FoundSF

Historical Essay

by Chris Carlsson, 2025

Statue of Junípero Serra, 1920s, with limousine.

Photo: OpensSFHistory, wnp15.564

Of the thousands of Catholic missionaries who preached throughout the Americas, only a handful are today remembered by name and deed… Serra would likely have remained just one more obscure friar, except for the remarkable events of the late nineteenth century, when Californians spun for themselves a romanticized “fantasy heritage” that glorified the Spanish missions and lionized their Founding Father.
—David Hurst Thomas(1)

The fallen Serra statue, June 19, 2020.

Photo: Veronica Solis

I arrived in California in time to start the 5th grade in 1967. As a result, I was not subjected to the standard 4th grade curriculum that taught kids in our state for decades about the history of the Missions, which for most children involved building some kind of a diorama of a mission. Efforts to “repeal, replace, and reframe” native California history finally have ended the false and simplistic histories once taught, but many Californians over 40 still harbor those ideas that were standard curriculum for decades. We know a lot more in light of widespread scholarship showing that the generally accepted history of the Missions is largely a myth. Most of the actual missions were rebuilt in the early 20th century to embody that myth, including bucolic gardens in an Anglo-Germanic style full of flowering plants in the center of well-kept buildings constructed with a “mission revival” façade.(2) As David Hurst Thomas says, “there were no pleasure gardens of any kind at the original California missions… only hardscrabble reality.”(3)

And the myth itself, strangely, began with an extraordinarily popular novel written in the 1880s, Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson, a book that sold over 300,000 copies in its first year. Why was it so popular and how did it not only shape the story that Californians have told about themselves ever since, but how did that mythologized “history” lead directly to the canonization of Father Serra in 2015? And why do we remember and honor Father Serra at all? To understand, we must look at how history was written and shaped to meet specific needs when it was written, which turns out to be mostly between the appearance of Ramona in 1884 and the 1920s.

Our specific query begins with the Serra statue that stood in Golden Gate Park and was toppled during the anti-racism protests surrounding the murder of George Floyd during midsummer 2020 in the middle of the pandemic. Why did we have a bronze statue of this particular Franciscan friar and why was it built in 1907 in San Francisco? Who decided and who financed it?

Serra statue in Golden Gate Park, n.d.

Photo: OpenSFHistory.org wnp15.1148

To answer the last question first, it was former Mayor James Duval Phelan who paid for it. To understand why Phelan sponsored the Serra statue, it is important to note that he shared the deep racism and imperial ambitions of his ruling elite contemporaries in the first decades of the 20th century. Earlier in his political life, he served on the committee that chose architect Arthur Brown to build the California pavilion building at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, a building that launched the “Mission Revival” style that embodied the developing mythic past of the missions. From 1897 to 1901 he served as San Francisco’s Mayor and it was during the first decade of the 20th century, after he was voted out of office for sending San Francisco police to support shipowners against a powerful 1901 waterfront strike, that Phelan financed a number of prominent statues, many of which still dot our municipal landscape today. Later in life, Phelan was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1914 and when he unsuccessfully ran for re-election in 1920 his campaign slogan was “Keep California White” with a series of outlandish claims about how Japanese immigrants were taking over the state. But Phelan’s imperialist world view spurred his enthusiastic support for the annexation of the Philippines and Hawaii in the 1890s. By 1907 it led him to embrace the mythological story of the missions and an extremely romanticized version of Junípero Serra because it served to whitewash the settler-colonial project that he avidly supported.

