A Brief History on Temescal Valley
Volume 1, Number 1
Introduction
This is the first in what will be a series of articles chronicling two intertwined journeys: the history of our community and my own experience running for California Assembly District 63 in 2025 and 2026 (you will have to beat me two years in a row). Why take on such a task? I deeply believe that there has long been a distance, sometimes quiet and sometimes pronounced, between the people of our district and the machinery of state politics. That distance has bred disconnection.
My name is Vincent Romo — I am a historian, an educator, a father, and a coach — roles rooted in listening, learning, and service. It is from those roots that I offer myself as a candidate—not to play politics but to represent and reconnect.
This campaign is not just a campaign. It is also a story I want to tell—especially to my community and students. I want them to see the civic process as it is lived: the work, the learning, the conversations, the frustrations, and the hope. I want to show what it means to try to build a bridge between community life and the political world, especially in this digital age where both connection and division happen at the speed of a scroll.
If this story resonates with you, I invite you to subscribe to my Substack below. There, I’ll share reflections on our community’s history, culture, public life, and the evolving journey of civic engagement here in California Assembly District 63.
Native Americans in Temescal Valley
Long before surveyor’s chains crossed the valley or a name like “Temescal” was written in a Spanish ledger, the land already had its keepers. The Temescal Valley—stretching from Lake Elsinore to the broad plains where Corona now stands—was home to generations of Native peoples, including the Luiseño (the name given based on their perceived association with Mission San Luis Rey) and Cahuilla, whose lives were deeply tied to the valley’s generous waters and wooded canyons.
They called this place home not by accident but by careful design. The ciénagas—broad marshlands that remained lush even in the driest seasons—provided vital water and food. Coldwater Canyon ran year-round, one of several highland streams, fed by mountain snowmelt and spring rains. Hot sulphur springs, sacred to many local tribes, rose nearby, believed to carry both spiritual and medicinal power.
Near one ciénaga stood a temescal, or sweat house—used for ritual purification, healing, and communion with the sacred. That name, temescal, later adopted by Spanish and Mexican settlers, was never meant to mark a town or a tract of land—it was a living part of the people’s cosmology.
But according to Walton Bean, one of California’s most famed historians, the term “temescal” originates from the Náhuatl language of central Mexico (the language of the Aztecs) and has no direct linguistic or cultural connection to the Indigenous peoples of California.
Either way, the sweat-house in Temescal Valley stood near a ranchería in a small Indigenous village, where daily life unfolded in rhythm with the seasons: acorns ground into meal beneath the oaks, nets thrown into mountain streams, willow shelters built in clusters, and stories passed down under starlit skies.
To the Luiseño, every hill and water source had a story. The Cahuilla, whose territory extended from the desert basin west to these hills, brought their own knowledge systems and trading networks to bear on the region’s ecology. Between the tribes, there were wars, marriages, alliances, and boundaries—defined not by fences but by understanding.
These were not isolated communities—trails wound from Temescal to the coast and eastward to the desert. Trade, ceremony, and diplomacy moved along these footpaths long before the first horse or ox touched the soil. The arrival of Spanish missions changed all that.
By the early 1800s, Mission San Luis Rey had extended its influence inland, staking spiritual and agricultural claims in distant valleys. One of its leaders, likely Father Antonio Peyrí, saw the Temescal Valley as both a pasture and a buffer. In 1818, he sent a loyal soldier, Leandro Serrano, to settle there—not merely to graze livestock but to establish order. Serrano, the son of one of Fray Junípero Serra’s early expeditionaries, had served as mayordomo at outposts like Pala and San Juan Capistrano, gaining land and trust from government officials.
The missions sought not just to convert but to reshape—replacing native cycles with Christian calendars, sacred groves with orchards. Still, even as Spanish power extended inland, Indigenous people remained the valley’s lifeblood. According to Dolores Serrano, Leandro’s daughter, there were still many Indians in the valley when her father arrived. She recalled their temescal near the big ciénaga and how her father relied on their help to organize hunts against the mountain lions and bears that roamed the region.
However, even as some Indigenous families cooperated or coexisted with the newcomers, the long arc of dispossession had begun. Their land use was not protected by legal grants or colonial favor. Over time, their villages faded. The sweat-houses were abandoned. In the vines that tangled through the creekbeds, in the wild grapes and those bright orange California poppies (eschscholzia californica) we all know and love—there was the echo of a world before fences. The first stewards had shaped this place with reverence, and even in their absence, their imprint remained.
Volume 1 Bibliography
Bean, Walton, and James J. Rawls. California: An Interpretive History. 10th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011.
Chaput, Donald. The Temescal Tin Fiasco. Southern California Quarterly 67, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 1–24. University of California Press on behalf of the Historical Society of Southern California. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41171133.
Ellerbe, Rose L. "History of Temescal Valley." Annual Publication of the Historical Society of Southern California 11, no. 3 (1920): 12–20. University of California Press on behalf of the Historical Society of Southern California. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41168778.
Gould, Janet Williams. "The Indians and Pioneers of Corona and the Temescal Valley." The Quarterly: Historical Society of Southern California 30, no. 3 (September 1948): 228–246. University of California Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41168172.
Gould, Janet Williams. "The Old Temescal Road." The Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly 41, no. 3 (September 1959): 257–260. University of California Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41169397.
Hayes, Benjamin. "San Jacinto and Temescal." Annual Publication of the Historical Society of Southern California 11, no. 3 (1920): 21–23. University of California Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41168779.
Kroeber, A. L. Shoshonean Dialects of California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1925.
DuBois, Constance Goddard. The Religion of the Luiseño Indians of Southern California. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 8, No. 3. Berkeley: The University Press, 1908.