St. Augustine

For our first stop in St. Augustine, we went to the first Spanish fort in America. Being at that place and knowing that this was where the settlement of our country began (settlement, not discovery of our country- we seem to forget that minor detail that there were plenty of people inhabiting this land who definitely already knew "America" was here), was really interesting. It looked and felt ancient and filled with history, and yet at the same time, I couldn’t help remembering that even as old as that feels, our country is so much newer than most other nations, that we are still such a young country, and wonder how that affects our identity and telling of history.

We then went to the site of the first Spanish mission in America, Mission Nombre de Dios. Here we saw two interesting examples of one of the national debates of “Who is a Person” as outlined in Howard Fineman’s book “The Thirteen American Arguments.” In this chapter of his book, Fineman points to the debate over abortion as one of the key issues in examining who is considered a person. In the church graveyard of this Mission, there is a gravestone decorated with pacifiers for all of the babies that have been aborted since Roe v. Wade. Not that the Catholic church has ever been ambiguous about its stance on abortion, but I was still shocked to see this- they are so sure of the personhood of fetuses, they have actually erected a symbolic grave as if there would actually be something buried there.

The other, more disturbing example of the debate over who is a person is more subtly demonstrated in the representation of history of the relationship between the Native Americans who lived in Florida at the time of the Spanish arrival and the priests who evangelized to them. We saw in the display case in the gift shop a model of the Spanish arriving and dedicating the land to God. A small figure of a soldier is holding up a cross that is surrounded by rays of light. A couple of other soldiers stand around, in awe of the cross. Then there are multiple figures of Native American men dressed in loincloths, bowing down to the cross. Also in this gift shop is a charming little children’s story (note sarcasm) about the one Native American saint, who is a little girl who abandoned her family to go live with and work for the nearby Catholic community, after her mother dies suddenly from this strange disease called smallpox- wonder how that happened?? The book vilifies her other relatives for not wanting to allow her to go serve these Catholic priests and ends with praising this young girl, who died of an unnamed illness at age 20, for being brave enough to defy her people and leave to faithfully serve God’s servants. (Another highlight of this story is the description of this little girl’s appearance as her having, no joke, “dull red skin.”) So what does this communicate? That even in today’s children’s stories being provided in this tourist spot, we are saying these Native Americans are only worth anything, only considered people worthy of rights and dignity, when they bend to the Spanish Catholic culture and faith. What is told at this mission is a pretty little tale of conversion- missing from the story is the cost of this process.

We went to lunch at a hip little vegetarian place and then spent a pleasant afternoon on the beach, where the group all hung out for quite awhile, as it began to sink in that we didn’t have much time left to spend together. We showered at beautiful Flagler University and then enjoyed dinner in Old St. Augustine, a part of town that is full of restaurants and gift shops but still looks very Spanish, old and quaint. St. Augustine was another city that I had no idea what to expect from, but I feel like it would be worth a trip back to see beyond just the beach and the historic sites we saw to see what the city itself is really like.