SANTA ANA, CA — Over the weekend, the City of Santa Ana officially unveiled a new Chinatown Memorial at the corner of 3rd and Bush streets. The monument features a detailed historical map and a plaque dedicated to correcting a dark piece of municipal history. In May 1906, city leaders weaponized a manufactured public health scare—falsely claiming a resident had leprosy—as a pretext to unanimously vote to burn the entire neighborhood to the ground for an “urban renewal” project. Over 1,000 residents cheered as homes and businesses were destroyed, forcing the Chinese community out with zero compensation.
Following a formal council resolution, this new physical monument stands as a vital and necessary step toward municipal accountability. Yet, as city leaders rightly atone for the racist actions of 120 years ago, a glaring omission remains: the city has never made any effort to formally apologize for, or even publicly monument, the original and far larger theft of the very land Santa Ana is built upon.
The Erased History of the Acjachemen and Tongva
Long before the Spanish land grants or the incorporation of Santa Ana, this region was the thriving homeland of the Acjachemen (Juaneño) and Tongva (Gabrieleño) nations. These tribes maintained deep spiritual, cultural, and ecological relationships with the land, managing the area’s natural resources for thousands of years.
The theft of their land was not a single event, but a multi-tiered campaign of violent displacement:
- The Mission System Collapse: Beginning with the Spanish Portolá expedition in 1769, local Indigenous populations were forced into the Spanish mission system (primarily Mission San Juan Capistrano and Mission San Gabriel). Under the guise of assimilation, tribes faced forced labor, the brutal suppression of their languages and religions, and devastating European diseases that decimated their populations.
- The Mexican Land Grants: Following secularization, rather than returning the land to its rightful Indigenous stewards, the Mexican government carved up the region into massive private ranchos. The land Santa Ana occupies today was stripped away via the Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana grant, pushing local tribes entirely off their traditional hunting and gathering grounds.
- The Sovereign Erasure: When California transitioned to American statehood, the federal government negotiated 18 treaties with California tribes in 1851–1852, promising them millions of acres of reservations. Instead of honoring them, the U.S. Senate hid the treaties in secret archives, leaving local tribes landless, legally unprotected, and unrecognized.
Institutional Shifts: The Case of the Bowers Museum
This pattern of selective remembering and literal erasure isn’t confined to city hall; it is mirrored in Santa Ana’s premier cultural institutions. Consider the evolution of the Bowers Museum, located just north of downtown…