SIX divisions of insurrectionists mustered at the intersection of Hill and Ninth Streets at 11:30 A.M. in Los Angeles on April 10, 1894. Many of them were armed and in full military dress. At City Hall, only a few blocks away, Mayor Thomas Rowan called to order an emergency session of the Common Council. Almost immediately, a detachment of rowdy citizens stormed the council chamber. They forced the mayor’s abdication, deposed the council, and marched Mayor Rowan to Sixth Street Park, where an assembly more than ten thousand strong cheered the coup. The rebel leaders, calling themselves the Angels, crowned Mrs. O. W. Childs their Lady, Queen of the Angels. The six regiments of armed and uniformed troops consolidated their victory by marching on the park and then parading through town. An ecstatic populace wholeheartedly approved.1 The Angels’ 1894 insurrection marked the eighth conquest of Los Angeles in just over a century. Although the takeover was staged by businessmen masquerading as rebels, its significance proved more profound than the seven coups that had preceded it, for it established European American hegemony over a past shared by the diverse peoples and places of Los Angeles.
One hundred and thirteen years earlier, a smaller, more ragtag band of invaders had arrived on a level mesa not far from the Porciuncula River in the New Spanish colony of Alta California. They found no city hall to storm, no mayor from whom to demand abdication, nor even a hostile contingent of local Tongva Indians to impede their plans. Following explicit instructions laid out in a bundle of documents bearing official seals, these conquistadores founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora La Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula. Their Lady, the Queen of the Angels, was not a member of their party but the Virgin Mary. They went to work fulfilling the obligations outlined in their documents: damming the river; drawing off an irrigation channel; dividing among themselves a series of house, garden, and agricultural lots; and establishing a central plaza. In so doing, they carved a town out of the arid yet fertile basin.2
Over the next century, no fewer than six invading parties attempted to conquer Los Angeles. In 1822 representatives from the newly independent nation of Mexico delivered sealed orders requiring the pobladores (town dwellers) to lower the flag of Spain, raise that of Mexico, publicly swear allegiance to the new nation, and celebrate with due fanfare in the Plaza.3 Fifteen years later, centralist politicians in Mexico—anti-democratic, anti-federalist strongmen who aimed to consolidate their rule along a military chain of command radiating outward from Mexico City—sent Mariano Chico (1836), Nicolás Gutierrez (1836), and Manuel Micheltorena (1844) north from Mexico City with soldiers. These men tried to assume California’s governorship and replace democratically elected municipal officials with military prefects. On each occasion, Mexican Californians formed militias, resisted the interlopers, and sent them and their troops packing back to Mexico City. Without legal mandate, Californians subsequently assumed the governorship while awaiting acceptable candidates from the capital.4 In August 1846, U.S. Commodore Robert F. Stockton successfully led a phalanx of marines north from San Pedro harbor to claim Los Angeles for the United States of America, and Angelenos feted them with a musical performance in the Plaza.5 Believing the city sufficiently subdued, Stockton departed shortly thereafter. He left behind a garrison of only fifty men under the control of Archibald Gillespie. Within two months, Gillespie’s “very obnoxious regulations”—designed “to annoy the people”—and his penchant for arresting “the most respectable men in the community” on “frivolous pretexts” provoked an armed rebellion. Angelenos booted out Gillespie and his troops and reclaimed the city for Mexico. María Flores, Serbulo Varela, and José Castro, men born in California, held the town for more than four months. In January 1847 they concluded a mutually satisfactory treaty with John C. Frémont, after which Frémont and his dragoons returned to occupy Los Angeles.6
When the Angels seized control of Los Angeles in 1894, they became the eighth conquerors of Los Angeles since 1781. Marking the culmination of months of planning, community organizing, fund-raising, and advertising, members of the Los Angeles Merchants Association staged the April 10, 1894, coup to open a week-long carnival: La Fiesta de Los Angeles. The Merchants Association gambled $10,000 that La Fiesta would boost the city’s lagging economy and raise its regional and national standing.7 Giving the event a grand start, the organizers dressed in costume as the Angels, symbolically (but legally) took control of the municipal government, then handed control to their queen, Mrs. Childs, who oversaw a court of young women from cities and towns throughout the region. The subsequent festivities lasted five days and offered strategic displays of regimented marching, themed parades, and exuberant concerts designed to awe locals and visitors, who numbered in the tens of thousands and hailed from throughout the United States.8
