The Mission Sensorium: Church Bells, Spanish Colonization, and California Indians, 1769–Present

This talk examines sound in the Spanish Franciscan missions of California. The cast, suspended metal bell, or church bell, was a crucial tool of the mission system in Alta California (1769–1846). Adapted from the Western European tradition, church bells with “sound and voice” generated the soundmark of the mission sensorium—shaping time, space, and discipline—in which concentrated Native peoples negotiated missionization. Beginning in the 1880s, the mission bell came to represent “fantasy heritage” aesthetics of belonging and nostalgia for Anglo Californians. Yet, more recently, California Indian truth-telling has sought to reckon with the legacies of the mission bell as a symbol of the consequences of colonization for their ancestors.

Bernard Gordillo Brockmann, a native of Nicaragua, is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History, Department of Musicology, and the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA. He is a historian of music and sound in Latin America, studying the early modern period and the twentieth century. His book project, Canto de Marte: Music, Popular Culture, and U.S. Intervention in Nicaragua, 1909–1933 (under contract with Oxford University Press), is a social and cultural history of Nicaragua examined through the art and popular music, writings, and social networks of Nicaraguan composer Luis Abraham Delgadillo. He serves as Central America area editor on the Grove Dictionary of Latin American and Iberian Music, and associate editor of Diagonal: An Ibero-American Music Review. He holds a Ph.D. in historical musicology from the University of California, Riverside, and graduate degrees in performance from Indiana University in Bloomington and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.

Sponsor(s): Musicology, The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music