The rebellion originated from both the Gabrielino people's frustration at the Spanish mission's imposition on their traditional territory, as well as their oppressive rule over their culture, language, labor, and sexual life.
By the end of October 1785, Nicolás José—a Neophyte and key figure in the 1785 rebellion— and others at the mission seem to have concluded that the ban on dances was intolerable, and that their inability to carry out their rituals jeopardized the repose of their dead relatives' spirits.
José reportedly gave her beads—as is customary to give a gift to doctors in return for their services[7] —in exchange for her calling together a meeting of unbaptized Indigenous peoples from the area.
When questioned about the attack, Toypurina responded in a stinging statement that became famous: she participated because [she hated] the padres and all of you, for living here on my native soil, for trespassing upon the land of my forefathers and despoiling our tribal domains.
I came [to the mission] to inspire the dirty cowards to fight, and not to quail at the sight of Spanish sticks that spit fire and death, nor [to] retch at the evil smell of gunsmoke—and be done with you white invaders!
According to the soldier who recorded her words, she said that she ‘‘was angry with the Padres and the others of the Mission, because they had come to live and establish themselves in her land.’’[6] Spanish officials convicted her and the three men of leading the attack.
Following the Spanish authorities’ arrest of twenty-one Gabrieliños on the night of the rebellion, four of the Indians identified by guards as revolt leaders were interrogated in early January 1786.
[6] Thomas Workman Temple II, a genealogist and descendant of some of the first Spanish residents at the mission in Alta California, was the first scholar to study testimony from the interrogation.
[9] As William Bauer writes in Toypurina, she “emerges from the historical record as a woman who not only confronted Spanish expansion in southern California but also charted a path for her survival and the endurance of her people.”[page needed] Well-known accounts of Toypurina's rebellion often depict her as a treacherous witch or seductive sorceress, including Temple's article, regarded as one of the most influential for subsequent writings on the Native woman.
Toypurina's resistance against the colonial authorities through medicine and dialogue was consistent with the women's “other means of creating counter-histories,” such as through “oral and visual traditions”.
[9] In “Engendering the History of Alta California, 1769-1848,” Antonia Castañeda suggests that “women themselves used witchcraft as a means of subverting the socio-sexual order sanctioned by religion and enshrined in the colonial honor code.
"[9] She said that using “sexualized magic to control men and subvert the male order by symbolically using their own bodies” was their way of re-asserting their power physically, in face of the overbearing colonial rule.
On either side of El Monte, Toypurina is celebrated through monumental works of public art: Raul González, Ricardo Estrada, and Joséph “Nuke” Montalvo painted a 60-by-20-foot mural entitled Conoce Tus Raíces (2009) (Spanish for “Know Your Roots”) in Boyle Heights.
One of the mural's creators characterized Toypurina as incarnating “the ultimate strength, the woman fighter, the mother who protects her children from harm at Ramona Gardens.”[10] Judy Baca, Chicana artist and Gabrieliño traditionalist, designed a 20-foot arch and a 100-foot plaza prayer mound named Danzas Indígenas (Indigenous Dances, 1993), which is installed on a Metrolink commuter train platform in Baldwin Park.
[9] Some have hinted at the irony of the memorial's location, a commuter train platform, which is typically associated with anonymity, unfamiliarity, transience, and separation of family, home, and work, in contrast with Native tribes’ communitarian organization.
After three years of being converted to Christianity at the distant mission, Toypurina takes the baptismal name Regina, returns to California and marries Don Alejandro.