On a sunny Tuesday afternoon, the smoky smell of frybread greeted visitors as they entered the San Xavier del Bac mission located just south of Tucson.
Susie Moreno, a conservation apprentice and preventive technician at the mission, stood in front of the 225-year-old building’s original wood doors chatting with one of the workers who helps maintain the building before heading inside the cool sanctuary, an escape from the bright, hot sun outside.
“Let me show you something really cool,” she said, with an air of contagious excitement for the building, the oldest intact European structure in Arizona.
Moreno walked around pointing out murals that lined the white, textured walls, and moved around rickety wooden benches that filled the room until she reached the front of the sanctuary. Towering in front of her was the main altar overflowing with multi-colored images, statues and gold baroque-style embellishments.
She pointed to an old, wooden pulpit no longer safe to use. The structure, which dates back to at least the 1940s, had some recent pencil markings etched on the side. Moreno said the writing could be the date of a death from 2009, adding that an eraser made from conservation-approved materials will be used to remove the pencil marks.
Moreno works for Patronato San Xavier, the non-profit that funds conservation projects at the mission. She exemplifies a longtime goal to integrate local community members into the nonprofit’s conservation work, said Miles Green, the nonprofit’s executive director.
Moreno’s work is part of a conservation strategy outlined in a Conservation Management Plan published in 2020 by Patronato. According to the plan, projects have focused on replacing the cement-based exterior coating with lime-based system and conserving the painted artworks inside the building.
“Moving forward, prioritizing resources and funding and pursuing a conservation program built around preventative maintenance is essential,” the plan says.
Since Patronato’s inception in 1978, the nonprofit has funded numerous projects.
Green said there are multiple projects underway and many planned for the future. Patronato is focusing on conserving mural art and plaster walls in the mission’s sacristy, and treating a set of historic original doors.
After the sacristy project has been completed, Green said Patronato will move on to conserve the sanctuary’s dome, the highest area of the church’s interior, followed by conservation of the church’s elaborate iconic tan exterior.
Green said that the completion of these projects depends on available funding and resources, and can carry a high price tag: The sacristy project totals approximately $80,000, and the dome project will reach about $320,000. Funding for conservation projects is provided by grants, donors and annual fundraising events.
‘After the first day I was hooked’
San Xavier del Bac is in the Tohono O’odham village of Wa:k — the village of water — 10 miles south of Tucson.
According to Patronato, the Wa:k community was a large and significant settlement in the region prior to the arrival of European colonists. It was home to several hundred Sobaipuri O’odham who lived along the Santa Cruz River.
It is that history and the love the community’s parishioners have for the church that informs every aspect of Moreno’s work.
“I draw the connections between how the community uses this place and how they see things here,” said Moreno, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation. “When I go in with treatment, especially with sculptures, that is always in the back of our minds, all of us: How will the community feel?”
As part of the five-person conservation team, Moreno is following in the footsteps of her aunt Matilde Rubio and uncle Tim Lewis who have worked for decades to restore and conserve the mission.
The young apprentice is a student at the University of Arizona studying sustainable built environments with an emphasis in heritage conservation.
After six years working in the field, Moreno has trained her eye to notice which walls of the mission have been treated by specialists and which ones need more work by looking at white spots, or areas of missing paint, and how the dust has accumulated on the walls.
The conservation team uses organic rabbit glue inserted behind paint on the walls to fix loose paint. Rabbit glue is made of rabbit cartilage and, based on studies, is known to have been used when the church was first built, she said.
Moreno can be found most mornings at the mission as early as 6 a.m. Some of her tasks include not only conservation and restoration work, but also monitoring the building for issues. She looks for wall cracks, water leaks, flaking paint, graffiti and rodents, among other things.
“There’s a lot to look at. I’m here almost every day and I see something new almost every day,” she said.
Moreno helps restore the mission’s sacristy, a room where the priests prepare for services and that holds items used for worship. She meticulously fills in damaged, deteriorated or missing parts of the paintings that cover the walls, dot by dot.
Her team is working on replacing parts of the sacristy’s walls where cement previously was used to repair them as they deteriorated.
Cement, which does not allow the wall to breathe, is being replaced with lime plaster, a material similar to the original building materials, Moreno said. Lime plaster consists of lime, sand and cactus juice from nopal cactus. Her uncle collects the nopal juice and prepares the mixture himself.
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Moreno’s work is a continuation of her childhood experiences, which centered around the mission. She attended the San Xavier Mission school, which has since closed, and worked as an altar girl.
However, conservation and restoration had never been a career she thought she would go into, until one day, the opportunity presented itself.
Her uncle and aunt were looking for an apprentice and thought of her. At the time she was working in retail and decided to give it a try.
