Discusses Mission San Miguel Arcâangel from its founding in 1797 to the present day, including the reasons for Spanish colonization in California and the effects of colonization on the California Indians.

A twenty-four page booklet of the history of San Miguel de Allende from the settlement through the War for Independence with historic pictures.

Learn about the rich history of Mission San Miguel Arcángel: how it started, the people who ran it, the indigenous population, and its legacy today.

A Short History of San Miguel Mission, by Ryan Thornton, OFM Murals, madness, and murder. This is the history of Mission San Miguel Arcángel, rich with tales of poisoned padres and murderous desperados. In a new book, a Franciscan friar who lived, worked, and studied at Mission San Miguel offers an insider's take on the history of the place. Combining the art of story-telling with well-researched facts, this book is the perfect introduction to Mission San Miguel, no matter what age.

Struggling to free itself from a century of economic decline and stagnation, the town of San Miguel de Allende, nestled in the hills of central Mexico, discovered that its "timeless" quality could provide a way forward. While other Mexican towns pursued policies of industrialization, San Miguel--on the economic, political, and cultural margins of revolutionary Mexico--worked to demonstrate that it preserved an authentic quality, earning designation as a "typical Mexican town" by the Guanajuato state legislature in 1939. With the town's historic status guaranteed, a coalition of local elites and transnational figures turned to an international solution--tourism--to revive San Miguel's economy and to reinforce its Mexican identity. Lisa Pinley Covert examines how this once small, quiet town became a UNESCO World Heritage Site and home to one of Mexico's largest foreign-born populations. By exploring the intersections of economic development and national identity formation in San Miguel, she reveals how towns and cities in Mexico grappled with change over the course of the twentieth century. Covert similarly identifies the historical context shaping the promise and perils of a shift from an agricultural to a service-based economy. In the process, she demonstrates how San Miguel could be both typically Mexican and palpably foreign and how the histories behind each process were inextricably intertwined.

In a landmark study of history, power, and identity in the Caribbean, Pedro L. San Miguel examines the historiography of Hispaniola, the West Indian island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He argues that the national identities of (and often the tense relations between) citizens of these two nations are the result of imaginary contrasts between the two nations drawn by historians, intellectuals, and writers. Covering five centuries and key intellectual figures from each country, San Miguel bridges literature, history, and ethnography to locate the origins of racial, ethnic, and national identity on the island. He finds that Haiti was often portrayed by Dominicans as "the other--first as a utopian slave society, then as a barbaric state and enemy to the Dominican Republic. Although most of the Dominican population is mulatto and black, Dominican citizens tended to emphasize their Spanish (white) roots, essentially silencing the political voice of the Dominican majority, San Miguel argues. This pioneering work in Caribbean and Latin American historiography, originally published in Puerto Rico in 1997, is now available in English for the first time.

Discusses the history of bilingual education policies in the United States.

The schooner from Santa Barbara arrives at the tiny, desolate island on New Year's Day, 1888. As the trunks are unloaded onto the wet sand, thirty-eight-year-old Marantha Waters looks at the cliffs falling away into the churning sea. This is the first day of her new life on San Miguel.Joined by her husband, a fiercely possessive Civil War veteran who will take over the operation of the sheep ranch on the island, Marantha strives to persevere in the face of brutal isolation. But the constant wind and sheep-ravaged wasteland shatter her illusions; her husband promised paradise. As he obsessively resolves to stay - and becomes increasingly distant from her and their adopted daughter Edith - Marantha's blighted lungs grow weaker in the dampness. Two years later, Edith, now a spirited teenager and an aspiring actress, will exploit every opportunity to escape the captivity her father has imposed on her.March, 1930. Another family - and another bride - arrives on San Miguel. Elise Lester, a librarian from New York City, and her husband Herbie, a World War I veteran full of manic energy, achieve a celebrity of sorts as the news cameras take an interest in these wayward people living in the wild. But the unyielding island is haunted by its history. Will the family be able to cling together as the war threatens to pull everything apart?San Miguel is a vivid and gripping story of hard lives pitched against the elements, the desires of stubborn men and the unbearable burden of love, from master American storyteller T. C. Boyle.