FRAY MARIANO PAYERAS AND CALIFORNIA’S FRANCISCAN MISSIONS

One of the first clerics to sound the alarm of a looming demographic cataclysm was the fifth mission president, Fray Mariano Payeras. In his reports to the head of the Apostolic College of San Fernando in Mexico City, he advocated for increased evangelization in the San Joaquin Valley. Fray Mariano Payeras’s letters in this biographical study of the native California resistance leader Pacomio Poqui, who had been a tutee of the friar (Bartelt 2026). Not as well-known as the friars Junípero Serra or Fermín de Lasuén, Mariano Payeras nonetheless as a protagonist who might shed further light on the mission period.