IN September 1841 a wagon train arrived in Los Angeles, completing a long and dusty journey from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Following a route then becoming quite popular for U.S., European, and New Mexican traders, this particular caravan brought immigrants as well as products. Twenty-three heads of families, some born in New Mexico and the rest born in the United States, along with nearly eighty family members, Indians, and others, had come to make Los Angeles their home. John Rowland and William Workman, who would become prominent landowners and merchants in the city, led the party. Another member, Tennessee-born Benjamin Davis Wilson, had established a trading house on his home state’s Indian frontier before moving to New Mexico in 1833. Eight years later, increasing violence among New Mexicans and between New Mexicans and Indians sent Wilson packing for China by way of California. While struggling to arrange his Pacific voyage, Wilson received “so much kindness from the native Californians” that he “arrived at the conclusion that there was no place in the world where I could enjoy more true happiness and true friendship than among them.”1 So he scrapped his plans and stayed in Los Angeles.
In 1843 Wilson bought a ranch from Juan Bandini in present-day Riverside and in 1844 married Ramona Yorba, daughter of Don Bernardo Yorba. Wilson, often called Don Benito, rose in economic and political status in Los Angeles. He served as both alcalde and ayuntamiento member in the Mexican period, then as mayor and common councilman in the 1850s.2 Reflecting on his political experience in Mexican Los Angeles, Wilson remarked, “There were no courts, no juries, no lawyers, nor any need of them … [because] the people were honest and hospitable, and their word was as good as their bond—indeed, bonds and notes of hand were entirely unknown among the natives.”3 Wilson’s words and the sentiment they convey suggest the extent to which he became inculcated into and embraced the nuances of Mexican Californian civic, social, and commercial culture.
Beginning in the 1820s, foreigners, including Abel Stearns, Jonathan Temple, and William Wolfskill, participated in family, economic, and political life in Mexican Los Angeles. Although only twenty-five or so expatriates lived in California before 1840, Wilson and others swelled the foreign ranks in Los Angeles to fifty-three by 1844.4 Stearns, Temple, Wolfskill, Wilson, and others in Los Angeles joined nearly two hundred other U.S. immigrants in deciding to marry Mexican Californian women between the early 1820s and 1846. Intermarriage produced “shared cultural systems of kinship,” allowed U.S. and European immigrants to “tie themselves” into Californian communities socially and legally, and “implied a whole complex of gendered, race, class, and economic relationships” between husbands, wives, and their extended families.5 Counter to folk and scholarly traditions claiming californio fathers pursued immigrant males as husbands for their daughters, the cultural and legal contours of Angeleno society suggest the opposite: immigrant men from the United States and Europe pursued relationships—as often as not with genuine affection for their californiana and vecina spouses—that involved a more reciprocal exchange between their own commercial connections and their californio and vecino fathers-in-law’s economic and political resources.6 Moreover, an ongoing surge in immigration from the United States and Europe coincided with tumultuous times, including but not limited to political instability within Mexican California, national uncertainties growing out of the Mexican-American War, and the subsequent annexation of California to the United States. The foreign-born population of Los Angeles rose from 53 in 1844 to 395 in 1850 (in a total population of 1,610), then grew to 2,316 in 1860 (in a total population of 4,385).7 The combination of fluid demographics and geopolitical imperatives provoked rapidly evolving and increasingly complicated dynamics in the realms of identity, space, and municipal power.
Rather than generating answers and creating a sharp break, the Mexican-American War instead stood in the middle of a longer period during which Angelenos confronted questions regarding family, economy, and public policy. Such questions arose neither independently of each other nor in a landscape marked by singular power structures. Mexican Californians had already spent decades forging locally specific strategies for reckoning race and making public policy, and the previous experiences most immigrants from the United States brought with them proved critically asymmetrical to those then operating in Los Angeles. As explored in the previous chapter, Mexican Californians developed civic ideals that claimed to look first to the overall health of the community when considering policy questions, even though their definition of community rarely included Indians or recent, poor immigrants from Mexico. Nevertheless, when resolving issues related to land, water, and the use of public space, collective rights held sway over individual claims. By comparison, civic ideals in the United States held individuals in greater esteem than communities and privileged individual claims to entities such as water and land. These differences reflected still deeper ideological divisions regarding the state’s role in society. Creating another key axis of difference, Mexican Californians and U.S. immigrants deployed very different race-making strategies. Mexican Californians made racial judgments based on a nexus of factors, including behavior, dress, status, and ancestry. Phenotype never served as determinative of one’s standing. Immigrants from the United States, many of whom hailed from the South, saw things very differently. Skin tone stood above all other measures of a person’s social worth and, according to popular thinking, not only indicated but also dictated behavior.8 For Protestant male immigrants from the United States, race and civic ideals often fused. In particular, they understood the pursuit of “private property, aggressive entrepreneurship,” individual reputation, and “capital accumulation” as key to their standing as white men. Nevertheless, these notions of race and manliness had not yet become static, and “personal and business success demanded accommodation to local conditions,” setting the context for intercultural innovation.9
These critical differences suggest that Angelenos, like others in Mexico’s far northern frontier and later the southwestern United States, lived in overlapping social, legal, political, and spatial borderlands. The many asymmetries complicated how various constituencies understood the substance and products of their interactions. In particular, this chapter explores engagements among immigrants and resident Angelenos in the contexts of family, work, society, and municipal politics, with an eye to the variety and scope of both exchanges and their outcomes. Immigrant integration into Mexican Los Angeles affords a glimpse of an increasingly intercultural community. The Mexican-American War provoked specific crises in social relations, and the solutions Angelenos sought contributed to an ongoing fluidity in the realms of identity and public policy. When the United States annexed Los Angeles, the social, economic, and legal traditions that first arrived in newcomers’ bodies gained geopolitical weight. Angelenos subsequently renegotiated practices regarding land, water, and the rule of law while continuing to wrestle with issues regarding identity and power. The choices they made reveal much about the substance and texture of the local arrangements they forged as they found ways forward together.
A limited reading of the encounters between rancheros, vecinos, and visitors from the United States could easily lead to the conclusion that no hope existed for positive and productive relations between them. Although many notable californios and vecinos had familial and commercial ties to certain immigrants, some nevertheless opposed granting residence to all newcomers and feared that if too many of the wrong sort arrived they would one day threaten Mexico’s sovereignty.10 Governor Juan Alvarado openly lamented that those who arrived after 1841 proved more adversarial than their predecessors. Pío Pico felt himself and his countrymen “threatened by hordes of Yankee immigrants” whose ambition could not be checked.11
Some travelers from the United States who became famous for publishing accounts of their visits to California held their hosts in even lower regard. Often they failed to understand local racial practices that distinguished Indians, cholos, vecinos, and californios. Lansford Hastings, who in 1841 published the popular Emigrants Guide to Oregon and California, told his readers that “although there is a great variety, and dissimilarity among” California residents “in reference to their complexions, yet in their beastly habits and an entire want of all moral principle, as well as a perfect destitution of all intelligence, there appears to be a perfect similarity.”12 Thomas Jefferson Farnham wrote, in Life, Adventures, and Travels in California, that Mexican Californians who “by courtesy are called white” were in fact “a light clear bronze; not white, as they themselves quite erroneously imagine.” Moreover, rancheros’ and vecinos’ mixed blood retained “the Indian laziness” and left them only “somewhat humanized” and a “poor apology of European extraction.”13
Extending the failure of whiteness without to an absence of whiteness within, travel writers condemned Mexican Californians for dubious intelligence, poor behavior, and deficient work habits. Hastings counted “ignorance and its concomitant, superstition, together with suspicion and superciliousness” as hallmarks “of the Mexican character. More indomitable ignorance does not prevail,” he wrote, “among any people who make the least pretensions to civilization; in truth, they are scarcely a visible grade, in the scale of intelligence, above the barbarous tribes by whom they are surrounded.”14 Not to be outdone, Farnham railed that although “no country in the world possesses so fine a climate, coupled with so productive a soil,” Mexican Californians refused to accept nature’s invitation “to the noblest and richest rewards of honorable toil.” Instead, they preferred to “sleep, and smoke, and hum some tune of Castilian laziness.”15 In short, Hastings and Farnham—among many—branded Mexican Californians racially brown, economically backward, and culturally impoverished. Or, in Farnham’s words, “the Californians are an imbecile, pusillanimous, race of men, and unfit to control the destinies of the beautiful country.”16
Travel tales like these became immensely popular among U.S. citizens living east of the Rocky Mountains. Even though Hastings, Farnham, and others curiously described all Mexican Californians in terms similar to those deployed by californios and vecinos to racialize indios and cholos, their assessments of Mexican Californians’ color and culture echoed prevalent U.S. stereotypes that denigrated eastern North American Indians. Most people who read these stories, moreover, had never visited Los Angeles or encountered people from Mexico. Consequently they lacked prior knowledge with which to mediate what they read. Travel writers seized this opportunity to liberally shape outsiders’ imaginations of the city and to recreate Los Angeles as they wished by painting a picture of a city populated by docile, easily dominated brown children onto blank canvases.17
Literary cultural assassinations notwithstanding, many visitors from the United States and Europe sharply disagreed with the travel writers by settling in Los Angeles and becoming thoroughly immersed in the city’s cultural, economic, and political life. During the 1820s and 1830s, a handful of Yankee newcomers integrated themselves into the Los Angeles community. Abel Stearns, a successful hide and tallow trader, settled in the city. Cave Couts also entered Los Angeles as a merchant trader. Immigrants Julian J. Williams, William Wolf-skill, J. S. Guana, Lemuel Carpenter, Moses Carson, William Chard, J. Isaac Williams, and John Marsh all applied to the ayuntamiento for naturalization in the 1830s, and many of them also requested pueblo house and farm lots. At least three Europeans, John Daniel Ferguson from Ireland, John Louis Vignes from France, and Juan Bautista Leandri, an Italian, joined them. Most of these men had initially visited Los Angeles as commercial agents before settling in the pueblo. Some plied the overland route between Los Angeles and Santa Fe, exchanging blankets and serapes for horses and mules; some trapped and traded fur; and others arrived aboard ships calling at California’s ports to trade for hides and tallow.18 After 1840, more and more immigrants arrived as part of traveling parties. The Rowland-Workman party, which included B. D. Wilson, arrived in 1841 from Santa Fe, to be followed by similar parties traveling along the same route each year thereafter; others drifted south from Oregon, as part of the Hastings and other parties. Carpenter, Carson, Couts, Stearns, Temple, Wilson, both Williamses, and Wolfskill married women from prominent ranchero families. Several applied for Mexican citizenship, which entailed conversion to Catholicism. Even those who didn’t worked pueblo lands, spoke Spanish, dressed according to local custom, and answered to Hispanicized names.19 Although meaning it disparagingly, Richard Henry Dana observed that these men and their California wives raised their children “as Spaniards, in every respect.”20
