Junipero Serra: California's Founding Father

Steven Hackel's Junipero Serra: California's Founding Father is a scholarly biography, published by Hill and Wang, of the Franciscan friar who founded the California mission system, written by a historian who also served as the lead scholar on the Vatican's own investigation supporting Serra's later canonization. Its authority rests on that unusually deep archival access and on Hackel's standing as a specialist historian of colonial California and Native American history specifically. Its particular strength is treating both Serra's own missionary intent and the documented severe harm the mission system caused California's Indigenous population with equal seriousness, rather than only celebrating or only condemning its subject. Its limit is the ordinary one for a single biography, focused on Serra himself, so a broader claim about the mission system's total impact across California needs a wider Indigenous history source alongside it.