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    Cemeteries of San Diego
    Cemeteries of San Diego
    Cemeteries of San Diego
    Ebook199 pages1 hour

    Cemeteries of San Diego

    By Seth Mallios and David M. Caterino

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    About this ebook

    San Diego has a rich and unique cultural history that can be effectively told through the commemoration of its dead. Local cemeteries throughout the city reflect San Diego’s multiethnic cultural dynamism and pinpoint marked shifts in power from Native American to Spanish to Mexican to American governance. They also reveal the current struggle for space in a burgeoning metropolis. Graveyards, with their individually detailed and hauntingly beautiful monuments, offer an unrivaled historic yet continuous glimpse at the essence of this diverse community. The story of San Diego’s cemeteries is a telling narrative that offers remarkable insight into the evolution of “America’s Finest City.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateMar 14, 2007
    ISBN9781439618226
    Cemeteries of San Diego
    Author

    Seth Mallios

    Seth Mallios is Professor of Anthropology, University History Curator, and Director of the South Coastal Information Center at San Diego State University.

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      Book preview

      Cemeteries of San Diego - Seth Mallios

      Mallios.

      INTRODUCTION

      America’s Finest City, as San Diego has come to be known, is home to more than a million living inhabitants and perhaps 500,000 deceased. The city’s rich multicultural history and dynamic identity is reflected in its 23 cemeteries, but so is its struggle with rampant development. Of those nearly two dozen historic cemeteries, less than 50 percent still exist above ground. In the case of the others, many of the gravestones have been stolen, buried, or separated in some other unceremonious manner from the bodies they once marked. Perhaps an inevitable consequence of growing to be the nation’s eighth-largest city is a loss of touch with its humble origins and a lack of appreciation for its history. Former English prime minister William Ewart Gladstone asserted over a century ago, Show me the manner in which a nation or community cares for its dead, and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender sympathies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land and their loyalty to high ideals. The tales of San Diego’s cemeteries that fill the following pages are decidedly split. As a group, they are simultaneously tender and callous, reverent and disgraceful, honorable and illegal. For every one of the many heartwarming stories about the local citizenry opting to preserve history in the face of expansion, there are counterexamples of rampant grave-marker theft and vandalism. The ongoing ambiguity in San Diego’s relationship with its history is never more apparent than in its tumultuous treatment of its dead. One cannot help but wonder: Can San Diegans collectively balance their love of the present and their drive for the future with an appropriate respect for the past?

      This book discusses cemeteries within San Diego’s current city limits. However, the city landscape, consisting of eight large neighborhoods (Northern, Northeastern, Eastern, Western, Central, Mid-City, Southeastern, and Southern) is far from straightforward. The city has large non-city pockets (Chula Vista and Coronado are not part of San Diego, yet they are mostly surrounded by it) and far-reaching fingers (San Pasqual to the northeast and Otay Mesa to the south). It is centrally located about Mission Valley and stretches intermittently all the way from the Mexican border to Escondido (see page 2). Contiguous San Diego is bounded by Del Mar, Rancho Santa Fe, and Escondido to the north, and Poway, Santee, and El Cajon to the east. Southern San Diego is isolated from San Diego proper by Chula Vista and Coronado and is bounded to the south by Mexico. Even though the city limits have changed over time, this book uses San Diego’s official boundaries at the start of the 21st century as its area of study.

      San Diego has a long and intricate history. It has been home to an indigenous population with multiple tribal affiliations, including the Kumeyaay, Luiseño, Cupeño, and Cahuilla for approximately 7,000 to 10,000 years. This area of coastal land clustered about the 33rd parallel of north latitude was first explored by Europeans in 1542 by Spaniard Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo. Although Cabrillo’s venture came only 50 years after Columbus’s inaugural trek to the Americas, no other Westerners would land in the area until Sebastian Vizcaino’s visit in 1602. Vizcaino’s landing preceded another hiatus; history recorded no European entry into the region again until Franciscan missionary Fr. Junipero Serra began a northward expansion of Spain’s mission system in 1769. This first substantive European presence in San Diego, the Spanish Mission Period, lasted from 1769 to 1821. During these years, clerics and soldiers established a joint mission and presidio military compound in 1769, moved the mission upstream in the 1770s to access a more reliable water venue, and completed Padre Dam by 1816. Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821 marked the start of San Diego’s 27-year Mexican Period. These years witnessed the secularization and stagnation of the missions and the land granting of numerous ranchos to the close friends of high-ranking local Mexican officials. The United States acquired California as a result of war with Mexico in the late 1840s and soon thereafter established the state’s first official county at San Diego in 1850. This Early American Period, from 1848 to 1880, saw little growth for the region, although it included harbingers of the good times to come in the form of the creation of New Town in 1867 and the 1870 Julian gold rush. During San Diego’s Victorian Period, from 1880 to 1907, the area burgeoned with railroads, international expositions, a downtown business center, and an elaborate system of irrigated agriculture. The years from 1908 to 1945, San Diego’s Air and Sea Period, saw tremendous expansion of both military and commercial navigation centers, including the creation of various naval bases and the building of Charles Lindbergh’s the Spirit of St. Louis. And finally, the current Modern Period, starting in 1946, has witnessed spectacular growth for America’s Finest City.

      Even though California Native Americans occupied the area that would become San Diego for thousands of years before European arrival, this text begins with the cemeteries of 18th-century Spanish explorers and missionaries. There are thousands of Native American burials in the region, yet few are included in this text. The reason for this is simple: an overwhelming majority of these indigenous mortuary remains are part of prehistoric archaeological sites whose location must remain undisclosed to the general public for fear of looting. It would be highly ironic to lament the loss of history in a book that undermines preservation of the past. The location of these archaeological mortuary sites, in accordance with standards set forth by the secretary of the interior and others, will continue to remain confidential. However, California Native Americans who were buried in established mission cemeteries during subsequent Spanish, Mexican, and Early American Periods are included and discussed in this study.

      San Diego’s cemeteries come in many forms and, for the most part, change over time in a standardized manner. Spanish mission cemeteries were located close to the church.

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