2026 Archival City Featured Essay
by Deborah A. Miranda
Native poetics has never been lost . . . our stories never stopped, which is the queerness embedded into Native storytelling. We did not need to be reborn. We were always becoming . . . The work of the writer, the poet, is to walk ahead of the people. To be in constant emergence.—Jake Skeets, Diné, Black Streak Wood, born for Water’s Edge, from his talk “Emergence & Becoming—Framing Native Poetics Beyond the Renaissance.”
Mission San Antonio de Padua baptism #01307 death #610 January 1786 age: about 40. “Udalrico” [no Native name reported] [We do not speak the names of the dead] “un gentil llamado Joya” [“Joya” their word, not ours for a sacred being neither male nor female] “el Indio Balthazar Cordero haver bautizado en varias rancherias algunos que hallo constituidos en grave peligro muerte” Balthazar, an Indian, baptized this “joya” in danger of dying [he gave you a good name] [even if it was Spanish] [“Wolf Ruler”] [You must have been a powerful being] age at death 40
You think you know what lies beneath your city: dirt, stones, bedrock, bulldozed hills trucked in for fill, even the garbage of your own civilization (or the remnants of someone else’s).
But layers of history are written not in any alphabet but with the weight of time, fallen trees, the debris of Earth making her Self. Somewhere in there, in that deep foundation, lay the bones of everyone—every being—who’s ever lived. Imagine that! Bones of animals, bones of plants, bones of cities beneath our cities.
[Beneath your city is where you keep all your secrets.]
[Beneath your city is an Archive of Stories you’ve never tapped.]
It’s not that you haven’t explored; it’s not that you haven’t dug your way deep into cemeteries, middens, tombs; it’s not that you haven’t uprooted mountains, collected skeletons of those who came before: Tyrannosaurus, Neanderthal, Romans, Indians. It’s not that you haven’t put them on display in museums for your children to witness your strength and ingenuity.
You’ve done all that.
Some things you dig up, inspect, then hastily rebury. Some things, you let stay buried. Things you don’t want to see the light of day; things you can’t bear to see. Truths you are afraid to hold in your hands, lest they be infectious. Because, if you know those truths, they might change you. [They might change how you carry yourselves in the world.] [Or how the world carries you.]
Sometimes the bones beneath your cities have that much power. The consequences of seeing those truths are to understand something crucial about the human capacity for cruelty, and self-inflicted amnesia.
Your kind are record-keepers, a culture that believes in documentation—in accounting books and ledgers, reports of experimental studies, statistics. Systems of classification are the treasures of empire.
The Nazi regime wrote down the names of each person taken into their death camps and assigned a number to each human who made it past the initial, brutal winnowing at the gate: tattooed that number on the skin of those chosen to survive a little longer. Each number, a catalogue of achievement; a number that made order out of chaos; one more “undesirable” carefully accounted for, enumerated, burned like so much trash.
In the United States, you like to think of shameful records like those existing only in the foundations of other nations. Less civilized, less democratic nations that do not value the humanity in other peoples. Indigenous peoples here in your own country will tell you differently.
Similar registers were kept in the state currently called California. From San Diego to Sonoma, twenty-one Spanish missions where a combination of Catholic priests from the Franciscan sect and undisciplined, brutal soldiers of mixed Spanish, Mexican, and African origins, “converted” [enslaved] [incarcerated] [colonized] Indigenous people from 1769 to 1834. As the priests baptized each Indian, they also assigned that person a number and a name. [Because if you want to own something, or someone, you need to organize it into your colonial archive, and label it accordingly to indicate it is your possession]
[“conversion”: first achieved with small gifts—glass beads, the novelty of religious paintings] [loss of personal sovereignty and freedom] [floggings] [leg irons] [withholding food] [shaming] [executions]
Mission San Carlos de Borromeo baptism #1048 January 21st, 1785 age: 1 day “Fructuoso de Jesus” [Cholom] “cuio bautismo se completan 1000 Yndios bautizados / with this baptism, 1000 Indians have been baptized” marriage #00642 burial #unknown date of death unknown [around 1845] [my great-great-great-great-great grandfather]
Yes, these missionaries also took it upon themselves to number and re-name each Indigenous person in their Baptism ledgers. The number documented each “catch” [“in the apostolic and evangelical net”]; the name, a traditional Spanish name to replace the individual’s Indigenous name. Afterwards, Indigenous names were no longer part of the official record. Later, priests wrote only the Spanish names in each mission’s collection of Marriage and Burial ledgers. It was as if the Indigenous names needed to be recorded solely to emphasize their deletion. [Removed, like a wart or a mutation] [Erased] [like languages] [like ceremonial dances] [like familial relationships]
These missions are the underpinnings of California settler identity. Subsequent generations of city planners have mythologized the signature of architectural “mission heritage” to the point that homes, businesses, hospitals, post offices, hotels, even grocery stores, imitate the curved red clay roof tiles, “stucco” walls, adobe bricks, mission bell campanarios and arches. [The false foundations of a state, of history.]