Based on their work and family connections, many immigrant men became incorporated into Los Angeles’s elite echelons. Over time, they became practitioners and beneficiaries of both local civic ideals and the emergent racial hierarchy. This happened passively and actively, as the newcomers received pueblo lands, gained acceptance as members of the gente de razón, engaged in trade, controlled Indian labor, and served as municipal officers. For example, Isaac Williams married María de Jesús Lugo in 1841. As a wedding gift, Antonio María Lugo, María de Jesús’s father, offered the five-league Rancho Santa Ana del Chino and 4,000 animals. Two years later, the couple acquired three adjacent leagues and controlled a massive rancho on which “they employed nearly eighty” Indians.21 Clearly, Williams had not only become enmeshed in californio familial and economic structures but quickly learned to control Gabrielino labor. Absorbed into families, invested in the pueblo’s future, and engaged in its life, these newcomers integrated into the social, political, and economic worlds of Los Angeles. Enacting and validating their high social standing, they played key roles in the city’s economy and held public office.22
Abel Stearns’s history in Los Angeles offers one example of the ways U.S. immigrants became enmeshed in local life. Stearns spent his childhood in New England. Orphaned at age twelve, he went to sea. During the 1820s he controlled a ship that traded with the Spanish colonies and later with the independent nation of Mexico. In 1826 Stearns moved to Mexico, living first in Vera Cruz and then in the Mexican capital of Tepic. He became a naturalized Mexican citizen in 1828 (renouncing his U.S. citizenship) and moved to Los Angeles later that year. He quickly became one of the city’s most notable merchants.23
Stearns’s work trading cowhides and tallow connected him to an extensive commercial community. Merchant ship captains anchored their large boats in ports near populated areas. Smaller detachments sailed up and down the coast seeking out trading partners. Using the main ship as a base, merchants sent goods ashore to be traded out of warehouses and set up onboard trading rooms to receive customers who rowed out in turns. Most of these vessels remained in port for a full year, by which time their ships’ holds had filled with as many as 40,000 hides.24 Ranchers sent more than 1 million hides around Cape Horn to the eastern United States and Europe between 1822 and 1844. In exchange, they took home over a million U.S. dollars in luxury goods, making the hide and tallow trade critical to the development of both the ranchero economy and local racial thinking. The trade offered elite Mexican Californians an outlet for their vast herds, a reason to increase their stock and control Indian and Mexican labor, and the finished items (furnishings, décor, and dress) that distinguished californios from vecinos, cholos, and indios.
Laws regulating animal slaughter paid no attention to the comings and goings of merchant ships, impeding easy trade. As an alternative to a system of credit and collections, Stearns built a warehouse near San Pedro. There he did a brisk business, carrying on a year-round trade with ranchers and merchant ships. He bought and sold hides, tallow, and finished goods and always had plenty of room to store surplus on site.25 In this way, the sailing Stearns became a merchant middleman and resident. He realized a substantial fortune in cash and goods, and his warehouse business greatly facilitated the city’s economic growth. In 1841, Stearns married fourteen-year-old Doña Arcadia Bandini, a member of an elite ranchero family.26 They lived together in Los Angeles, a block away from the Plaza, until Stearns died in 1871.
Stearns’s ascendancy in business, however successful, didn’t flow smoothly. He twice faced spurious charges for fomenting rebellion, once endured Governor Mariano Chico’s threat to hang him, and suffered severe facial stabbing wounds during a row with a local saloon owner, William Day, over a few barrels of vinegared wine.27 He also faced charges for smuggling goods in and out of his San Pedro warehouse under cover of darkness to avoid paying duties.28 The Los Angeles ayuntamiento defended Stearns and explained, “the interests of this community demand the up-building of a settlement on the beach of San Pedro where traders can supply themselves with provisions and merchandise.”29 Unsullied by the charges, Stearns served as syndico (treasurer) to the ayuntamiento the following year. During his tenure in office and afterward, he surveyed lands, participated in plans to regularize the Plaza, and worked as a census taker for the city.
Other immigrants who settled, worked, and joined families in Los Angeles held public office. The Italian Leandri served as alcalde in 1840, and B. D. Wilson held the office in 1845–46, up until the U.S. invasion. Considering the communal basis for governance, these settlers had to have become familiar with Mexican Californian civic ideals to succeed in making laws, granting lands, distributing water, and mediating disputes. When Angelenos elected immigrants from the United States to office, they placed a great deal of faith in erstwhile newcomers to act like informed and enlightened locals. Legal historian David Langum has concluded that in executing their responsibilities, these foreigners “were indistinguishable in their action from the Natives.”30 Stearns, Leandri, and Wilson were only three among several settlers to hold such positions. Evidently, Angelenos trusted these newcomers to share their beliefs, values, and interests. Otherwise, they would not have shared power so willingly.
Immigrants didn’t need to hold office to become enmeshed in civic ideals and the exercise of law. Jonathan, or Juan, Temple immigrated to San Diego in 1826 and moved to Los Angeles in 1827. He became a naturalized citizen of Mexico, opened Los Angeles’s first store, and married Rafaela Cota in 1830. In 1836, before immigrants began to arrive in great numbers, Temple hosted the first, and seemingly only, vigilance committee in Spanish and Mexican Californian history. As one of the group of sixty-eight male Angelenos (of whom fourteen, including Temple, had been born outside California and subsequently naturalized as citizens), Temple lynched Grevacio Alipás and María del Rosario Villa. Two years earlier, Villa had walked out on her husband, Domingo Felix, after he committed adultery. Villa then took up with Alipás, while Felix pursued formal, state-sanctioned reconciliation. In March 1836, Alcalde Manuel Requeña apprehended Villa, coerced her to reconcile with Felix, and sent the seemingly reunited spouses home together. A few weeks later, however, authorities found Felix’s dead body. Alipás had intercepted Villa and Felix before they ever reached their house, fought with Felix, and stabbed him to death. Villa helped Alipás hide Felix’s body. Claiming that capital criminals rarely received justice in California, but more likely seeking to reimpose patriarchal authority over a couple that severely violated both moral and gender norms, French immigrant Victor Prudon and California-born Manuel Arzaga demanded that the couple be formally tried and executed. When the ayuntamiento demurred, citing Mexican laws dictating that death penalties had to be authorized by Mexico City, Prudon, Arzaga, and others incorporated as the Junta Defensora de Seguridad Publico. They condemned the couple in a mock trial, in particular citing Señora Villa’s actions as a sign of moral decay and a harbinger of anarchy. The junta forwarded its manifesto to the ayuntamiento and formed an armed party. Lacking the will to anger so many prominent citizens, the ayuntamiento acquiesced to the vigilantes’ demands. Alcalde Requeña, however, did not. The armed group subsequently stormed both the jail and a private home where Villa had been incarcerated, executed the lovers by firing squad, and then disbanded. Since many of the vigilantes had recently immigrated to Los Angeles, the episode suggests that newcomers could speedily build alliances with established residents, join together in exercising male authority over women, and practice intercultural community justice.31
Newcomers from the United States also had to navigate foreign and unfamiliar rules governing the relations between individuals, land, water, and the municipality. In conformity with Spanish and Mexican law, pueblo lands served as the means by which residents provided for themselves and the community, rather than offering an opportunity for capital accumulation and profit. Consequently, titles to pueblo lands ensured continued use rather than inalienable private ownership. Like other Angelenos, immigrants seeking house and farm lots had to make improvements in order to secure such titles, then uphold the reciprocal relationship they entered into with both the municipal corporation and the community by doing so. By maintaining structures, building fences, and sharing the produce of their agricultural labors, immigrants integrated into pueblo life. Workman, Rowland, Wolfskill, and Wilson, among others, did so successfully.32 Angelenos employed an even stricter notion of communal rights, as opposed to private ownership, regarding the municipal waters. Occasionally immigrants ran afoul of these communal principles and provoked stern reprimands from municipal officers, which clarified civic ideals. When Lemuel Carpenter and Richard Laughlin pursued damages from the city for causing “serious injury” to their property by allowing Antonio Franco Coronel to draw irrigation waters over their land, the ayuntamiento chastised them for erroneously believing themselves in “ownership [of] an element which in no way should be in the hands of two or three persons.” When Carpenter and Laughlin appealed directly to Governor Pío Pico, the ayuntamiento characterized any claim to the absolute ownership of land or water as “unreal and fabulous” and reminded Pico that the “bylaws of this town since its foundation” made clear that the municipal lands and waters were “used by everybody” and did “not belong to anyone in particular.” Beyond persuading Pico, their statement offered Laughlin, Carpenter, and any other immigrant a clear expression of communal rights.33
Disputes like these, however, arose only infrequently during the 1840s and early 1850s. A few isolated incidents of friction did not undermine cooperation and innovation in the estimation and implementation of local policy regarding land and water. In contrast to the sneering racial and cultural judgments offered by the travel writers, U.S. immigrants through the early 1840s pursued, entered, integrated into, and prospered within Los Angeles’s californio and vecino communities. In particular, intermarried couples became “an accepted feature of the social landscape.” Intermarriage served as a “social language in which Spanish-Mexican, Indian, and Euro-American” participants exchanged “desired cultural capital” in the form “mercantile connections” for “landholding rights.” Although intermarriage produced more stable, middling families than stunning financial success stories, the practice nevertheless connected newcomers into Mexican Californian and intercultural social and economic networks.34 Similarly, those who failed to connect with the community remained vulnerable to arrest and deportation as allegedly vagrant and dangerous immigrants, leaving them in a situation not unlike that faced by Mexican immigrants regarded locally as cholos.35 The majority of immigrant ranchers, farmers, skilled craftsmen, and traders, however, forged an intercultural community with Mexican Californians, integrated into the community, found readily available land and economic opportunity, and became enmeshed in social and political life.36 Locals and immigrants worked together to forge a new basis for accumulating wealth and displaying their shared high status, and newcomers generally observed local practices regarding public policy, as both private citizens and public servants. Despite the travel writers’ accounts and some Angelenos’ worries about the United States’ penchant for naked imperial aggression, a stable, cooperative, intercultural community emerged in Los Angeles by 1845. Before the Mexican-American War, before California’s annexation to the United States, Angelenos born in different nations engaged familial, social, commercial, and political relationships that rested on intercultural innovations in the realms of race, space, and civic ideals.
