Researching Mission San José's Cemetery: An Intern at San Antonio Missions

A current and two former Latino Heritage Internship Program interns at San Antonio Missions: Chantelle Ruidant-Hansen, Tanya Helbig and Cristóbal López. Credit: National Park Service.

Cristóbal López spent a summer as the Cultural Resource Management Intern at San Antonio Missions National Historical Park in Texas, through the National Park Service's Latino Heritage Internship Program.

The project: a mission cemetery

The goal of the internship was to research the origins of the cemetery in front of the church at Mission San José, one of the park's four missions.

• Archives. López worked through repositories in San Antonio — the Texas A&M–San Antonio Archives, the San Antonio Conservation Society Library, the Bexar County Spanish Archives and the park's own library, where the internship office was.
• Online records. Bexar County public records and FamilySearch.com, a genealogy site López found especially useful.
• The result. A forty-page report, "Historical Overview of the Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo Cemetery," kept at the park's library.

Mission San José and its cemetery. Credit: National Park Service.

How the internship came about

López, a master's student in history at the University of Texas at San Antonio, heard about the position through an email from the program administrator in January, and applied because it matched the kind of research López enjoys. López studies the Spanish Borderlands, which the Spanish missions did much to define, and cares about public and local history — the internship meant learning the Mission San José community's history and hearing mission descendants' stories.

What makes the park special

• In 2015 UNESCO designated San Antonio Missions National Historical Park a World Heritage Site — one of twenty-four in the United States and the only one in Texas.
• With Mission San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo), the park makes up the largest collection of Spanish colonial resources in the United States.
• López also credits the park's rangers, for their help and welcome to every visitor.

Why heritage matters to López

For López, conservation means preserving history, heritage and culture. The child of two Mexican immigrants who came to the United States young, leaving family, friends and heritage behind, López has devoted an academic and professional career to preserving the history of people like them, whose stories are often lost or left out.

López's advice to young people drawn to conservation: find a path that suits your skills and passions, and enjoy it; ask questions of professors, supervisors, family and friends; and when plans go wrong, keep looking forward.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Q&A With Cultural Resource Management Intern Cristóbal López." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/cristobal-lopez-lhip.htm
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.