Mission Santa Clara: Past and Present Influence

The Santa Clara Mission Community has a complicated history when it comes to how it interacted with the people indigenous to the land that it stands on, starting all the way back in 1777 when the Mission Santa Clara de Thamien was founded. More recently, there has been an increased interest in the narratives that have been taught in the past relating to this history and how more recent information has changed the public opinion of this history. This exhibit is an extension of this conversation which continues to be had on how we should remember and acknowledge the Mission's difficult history.

The first part of this project addresses the immediate history preceding and proceeding from the initial contact that the Spanish missionaries made on the community. As you will see, much of the information that informs this understanding is based on documentation created by the Spanish in various correspondences to people in the mainland and leaders in their missionary project, including Junípero Serra. In the landing page for this first half, we will address the problems that arise from the use of primary sources from a biased one-sided perspective. At the same time, you will learn about the incredible efforts that the historians of today are making to use these sources in order to create a clearer image of what the past was like for the indigenous people surrounding the Mission community. The final part of this first half outlines a little known period in Mission history where efforts were made to secularize California after Mexico won its independence from Spain, and how this change affected the lives of the people who originally lived on the land.

The second part of this project will examine the influence of Mission Santa Clara on its later resident of the mission site, Santa Clara University(SCU), by looking at SCU's attitude toward the mission history and its connection to the Mission. The first two sections of the second half will look into activities organized by SCU and symbolic figure of SCU to draw understanding of SCU's early receiption on the mission past and the indigenous people. The final section of the second half will provide a timeline putting relative SCU events from the founding of SCU to present day to help build an overlook of the progression of SCU's acknolwedgment on the Mission history and indigenous people. Analysis and conclusion are conducted mainly based on records and images created by both SCU faculty and students to capture more perspectives among the entirety of the university.