Juan Bautista de Anza Trail Guide
and Audio CD Project
In
keeping with his interest in education and public service,
Sol Ideas founder Greg P. Smestad, Ph.D. has developed a trail
guide for the Juan Bautista National Historic Trail. This
project was carried out in conjunction with the National Park
Service and Los Californianos.
Dr. Smestad received Federal Challenge Cost Share Program
(CCSP) funds from the National Park Service to develop the
innovative trail guide. The work was undertaken in collaboration
with American Indians, musicians, historians and many other
people. The project features an audio compact disk (CD) that
contains sounds and songs relevant to the story of the trail.
What was produced from the work is in the public domain and
freely available to anyone. For more information, see the
online Anza Trail Guide.
Go
to the About
the CD and Music page in the Anza Trail Guide website
to listen to a few audio clips from the project. (That page
will open in a new window.)
The project included and acknowledged the contributions of
the Native American and Hispanic communities that shaped the
early development of California and Arizona. The Trail Guide
combined maps, text and an audio CD so that it is useful for
those who want to enjoy the trail while learning about it.
The intent of the Trail Guide and CD is to provide portable
interpretation of the trail that can be used in a variety
of ways to raise awareness of how this trail affected the
early Spanish colonization of the west. The Anza trail was
voted by Congress as one of the 16 U.S. millennium trails,
and is the only one on the west coast.
Greg is an eighth
generation "Californio" descendant of several members
of the 1775-76 Anza expedition (i.e. Apolinario Bernal, Luis
Maria Peralta, Juan Salvio Pacheco, Ygnacio Soto and Barbara
Espinosa, Maria Josepha Soto, and José Antonio Sanchez).
His maternal line also contains several Native American ancestors.
In May 2017, the California Frontier Project interviewed Sol Ideas' principal, Greg Bernal-Mendoza Smestad about Los Californios (the descendants of the de Anza Expedition). Read the blog post for Podcast Episode 002 "You Have to Carry This On": What it Means to be a Californio with host Damian Bacich and guest Greg Bernal-Mendoza Smestad. Listen to just the interview:
Watch a video of a
KTEH
TV show, from the This is Us series, first presented on September 27, 2009, about
the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail and Greg
Smestad.
As part of his continuing interest in his Californio heritage, Greg was also involved in documenting and preserving the remarkable story of Juana Briones, whose mother came to California with the Anza expedition. Unfortunately, her house — one of the earliest in the area of Palo Alto, California — was torn down. Learn more.
