Father Kino's Holy Chain

THE HOLY CHAIN FATHER KINO'S FRONTIER MISSIONS

TEXT BY KATHLEEN WALKER PHOTOGRAPHS BY JACK DYKINGA

Guevavi is almost gone now, only two adobe walls melting back into the land of southern Arizona. To the north, Tumacacori holds on, caught in time. Farther north on the edge of Tucson, San Xavier del Bac still stands tall in the beauty of her early years but getting her there and keeping her there has taken years of painstaking work. Teseros desaparecidos, David Yubeta calls them, "vanishing treasures." He calls himself a "mud man." As facility manager of Tumacacori National Historical Park, which includes the walls of Guevavi, he fights a battle against time and the elements waged at all the mission churches of Arizona. "It is endless," he says of the work required to preserve Tumacacori, about 45 miles south of Tucson. Completed around the 1820s, the mission once was a busy complex with residences, kitchens, classrooms, a granary, and workshops. Now Yubeta runs his hand down a new crack in the bare walls of the old church, and he worries. "What we have here," he says of Tumacacori, "is a nonrenewable resource."

(PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 4 AND 5) At the turn of the 18th century, Father Eusebio Francisco Kino established a series of missions on the edge of the Spanish Empire in what is now Sonora, Mexico, and Arizona. Mission San Xavier del Bac southwest of Tucson continues to be an active church. (LEFT) Father Kino's missionary work began at Tubutama, a village in Sonora, Mexico, which now has about 600 inhabitants. The church there today is the sixth or seventh built at that location. (ABOVE) An ancient cracked bell at Mission San Ignacio de Caborica in Sonora stands watch over the tiny village.

At Guevavi, he does what he can by "capping" the walls with dirt and sand to slow adobe's natural tendency to head back to earth. The ruin dates from the 1750s, but this also is the site of the first structure built by Europeans in southern Arizona. From the early 1700s, the faithful gathered here. They raised the walls high, and as at Tumacacori and San Xavier, the doorway of their church faced south toward Mexico City from which all power and money once flowed. Also to the south were the other missions, built in the villages and on the hilltops of Sonora. They were at Tubutama, Imuris, and Pitiquito. One stood

THE HOLY CHAIN

heavy and strong in Caborca while another rose high at Cocospera. More than 20 in all, they were part of a chain built of mud and faith in the late 1600s and early 1700s in the region called Pimeria Alta. Stretching from the present-day Mexican state of Sonora to Arizona, the area was the edge of the Spanish Empire, and the missions were the outposts of its faith. Some still stand like their sisters to the north, two centuries old and counting.

Father Eusebio Francisco Kino forged the chain. An Italian-born Jesuit, he arrived in the territory on March 13, 1687. On March 14, he was back on his horse, beginning a search for souls that lasted until his death 24 years later. He would go north to the Gila River, up the San Pedro, and west to the Colorado. He could ride 800 miles in 25 days, exploring, baptizing, and building. According to Father Charles Polzer, Kino scholar and fellow Jesuit, Kino may have covered as many as 20,000 miles on horseback during his years in the Pimeria Alta. And when he did sleep, he used his well-worn saddle as a pillow.

"Rugged," pronounces Polzer.

On that second day of his travels, Kino stopped at the village of Caborica which he christened San Ignacio. Today San Ignacio is a small town with a plaza facing the white church with its pie-wedge fringe over the door. Corn growing in the church courtyard and the orchards and fields below the structure remind that Father Kino sowed more than the seeds of faith. He introduced new crops to the region, planted fruit trees at the missions, and ran thousands of head of cattle. He stocked existing missions and prepared for the new ones. There was a time when livestock from Tumacacori grazed 20 miles along the Santa Cruz River.

The ranching tradition Father Kino established outlasted his churches, which were simple structures. Other more substantial churches were built over or near the original sites by those who followed the missionary trail into the Pimeria Alta, more Jesuits and then the Franciscans.

The Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish Empire in 1767 by King Charles III. They were too protective of the native people, "possessive" was one criticism, keeping them attached to the missions and out of the labor force. They weren't being made available for the brutal work in the Spanish mines. They weren't becoming taxpaying citizens. Then there was that stiffnecked tendency of the black-robed order to owe its obedience to something higher than the power of the Spanish king.

The Franciscans took over the mission chain, but they also were handed their walking papers in 1827 after Mexico won its War of Independence and expelled those born in Spain. But by then, the Franciscans had built their great churches with the labor of the people on whose land they rose.

"They must have thought the priests were crazy," says David Yubeta, laughing when he thinks of what the local reaction must have been to plans for sky-touching towers in a land of groundhugging ramadas.

"You want me to do what?" he mugs. "You want me to build the walls how thick?"

Five feet in some places, gentlemen, and with adobe blocks weighing up to 70 pounds each.

The builders used the materials at hand: stone; adobe, raw and fired, plastered over, painted within; and cactus, the ribs of the saguaro, limbs of the ocotillo. They used mesquite for stairways and doors.

The windows and doorways of some of the missions they framed with a scallop design, symbol of the shells carried by pilgrims as proof of a visit made to a shrine on the coast of Spain.

They also incorporated the symbol of the three-knotted rope belt Franciscans still wear. At San Xavier, the rope design runs along walls of the choir loft down the length of the church to the altar.