The Mexican-American War surely tested this intercultural community’s foundations. Although few, the moments of fighting in and around Los Angeles raised new questions about future cooperation in the realms of social and public life, especially for those whose national loyalties became clouded by mixed family and business relationships. Between 1846 and 1850—a period that began with the U.S. Army’s arrival in Los Angeles and during which the United States annexed California—developments in the realms of municipal authority and public power offer key terrain upon which to explore the strength and creative force of local intercultural relationships. Continuing to cooperate in the wake of two military occupations interrupted by a local rebellion would certainly require commitment and effort, both in basic innovation and emotional maturity.
The arrival of an invading army destabilized all sorts of relationships in Los Angeles. At first, Angelenos accepted the U.S. occupation of their city. However, Captain Archibald Gillespie’s subsequent maltreatment of the locals provoked a brief but divisive and successful rebellion (September 1846–January 1847), which restored Mexican Californians to power and disrupted hopes among U.S. supporters for an easy victory. The war and rebellion left numerous Angeleno families, especially those that had both U.S.- and California-born members, in an awkward situation. Rafaela Cota, wife of John Temple, sent arms from her husband’s store to rebel leaders Serbulo Varela and María Flores.37 Others, including B. D. Wilson, Isaac Williams, Louis Robidoux, Miguel Blanco (Michael White), and John Rowland, had been mustered into a “California Battalion” upon Commodore Stockton’s arrival in Los Angeles. While on a hunting trip outside the city and unaware of Flores’s and Varela’s uprising, the group found itself pinned down by the rebels at Williams’s Chino Ranch. Wilson, Williams, Robidoux, Blanco, and Rowland had all become naturalized Mexican citizens and married Mexican women before the war. As Rancho Santa Ana del Chino’s owner, Williams found himself in a particular pickle. In 1841 he had married María de Jesús Lugo and received the rancho as a wedding gift from his father-in-law, Antonio María Lugo. In September 1846 he and his brother-in-law, Vicente Lugo, suddenly stood facing each other at arms on family property. During a brief siege, Vicente Lugo and the rebels set fire to Williams’s house; his children—Vicente Lugo’s nieces and nephews—cried out from the house their uncle had set ablaze to roust the battalion. Although the Mexican Californians permitted Williams to remain at liberty, they took Wilson, Rowland, Robidoux, and Blanco—all of whom had Mexican wives and mixed children—as prisoners of war and required them to promise complete neutrality before releasing them.38 Clearly the war had complicated established intercultural relationships by imperiling those who chose one side or the other.
The uprising ended peacefully on January 13, 1847, when Mexican Californian and U.S. officials signed a peace treaty at Campo Cahuenga. The rebels received favorable terms and many hoped that a smooth transition, expected from the outset, would ensue. Yet the persistence of U.S. troops and an increasing tide of U.S. immigrants dashed Mexican Californians’ hopes that they could simply continue to lead under a new flag. New questions about race, civic ideals, and political economy emerged in ways that caused Angelenos to reconsider their own positions and to search for new solutions. How would Mexican Californians and newcomers from the United States divide or share political power? Whose social, cultural, and racial economies would hold sway? Would Angelenos reunite, or would they split into two groups at odds with each other?
The ayuntamiento resumed operations in 1847—after Stockton’s entry, Gillespie’s expulsion, and the new peace signed at Cahuenga. Although a garrison of U.S. soldiers, under the command of Colonel Stevenson, remained in Los Angeles during the interregnum between the end of the Mexican-American War and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the ayuntamiento regained municipal authority. During winter and spring of 1847, the body fielded a flood of petitions from residents seeking replacement paper titles to their lands. Ramona López filed the first petition for a deed, stating that when she and her late husband, Esteban Sanchez, had been granted a town lot long ago “there were no such formalities used as are now observed.”39 The petition speaks generally to change within Mexican Los Angeles, but the timing of her request indicates a concern that future municipal authorities might not know her and therefore could question her claim. Josefa Alvarado, Tomás Talamantes, and José del Carmen Lugo also cited the recent military upheaval when they requested replacement titles in 1847. Alvarado had to take her family “away from town” during the invasion, and “during the confusions arising in such cases and which cannot be helped, I suffered the loss of some documents, amongst them the title to the land which I am possessed of and cultivating.”40 Talamantes similarly blamed “the political troubles” for missing papers but looked to the future, equating his paper deed with “the protection necessary to give security to my homestead.”41 Lugo also cited the “political convulsions” and asked the ayuntamiento to issue “a new deed to my property for my protection and safeguard.”42
Under normal circumstances, securing replacement deeds should have been easy enough to allay any substantive worries. The petitioners actively occupied or cultivated their lands, knew their neighbors well, and could have confided in the ayuntamiento to readily issue new documents and reject any counterclaims to their property. In their number and urgency, however, the petitions suggest locals feared for the sanctity of their lands in the wake of the U.S. occupation. The men and women, californio and vecino, who wrote them expressed anxiety in the face of a new government. They indicate both an awareness that people from the United States thought about and adjudicated claims to land differently and that new administrators would employ new rules.
An important question lurks silently in these petitions’ subtexts: Just what happened to all of these titles in the first place? How did so many residents “lose” their papers when U.S. troops arrived? Juanita de Díos Rendon’s petition offers the only direct answer. Hearing that U.S. soldiers had begun marching toward Los Angeles, she “escaped from the city without having had a chance to protect” her “modest interests, since all I could do was to lock the doors of my house.” According to Rendon, “The Americans, on entering town, opened my house by means of false keys and carried off everything I had in it including the said title papers, thus leaving me today without any safeguard to protect my property rights.”43
Explicit in Rendon’s claim and implicit in the others, the image of “Americans” as dishonest, land-hungry thieves—the exact terms by which californios and vecinos disparaged and racialized as “cholos” immigrants from Mexico—contains the germ of a Mexican Californian–generated racial discourse, suggesting a boundary between californios/vecinos and norteamericanos, one that would grow significantly in salience and virulence in the decades to come. The petitioners’ words opened the possibility that Mexican Californians might in time draw clear differences between those who came as conquerors in 1846 and the settlers who had previously integrated into society on Mexican Californian terms, naturalized as citizens, and stitched themselves into the larger fabric of town life. Although older settlers earned acceptance into the upper echelons of Mexican Californian society, if soldiers and the cadre of dubious adventurers who followed on their heels acted like graceless commoners, to wit, gente sin razón, then they would be treated accordingly.44 Taking status, class, and behavior together—the main litmus tests of socio-racial standing in Mexican California—any U.S. soldiers acting like common thieves would have been no different than their predecessors from the Mexican interior. Californios and vecinos would accordingly denigrate them as worthless cholos. Following this line of speculation to its conclusion, the petitioners’ responses to their missing land titles represent the first salvo delivered by californios and vecinos against the social standing of ordinary “Americans.”
