The Penance of Magdalena and Other Tales of the California Missions

In the sun-baked valleys of early California, where stone mission walls rise from the chaparral, a young indigenous artist named Te-filo dares to dream beyond his station. At the Mission of San Juan Capistrano, he paints sacred images for the priests, but it is Magdalena, daughter of the Spanish foreman, who becomes the true obsession of his heart. Their love unfolds in secret, across a divide of race and caste that the mission's own hierarchy enforces. When Te-filo petitions Father José for permission to marry, he encounters not salvation but the cold machinery of colonial prejudice. The other tales in this collection extend this meditation on love and cultural collision across the chain of Franciscan missions, each story a small tragedy of the spirit played out beneath the cruz and the bell tower. Chase writes with an artist's eye for the California landscape and a novelist's feel for the human heart's capacity for both transcendence and self-destruction. This is a book about what happens when sacred spaces become prisons of the spirit, and what love costs when measured against the weight of centuries.