Ask a Californian columnist Gustavo Arellano pronounced Father Junípero Serra the state’s most overhyped resident. This Santa Cruz resident thinks the real answer is much more complicated. Got something to say? We’d love to hear from you. Email letters@altaonline.com. Please include your name, city, state, and phone number so we can contact you. Letters may be edited for brevity and clarity.
DON’T LOSE THE NUANCE
I am continually annoyed with your Ask a Californian column. In this version, we are supposed to think it made no difference to have Franciscans as the spiritual guides to the conquest of California by the Spanish Empire? As opposed to what? Dominicans (of Inquisition fame) or Jesuits (the militants of the Reformation)? Basically, your commentator just shows profound ignorance about the many ways history could work out, not to mention the history of the Catholic church and the Californias.
Yes, Serra supported beating acolytes. He beat himself. It is complicated. Yes, the missions exploited Native Californians. But the ranchos were worse! And it was the ’49ers, the Anglos, who pursued genocide, not the Spanish (or later Mexican) rulers.
For Indigenous people, the difference between Catholic colonizers, who at least believed the former had souls, and Protestant colonizers, who usually did not, was profound. Genocide is so much easier if your victims are judged soulless.
I did like the comment that being a Californian is not about being born here. In the past 50 years, California culture has emerged as a bright and hopeful thing, with its contradictions (f___ing tech lords) but also more and more about inclusion, harmony with nature, etc.
But what your California voices totally miss is that this is the Far West. There are Western values that we find echoed in Joan Didion, for example, of self-reliance and an appreciation of the human in the rest of nature. It helps to have grown up here, in the whole state as it were, not just San Francisco or Los Angeles.
It is complicated, and your Ask feature, as an insight into the emerging California identity, is lacking.
Chris Hables Gray
Santa Cruz, California•