Although the Merchants Association, mayor, and Common Council colluded in the Angels’ simulated coup, La Fiesta nevertheless carried as much symbolic power through the city’s streets as the geopolitical takeovers that preceded it. Immediately following Mayor Rowan’s abdication and the crowning of Queen Childs, an elaborate parade meandered through town. Designated “Historical Day” in accordance “with the magnitude of the occasion,” the parade condensed the story of the city’s past into nine floats.9 The first, “Prehistoric California,” featured several dozen Yuma Indians playing the part of Aztecs. While an Indian “chief” supervised from his tepee, the women pretended to work at various tasks and the men performed a war dance.10 “Resplendent in war-paint and buckskin dress,” the Indians “dazzle[d] the sun in brightness” and turned “the average rainbow … green with envy.”11 Next came Juan Cabrillo’s ship, celebrating the Spanish explorer’s “discovery” of California in 1542. “The Old Missions” followed, showcasing a “picturesque” replica of Mission San Gabriel’s bell tower and a retinue of twelve habited Fernandino friars. Representing the first U.S. immigrants, a prairie schooner trailed the friars with an escort of mounted cowboys. The fifth float, “Early Mining Days,” commemorated the 1848 gold rush and carried rough-looking men panning for gold in front of a model of Sutter’s mill. “Irrigation,” which celebrated “the change brought about by the use of water” in Southern California’s “dry, but fertile soil,” contrasted Indians toiling uselessly on barren hills with a well-watered garden oasis, “luxuriant with palm leaves and vines.”12 “Boom” and “Busted Boom” recalled the real estate rollercoaster of the 1880s. Here the Merchants poked fun at themselves, with well-known real estate market makers symbolically fishing for suckers, clinging to a safe, and drowning their sorrows in drink. “Solid Prosperity” marked the last chapter in this parade of the city’s history. Upon a chariot flanked with horns of plenty sat an enormous bag with a dollar sign painted on its side.13
For residents and visitors alike, the parade told the history of Los Angeles as a linear story of improvement and progress. Ignorant Indians had come under the control of pious fathers, who themselves gave way to ingenious Yankees, who harvested California’s gold and built aqueducts and canals, converting the arid hills of Los Angeles into a semi-tropical paradise from which they could reap agricultural wealth in perpetuity. Even the busted real estate boom had given way to a more sober, controlled commitment to “solid prosperity.” As enacted narrative, the history flowed smoothly from one epoch to the next; each chapter closed decisively and cleanly before the next one began. Much as it might on first inspection today, this parade of history made sense to the fiesteros; its clean lines and appropriate succession of people and events rang true.
La Fiesta and its history parade, while new in Los Angeles, stands as one of many small fairs and international expositions that drew more than 100 million visitors between Reconstruction and World War I. In moving displays of power and spectacle, these fairs sold historical change as progress, “synonymous with America’s material growth and economic expansion,” and “promised that continued growth would result in eventual utopia.”14 As the last float in La Fiesta’s history parade, “Solid Prosperity” made a similar pledge.15 Moreover, La Fiesta and other fairs—including the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, from which the Merchants drew inspiration—created “symbolic” universes, which “ritualistically affirmed fairgoers’ faith in American institutions and social organization, evoked a community of shared experience, and formulated responses to questions about the ultimate destiny of mankind in general and of Americans in particular.” La Fiesta and its history parade, rich in symbolic meaning and linear storytelling, offered a historically specific “cohesive explanatory blueprint of social experience” for Angelenos past, present, and future.16 The city’s recent growth from 10,000 in 1870 to roughly 75,000 by 1894, and the thousands of tourists among the crowd, made the stories La Fiesta and the history parade told both appealing and effective.
