The 1775 Burning: The Kumeyaay's Answer to the Mission

A year before the American Revolution, on the night of November fourth to fifth, seventeen seventy-five, the Kumeyaay gave a different answer to the Spanish colonial project than the one mission histories typically record.

Eight hundred warriors, organized across fifteen rancherias, moved simultaneously on Mission San Diego de Alcala. This was not an impulsive raid. It was a coordinated military operation planned across multiple communities, requiring communication, timing, and the collective decision that the mission system had to be stopped. The leaders of the uprising were two men named Zegotay and Aarazon.

What they did was thorough. The mission buildings were burned to their foundations. The vestments were destroyed. The sacred vessels, the objects the Spanish used to perform the rituals of possession and conversion, were scattered or burned. Father Luis Jayme, one of the mission's priests, was killed in the attack. He became the first Christian martyr in California, a designation the Catholic Church preserved carefully. The uprising that produced that martyrdom was recorded with considerably less care.

Zegotay and Aarazon were captured by Spanish forces afterward. They were imprisoned. The subsequent record of what happened to them is largely absent from mission museum interpretation, which tends to emphasize the rebuilding that followed rather than the resistance that prompted it.

The Spanish rebuilt the mission, moved it six miles inland to a more defensible location, and fortified it. The logic was military: a mission that had been burned once needed walls. The Kumeyaay had demonstrated that the colonial enterprise was not unopposed. The Spanish response was to make opposition more difficult, not to question whether the enterprise was legitimate.

One year later, in seventeen seventy-six, colonists on the eastern seaboard of North America would mount their own revolt against colonial authority, and the world would call it a founding act. The burning of Mission San Diego de Alcala is recorded in California as a setback in a longer story. The distinction says something about whose resistance gets to be foundational.