Gavin Newsom got rid of one Junipero Serra statue. But another represents the state in D.C.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill on Friday to replace a statue of Father Junipero Serra with a monument for Native American tribes after protestors and members of the state Legislature lobbied against the Catholic missionary’s controversial past.
Cities and protestors across California have toppled other statues of Serra in recent years, including the one in Sacramento’s Capitol Park last year.
But one stands strong: the figure of Junipero Serra that represents the state in the United States Capitol.
Efforts to remove that statue fizzled in 2015 as the Pope moved to canonize the Catholic missionary during his first-ever visit to the United States.
Serra, a Roman Catholic priest who established the first nine of California’s 21 Spanish missions in the late 1700s, was noted by Pope Francis as the “evangelizer of the West in the United States.”
Many groups have denounced his colonization and treatment of the indigenous people he aimed to convert to Catholicism.
The Serra statue in Capitol Park statue will be replaced with one honoring the region’s Native American tribes under legislation by state Assemblyman James Ramos, D-Highland, who lives on the San Manuel Indian Reservation in San Bernardino County. He is the first California Native American elected to the Assembly.
Since 2015, Serra’s likeness has been removed from several California locations, including from streets on Stanford University’s campus, the center of Ventura and a mission he founded in San Luis Obispo. Following widespread protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man, people toppled Serra statues in Los Angeles and San Francisco, among other places.
U.S. Capitol Serra statue
The first and last time California’s Legislature tried to replace Serra’s statue in the U.S. Capitol was in 2015. The resolution, introduced by then state Sen. Ricardo Lara, barely passed. It sought to replace Serra with Sally Ride, the first American woman to go to space.
But plans fell through as Pope Francis prepared his first visit to the United States and planned to name Serra a saint, and as legislators faced backlash from the Catholic community.
The Pope canonized Serra on Sept. 23, 2015, at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., heightening conversation over Serra’s treatment of Native Americans in California’s missions.
“California Native Americans were captured and placed in servitude, harshly punished or killed for disobedience or attempted escape. They and their children were sold into forced labor, and families were separated and sent away to build the missions,” Ramos and his cosponsor, Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, wrote in an op-ed piece for The Sacramento Bee about the measure to replace Serra’s statue in Sacramento’s Capitol Park.
The battle over Serra statues in the state continues to rage on as Native American activists and Catholic leaders debate his role in colonizing California.
“In working with Native Americans, he was a man ahead of his times who made great sacrifices to defend and serve the indigenous population and work against an oppression that extends far beyond the mission era,” wrote the California Catholic Conference of the removal of Serra statues in June 2020. “And if that is not enough to legitimate a public statue in the state that he did so much to create, then virtually every historical figure from our nation’s past will have to be removed for their failings measured in the light of today’s standards.”
How can a state replace a statue?
Every state has two statues in the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall Collection. California’s are Serra and former President Ronald Reagan, who was the governor of California from 1967 to 1975.
Serra’s statue was placed there in 1931 alongside one of Thomas Starr King, a Unitarian minister who helped establish Yosemite as a national park and advocated to keep California as part of the United States during the Civil War. Those were the first statues California gifted to the Capitol.
Only one proposal to change either of the statues has passed — California requested that Reagan replace King in 2006.
The state Legislature must approve a resolution to request the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress to start the process of replacing its statue, according to the Architect of the Capitol, which oversees maintenance of statues in Statuary Hall. The state’s governor must approve the resolution to send it.
A statue must be on display for at least 10 years before a state can request to change it, unless the Joint Committee waives this requirement on a case-by-case basis. Serra and Reagan’s statues are eligible for replacement.
A statue must be of a deceased person who lived there and has historic significance.
The process of changing a statue in the U.S. Capitol can take years. Florida, for example, started the process of removing a statue of a Confederate general in 2016. It will not be replaced until 2022.
McClatchyDC’s Alex Daugherty contributed to this story.
This story was originally published September 28, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