Sanitizing War and Empire

Standing at today’s Montgomery and Market is “The Native Son,” which Phelan paid sculptor Douglas Tilden to create (it was originally located at the corner of Market and Mason Streets). A couple of blocks further east is the Tilden-sculpted “Mechanics Monument” honoring the Donohue brothers who founded the original Union Ironworks at First and Mission. Historian Gray Brechin describes what likely influenced Phelan in his monumental philanthropy:

The fortune amassed by his father had given [James Phelan] a triumphal view of history that came with a classical education and a secure position in society. The Jesuits at St. Ignatius College and the grand tour of Europe fired him with the ambition to give his city a mythology appropriate to its place. He accordingly endowed it with statues meant to teach citizens their role in the westward march of the master race… As mayor between 1897 and 1901, he chaired committees and commissioned monuments designed to heroize the past, ennoble the present, and enrich his future.(4) [Italics added]

In the wake of the U.S. victory in the so-called Spanish-American War, James Phelan financed two war memorials, both originally planned for Union Square. One was built there, the Dewey Monument, to commemorate the U.S. Navy’s destruction of the Spanish fleet in Manila (Philippines) harbor in 1898 at the outset of the conflict. The other, the “California Volunteers” monument was dedicated to the U.S. Army’s ongoing occupation and suppression of the Philippine Independence movement. But it wasn’t placed in Union Square. Instead, a few months after the 1906 earthquake and fire, amidst the ruins of the city, James Phelan dedicated it at the corner of Market and Van Ness (it was later moved to the corner of Market and Dolores). Standing by his side at the dedication were two generals recently returned from the Philippines where each had become well known for their heartless belligerence.

The "California Volunteers" Monument at Market and Van Ness in 1908.

Photo: OpenSFHistory.org wnp14.1143

Inauguration of the "California Volunteers" Monument at Market and Van Ness, August 12, 1906, just a few months after the earthquake and fire had devastated this part of the city.

Photo: OpenSFHistory.org wnp27.2615

There is much to be said about the U.S.-Philippine War, which stretched from 1898 (while Phelan was mayor) until the U.S. declared it officially over on July 4, 1902, though hostilities continued for over a decade more. (The Philippines did not get full independence until after WWII in 1946.) For one, few Americans have heard of this war because it is hidden under the “Spanish-American War” name. Fewer still know how long and brutal the war was. A couple of months after Admiral Dewey steamed into Manila harbor in 1898, eventually buying the Philippines for $20 million, U.S. troops occupied Spain’s former colonial possession AND continued its brutal war against Philippine independence. In the following years different generals rose to prominence. One was

General William Shafter who told the Chicago News that “it may be necessary to kill half the Filipinos in order that the remaining half of the population may be advanced to a higher plane of life than their present semi-barbarous state affords.” With the initiation of a scorched-earth policy dubbed “protective retribution,” it appeared that the unlucky half might die of starvation and disease. General “Howlin’ Jake” Smith earned his nickname when he instructed his men to turn the island of Samar into a “howling wilderness” where “even the birds could not live.” His instructions to “kill and burn, kill and burn. The more you kill and burn, the more you please me” did not enter folklore… When asked to define the age limit for killing, Smith retorted, “Everything over ten.” Smith and Shafter flanked Phelan at the dedication of the California Volunteers’ Monument in 1906.(5)

San Francisco elites were anxious about their city’s reputation among easterners as a corrupt and un-American place, especially as a municipal graft investigation became a public scandal after the 1906 disaster.(6) So Phelan was in good company as he continued his monument-building boomlet. But monumentalizing war and warriors was not enough.

Fortunately for the insecure City leaders, there was a recently minted set of historical figures ready for adoption. In the wake of Ramona and the twenty years of avid promotion that followed, by the early 20th century San Francisco’s business class was ready to jump on the Mission revival bandwagon too. James Phelan had already promoted the architectural style for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair California Pavilion. A practicing Catholic, he had begun attending the Mission’s parish church in the 1890s, an Anglo-Gothic revival structure that towered over the dilapidated Mission much like the post-quake Mission Revival-style church continues to. Historian Ocean Howell describes the changing attitude in the early 20th century:

Even though [Bret] Harte had already written the Mission’s eulogy in the 1890s, by the time of his death in 1902, a new generation of San Franciscans had begun to breathe new life into the structure. Prominent citizens seemed to feel it was safe to memorialize the neighborhood’s Spanish heritage. Perhaps this was because there was now more than half a century between the present and the city’s Mexican and Spanish periods, with the United States having recently vanquished the Spanish military in the Philippines. Add to all this the fact that there were no Latinos living in the area, and the anxiety about the Spanish past might itself have seemed quaint.(7)

The Irish-dominated Mission Promotion Association sponsored Mission Revival buildings around the neighborhood and took the lead in promoting a romanticized Spanish past in 1909 when they created the first-ever Mission Carnival, following the downtown-sponsored Portola Festival of the same year.

