San Antonio and Its Missions: Three Centuries of History, Memory, and Heritage

Characterizing San Antonio’s five Spanish colonial–era missions as “sites of memory,” author and historian Joel Daniel Kitchens explores how and why Spain built the missions, what happened to the missions after the Spanish colonizers left, and how and why the missions came to weigh so heavily in American imagination and identity, even into the twenty-first century. While the Alamo figures prominently in these discussions, nonetheless all five missions collectively are an enduring and deeply rooted part of the city’s cultural legacy, as recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2015. This careful study aims to tease out the means and process by which the missions of San Antonio came to represent much more than the original religious and educational functions that began three centuries ago at what was then a remote site on the Spanish colonial frontier. Incorporating deep research into Spanish Colonial documents, census data, travel narratives, advertisements by railroad companies, tourist guides, and even the buildings themselves, San Antonio and Its Missions: Three Centuries of History, Memory, and Heritage adds nuanced layers of understanding to the ways in which these buildings and the stories they embody continue to contribute to cultural and historical memory.