In addition to replacing property papers, the ayuntamiento heard numerous complaints about Indians who drank excessively, played games of chance, engaged in promiscuous sex, and participated in suspicious rituals. In early 1846, before U.S. soldiers arrived, the ayuntamiento began experimenting with new policies designed to resolve tensions between pobladores and indios—ranging from tighter supervision to disbanding the rancherías. None of the policies worked. During the summer and autumn of 1847 the ranchería remained a popular evening and weekend destination where Indians, Mexican Californians, and U.S. soldiers congregated.45
In November 1847, looming violence between vecinos and U.S. soldiers brought the ranchería question to a head. On November 3 Stevenson officially requested the abolition of the Indian settlement, fearing that “trouble of the most serious nature would be sure to occur.” Syndico Vicente Guerrero told the ayuntamiento that a duel “between Mexicans and Americans”—the probable cause for Stevenson’s entreaty—“had been arranged for next Saturday at the Indian ranchería.” He argued such a duel imperiled the pueblo’s “good order” and that the ranchería “ought to be done away with.”46 After a heated debate, the council rejected Guerrero’s proposal. Instead, it prohibited all Saturday “diversions” and warned both Indians and non-Indians that any violation of the order would lead to the ranchería’s “complete destruction.”47
Stevenson rejected the compromise. In an open letter to the ayuntamiento, he wrote that “citizens” and soldiers descended on the ranchería “almost every night” and that “disputes and conflicts,” often settled by arms, too often arose among them. “If this state of affairs is permitted to exist any longer,” Stevenson warned, “somebody will surely get killed, maybe a soldier or maybe a native, and possibly both. In such a case the garrison of this Town will find itself at swords’ points with its citizens.” Stevenson deemed this result unacceptable, claiming it would be “impossible” to fulfill his “duty to preserve order” in Los Angeles “unless … this source of infamy is wiped out of existence.” Accordingly, he asked the “Honorable Council” to end all gatherings and move the “the Indian settlement to some other place within a week.” Although he hoped not to “interfere with the civil authorities,” he left the ayuntamiento no wiggle room. “Should you fail to do it within that time,” Stevenson warned, “I should feel in duty bound to take the necessary steps to preserve the good order in this Town and vicinity by destroying the Indian village.”48 In asserting his own authority, Stevenson labored to respect the ayuntamiento’s position and invited the councilors to cooperate with him in preserving the civil peace.
The ayuntamiento promptly appointed a committee whose members conferred with “prominent citizens” over two days, only to find “a diversity of opinion.” The report provoked the same “protracted discussion” that had inhibited decisive action for nearly two years.49 This time, however, Stevenson’s looming ultimatum prevented further prevarication. The ayuntamiento retained its authority by choosing violence against the city’s Indian village instead of conflict with the Americans. The council required those who employed Indians to board and supervise them, remanded all vagrants to work, and prohibited all Indian gatherings. Self-sustaining Indians received roomy lots—outside the city limits. Most important, Syndico Vicente Guerrero and Councilman Rafael Gallardo were to implement the legislation’s centerpiece, ensuring that “the main settlement or Indian village shall within three days from today be razed to the ground so as to put an end to all disorderly gatherings.”50 On November 20, 1847, the two men reported having fulfilled their duty, then requested and received permission to similarly liquidate a smaller ranchería farther afield.51
By choosing to make peace with each other by joining in violence against Indians, Angelenos bridged the gap that separated U.S. newcomers from vecinos, californios, and integrated Yankees. The ayuntamiento and the U.S. military and their respective constituencies found common ground, promoting social harmony among themselves and acting violently on a shared belief that Indians posed a palpable threat to public peace. Just what had brought vecinos and soldiers to a breaking point remained unstated, but the exposure to Indians, vice, and alcohol in the context of recent armed conflict clearly compromised everyone’s razón. Colonel Stevenson and the ayuntamiento decided to stamp out the ranchería and to stabilize Mexican Californian–U.S. relations. Whereas the ayuntamiento as a constituted body and californios and vecinos as private citizens had frequently behaved violently toward Indians as an exercise of power and racial domination, destroying the ranchería sent a message not to local indios but to the newcomers from the United States. In obliterating the village, Angelenos staked a claim both to their social equality with the norteamericanos and situated themselves and those from the United States as equally superior to Indians. On both sides of the national divide, sharing in the ranchería’s elimination likely diffused suspicions regarding each other’s respective claims to racial primacy. To those unfamiliar with Mexican Californians’ already substantive history as artificers of racial difference, Angelenos’ actions demonstrated the difference between themselves and local Indians. By respecting the ayuntamiento’s authority and confiding in its members’ ability to preserve social harmony, U.S. government representatives allayed Angelenos’ fears of being imminently overrun by a band of thieving savages from the east. Working together to obliterate a physical space that threatened their harmonious interaction, they found a new way forward together. Eliminating the ranchería thus privileged the principal similarities in their otherwise distinct understandings of race: that they shared a stratified society and that Indians belonged squarely at the bottom. The underlying motivations for and the symbolic content embodied in razing the ranchería established a new mode of relations between California- and U.S.-born Angelenos.
Shared violence, moreover, sparked reconciliation among vecinos, californios, established immigrants, and newcomers. Following the ranchería’s destruction, locals and soldiers got along without further incident, and episodes of cooperation became increasingly common. Even when the occupying army installed recent immigrants as municipal officers, the appointees worked with the locals and upheld old traditions. For example, acting governor Mason appointed Stephen Foster alcalde in January 1848, two months after the ranchería’s destruction. Foster had arrived less than one year earlier, by way of Sonora, Santa Fe, and San Diego, as a translator with the Mormon Battalion. Foster quickly earned the trust of local Mexican Californians, in part because he defended the principle of home rule against his former colleagues in the U.S. Army, and in part because he took pains to learn local customs. In one instance, he oversaw the trial and execution of Juan Antonio, an independent Indian wanted in a string of cattle thefts and violent crimes over a period of nearly twenty years. Foster, who had never presided over an execution, asked Major Graham of the U.S. forces to provide a soldier who could teach two Gabrielino volunteers how to properly build the gallows and tie the noose. When the tutor subsequently complained that “he had enlisted as a soldier and not as a hangman,” Foster candidly commiserated. Having “enlisted three years before as Interpreter and Translator,” Foster had since “twice acted as guide and spy” before becoming “a judge in Los Angeles.” Among his duties, he had to “administer justice according to Mexican law” even though he “did not know anything about any law except what I learned as I went on.”52 Training on the job, Foster consulted with established residents, adapted to communal practices, and learned well the ambiguous nature of alcaldes’ duties. In February 1848, after only one month in office yet in perfect keeping with more than fifty years of local practice, Foster called upon irrigators to put “the zanjas in proper order” ahead of the growing season. In line with long-standing communal custom, landholders worked or provided peones (involuntary Indian laborers) proportional to their holdings; as a new wrinkle, Foster required irrigators to pay the zanjero in coin rather than produce.53
The first California State Constitutional Convention presented a new challenge to vecinos’ and californios’ civil status as U.S. residents. Forty-eight regionally elected delegates convened to craft a constitution in preparation for California’s entry into the Union. Voters chose eight Mexican Californian participants: José Miguel Covarrubias, Antonio Pico, Jacinto Rodriguez, and Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo from the north, and José Antonio Carrillo, Manuel Dominguez, Pablo de la Guerra, and Miguel de Predronena from the south. Voters in Los Angeles also selected four immigrants: Abel Stearns, Hugo Reid, William Hartnell, and Stephen Foster. The recently arrived Foster had earned locals’ confidence through his sensitive work as alcalde. Stearns, Reid, and Hartnell each drew on more than a decade of experience as members of intercultural families and participants in local government.
As the convention unfolded, discussion of portions of the constitution pertaining to citizenship and enfranchisement provoked a spirited exchange about the meaning of whiteness, bringing asymmetries in Mexican and U.S. race-making strategies into sharp focus. A small committee presented the full body with draft language stating that “every white male citizen of the United States” would be “entitled to vote.” One European American delegate, Edward Gilbert, suggested adding “every male citizen of Mexico.” Another, Charles T. Botts, countered that revised language specify “every white male citizen of Mexico.” In the sustained and fascinating discussion that ensued, Mr. Gilbert argued that “the meaning of the word ‘white,’ in the report of the Committee, was not generally understood in this country.” Pablo de la Guerra challenged the delegates to consider “the true signification of the word ‘white.’” Although “many citizens of California have received from nature a very dark skin,” de la Guerra pointed out, many not only voted but also held “the highest public offices.” Consequently, “it would be very unjust to deprive them of the privilege of citizens merely because nature had not made them white.”54
De la Guerra’s discourse provoked a still more wide-ranging discussion about just what “white” meant. De la Guerra suggested that a color test would exclude the darker-skinned delegates from voting to ratify a constitution they would themselves be signing. He subsequently reminded the convention that limiting Mexican Californian enfranchisement could violate the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which granted full citizenship rights to all Mexicans remaining in California. Other delegates worried that omitting the word “white” would allow Indians and Africans to vote. De la Guerra agreed that “white” would satisfactorily “exclude the African race,” but he and others reiterated their previous objections. Determining the import of Indian ancestry, distinguishing between “Indians and descendants of Indians” (some of whom sat in the very room as delegates), separating (on the basis of blood quantum, behavior, or property holdings) properly civilized and franchise-worthy Indians from uncivilized and franchise-unworthy Indians proved more troublesome. Delegate Hugo Reid had married widowed former Mission San Gabriel neophyte Victoria Comicrabit in 1836 and subsequently adopted her four children. Although their marriage encompassed difficult periods, Reid and Comicrabit raised the children as full members of californio society. Reid, therefore, knew well just how fluid the relationship between birth, phenotype, and achieved status could be in Mexican California. His adopted son Felipe married María de la Resurrección Ontiveros, daughter of a respected vecino couple and lived his adult life as a similarly respected member of the Angeleno community.55 After much discussion, the assembly ultimately approved compromise wording, granting the franchise to “every white male citizen of the United States, and every male citizen of Mexico (Indians, Africans, and descendants of Africans excepted).” To break the deadlock, delegates legally acknowledged the different systems by which people born in Mexico and the United States reckoned identity.56 Perhaps spurred by a collective desire to strengthen their case for statehood by achieving consensus on important issues, the delegates nevertheless created an intercultural strategy for determining race, whiteness, and citizenship.
