The Stones of la Asistencia de Santa Gertrudis

How can we relearn the history of "our" place?

The Ventura River Watershed stretches from the City of Ventura and up along the Ventura river into Nordhoff Ridge and White Ledge Peak. It is a beautiful valley with a long history. While stories usually begin with the Spanish founding Mission San Buenaventura in 1782, Chumash people have inhabited the region for thousands of years and still live there today. 

The Chumash of the Ventura river area had a deep culture that was dramatically disturbed by Spanish Mission project. Many Chumash died primarily as a result of Spanish diseases. Further, the imposed culture of the missionaries destroyed the classical way of life for Chumash people. The imposition of foreign crops and animals, new work and living practices that centered on mission life, and the forced restriction of Chumash people to the Mission grounds, disrupted indigenous practices of living, particularly food gathering and preparation that functioned within the natural limits of the watershed.

As we try to hear this story differently, we look to a small Asistencia, or chapel, of Mission San Buenaventura to follow this alternative narrative. The Santa Gertrudis Asistencia was located about six miles up the Ventura River Valley from the Mission, near what has become/is known as Foster Park. The Santa Gertrudis Asistencia was believed to be founded between 1804 -1808 and it served as a support chapel to Mission San Buenaventura.

Chumash labor built the mission, asistencias, and aqueduct of the area, yet typical Mission history usually highlights the Spanish role and perspective as some time of colonial adventure, while the labor and stories of the Indigenous Peoples who were and are the foundation of what California has come to be are downplayed, ignored, or forgotten. Yet, even the story of the Spanish presence is lost in pressure of the United States progress narrative.

The Asistencia site was used to oversee the Chumash who worked on building and maintaining the Mission aqueduct which ran seven miles up the valley and brought water down to the Mission. The Asistencia also served as the main worship site for the Mission after earthquakes damaged the Mission in 1812. In 1818 it became a place a refuge away from the Mission and the possibility of invasion by Captain Hippolyte de Bouchard. The Spanish left the Asistencia in 1837 with the secularization of the California Missions. Yet, a Chumash community continued to reside around the Asistencia until 1868. Their woven dome homes, called aps, prompted the naming of the area as Casitas, or little houses, by settlers. Casitas remains a town today, on California highway 33, and this name was also given to Lake Casitas, a dam constructed lake formed in 1959. By the 1880’s the Asistencia was in ruins, as roof tiles were taken to build the Ortega Adobe in Ventura.

By the twentieth century, the location and remains of the Asistencia were lost. In the early 1960s Mike Pulido, a foreman working on a bean field on Cañada Ranch, found the low wall and remains of the Asistencia. With his rediscovery of the site and the Route 33 highway project coming up the valley, a team of archaeologists had three months to “salvage” the site before the highway covered it.

Today, this Spanish site of worship and control, this Chumash location of community and effort is buried under Route 33. A marker stands against the freeway, 500 feet from the site of the Asistencia.

Perhaps because it was not a grand site, the state project bulldozed over this history. This interwoven story became merely foundation for quicker commutes and trips to the Ojai Valley.

While the Asistencia is lost, we wonder how we can re-vision this lost site, this present roadway. There are still stories in the stones. Santa Gertrudis is buried, but remains of the aqueduct still stand. What can they teach us? We look for lessons. The aqueduct, built to control the river, crumbles, torn by the flooding waters it sought to control. Yet, the flow of the Ventura river mirrors the disintegrating aqueduct. It once flowed heavily and strong, now it trickles. The presence and history of the river fades against the push of our modern lives.

The grandness of the San Buenaventura remains, a church and museum, and symbolically it is understood as pointing to the Spanish story in California, not the Chumash hands and backs that constructed it, that fed it, who became the church. We strive to remember what the ruins of Santa Gertrudis and the aqueduct have taught us.

The name Casitas can help us remember. Recovering the vision of Santa Gertrudis can hep us remember. Today, Carol Pulido, Mike Polio’s daughter-in-law, remembers. Carol, a Ventureño Chumash Indian, works to preserve historical Chumash sites. She cares for the remains of unearthed Chumash bodies and pauses the story of progress which would bulldoze over them. We see her and learn how to remember from her.

She tells her children, "The biggest thing that I'm going to leave you, that I can give you is that you know exactly where you came from. And who you are inside. That's going to be your gift.” And we just might learn more about our own story in the place for her gift.