(birds chirp) - About 10 miles south of Tucson, Arizona is the mission San Xavier del Bac, a historic building visible for many miles away.

It begins with one man, a priest bigger than life, and a string of missions in Mexico to the South.

(Southwestern guitar music) (bright percussion music) - [Announcer] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was also provided by the Guilford Fund.

(firecrackers sizzle) (man speaks faintly) (bright music) (women vocalize) (birds sing) (men speak faintly) (gentle guitar music) - About 50 miles north of the border sits what is often called the White Dove of the Desert, the mission San Xavier, the most glorious mission in the United States.

Father Kino arrived here after founding his first mission to the South in Mexico It was called Dolores and nothing came of it.

In contrast, San Xavier is a living church.

Father Kino left Dolores, really, he had founded the mission, he left it behind, came up north, didn't get here til 1692, and from his standpoint (church bells toll) there was nothing here except unending fertile fields of prosperous people, but no buildings except for the homes of the O'otham that lived here.

(religious chanting music) (fast-paced guitar music) - It means a lot to me, it is because my ancestors helped build it along with the Spanish people that came, the priest that came and decided to build it here to convert us to catholicism.

But it's just for our ancestors and the future of the, you know, our tribe, to preserve it for them.

We have a bit of history here, there may have been differences of opinion about the church, you know, people, some people like it, some people don't like it because of what the system had done to us.

But if you look through history it's been like that, you know, cultures always get dominated by the stronger culture, and so on and so on, and here we have this monument that we should be proud of and have our kids aware of it and have them be proud of it.

But it's like music, you know, you listen to Bach, you say what is this, and all of a sudden it hits you, it's like that in here, I mean you look at every phase of it it tells you something.

There's some Indians painted inside the church, there's very few, there's only three or four in there, but it's part of our history, I mean, some of the designs also I was told were found on pottery that dates back 2000 years ago, that is inside the church.

I don't know if it was meant to be like that or if the artists in themselves just stuck it in there (religious chanting) just as a reminder to us, you know, that this is what we are, this is where we came from, that catholicism is here but we're also still here, which we are 200 years later.

The name San Xavier del Bac actually means San Xavier del Wa:k, which is San Xavier of Wa:k, the village of Wa:k, so that is also part of the history of the church that they never left the village out of the system, it wasn't just named San Xavier, and that's it.

I mean we've lived here all our lives so we know, (chuckles) but a lot of people from outside the country don't know about this place.

(melancholy music) - This is... - [David] My friend and Sonoran expert Alberto Burquez was born in Hermosillo.

He and I have explored Sonora and we are going to follow the paths of the Jesuit padres through the state.

(slow guitar music) (speaks in foreign language) - Every aspect of the history of Sonora is painted in here somewhere.

- That is San Xavier del Bac, which until 1845 or so was part of Sonora.

- [David] When Spaniards conquered Mexico, they adopted different strategies for pacifying different parts of the country.

In the Northwest, they turned the job over to priests.

- But as we all know, in Arizona and all the Southwest of the United States and Northwestern Mexico.

It embodies the conquest, you see.

- In a plaza of Hermosillo, the capital of the state of Sonora, is this statue of Father Kino.

He died over 300 years ago and by all accounts he was worn out from the thousands of miles he spent on horseback, and many of them on foot, much of that as a missionary but even more as a geographer and a mapmaker.

His influence on us today in the Southwest is incalculable.

(percussion music) - Before we head northward to the missions Father Kino knew, we drive a couple of hours north east of Hermosillo to visit one that has an unusual story to tell.

This church in a lake is, to me, one of the saddest stories in all the history of Sonora.

Batuc, the town, this church was built in the early 18th century, the priest's name was Rapicani and he brought in stonemasons from his native Italy to make the prettiest church in the entire region and it was, it was perfectly shaped out of marvelously cut stone and the town itself, it was a prosperous town.

- [David] It's still there.

- [David] So the town was sacrificed, Sonora's most beautiful church, to satisfy the thirst of a small number of land owners.

(light guitar music) Not far from Batuc was the Jesuit headquarters in a very old town.

This is the town of Matape, it's a very quiet, small town, but for the Jesuits in the first half of the 17th century it was their most important place, they owned a mine, they had a college for young people, they had slaves here and there was a beef production center.