Such an interesting bit of compromise became possible because Mexican Californians and European Americans from Southern California demonstrated sufficient flexibility in their racial and civic ideals to inscribe an intercultural definition of citizenship and suffrage into the state constitution. Despite the influx of newcomers that preceded the conquering army and the difficult time that immediately followed its arrival, Los Angeles’s Mexican Californians retained powerful social and political voices. Moreover, some newly arrived foreigners like Foster operated in ways commensurate with local practices. On the brink of California’s admission to the United States, therefore, evidence pointed to the realistic possibility of a fruitful partnership between Mexican Californians and European Americans in Los Angeles.
Regardless of the change in flag, complex familial, commercial, and social relations bound many Mexican Californian and U.S.-born Angelenos together. Those who had long lived in Los Angeles continued to dominate the city’s social and cultural life through fiestas, religious ceremonies, and the celebration of national holidays. Just as the ink dried transferring California from Mexico to the United States, the gold rush sparked a multiyear ascent in beef prices. Cows previously worth only one or two dollars suddenly brought thirty dollars per head. The cattlemen and their trading partners realized staggering economic gains and consolidated their status as the driving force behind Los Angeles’s intercultural social and political communities. Abel Stearns chaired the Los Angeles Whigs in 1851, and Andrés Pico served as a delegate at the state convention.57 Local Democrats conducted meetings in English and Spanish, and “the greatest harmony and good feeling prevailed” among them.58 Public amusements such as bullfights, bull-and-bear fights, and cockfights continued in and along the Plaza, drawing broad audiences.
Although elite and ordinary Angelenos found numerous opportunities to participate in public life, poor people from the United States and Mexico did not. Building on both Mexican and U.S. tradition, local officials preferred to discipline the pueblo’s poor residents rather than engage them in open dialogue. Over time, these prejudices spread into social relations. Whereas in the past fiestas had traditionally included the entire community, they became increasingly exclusive to middling and elite residents of U.S. and Mexican descent. When Abel Stearns threw a ball in honor of George Washington’s birthday in 1852, he invited every influential Angeleno but assiduously kept out any rough looking would-be attendees. Some drunken Yankees, claiming equal privilege to celebrate Washington’s birth, tried to crash Stearns’s party, leading to a melee involving fisticuffs, gunshots, and cannon fire.59 Such a disturbance was rather mild in comparison to the dozens of murders and scads of other violent crimes committed on Los Angeles’s streets during the early 1850s. Although the violence alarmed genteel Angelenos, it failed to deter their ongoing cooperation in public and private life.
Far away as it was from U.S. centers of power, Los Angeles nevertheless could not remain completely isolated from institutions that trailed the state’s entry into a new nation. Strong U.S. legal traditions regarding private property, cultural convictions about economy, and established racial hierarchies based on color rather than achieved status trickled westward over land and sea with immigrants and on official papers. But Mexican Californians had seen other governments come and go with little effect on local conditions, and Mexican Californian Angelenos stood poised to retain their social, political, and economic power as U.S. citizens. During the Mexican period, californios and vecinos had helped U.S. immigrants negotiate the social and political borderlands they found in their adopted homes, achieving citizenship, establishing kinship ties, and building businesses, much as Tejanos had served as “cultural brokers” to Anglo-American colonists in pre-independence Texas. After California changed hands, the bonds linking the intercultural community remained strong. As in Texas, where “shared cultural and economic values between southerners and Tejanos, particularly around ideas of land, aristocracy, and bonded labor, opened avenues” to a mixed community, californios and norteamericanos had formed families and deep friendships, built political alliances, and developed lasting commercial bonds.60 Even the unpleasantness of war and rebellion, the capture and incarceration of leading immigrant citizens, and a change of flag had not done lasting damage to intercultural connections. After the war, Mexican Californian Angelenos secured voting and citizenship rights, enjoyed a substantial political majority (even though national origins did not then cloud local politics), and held a firm grip on the region’s principal economic resources: land and cattle.61 Although aware that more and more newcomers would arrive from the east, Angelenos’ intercultural social, political, and economic relationships had resumed their prewar ease by 1850, further justifying a sense of optimism and removing lingering doubts. The shape of things to come remained fluid and open to interpretation. Mexican Californian- and U.S.-born Angelenos who had forged a rich intercultural world knew that making a bright future for their families and their children depended on continued cooperation.
Abstract hope alone did not sustain Mexican Californians’ and prewar immigrants’ optimistic outlook. Numerous settlers from the United States, both publicly and privately, offered plenty of concrete reasons to believe a bright, intercultural future lay ahead. Some used public speeches on national holidays as venues in which to explore the future of social relations in Los Angeles. Addressing a large crowd assembled to celebrate the Fourth of July in 1851, Isaac K. Ogier, a Charleston, South Carolina, native who had arrived in California only in 1849 and served as the district attorney of Los Angeles between 1851 and 1853, expressed delight that so many “native citizens of California” turned out to celebrate U.S. independence. He interpreted the turnout as “evidence” that the hijos del país enjoyed “the high privilege” of “calling themselves citizens of the country of Washington, of Jefferson, and the other patriots of the revolution.” Ogier suggested that Angelenos “should endeavor to cultivate” warm feelings and that Americans in particular should act toward Mexican Angelenos in accordance with the maxim that “we look upon them as fellow citizens, enjoying the same privileges, and [as] members of the same family with ourselves.”62 Although Ogier’s heavy reliance on “we” and “them” indicates that he perceived differences between U.S.- and Mexican-born Angelenos, one can hardly imagine him giving a similar speech in his hometown of Charleston to a mixed crowd of white and black Americans.
The following year, Independence Day celebrants saluted the U.S. flag in the Plaza, paraded to the beach at San Pedro, and enjoyed a properly californio fiesta well into the following afternoon. Louis Granger spoke on the shore where Abel Stearns had been accused of smuggling, where Pico had sent Micheltorena packing, and where Stockton’s invading force had landed. He lauded the assembled scions of Anglo-Saxons and Castilians who rightly claimed unparalleled collective achievements in “adventure and valor … on the western continent.” Both had proved themselves “sturdy and enterprising” during “wars of independence.” Throwing off the shackles of monarchy, they became “uncompromising republicans,” who in turn united in Los Angeles to “fraternize and cooperate in [the] future for the progress of free institutions.” A “cord of mutual interest” cemented “relations between these two republican races” before which “the prejudices of generations in a moment pass away.”63
On July 4, 1853, Angelenos again made their way from the Plaza to San Pedro. Juan Sepúlveda brought with him the cannon California forces had used in rousting Gillespie from Los Angeles and holding off U.S. forces during their stunning victory at San Pascual. However, Sepúlveda brought the cannon in a spirit of peace and harmony. Together with Horace Bell and a few others, Sepúlveda rowed the cannon out into Wilmington Bay and landed it on Dead Man’s Island, where some U.S. soldiers who died during the war had been buried. From there, he commenced firing salutes back toward those celebrating at San Pedro. Don Sepúlveda explained his “triple purpose” in bringing out the old cannon and firing it: “It would dissipate the last vestige of unfriendly feeling that may have lingered in the bosoms of the sons of the country towards the United States; that it would serve to express our gratitude to the great founders of modern liberty; and it would be an appropriate salute to the seven brave mariners who lost their lives in their country’s service.”64
On these most American of occasions, U.S.- and California-born speech-makers pronounced clear visions of intercultural harmony. In both Ogier’s and Granger’s formulas, the two groups had formed extensive kinship ties—a locally specific and novel mestizaje that went beyond individual families to the city’s larger social, political, and economic fabric. The two immigrants further observed that a shared investment in republican government and commercial exchange would overshadow differences of ancestry and national loyalty. Re-deploying a weapon of war as a symbol of peace and harmony, Sepúlveda demonstrated his own sense of the camaraderie among Angelenos of Californian and foreign birth, seven years after war began and five years into his life as a U.S. citizen. Based on these mutual interests, the prejudices of birth and blood gave way to a locally developed, Mexican Californian–influenced method of reckoning community membership and social identity on the basis of behavior, economy, and achieved status. Few mid-nineteenth century orators afield of Los Angeles used public platforms to claim brown-skinned Mexicans and pale Anglo-Americans belonged to the same family, or to suggest that their work together in the arenas of society, government, and commerce would quickly supersede generations of prejudice.65 In Los Angeles, however, setting aside differences cued by color and blood became an important element of civic culture in the late 1840s and early 1850s.
Easily dismissed as hollow rhetoric trotted out to nurture both good feelings and social control, Angelenos backed up the sentiments expressed in such speeches with careful, constant work to find mutually agreeable solutions in the arena of public policy. To be sure, the change in national power altered the structure of city government. In line with U.S. practices, the executive, legislative, and judicial powers that alcaldes held became neatly divided among a mayor, common council, and layers of local, county, and state jurisdictions, within which different courts handled civil and criminal matters.66 Although office titles had changed, Angelenos continued to elect both Mexican Californian- and U.S.-born representatives, choosing newcomers Stephen C. Foster, Adelpheus Hodges, and John G. Nichols; Rowland-Workman party members B. D. Wilson, David W. Alexander, and Julian Chavez; and established Angelenos, including Abel Stearns, Cristóbal Aguilar, Antonio Franco Coronel, Ygnacio del Valle, José L. Sepúlveda, and Manuel Requeña. During the military and territorial periods (January 1847 until California’s admission to the Union in 1850) and in the city’s early career following statehood, city officers reenacted and enforced policies regarding land, water, taxes, licenses, and public behavior that mirrored those in force before the war.
