“Remember the Kumeyaay Rebellion: A Pilgrimage to Sites of California Indian Resistance to Spanish Missions”

The San Diego mission is well known as a tourist destination. It was also the site of our largest Kumeyaay rebellion. We burned it several times, killing the missionary Father Luis Jayme and two others on November 5, 1775. The Kumeyaay destroyed missions in San Diego and Baja California, leaving them as rubble. In Baja there were originally thirty-four missions but today only eight are remaining. This form of strategic resistance was not about accommodation to the missions or fleeing from them but instead focused on systematically destroying them. In most California Indian communities where the missions remained intact, they lost their language and are now trying to recover it.  Today there are about 45 native speakers of Kumeyaay remaining. Although the number is small, the Kumeyaay still have our Native language because we burned the missions down. One difficult question that remains is why were some groups able to successfully resist Spanish missionization and keep a majority of their culture intact while others succumbed to the foreign missionizing of their people. It was this question that brought us to take a cross-border journey. In August of 2021, I guided a pilgrimage of community members, scholars, students, and young people to visit sites of Indian resistance to Spanish missionization on the U.S.-Mexican border and in Baja California. This journey took us to the different missions to hear from the people, the descendants of those who were missionized about the impact that the missions had on them. This paper is based on community knowledge including histories gathered through the use of interviews and conversations during our pilgrimage.