"Saints and Citizens" is a bold new excavation of the history of Indigenous people in California in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, showing how the missions became sites of their authority, memory, and identity. Shining a forensic eye on colonial encounters in Chumash, Luiseo, and Yokuts territories, Lisbeth Haas depicts how native painters incorporated their cultural iconography in mission painting and how leaders harnessed new knowledge for control in other ways. Through her portrayal of highly varied societies, she explores the politics of Indigenous citizenship in the independent Mexican nation through events such as the Chumash War of 1824, native emancipation after 1826, and the political pursuit of Indigenous rights and land through 1848.

This volume makes available a remarkable body of writings, the only indigenous account of early nineteenth-century California. Written by Pablo Tac, this work on Luiseno language and culture offers a new approach to understanding California's colonial history. Born and raised at Mission San Luis Rey, near San Diego, Pablo Tac became an international scholar. He traveled to Rome, where he studied Latin and other subjects, and produced these historical writings for the Vatican Librarian Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti. In this multifaceted volume, Pablo Tac's study is published in the original languages and in English translation. Lisbeth Haas introduces Pablo Tac's life and the significance of the record he left. She situates his writing among that of other indigenous scholars, and elaborates on its poetic quality. Luiseno artist James Luna considers Tac's contemporary significance in a series of artworks that bring Pablo Tac into provocative juxtaposition with the present day.
Transcribed by Marta Eguia, Cecilia Palmeiro, Laura Leon Llerena, Jussara Quadros, and Heidi Morse, with facing-page translation by Jaime Cortez, Guillermo Delgado, Gildas Hamel, Karl Kottman, Heidi Morse, and Rose Vekony

Spanning the period between Spanish colonization and the early twentieth century, this well-argued and convincing study examines the histories of Spanish and American conquests, and of ethnicity, race, and community in southern California. Lisbeth Haas draws on a diverse body of source materials (mission and court archives, oral histories, Spanish language plays, census and tax records) to build a new picture of rural society and social change.
A borderlands and Chicano history, Haas's work provides a richly textured study of events that took place in and around San Juan Capistrano and Santa Ana in present-day Orange County. She provides a vivid sense of how and why the past acquires meaning in the lives that make up the historical identities she discusses. The voices of Juaneno and Luiseno Indians, Californios, and Mexicans are heard along the shifting faultlines of economic, social, and political change.
This is one of the first truly multiethnic histories of California and of the West. It makes clear that issues of multiculturalism and ethnicity are not recent manifestations in California--they have characterized social and cultural relationships there since the late eighteenth century.