Such a parade would have been impossible to mount at earlier moments in Los Angeles’s history. The selective, refined version of the broader past it presented could have been neither staged nor eagerly consumed previously. Had La Fiesta been first celebrated in 1871, the history parade could not have entirely erased—as it did in 1894—the forty-two-year period during which Los Angeles was part of the independent nation of Mexico or the power and prominence of Los Angeles’s Mexican Californian inhabitants. In 1871 the mayor was Cristóbal Aguilar, and had the Angels demanded his abdication, he would have been as likely to relinquish control in Spanish as in English. At that time, too, it would have been difficult for the Merchants to solicit the Chinese community’s participation. In 1894, Chinese Angelenos led the parade’s mercantile portion with a vanguard of elaborate floats costing more than $2,500. Their flags, costumes, music, and spectacular artistry highlighted the opening festivities and drew praise as “one of the most gorgeous” spectacles “ever witnessed” in Los Angeles. By contrast, in 1871, a mob of five hundred citizens had perpetrated a devastating riot, murdering nineteen Chinese Angelenos and nearly destroying the Chinese quarter. Had La Fiesta been held in the 1860s or 1850s, it could not have sidestepped Mexican Californians’ enduring control over land and wealth or the occasionally intense political struggles among English- and Spanish-speaking Angelenos. From the town’s founding in 1781 until almost any time before 1894, fifty Indians parading through the streets enacting war dances and scalp dances would have threatened imminent attack and thrown the town into a panic. During La Fiesta, however, Angelenos reveled in the timbre of their “warwhoops” and delighted in Indians who so “enjoyed dancing for the white man’s benefit.”17
Only in 1894 could the Merchants stage La Fiesta and the history parade, because only then did they and the elite, commercial, racially exclusive interests they represented control sufficient power to make such a story stick. Erasing Mexicans, repackaging Indians and Chinese, and using these innovations to rewrite the past on the city’s streets required not only hubris but also a level of uncontested dominance that no previous elite enjoyed. Compelling Indian, Mexican, and Chinese Angelenos to participate, in fact, proved crucial to the Merchants’ will to temporal and historical power. Diversity not only added to La Fiesta’s appeal, it made possible a presentation of a “larger constellation of ideas about race, nationality, and progress” that authoritatively shaped “racial beliefs” by offering fairgoers “a powerful and highly visible, modern, evolutionary justification for longstanding racial and cultural prejudices.”18 In Los Angeles, La Fiesta successfully deployed otherwise “undesirable” Angelenos to assume stereotyped, monolithic identities while enacting a repackaged, skewed history that replaced a century of often violent intercultural negotiation and innovation with a linear tale of inevitable Anglo cultural and economic dominance. That Indian, Mexican, and Chinese Angelenos did their acting in multiple parades only enhanced La Fiesta’s didactic power because the new narrative’s central messages emerged from the very bodies of the people over whom it exercised control.
