Pearls as Resources, Pleasure, and Fruit in the Early Californias

This contribution will provide a discussion of the language, economic and labor relations, and religious symbolism that coalesced in early California pearls. I will analyze pearls within the continuum of colonial and religious imaginaries and practices. These luminescent and polyvalent natural objects embodied colonial tensions and environmental interactions. They attracted slavers, colonizers, missionaries, administrators, and soldiers from around the globe to the coasts of the Sea of Cortes and to the northwestern margins of New Spain on the Pacific shores. From the first decades of the sixteenth century, travel reports, missionary chronicles, cosmographic descriptions, petitions, and royal proclamations relating to those largely uncharted territories promoted the extraction and commodification of these small, nacreous bodies for imperial, confessional and private profit. In the language of those accounts, pearls were defined as “resources”, “fruits” and “pleasures”. As “resources”, they were extractable natural commodities, akin to the modern sense of the word, as well as religious expedients integrated into apostolic imagery and practices. As “pleasures” and “fruits”, they were luxury goods for global trade, which simultaneously represented missionary ideals of the bounties of spiritual conversion. Though the words “resource”, “pleasures”, and “fruit” were formal legal and bureaucratic signifiers, they were not strictly defined as distinct categories. Instead, they worked as porous, flexible, extensive, and mutually supporting performative metaphors that could be adapted to different aspects of the colonization enterprise.