All the while, the bones of the peoples Indigenous to this same land go begging [settlers use skulls as ashtrays] Cemeteries [mass graves] full of Indigenous ancestors bulldozed by those who “renovate” the missions to create parking lots for tourists, sacred land groomed for golf courses, housing developments [bones rise up to the surface of construction sites daily] [Indigenous bones stored by the thousands beneath UC Berkeley’s Hearst Gymnasium swimming pool] [bones warehoused in museums and anthropological collections of universities all over the state]
There was still another labor of identity erasure for those hard-working Franciscans to check off their list. The foundations of California cities are built over the bones, lives and memories of an identity that the Spanish priests encountered and, in fear and loathing, attempted to obliterate: a third gender. [neither female nor male] This, priests could not comprehend or even attempt to understand. They called these people “joyas.” [each language had its own endearment] The priests, however, used their own descriptors [slurs] such as “amafrodita,” “amugereado,” “nefando pecado.” [Hermaphrodite] [Womanly Man] [The Heinous Sin] Marriage between male and female, mandatory in the missions. Bearing and siring children, mandatory. [Hermaphrodite] [Womanly Man] [The Heinous Sin]
Mission La Purisima Concepcion baptism #01326 May 19th, 1800 age: infant “Geminiano” [no native name given] marked as “male” at birth marriage #00869 November 11th, 1818
“Geminiano, alias La Joya” this person does not hide their identity even when forced to marry a woman [the mission needs laborers] (second) marriage #01047 around 1835 baptism of a 14-day-old girl named Olivia “father is a joya” [the missions need laborers] “Geminiano” born and raised within the mission system [punished] [flogged] [stripped naked] [re-gendered] and yet this individual still presents to the priest at the time of their child’s baptism as a recognizable “Joya” [dressing acting living as a woman] [what does it mean to claim a third gender identity within mission walls?] [under the reality of: conform or bear a soldier’s flogging?] [priests demand childless Indigenous couples copulate in front of them] [refusal means flogging] [imprisonment] [shackles] [public shaming rituals] perhaps their spouse had a lover outside her marriage who fathered her child [a common form of resistance by women] “Geminiano” burial #02950 sometime in July 1844 a measles epidemic lasts five months age at death 44 [even on their burial record “joya”] [we will remember / know] [this story] [with all of the pain that bleeds from the telling] [their courage remains] [buried] [just out of our sight]
Mission Santa Barbara baptism #02569 June 14th, 1803 age: 54 “Pastor” [Quitsemehuit] “Joya” death #1646 January 1808 “murio de repente sin sacramentos he died suddenly without sacraments” [suddenly] [violent] [how?] age at death 59
Mission San Fernando baptism #00918 February 19th, 1803 age: 66 “Pablo” [no Native name given] [“joya”] death #00239 August 5th or 6th, 1803 age at death 66
Mission San Jose baptism #03681 January 10th, 1818 age: 22 “Luis Antonio” [Yonequichs] “Joya bad name and worst role [the priest wrote] Homines et jumenta salvabit Dominus The Lord will save men and beasts/animals What is to be done! I gave the name Luis Antonio before that he was called Yonequichs” burial #03110 March 2nd, 1824 [“soltero” single never married] [beast/animal] age at death 28
Mission Santa Barbara baptism # 04128 July 29th, 1819 age: 33 “Victor Maria” [Liuixucat] “Joya” [“soltero unmarried”] burial #02854 August 5th, 1821 [“soltero”] age at death 40
Mission San Juan Bautista baptism #03120 May 7th, 1822 age: 28 “Tarbula” [Chalmiti] “adulto hermofrodita…vestido como muger, cuio nombre de Sta tiere” “Sta tiere = Stand Back (Latin)” “utei-Tonthro (Latin = Thunder)” but “dresses like a woman” “Tarbula” [Tarbula = Persian saint] [virgin] [Christian martyr] [noted for her beauty] [the priest gave a woman’s name to this person] [the priest gave a woman’s name to this person] burial #unknown age at death unknown
Mission San Rafael baptism #00902 October 15th, 1823 age: 50 “Zacarias” [Ossamicha] [“un hermafrodita … en la lengua de ellos Coya”] [“a hermaphrodite … in their language Coya”] burial #unknown age at death unknown
Mission San Jose baptism #04733 December 17th, 1823 age: 32 “Robustiano” [Yautaya] “Joya o amugereado” death #04779 July 23rd, 1832 age at death 42
Mission San Francisco Solano baptism #00977 July 5th, 1832 age: 45 “Viador” [Coutesi] “amafrodita, o Joya” death #unknown age at death unknown