Native Daughters of the Golden West float at the 1909 Portola Festival.

Photo: OpenSFHistory.org wnp37.01959

Fake History Overtakes the Missions

Ironically, it was the east coast journalist Helen Hunt Jackson, raised by strict Calvinists, whose novel Ramona had begun the process of turning Spain’s colonization of California into a rosy-hued fantasy, “of mingled myth and memory, free of fanaticism and injustice, their cruelty and pain forgotten.”(8) Jackson traveled to California in the early 1880s to sympathetically report on the plight of California Indians a decade after their slaughter by white settlers had finally subsided. Imagining that the mission ruins she encountered had once been thriving, and that the Franciscan fathers had been welcomed and appreciated, she spun a tale that had little to do with the reality of what happened. As famous California journalist and historian Carey McWilliams noted in his 1946 book about Southern California: “It was this novel,” he concluded, “which firmly established the Mission legend in southern California,” and which, in the hands of grasping and tawdry tourism boosters, instigated “a Ramona promotion of fantastic proportions.”(9) With the book’s enormous popularity, an enterprising businessman named Frank Miller, a Protestant Republican, began a years-long effort to promote a made-up, almost Disneyesque version of the original colonization years.

… the Mission Inn was basically Frank Miller’s creation, an imagined palace of Spanish dreams, giving spatial expression to a California that never really existed….it was as if the Midwest Protestant American imagination, disordered with suppressed longing for the luxuriant bosom of the repudiated Mother Church, now indulged itself in an orgy of aesthetic hyperdulia. Riverside, California, which had not even had a mission in the days of the padres, now became the Southern Californian center of the mission cult. In 1907 Miller had a cross erected in honor of Junípero Serra atop [nearby] Mount Rubidoux.(10)

1907 was the same year the Serra monument was placed in Golden Gate Park. (And it’s worth noting, both monuments were defaced by protesters in 2020.) This early 20th century date awkwardly corresponds in time to the erection of monuments to Confederate generals across the Jim Crow South. Like the Daughters of the Confederacy who built those monuments to glorify their “lost cause” of slavery, the Serra monument ceremony was presided over by California’s Native Sons of the Golden West. (This group was dedicated to falsifying and glorifying the Gold Rush and promoting a burnished history of “great white men.” The actual gold rush was a half-decade rampage following the seizure of California from Mexico when American “settlers” began the 25-years-long genocide carried out on California’s First Peoples.) (11)

It was also at the turn of the 20th century that the eventual celebrity of Junípero Serra began to take shape. He would most likely have been forgotten, but men with financial interests (if not corresponding religious ideas) saw in him and the mission myth a way to make money, forge an imperial history that glossed over the barbaric Gold Rush and genocide that launched modern California, and to anchor their own oceanic imperialist ambitions in an earlier empire whose disappearance lent them an air of inevitability.

As James Sandos wrote in 2015, “Serra would have been an obscure missionary working on the very fringe of Spain's New World Empire had he not had the luck to die in territory that was conquered by the United States.”(12) What drove his re-emergent notoriety were

“rootless Anglo immigrants [who] began to identify with the region’s earliest European settlers, deriving from them a sense of continuity, tradition, pride, and regional identity.(13) … This new folklore was tailor-made for the Anglo-Protestant population that flooded … California in the late nineteenth century. The Franciscan fantasy overlaid the Protestant virtues of hard work, order, and productivity. It was a utopian vision of progress free of labor problems, sweatshops, and Anglo workaholics.”(14)

This process reached its peak at the 1907 dedication of the Serra Cross on Mt. Rubidoux in Riverside by then President William Howard Taft, all 310 pounds of him. During his speech at the event, President Taft described Spanish Catholic colonialism as the “White Man’s Burden” rather than a genocidal campaign of apocalyptic violence against Indigenous peoples. Taft stayed away from overt belligerent racism in favor of an ostensibly rational and ethnographic language, but ultimately his speech and the overriding logic of U.S. policy and power during that era was in service of white supremacist empire building.(15) Later in 1907 the Serra monument in Golden Gate Park was celebrated in a similar fashion, forging a false memory in permanent bronze.

