El Camino Real Winds Through State’s Psyche

El Camino Real, the route that connects California’s 21 Spanish missions, runs more than 600 miles from San Diego to Sonoma. Along the way, it passes not only through Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Carmel, but straight through the psyche of modern Californians.

In that latter landscape it is lined with the historical truths and romantic myths that comprise the way California chooses to remember its roots.

Behind Mission San Juan Bautista, partway down a slope that leads to a broad swath of semi-developed land, runs a stretch of stony dirt road about a hundred yards long. It is gated at both ends. Wild blackberry grows rampant on its down-slope side.

The California missions weren’t established in tidy steps northward from the first mission in San Diego. Their founding proceeded in a hopscotch manner, with later missions filling the gaps between earlier ones.

El Camino Real, the Royal or Main Road, probably followed established Indian trails, which, in turn, probably followed the habitual pathways of game the Indians hunted. When the 21 beads of the mission rosary were in place, pedestrians or wagons could travel between any two without having to overnight on the road with costly military escort.

Like almost everything else regarding the missions, El Camino Real has been re-construed over the years to suit contemporary wishes.

Efforts to reestablish it began in 1904, with the founding of the Camino Real Assn. They were immediately caught up, however, in disputes between purists, who wanted the route to be historically accurate, and automobile interests, which saw the tourism potential of a readily drivable route.

The resulting route was a compromise. In 1906, the association began marking it with the first of 459 mission-style bells hung on 11-foot poles. A few of the bells are still to be found on rural segments of the route and close to missions.

The bell route has since given way to U.S. 101, which only approximates El Camino Real.

The original route of the padres now is buried beneath concrete and, in many places, impossible to discern.

The dusty road at Mission San Juan Bautista is the rare exception. It’s a segment of El Camino Real preserved in a state that might have been recognizable to a Franciscan friar of 1797. It’s a California anomaly, a bit of highway more suited to burro than Benz.

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Driving past the piney, two-acre hillock at Washington and Constitution in Fremont at the southeast tip of San Francisco Bay, a motorist would have scant reason to imagine anything particularly meaningful about it. Yet the fenced plot of undeveloped land with the concrete-and-wood sign reading simply “Ohlone” is unique in California history.

It’s the fulfillment, however pitifully circumscribed, of the intention that lay behind the establishment of the California missions.

Spanish colonial policy envisioned that all mission land would revert to the Indians after they had become reliable, Christian citizens of the empire.

This method of colonizing--using religion to hold land--had roots in the Spaniards’ 700-year struggle to oust the Muslim Moors from Spain, but also in the colonizing patterns of ancient Rome. Roman soldiers were encouraged to intermarry with local people and were given land as pensions.

In California, the promise, which was supposed to be realized 10 years after a mission’s founding, never flowered. The California Indians, essentially a Stone Age people, were adjudged too backward for stewardship over the increasingly valuable mission holdings.

To this day, the only mission land that has reverted to unfettered Indian control is the wind-swept hill in Fremont, about a mile from Mission San Jose. The place has been a burial ground for Ohlone--pronounced o-LOW-nay--Indians since time immemorial. In 1911, it became a Catholic cemetery, but racial attitudes being what they were, only Indians were buried there. In 1971, the Catholic Church gave it to the local Ohlone tribe.

“It’s the only Indian land I’m aware of that was returned to the totally autonomous control of Indians after being mission land,” says Andrew Galvan, an archeological consultant whose father, Felipe, is headman of the Ohlone tribe associated with Mission San Jose.

Since 1971, Felipe “Phil” Galvan and his son have buried in the ancient cemetery the remains of more than 3,000 Ohlones found at construction sites and removed from various museums.

The Galvan family has a passionate and contradictory attachment to the mission past. Phil’s great-grandfather Tarino, from whom he inherited his headman status, laid the cornerstone for the mission church started in 1809. Phil himself laid the cornerstone for the present, rebuilt mission church in 1981. Andrew spent seven years as a Franciscan lay brother, and his brother Michael is a Catholic priest. For a quarter-century, Phil Galvan has been custodian and groundskeeper at the motherhouse of the Sisters of the Holy Family in Fremont.

Phil is by nature a mild and jocular man. Yet 20 years ago he was colossally incensed by a magazine article in which a civic matron, who had erected a large wooden cross at the Indian burial ground in 1915, was quoted as saying the gesture repaid any debt owed the Indians.

In his anger, he gassed up the convent’s tractor, pulled down the cross and dragged the Indian cemetery with it. Relaxing barefoot in his house on the convent grounds, Phil recalls the incident with a smile. “It made it real smooth and even too,” he says. “I still have sections of it in my garage.”

Andrew, who recently completed a three-year term as president of the California Mission Studies Assn., embodies the contradictions. He believes that Junipero Serra was a saint, yet bristles at the romantic portrayal of mission Indians “as happy as peasants in an Italian opera.”

Andrew gives lectures on how the mission system of agriculture and cattle-raising destroyed the Indians’ natural hunting and gathering grounds; how the padres sometimes kept Indian children locked up to prevent their parents from leaving; how Spanish soldiers sallied into the Central Valley to capture Indians to replace those who had fled or died of disease at Mission San Jose.

He is equally insistent, however, that it was not the missions that all but destroyed California’s Indians. It’s estimated the mission contacted less than half of the Native Americans living here--some historians estimate only 10%.

The eradication of aboriginal culture was accomplished by the Americans, who brought with them an all-but-official policy of Indian extermination.

To the padres, at least, the Indians were human beings with souls that merited saving.

