Mission San Juan Capistrano is also celebrating its 250th anniversary. It has American subjects

On an overcast weekday morning last month, I visited San Juan Capistrano hoping to see the future of this country in a place happily attached to its past.

The city of about 35,000 people has long considered itself an island of Old California, as boarded-up streets and McMansions mar the once pristine hills. Physically and spiritually, San Juan Capistrano is focused on its mission, one of the 21 founded by the Catholic Church under the Spanish crown in the 18th and 19th centuries, building the scaffolding of modern California.

These southern suburbs are one of the few areas in Orange County in terms of purple that have aligned with President Trump all three times. So I wasn’t surprised that the city looked like a MAGA wonderland as I walked towards the machines.

Drivers pledged their loyalty to Trump with decals and bumper stickers. Banners on the light fixtures announced “250” – the birthday celebrated this year by the mission and the United States. It is a number that the president tried to hijack by tying the love of this country’s history to him.

How the history of Mission San Juan Capistrano is told has long been a reflection of my Orange County, which itself has been an example of America’s worst tendencies: love of avarice, backward conservation and urban sprawl; xenophobia and liberalism; a communal cult of nostalgia for a bucolic age enjoyed only by a few.

I started visiting my local mission when I was in the fourth grade. We learned about the annual return of the swallow, the praise of blooming roses and orange trees and we learned a simple story: Spanish conquistadors and Catholic priests tamed a wild land, and we must follow their example.

We never heard of Europeans bringing diseases that wiped out Native Americans. Or that the Franciscan fathers – members of an order dedicated to lives of poverty and humility – forced nations to give up their food, customs and religion in the name of Christ, rewarding them with serfdom. Even if those swallows don’t come in the numbers they used to because they have fewer places to build their nests.

It reminds me of one of Trump’s most offensive projects: distorting history to celebrate only the winners. Anything tragic that happened to the young was inevitable and necessary. Anything that highlights their neglected stories of struggle and resistance to white supremacy is diversity, equality and the nonsense of inclusion.

He knows what dictators of old have known: The more you control how society remembers the past, the better you can control the present and the future. That’s why Trump casts those of us who want a complete narrative of American history as unpatriotic, even treasonous.

The San Juan Capistrano Mission was empty when I entered with a map and a handheld speaker that played a short, recorded narration. I groaned as strumming Spanish guitars played under a joyful introduction to the “Jewel of the Missions” – a slogan coined decades ago.

Visitors walk among the ruins of the Great Stone Church, destroyed by an earthquake in 1812, at Mission San Juan Capistrano.

(Gary Coronado / For The Times)

I cast my eyes on a memorial board for deceased members of El Viaje de Portolá, a private men’s-only club that runs an annual horseback ride through the back hills of Orange County meant to commemorate the 1769 voyage of Gaspar de Portolá. The Catalan conquistador led the first large-scale European expedition up and down what is now California.

But as I walked the grounds, I realized even more that I was in the new Mission of San Juan Capistrano.

Shows now offer a grittier, more problematic version of what happened there, not the rose-tinted take absorbed by generations of Californians.

There are nods to the environmental destruction wrought by the cattle industry that dominated Southern California in the first half of the 19th century, as well as the Faustian dialogues struck by Native people who converted to Catholicism. The life of the Acjachemen – Native Americans who lived in today’s South OC before the arrival of the Spaniards, and who continue to live in the region – “changed forever” under the gaze of “poor and illiterate” soldiers, the narrator admits.

The statue of St. John of Capistrano, a 15th-century Franciscan priest, is the centerpiece of the Golden Altar in the Serra Chapel at Mission San Juan Capistrano.

(Gary Coronado / For The Times)

A well-lit room dedicated to pre-colonial lifestyles even displays a letter from San Juan Capistrano Mission Executive Director Mechelle Lawrence Adams, acknowledging that “the well-intentioned mission of the missionaries also caused challenges and in some cases, disastrous results.”