From Obscurity to Sainthood?

It’s a separate story to understand how Serra went from being an obscure Franciscan leader of the early efforts to colonize California Indians to being declared a saint by Pope Francis in 2015. Serra was a man known for his fanaticism and sado-masochism, who oversaw the forced imposition of Spanish economic and religious practices on thousands of Californians while their population was precipitously collapsing due to the introduction of new diseases and the breakdown of their food provisioning and lifeways. His years marketing the Catholic Church in Mexico’s Sierra Gorda involved countless “floggings and, at times, soldiers were sent out at Serra’s urging to round up fugitives and return them to their missions, sometimes brutally. The formal complaints lodged in subsequent years criticizing Serra’s harsh treatment of the Indians in the Sierra Gorda presaged similar accusations of cruelty in the Alta California missions.”(16)

Serra’s religious education started on the Spanish island of Majorca where he was born. By the time he left in the 1740s, he had been fully schooled in the Catholicism of the Middle Ages. There is no evidence that he was aware that Franciscans were on Columbus’s second voyage to Hispaniola and were among the first to condemn the enslavement of the island’s natives,(17) nor that Dominican theologians like Bartolomeo de las Casas and the Spanish legal scholar Francisco de Vitoria spent decades trying to halt the violence against the people of the Americas. Nor was he schooled in their philosophical defense of the personhood of non-Christian pagans in the New World. For Serra, like most of his cohort of missionaries, there were only potential converts awaiting baptism and integration into the strict confines of his Church. Failure to conform was grounds for lashings, kidnappings, and incarceration.

Junípero Serra was also apparently delusional, as revealed by his decades-long belief in a book written a hundred years earlier by a Spanish nun María de Jesús de Ágreda (1602-1665), The Mystical City of God. The book describes her supposed “bilocating” from her Spanish convent (which she never physically left) to visit the Indians of Alta California and urge them to embrace the Franciscans when they arrived. She described how “she went to America by flying on the wings of Saint Michael and Saint Francis, sometimes making multiple trips in a single day. Protected by angels and dressed as a friar, María de Ágreda spoke to the Indians in their own language, urging them to seek out a Franciscan to perform their baptisms. Serra believed in his heart that he was that Franciscan and fully expected to be greeted as such in America.”(18) It was only after the 1775 Kumeyaay rebellion, when 15 villages banded together to destroy the San Diego mission, that Serra stopped citing the nun’s book as evidence that California Indians were simply waiting to be baptized by Franciscans.(19)

Though current San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Joseph Cordileone has proclaimed—incredibly—in July 2025, “Serra as one of the first American champions of the human rights of Indigenous peoples”(20) the historic record is replete with denunciations of his behavior and the cruel physical punishments he sanctioned by political and religious leaders who lived during HIS time. Serra himself admitted to excessive violence by his followers against native Californians in a 1780 letter to the governor. And that same Governor charged that Indian labor was being forced and resisters were being put in irons at Serra’s OWN Mission San Carlos in Carmel.(21)

Thanks to meticulous research by Sherburne Cook in the 1940s, using the missions’ own records, we know specifically how many died at each mission compared to less than half as many births. Miscarriages and self-induced abortions among Native Californians were common too as the devastating childhood mortality rates in the missions made bearing children a frightening prospect. Throughout the mission system, Indians responded to the horror of watching their loved ones die in enormous numbers by running away. A sustained rate of 10% ran away during the mission years, and the highest rate was at Serra’s own mission in Carmel, over 15%. Punishment for captured runaways usually involved flogging, up to 25 lashes and sometimes more. After Serra’s death in 1784 the system he established became even more dependent on compulsory conversions, kidnappings, and violent coercion. Cook’s research also showed that the Indian populations at the Missions were fed a “suboptimal” diet, which Carey McWilliams took further and suggested it was a deliberate effort to weaken the population so they would be less likely to escape.(22)