Phil Galvan mourns a vanished people he remembers, through his half-Ohlone mother and aunts and uncles, as lighthearted and sociable.

“They’d sit us down and try to make us listen so we wouldn’t forget what happened to their people,” Phil says. “They were so sad about the whole thing, and there were so few of them. But what can I do about it now? The point is not to be angry, but to insist it be taught right.”

The purity of blood in members of the Ohlone tribe Phil heads is thinning with each generation. One-fourth is about as high a level of Ohlone ancestry to be found in any individual. Intra-marrying is not a viable way of preserving the blood quantum.

“The problem is, we all tend to be related,” Phil says. “My brother married an Ohlone and we were worried for a time that they might be related. Eventually, there will be nothing. Right now in Fremont there’s only one, two Ohlones”--he points to himself and Andrew--”and all the people sleeping at the cemetery.”

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The 9 a.m. Sunday Mass at the small church of Mission San Rafael, the northernmost mission on San Francisco Bay above Mission Santa Clara and Mission Dolores, is said in neither English nor Spanish. The liturgy is in Vietnamese.

About 40 of the 2,000 families that make up the parish here, with its spacious modern main church, are Vietnamese. The 80 to 90 people who come to the Vietnamese-language Mass fit tidily in the small mission church, a 1949-vintage, best-guess replica of a long disappeared original.

In his homilies, assistant pastor Father Joseph Pham Hung frequently tries to address the principal problem facing many of the Vietnamese families--the emotional gulf between tradition-minded parents and Americanized children.

“The children born here often don’t speak the native language fluently, but the adults don’t speak much English,” says Hung, a short, stocky man of 55. “It’s very hard for the parents to accept a new way of living. They see their children as living too much for individualism. Before, the Vietnamese believed in the extended family. The parents see the children as bad, and the children see the parents as over-controlling. Many come to me in tears.”

The convergence of different cultures--clashing, assimilating, combining in marriage--is an old story in California.

The Spanish colonial way--so different from that of the more insular English--accepted the intermixing of Europeans’ blood with that of native peoples and others.

This Spanish proclivity “was the beginning of the mestizo culture,” says Cal State Northridge history professor Gloria Ricci Lothrop. “Today, go down Broadway in Los Angeles or to the Central Market and you’ll see those wonderful faces that are the result of that policy.”

Archeologist Jack Williams, who is leading the excavation of the old Spanish fort back at Presidio Hill in San Diego, says the policy “made California, from the beginning, a cosmopolitan place.”

Williams says the people who lived at the San Diego presidio included Europeans, Mexicans, Afro-Hispanics, and native Americans, as well as a few Filipinos and Chinese. “Even in the Spanish period,” he says, “California was plugged into the Pacific Rim.”

That first California community may hold lessons for the Vietnamese of San Rafael, as well as all other ethnic groups in the state, Williams says.

“Here was a diverse community that had to work together to survive. The harmony that existed then is not apparent today in our society. One of the major reasons we’re excavating this site is so we can learn how it was that this community came together with all this diversity--different languages, different cultures, different racial backgrounds.”

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At 8:40 on a weekday evening, a little more than two weeks and 600 miles after the sunrise on Presidio Hill in San Diego, the journey culminates with darkness gathering beneath the trees of Sonoma’s central plaza park.

A large tablet laid into the lawn of the reconstructed mission marks “The End of the Mission Trail.” Mission San Francisco de Solana, which was founded in 1823, was the last and most northerly of all the missions established by Spain in the New World over 300 years.

As the light turns purplish, 17-year-old Bridgett Bollin adjusts her Pentax camera atop its tripod to photograph down the mission’s short colonnade.

Bridgett, who is visiting from Washougal, Wash., came to shoot the mission earlier in the day, but was dissatisfied with how it looked through the lens. People kept walking in front of her camera. Daylight on the white mission seemed garish; it seemed to conceal, not reveal, the building’s character.

Much as rigid historical scrutiny of the missions tends to drain the magic from people’s preferred perception of them.

“I like the shadows that are falling on it now,” Bridgett says. “They give you a better sense of how old the place is, and of its cracks and all. It’s just a lot more interesting when there’s not a lot of light.”

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Gene Rapp, a longtime Mass-goer at Mission San Gabriel, and actor Brian Thomas, who watched the wedding of strangers at Carmel, articulate the central point; an Indian baby’s footprint, pressed into an old floor tile at Mission Santa Ines, expresses it even more profoundly:

What ultimately makes the missions evocative, what draws the visitors to the quaint adobe and comfortingly reconstructed spaces, is the thought of the people who inhabited them long ago. Human lives now gone are the source of the missions’ resonance.

This feeling is not unique to the missions. Even an ordinary abandoned house can engender a faint, ineffable something--dismay, pity, reverence--for its vanished residents. But nowhere in California, with its brief recorded history, is the feeling quite so easily invoked or readily connected to larger thoughts as at the missions.

“The history of California is that we went through a lot of transitions in a relative heartbeat,” says Caltech’s William Deverell. “The missions seem haunted because we have an understanding of the wrenching nature of those transitions. They weren’t easy. They were violent. They could be heartbreaking.

“The missions deserve meditation. They echo. I may cast aspersions on how they’ve been restored, but I’m glad they’re around. They’re quiet and sacred, and like all sacred sites, sad. They’re somber and powerful because they’re old in California, where usually what we praise is something new.”

Tuesday: A look at how Native American activism and the multicultural movement have affected how mission-era history is taught in state schools.