CUPERTINO — De Anza College is the latest Bay Area institution where students, faculty and community members are pushing for a name change to honor indigenous people who were harmed and pushed out by Spanish colonizers several centuries ago.
Founded in 1967, De Anza College was named after Juan Bautista de Anza — an 18th century Spanish military officer who led two expeditions to California. The first from Spanish-controlled Mexico, which is now Arizona, to Southern California, and a second from the south to the San Francisco Bay where he established a presidio and a mission.
Students, faculty and staff from the college recently began circulating a petition asking administrators to consider changing the De Anza name, which they said “covers up the disaster that he and the process of Spanish colonization would bring upon the indigenous people.”
“The missions soon became bases from which the Spanish priests and military officers could exercise control over the surrounding land, disrupting the environment and indigenous ways of life, thus forcing indigenous peoples to seek food and shelter in the missions,” the petition said. “Once there, Native people were forbidden to leave the missions and their traditional cultures were severely limited.”
The petition comes as schools across California named after historical figures linked to racism and white supremacy have reckoned with whether to change their names. But many of those efforts have been met with backlash from community members, stalling the process or ending it entirely.
In late 2020 and early 2021, the San Francisco Unified School District proposed to change the name of 44 schools — including ones named after George Washington, Junipero Serra and Abraham Lincoln. The board ultimately suspended its efforts, passing a resolution that said it “wishes to avoid the distraction and wasteful expenditure of public funds in frivolous litigation.”
Cabrillo College in Aptos also had gone through a multi-year process over the name change, but last month its board voted to delay making any changes until 2028, citing a need to education the community more.
Quirina Geary, the chairperson of the Tamien Nation — the tribe indigenous to the Santa Clara Valley — said no academic institution should support people like Anza.
She told the Mercury News that excerpts from Anza’s journal portrayed him and other Spanish military officers beating indigenous people.
“As an educational institution they need to do their due diligence, understand who you’re elevating,” she said. “They have all the resources at their finger tips to do this research and figure out if they think it’s warranted, and it is. These spaces have been erased. We’d like to see some of those spaces renamed to reflect indigenous perspectives.”
When asked whether the college would be open to discussing a name change, De Anza spokesperson Marisa Spatafore said in an email, “the group is more than welcome to engage in conversation on this issue and any other topic.”
Spatafore added that last year De Anza College changed its mascot from the Dons — a Spanish word used to reflect a title of nobility — to a mountain lion named Roary.
Patrick Ahrens, the president of the Foothill De Anza College Board of Trustee, said he also welcomes any type of dialogue on the campus.
“I think there’s clearly students, faculty and staff who are studying the issue,” he said. “It hasn’t come before the board or engaged in that way but I am aware of surrounding community colleges that are looking into these issues.”
He added that the change of mascot was “welcome news” and was a “process that took a lot of student, faculty, staff and community input.”
Sherwin Mendoza, a part-time faculty member at De Anza College who is advocating for administrators to consider the name change, said their efforts were inspired by Cabrillo College’s own process. He said he hopes their petition urges education officials to create their own college-sanctioned task to explore the issue.
As a Filipino American whose Christian family moved to Mindanao he feels a sense of responsibility as Christina Filipinos relocated south to the island, displacing Muslims and other indigenous people.
“I feel like I have an obligation to try to do my part in correcting these past wrongs that were committed against indigenous people by settlers,” he said.
Mendoza said their group has yet to decide when to deliver the petition to administrators, but hopes to decide that soon.
Geary, whose people have lived in the region long before Spanish colonizers arrived in the 1700s, attributes pushback in other communities about renaming schools due to a lack of understanding. She said most people probably don’t know who Anza is and wouldn’t support someone who “ordered brutality on another culture.”
“We need to be able to have a constant reminder of the people who were there for thousands of years,” Geary said. “It’s only been colonized for a couple of hundreds of years.”