Junípero Serra founded Mission San Diego de Alcalá on 16 July 1769 on Presidio Hill, the first link in the chain of twenty-one missions that would run to Sonoma by 1823. In August 1774 its pastor, Fr. Luis Jayme — born in Majorca in 1740 — moved it inland to its present site, nearer water and the villages of the Kumeyaay.
On the night of 4–5 November 1775 several hundred men from those villages attacked the mission, set it on fire and killed Jayme as he went out to meet them; as the mission tells it, he greeted them with the words 'Amar a Dios, hijos' — 'Love God, my children.' He is buried beneath the chancel of the mission church. Tradition remembers him as the first Christian martyr of California, but no cause has been opened for him, and the attack is also remembered as a revolt against the mission and the soldiers who came with it.
That second memory belongs here too. The missions baptised many tens of thousands of Native Californians and recorded nearly as many burials, much of the dying from epidemic disease. Native Californian scholars point out that converts were not free to leave the missions and that their labour was unpaid, and many Native communities remember the missions as conquest. When Pope Francis canonised Serra in 2015 he said that Serra 'sought to defend the dignity of the native community, to protect it from those who had mistreated and abused it', and spoke of 'mistreatment and wrongs which today still trouble us'. In 2020 statues of Serra were pulled down in San Francisco and Sacramento; the California bishops defended him, and Native Catholic and non-Catholic voices answered that the Church had still not reckoned with the missions. Both are part of what this place means.