Sonoma Plaza as the Living Center of Mexican California

Most American towns have a main street. The Spanish colonial tradition built a plaza instead, a square open space around which the institutions of civic life were arranged: the church, the military barracks, the government building. Sonoma Plaza was laid out in the eighteen thirties on exactly that model, and it was, for a decade, the northernmost planned urban space in Mexican California.

Before the Bear Flag revolt turned it into a monument to American conquest, this plaza was a working civic space for a community that the revolt mythology has largely erased. Californio families came here to attend mass at the mission, to conduct business, to negotiate with the soldiers Vallejo commanded. Mission-displaced Indigenous people moved through the same space, their legal standing diminished but their presence undeniable. American trappers and traders arrived here from the east, looking for hides and horses and permission to stay. Russian traders came down the coast from Fort Ross. The plaza was where all of these communities negotiated the terms of living near each other.

That world ended on the morning of June fourteenth, eighteen forty-six, when the Bear Flaggers rode in and made this a different kind of historic site. The Mexican civic center became an American historical monument. The Californio community that had actually constituted most of Sonoma's population, the women who managed the households and ranches, the soldiers who garrisoned the barracks, the mission workers who had built the church, were not in the flag-raising scene that subsequent memory encoded as the founding moment.

The plaza still functions as a civic space. The mission building, the barracks, Vallejo's town house: all remain, arranged around the same open square. What the space used to contain, before the story narrowed to a flag and a captured general, is worth considering while you are standing in it.