A smiling bride embraces her jubilant groom outside the Santa Barbara Courthouse. Loved ones rejoice around the newlyweds, while tourists speaking in foreign European tongues smile in amusement.
On the walls of the historical courtroom, where “I do”s are exchanged, lies sanitized imagery of Spanish colonization. All around the judge’s chair and the public benches, the courtroom’s painted murals depict indigenous people as embracing the arrival of Spanish sailors.
Just two blocks down at El Presidio de Santa Bárbara State Historic Park, which was a former Spanish government fort, a plaque informs its visitors of a revisionist historical narrative that intentionally evades the atrocities of Spanish colonialism. The Presidio’s plaque reads that it was: “ … built by soldiers with the assistance of native Chumash Indians.” There was no such assistance. Instead, native Chumash Indians faced indentured servitude vis-a-vis forced christianization and physical punishment.
However, this history of colonization is not foreign to the Americas. U.S. scholars, such as Nikole Hannah Jones, date the transcontinental institution of slavery back to 1619, when the first ship from Africa arrived in what was then Colonial Virginia.
Marriages and other significant celebrations taking place on former Southern slavery plantations have made national headlines. They’ve been as a topic of contention within an already politically polarized United States. Indeed, the notion of holding one’s most important ceremony in life on a historical space that once was the site of rape, genocide, colonization, and slavery, is what led Jade Magnus Ogunnaike, the 2019 interim senior campaign director of Color of Change, to successfully lobby Pinterest and The Knot to no longer promote plantation weddings.
However, historians estimate that about 95-98 percent of indigenous people were exterminated through war, famine, disease, indentured work, and cultural erasure at the hands of Western European colonizers. An estimated 12 million-18 million indigenous people existed in 1492, but by 1890, 250,000 remained throughout South, Central and North America. Yet, virtually every month, Santa Barbara’s Courthouse is filled with weddings and most recently the city celebrated its much talked about annual Spanish “Fiestas.”
Although Santa Barbara was under Spanish rule for less than a half-century, the distinct architecture still dominates its landscape. During the early 20th-century Spanish Colonial Revival Phase, architects throughout California incorporated exaggerated Colonial and Mission elements while developing cities. The architecture glorifies Spanish settlers and erases the Chumash history of the land, while demonstrating Eurocentrism in its exploitation of the Moorish features inherent in Spanish architecture.
Colonial-style buildings are ubiquitous in the modern Californian vernacular, although it is unclear whether residents and visitors are aware of their origins.
Spain has its own history of conquest. The Islamic Moorish empire of North Africa conquered the Iberian Peninsula and ruled for 800 years, which is longer than the Spanish colonization of the Americas. They left a cultural and genetic imprint on Spain, which colonizers brought over to the New World.
During a six-week-long summer research project through UCSB’s Summer Sessions Research Mentorship Program, our research team captured photos of architectural features in downtown Santa Barbara and analyzed them through historian Patrick Wolfe’s framework of settler colonialism. Wolfe argues that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, that depends on the continuous repression of the native people. The elimination logic of settler colonies enables them to erase indigenous culture while normalizing their own colonial identity in the land. Once the native peoples are removed from their communities and contained within the new colonial society — in California’s case, through being adapted into mission life — the practical logic of elimination leads to assimilating institutions like boarding schools, resocialization, and the cultural appropriation of indigenous motifs for a new colonial society’s identity.
Indeed, we found red tiles and white stucco, the hallmark of Spanish Colonial Revival elements, in all of the downtown area’s 24 blocks, from residential to public and business sites. Moorish features, especially zellige tiles of various colors and vegetal patterns, were used frequently as decoration throughout the city’s streets even in seemingly trivial areas such as stairs and benches. Decorative stucco and symmetric fountains were common in larger buildings. Some had arbitrarily placed singular domes or towers on roofs; for instance, the tower that is part of the famous Arlington Theatre. Cumulatively, they represent an appropriation of Spain’s orientalist cultural influences, which sociologist Alber Fu investigated in his case study of Los Angeles Malls in 2011.
Lastly, we recognize the local native tribes, who have utilized “Fiestas” as a site of resistance to bring about awareness, share pride and knowledge of their cultures beyond Spanish colonization. For instance, the grand marshal of the 2023 Fiesta Parade was an elder of the Barbareño Chumash community — for the first time ever.
In 2021, Indio Muerto Street (“dead Indian” in Spanish) was renamed in Chumash language to Hutash, or “Mother Earth,” thanks to local native activists and their supporters. We urge city lawmakers to enact similar types of changes, such as updating its monuments to illuminate this history of genocide. Lastly, Spanish culture is not a monolith and one that should not be glorified akin to the slavery plantation systems of the South. But we will leave that up to the reader to decide.
Edward Reyes is a PhD student at UC Santa Barbara’s Chicana/o Studies Department. The photos are by Reyes and his research assistant Yejee Hwang.