By: Ellen C. Caldwell
For JSTOR Daily
Father Junípero Serra, founder of California’s mission system (1713-1784), has been making headlines recently. Besides current debates surrounding his upcoming canonization in the fall, the California Senate also just voted along party lines to replace his statue with one of Sally Ride in the nation’s Capital. Each state is allowed two statues to represent itself in the National Statuary Hall of the Capitol Building and after a statue’s installation, it must remain there for at least ten years.
Father Serra helped to establish nine missions before his death. Eventually the Spanish built 21 missions during their colonization of Alta California, stretching from San Diego to Sonoma, forcibly introducing Spanish culture and religion to the region and establishing a European presence on the west coast of North America.
Currently California has representative statues of both Father Serra and Ronald Reagan; the former installed in 2009, and not yet up for replacement. Because Serra and the now more-widely known history of the California missions’ brutal conversion and assimilation of Native American converts and laborers, many contest both Serra’s canonization and the statue…