Mission Espada

I and a couple of classmates from my humanities class at Palo Alto College visited one of the missions here in San Antonio. Mission San Francisco de la Espada, also known as Mission Espada, is full of history it goes as far back as the 1600’s. The people of the missions were a diverse group of people made up mostly of Indians from all over the country, and were run by the Spaniards. The missions were here for many reasons the main one was to bring all the Indians from New Spain into Catholicism. Another reason for the missions was to make New Spain bigger and better than any other nation by bringing the Indians into the missions. They wanted to make the Indians civilized in their eyes and some Indians were forced to do so. The Indians were taken away from their former ways of living and thrown into a completely new way of life. The hardest part for the Indians to overcome was the concept of time, eating, worshiping in the parish, work, and even free time all had a certain part of the day that they needed to be done. Also the Indians were in a way forced to learn a new language because the priests and the soldiers were not going to learn their way of communication. Despite all that the people of the mission had to endure they still live on today although they may not live in the missions their culture is still apart of our world today.