On a cloudy weekday morning last month, I visited San Juan Capistrano hoping to see the future of this country in a place gladly stuck in its past.
The city of about 35,000 has always considered itself an island of Old California, even as clogged roads and McMansions blemished the once-pristine hills. Physically and spiritually, San Juan Capistrano is centered around its mission, one of 21 established by the Catholic Church under the Spanish crown in the 18th and 19th centuries, forming the scaffold of modern-day California.
These southern reaches are one of the few areas of an increasingly purple Orange County that went with President Trump all three times. So I wasn’t surprised that the downtown looked liked a MAGA wonderland as I walked toward the mission.
Drivers pledged their allegiance to Trump with decals and bumper stickers. Banners on light poles proclaimed “250” — the birthday celebrated this year by both the mission and the United States. It’s a number that the president has tried to hijack by tying a love of this country’s history to fealty to him.
How the history of Mission San Juan Capistrano is told has long been a reflection of my native Orange County, which itself has exemplified some of America’s worst tendencies: a love of avarice, retrograde conservatism and suburban sprawl; a hatred of immigrants and liberalism; a civic religion of nostalgia for a bucolic yesteryear enjoyed only by a few.
I first visited my local mission in fourth grade. We learned about the annual return of swallows, admired blooming roses and citrus trees and absorbed a simple story: Spanish conquistadors and Catholic priests tamed a wild land, and we should follow their example.
We didn’t hear about Europeans bringing diseases that decimated Native Americans. Or that Franciscan fathers — members of an order dedicated to lives of poverty and humility — forced tribes to give up their foods, customs and religion in the name of Christ, rewarding them with serfdom. Or that swallows don’t come in the numbers they used to because they have fewer and fewer places to build nests.
It reminds me of one of Trump’s most insidious projects: distorting history to only celebrate winners. Anything tragic that happened to minorities was inevitable and necessary. Anything highlighting their overlooked stories of struggle and resistance to white supremacy is diversity, equity and inclusion nonsense.
He knows 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 casts those of us who want a full telling of American history as unpatriotic, even treasonous.
Mission San Juan Capistrano was mostly empty as I walked in with a map and a handheld speaker that played short, recorded narrations. I groaned as strumming Spanish guitars played underneath a cheerful introduction welcoming me to the “Jewel of the Missions” — a slogan that boosters coined decades ago.
I rolled my eyes at a memorial plaque to deceased members of El Viaje de Portolá, a private men’s-only club that stages an annual horse ride through the back hills of Orange County meant to commemorate a 1769 trek by Gaspar de Portolá. The Catalan conquistador led the first mainland expedition of Europeans up and down what’s 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 grittier, more problematic version of what happened there, not the rose-tinted take absorbed by generations of Californians.
There are nods to the environmental devastation wrought by the cattle industry that dominated Southern California in the first half of the 19th century, as well as the Faustian bargain struck by Indigenous people who converted to Catholicism. The lives of Acjachemen — the Native Americans who populated modern-day South O.C. before the Spaniards came, and who continue to live in the region — “changed forever” under the watch of “poor and uneducated” soldiers, the narrator acknowledges.
A well-lighted room dedicated to precolonial ways of life even displays a letter from Mission San Juan Capistrano Executive Director Mechelle Lawrence Adams, admitting that “well-intended missionary purposes also resulted in challenges and in some cases, devastating consequences.”
The overall effect is nowhere near woke. Another room is dedicated to the founder of California’s mission system, Father Junípero Serra. Pope Francis declared him a saint in 2015, despite protests from Native Americans because of his treatment of their ancestors.
Still, the tour doesn’t shy away from the mission’s sins over its 250 years, demystifying how supposedly carefree life was during the height of its operations before the United States conquered Mexico.
If a historical reckoning can happen in Mission San Juan Capistrano, it can happen anywhere. As we mark 250 years of this country, we need to push for more honest reflections about our national journey — not the historical revisionism and triumphalism that Trump wants.
Acknowledging and even criticizing our mistakes of the past doesn’t cheapen one’s love for the United States. Take my family. Five generations of us have lived in Orange County, going back to my maternal great-grandfather and grandfather Plácido and José Miranda, who arrived in 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 teens in the 1960s, not so we will hate America, but to show how they would not be deterred in creating a paradise for their children, as imperfect as it may be.
No matter how false democracy may look right now, you fight for a better day.
Nearly all my cousins still live in O.C., buying homes on blue-collar salaries and seeing their children off to colleges we didn’t have the opportunity to attend because we were discouraged by our parents. We took the good with the bad and soldiered on — unlike other self-professed patriots who saw a changing Southern California and decamped to other, redder parts of the country.
Meanwhile, Orange County became majority minority in 2004. A new generation is fighting Immigration and Customs Enforcement, creating a new identity for O.C. We’re not in John Wayne’s Orange County anymore. Hell, we don’t live in my Orange County anymore — and that’s a good thing.
Change hasn’t been easy, because it’s not supposed to be easy. As a reminder, the Mission San Juan Capistrano tour ends at the ruins of what’s now called the Great Stone Church, which collapsed in an 1812 earthquake that killed 40 Acjachemen worshippers.
As I stared into empty niches that once contained massive wooden statues of saints, I meditated on how fragile our democracy is. We’re one catastrophe from failing, no matter how strong we think our foundation is. But we shouldn’t give up if it starts to crumble. The only way to preserve our republic is to strengthen the pillars of our present with the mortar of our past.
Maybe that’s not what Serra and his Spanish hosts thought when they established the mission system, or what its white saviors had in mind when they began to restore 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 sure as hell better be willing to accept them.
As I ended my visit, the strong smell of tallow drifted from massive smokers across the street at Heritage Barbecue. Chef and co-owner Danny Castillo has earned national acclaim for his Texas-style smoked brisket, chickens, sausages and other meats informed by the ethnic backgrounds of his crew — white, Mexican, Argentine, 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, eaters regularly asked him where the real owner was, something Castillo always took in stride. Now, he’s finishing up a massive expansion.
“We diversified this area, and I can say it proudly,” Castillo said. He is of Mexican, white and Indigenous blood, and his ex-bracero grandfather was the first Mexican to own a home on his block in Westminster. “Look around.”
The Heritage crew buzzed around inside the kitchen and guided eaters to the patio. People of all ages and ethnicities waited in a line that was easily an hour long.
“You’ll find the guy who’s saved up three months to be able to splurge for one day and the couple for whom money means nothing,” Castillo continued as my brisket taco arrived. “It doesn’t matter — they all have to stand in this line, together. And then they have to eat alongside each other in benches, together.”
I asked Castillo if he had done the Mission San Juan Capistrano tour recently. He hadn’t. But every day at Heritage Barbecue, he applies lessons he has learned from the past.
“This country is a place where we’re forced to come together and create something out of it,” Castillo concluded. “We still can’t figure it out, but that’s OK — we’ll get there.”