For Her, Capistrano History Is Personal

Cha Cha Belardes stands behind the glass at the entrance to the mission at San Juan Capistrano. People hand her money for admission at the threshold of their walk into California history. They take their change and pass her by, often without a word, unaware that they’ve just encountered a slice of that history in the flesh.

“Your map and guide are on Page 2,” says Belardes mechanically as she hands another booklet to a visitor with the phrase she’ll repeat countless times during the day.

Tourists, teachers and school children then file into the sun-drenched courtyard of the old Spanish mission, with its lovely gardens and water fountain. Most don’t bother to look back at the bespectacled lady in leather sandals whose real name is Aurora, which means dawn.

They move on to explore the mission grounds christened by Junipero Serra himself in 1776 on land inhabited by Native Americans thousands of years before Christ was born. Some will stop to admire the ruins of the old stone church, built with stones carried from the rocky shore over hillsides by native men and women.

Perhaps a few visitors will have the history pamphlet sold by Belardes at the entrance. On Page 58, they will learn that the padres secured the services of a master stone mason from Mexico to oversee construction in the 1790s. His name was Isidro Aguilar, from Culiacan in Sonora.

The pamphlet doesn’t tell you that Belardes, 53, is one of his descendants.

“Hi,” she says to the next group at the window. “How many?”

Belardes has been working for the mission for almost 20 years. She does her job with a detached efficiency, pleasant but not smiling much. In the way she addresses customers, she shows an old-fashioned, professional friendliness.

“Yes, ladies?”

“Hi, guys.”

“What, hon?”

Belardes is alert and always moving on the job, but she seems to be going through the motions. She comes alive only when she’s kidding with her comical co-worker, Irma Camarena, who started as a part-timer in high school and just celebrated her 24th anniversary on the mission staff.

“We talk to each other like sisters, and we fight like sisters,” says Camarena, who asks Belardes to cover for her Thursday while she steps out to get her nails done.

Belardes is more serious. Some of the history she carries inside is painful.

She’s married to David Belardes, the besieged leader of a faction of the Juaneno band of Mission Indians. She feels personally betrayed by the split.

About 10 years ago, her husband also led a bitter public fight with mission managers over the way Native American employees and parishioners were being treated. Belardes was briefly fired in 1990, she believes in retaliation for her husband’s protests, a charge the church has always denied. She went to work as a sales clerk for the May Co. department store, but was rehired at the mission after her husband promised to temper his public attacks on the church, the Belardeses say.

Later, a special Indian Mass was held on the mission grounds as a sign of healing. Yet, some wounds are still sore.

Belardes says she’s one of the last two full-time mission employees with Indian blood. The other is Jerry Nieblas, 48, the mission’s purchasing agent. He’s the son of a former mission manager whose forced retirement after 42 years sparked the confrontation with the church a decade ago.

“I guess the mission had to come into the modern world,” says Nieblas during a visit with Belardes on Thursday. “But from being a close parish, we got corporations and CEOs and office staff and different departments. I call it my future-shock years.”

Camarena and Belardes remember simpler times when people felt a part of the mission and locals were allowed in free. No ID needed. Everybody in town knew each other in those days.

Today, the town is booming, the tribe is in disarray and the mission is run like a business.

“Well, it’s gone so commercial,” says Belardes, as she sells another set of tickets. “But that’s a word we don’t use around here.”

“Do you accept AAA [discounts] on these tickets?” asks the man at the window.

“No,” says Belardes.

“How about AARP?”

“No.”

“Traveler’s Advantage?”

Strike three. The visitor pays full price.

Everybody says it must be marvelous to work in such a beautiful environment. But the view of the mission changes from where Belardes and Camarena are standing.

They work all day in a room the size of a large walk-in closet. The sun blazes in the courtyard, but their quarters are oddly dark, lit by a fluorescent fixture. The room has windows on three sides, and Belardes and Camarena must watch in all three directions.

At the entrance, they count the large tour groups to make sure nobody sneaks in without paying. On the side facing the courtyard, they sell booklets, jewelry and souvenirs in the shape of swallows, making sure little rascals don’t shoplift. Behind them at the exit, they take care that kids don’t climb or swing on a large turnstile where they can be freed only by firefighters if they get stuck.

The job appears easy. But it’s not.

The two most frequently asked questions: “Where are the swallows?” and “Where are the bathrooms?”

Only one has an easy, direct response. The other can’t be answered honestly, say the women, without undermining the feathery myth that serves as natural PR for the mission.

Sometimes, it’s best to let the flocks of tourists take pictures of pigeons and sparrows without correcting them.

The public can be occasionally nasty too. A few artists balk at being told where they can set up their easels. Descendants of people buried at the mission cemetery don’t like to leave a deposit for the gate key.

And some folks hate the idea of paying admission, which has jumped from 60 cents to $6 since Camarena started in the mid-1970s.

“They get nasty because they don’t think they should have to pay to get into a Catholic Church,” says Camarena.

“They throw money at us too,” chimes in Belardes.

“And they’ll use some four-letter words. They’re so angry at the church.”

The job has its bright side though.

The women come to recognize thin and balding visitors who pray regularly at the mission’s St. Peregrine shrine for cancer sufferers, and they delight in their recovery. They also recognize the occasional celebrities who pass their post, from Mick Jagger to Richard Nixon.

One visitor Thursday needed special directions.

“I’m here to measure the two bells,” said the workman.

The mission’s two big bells are cracked and need recasting. The town still depends on those bells, explains Nieblas. Unlike the two smaller bells, he says, the large ones usually ring to announce solemn occasions, such as the death of a native or an old-timer.

In March, they rang for Belardes’s mother. Grace Cecilia Sepulveda Paramo, 82, descendant of that original stone mason, was buried at the mission’s hilltop cemetery.

At work, Belardes keeps a newspaper clipping of her mother pictured with the first graduating class of the Mission School, which Belardes also attended before going on to Mater Dei in Santa Ana.

During her break, Belardes took me nearby to the Blas Aguilar Adobe, where her grandmother was born. Belardes and her husband fought City Hall to save the old structure, occupied by her forefather, the town’s last mayor under Mexican rule. Instead of being razed for a hotel, it’s been restored and serves as a museum.

Belardes stands at the adobe’s doorway, just inside its massive walls, two feet thick. From the cool interior, she looks out on a parking lot and a new downtown development.

“Now that my mother’s gone,” she says, “I want to fight even more.”

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com