This story was reported for K Onda KQED, a monthly newsletter focused on the Bay Area’s Latinx community. Click here to subscribe.
I have a hard time imagining San Francisco when it was founded 250 years ago. Few people inhabited the hilly, foggy landscape. Mission Dolores, officially Misión San Francisco de Asís, was a small chapel made of adobe — the only original intact building from that time.
Construction on the Presidio was just beginning. Most of the inhabitants were Indigenous people and some Spanish families who came this far north in Alta California because they had few options elsewhere.
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San Francisco was more of an undesirable, remote village than the bewitching metropolis it is now.
As our nation nears what’s being called our 250th birthday — the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence — I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a citizen of this nation now in the Bay Area, which was not even part of the United States in 1776. At the time, California was part of the Spanish colony that would later become Mexico.
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