ABSTRACT
Up and down the coast of California, there are monuments to the Indians, the Spanish, and those Mexicans who called themselves Californios. Few of those people remain in or around those monuments –– the missions, the presidios, houses of elite rancheros, and an occasional Indian site — all imaginatively restored for the tourists and school children. These peoples appear on the landscape frozen in time, remnants of a distant past, though indeed more than a million Mexican and Mexican Americans — migrants of the twentieth century — live around California. The monuments have narratives that explain the different peoples’ histories but mostly they deny, distort, or even disappear their experiences. But there are real stories haunting those places, ones that have so much to do with race and nation, identity and power.