The overall effect is not even close to waking up. Another room is dedicated to the founder of the California mission, Father Junípero Serra. Pope Francis canonized him in 2015, despite protests from Native Americans over his treatment of their ancestors.

However, this tour does not exaggerate the sins of the mission during the 250 years, it describes what the supposedly indifferent life was like during its operation before the United States conquered Mexico.

If history can be made at Mission San Juan Capistrano, it can be made anywhere. As we celebrate this country’s 250th anniversary, we need to push to think more honestly about our national journey – not the historical revisionism and triumphalism that Trump wants.

Acknowledging and even criticizing our past mistakes does not diminish one’s love for the United States. Take my family. Five generations of us have lived in Orange County, going back to my maternal grandparents Plácido and José Miranda, who came to Anaheim in 1918 from the copper mines of Arizona to pick and pack oranges and settle in a separate area.

My aunts and uncles remind us of the discrimination they faced when they were growing up in the 1960s, not that we will hate America, but to show how they would not be prevented from creating a paradise for their children, since they are not perfect.

No matter how fake democracy may look right now, you are fighting for a better day.

Almost all of my cousins ​​are still living in OC, buying homes with raw salaries and seeing their children go to colleges we didn’t get a chance to go to because we were depressed for our parents. We took the good and the bad and moved on – unlike some patriots who saw Southern California change and stopped in other parts of the red state.

Meanwhile, Orange County became a minority in 2004. A new generation is fighting Immigrant Development and Conservation, creating a new identity for the OC We are no longer in John Wayne’s Orange County. Hell does not dwell in it mine Orange County now – and that’s a good thing.

Change has not been easy, because it shouldn’t be easy. As a reminder, the Mission San Juan Capistrano tour ends at the ruins of what is now called the Great Stone Church, which was destroyed by an earthquake in 1812 that killed 40 worshipers from Acjachemen.

As I stared at the empty spaces that once housed large wooden statues of saints, I reflected on how fragile our democracy is. We are one disaster away from failure, no matter how strong we think our foundation is. But we should not give up when it starts to crumble. The only way to save our republic is to strengthen our present pillars with the mud of the past.

Maybe that’s not what Serra and his Spanish managers had in mind when they set up the mission system, or what its white saviors had in mind when they started renovating the buildings in the early 20th century. That’s the funny thing about a healthy democracy – you never know when you’re going to get an unexpected lesson, but you sure as hell better be willing to accept it.

One of the pitmasters at Heritage Barbecue loads the sausage smoker.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

As I finished my visit, the strong smell of tallow wafted from the many smokers across the street at Heritage Barbecue. Chef and co-owner Danny Castillo has gained national acclaim for his Texas-style smoked brisket, chicken, sausage and other meats inspired by his team’s ethnicities – white, Mexican, Argentine, Filipino and more.

When Castillo opens Gugu in 2020, skeptics say no one will eat the Mexican-American barbecue in South Orange County. For years, diners kept asking him where it was the original The owner was, something Castillo always takes a little. Now, he is completing a major expansion.

“We took this place apart, and I can say it with pride,” Castillo said. He is of Mexican, white and Native American blood, and his grandfather who was a bracero was the first Mexican to own a home in his area of ​​Westminster. “Look around.”

The Heritage staff hustled inside the kitchen and directed diners to the patio. People of all ages and races were waiting in a line that easily lasted an hour.

“You’re going to get a guy who saved up for three months so he can spend one day with a couple you don’t mean a thing to,” Castillo continued as my brisket taco arrived. “It doesn’t matter – they all have to stand in this line, together. Then they have to eat next to each other on the benches, together.”

I asked Castillo if he had made a trip to the San Juan Capistrano Mission recently. He hadn’t. But every day at Heritage Barbecue, he applies the lessons he’s learned in the past.

“This country is a place where we are forced to come together and do something about it,” concluded Castillo. “We still haven’t found it, but that’s okay – we’ll get there.”