(religious chanting music) - [David] More malleable.

(light guitar music) - I know this is one of your favorite places.

(dog barks) - Just north of the pass, the Rio Sonora Valley opens up.

We see it and some of its churches just as Father Kino saw it.

I always like to stop in Huepac, it's a tiny little town of a thousand people, but the church is the oldest and best preserved.

It's not big, but these (speaks in foreign language), these beams they have in the ceiling are massive.

- [David] It took some very good carpenters to carve them and they've probably been here for over 380 years.

(women chant) There is a record of him having stopped here and spoken with the priest who was here, and this would have been probably 1687, - [Alberto] Seven.

- [David] Yeah, so this church had already been existing for 40 or 50 years when he came here.

(guitar music) He was sometimes a non traditional priest.

- [David] He could wander off and do all sorts of things that other priests could never do, but his personal contact with the Indians was unlike any other priest.

(melancholy music) When the Jesuit missionaries arrived in northwestern Mexico, they found a very fertile ground for evangelizing in what is now Sonora's most famous river, the Rio Sonora.

All along the river were towns populated by the Opata people, Baviacora, Aconchi, Huepac, Banamichi, Sinoquipe, Arizpe, these are all Opata names that stay on the map and now make this one of Sonora's most popular tourist sites.

The Jesuits and Europeans brought wheat here and you can grow wheat in the winter.

In summer everyone raises corn, but if you came here in the 17th century in the winter you would see mostly just brown.

European crops are now mixed with Indigenous crops like corn and beans and squash, and you have the Rio Sonora, the economy that we see today.

(tractor rumbles) from Banamichi, the Rim of Christendom was not far away, just over a mountain range and into the next valley, the frontier mission of Cucurpe.

You think that this bell originally was hung here?

- Yeah, a lot of the church is falling part but it was built with three different materials, this stone, which is terrific, but also, you can see in the arches up there the brick, and then there's adobe.

This mission was established to convert the Opata Indians who were the people who lived around here.

To the North lived the Pimas or the, as we call them today, the O'otham.

No Christianity had ever been brought to them, there had been no missionaries, and Father Kino saw it as his challenge to bring a missionary effect, evangelize the Christians, the heathen who lived to the North and West, and he set out from here probably in 1687 to found missions and bring into the fold of Christianity hundreds or thousands of Pimas, the O'otham of today.

- These arches are still pretty much intact, they're all brick, I hope they are, but everything else has fallen away.

- Yeah.

- Father Kino set out to the Northwest, in the next valley over was a settlement that later came to be called San Ignacio.

The church there is special.

(fast guitar music) It's ironic but the best preserved church from Father Kino's time and all of the area that he served is this church in the tiny town of San Ignacio.

It comes from about the middle of the 18th century, long after he was dead, the original church was burned down by rebellious Indians who resented their mistreatment at the hands of Spaniards, but today this little church is the glory of Northern Sonora.

(religious chanting music) so when Kino saw San Ignacio along the river here with all the fields that were already here, he must have thought this is an agrarian paradise.

- Those are the European Italian crops that they like the best, and this is a perfect place for them.

This stairway, circular, it's made out of mesquite, these individual stairs are carved, each one, and then spiraled, my goodness, what carpentry.

- Huge, and the Indians had to carve them.

(bell tolls) If you heard the bell and you're an Indian you had to come to the church.

- [David] Yeah, yeah, a place where all the Indians were brought and it was compulsory.

If you didn't go to mass, five lashes.

- Miles away, and you would hear them miles away.

(bell tolls) It's kind of, it's got a big crack in it, it's an old bell.

A couple of decades after he first came to San Ignacio, Father Kino died.

Where he was buried remained a mystery until about 50 years ago.

It's only a few miles south of San Ignacio.

This is the crypt that the Federal government built and paid for and brought artists in, because they considered Father Kino to be so important, and inside this crypt, there, you can see the bones.

What makes you think those are really Father Kino's bones?

- He must have been six feet tall and those bones are... - It's a big man.

- Yeah, he's a big man, and he certainly was a priest of some kind, because of the stuff he was buried with.

- So it had to be somebody priestly and important to the Jesuits then.