The master builders and artists who created the missions came from the interior of Mexico, as did the statuary that filled the interiors. Native-born artisans of the Pimeria Alta left their mark as well. They built the walls and painted them, adding their own artistry to the interior designs.

As in a family of beloved children, each mission was allowed its own identity, and each remains unique to this day. San Ignacio's interior walls are soft yellow. Pitiquito's high ceiling includes a dome of blue sprinkled with stars, while Tubutama's flaunts a paisley print of red and blue on white.

The missionary work of Father Kino began at Tubutama in 1691. The faith has held. There are 600 residents in the town, and according to one, casi todo, "almost all," are Catholic. They certainly have had the churches to support them.

The domed and towered church at Tubutama is the sixth if not the seventh built there. Others included the church destroyed in the Pima Uprising of 1695 and the one built in the 1740s with 50,000 adobes, which fell in 1751 in the rebellion of the native peoples against the Spanish and the missions. Be they Pimas, Jacomes, Seris, Apaches, or Opatas, not all those native peoples offered a new civilization complete with religion and building projects were willing to let go of their own ways.

THE HOLY CHAIN

Continued from page 8 1840s, the few believers left at Tumacacori finally gave up against the continual raids. They moved north carrying with them for safe-keeping the vestments, statues, and chalices of their church.

To the south, Cocospera suffered a similar fate. The hilltop position chosen for the mission was beautiful, but it proved no deterrent to attack. By 1845 Cocospera was abandoned. The church survives as a gutted shell, roof gone, walls collapsing, scaffolding holding together what's left.What the Apaches didn't do, the treasure hunters did. At Cocospera, Tumacacori, San Ignacio, churches throughout the region, the vandals dug holes, tunneled, and punched through walls looking for Jesuit gold, Franciscan gold, anybody's gold. "There simply wasn't any," states Father Polzer, who has written articles debunking the myth. The hidden treasure story was concocted, he says, long after the Jesuits marched away with barely the black robes on their backs.

Poverty always came with the territory. The Jesuits might have enjoyed the luxury of a social cup of chocolate, but the sugar they used was held in bowls made of hardened orange rinds. And while the silver mines of 18th-century New Spain might have been able to feed the coffers of the king, the Franciscans needed a kettle for cooking at San Xavier.

The needs are far different but no less pressing for the missions today. Guevavi is melting. Cocospera is held together by metal framework.

"And we're losing it," laments David Yubeta, who sees Cocospera as a classic example of what happens to ruins. "All of a sudden they hit this point, and a rapidly accelerated deterioration starts to happen."

The little churches of the little towns in Sonora fight their own battles against time and nature to which even the mightiest can fall. The great church with the weighty name of La Purisima Concepcion de Nuestratra Senora de Caborca is now closed. Believed to have been designed by the same architect who worked at San Xavier, Ignacio Ganoa, the structure is a massive echo of that northern church. In the Sonoran city of Caborca, the church has made it through revolutions and an invasion, small but bloody, of North Americans in 1857. Today it hangs on the edge of an abyss created by the Rio Concepcion, the river that destroyed the mission's buildings (ABOVE) A tour group scatters around Cocospera in Sonora to get photos of the deteriorating mission held together by metal framework.

and undermined its structure. "I see nothing but just constant deterioration and decline," Father Polzer says of the missions in Sonora. He cites the need for tourist money and government support. The latter is difficult to come by on either side of the border, impossible on the northern side when the church is active, as is San Xavier. The major conservation project completed in 1997, which brought that church's interior back to the gilt and glory of 1797, depended on donations and grants.

As for tourism, a few hundred thousand visitors go to San Xavier every year, and about 60,000 to Tumacacori, but there is no rush to the rural towns of northern Sonora. For tourists, the beauty, history, and impact of the "vanishing treasures" below the border remain relatively undiscovered. But the people of the missions have not forgotten them.

In Oquitoa, lessons of faith are still being given as they were three centuries ago. In Pitiquito, the women still pray with arms folded across their hearts, their words whispers in the old church. In San Ignacio, visitors arrive after a more than twohour drive from the city of Hermosillo. "To know it," one says simply of the reason they come to the church.

The last building project completed under Father Kino was a chapel in the town of Magdalena. The chapel is gone, but the bones believed to be those of the Jesuit missionary lie under a glass dome on the site. Above, there is another dome, of masonry, with the names of his missions circling it. The open grave serves as a bleak reminder of where all journeys on this Earth must end. But by looking up, one also is reminded of how much can be accomplished on the trip.

Additional Reading: In March, 1998, Arizona Highways will publish The Spirit Endures, a book by Kathleen Walker presenting a visual and narrative account of San Xavier del Bac. This book, containing historical and modern photographs, will explore the beauty, history, legends, miracles, and people associated with the famed desert landmark south of Tucson, as well as other Kino missions in Sonora, Mexico.

Editor's Note: Southwestern Mission Research Center Inc. offers spring and fall guided tours to Father Kino's missions on both sides of the border. To inquire, contact Julieta Portillo, SMRC Tours, P.O. Box 27823, Tucson, AZ 85726; (520) 628-1269.

One-day and overnight mission study tours also are available through Pima Community College, 401 N. Bonita, Tucson, AZ 85709-5500; (520) 206-3952.

Tucson-based Kathleen Walker enjoys any assignment or excuse that takes her back to Mexico and its history.

Jack Dykinga, of Tucson, also contributed photographs to Walker's upcoming Arizona Highways book on the missions.