2026/01/01 by Steven W. Hackel
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Archaeology and Natural History #Historical Studies in Central America #Latin American history and culture
paper · doi:10.1525/ch.2026.103.3.17
openalex publication_date 2026/01/01 · openalex created_date 2026/07/29 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
This essay reframes the early history of California by assessing the ways in which the on-the-ground issues that defined the American Revolution—specifically, taxation, self-governance, and individual liberty—played out to one degree or another for the residents of Alta California in the Age of Revolutions. The story begins in the 1780s when the people of Alta California were called upon by the Spanish Crown to make monetary sacrifices—the donativo gracioso—in support of its war against England. It continues with the implementation of elections in the missions of California that were part of a broader reevaluation of Franciscan rule in the missions. And it extends through the early 1790s when the Spanish king and California missions led prayers in support of the Spanish army that went to war against France in 1793. The story concludes a generation later when Californians of all ranks and ethnicities grappled with the legacies of these earlier struggles and the ideas of freedom and independence that stood at the center of the Age of Revolutions as a whole, not just in British North America but across Spain’s New World colonies. At the center of this part of the story is Pacifico Sunicamiol, a Chumash man from Mission San Buenaventura whose petition for liberation from the mission was instrumental in making a new order in California.