As James Sandos aptly concludes in his examination of the historical record, “Cannot the Indian interpretation also be applied, namely, that sainthood for Serra is yet another example of white over red, of European dominance over aboriginal culture, but this time not only justified but glorified in the name of religion?”(23)

For a non-believer like myself, it is incomprehensible that Serra was declared a saint, especially that it was mysteriously fast-tracked during the papacy of Francis I. How do we explain the arduous decades-long effort by the Catholic Church from the 1940s to 2015 to manufacture a “saint” out of this delusional, cruel, single-minded, and sadomasochistic man’s life?

A wider view of the toppled statue and graffiti, June 19, 2020.

Photo: anonymous

A Monument Redefined by Recent History?

As for his fallen and vandalized statue? I understand why it was defaced and pulled down. If we are going to retain it as a public monument it should remain defaced and laying prone, perhaps in a museum. Given the current administration’s efforts to rewrite history, maintaining this monument in its fallen state is to underscore and preserve an important history that might otherwise be lost to us. The 2020 nationwide—even global—uprisings against racism and police violence were unprecedented. They are deserving of their own memorialization, especially contrasted with the heavy-handed efforts to literally whitewash U.S. history by the Trump government. Accompanying any such display should also be a proper accounting of the role the missions and Serra played in the devastation wrought during the early colonial period on cultures, lifeways, and ecologies that had evolved over millennia. That crime cannot be reversed, but we owe it ourselves to remember it and try to properly understand it.

Notes

1. The Life and Times of Fr. Junípero Serra: A Pan-Borderlands Perspective by David Hurst Thomas, The Americas, October 2014, Vol. 71, No. 2, p. 246

2. Op.cit. “The Life and Times…” p. 135

3. Ibid.

4. Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, by Gray Brechin, UC Press: 1999, p. 121-122

5. Ibid. p. 136

6. Making the Mission: Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco by Ocean Howell, University of Chicago Press: 2015, p. 86

7. Ibid. p. 88

8. Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era, by Kevin Starr, Oxford University Press: 1985, p. 58. Kevin Starr was a 7th generation Catholic San Franciscan who served as both City and State Librarian, briefly considered running for Supervisor before settling into a long run as the unofficial historian of California, author of a half dozen books covering the state’s history.

9. “Ramona, I Love You” by Douglas Monroy, California History magazine, 2002, Vol. 81, No. 2, p. 136

10. Ibid. p. 86-87

11. See An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe by Benjamin Madley, Yale University Press: 2016.

12. “Writing Missionary Biography in the Post-Colonial Turn: Junípero Serra” in 'Reviews in American History, September 2015, Vol. 43, No. 3, p. 448

13. “Harvesting Ramona’s Garden: Life in California’s Mythical Mission Past” by David Hurst Thomas, in Columbian Consequences, Vol. 3: The Spanish Borderlands in Pan-American Perspective, edited by David Hurst Thomas, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C., 1991, p. 119

14. Ibid. p. 125

15. “Taft’s Chair, Serra Cross, and Other Props” by Stanley Orr in Pacific Coast Philology, 2021, Vol. 56, No. 1 p. 113

16. The Life and Times of Fr. Junípero Serra: A Pan-Borderlands Perspective by David Hurst Thomas, The Americas, October 2014, Vol. 71, No. 2, p. 191

17. Greg Grandin, America, América, Penguin Press, New York: 2025, p. 36

18. The Life and Times of Fr. Junípero Serra, op.cit. p. 189

19. Ibid.

20. “We Have Much to Celebrate!” by Archibishop Salvatore Joseph Cordileone, in Catholic San Francisco magazine, July 2025

21. “Junípero Serra’s Canonization and the Historical Record” by James A. Sandos, in The American Historical Review, December 1988, Vol. 93, No. 5, p. 1255

22. Ibid. p. 1258

23. Ibid. p. 1269