The City of San Francisco has elected Supervisor London Breed as the new mayor. www.sfgate.com/…
Breed has broad support among her constituents, and she served for a time as interim mayor following the death of the widely popular Mayor Ed Lee.
London Breed’s leadership harkens back to Willie Brown and other great city leaders, but one in particular is not well known. www.californiahistoricalsociety.org/...
In the 1830s, curandera and herbalist Juana Briones set up a farm and shop at Yerba Buena, about the same time William Richardson and his wife Maria Antonia Martinez built their home there. These were the first residents of the town that would become San Francisco. Briones was born in 1802 in what is now Santa Cruz, to an Afro-Latino father and a Mestizo mother. She was part of a multicultural community in Alta California that thrived in the years between Spanish mission authority and U.S. rule.
Soon after the U.S. invaded Alta California in 1846, Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco. Facing increasing discrimination of those in her extended family, Briones moved to a ranch in what is now Palo Alto, but her daughter Presentacion continued to live in the city through the Gold Rush years. Juana Briones was a healer who cared for people regardless of their ethnicity or ability to pay. She often treated Native people, who had not previously been exposed to European diseases. She also provided refuge for Native Californians fleeing genocidal attacks by U.S. settlers. As San Francisco’s founder, Juana Briones is a fitting example for the people of San Francisco to live up to, and now the city has a leader who follows in the footsteps of this remarkable woman.
Mayor Breed has a lot of hard work ahead, and may she find the strength of her forebears as she tackles these challenges.