Introduction from Deep California:
Images and Ironies of Cross and Sword along El Camino Real

 

Craig Chalquist, PhD



What’s the answer to my state? There must be an answer to everything but for California I can reach no conclusion. Statisticians have tried. Even the Heaven on Earth club has tried. But California continues to erupt.
— Max Miller


On July 16th, 1769, Franciscan padre Junípero Serra blessed the opening of the first of twenty-one missions in what he called Alta, or Upper, California. Although he would not live to see them all founded, he spearheaded what would develop into the first conquest of the Golden State, its earliest churches and forts set up from San Diego to Sonoma along a six-hundred-mile coastal trail nicknamed the King’s Highway. Several freeways now run its course; and where the missions sought to convert indigenous Californians into a workforce of believers and soldiers under the Cross and Sword of Spain, towns sprang up, then cities once the Americans took over, and then immense urban sprawls of steel and glass still bearing religious names like Los Angeles, Santa Clara, and San Francisco.

Because the conquerors control what passes for official history, the wounds left by colonization go underground as acts of violence and cruelty to the land and its dwellers are revised into glorious wonders and brave deeds. Columbus has holidays, towns, and monuments named after him, but from the standpoint of the indigenous people he herded into plantations, his status was that of a mass murderer on a mission for worldly wealth. The word “gold” appears on nearly every page of his sea journal. To optimistic chambers of commerce and organizers of civic pageantry, Cortés sailed forth as a hero; to the Aztecs, he was a red-handed killer responsible for the deaths of millions of people then living in what is now Mexico. In his letters to the King of Spain he bragged about luring Aztec citizens outside the walls of their city so he could put them to the sword and divide up the spoils with his men. It might have been he who named California after the fictional realm described in the sixteenth-century novel The Exploits of Esplandian, a realm ruled by formidable Queen Calafía until conquered by incoming crusaders.

One of the most consistent findings from a century of psychotherapy is that deep woundings repressed into unconsciousness find expression in symbolic reenactments that cannot end until the pain is witnessed, mourned, and memorialized. As we begin to see this truth operating in ancestral and family legacies as well, I have come to believe it also applies to the wounded places that frame our supposedly internal sense of self. Centuries of social and ecological injustice remain at large to replay symbolically and thematically over and over, troubling individuals, families, neighborhoods, cities, states, empires. We are not as separate from the places we inhabit as we like to believe. Obesity rates parallel the sprawl of fattening cities, nor is a fortified border just a very tall fence: it also recurs as a psychic division, a cleavage of the heart, a spiritual dam, a cultural barrier, a split within the self, a political regression, and an ecological absurdity. The matter we would master enters into us at will through openings of metaphor and over imaginal bridges.

History matters because unhealed events have not been left behind us. Old motifs of wounding haunt our occupied territories—inner and outer—as persistently as La Llorona, the Weeping Woman of Mexican folklore, is said to haunt conquered territories seeking her dead children. In nightmares, symptoms, families, freeways, and barrios along El Camino Real, some contemporary Cortés still charges across a promenade, some resistance still opposes gold-seeking invaders, some ideology obliterates indigenous customs and values, and old mistakes, tragedies, nightmares, and dramas go unlearned from and therefore uncompleted, coming forth again and again as unburied ghosts inhabiting our injured landscapes with us.

This book is a collection of Californian tellings arranged in chronological order county by county. The tellings are about conquest, the resistance to it, the symbolic recurrences of its unfinished motifs, and the writing on the wall about its inevitable downfall, for the sustainable empire has never been invented. Rather than laying down dead in a text caught in a fantasy of objectivity, the events described herein constitute a multidimensional history in the spirit of Nietzsche’s term “genealogy” as a quest through key situations, prime movers, Great Men, “facts of history,” ecological anomalies, character quirks, and other forces often lab-coated as causes to uncover some of the themes and images in motion behind them. Put simply, this book is a case history of California’s edgy psyche, or to be more specific, a “place history” set forth in a series of briefly sketched accounts, details, and data amplified here and there by deepenings into what has happened since 1769.

“Deepening” is the move made to feel into these connections below their surface effects. It is impossible to really get to know California or any other place without recovering our eclipsed cultural traditions of heart-based imagination at home in the symbolic dimension. Art, literature, myth, and the deep psychologies have all warned us that to lose the primordial feeling for the metaphoric, the imagistic, the dreamlike, and the thematic is also to lose contact with the deepest dimensions of experience. Dreams and the unconscious communicate through symbols, the wellsprings of creativity do as well, and for all we know, so do the natural world and even the unnatural veneers that would cover it over.

Starting out first in conquered Mexico and Baja, we will learn the story of each mission town from its founding days onward, listening for repeating themes and meanings and gleaning the symbolic in the factual as we feel our way into the past of each county—San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles, and on up to Sonoma—whose inhabitants and conquerors still struggle in localized returns of the ecohistorically repressed. Quotations throughout highlight themes latent in the material. Each chapter also includes a brief biography of a life in which these recurring local themes stand out: Serra (San Diego), Walt Disney (Orange), Carey McWilliams (Los Angeles), Jiddu Krishnamurti (Ventura), Jane Hollister Wheelwright (Santa Barbara), William Randolph Hearst (San Luis Obispo), John Steinbeck (Monterey), Tiburcio Vasquez (San Benito), Charley Parkhurst (Santa Cruz), Sarah Winchester (Santa Clara), Robert Oppenheimer (Alameda), Mark Bittner (San Francisco), Alan Watts (Marin), and Mariano Vallejo (Sonoma). The narrative will advance through time and geography from Baja to Alta to top of the Mission Trail and beyond it to the hope for fresh sights and soundings that make for healing and an end to anguished reenactments.

