Becoming Visible: The Resurgence of Tongva Identity in Los Angeles Diego Frankel + Jacob Yeh

BECOMING VISIBLE

The Resurgence of Tongva Identity in Los Angeles

Writing by Diego Frankel Photography by Jacob Yeh

The city of Los Angeles is a unique dream, one that tramples over the city’s previous lives. Today, LA is praised as a cultural melting pot, boasting a variety of ethnic enclaves ranging from Little Armenia to El Salvador Corridor. But what is now the incredibly diverse world capital of media was built by forcibly, violently removing a population from the land and narrative of American triumph.

The Tongva are the original inhabitants of the Los Angeles basin. Their words appear on maps – Topanga, Cucamonga, Cahuenga – but their cultural presence is largely erased from public memory. Yet in the face of the erasure, there are many Tongva descendents reclaiming their narrative, searching through a sea of records to confirm their heritage, and reviving old practices.

Josh Andujo works for numerous organizations: a veteran-owned coffee company, another that takes low-income kids backpacking and hiking, and one where he teaches firearm safety on weekends.

Growing up, he wasn’t very concerned with his cultural identity. “I always identified as American,” he said. Some of his family would have said Mexican or Chicano, but Andujo understands that his family didn’t move – the borders did.

“We’ve always been in Montebello,” Andujo said. His family worked in the brick and oil industries that dominated the area even before the city was incorporated in 1920. Andujo’s great grandparents formed and played for the first Hispanic baseball and softball teams in Montebello. They also helped desegregate some of Montebello’s public spaces, advocating to allow Hispanic and Black people into the public pool every day of the week rather than a designated Monday, known as ‘Mexican Day.’

Still residing in Montebello, Andujo said he feels a strong connection to his home.

The first and last time he heard about Native Americans in school was in fourth grade when he did a project on the Spanish missions. It wasn’t until 2016, when Andujo was 22, that he learned about his Indigenous ancestry.

He found out as his paternal grandmother was dying. Toward the end of her life, she started to lose her mental faculties — among them, the ability to speak English and Spanish. Instead, she started communicating through a strange combination of sounds. “We thought she was losing it,” Andujo said, but then his aunt stepped in and told him that she was speaking Apache. He ominously mentioned that her husband, Josh’s grandfather, “didn’t want her speaking the language.”

Andujo started asking questions, and found out that his father’s side of the family was Chiricahua Apache, from the San Carlos Apache Reservation in Arizona. Later, he was able to trace his heritage to the Bedonkohe band and found that some of his ancestors rode alongside Geronimo (a famous Apache warrior from the Apache-US conflicts in the mid to late 1800s). On his mother’s side, nobody said more than “we’re L.A Indian” until Andujo got to speak with his grandmother’s cousin, who started telling him more of his Tongva history.

In 2018, Josh attended Moompetam, an annual event at the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific celebrating California’s Indigenous maritime cultures (Moompetam means ‘People of the Saltwater’ in Tongva). There, he met his future mentor who advised him that if he wanted to join the tribe, he would need to show proof of “anything that’s going to trace back to the San Gabriel Mission.”

There, he met his future mentor who explained to him the process of joining the tribe, which is intimately tied to ancestral suffering. Andujo had to show proof of “anything that’s going to trace back to the San Gabriel Mission.” Baptismal records are the most common, as they document Tongva who were connected to the Mission and stand as testimony to the violence they were subjected to.

With the help of his grandmother’s cousin, Josh searched through the Gabrieleño Mission’s archives, now held and digitized through the Huntington Library, to find records of his family.

Andujo struck gold. He was able to quickly find evidence of his family that traced back to not only the San Gabriel Mission, but his ancestral village. He now knows his family came from the village Shevaanga, located in what is today Montebello. He was also able to find his family names before they were given the name Contreras.

Three years later, Andujo is now a tribal dancer and constantly learning more about Tongva culture. Other tribe members have told him he’s a rising star, confirmed by the significance of his naming ceremony. He was given the name Strong Standing Oak. For the Tongva, the oak tree symbolizes strength and survival due to its ability to survive tough conditions. Oak trees provide food and shelter, both of which Andujo also provides for his family. In addition to the name, he spoke to how impactful the ceremony had been for him.

