The story first ran in the LA Times and was written by Deborah Vankin on June 28, 2023. To read the story in full, hit here
Steven Hackel thought it was a prank at first when the call came, early in the morning: “What do you mean the church is on fire?” He raced from his Pasadena home to the 249-year-old Mission San Gabriel, which was ensconced in flames devouring the historic structure.
Hackel was not a member of the still-active parish in San Gabriel, but as a UC Riverside history professor specializing in California’s missions, he was intimately familiar with the small, on-site Mission San Gabriel Museum, which he’d been helping to steer, in various unpaid capacities, for almost a decade.
As 80 firefighters from seven cities battled the four-alarm fire, Hackel and about half a dozen others set out to rescue the museum’s collection, which the fire hadn’t yet reached. They carried out about 100 objects — Native baskets, 17th and 18th century paintings, rare books and photographs — from the museum building, which was intact but for smoke and water damage. They stored the items at a convent next door before later relocating them to proper art storage.
That terrifying experience was compounded by the timing: The fire, later determined to be arson-caused, happened on July 11, 2020.
But they felt compelled, nonetheless, to push forward and try to save the collection.
The Mission San Gabriel Museum — a new version of which opens to the public on July 1, along with the mission itself and its renovated church — may be small and little-known. But it’s critically important, Hackel says. L.A.’s Southwest Museum of the American Indian, which was inaugurated in 1907, may be slightly older; the Autry Museum of the American West may be larger, with collections totaling more than 600,000 objects and cultural materials. But the Mission San Gabriel Museum offers curated historical objects within a relevant setting, providing unique context. The mission was established in 1771, the fourth of California’s 21 Spanish missions, and the on-site museum has been in continuous operation since 1908. (Originally located in Whittier Narrows, the Mission San Gabriel was moved to its current location in 1774.)
“This is a place of memory,” Hackel says. “This is where the missionaries lived, and where Native people from distant regions — more than 7,000 of them — came and had their struggles. It’s where the human drama played out — here, on this site. And the museum helps us understand this complicated Native American and Catholic story.”
The Mission San Gabriel Museum has been shuttered for three years. But the fire proved an opportunity: With the galleries emptied out, Hackel says, the museum could rebuild from the ground up — both physically and conceptually. The museum reimagined itself in order to present a more historically accurate and inclusive picture of the Catholic mission and the Indigenous communities it colonized. This inevitably involved a reckoning with the past. Although the mission was built by Indigenous people, with about 5,600 Native Americans buried there, the Native experience had not previously been represented in the museum.
Its inaugural exhibition — “Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, 1771-1900: Natives, Missionaries, and the Birth of Catholicism in Los Angeles” — is an attempt to publicly recognize “a 250-year-long erasure of the mission’s Native history and to displace a Eurocentric understanding of the legacies of Spanish colonization and Catholic missionization,” the museum said in its opening announcement.
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Deborah Vankin is an arts and culture writer for the Los Angeles Times. In what’s never a desk job, she has live-blogged her journey across Los Angeles with the L.A. County Museum of Art’s “big rock,” scaled downtown mural scaffolding with street artist Shepard Fairey, navigated the 101 freeway tracking the 1984 Olympic mural restorations and ridden Doug Aitken’s art train through the Barstow desert. Her award-winning interviews and profiles unearth the trends, issues and personalities in L.A.’s arts scene. Her work as a writer and editor has also appeared in Variety, LA Weekly and the New York Times, among other places. Originally from Philadelphia, she’s the author of the graphic novel “Poseurs.”
