Gerónimo Boscana

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Gerónimo Boscana (Jerónimo Boscana) was an early nineteenth-century Franciscan missionary in Spanish and Mexican California. He is noted for producing the most detailed ethnographic picture of a Native Californian culture to come out of the missionary period, an account that "...for his time and profession, is liberal and enlightened" (Kroeber 1959:282). Born at Llumayor on the island of Mallorca, Spain in 1776. Boscana was educated at Palma and jointed the Franciscan order in 1792. He traveled to Mexico in 1803 and to California in 1806. He served at the missions of Soledad, La Purísima, San Luis Rey, and San Gabriel. For more than a decade (from 1812–1826) he was stationed at Mission San Juan Capistrano. He died at San Gabriel in 1831, and is the only missionary to be interred in its cemetery among over 2,000 former inhabitants.

Boscana's first ethnographic contribution resulted from an 1812 questionnaire sent by the Spanish government to the missionaries of Alta California (Geiger 1976). The task of preparing a response on behalf of San Juan Capistrano may have stimulated the missionary's latent interest in the native culture. While at San Juan Capistrano, Boscana composed two versions of a detailed ethnographic sketch of the Juaneño Indians, who were primarily speakers of a dialect of Luiseño but probably also included Gabrielino speakers from the north. One version of Boscana's manuscript ("Chinigchinich; a Historical Account of the Origin, Customs, and Traditions of the Indians at the Missionary Establishment of St. Juan Capistrano, Alta California Called The Acagchemem Nation") was translated by Alfred Robinson and published in 1846 as an appendix to his book "Life in California" (Robinson 1846). Robinson was apparently responsible for giving the title "Chinigchinich" to Boscana's work. An edition of this version with extensive annotations by the anthropologist and linguist John Peabody Harrington was published in 1933.

The following year, Harrington published a translation of another, variant version of Boscana's account, newly discovered in France and entitled "Relación histórica de la creencia, usos, costumbres, y extravagancias de los indios de esta Misión de San Juan Capistrano llamada la nación Acagchemem" (Harrington 1934). The second version was subsequently also published in its original Spanish (Reichlen and Reichlen 1971). It seems to have been an earlier draft of the manuscript published by Robinson, but it contains some material not included in the later version. Portions of a still earlier draft made by Boscana, with some additional ethnographic information, have also recently been discovered (Johnson 2006).

[edit] References

• Geiger, Maynard J. 1976. As the Padres Saw Them: California Indian Life and Customs as Reported by the Franciscan Missionaries, 1813-1815. Santa Barbara Mission Archive Library. Santa Barbara, California.
• Harrington, John P. 1933. Chinigchinich: A Revised and Annotated Version of Alfred Robinson's Translation of Father Gerónimo Boscana's Historical Account of the Belief, Usages, Customs and Extravagancies of the Indians of this Mission of San Juan Capistrano Called the Acagchemem Tribe. Fine Arts Press, Santa Ana, California.
• Harrington, John P. 1934. A New Original Version of Boscana's Historical Account of the San Juan Capistrano Indians of Southern California. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 92(4). Washington, D.C.
• Johnson, John R. 2006. "The Various Chinigchinich Manuscripts of Father Gerónimo Boscana". In San Diego, Alta California, and the Borderlands: Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the California Mission Studies Association, Mission San Diego de Alcala, February 18-20, 2006, edited by Rose Marie Beebe. California Mission Studies Association, Bakersfield, California.
• Kroeber, A. L. 1959. "Problems on Boscana". University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 47:282-293. Berkeley.
• Reichlen, Henry, and Paula Reichlen. 1971. "Le manuscrit Boscana de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris". Journal de la Société des Américanistes 60:233-273.
• Robinson, Alfred. 1846. Life in California. Wiley & Putnam, New York.