Mission San Diego de Alcalá: The First and the Bloodiest

The white adobe church before you is the oldest of California's twenty-one missions and the site of one of the most violent confrontations in the entire mission era. This is Mission San Diego de Alcalá, founded July sixteenth, seventeen sixty-nine, and its history contains almost everything that defined the Spanish colonial project in California: ambition, disease, forced conversion, and the inevitable resistance of the people whose land it was.

Father Junípero Serra planted the cross on Presidio Hill and dedicated the mission in the name of Saint Didacus of Alcalá, a Spanish Franciscan known for humility. The original site was perched above the bay, but drought in seventeen seventy-four forced the padres to move the mission six miles inland to the San Diego River valley, closer to water and to the Kumeyaay villages the mission depended on for labor and converts.

The move accelerated tension. By the autumn of seventeen seventy-five, Spanish soldiers and priests had baptized roughly four hundred Kumeyaay, including village leaders, over the summer and autumn of that year, a pace that signaled coercion rather than persuasion. In the early morning hours of November fifth, a force variously estimated at six hundred to eight hundred Kumeyaay warriors surrounded the mission, set fire to its wooden buildings, and attacked the small Spanish garrison. Father Luis Jayme walked toward the warriors with his arms open, calling out the traditional Franciscan greeting, and was killed. He became the first Catholic martyr of Alta California. Two other Spaniards died in the fighting.

Spain rebuilt the mission in adobe between seventeen seventy-seven and seventeen eighty. Secularization ended the mission system in eighteen thirty-three. The church served as a military barracks, then as a ruins, before restoration began in the early twentieth century. Today it is an active parish, the site of the first mission founded in California, and the mission cemetery holds the remains of thousands of Kumeyaay who died under the mission system.