walls. What is left of the thin whitewash, which had originally been plastered over the bare interior brick, has begun to peel, curling back like strips of bark on the trunk of a tree.

The fragile impressions you carried so carefully from Tumacacori seem an intrusion here, like time-worn pattern pieces that sadly no longer fit.

To visit Magdalena on a weekend is to confirm that it is still the hub of agricultural activity. Cantinas are filled with genuine cowboys; the shops are busy with ranchhands stocking up for another week or month in the hill country. Situated on the Rio Concepción, where it breaks into the open Sonoran desert, Magdalena has been at the heart of an inland empire from the days of the Hymeris Indians of the seventeenth century. When Padre Kino died here in 1711, he probably never reflected on the curious fate that his grave would be the object of an intensive search two-and-ahalf centuries later! He would never have believed that Magdalena was to become the focus of a pilgrimage in honor of St. Francis Xavier, his special patron. He would have been astonished to think that thousands of people of many nationalities would visit his tomb to pay him homage as priest, explorer, and friend.

With the coming of the railroad in 1880 Magdalena rapidly forgot its colonial past; it had become a town of the new age. The tiny chapel where Kino was buried was forgotten and his grave overrun by cobbles and decorative trees. But the discovery of Kino's grave in 1966 clutched the town with a new purpose and a richer pride. The confusion of municipal buildings, houses, and small shops was cleared away for an expressive Plaza Monumental. By January, 1970, hundreds of workmen transformed the placid town into an impressive tribute to Sonoran history.

Only a year later, the entourage of President Luis Echevarria Alvarez swirled into town with full federal fanfare. Thousands pressed into the plaza where the Mexican President went to dedicate the grave of Padre Kino, now a recognized hero of Mexico. Then, on the steps of the renovated town hall, Santa María de Buquibava received a new name, Magdalena de Kino. The whole sequence of events amounted to a marvelous tribute to the continuity of human endeavor and heroic history. Certainly Kino never attached his name to any place in the Pimería Alta; he was too humble. But history does not often forget its heroes, even if it takes centuries.

Magdalena de Kino now boasts of paved streets, refurbished houses, and many new shops. Because it recognized its past, it has a new hold on the future. But it is still a town that is tranquil, close to the earth, and thoroughly Mexican.

The church which stands in Magdalena today, repaired and refurbished, was erected in 1832.

From across the plaza, you study its form, cleanly cut, sharp, and expertly retouched, its dome and single tower outlined with rich tiling. Inside, behind elaborately carved doors and an inner partition, immaculate walls of satin whitewash, lit by candlelight, move softly in and out of shadow. Simple draped images lean peacefully into their darkened altar recesses.

Outside again, in a patchwork of color, genial groups of people begin to gather on the plaza for mass. They stroll about the tile-roofed walkways, in and out of shops, past rose gardens, and around the central fountain. The plaza pulses with life from the side chapel of St. Francis Xavier across to the domed crypt where Padre Kino's remains have been reverently displayed since 1970.

The way of life you discovered at Tumacacori, was lost forever in Cocóspera, but here at Magdalena it reached its climax. Magdalena stands firm and secure, matured fruit from the vineyard that was the mission frontier. These then, you'll find, are the missions today - the revealed and defined, the lost and forgotten, and the vibrantly alive. Pages of the same book; blossoms of the same tree; and yet as displaced from one another as the space between what was and what could have been.