"At the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, California’s commission created a lavish representation to ‘attract capital and the best class of settlers.’ The main building, a replica of Mission Santa Barbara and its famed garden, marketed the state as a semi-tropical arcadia from the days of Spanish colonization. The implications of this display justified American imperialism by relegating Spain’s global empire to the past, erasing the influence of Indigenous and immigrant Californians, and encouraging gardening as a means for white women to civilize the landscape. This use of the space echoed the garden’s origins, as a Franciscan friar had designed it in 1872-1873 in an attempt to increase the enrollment of white youth at the mission’s private school. These events show that the California mission aesthetic was both imported to the state and exported to the rest of the country as a cultural and economic commodity to attract white Americans."