Mission San Juan Bautista baptism #03555 April 5th, 1826 age: 28 “Briena” (probably meant Virena) [Cocthiths] “hermafrodita” “there are four hermaphrodites in the mission” “Virena: integrity” [the name of Saint Verena] [early female Christian martyr] [consecrated virgin] [what priest chose this woman’s name for a “joya”?] [for a third gender person dressed as a woman?] [who marked them with the feminine ‘india’?] [Cocthiths] [so suave so sure so powerful] burial #unknown age at death unknown
The origins and meaning of the word “joya” remain a mystery. Was it a Spanish adaptation of “Coya,” which the priest at Mission San Rafael wrote as the local Indigenous word “Coya”? Was it meant as a joke, a play on the Spanish word “joya” (jewels), meaning “family jewels,” and scathing sarcasm for the reverence and honor given to third gender people by their own communities?
“Joya” is a word invented by perplexed priests determined to exterminate the third gender people who provided crucial portals between life and death for Indigenous peoples in “Alta California,” whose spiritual responsibilities and guidance were never glimpsed by those Spaniards, let alone understood. Joya is not a terrible word. But I will say those Indigenous titles—endearments—of our homelands:
In the wake of his administration’s threat-induced elimination of gender-affirming health care for trans people, the 47th President of the United States shares a post on social media that uses the inverted pink triangle patches—made infamous by Nazis as the mark of shame that all homosexuals must wear on their clothing. The President’s mouthpiece then, white South African Elon Musk, gives a Heil Hitler salute after speaking.
[foundations crack] [groan] [whisper] [beneath us]
These are people who remember only parts of history. They reenact the foundations which this nation’s forefathers laid like bricks: genocide and enslavement, homophobia and racism, theft and lies. Our “leaders” feel no shame as they purge their websites of words they can’t bear to hear, whole sections of websites that attest to the presence of anyone not white, not heterosexual, not “pure.” Of people who have invented, sacrificed, honored the flag, are buried in Arlington National Cemetery as heroes, who fought for justice, grew a nation out of—and despite of—a foundation made of theft, genocide, and enslavement.
These acts are the 21st century equivalent of burning books, burning down archives, destroying the statues of previous rulers, scratching out their names engraved in stone.
[scatter these words] [like sparks?] [like spells]
These so-called leaders feel only the drug-like rush of power in having their every command obeyed by sycophants and lackeys, an ecstasy of erasure, the deceptive siren of destruction.
[As a queer, Indigenous, woman, I am triply deleted.]
Beneath that layer of history—the layer of antisemitism and hatred—older layers still speak.
[Whose bones are buried beneath Mar a Lago?]
[buried beneath Washington, D.C.?]
Foundations don’t just crumble. Sometimes they rise up; the Earth heaves, volcanos erupt, mudslides and avalanches rampage. Tsunamis tower and cleanse. We exist. We will always exist, because we are a part of you.
We are not a separate species; we are not a different or “inferior version” of you. We are you. We come back in your children and grandchildren. We come back in the choices we make. We come back because we are not simply bodies you have labeled, but spirits. We are history, but not past, not extinct. We are the part of yourselves that you can never outrun, outgun, outrace. We will always be with you, hidden or out, silent or flagrant. [We do not require resurrection to exist we are never gone]
When you seek to destroy us, you destroy the best parts of yourselves, beautiful parts, powerful parts. [Choose your own analogy: shoot yourself in the foot. hoist by your own petard.] What you do to us, you do to yourselves, to your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
And there you’ll be, standing on a bridge that leads nowhere. How can a culture that eats its young hope to have a future?
[technologies of power are erasure]
California tribal peoples did not have a system of writing—we relied, instead, on oral literatures and extraordinary memories. No Indigenous-authored written records from missionization exist—but we have work of a Rumsen-English woman named Isabel Meadows.
Isabel was born in Carmel Valley in 1846, ten years after California missions were secularized, and three years before the Gold Rush. Her mother, Loreta Onesima (San Carlos baptism #03061, December 10, 1817), carried an Indigenous lineage that went back thousands of years; her father was an Englishman named James Meadows.