Kino's bones are a good hundred yards away from an old church, this church was actually in 1920s converted into a labor union hall at a time when there was great anticlericalism in Mexico, so it's undergone a number of changes, but is is a very fine church, but not really associated with what Father Kino had done.

Father Kino's remains are in Mexico, but in the United States he is equally revered and well known.

Tucson has Kino Boulevard, Kino Hospital, and a host of other places named after the great priest.

Hermosillo has not one of these statues but two, why is that?

- [David] As you are, yes.

- More like a Sonoran cowboy, but this is probably realistic.

(bright guitar music) - Father Kino founded a mission at a place where there was water, a lot of people, and agricultural land.

He wanted a place where he could congregate the Indians and teach them European religion and values.

He ordered a chapel built, it was a modest structure, and it's pretty well vanished.

The building that we see now was not constructed until about a hundred years after his death.

Over the last 200 years, it has experienced countless masses, rites of passage, and visitors, and a million or so smoking candles, all of that requires maintenance, reconstruction, and artistic expertise.

- There's a great deal of difference between the condition and the state of preservation in missions throughout the American West, California and Arizona.

Some of that is due to the level of disrepair and loss over time, part of that is due to how they are managed for preservation and maintenance.

- What we're trying to do here is preserve the 200 year, 200 plus year paintings that are in this building that our ancestors did over 200 years ago.

We don't try to add or subtract anything from there.

We try to use what they used back then, you know, if we try to use something that's 21st century, it won't hold, or it might be too strong for what we have that is original.

(restorer speaks faintly) Areas of cleaning that were changed in the next six inches, it's very challenging because the areas are uneven, and there some of them are unfinished, and a lot of it is flaking of paint layers and gesso layer.

(light religious music) - [Nancy] The last 30 years, the Patronato de San Xavier, a non-sectarian, non-profit organization, with the purpose of restoration, maintenance and preservation, has tried to fund projects.

(women chant) Where we are now is looking at a larger conservation plan that will integrate these living religious heritage values with an overall goal that integrates the ongoing restoration, maintenance and preservation together.

And we also expect this building to be a protective envelope for the artwork inside, but the artwork is the symbolism, the meaning and the beauty of those that are faithful to the church, and those of us that are visiting as tourists and other visitors bask in its beauty, we want to see that preserved as well and so that becomes how we have to decide the priorities.

- When people see us working here, restoring the interior, they think, oh you're finished, we're not, we're never finished, because it's a living, breathing church, it expands and contracts, we're gonna have loose areas here and there eventually over the years.

I got involved in this art conservation back in 1992, my father told me about it in 1991, that we were gonna have this church restored.

Back then the church was just dark, I mean, it wasn't really dark that you couldn't see anything, but just kind of a shadowy, dark shadow over it.

But when we finished the East transept and I saw that there was something like a light coming out of there every time I came to mass and I said, well this is something I could get into.

I grew up here and I always took it for granted that it was here, and since I started working in here it has meant more to me because it's something that our ancestors built, and for my part, that's all I'm trying to do, is preserve it in their memory and plus the memory of, you know, for the future of our kids, our grandkids.

My wife and I have visited several other Sonora missions but nothing compares to San Xavier, especially on the interior.

I mean the artwork you can't compare to any other church.

(Latin chanting music) - Father Kino was more a geographer than a missionary, more an explorer than a priest, and more a humanitarian than a theologian.

His greatest legacy by far was establishing a nation which one day would have this building, the most magnificent example of architecture of any age in the entire Southwest of the United States, el mission San Xavier del Bac.

Join us next time In the Americas with me, David Yetman.

(man chants in foreign language) Brasil is one of the world's most urban large nations.

What few people including Brazilians realize is that one of the least urbanized part of this huge nation is also a world hot spot of wildlife and traditional cowboy culture, the Pantanal of Brazil.

(solemn music) (cars rumble) - [David] Now in the middle of your home town, the capital of Hermosillo in this roaring traffic, we see the facade of Batuc, how did that happen?

- [Alberto] At the time of the flooding, the state government decided to start the rescue of the facade.

(bright music) (percussion music) - [Announcer] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was also provided by the Guilford Fund.

(choir chants) Copies of this and other episodes of In the Americas with David Yetman are available from the Southwest Center.

To order call 1-800-937-8632.

Please mention the episode number and program title.

Please visit us at intheamericas.com or intheamericas.org.

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