"In the 18th and 19th centuries, Mission San Gabriel - long before it became a tourist mecca or the modern parish that it is today-was at the center of the collission and blending of Native and European culture and religion.  The history of those encounters reverberates to this very day.  It was here, one might argue, where California actually began, in the interations of people foreign to one another, in their struggles to understand one another, to live and pray alongside one another, to learn from one another, and to create something new together."  Steven Hackel, Historian