History was part of the baggage we threw overboard when we launched ourselves into the New World. We threw it away because it recalled old tyrannies, old limitations, galling obligations, bloody memories. Plunging into the future through a landscape that had no history, we did both the country and ourselves some harm along with some good. Neither the country nor the society we built out of it can be healthy until we stop raiding and running, and learn to be quiet part of the time, and acquire the sense not of ownership but of belonging.
— Wallace Stegner

As for the architects of the historical and contemporary events described in these pages, some, like Cortés, were deliberate, ruthless opportunists, and some were not. There were missionaries who beat their “children” while others stood up for their rights. The missions founded and guarded to house the Indian converts were not blessed outposts of civilized pure-heartedness, as the Catholic Church maintains even now against heaps of documented evidence to the contrary. Into the so-called New World rootless men carried new ideas and a measure of good will as well as diseases of body and mind and soul. Whether their motives were akin to those of gentle St. Francis, nominal patron of a colonizing Order, or corrupt Alexander VI, writer of the papal bull of 1493 that handed a brave New World to Spain, what these true believers and wandering conquistadors did here lingers on to demand recognition, even to haunting us from within.

The men responsible for starting us along this trail are long gone, as are their most immediate victims, but the will to colonize—places, people, resources, economies, cultures, even gods—is no bygone relic of a less evolved era. It has grown clever enough to pitch for the planet and “the people”: for democracy, globalization, progress, “free” trade (free for whom?), even freedom (from a Sanskrit term for “to own”) in the totalizing campaign to enforce widespread dependence on rosy pseudo-worlds of well-machined fantasy.

Disregard of the invisible landscape—and impressing change upon the physical terrain that anchors that landscape—forces psychic pain and dislocation on others, pounding flat those imaginative bumps by which they orient themselves and which give meaning to their worlds.
— Kent Ryden

Listened in on through an ear attuned to myth, we find California alive with eerily persistent images and motifs and dreamlike figures of folklore. One of them, the archetypal Weeping Woman, followed the Cross and Sword from Mexico. Her most frequent form here is La Llorona, the wailing ghost who murdered her children under a full moon and is said to be seeking their souls. Long ago she passed across what is now an international border (for no borders can stop her) and on up the King’s Highway to its terminus in Sonoma, site of the last of the missions. As I argued in my dissertation, she and her sisters around the globe—whether named Llorona, Lorelei, Medea, Banshee, or Caillach—walk the trail of the conquerors as though the land underfoot were crying out in pain and apprehension at the devastation always following in the wake of imperial claims.

Before we launch into our task of sifting the historical data for the outlines of syndromes operating in each county, syndromes that flare up in people and places alike across many dimensions of local experience, a potential objection confronts us. Here is an example: “Lots of places have military installations and wartime industries. What necessarily makes San Diego’s central theme or story or ‘spirit of place’ a guarded sanctuary? Or Los Angeles a fallen angel, materialistic Venus descended from above? Or San Francisco the home of bisexual Dionysus, Monterey the abode of Pluto and the underworld? These attributes can show up anyplace.” Indeed, but not in highly particularized and meaningful configurations. To borrow an analogy from psychotherapy: Any client can exhibit inappropriately permeable boundaries, just as any can alternate between rage and idealization. By themselves these symptoms don’t mean much. Add in several others, however—dramatic acting out, terror of abandonment, a sense of inward emptiness, emotional disregulation—and a pattern begins to take shape, possibly that of a borderline personality disorder. It is the pattern one must focus on; compartmentalizing its components, as is often done in the study of a place, can offer no coherent sense of the place’s inside story, or the patterning of its strengths or traumas.

To break through the flat-earth literal-mindedness and “objectivity” that pave over historical reflection just as they authorize the paving over of native people and living places, a key premise will remain in effect throughout the book: that features of the land operate as socially and psychologically potent metaphors joining inner and outer, people and places, present and past, self and locale. As a consequence, not only do aspects of the surround symbolically shape the human discourse taking place within it (the San Andreas fault line running through statewide cultural and political ruptures, for example), but what we do to California we also do to ourselves, over and over and over again. A new sensitivity informed by myth, history, fact, and folklore must remember an ancient human truth: those who alienate themselves from the natural world by attempting its domination always alienate and dominate people. This book, therefore, is about what the conquest of California has done and is doing psychologically to her occupants.

Yet, “The dream lives on,” notes Kevin Starr, former state librarian, “promising so much in the matter of American living. It also threatens to become an anti-dream, an American nightmare. Memory, then, must come to our aid; for while the recovery of the past can traumatize, it can also heal.”

California has ever been pictured as an exquisitely spiritual domain—but one insisting that the spiritual ground itself in the earthly, in cool rivers and dank, tangled roots. In psychological terms this means taking our highest aspirations here with a healthy dose of sorrow, protest, humility, and absurdity, blending them soulfully in the cauldron of the heart. Only then, when the stories and themes have grown slowly within us, can we claim the authority to have heard even a little of what California has to say. Only then do we stand a chance of taking back this place—every place—from those who squint at the land only from the outside, as at an object to use up or pave down, and allowing it instead to bloom again as the paradise it once was.

Healing through storytelling lays the cornerstone of the counter-mission of renewed belonging to some beloved place: in this case “west of the west” in the assaulted and fabled Land of the Sundown Sea.

 

© 2008 by Craig Chalquist. All rights reserved.

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