Last month, on a cloudy weekday morning, I visited San Juan Capistrano hoping to see the future of this country in a place happily trapped in its past.
The city of about 35,000 people has always considered itself an island of old California, even as clogged roads and McMansions stained the once-pristine hills. Physically and spiritually, San Juan Capistrano is focused on its mission, one of 21 established by the Catholic Church under the Spanish crown in the 18th and 19th centuries, forming the scaffolding of today's California.
These southern stretches are one of the few areas of an increasingly purple Orange County that supported President Trump all three times. So I wasn't surprised that downtown looked like a MAGA wonderland as I walked toward the mission.
Drivers pledged their allegiance to Trump with stickers and bumper stickers. Banners on light poles proclaimed “250,” the birthday celebrated this year by both the mission and the United States. It is a figure that the president has tried to hijack by linking love of this country's history to loyalty to it.
The way the story of Mission San Juan Capistrano is told has long been a reflection of my native Orange County, which in turn has exemplified some of America's worst tendencies: greed, backward conservatism, and suburban sprawl; a hatred of immigrants and liberalism; a civic religion of nostalgia for a bucolic past enjoyed only by a few.
An American flag hangs on the Bell Wall of Mission San Juan Capistrano. Both the mission and the United States are celebrating their 250th birthdays.
(Gary Coronado / For The Times)
I visited my home mission for the first time in fourth grade. We learned about the annual return of the swallows, admired blooming roses and citrus trees, and absorbed a simple story: Spanish conquistadors and Catholic priests tamed a wild land, and we must follow their example.
We don't hear about the Europeans bringing diseases that decimated the Native Americans. Or that the Franciscan fathers (members of an order dedicated to a life of poverty and humility) forced the tribes to give up their food, customs and religion in the name of Christ, rewarding them with servitude. Or that swallows no longer appear in as many numbers as before because they have fewer and fewer places to build their nests.
It reminds me of one of Trump's most insidious projects: distorting history to celebrate only the winners. Anything tragic that happened to minorities was inevitable and necessary. Anything that highlights their overlooked stories of struggle and resistance to white supremacy is nonsense on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Know what dictators have long known: the more you control how society remembers the past, the better you can control the present and the future. That's why Trump calls those of us who want a complete account of American history unpatriotic, even traitorous.
Mission San Juan Capistrano was nearly empty when I entered with a map and a portable speaker playing short recorded narratives. I groaned as Spanish guitars played beneath a cheerful intro that welcomed me to the “Jewel of the Missions,” a slogan boosters coined decades ago.
Visitors walk among the ruins of the Great Stone Church, which was virtually leveled by an 1812 earthquake, at Mission San Juan Capistrano.
(Gary Coronado / For The Times)
I rolled my eyes at a plaque commemorating the deceased members of El Viaje de Portolá, a private men's-only club that hosts an annual horseback ride through the hills of Orange County meant to commemorate a 1769 hike by Gaspar de Portolá. The Catalan conquistador led the first continental expedition of Europeans through what is now California.
But the more I walked the grounds, the more I realized I was in a new Mission San Juan Capistrano.
Exhibits now offer a rawer, more problematic version of what happened there, not the rosy version absorbed by generations of Californians.
There are nods to the environmental devastation caused by the cattle industry that dominated Southern California in the first half of the 19th century, as well as the Faustian pact reached by indigenous peoples who converted to Catholicism. The lives of the Acjachemen, the Native Americans who populated present-day southern OC before the arrival of the Spanish, and who continue to live in the region, “changed forever” under the watch of “poor and uneducated” soldiers, the narrator acknowledges.
A statue of St. John of Capistrano, a 15th-century Franciscan friar, is the centerpiece of the Golden Altar in the Serra Chapel of Mission San Juan Capistrano.
(Gary Coronado / For The Times)
A well-lit room dedicated to precolonial ways of life even displays a letter from San Juan Capistrano Mission executive director Mechelle Lawrence Adams, admitting that “well-intentioned missionary pursuits also resulted in challenges and, in some cases, devastating consequences.”
