A tribute to Fray Junípero Serra, a martyr two centuries later
When you travel along the Californian coast, following the road 101 known as El Camino Real, literally the Royal Road, you will come across twenty-one Christian missions founded by Spanish monks between the 18th and 19th centuries. If the spirit driving you to those wonderful American sites is to soak up the culture and history of the most powerful country in the world, as much as you are attracted by the repressive wave of Western symbols, you will have to stand on that long score of buildings made of adobe and humanity, with many years behind them and an admirable legend about what civilization is. Even if you cover your ears, you will still listen to the name of Junípero Serra, a Spanish Franciscan friar born in Mallorca who emigrated to America to found new territories and contribute to the progress of its inhabitants.
If you stop in the beautiful coastal town of Carmel-By-The-Sea you will find the mission of San Carlos Borromeo, nestled on the wild peninsula of Monterrey where a 20th century celebrity, filmmaker Clint Eastwood, has his residence and ranch. It was built by Junipero in 1770, and despite the many reconstructions made in the neighboring spaces, it preserves the central axis of the chapel with the flavor of the old and the authentic. All around it you will find gardens carefully cared for, in which a stone sculpture of the founder emerges, which has not yet been torn down for the sake of the fight against the racism shaking the world today.
His first foundation was the Mission of San Diego de Alcalá, the embryo of today's cosmopolitan and multicultural San Diego. Please note the influence of the names of the missions raised up in California in those places we know today: Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa in San Luis Obispo, Mission San Buenaventura in Ventura half a hundred miles west of Los Angeles, Mission San Francisco de Asis in San Francisco... As it is well defended and promoted by The Hispanic Council, Spain's heritage in American toponymy is rich and immense.
By stripping the character of Juniper of all the holiness granted to him by the Catholic religion, something that can disturb radical seculars, the judgment he deserves is that which should correspond to someone who lived and worked for the native community in the places where he settled. Does the work of evangelization bother you too? The history books place him as a member of the Holy Expedition that went from Mexico to the north to evangelize California, and that is why Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1988. It may be this aspect of his personality that unleashes the devil's fury against his statues, but those who feel it seem to be unaware of his work during his lifetime. He taught the natives to work, to read and write, to cultivate the land, he fed them and prevented them from falling into marginalization and becoming the grazing ground of the lewdest settlers.
Should it be radical Indianism that is carrying out this campaign of harassment against the symbols that represent the founder of the state of California, supported by white power circles such as the Californian universities that should feel responsible for what happened to the American Indians, if it is, as I say, a reaction of the descendants of native ancestors who were marginalized by the history narrative, the education and dissemination of the values he transmitted could work the miracle that this mistaken impression will change in a couple of lustrums. But if it is, as it seems, an instrument of the extreme left, nesting in all the countries of the world, appropriating crusades shared by all and creating new crusades to throw in the face of those who do not think the same way, we have a problem hard to solve. Because if this is the case, what is serious is not the usual historical revisionism, but the constant contempt and harassment of everything that means a discrepancy with the unique and right thinking.
A scene from a Marx Brothers' film, an endless source of parallels in today's reality, in which the three brilliant comedians Groucho, Chico and Harpo ( their brothers Zeppo and Gummo never reached their corrosive level) share the shot, and the mute with the blond curls examines a written paper and tears it apart in anger. To Groucho's disbelief, Chico says, "He gets angry because he can't read". That gag reminds me a lot of what is happening with this radical "minority", graffiti and monument-throwing. By not understanding the meaning or knowing the lives of those who are symbolically dislodged from their sculptures, they are deep down showing their anger at their own ignorance.
Photography: Víctor Arribas, 2010