Mission San Juan, San Antonio, Texas

Mission San Juan is being rebuilt. At first thought this may seem to be defacing the original work. Actually, it is only defacing work that had previously been reconstructed over the original. Most of what is available in the missions was rebuilt during the days of the WPA. I believe that much of what is still standing of Mission Concepcion is original but almost all of San Jose was built in the 1930’s. Actually, a project was just finished at San Juan where the granite used in the WPA reconstruction has been replaced with the native limestone which is what was used in the original.

 

The last time I visited San Juan there were buttresses jutting out from the side of the building. Those were not original. They were added because the walls were in danger of collapsing and the buttress offered the easiest solution to the problem. Now you can see large white rectangles where the buttresses have been removed so I suppose that the walls will now be braced differently, more in keeping with the original construction.

 

Since there wasn’t much to photograph we started looking for textures or details. We noticed a large number of names and dates that had been carved into the stones over the years. Most were not legible but I came across one for last year and made some remark that you would think that people would have learned better. Alcy asked me why I thought it was okay to carve your name in the stones in the 1920’s and not today—why I was more willing to overlook the previous carvings.

 

That’s a good question. In hindsight of course it wasn’t less destructive but you have to remember that the people in the 1920’s saw the world differently than we do today. Probably at that time, before the WPA, most of the missions were in ruins. I do not know when the preservation actually began but it is obvious that they were not held in the same regard as they are today. I think too often we have a really bad habit today of seeing history from our present point of view and not realizing that points of view has changed drastically over time. I know for sure that we do not think the same way we did in the 1950’s but that doesn’t mean that there was anything wrong with the thinking in the 1950’s for that period in history. We erroneously seem to think that we have reached some sort of a pinnacle in our evolution. Believe me we haven’t. Hang in there, a half century into the future and they will think as ill of this period as we do of a half century ago.