Esquire's July 2026 feature spotlights Mission Dolores curator Andrew Galvan's quest to memorialize 5,700+ Indigenous people buried in unmarked graves, as his proposed $3–4 million museum expansion remains partially funded amid the mission's 250th anniversary.

At 16th and Dolores, the bells that arrived in 1794 still hang, but the story beneath them has just gone national. Esquire's July feature, "The San Francisco Church That Holds America's Secrets," centers on Andrew Galvan, the first Native curator of a California mission, who's spent decades trying to name the more than 5,700 Indigenous people buried in unmarked graves at Mission Dolores.

The piece frames the mission's 250th anniversary not as celebration but as revelation—those secrets being the names erased from church records but preserved in Galvan's research. "Putting the Indian into the story," Galvan tells Esquire, has meant buying redwood boards from Home Depot with cousin Vincent Medina to carve the names of their ancestors Jobocme and Poylemja, now standing in the cemetery as the only markers among thousands.

But the national spotlight arrives as Galvan's larger memorial project remains stalled. He's proposing a $3–4 million museum expansion that would include a plaque naming all 5,700+ Indigenous dead, with only partial funding secured. The mission sits at 3200 16th Street, where 43 eviction notices have been filed in the Mission District in the last 90 days and 2,366 311 requests logged in the past week—a neighborhood still wrestling with the displacement patterns that began with those first forced conversions.

The Archdiocese of San Francisco marked the anniversary with an official Mass June 27, while Galvan has pushed for "commemoration" over celebration. Corinna Gould of the Sogorea Te' Land Trust, quoted in supporting coverage, says naming the dead humanizes them but adds that "the Catholic Church extensively harmed the indigenous people of California, and owes them 'some kind of reciprocity.'"

The Esquire feature lands amid ongoing tensions about who controls the narrative at the city's oldest building. Galvan's redwood memorial for two ancestors is visible to visitors, but the full list of names remains in his research files, waiting for a permanent home that the mission's current one-room museum can't accommodate. The bells still ring, but now they carry a question: which version of San Francisco's origin story gets told in the space where both were built?