Twilight of the Mission FrontierTwilight of the Mission Frontier examines the long process of mission decline in Sonora, Mexico after the Jesuit expulsion in 1767. By reassessing the mission crisis paradigmwhich speaks of a growing internal crisis leading to the secularization of the missions in the early nineteenth centurynew light is shed on how demographic, cultural, economic, and institutional variables modified life in the Franciscan missions in Sonora. During the late