Mission San Gabriel Arcangel

This is Tovaangar, and this mission sits on it. The Tongva village of Toviscanga stood where the Franciscans planted the fourth of the twenty-one Alta California missions, founded on September 8, 1771 under Junipero Serra's direction and moved to this spot in 1775 after floods. What followed was not a partnership. Tongva people were brought into the mission system and made to build and run it, and the Spanish renamed them Gabrieleno after the place that took their labor; some descendants today carry the ancestral name Kizh. More Native people were baptized here than at any other mission, roughly twenty-five thousand before secularization in 1834, and about six thousand are buried in the Campo Santo beside the church, the oldest cemetery in Los Angeles, marked now by a memorial. In 1785 Toypurina, a Tongva medicine woman, joined Nicolas Jose in planning a revolt against the mission, one grievance being an order forbidding the people their own dances; the rising was stopped and she was exiled north. The church itself is unlike the other missions, a fortress of capped buttresses and a long unbroken wall, designed by Antonio Cruzado and finished in 1805, its lines borrowed from Moorish Spain. An arson fire on July 11, 2020 destroyed the roof and gutted the interior. It reopened on July 1, 2023, rebuilt, with a reworked museum that says considerably more about the people who built it than the old one did. Route 66 passed close by, on its way toward Pasadena and the Colorado Street Bridge.