Once during the territorial period and then again immediately after California’s admission to the Union, the Common Council enacted comprehensive civil and tax codes. These laws regulated the possession and carrying of firearms, prohibited Sunday liquor sales, pit and cesspool making, and clothes washing in the zanjas, and required householders to light their porches on dark nights and to sweep the streets in front of their houses each Saturday. The tax code required monthly license fees from the owners of billiard tables, bowling alleys, and gambling parlors; commercial establishments; grocers; liquor sellers; and peddlers.67 Although these rules echoed those established by earlier ayuntamientos, the council established a standing “police force consisting of not less than twelve men” to enforce the laws, marking a sharp departure from Mexican practice.68 Even so, a communal ethos continued to influence enforcement. Tired of dealing with newcomers arriving “with daggers, getting drunk, fighting and inflicting wounds on one another, and committing robberies,” Alcalde Abel Stearns banished—rather than fining or imprisoning—seven recent arrivals in April 1850.69 In May 1849 the council inaugurated and in 1850 renewed a chain gang made up of all residents without work, “found loafing,” drunk, “acting in a scandalous manner,” or otherwise offending “public decency,” using public policy to reestablish control over local Indians and other alleged malefactors.70 The city also outlawed “all Indian gatherings for the purpose of indulging in games or other diversions,” reaffirming Indian domination as a foundation of intercultural californio, vecino, and norteamericano relations.71 Together, these laws and rules recreated locally specific mestizaje within the body politic.
Although fairly specific, the municipal police and tax codes did not regulate the totality of city life during the early 1850s. In fact, the first policies said almost nothing about the distribution of the municipal water supply or the fate of the municipal lands. During the Spanish and Mexican periods, the pueblo collectively owned both water and land, and the ayuntamiento presided over the equitable distribution of these resources. Irrigators shared in maintaining the zanjas and paid zanjeros (water overseers) out of the produce of their fields, and the ayuntamiento granted lands on condition of their improvement and productivity. In the United States, city residents normally paid for both land and water, as underlying civic ideals considered them commodities rightly controlled by private entities.72 In Los Angeles during the 1850s, questions of practice rather than principle caused occasional friction between these asymmetrical ideals. As residents accustomed to very different traditions learned to share the waters and lands upon which they nurtured their familial and economic pursuits, disagreements created opportunities for exchange, education, and innovation.
Distributing the waters of the Los Angeles River and maintaining the network of zanjas through which these waters flowed proved to be a particularly tricky subject. As a town located on a frequently arid plain in which many of the residents depended on agriculture for their livelihood, water regulation stood paramount among the municipality’s responsibilities. In addition to managing apportionment, zanjas had to be regularly cleaned because silt accumulated in them over time and weeds grew in the silt, diminishing capacity. Once reincorporated under the U.S. flag, the city at first experimented with an independent water service whose employees managed a complicated irrigation schedule. When disagreements arose, and in line with standard U.S. practice, the various parties filed suit against each other and went to court. The new system proved so problematic that Mayor Stephen Foster officially asked the council for alternatives in 1850. On separate occasions, Abel Stearns as council president and numerous citizens in a detailed petition recommended a return to the Mexican system by appointing an experienced zanjero to mediate disputes. In response, Councilmen Manuel Garfias and José Loreto Sepúlveda drew up plans for an intercultural solution. A zanjero kept the zanjas working, compelled irrigators to clean them regularly, and withheld water as punishment for noncompliance, and a juez de aguas (water controller) oversaw apportionment and resolved all disputes. In addition, the potential productive value of each landholder’s aggregate acreage determined fees owed in specie to the city, either annually or semi-annually.73
Joining Mexican and U.S. components in the new system of water management proved challenging. When implementing the new system, the council fielded “frequent complaints” from local farmers, and Councilman Manuel Requeña, alcalde many times in the past, insisted the council write yet another code.74 Together with Cristóbal Aguilar he presented yet a third set of water rules on July 8, 1850. They ditched the juez de aguas and empowered a single zanjero to apportion and distribute water, compel assistance in maintaining the zanjas, and collect fees. If needing help, zanjeros could appoint assistants “to watch over and protect the work.” Responsibility for receiving irrigation fell to “whosoever may need water,” as the regulations required such persons to apply to the zanjero only when prepared to receive the flow. While reinstating the traditional office of zanjero and the principle of informal mediation, Requeña and Aguilar found a middle ground on the question of payment in produce versus specie in their revision: farmers growing any kind of grain could choose to pay the zanjero either one bushel from their harvest “or its value in money”; vineyardists had to pay in coin rather than kind based on the size of their vineyards.75
Getting the new laws to work effectively proved no less difficult than making them. Individuals made so many small, semi-private canals that the council had to explicitly outlaw them in July 1851. Two weeks later, the Water Committee blamed a “lack of capacity, attention, and firmness on the part of the zanjeros” for causing “much disorder” and urged Mayor Wilson “to fill the positions with more suitable employees.”76 A deeper obstacle to efficiency made quick fixes elusive. A distribution system based on clear but minimal instructions required both users and administrators to understand and respect its rules and objectives, especially because zanjeros resolved competing claims informally. Since many residents born outside of Los Angeles had no experience with the system and because Mexican Californian zanjeros knew no other way, learning how to work together took time.
A similar learning curve generated moments of intercultural education regarding water use. Shortly after settling on the new zanjero system, the council took a great interest in “keeping the principal canal free from filth of every nature, thus avoiding many ills from which the people suffer.”77 In March 1852 Ygnacio Coronel kindly offered the entire city a lesson in how to properly wash its dirty laundry without compromising the river. Recognizing washers’ need to use zanja water, he directed them to place “the plank or wash-board … outside of the edge of the ditch.” Although they drew in fresh water, Coronel told them, they should scrub only on the bank, taking care that “none of the dirty water coming from the clothes” would run back into the zanja or “in any manner whatsoever contaminate the drinking water.” Upon Coronel’s suggestion, the council also ordered the mayor to fine violators not less than three dollars.78 With precise, didactic language, Coronel shared his knowledge of how to wash without fouling the river, and the council backed up his teaching with formal law.
Keeping the city’s streets clean required a similar amount of attention and instruction. Reinstating Mexican practice, the council required Angelenos to sweep the streets in front of their houses “every Saturday, so that on Sunday the streets are clean.” Violators incurred five-dollar fines.79 When residents failed to comply, Mayor John G. Nichols contracted with a street sweeper to do the work for fifty dollars a week. Led by Manuel Requeña, the council suspended payment to the street sweeper and asked Mayor Nichols to enforce the ordinance requiring house owners to maintain the streets. When Nichols, a relative newcomer, subsequently complained to the council that the streets remained dirty, the members reminded him that “City Ordinances do prohibit the throwing of filthy matter into the streets of the community, and that it is the province of the Mayor and the Marshal to observe due vigilance in the enforcement of the Ordinances.”80
In each of these examples regarding the city’s waterways and roadways, variant civic ideals produced tensions. Mexican laws principally rested on communal practices for their use and upkeep, and alcaldes handled and resolved all disputes. Immigrants from the United States had more experience paying for services and resolving problems in court. As Angelenos learned more about each other’s practices, complaints diminished and a broader base of collective knowledge allowed for new solutions. When Antonio Franco Coronel took office as mayor in May 1853, he implored the council to pay the zanjero “a sufficient salary, enabling him to live” in order to attract a qualified individual “willing to serve usefully.” Considering Coronel’s long experience with the Mexican system, under which irrigators individually compensated the zanjero with the produce of their fields, his suggestion constituted a radical departure. The council responded by establishing the zanjero’s pay at $600 per year, then and for years thereafter the highest salary for any municipal position.81
During his term, Coronel also prodded the council to substantively expand and precisely codify the zanjero’s duties and the regulations concerning irrigation. After nearly a year of work, the council passed and Coronel signed a sixteen-section law that blended Mexican and U.S. civic ideals. The law renewed the municipality’s insistence on maximal distribution, shared maintenance provided by landowners or their designated laborers, and the zanjero’s ultimate authority to control the supply and mediate conflict. Data harvested from surveys, maps, and accounts produced specific, formal calculations for apportionment. Once drafted, the allotment schedule became publicly available and a subsequent hearing addressed complaints and adjustments. In a further move toward pay-for-use, the city reserved the right to collect taxes for future improvements; irrigators living beyond the city limits paid to have their lands surveyed and included in the irrigation schedule.82 In its various parts, the law both conformed to legalistic U.S. traditions and retained communal rights common under Mexico. Indicating how public officials understood the place of water in the larger relationship among citizens, the city government, and the environment, the law rested on a middle ground wherein water remained paramount to the community’s well-being while becoming a commodity capable of generating other commodities for sale in a capitalist market. Only through the experience of living together and exchanging civic ideals could Coronel and the council, which included Mexican and recently arrived Angelenos, have authored an intercultural policy.
