For whom the mission bells still toll

Confederate statues or cancel culture?

That’s pretty much sums up the current debate in a Central Coast city over a “mission bell.”

But this controversy doesn’t involve the city of Santa Cruz, which was set to remove its final mission bell at the corner of Soquel and Dakota avenues last August at the behest of a local Native American tribe. But just before that removal was scheduled, the bell was lopped off and stolen. The ceremony commemorating the removal, however, still took place.

A mission bell also was stolen from Mission Park by the Santa Cruz mission during a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020. UC Santa Cruz said goodbye to its bell in 2019.

But Gilroy, just the other side of Hecker Pass from Watsonville, is planning to install a new bell, a move called “a slap in the face” by Valentin Lopez, chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band. Amah Mutsun ancestors lived in the Central Coast region for thousands of years before soldiers from Spain in the 1700s forced them to build the local missions and convert to Christianity.

In a recent session with the Sentinel Editorial Board, Lopez said he was “shocked” by Gilroy’s decision.”

Lopez and the Amah Mutsun tribal council spearheaded the move to remove the mission bells in Santa Cruz – which remain the only area bells to have been removed. Lopez said a campaign has been gearing up to remove all the mission bells along the El Camino Real. For the tribes, they’re the California version of Confederate statues.

But Gilroy apparently is still planning to install a new bell downtown as soon as next Friday to celebrate the city’s 150th anniversary. The issue has become so controversial that public officials who voted in favor of installing the bell now refuse to talk to reporters about it.

Gilroy City Councilman

Zach Hilton, one of three council members who oppose the bell, told the Bay Area News Group he considers the plan an embarrassment. “In my mind, this is something that you just don’t do in 2022,” Hilton said.

Supporters, however, say it’s not their job to rewrite history. But here’s the rub: the bells, easily identified with their curving green poles, are not historic. Their installation starting in 1906 was at the behest of ladies’ guilds and automobile associations who wanted to commemorate a romanticized version of early state history and promote California tourism.

So the markers were put up along the El Camino Real, “the royal highway” named in honor of the Spanish monarchy, and were intended to mark each mile of the old route connecting the 21 missions from San Diego to Sonoma. At one point, more than 500 markers, including those installed at the missions themselves, were placed along the corridor, which Lopez said were originally a series of trade routes established by indigenous people.

The green pole is already in place in Gilroy for the new bell, planted on the edge of a wide alley known as the “paseo” along Monterey Highway between Fifth and Sixth streets. In addition, interpretive signs about Gilroy’s history were installed, including a notation about “early settlers” that describes the Amah Mutsun’s diet of acorns and berries and how, in the 1790s, “the local natives were relocated to the mission grounds at either San Juan Bautista or Santa Cruz.”

Lopez, who grew up in Morgan Hill and now lives in Galt, is not impressed. “It says nothing about how, during mission times, between 100,000 and 150,000 indigenous people died,” he told reporters last week. “How can the state of California, much less a local community, want to glorify that period of time?”

Indeed. The bells are a gimmicky relic and promote a false history. We’re glad they were removed in Santa Cruz, and they should be replaced elsewhere with accurate commemorations that tell the true story, good and bad, of what happened centuries ago. It’s not our town, but we also hope the city of Gilroy will make a last-minute decision to not go ahead with a new bell.