“After my first day I was hooked,” she said.
Moreno said she appreciates the difference between caring for a historic building — like taking a gentle, soft brush to 200-year-old artifacts and gently brushing off the dust — compared to how one cleans their home.
“This is a way of caring for history in a different way that nobody thinks about,” Moreno said.
San Xavier del Bac’s unique history
Moreno recalled stories in her community about the mission’s founder, Jesuit missionary Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, that described him as peaceful and respectful of Indigenous communities.
Ethnohistorian Dale Brenneman confirmed the stories about Kino. In her research she delves into the Spanish colonial documentary record and works with O’odham colleagues to better understand the O’odham experience of Spanish colonization.
“By all appearances, he did seem to have respect for the people and was not as forceful as other missionaries, his contemporaries or others that followed him,” Brenneman said of Kino.
She noted how Kino thought if people were treated well and given what they needed they would eventually come around to Christianity.
Brenneman couldn’t comment on whether labor was forced when the mission was built in 1797 under the Franciscans, 86 years after Kino’s death.
She explained when the Spanish missions began in New Spain, the missionaries required Indigenous communities to split their time between their own land and the mission. They were required to spend three days working for the mission, which included tasks such as herding animals, constructing churches and growing food. They had three days to tend to their own farms and one day to attend church services and to rest.
Kino established missions throughout present-day southern Arizona and the northern portion of Sonora State in Mexico, with San Xavier del Bac being his northernmost mission.
In 1691, Pima, or Oʼodham, messengers went to Kino and asked him to travel up north to visit them, Brenneman said.
Indigenous communities were interested in commodities the “black robes,” or Jesuit missionaries, could offer them, she said. Commodities of special interest included seeds such as wheat, which could be harvested in the spring before other crops were planted, and medicine or rituals that might help their people who were dying from European diseases.
Documents suggest that diseases moved into Indigenous communities ahead of the Spaniards. This was because of the mobility of Indigenous people who traveled extensively and traded between communities.
“Often you see people from communities further to the north coming down to where the missionaries are, asking them to come up. When the missionaries go up … they baptize people who are on the verge of death,” Brenneman said.
It was not religion that caused issues, as Christianity was often compatible with the Indigenous beliefs, “if it’s allowed to be,” she said.
It was when individual missionaries were too forceful in requiring Indigenous communities to adhere to European ideals of behavior that resistance and revolts and resistance were likely to happen, Brenneman said.
In her article, “Learning the Landscape: The O’odham Acclimation of Father Agustín de Campos,” published in “Journal of the Southwest,” she wrote how many O’odham ceremonies and traditions reflected their deep knowledge of how to survive in the Sonoran Desert.
“For the O’odham, life in the desert meant mobility. Differential access to water and arable land led to various combinations of planting and foraging,” Brenneman wrote.
When harvests failed or were reduced, Indigenous farmers would rely on foraging, exchanging with other communities, and other activities that involved mobility, an act frowned upon by the European missionaries.
However, when missionaries established their missions, part of their evangelization efforts included teaching the Indigenous peoples how to be Christians, which to them meant conforming to European ideals of behavior. Those ideals consisted of living in community, farming and staying in one place, which differed from the O’odham culture of mobility.
In suppressing activities that the missionaries considered “heathen, disorderly and immoral,” Brenneman said, they also altered what was a successful adaptation to the harsh landscapes where the O’odham lived.
Although missionaries were required to distribute food to the Indigenous communities, they did not always sufficiently meet the need.
Brenneman highlighted one O’odham revolt against the missionaries that happened in 1751. According to O’odham testimonies in subsequent Spanish investigations, people felt they were not getting enough food.
“If they went out, they were punished,” Brenneman said about O’odham foraging for their food.
For the O’odham near San Xavier del Bac mission, their interactions with Jesuit missionaries were a lot more sporadic than was the case in communities to the south where missionary vacancies were prioritized when there was a shortage of priests, she said.
For many years, San Xavier del Bac was without a resident priest, which meant the surrounding Indigenous community could experience Christianity on their own terms, Brenneman said.
Kino would periodically visit Bac, she said, but there was no resident priest at the mission until 1701, several years after Kino had started his evangelization efforts in the area.
The priest put there that year died just one year later. In the following years, there was no missionary to take over until 1732, and that priest was transferred after one year, at which point San Xavier del Bac was again only occasionally visited by priests stationed farther south until the 1750s.
Moreno said the history of San Xavier del Bac is intertwined with the community’s Indigenous history, and reiterated how proud she is to follow in her family’s footsteps in helping save the mission. As the church is a working church and open daily to tourists and parishioners, and lacks climate control, she will have continuous work for a long time to come.
“It feels pretty special,” Moreno said. “I was meant to do this.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)