As they had in addressing the city waters, Los Angeles’s public officials negotiated a legal and philosophical borderlands concerning the city lands. Mexican municipal authorities distributed available parcels freely to petitioners under the condition that the recipients promptly fenced and improved the premises by either building houses or planting crops. Once improved, the city offered deeds and titles, but under Mexican law ownership was limited to use and occupation. In the United States, most townships sold lots at auction for cash, and deed holders owned property outright. Policy makers negotiated these cultural and legal tensions as they moved forward with the city lands. The U.S. Congress complicated the quest for new solutions when it passed the Land Act in 1851. Disregarding the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo’s clear endorsement and protection of all Mexican-granted land titles, the Land Act required all owners to prove the validity of their titles in court. Residents holding Spanish or Mexican deeds and titles, including landowners born in the United States and Europe, immediately became defendants in lawsuits wherein the federal government stood as plaintiff. No aspect of the Mexican-American War or its subsequent peace had so threatened the social and economic power wielded by Los Angeles’s californios, vecinos, and their intercultural trading partners.83 Congress carved out a different set of requirements for municipal land titles. Individual holders did not bear responsibility for validating ownership of “farm lots, town lots, or pasture lots held under a grant from any corporation or town.” Instead, “corporate authorities” had to prove their town’s existence as “prima facie evidence of the claims for the land embraced within the limits” indicated.84
Although the act spared individual vecinos and established immigrants who owned town lots from the lengthy and costly adjudication process, it nevertheless required the municipality to spend more than $10,000 on lawyers, surveys, and maps to define and defend a composite claim valued in excess of a million dollars.85 To retain the four square leagues it traditionally controlled, the city also had to challenge a state law restricting the city’s size to two square miles. Lead attorney James Lancaster Brent explained, first to the legislature and later to the land commissioners, that Los Angeles was “peculiar and different from any city in California” because of the “large number of vineyards and gardens” in its limits, all of which depended “for their successful cultivation upon a system of irrigation and a proper distribution of the waters of the River of the Pueblo.” Water management had to be “uniform and consistent, directed and controlled by one Authority alone.” Restricting the city’s size, Brent argued, would leave numerous property holders and irrigators, including the municipal corporation itself, outside the municipal water management structure. Suddenly excluded, owners would face unpredictable access and dispute resolution, causing in turn a decline in productive effort and property values—consequences Brent deemed “deplorable.” In addition, private owners whose titles required contributions to city funds would face taxation without representation. The petition ultimately succeeded and the city secured a perfect title to four square leagues. In the process, Brent created an intercultural defense of the city’s claim, shrewdly blending Mexican notions of communal ownership and municipal control over the water with thoroughly U.S. concerns about private property, property values, and taxation.86
Angelenos greeted the Land Law with nearly unanimous outrage and drew on a similar mix of Mexican and U.S. maxims to launch blistering attacks on the new policy. These broadsides appeared frequently in the two regularly published Los Angeles newspapers, La Estrella (published in Spanish) and the Los Angeles Star (published in English). Although the two newspapers had separate editors and independently controlled content, they were printed together with La Estrella folded into the center of the Star. La Estrella warned that the bill, those who went after lands granted under Mexico, and the scores of squatters who usurped other’s properties would “give Americans a very bad name and reputation.”87 In other words, they risked their razón. In English, the Star ripped the Land Act on capitalist terms, fearing a suite of deleterious effects on both property and the town by threatening “marketable value, hindering their improvement, and retarding population” growth. Echoing the sentiments of recent Fourth of July speeches, the Star complained with equal anger that the Land Act betrayed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo’s promises to Mexican Californians regarding the “‘protection and maintenance’ in their property.” Rather than “a principle of magnanimity,” the U.S. government had intervened “as an interested and adversarial party,” resorting to “harshness and severity” in its “first stroke of the law” concerning Los Angeles.88
Public policies paralleled printed sentiments. In diametric opposition to the Land Act’s inherent suspicions, the Common Council in 1854 awarded land titles to all “persons who themselves or whose ancestors have occupied [such lands] without interruption, peaceably and in good faith, for a term of twelve years.”89 Diverting further from the spirit of federal policy, Los Angeles’s municipal officers renewed the tradition of freely distributing city lands. During 1850 and 1851, in conjunction with standard U.S. operating procedure, the mayor had periodically offered municipal lots at auction. The practice proved rather unsuccessful, generating little profit while a few buyers accrued large holdings. On August 13, 1852, the council changed course and established the “Free Land Law,” making available lots of “ten acres, within the limits of the City, or thirty-five acres without said limits.” Recipients had one year to make improvements “by building, planting orange or other fruit trees, or cultivating crops thereon.” In addition, “the value of such improvements” had to exceed “two hundred dollars” in order for the grantee to secure a permanent title. Otherwise, the parcel reverted to the city and could be requested by another resident.90 Twenty-seven residents petitioned the council for lots in the law’s first month in force. Prompted by Mayor Nichols’s concern that “some individuals” might try to piece together “immense tracts” to which they had “no right,” officials agreed to “scrutinize the documents of every interested party” to ensure equitable distribution.91
In its component parts and the public response it provoked, the Free Land Law exemplifies an intercultural policy that wove together two different civic ideals into something new and locally specific. Provisions limiting the size of granted parcels, imposing the improvement requirements, and prohibiting recipients from subsequently selling without the council’s permission grew out of Mexican principles dictating that municipalities controlled and disposed of lands on their own terms. Instead of earning titles by contributing produce to the community, however, recipients’ improvements had to realize a specific dollar value. As a test of validation, this component reflected U.S. principles that understood both land and the products derived therefrom as commodities with capital rather than intrinsic worth. Moreover, the law played to a characteristically American insistence on an orderly development of the city, as all grants had to be “in form as nearly square as possible.”92
While the council discussed and enacted the Free Land Law, editors of both the English and Spanish pages of the Star/La Estrella offered support. Responding to Uno, a correspondent who worried that the municipality couldn’t “impose the old laws” that had “ceased to exist” over the city lands, La Estrella’s editor Manuel Clemente Rojo replied that “neither the California State Assembly nor the State Senate have the power to dictate laws that damage rights legally acquired in earlier times.”93 The Star similarly saw no “reasonable objection … to donating [the lands] in the manner proposed,” but for different reasons. The “fifty thousand acres of unimproved land” owned by the city had become “a burden” because of taxes owed to the county and state. The Free Land Law promised to turn the tax egress to ingress, while increased settlement and cultivation could raise property values across the board. “If the produce of grain, fruit, poultry, milk, vegetables, etc. were increased five fold,” the Star argued, “a profitable market would be found.” With opportunity knocking, distributing free land was not merely a “wholesome measure for the prosperity of our city” but also a method by which the council could fulfill the “duty of our city … to encourage agriculture by every means within its power.”94
Interestingly, asymmetrical civic ideals had generated divergent, though similarly enthusiastic, endorsements for the Free Land Law. Under Mexico, the municipal lands served as the pueblo’s principal reserve of potential prosperity. Officials granted lots so that residents could support themselves and their families thereon, and the recipients in turn contributed a share of their produce to the pueblo’s overall welfare. Passing a new policy to distribute such lands free of charge renewed a key component in the relationship between the municipality and the citizens. While Rojo and others with experience in Mexican Los Angeles may have understood the Free Land Law on such terms, newcomers likely did not. Instead they saw tax relief and growth opportunities, finding in the free lands the germ of new enterprise. Differences in civic ideals might have influenced the overall distribution of city lots. Over the Free Land Law’s short life, Angelenos received 8,249 acres, with roughly 60 percent (4,964 acres) going to European American men, 34 percent (2,834 acres) to Mexican Californian men, 5 percent (414 acres) to Mexican Californian women, and less than 1 percent (37 acres) to European American women.95 Considering that local californios and vecinos had already voiced their concerns regarding rising property taxes and the general preference to use land rather than speculate in real estate, the differences are not especially surprising. However, the significant uptake from Mexican Californian men and women illustrates the ways that Mexican and American ideals regarding the use of land and the relationship between the municipality, municipal lands, and Los Angeles’s residents blended to produce new, locally specific meanings. In both ethos and objectives, the Free Land Law combined features of the agrarian-oriented Mexican ideals and capital-oriented American interests.
Throughout the 1850s, Angelenos born in Mexico and the United States brought their respective civic ideals together to create several intercultural policies concerning land tenure and water use. Although each contained elements and justifications familiar and foreign to one tradition or another, they mixed in ways recognizable principally to those living in Los Angeles. Despite the policies’ potentially divisive asymmetries, few objections made their way into the council minutes or found voice in the local newspapers. As innovative strategies for dealing with new circumstances, these policies provided sufficient common ground upon which Mexican Californians’ and European Americans’ respective civic ideals could peacefully coexist. Yet intercultural civic practices proved disruptive as well as peaceful, and dangerous as well as productive.
Continued attention to Indians constituted a key component in the council’s efforts to regulate public life. In keeping with both Mexican practices and the alliance forged in 1847 regarding the threat local rancherías posed to Mexican Californian and European American social harmony, the common council under the U.S. flag created a host of Indian-specific policies. After first outlawing all Indian reunions within the city limits, residents protested that Indians met and drank to excess in the surrounding orchards, causing “disorders and mischief.” The council accordingly resolved to send out patrols “to abate the evil.”96 Five months later, the council prohibited all other Angelenos from “mixing” with Indians “during their feasts or reunions.”97 In May 1851, prompted by ongoing complaints, the council prohibited all Indian gatherings, outlawed the playing of a team gambling game called “peon” after dark, and prohibited the sale of any “intoxicating beverage” to Indians. The council fined Indians violating these rules $2.50 or remanded them to six days’ service in the chain gang; non-Indians who supplied Indians with alcohol or allowed the playing of peon on their premises incurred fines of no less than $25 and five days in jail.98 To these increasingly severe restrictions on Indians’ social and cultural lives, laws relegating vagrants to the chain gang effectively enabled the city and wealthy individuals to make use of coerced Indian labor. By continuing to segregate and discipline local Indians, Mexican and American Angelenos strengthened the institutional boundaries that defined their intercultural community.
Cruel policies toward the city’s Indian residents made up only one component of life in a town often saturated by sanctioned and unsanctioned violence during the early 1850s. Although historian J. M. Guinn exaggerated greatly in claiming that “Los Angeles averaged a homicide for each day” during 1854, the murder rate reached dizzying heights during the early 1850s, even in comparison to other locales in the borderlands. In a city that ranged in population from sixteen hundred to two thousand people, murders claimed between twenty and thirty lives each year from 1851 to 1854.99 Clearly, not everyone in Los Angeles welcomed the opportunity to experiment with new social and civic combinations. Violent crimes disturbed the peace and dismayed Angelenos, but the killings rarely crossed national lines, unsettled broader social relations, or threatened the intercultural social order.