In her mid-80s, Smithsonian Ethnologist John P. Harrington “discovered” Isabel. [“native informant”] Isabel, a consultant of equal stature and greater expertise, proved so important that Harrington asked her to come to Washington D. C. with him to continue their scholarly partnership. She died there at the age of 96 in 1939, far from home.
She left behind thousands of pages of stories, housed in the Smithsonian archives.
A translator of sorts, a bridge by which another world might be glimpsed, heard, witnessed, Isabel told Harrington, “If I had known how to write, I would have written up the life of those Indians.”
Isabel spoke; Harrington took dictation.
Through Isabel we hear this story about my relative, my cousin. Child of my 5x great-aunt, Estefana.
Mission San Carlos Borromeo [Carmel Mission] baptism #04700 age: 7 days March 4, 1846 death #unknown burial #unknown Nestor Bitoreano Antonio Real-Acedo [if you had an Indigenous name,
your mother did not reveal it] —known as Victor— [a Rumsen/Esselen person who, in a previous time, would have been a member of the elite class the missionaries called “joyas”] [those people responsible for spiritual balance cherished for their strength living and working side-by-side with the women marrying men of high status] [instead, now, born into scandal and illegitimacy] [the priest wrote the name of another priest in as your father] [“Razon … parvulo de Real”] Victor, I follow your trail through the Archives of Colonization, find you find us
Translation:
(Isabel March 1937) “…Estefana had a son, Victor Acedo, who was a faggot. The old lady Estefana never said nothing, or she didn’t know, maybe, that her son, Victor, was a faggot.”
“Joto”: Spanish slang for a person with same-sex [homosexual] [pansy] [gay] [queer] [faggot] orientation.
At six years of age, Victor, you appear in the 1852 census living with your mother and her husband in Monterey In the 1860 census, you are twelve years old “servant” in the Clay household Next, I find you enlisting as a private at Monterey on March 10, 1865 mustered into Company B, 1st Battalion, Native California Cavalry described as a ranchero ranch hand black eyes black hair “copper complexion” 5’3 ½” tall 18 years old Company B, noted for their horsemanship and flair; ranchero vaquero with a sword.
You desert five months later, in Arizona [your captain writes: “Thermometer every day in the shade 113 to 116, wind none. Scorpions thick as molasses, flies … Es imposible dar una descripcion de este punto”] but return to your company desertion forgiven muster out in March 1866 . . . I can’t find you, Victor . . . 1883 you register to vote in Monterey occupation: “laborer” 1896 Monterey Cypress Newspaper: “[Snively] … told the cook, Victor Acedo, that he was not feeling well … Acedo found the deceased lying across the bed, apparently asleep … “ (Isabel tells Harrington, “Vitor Acedo, Snively’s cook, used to put up abalone in mason jars”) where did you go, cousin? 1900 U. S. Census: you board with the Manuel Lewis family “single” able to read NO able to write NO speaks English YES occupation: cook 54 years old
No death record no burial record You are poor queer [joto] Indian you disappear you are disappeared
In a white man’s historical collection, I find one precious photograph
“Victor Acedo” you stand beside your first cousin, Quito Cantúa hands in coat pockets feet close together as if standing at attention drooping mustache the fashion of the times hair combed. just a little bit wavy you are dark solemn guarded The photograph is a postcard often sold to tourists [“Monterey Natives”] Isabel’s comment: “Vitor Acedo … what a name. Era muy acedo surely” born in the same year same town you and she might have known one another “acedo”—sour I would not blame you for that, cousin who could blame you for all that has been taken from you?
Diving into the untapped Archive of Stories, I find you, Victor: a queer ancestor born into the aftermath of devastation and gendercide who made a life for himself, learned an occupation, earned a living as a cook.
Behind you rises a genealogy of powerful, spiritual third-gender ancestors. And ahead of you? We continue. We give ourselves a new name: Two Spirit. Like you, Victor, there is no one to teach us how to fulfill the roles our communities need so much, are so hungry to learn. We swim in the Archive. We dream. We make mistakes. We refuse the slurs. We search for the songs, the dances, the language that will allow us to communicate with the sacred. We grow stronger.
And who are “we”? We are those whose bodies, lives and words are becoming archive. An archive that cannot be buried, denied, or disappeared.
[we are always emerging]
SLAG GLASS CITY · Volume 12 · June 2026
Header image by Ripoll, Franciscan Fathers, Montgomery, Ross
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