Angelus News | August 2-9, 2019 | Vol. 4 No. 27
A nationwide trend pushing to remove tributes to certain historical figures of U.S. history has seized on a new, unlikely target: the bells lining California’s iconic El Camino Real. The reason? The belief that Spanish missionaries — among them St. Junípero Serra — were oppressors, captors, and even murderers of California’s first peoples. On Page 10, renowned historian Gregory Orfalea examines the most common critiques of the Spanish evangelization of California and makes the case for why the bells represent a legacy of love, not oppression.
A nationwide trend pushing to remove tributes to certain historical figures of U.S. history has seized on a new, unlikely target: the bells lining California’s iconic El Camino Real. The reason? The belief that Spanish missionaries — among them St. Junípero Serra — were oppressors, captors, and even murderers of California’s first peoples. On Page 10, renowned historian Gregory Orfalea examines the most common critiques of the Spanish evangelization of California and makes the case for why the bells represent a legacy of love, not oppression.
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Statues of Confederate generals<br />
brought down or repositioned.<br />
McSherry Hall at Georgetown<br />
University renamed because Father<br />
William McSherry sold slaves.<br />
What’s in a name? What’s in a statue?<br />
Are California’s 585 mission bells along<br />
the road next in this flurry of reassessment<br />
of representational history that<br />
includes aggrieved people, questions<br />
about the nature of art, and a selective<br />
rendering of what took place long ago?<br />
What, exactly, is a symbol and what<br />
force — moral, spiritual, or otherwise<br />
— does it have?<br />
Californians take pride in the weathered<br />
old bells on their staffs spaced<br />
along U.S. Route 101 and offshoot<br />
roads taken by original padres. When<br />
I was a child, my heart quickened at<br />
their sight, for it meant my parents and<br />
us kids were on the road and would<br />
soon be taking in a mission or two on<br />
our way to the mountains, the beach,<br />
the desert, or Lake Tahoe.<br />
Spotting the road bells meant inner<br />
joy, as it did later for my wife and our<br />
kids. Even as we age, I hear those bells<br />
inside when I pass and my heart is<br />
glad.<br />
But for some, that bell on the road is<br />
an insult, and echoes with something<br />
akin to Julius Caesar’s infamous summary<br />
of laying waste to Gaul: “I came.<br />
I saw. I conquered.”<br />
To Valentin Lopez, chairman of<br />
the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band near<br />
Gilroy, those bells mean, as he put it,<br />
“We conquered you, we controlled<br />
you, we destroyed you.” And since the<br />
missions and their bells were erected<br />
by the Spanish Franciscans, there’s no<br />
mistaking who Lopez accuses: the followers<br />
of St. Francis of Assisi. So much<br />
for talking to animals, right?<br />
After many years of trying, in June<br />
of this year Lopez was able to get one<br />
bell removed from the University of<br />
California Santa Cruz campus.<br />
But what of Mission San Luis Rey,<br />
where several hundred Luiseno Indians<br />
ran into the water off Oceanside<br />
to beg Father Antonio Peyri not to go<br />
back to Spain as he boarded a ship, but<br />
to stay with them where he had served<br />
them for three prosperous and peaceful<br />
decades?<br />
What of St. Junípero Serra’s death at<br />
Mission San Carlos Borromeo in Carmel,<br />
where 600 Esselen and Rumsen<br />
Costanoan Indians fell weeping, many<br />
cutting off talismans from his robe and<br />
even his hair?<br />
What of that all-Indian orchestra<br />
at Mission San Antonio that played<br />
original works? Were those performed<br />
without pride or joy? Were the Indian<br />
singers at Carmel whom the celebrated<br />
author Robert Louis Stevenson said<br />
sang in 1879 with such profundity<br />
merely faking it? Was there no music<br />
in those bells?<br />
In a June ceremony, California Gov.<br />
Gavin <strong>News</strong>om apologized to the<br />
state’s 600,000 Native Americans at a<br />
June ceremony, calling what happened<br />
to their ancestors in the takeover by<br />
Europeans “genocide.” Undoubtedly<br />
it was. And shameful. But who was<br />
responsible for it — the Spaniards or<br />
the Americans?<br />
To understand the legacy of the bells,<br />
that and other questions need to be<br />
answered. The role that microbes of<br />
infection played in this tragedy, for<br />
example, must be understood.<br />
The treatment of Indians by the<br />
Franciscans, a source of many accusations<br />
against the Spaniards, must be<br />
examined with context and a careful<br />
attention to statistics. And the good<br />
works, especially those of radical mercy,<br />
of Serra and the Franciscans cannot<br />
be ignored.<br />
Who committed genocide?<br />
On the question of genocide there is<br />
no less an authority than James Sandos,<br />
Ph.D., Farquhar Professor of the<br />
American Southwest at the University<br />
of Redlands. In 2010, he told a large<br />
gathering of mostly Native Americans<br />
at the California Indian Conference in<br />
Irvine that the “comparison [of Franciscan<br />
acts] to genocide is totally false.”<br />
The true culprit? “The U.S. government<br />
paying people to slaughter others,<br />
that’s genocide,” Sandos said at the<br />
event. On the same panel with Sandos<br />
was reputable mission-era historian<br />
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS<br />
One of California’s many historic El Camino Real bells.<br />
<strong>August</strong> 2-9, <strong>2019</strong> • ANGELUS • 11