Sarah Michaels
Mission San Luis Rey de Francia was the largest of California’s twenty-one missions. At its peak, nearly 2,900 people lived there. From all of them, across all those years, historians have one substantial firsthand account written by a Luiseño person who was there - a boy named Pablo Tac, who left California at ten and died in Rome at nineteen.This book is about that gap, and about how anyone knows anything at all about a place where most of the people left no paper.Readers ages 9 to 12 meet the mission through the things that survived it. A hole worn into granite by generations of acorn grinding. Half a million adobe bricks made by hand, and the arithmetic that reveals a workforce nobody wrote down. A sunken stone laundry that describes a day’s work. A margin note reading huyó - he fled - the only record that a person ever made a choice. A pepper tree from Peru. A cemetery still in use. A water lawsuit that ran for nearly fifty years and ended in 2017.Along the way, readers learn that this mission’s baptism, marriage, and burial books have been missing since the 1800s, and how researchers rebuilt part of that lost record from two surviving census books. They learn why the restored church they can visit today is partly an argument made in the 1890s about what 1815 looked like. They learn where the nickname 'King of the Missions' came from, and who benefited from repeating it.The Luiseño people - Payómkawichum, People of the West - are not confined to a chapter about the past. Six federally recognized tribal governments run schools, clinics, courts, and language programs today. A seventh community, descended directly from this mission, is still seeking federal recognition.A history of one California mission, and a working introduction to how history gets made, for readers old enough to want the real answer.
