22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY MARCH 12-18, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com nal side, she came to realize her connection to the expedition. Looking back from a modern perspective, Gularte says she feels ambivalent. “I have conflicted feelings about it,” she says. “There’s some pride in having been in California so long, but also some feelings that it started pushing out people. There’s a lot of negative press around the whole of that era. “It wasn’t all positive but it wasn’t all negative, and I assume positive intentions on all fronts.” Amaya has solo-walked the entire mission route once, over 58 days. “If we talk about the colonization of California, there’s a lot more negative than there is positive, but I take it from a more personal point of view,” she says. She recalls walking along River Road from Soledad toward the Monterey Peninsula, and imagining what it was like for her fifth-greatgrandmother, who likely didn’t want to leave her home in Mexico, but had no choice but to accompany her husband. “She left her family and everything she knew. She takes these three small children—and again, it’s from her point of view—hoping for something better than what they have,” Amaya says. “I found myself wondering if I even took the same footsteps that she did in certain areas, with 200-plus years of earth between her footprint and mine.” Tom Little Bear Nason now walks in his ancestors’ footsteps, as an eighth-generation Esselen and the tribal chairman of the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County. For him, the Anza expedition is inextricably linked to Serra and the trauma experienced by his ancestors who lived in the region 250 years ago. “It’s definitely something that runs in many deep veins of my family and my tribe and our people who lived here on the Central Coast,” Nason says. “We’re living right now a generational trauma, caused by the missionaries primarily, and by the Anza expedition, which had a huge impact on our cultures, our land, our values, our homelands.” The colonization by Spain took the tribes away from their land and their homes, Nason says. “We had complete complex cultures, trading route systems and villages,” he says. The Spanish gave “free” lands to their own citizens to settle here, but “that wasn’t free, it was all our land.” The tribal members who were coerced into the mission system were forbidden to speak their language or practice their religion or culture. “It was really annihilation for us,” Nason says. “They made slaves out of us.” Today, Nason says, they are trying to regain their past, “and teach our young how we lived as one with the earth, how we lived in balance with nature.” In recent years, the Esselen Tribe has been working to reclaim its land in Big Sur and in Carmel Valley. Last year the tribe purchased 1,270 acres along Tularcitos Creek, using grants from the state Wildlife Conservation Board and State Coastal Conservancy. The tribe plans on using it for gatherings and ceremonies for all tribes, along with educational programs and guided tours. “We have to sit with the land, be with the land and sit with our elders,” Nason says. “But there is no one on this Earth left who has the true knowledge of our people because it was taken from us. It was wiped out, it was erased. That’s the impact we’re feeling since Father Serra and then Anza came.” The trail Anza forged was formally recognized by Congress on Aug. 15, 1990 as the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail, part of the National Park Service, putting it in league with other historic trails like Lewis and Clark, Pony Express and Trail of Tears. Creating such trails are meant to recognize momentous events that have a significant bearing on North American history, according to Mendoza. “A lot of these trails, depending on one’s background and interest, are either going to be elevated or diminished. I do believe that the narratives tend to be polarized, especially in the way in which Americans address the Spanish colony in North America which literally encompassed 38 of the 50 states, either through settlement, colonization, exploration and a whole host of other narratives,” Mendoza says. “The reality is we still see an exceptionalism in the American presence that doesn’t extend in all cases to the American Indian presence, the Hispanic colony, or for that matter the Mexican heritage republic that once dominated the American Southwest,” he says. With the historic trails, some will be elevated and others diminished depending on the politics of the day, which could be a factor in a muted response to Anza today. Mendoza cites a declining ability to teach history in the U.S. public school system, in part due to lawsuits and shifting political views. Polarization and culture wars are also partly to blame. “That too has affected the way in which people either take interest or see no interest in such features as the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail, which was significant in its own right because it was one of the first significant exploration into Alta California that led to the founding of the Presidio Garrison, the mission and the Spanish settlement of San Francisco,” he says. Mendoza notes pushback today, which he says is unfortunate. “In the Monterey Bay and Salinas areas today there is reluctance to accept Anza as part of the cultural heritage of the Mexican community,” he says. The people that were brought in came from Northern Mexico and founded the City of San Francisco, a significant accomplishment. He points to Anza establishing the trade route as “significant to the history of commerce for the beginnings of what ultimately would become the fourth-largest economy in the world, California.” The camp in Natividad “puts them dead center in the area of Salinas,” he says. “It’s a predominantly Hispanic community and yet they don’t really acknowledge this expedition.” As president of the Historical Society, Mendoza intends to elevate Anza’s profile in the coming months, “because Anza was key to the first immigrant community of California.” When the reenactors entered Monterey on horseback on Wednesday, March 10, 1975, to cheers, the parade kicked off three days of celebratory events that included cocktail parties and dinners, more parades and a closing barbecue, “California Style.” This year the only local public recognition of the expedition so far is an exhibit inside the Monterey History and Art Association’s Stanton Center at Custom House Plaza in Monterey. MHAA Board Member Scott Gale curated the exhibit, seeking reproductions of photos and drawings of Monterey from the era of the expedition. On March 24, a cyclist from Mexico, Luis Valle, is scheduled to come through Monterey on a solo bike trip from Mexico along the Anza historic trail, as part of a documentary he’s making about the expedition and his trip. Gale says the plan is for Valle to return to Monterey in June to give a talk. In Salinas, there are plans to commemorate the Anza expedition on Salinas Day, May 2, says Craig Kaufman, executive director of the Salinas Valley Tourism and Visitors Bureau. He’s also a new member of the Anza Trail Foundation. He runs the California Visitor Center at the Salinas Transit Center, which will open a permanent exhibit about the trail during the festivities. Kaufman has been advocating for several years to highlight the trail as a potential tourist draw, only to meet resistance from those who fear it would romanticize colonialism. Pointing out that the expedition itself would not have been possible without the help of at least 38 Indigenous tribes along the way, he sees the legacy of the trail in a broader context. “This trail is significant because it chronicles the human spirit of discovery and perseverance in the first overland colonizing expedition that founded San Francisco,” Kaufman says. “The diverse ancestry of this group, including First Peoples, African and European heritage, underpins the very foundation of California as it is today.” Part of the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail stretches four miles between an unmarked trailhead in North Salinas and the trailhead in San Juan Bautista. SARA RUBIN
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