The overall effect is by no means an awakening. Another room is dedicated to the founder of the California missionary system, Father Junípero Serra. Pope Francis declared him a saint in 2015, despite protests from Native Americans over his treatment of their ancestors.
Still, the tour doesn't shy away from the sins of the mission throughout its 250 years, demystifying how supposedly carefree life was during the height of its operations before the United States conquered Mexico.
If a historic reckoning can happen at Mission San Juan Capistrano, it can happen anywhere. As we commemorate 250 years of this country, we must encourage more honest reflections on our national journey, not the historical revisionism and triumphalism that Trump wants.
Acknowledging and even criticizing our past mistakes does not demean our love for America. Take my family. Five generations of us have lived in Orange County, dating back to my maternal great-grandfather and grandfather Plácido and José Miranda, who came to Anaheim in 1918 from the copper mines of Arizona to pick and pack oranges and live in a segregated neighborhood.
My aunts and uncles regale us with stories of the discrimination they faced as teenagers in the 1960s, not to make us hate America, but to show how they would not be deterred from creating a paradise for their children, no matter how imperfect.
No matter how fake democracy may seem right now, one fights for a better day.
Almost all of my cousins still live in OC, buy houses on blue-collar wages, and take their kids to colleges we didn't get the chance to attend because our parents discouraged us. We took the good with the bad and moved on, unlike other self-proclaimed patriots who saw a changing Southern California and moved on to other redder parts of the country.
Meanwhile, Orange County became a majority minority in 2004. A new generation is fighting Immigration and Customs Enforcement, creating a new identity for OC. We're not in John Wayne's Orange County anymore. Hell, we don't live in my Orange County already, and that's a good thing.
The change has not been easy, because it is not supposed to be easy. As a reminder, the tour of Mission San Juan Capistrano ends at the ruins of what is now called the Great Stone Church, which collapsed in an 1812 earthquake that killed 40 Acjachemen worshipers.
As I gazed at the empty niches that once held huge wooden statues of saints, I reflected on how fragile our democracy is. We are one catastrophe away from failure, no matter how strong we think our foundations are. But we shouldn't give up if it starts to fall apart. The only way to preserve our republic is to strengthen the pillars of our present with the mortar of our past.
Perhaps that's not what Serra and his Spanish hosts thought when they established the mission system, or what their white saviors had in mind when they began restoring the buildings in the early 20th century. That's the funny thing about a healthy democracy: you never know when you're going to find unexpected lessons, but you better be willing to accept them.
One of Heritage Barbecue's grill masters loads a smoker with sausages.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
As I finished my visit, a strong smell of tallow wafted from the huge smokers across the street at Heritage Barbecue. Chef and co-owner Danny Castillo has earned national recognition for his smoked brisket, chickens, sausages and other Texas-style meats based on his team's ethnic backgrounds: white, Mexican, Argentinian, Filipino and others.
When Castillo opened Heritage in 2020, skeptics said no one would eat barbecue made by a Mexican-American in south Orange County. For years, diners regularly asked him where the real owner was, something that Castillo always took in stride. Now a massive expansion is wrapping up.
“We diversified this area and I can say that with pride,” Castillo said. He is of Mexican, white and indigenous blood, and his ex-bracero grandfather was the first Mexican to own a house on his block in Westminster. “Look around.”
The Heritage team toured the interior of the kitchen and guided diners to the patio. People of all ages and ethnicities waited in a line that easily lasted an hour.
“You'll find the guy who saved three months so he could splurge for a day and the couple for whom money means nothing,” Castillo continued as my brisket taco arrived. “It doesn't matter, everyone has to line up, together. And then they have to eat together, side by side, on the benches.”
I asked Castillo if he had toured Mission San Juan Capistrano recently. I hadn't done it. But every day at Heritage Barbecue, he applies the lessons he's learned from the past.
“This country is a place where we are forced to come together and create something from it,” Castillo concluded. “We can't figure it out yet, but it's okay, we'll get there.”
