Father Junipero Serra is toxic in California, and his D.C. statue is on borrowed time | Opinion

Within the ornate majesty of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., is a Statuary Hall that features two representative figures from each state of the union. Since 1931, one of the two statues representing California has been a bronze of Father Junipero Serra.

For those of you unfamiliar with Father Serra, he was a Spanish Franciscan friar who founded nine of the 21 Catholic missions across California. History, however, has fought it out over Father Serra’s legacy in recent years.

In 2015, he was canonized by Pope Francis, in part, for saving the souls of indigenous peoples in 18th-century California. But scholars, academics and advocates for indigenous people have branded Serra a ruthless colonizer.

“Serra did not just bring us Christianity. He imposed it, giving us no choice in the matter. He did incalculable damage to a whole culture,” Deborah A. Miranda, a Native American and a professor told the New York Times in 2015.

Consequently, Father Serra is seriously out of favor in California. Yet he enjoys the limelight of a perch in the U.S. Capitol, the site of an insurrection where mobs of unpleasant people have since been convicted of crimes committed on Jan. 6, 2021.

California’s other statue in the capitol is a very chipper-looking President Ronald Reagan, who just keeps defying historians’ attempts to characterize him, hence his statue’s bubbly demeanor since his installation in 2009.

I prefer to think of Reagan as more representative of California’s vast B-movie contributions rather than of the presidency. (He was from Illinois anyway.)

Since Serra’s statue at California’s Capitol Park was unceremoniously pried off its pedestal in 2020, and a 5-ton statue of Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella was removed from inside the Capitol the same year, other historically problematic statues have also gone to… um… wherever used, out-of-favor statues go.

If these statutes could talk, one could imagine them bemoaning their lost status with other disgraced statuary of Confederate generals, slave-owning Founding Fathers and assorted monuments of racist civic leaders that were sent packing by the whims of history.

The afterlife is “storage” for a defunct statue.

The search for Serra’s replacement has generated a bit of comment, but how would our state agree on one when California has, shall we say, vastly disparate interests?

Not that the U.S. Capitol Statuary Hall is all that picky about who stands in there. A 2022 Washington Post investigation found that artwork at the U.S. Capitol including statues, paintings and other works honored 114 enslavers and 13 Confederates.

I am sure they were greeted warmly by their fellow insurrectionists on Jan. 6.

I propose a California Statuary Hall. We could fill it with elections, like primaries. We spent $250 million on the 2021 gubernatorial recall, so why not just keep the fun rolling?

Of course, this would provide a lot of work for lobbyists who would promote Dead Historic Yet Acceptable Figures. We could be vastly entertained by the spectacle while characters like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel funded insane candidates.

We’re not going to be able to have a convention to decide this. It’s gotta be an open ballot, with the top two finishers going head-to-head in the general.

I called a buddy who worked for a nationally historic figure from California who is no longer with us. I asked him if anyone was engaged in any lobbying on behalf of suitable statuary figures with California ties.

“That’s not our mission,” he gamely observed.

No, we have to throw this out to the people. Let Jackie Robinson slug it out with Sally Ride in the biggest March Madness bracket ever. Maya Angelou can easily take out Vin Scully, right? Joan Didion vs. David Crosby?

See? This is hard, and I haven’t even mentioned politicians yet. The Bee has a reader’s survey where you can participate in a poll on who should represent California in the U.S. Capitol, and we welcome your suggestions.

Richard Nixon vs. Pat Brown? Oh, duh. Brown won in 1962. Game over. Hmm. Earl Warren vs. Kevin McCarthy? Kevin McCarthy is physically alive, but his soul is dead.

Anyway, the legislature should make this happen. I’m sure they can agree, right?

This story was originally published April 3, 2023 at 4:01 PM.