In East Los Angeles, Toypurina stares magnetically from a mural at the Ramona Gardens public housing project, her penetrating black eyes evoking the night in 1785 when this young Indigenous woman organized men from six villages to storm Mission San Gabriel Arcángel and reclaim their ancestral land.
Northwest of East L.A., on a wall along Van Nuys Boulevard in Pacoima, Toypurina is equally radiant, but her image is more subdued, perhaps reflecting the failed revolt that night, in which many of her Native compatriots were killed and the leaders, including Toypurina, were put on trial and exiled.
On walls throughout Los Angeles, on plaques and medallions embedded in library floors, in statues that dot public spaces and galleries, Toypurina, a powerful shaman, the daughter of a village chief, and a brave warrior, is commemorated as the only woman known to have helped lead a revolt against European colonial rule on this continent.
But despite her ascendance to cultural icon among feminists and within many of Southern California’s communities of color, Toypurina’s story remains little known compared with those of Indigenous women like Sacagawea and Pocahontas, whom schoolchildren study in U.S. history classes.
“Those Native women helped the colonists—that’s why they got written about,” says Delia “Dee” Dominguez, a member of the Kitanemuk and Yowlumne tribes who gives talks on Toypurina’s legacy. “The only reason
