The following study is a post-colonial rhetorical analysis of selected texts from and about mission-era California, with particular emphasis on the role of mythological and ideological tropes in the inter-cultural construction of identity and public memory. Combining insights and methodologies from the fields of literature, history, rhetoric, and cultural studies, I examine both Franciscan and indigenous texts from the mission period, as well as select contemporary sources. Ultimately, I seek to explore what California’s earliest texts, and the enduring legacy that they helped to establish, can teach us about the region’s present-day cultural paradigm.
