Elias Castillo is a three-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and has earned 13 journalism awards in a career that included reporting for the Associated Press and the San Jose Mercury News. Under a grant from National Geographic magazine, he led the first scientific exploration of Mexico’s vast Copper Canyon, a chasm that rivals the Grand Canyon in length and depth and is located in one of the most isolated areas of North America.

In writing A Cross of Thorns, Castillo spent seven years meticulously researching historic documents including diaries and letters written by Saint Junipero Serra and padres Fermín Francisco de Lasuén, Francisco Palou and Mariano Payeras. His book includes the descriptions of explorers of the mission period who were shocked by the Franciscans’ brutal treatment of California’s Indians. Castillo’s goal was to write a book that would enable readers to understand the forces that ultimately destroyed the native communities and cultures that had existed for thousands of years and that led to the deaths of more than 60,000 Indians held captive within the California missions.

Within the year after its release in February 2015, Castillo’s book A Cross of Thorns and its irrefutable truths prompted major universities to begin launching new classes to teach students its contents that shatter the popular image of the Franciscan missions, directed by Serra, as sites where the padres loved the Indians and the Indians loved the Franciscans. In reality, the missions were death camps. The Indians were forcibly rounded up from their tribes and enslaved, facing daily beatings. Under Serra’s policies they would remain in those compounds until they died.

A Cross of Thorns has been taught at the University of California at Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, Monterey State University, Sonoma State University and Oklahoma State University and community colleges in California. It is the first book to specifically focus on the horrors of mission life under Serra’s policies and has been acclaimed by critics and California’s Indians.

Castillo was born in Mexicali, Mexico, where his step-grandfather, Jose Severo Castillo, a renowned newspaper publisher, focused on exposing corruption in Baja California. As a journalist, Elias Castillo reported frequently on criminal organizations, politics and immigration issues in Mexico and was invited to speak at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club, the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement and co-authored a chapter in the book Organized Crime & Democratic Governability: Mexico and the U.S.- Mexican Borderlands (University of Pittsburgh Press). He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from San Jose State University.