Sécularisation de 1833

The Mexican Secularization Act of 1833, officially called the Decree for the Secularization of the Missions of California, was an act passed by the Congress of the Union of the First Mexican Republic which secularized the Californian missions. The act nationalized the missions, transferring their ownership from the Franciscan Order of the Catholic Church to the Mexican authorities. The act was passed twelve years after Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821. Mexico feared Spain would continue to have influence and power in California because most of the Spanish missions in California remained loyal to the Roman Catholic Church in Spain. As the new Mexican republic matured, calls for the secularization ("disestablishment") of the missions increased. Once fully implemented, the secularization act took away much of the California Mission land and sold it or gave it away in large grants called ranchos. Secularization also emancipated Indigenous peoples of California from the missions and closed the monjeríos, although only a minority of Indigenous peoples were distributed land grants, which left many of them landless to work the ranchos. The Spanish missions in Alta California were a series of 21 religious and military outposts; established by Catholic priests of the Franciscan order between 1769 and 1823 for the purpose of spreading Christianity among the local Native Americans. The missions were part of the first major effort by Europeans to colonize the Pacific Coast region, the most northern and western parts of Spain's North American land claims. The settlers introduced European fruits, vegetables, cattle, horses, ranching and technology into the Alta California region and to the Mission Indians. The El Camino Real road connected the missions from San Diego to Mission San Francisco Solano, in Sonoma, a length of . Between 1683 and 1834, Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries established a series of religious outposts from today's Baja California and Baja California Sur into present-day California.