EL CAMINO REAL BELL REMOVAL CEREMONY

On Saturday, August 28th 2021, our community witnessed history as we attended the bell removal ceremony for the last standing “El Camino Real” mission bell located in downtown Santa Cruz. The event took place at Santa Cruz Mission/Mission Plaza Park. The event will also be live-streamed on the @removethebells Facebook page if you are unable to make it.

The City of Santa Cruz made an unanimous decision to remove all El Camino Real mission bells from public property. Amah Mutsun Tribal Band had made this request statewide, with Santa Cruz being the first city and California to start the removal, in addition to requesting the removal of all other monuments that may “glorify and celebrate the domination, dehumanization and erasure” of California’s indigenous people.

”Mission bells symbolize the enslavement of Indigenous people in the California Mission system. The El Camino Real bell markers were created in the early 1900s to promote automobile tourism and visitation of the missions and to celebrate a white-washed, romanticized and distorted history.” - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

The event began at 1pm with many great speakers from our community and was followed by a 1-mile procession at 3pm to the bell removal ceremony location. Over 100 people showed up for this event!

For information on the event, click here.

To read about how the event went, check out these great articles by the Santa Cruz Sentinel, BenitoLink, and Good Times Santa Cruz.