History teachers at all levels encounter these preconceptions when the subject of Spain in America arises. American students, even those of Hispanic descent, know about Spaniards' extraordinary cruelty toward Indians. Our students also imagine the Spanish Borderlands as a place where Spanish men came to find gold and silver and to live without work by exploiting Indian labor. Spanish men, according to the conventional wisdom, arrived without women but soon married or cohabited with Indian women. This image contrasts sharply with our students' image of the English-American past, in which Englishmen in search of religious freedom fled to America with their families and took up farming with their own hands rather than exploiting the natives.
Missions also come readily to mind for our students.
In southwestern America they constitute one of the most enduring landmarks from the Spanish era, and their style has permeated the architecture of the region and even the nation. In particular, California's twenty-one missions inspired the Mission Revival Style that spread across the nation in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Across the Southwest today, visitors stream through neatly restored or reconstructed missions, which represent themselves as islands of tranquility and civility. As a result, visitors usually suppose that kindly priests once ministered to grateful Indians in such bucolic places. On the other hand, American Indian students and students sympathetic to American Indians see historic missions as sites of enforced acculturation at best, or as concentration camps at worst.