Santa Clara Public Memory through Plaque

Santa Clara Public Memory through Plaque

Erika Rasmussen
published via YouTube.com

I decided to go on a walk, which is something I do on a regular basis. However, in the spirit of using walking as a methodology, I decided on the fly to turn my morning walk into a walking lab, a la the inspiration of scholars Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman, who wrote that “As you amble to your destination you are still writing. You are writing in movement" (133).

So, I decided to “differentiate,” and walk a loop that stopped by the plaques I’d been looking at, which meant I had multiple destinations and would take a path I normally never would in order to complete this proactive loop. So, off I was to the first stop, the Santa Clara Women’s Club Adobe. I walk on The Alameda nearly ever day, and I’d seen the adobe before, and likely have at least skimmed the words on the plaque, but this plaque has turned so many questions over in my head since I’ve invested more thought into a very specific phrase on the plaque: “This adobe, among the oldest in Santa Clara Valley was one of the several continuous rows of homes built in 1792-1800 as dwellings for the Indian families of Mission Santa Clara.” Hold up, what? The plaque states this quote-unquote fact casually, as if it was inevitable, or kind, even, that these homes were built “as dwellings for the Indian families of the Mission.” What does that even mean? And, this is what the plaque does: it offers this information and asks an onlooker to absorb it and move on. It does not encourage questions. It is stated and meant to function as a fact, these homes were built for Indian families. Now go on with your day. The plaque, as a revered form of commemoration, is trusted—nobody suspects plaques of doing anything harmful. But what this plaque does, in saying what it says, is dissolve the space’s memory into a simplified, historicized version that both justifies whatever happened to these Native families and the Native people in the region, all at once, even though it can be assumed these “Indian families” weren’t really “of the Mission” at all. The plaque does not address any reasoning behind a need to build these people dwellings, or the perspective of the Native people in relationship with these dwellings, the Mission, and the land. The plaque says “this happened, these homes were built for these people.”

On my walk, I kept thinking about that. What are these plaques doing? They say something, and in saying that specific something, they draw away from everything else that relates to the space, that matters to the space.

The plaque in front of Mission Santa Clara shares another line that offers some semblance of Native memory that, in fact, conveys almost no memory at all: “It once had the largest Indian population of any California Mission.” Firstly, this is a sad attempt at acknowledging a Native presence and memory. Furthermore, it erases Native presence from the present itself—the language insinuates that Natives are no longer a part of this space, and not only that, but their not-belonging in this space is simply happenstance, simply the ways things are. Inevitable.

As I walked down Homestead between Junípero Serra and the Carmelite Monastery, I was thinking about plaques, and words from Bradford Vivian came up in my mind: “What is repeated is always the same.” That’s it, I thought! That’s part of what plaques do. They concretize a specific, concise version of history at the sentence level and they repeat it, again, and again, and again, for each visitor, for each read, for years, and years.

Those sentences become internalized. To the viewer, those sentences become the past. The plaque has done a consideration of the past for you, and has presented all you need to know. The plaque becomes the past. And that’s it. You keep walking.

Plaques take on an active role in our memory-making, past-invoking, future-forming processes. Before taking this project on, or delving into understanding public memory for the first time, I didn’t realize how many plaques there are in our community, doing memory work for us. But they’re everywhere.

Never before would I have considered all that the plaque was doing, and all that it failed to do.

But I want to start considering what plaques do to my sense of the past—what any commemorative objects and structures do in creating my sense of the past. And I urge other community members to do the same. Go on a walk, and ask more questions when you do.

2020-03-19T02:52:14.000Z

http://youtu.be/u78mNC5KiX8

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