California’s modern cities quickly sprouted up around the Franciscan Missions that first brought European society to the region, enveloping the aged buildings, most of which are still functioning parts of the Catholic Church.
The La Purisima Mission in Lompoc is an exception though. The sprawling building was a neglected ruin when Union Oil acquired it. The company donated the building and artifacts to the state, and thanks to a collected effort between the state of California, the county of Santa Barbara, the National Park Service, and the Civilian Conservation Corps, it was preserved and moved to its current location. Its fate was to become the La Purisima Mission State Historic Park, where community members could visit the restored mission in a landscape removed from a modern setting.
“We are the most complete and restored mission with almost 2,000 acres of park land surrounding it,” State Park Interpreter Ann Boggess said. “It was established as a place where people could escape modern noise and views and step back in time, and people are still blown away by that.”
The La Purisima experience is especially potent on days like the upcoming Mission Life Day event scheduled for March 19, or the recent People’s Day that happened March 5 and will continue through the summer. These events are tailored specifically to reawaken the way of life that existed on the mission for years before California ever became part of the United States.
La Purisima and the mission fill up with docents who are all dressed in period attire and demonstrate a number of craft skills that kept people clothed, fed, and comfortable two centuries ago. The difference between a docent and a volunteer is training, Boggess said. The Mission Life Day actually serves as a graduation for many volunteers who earn their stripes and become full-fledged docents who can offer live interpretation in the park.
“Part of the challenge of interpretation is presenting things in a human way that is interesting,” Boggess said. “So we accumulate facts from direct sources, from academic speakers, and the books we’ve read. You have to have your sources and be sure you’re telling the correct story.”
The docents appear in character, Boggess explained, and do more than just display crafts. Docents interact with visitors in character, tell personal stories, and take questions.
Another challenge of interpretation is staying true to the facts, no matter how controversial they are, Boggess said. Interpreters don’t shy away from discussion about the interaction between the Franciscan monks and Native Americans—in La Purisima’s case, the Chumash—or the displacement of the latter. It is history, after all.
“When we have docents come in, we want them to understand the history, we don’t want a fairy-tale view,” Boggess said. “We want to be culturally sensitive to everybody, including the Native Americans, because the story has been simplified in the past, but it’s very complex and we want the docents to know it’s complex.”
Visitors get to interact in more ways than just talking with docents, Boggess explained, they also get to participate in handicrafts and multisensory experiences. Docents cook up fresh bread, bake tortillas in a comal, and even churn fresh butter that visitors get to taste.
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Some docents learn how to perform crafts that visitors can’t join in on because of their complexity or the equipment needed. This includes the simple yet refined looms with which docents weave blankets of wool yarn. There’s also a candlestick maker who demonstrates the different kinds of candles used at the mission, including a big melting pot for the beeswax and the special molds needed to make them.
“Things like that, people are so removed from it today that when they come here, it’s fun to see and just be here without all the technology,” Boggess said. “It takes a lot of skill—and that’s what it is, a skill—and we build that in our docents.
“It takes a lot of practice to fine-tune it, and one of the many things we try to do is build that skill so that when the school kids or families come up, [docents] can actually give them some information about what they are doing as they are doing it,” she added. “We’re trying to get them to see it, to feel it, to touch it, to taste it. To me, adults are kids too, and we’re all the same curious little beasts.”
Arts Editor Joe Payne wouldn’t mind his own beeswax candles. Contact him at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 10-17, 2016.