Celebrating a Forgotten People

A little girl will be baptized into the Catholic faith at Mission Dolores this afternoon, and 10 generations of an almost forgotten people will be there - at least in spirit.

Her name is Amaya Fabrio-Irwin, and she is a direct descendant of the Ohlone and Miwok people who lived in the Bay Area before Europeans came and changed it forever.

After the baptism ceremony, which follows a 5 p.m. Mass in celebration of San Francisco's 233rd birthday, the congregation will move in procession to the mission cemetery next door, where a redwood grave marker honoring Amaya's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents was put up Friday. They are Faustino, a Bay Miwok Indian who was baptized at Mission Dolores in 1794, and his wife, Obulinda, an Ohlone, baptized into the Catholic faith in 1802.

The ceremony and the marker commemorate a complex and nearly forgotten history.

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Peralta/Bernal Descendant Pioneers New Technology

...IF Silicon Valley 1.0 was semiconductors and computers and Silicon Valley 2.0 was the web and networks, will Silicon Valley 3.0 be solar power, with green jobs for all?

Dr. Greg Bernal-Mendoza Smestad says yes. A world-class solar-science nerd—editor of the Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells Journal—Smestad brings a unique perspective to the valley: he's a descendent of the Bernal and Peralta families that founded the Pueblo of San José in 1777. His ancestors built the Peralta Adobe and mined New Almaden cinnabar. And now he's making some history himself.

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Documentary on Junípero Serra in the Works

Husband-wife Film Artists Monty and Marsha Brown are planning a film on the founder of the California missions:

“A longer-range plan is filmingThe Travels of Father Serra, which will take us to Majorca in 2010,” Monty told us.

“We have already filmed The Missions of Father Serra, a 37-minute film featuring the original nine California missions established by Junipero Serra in the 18th Century. Majorca, where Serra was born, should complete the story.” That film has a likely release date of January 2011.

A forthcoming UC Press book about Alta California.

From the UC Press blog:

Spanish California—with its diverse mix of Indians, soldiers, settlers, and missionaries—provides a fascinating site for the investigation of individual and collective identity in colonial America. Through innovative methodologies and extensive archival research, the nine essays in this volume reshape our understanding of how people in the northernmost Spanish Borderlands viewed themselves and remade their worlds. Essays examine Franciscan identity and missionary tactics in California, Sonora, and the Sierra Gorda; Spanish and Mexican settlers' identity as revealed in the life of Pablo Tac, among the most literate of Alta California's Indians; and mission choral guilds. The last section of the book turns to the historiography of the Spanish Borderlands as it has developed over the last century in North America as well as in Spain.