The circumstances surrounding the disappearance of two immigrant Americans who failed to reach Los Angeles safely in July 1852 provoked a far less blasé response. The press paid unusual attention to the missing men, named Ludwig and McCoy, and rumors circulated that Mexicans had killed them. The Star noted their disappearance under the headline “Suspicious Circumstances” on July 24 and followed with long tales of “Terrible Events” told in both English and Spanish the following week.100
On July 27, 1852, Santa Barbara police arrested three men for horse thievery: Teodoro Savaleta, a known criminal who had recently escaped from Los Angeles’s jail, Jesus Rivas, and Francisco Carmillo. The next day, Los Angeles Sheriffs Barton and Osburn extradited them as suspects in Ludwig and McCoy’s disappearance. Barton and Osburn appointed Manuel Requeña, Matthew Keller, J. R. Scott, Lewis Granger, Manuel C. Rojo, and John G. Downey—six respected bilingual Angelenos—to interview the suspects. At B. D. Wilson’s house the next morning, they applied the screws. Carmillo professed innocence, telling the group Rivas had bragged about killing two Americans with Savaleta a few days earlier. Rivas cracked quickly, but Savaleta held out for “four or five hours” before admitting his guilt and leading the investigators to the dead bodies. On Friday, Abel Stearns oversaw a public hearing and the investigators made their report, indicting Savaleta and Rivas for murder and ordering them to stand trial. William G. Dryden stood as inspector while Manuel Rojo and V. T. R. Sanford served as secretaries. Alexander Bell, Manuel Garfias, and Francis Mellus empanelled a jury of twelve upstanding community members: seven men born in the United States, five born in Mexico.101 An orderly trial ensued, the jury convicted Savaleta and Rivas, and Stearns sentenced them to death. On a hill just at the edge of town, Savaleta and Rivas were hanged the next day from a makeshift gallows. A large crowd gathered to watch them die.102 The entire process bore the markers of an official legal proceeding, except that Stearns turned Carmillo over to the “proper authorities,” revealing that the investigators, judge, and jury worked as a popular tribunal. Operating outside formal law, Angelenos executed Savaleta and Rivas not as officers of the state but as vigilantes. Everyone involved knew enough about legal procedure to create an ad hoc process that perfectly mimicked a legitimate trial, raising questions about the various traditions upon which they drew to bring this brand of justice to bear.
The manner of investigation and the impromptu trial reflected intercultural adaptations. Happening outside the formal courts and arranged by a group of elite citizens, the entire procedure followed the general contours of Mexican-era community justice. In particular, alcaldes’ judicial responsibilities included supervising legal proceedings, gathering evidence, hearing testimony, and rendering decisions. Among the group of six who interrogated the suspects, Requeña had served as alcalde, as had host B. D. Wilson. As judge, Abel Stearns also drew on alcalde experience, and his ties to both the United States and Mexican California made him an ideal arbiter of the proceedings.103 During the trial, he appointed representatives for each party, went with them to investigate the crime scene, reexamined the witnesses, and ultimately delivered a sentence. Alcaldes also relied on hombres buenos, impartial persons who offered advice to the alcalde regarding a final decision.104 In place of the hombres buenos, Stearns seated a twelve-man jury, following U.S. rather than Mexican tradition.105 Executing convicted murderers conformed to both Mexican and U.S. legal rules, although vigilantism did not.
Middling and elite Angelenos, born in different nations and in some cases brought together by war and conquest, worked together to execute Savaleta and Rivas. In keeping with notions of locally arbitrated community justice, they blended strategies for investigating, trying, and punishing the criminals. Acting as vigilantes allowed them to punish swiftly two Mexicans who endangered continued cooperation by murdering immigrant Americans. As leaders of a most orderly lynch mob, the Angelenos who participated in and watched the proceedings delivered a form of intercultural vigilante justice.106 Harris Newmark, an immigrant to Los Angeles in 1850, later explained that “the safety of the better classes in those troublous times often demanded quick and determined action, and stern necessity knew no law. And what is more, others besides myself who have also repeatedly faced dangers no longer common, agree with me in declaring, after half a century of observation and reflection, that milder courses than those of the vigilance committees of our young community could hardly have been followed with wisdom and safety.”107 Mexican and European American Angelenos made up the better classes, and together they engaged in and benefited from vigilante justice, ostensibly to enhance public safety.
The intercultural method deployed to punish Savaleta and Rivas may have proved effective in ways that went beyond stern necessity. Extralegal (and certainly illegal) mass action, especially when advertised and enacted publicly, required a very close-knit community. To be sure, Angelenos professed dissatisfaction with both the violence that surrounded them and the constituted authorities’ inability to control it. Nevertheless, only tightly bonded communities provide vigilantes sufficient security to publicly engage in premeditated murder. Otherwise, public officials and ordinary citizens would fear legal consequences for such violent behavior. Moreover, by joining together to kill Savaleta and Rivas, Spanish- and English-speaking Angelenos demonstrated to one another their fundamental agreement about the boundaries of a working community, regardless of their asymmetrical beliefs regarding race and identity.108 Instead of leaving open questions about loyalty, extralegal violence offered middling and elite Angelenos an opportunity to proclaim both their allegiance to each other and their shared willingness to discipline those who threatened the community they had created together. Perhaps, as it had in the destruction of the Indian ranchería and the litany of laws passed to regulate Indian behavior, cooperative popular violence provided a hidden passageway to common ground upon which Angelenos engaged in bloody deeds and solidified their intercultural relationships.
Following Angelenos’ negotiations in the arenas of identity, space, and municipal power along the threads of family, economy, public policy, and popular violence, it becomes clear that Los Angeles’s residents wove their lives and interests together in ways that blurred previously clear distinctions. To be sure, Mexican Californians’ and European Americans’ divergent civic and racial ideals provoked tension and experimentation. Caught between competing visions of people, land, and water in the world they inhabited, Spanish- and English-speaking Angelenos collaborated on policies that blended communal and individual principles. The ongoing revisions regarding water policy reflect consistent tinkering with different strategies as residents gained practical experience working together, even when agreement on the particulars often obscured fundamentally different underlying motives and desired consequences. Similarly, some Mexican Californians considered certain U.S. immigrants unworthy of inclusion among the gente de razón, and many newcomers from the United States dismissed as poppycock rancheros’ claims to whiteness. As they engaged with these complex local circumstances and allowed their ideas to comingle, Angelenos pieced together an intercultural society, polity, and economy.
Between 1840 and 1854 Mexican Californians and U.S. immigrants found innovative solutions to local problems and prevented differences in their civic ideals or racial worldviews from derailing their productive interactions. Elite and middling residents born in both nations shared congruent histories as accomplished architects of racial hierarchies and public policies designed to establish and sustain their own superiority. Both constructed Indians as savages capable of neither advanced intellectual thought nor bodily discipline, and both found vagrant, violent drifters—Mexican and American—to be nearly indistinguishable from Indians in their habits and public behavior. Elite and ordinary Angelenos thus found common ground by jointly disciplining “inferior” residents, by way of both public policy and extralegal violence. Consequently, sufficient commonalities balanced Mexican Californians’ and U.S. immigrants’ mutual doubts about each other’s racial standing and national loyalties, allowing for a negotiated racial peace reinforced by cooperative violence.
Innovations in the realms of public policy and municipal power produced similarly intercultural results. Although titles, job descriptions, and institutional responsibilities corresponding to municipal offices changed abruptly as California entered the United States in 1850, civic ideals did not follow suit mechanically. As Mexican Californians and U.S. immigrants shared power and policy-making responsibilities, they devised workable policies, especially relating to land, water, and public space. Newcomers and old-timers butted heads on the critical question of the right of individuals versus the right of the community, but they found common ground more often than not, both before and after the transition from one national government to the other. In much the same way that elite Mexican Californians and immigrants from the United States worked together to discipline violent people they mutually held to be racially inferior, they also cooperated in developing mutually agreeable public policies like the Free Land Law.
Between 1840 and 1855, Mexican Californians and European Americans built a society bound together by a dense web of mutual relations, interests, and obligations. Although the Mexican-American War (1846–48) and waves of violence during the early 1850s strained such relationships, ties of family, property, economy, and identity nevertheless stitched together Mexican Californians and immigrants. Bonds beyond those of home and hearth also helped to persuade Mexican Californians and newcomers to find common ground and to forge a sense of shared destiny. Many newcomers played active roles in the local economy as merchants, warehousemen, and skilled craftsmen. Before the Mexican-American War, immigrants and californios worked together to expand the hide and tallow trade, and they shared in its attendant benefits for class, status, and racial standing. After war’s end, reciprocal relationships between U.S. and European settlers expanded and deepened. More Angelenos depended on each other for financial and social prosperity, and only by protecting these ties could they secure their own and their children’s and their grandchildren’s futures. Historian Leonard Pitt branded Los Angeles as “semi-gringo” during the early 1850s, but the phrase belies the ways in which negotiated compromises were neither Mexican nor American but instead dynamic, locally specific intercultural arrangements in the realms of race, space, and municipal power.109 Like other intercultural communities, this one was always precarious and frequently tendentious, yet its relative stability between 1840 and 1855 offered Angelenos legitimate, viable alternatives to the imperatives of strict loyalty to either Mexican or U.S. racial, spatial, or governmental practices. If American immigrants’ willingness to build an active intercultural community with Mexicans living in Los Angeles seems surprising from our twenty-first-century vantage point, the ways subsequent immigrants strained intercultural bonds took mid-nineteenth-century Angelenos by surprise and threatened future social harmony.