Renewal Is Mission of His Life

As a young man painstakingly re-creating the mysterious Native American religious art on the walls of California’s oldest remaining mission bethel, Anthony Salas was more concerned with pigment than parables.

What colors should be used for the hand-drawn bells? How high are the painted ocean waves? How much space between the thorns? In search of perfection, the San Juan Capistrano artist and craftsman was consumed with detail.

But more than three decades after he finished the work, all of those Juaneno Indian squiggles and scribblings on the plaster walls of the Serra Chapel at Mission San Juan Capistrano have taken on a deeper meaning.

Now retired, and with eyes much the wiser, Salas is slowly repainting the work of his youth to preserve it for another generation.

“People kept asking me--what does it mean?” said Salas, an easy-going and religious man who is a descendant of Comanche Indians. “And I wondered myself. So I started asking the older folks, and I kept digging. In time, I found answers.”

What Salas was able to re-create more than 30 years ago from old pictures, old memories and preserved segments of drawings and etchings turned out to represent more than simple Indian ornamentation. These designs likely describe part of the local Indian experience after the arrival of the Spanish padres.

The paintings adorning the walls and beams tell the story of an indigenous community that learned to irrigate, cultivate, build, pray and worship in European ways, Salas and mission officials said.

“It’s the story of the Indians that they themselves put on the wall,” Salas said. “It’s an important story.”

It’s all the more important because the Serra Chapel, built in 1776, is the oldest standing structure in California and is the only church where Father Junipero Serra, the famed Spanish missionary, is known to have celebrated Mass and performed the sacraments.

“All of the designs in the Serra Chapel are original, but they’ve been repainted,” said Gerald Miller, Mission San Juan Capistrano administrator.

“They are a testament to the early Juaneno Indians, but also a testament to our cultural history, because so many people had a hand in their preservation.”

The small, unevenly built chapel has been under the flags of four nations. It was privatized and used as a barn at one time and pillaged for its richly colored, hand-made tiles at another. It was left for a period without an adequate roof, its interior exposed to the elements that dissolved many of its artistic features.

Yet, much of the tabernacle remained, including many original pews made of coarse pine and most of the brightly painted ceiling beams of sycamore. Much of the rest was restored, and an antique retablo appears to cast a divine, golden aura to worshipers entering the nave.

In the 1960s, when Salas was an apprentice caretaker at the mission, he looked over the faded designs in the chapel and contemplated their restoration, not dreaming what a big job it would be. The last time they had received any attention was in the 1920s, under Father St. John O’Sullivan, the legendary mission restorer and director.

“Msgr. [Lloyd] Russell said he wanted everything to be the original colors--no changes,” Salas recalled. “It took three years to do it in the 1960s with my two older sons helping me when they weren’t in the mission school.”

Salas went to the mission archives and scavenged for old photographs. He found that most were in black and white, of little use in his search for true colors.

“I had some old postcards, and we would look in corners and shadows and under the pews or in places where water couldn’t get at the painting,” he said. “We even used an old mission letterhead that had the same designs on it.”

Painting each pattern and design over and over across the chapel walls, some of them hundreds of times, Salas found they became engraved in his mind. At a time when even academic experts dismissed the art as insignificant Indian flourishes and designs, Salas and mission elders saw things differently.

“Indians didn’t express themselves in written form; they used designs,” Salas said. “In the 1700s, the Franciscan priests in charge of building the chapel asked the Indians to put in their own language what they felt about the priests coming to their land, what they experienced after the priests came.”

Under the direction of the priests, those thoughts and feelings are memorialized in frescoes on the lower half of the church walls, beginning with a zone of blackness along the red tile floor, signifying that “they were in darkness in terms of their knowledge and belief in God,” Salas said.

Along the top of the artwork is a continuous series of undulating, pointed waves split by a straight line. They show the importance of water, with the line representing a zanja, or channel, the conquest of the river and the use of its water for irrigation.

Interposed are paintings of flowers that represent the acquired knowledge of planting, arches displaying a newfound ability to build and a seed-like form surrounded by thorns marked the “Word of God,”

Of the latter, Salas said, “They understood from the priests that along with ‘the word’ came the crown of thorns.”

Bells in gold and bronze that once rang out several times a day to herald the beginning of worship services, weddings and funerals are among the murals as symbols of new beginnings; but black quarter moons show an understanding that dark days still would occur.

Here and there fluttering through the chapel decorations of the swallows traditionally identified with the mission. While some historians have a negative view of the treatment of local Indians by church officials and priests, Salas said many local residents apparently believe in the symbol of the Franciscan mission that he re-created--two clasped arms, one with dark skin, one light, “to show the priests were brothers with the Indians.”

With help from other volunteers, Salas hopes in the next year to publish a brochure describing the meaning of the painted symbols so that visitors will be able to appreciate these hallowed voices from history, and not desecrate them.

“That’s my next big project.”