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Editorial: California’s Pilgrim Story

Posted on November 20, 2015 by Sonoma Valley Sun

California is a long way from the chilly New England shore where the pilgrims landed. Living three thousand miles from Massachusetts and nearly 400 years after that continent-changing event, we can’t help but ponder the significance of the Thanksgiving celebration we Californians are heirs to.

The story of Squanto teaching the pilgrim newcomers to bury a fish head under each hillock of corn indicates that the indigenous people shared with the pilgrims not only the foods available in their land, but also skills in living on it. That first “thanksgiving” feast was to offer gratitude to God. They so wanted to worship God in their own way they undertook the risk of crossing the ocean in a small sailing ship to settle in an unknown, new country. Presumably they were also grateful for help from their Native American neighbors, whose land they had entered, and who had shared what they had with them. Sadly, only some places and their names are left to remind us of those now vanished native inhabitants.

Nevertheless, Thanksgiving celebrates the encounter of two cultures, the aspirations of emigrants from England, and the experience of sharing.

In California, the history of European settlement is very different. It began with the Spanish who traveled north from Mexico to convert the native inhabitants to their Christian religion. This encounter involved much-chronicled brutality, which we acknowledge here in Sonoma by listing the names of Native Americans who died at the hands of the Spanish on the remembrance wall outside the Sonoma Mission on the Plaza.

When Spain’s power declined an independent Mexico governed where we now live. Subsequently, the United States acquired California from Mexico through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848; its terms included that the Spanish language would be one of two official languages in California. One year later, the discovery of gold brought a second wave of settlers descended from Europeans. In many cases, by taking advantage of the English method of recording property rights, the ‘49ers claimed for themselves lands that had been held for generations by Spanish/Mexican residents.

The prevalence of Spanish place names bears witness to the influence of those first settlers; they left a lasting imprint on our architecture and agriculture – citrus, olives, grapes and more. The affirmation of individual property rights which came with the gold rush – the loss of the rights of the common – is at the heart of today’s groundwater and mineral rights conflicts. And, the opportunity for California to be a bilingual state was also lost.

And yet, we would suggest that two elements of the Thanksgiving story – encounter of cultures, and an emigrating people with aspirations for a better life – are found in present-day California. An analogy can be drawn between the pilgrims of 1620 and today’s immigrants from Mexico who, on a peril-fraught journey, travel here for opportunities they do not have at home. As Alex Águilar said in our “Voices of the New Majority” column, “No one leaves behind home, family and friends, and tradition, and risks the dangers of the trip, to live a worse life than they had.”

We have the encounter of cultures, and a people coming with hope to a new land. Can we now celebrate the third element – the reason for the feast – in gratitude and sharing?

The SUN Editorial Board




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