Good morning, and welcome to the
Essential California newsletter. It’s
Friday, June 21, and I’m writing from Los Angeles.
The dangling silhouette of
the mission bell has become a defining element of California iconography.
You’ve seen them in history books, countless souvenirs and on highway markers commemorating the
“Historic El Camino Real” across the state.
To some, those mission bells conjure the romance of California’s Spanish past — a paternal Mission pastoral punctuated by elegant archways, vine-covered ruins and ornate pageantry.
To others, like tribal leader Valentin Lopez, those bells represent unimaginable suffering and destruction.
“‘We conquered you, we controlled you, we destroyed you’ — that’s what those symbols mean to us,” Lopez, who serves as chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, explained. The Amah Mutsun are descendants of the indigenous people who were taken to Missions San Juan Bautista and Santa Cruz near California’s Central Coast.
On Friday morning, a mission bell that has long hung near the Hahn Student Services Building at UC Santa Cruz
will be removed. By the time you’re reading this, it might have already happened. But the process was by no means simple or quick.
Lopez has been campaigning for the removal of mission bells for years, and spent the past year in discussion with campus leaders over the removal of this particular bell.
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