15A. CARRILLO, Carlos Antonio. Exposition Addressed to the Chamber of Deputies of the Congress of the Union...Concerning the Regulation and Administration of the Pious Fund. Translated and Edited by Herbert Ingram Priestley.... San Francisco: John Henry Nash, 1938. xx, 15 [1] pp., ornamental chapter headings. 4to, original half green cloth over green boards, printed paper spine label. Exceptionally fine in very fine d.j. Signed by fine printer John Henry Nash on pastedown.          ($50-100)

As a result of the high costs of halting the Pueblo Revolt of New Mexico, the crown was unable to finance further growth of Jesuit missions in northwestern New Spain during the final decade of the seventeenth century. Although Eusebio Francisco Kino, S.J., had failed to achieve permanency at San Bruno on the California peninsula in 1683-1685, his labors inspired fellow Jesuits Juan María de Salvatierra, Francisco María Piccolo, and Juan de Ugarte to continue the efforts to evangelize the Californias. To finance this enterprise, Salvatierra and Ugarte began the collection of alms from benefactors of the Society of Jesus in Mexico City in 1692, and having raised sufficient funds by 1697, Salvatierra and Piccolo succeeded in founding Mission Nuestra Señora de Loreto on the peninsula. Ugarte, remaining in Mexico City, continued to raise funds to assure not only the permanency of Loreto but also the expansion of the mission field, and thus established what became known as the Pious Fund of the Californias. During the seventy-five years of Jesuit presence on the peninsula, the fund received not only generous monetary donations from such noted benefactors as Presbyter Juan Caballero y Ocio and the Marqués de Villapuente, but also gifts of land that provided sources of income from usufruct in perpetuity.
          Following the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, the income from the Pious Fund was transferred to the Franciscan missionaries from the Colegio de San Fernando for the development of California missions, and in 1773 a percentage of the fund was granted to the Dominican missionaries to continue the peninsular missions. Upon the consummation of Mexican independence in 1821, the fund continued as before; however, with the establishment of a liberal Mexican Republic in 1824, questions were raised as to both the continued presence of Spaniards in national territory as well as the role of the Church in politics and the economy, and in 1825 the Junta de Fomento de Californias proposed government administration of mission temporalities (farming and grazing lands). The following year, Governor José de Echeandía decreed the emancipation of those neophytes who wished to leave the missions. In 1828, Spaniards were expelled from the Mexican Republic, and in Alta California the Spanish Fernandino Franciscans were replaced by Mexican friars from the Colegio de Guadalupe in Zacatecas. By 1830, many Mexican liberals increasingly considered the confiscation of Church property as a means of resolving the rising national debt, and included within this property was the Pious Fund of the Californias and the temporalities of the California missions. Secularization, the conversion of missions into parish churches under a vicar general or bishop, and the distribution by grant or by sale of their temporalities was highly favored by Mexican liberals. Locally, in 1831 the provincial deputies approved a decree for the secularization of the missions, promulgated by Echeandía, but the matter was still under debate nationally.
          Carlos Antonio Carrillo, deputy for Alta California in the national chamber of deputies, opposed secularization and government seizure of the Pious Fund, and argued that the province was insufficiently defended, subject to constant encroachments by British and U.S. nationals, and that the Indian population was unprepared to form a part of the Mexican population. Carrillo further proposed the establishment of new presidios and missions to the north of San Francisco Solano de Sonoma and to the interior of the Coast Range. His arguments were printed on September 15 as a pamphlet, the first publication by a native Alta Californian relative to his homeland. In the same year, he published his arguments for the establishment of local courts under republican legal philosophy in Exposición que el diputado de la Alta California, ciudadano Carlos Antonio Carrillo hace a la Cámara de Diputados, pidiendo se establezcan en aquel territorio los tribunales competentes para su administración de justicia (México: Imprenta de Galván a cargo de Mariano Arévalo, 1831). Although Carrillo was able to achieve a brief respite for the Pious Fund, on August 17, 1833, President Valentín Gómez Farías decreed the national secularization of missions (Baja California was excepted a year later) and the employment of the fund for the promotion of colonization, executed in Alta California by the new governor, José Figueroa.
          The exceedingly rare pamphlet, probably printed in a very limited run as was the custom, was translated and edited by the eminent historian Herbert Ingram Priestley as Exposition Addressed to the Chamber of Deputies of the Congress of the Union by Señor Don Carlos Antonio Carrillo, Deputy for Alta California, Concerning the Regulation and Administration of the Pious Fund, and finely printed in San Francisco by the famed John Henry Nash in an edition limited to 650 copies on Van Gelder handmade paper in February 1938.

——W. Michael Mathes