It was back in June of 2020, a few months into the pandemic. Andujo knew the ceremony would be small, and the few tribe members who would attend and perform the ceremony told him to meet them at a house he visited regularly for trainings. When he arrived, they told him they were going into the mountains. Traditionally, the Tongva had held their naming ceremonies in the mountains, but were forced to stop by the Spanish in the 1700s. Andujo’s was the first naming ceremony held there in over 300 years. ‘How do you feel?’ they asked him afterward. “I feel good. I feel accepted. I feel, I feel Tongva now,” he responded.

The other tribe members have told Andujo he’s incredibly lucky to have traced his lineage in such a short amount of time. Many of the elders who have been researching their family’s histories for much longer haven’t been able to find their village. “I still haven’t even met anyone who descends from my village either,” Andujo said. A lot of people are actually surprised that he is from Shevaanga since it’s so close to the original San Gabriel mission, the Mission Vieja. “Not many made it out,” he said.

There are a lot of remarkable things about Andujo’s story, but many are common within the community. Like Andujo, many Tongva have submerged their identities under Chicanx or Latinx, as previous generations mixed and found it less burdensome to assimilate.

Another Tongva tribe member, Julia Bogany, said “it skips a generation.” It was her grandmother who got her a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) card when Bogany was born in Santa Monica in 1948. The BIA is a federal agency responsible for laws and policies related to Native Americans, including providing funds for healthcare, housing, food, and education to federally recognized, card-holding Native Americans in need. Two years later, her grandmother passed away, and eleven years after that, when she was 13, Bogany’s mother handed her a BIA card.

Bogany said she probably would have identified as Chicana growing up, though she didn’t give it much thought. Her mother was Tongva and Acjachemen (a tribe from the San Diego area), and her dad was “Azteca and Spaniard.”

Bogany’s father once tried to sever her legal ties to the Tongva tribe. Bogany believes he was motivated more by internal family arguments rather than a broader anti-Native sentiment, but even so, it fits a trend of Tongva identities being made invisible. Without telling Bogany, her father went directly to the Tongva chief to ask that she be unenrolled from the tribe. She expressed a sense of conflict, knowing that her father knew more about her heritage than he let on. He knew who her chief was, “but it’s not something they told you,” she explains. Fortunately for Bogany, the chief refused.

Bogany was raised Catholic but doesn’t identify as Catholic. In Catholic school, she said she was disappointed in how local history was presented. “When I was in Catholic school we didn’t learn about the missions. We learned about the crusades,” she said. “My ancestors died building those missions.”

Today, Bogany is the cultural consultant for the Tongva tribe and sits on the tribal council. She maintains a website (tobevisible.org) and does an impressive range of other jobs ranging from sitting in on federal negotiations around Indian Health (specifically child welfare and mental health) to teaching the Tongva language and crafts such as basket weaving and soap stone carving, to supervising doctoral theses in the greater LA area. Bogany’s website says that “her calendar is a full year ahead of time.”

Bogany also maintains a close relationship with the San Gabriel Mission and often gives talks there to discuss the genocide that happened there, though today’s mission is actually a few miles away from the original one that was built near Andujo’s ancestral village. That one sat on the bank of the LA River, but was damaged by flooding around 250 years ago and relocated to where it sits today.

Bogany also works with priests at the Mission, in a surprisingly fruitful relationship. “[They] say ‘we’re happy you’re not angry.’ I’m not, because it’s a healing process,” she said, demonstrating an incredible capacity for compassion.

It wasn’t an easy or fast journey, though. Bogany has been working as the tribe’s cultural consultant for thirty four years, ever since she joined the tribe in 1987. She was 39 when she decided to attend a Tongva tribe meeting at La Casa– a church, Catholic school and community center in San Gabriel. When she arrived, she opened a door that set off a fire alarm. “I don’t know who you are but you made a grand entrance,” a tribe member later told her. But the day was marked by joy, not embarrassment. “All of a sudden from having just me and my children. ... I had like 300 cousins in one day,” she said. One of those cousins is now Andujo, though they refer to each other as aunt and nephew.

Bogany took on the role of cultural consultant shortly after she joined the tribe. “I started buying, like, every book that had the word ‘Tongva.’ Sometimes it was just a word on a map,” she said, laughing. She started working in universities, including USC, creating presentations on Tongva history, which she still gives today.

Bogany also spoke on the interesting relationship between the Tongva and other Native Americans that were brought to L.A. Most came in the 1950s, as the result of a program known as ‘Relocation,’ which involved the Bureau of Indian Affairs relocating Native Americans away from their tribal lands and integrating them into urban environments. This policy culminated in the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, which freighted Native Americans into urban centers, away from their reservations or tribal lands in an attempt to assimilate them into American life and erase their cultures.

The Native Americans who were brought to Los Angeles “don’t know we’re here,” Bogany said, “because they’re thinking they’re coming to the promised land and, [there] couldn’t be no Indians there because they’re bringing us.” Additionally, like Bogany’s, Tongva identities at this point had largely been submerged under Chicanx identities. This was just one of the ways Bogany said Tongva people felt invisible.

Five years ago, Bogany’s great granddaughter asked her what it felt like to be a Tongva woman. Bogany replied, “I feel invisible.” Even at 10 years old, her great granddaughter was taken aback. “That’s how I feel,” she said. Now, Bogany laughs at the “trouble” her daughter causes, fully aware of and vocal about her Tongva roots. “Now your job,” Bogany tells her, “is to teach the next seven generations.”

Bogany also works with Indian Health in a few different capacities. “I sit on the roundtable for ICWA [Indian Child Welfare Act] in children’s court in Los Angeles.” She said it’s important to just have another Native voice supporting the children. She wrote and now teaches the curriculum at Riverside San Bernardino Indian Health on mental health for Native Americans.

“Maybe we didn’t all deal with the same things, but there’s issues down deeper. There’s trauma that’s been going on for years,” Bogany said. She wants social workers to understand the traumas that Native Americans especially deal with.

Bogany also strives to create more room for Tongva youth in higher education systems. When a young Tongva member asked if college was for them, she replied, “As long as my foot’s in the door, it’s for you.”

To complete her already bursting resume, Bogany said she “still [researches] everything under the sun.” She’s constantly creating new presentations, and one of her latest projects is a book on important Tongva women. Among them is Azusa, a Tongva healer for whom Bogany was trying to find more sources, but kept hitting a wall. Eventually, someone came to one of Bogany’s book signings and told her he didn’t know why, but he felt he had to come see her. He flipped through the pages and saw Azusa, solving the riddle for Bogany. He pointed her to sources on a woman named “Blessed Miracle,” the translation of “Azusa.”

The other women in the book include the L.A. Water Woman, the first Tongva woman to work for the LA Department of Water and Power DWP — you can find her statue on the Gold Line, Lincoln Heights/Cypress Park station — and the La Brea Tar Pit Woman, a partial skeleton recovered in 1914 whose digital reimaginings startled Julia, who pulled up an image of her daughter. “They look exactly alike!” Bogany said.

The work that Bogany does is nothing short of amazing. Her work, as she is happy to tell you, is and has always been rooted in love. Not only for her family or for Tongva people, but for everyone. Her compassion and motivation are infectious– a quality you want from someone at the forefront of the discussion on how to move forward while acknowledging our past.

Bogany didn’t completely transition away from Christianity though. While Andujo had grown disillusioned with the church, Bogany became a Pentacostal minister.

Again fighting any one-dimensional characterizations of her narrative, Bogany offered a piece of wisdom. “History happens to all of us,” she said smiling, reclining in her desk chair, settling into comfort in the presence of conflict.

Diego Frankel is a student at the University of Southern California currently pursuing a degree in Computational Linguistics.

Jacob Yeh is an Pasadena-born and Los Angeles-based photographer who specializes in portraiture and abstract photography. He enjoys cinema, music, and most recently, cooking. Jacob studies Communications and minors in Cinematic Arts and Media Studies at the University of Southern California.