In all, La Fiesta provided a clean slate upon which elite Angelenos could move forward into the future while hiding a fractured, violent, and contested past from view.19 Writing in 1914, Harris Newmark, one of Los Angeles’s most important chroniclers, recalled La Fiesta de Los Angeles of 1894. A German Jew who moved to Los Angeles in 1852, Newmark was one fiestero with long experience as a witness to Angelenos’ fraught pasts. He even put pen to paper, leaving a record for posterity in the weighty tome Sixty Years in Southern California. Therein he wrote sympathetically about Indians and Chinese, praised many Mexican Californians for their hospitality and vibrant culture, and lamented the passing of the city’s quieter days. But he swallowed La Fiesta’s version of Los Angeles history hook, line, and sinker. Seemingly still enthralled, twenty years later, by the “uncontrollable enthusiasm” that overtook the city in 1894, Newmark reckoned La Fiesta as “among the earliest and, in some respects, the most important elements contributory to the wonderful growth and development of our city,” essentially rendering meaningless the first six hundred pages of his own memoir.20
Newmark’s amnesia likely served specific purposes. After arriving in Los Angeles in the early 1850s, Newmark married and enjoyed a happy family life, operated one of Los Angeles’s most successful stores, befriended a remarkable array of English- and Spanish-speaking Angelenos, and, among other community-building activities, helped found the Hebrew Benevolent Society and Turnverein Germania. But he also lived through a period when violence and murders were so common that “stern necessity knew no law”; saw his ranchero friends lose their lands to high taxes, court cases, and scheming lenders; witnessed firsthand the 1871 anti-Chinese massacre; and endured the boom and bust of the 1880s. Consequently, Newmark and others like him had much to gain by placing La Fiesta at the beginning of Los Angeles’s history. La Fiesta, the history parade, and Newmark’s book engaged in systematic processes of selective remembering and forgetting. By omitting the difficult parts—the physical violence, the territorial predation, and the commercial chicanery—they could reset Los Angeles on a righteous, level, and historically progressive foundation. Free of its shifting and unstable past, this foundation became a sturdy base upon which future artificers could build toward long-term social peace, constrained cultural diversity, and “solid prosperity.”
Projecting forward into the future, La Fiesta opened a new chapter in Los Angeles. Staged on the cusp of the twentieth century and emanating from a cartel of emergent entrepreneurs, cultural brokers, and politicians, La Fiesta marked the establishment, for the first time, of European American hegemony over Los Angeles’s peoples and places. La Fiesta painted, upon this clean canvas, a still-familiar history of Los Angeles: its Spanish fantasy past, an agricultural arcadia, vibrant commerce, tidy racial markers, and clear hierarchies all defined and solidly controlled by elite white American businessmen. La Fiesta’s participants and witnesses, Angelenos and visitors alike, offered the Merchants and the Anglo power elite they represented the nearly unanimous “spontaneous consent” required from “the great masses of the population” in order for a new vision of Los Angeles’s past, present, and future to achieve hegemonic power.21
So many accepted as natural and timeless La Fiesta’s rendering of history and hierarchy that Los Angeles emerged, like Athena, as a resplendent proto-metropolis through the fair’s euphoric haze. The power emanating from the spectacle of La Fiesta’s diverse displays and the progress presented in its history parade have held countless consumers, past and present, in thrall. The enduring power of the people who orchestrated the 1894 Fiesta and the messages they delivered during the fair made it the most thoroughly successful of the eight conquests of Los Angeles. The previous seven had opened periods of contestation among various parties that wrestled for control over people and space. The Angels, however, following their successful takeover in 1894, became the first conquistadores to deploy particular arrangements of history, people, place, and power without substantial opposition.
La Fiesta simultaneously opened Los Angeles’s career as a modern metropolis and buried a long and complicated chapter in the city’s history as a frontier borderlands. La Fiesta, the history parade, and the legions of stories told over the intervening century have maintained a facade that covers nineteenth-century Los Angeles’s complicated past, obscuring a world in which various people and their attendant projects competed for control over space, identity, and the power to shape the city’s future. This book is an effort to break through that facade to reveal the complex world of nuance, unexpected moments, and numerous contingent choices that characterized Los Angeles from its Spanish founding in 1781 through the 1894 Fiesta. Thought of another way, this book covers the period that began when Los Angeles’s settlers opened the borderlands and ended when La Fiesta closed them. I understand Los Angeles as a space where “real and imagined narratives overlap” in ways that disrupt both either/or dichotomies (Spanish or Indian, Mexican or American, Brown or White) and “linear historical understandings of this place and its people.”22 In Los Angeles, as in many settlements forged on the New Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. borderlands, ties of kinship and commerce rather than a notion of the nation held social, economic, and political relationships together.23 In part, such ties formed not because Los Angeles lay geographically at the fringe of an isolated frontier, but because it occupied a global crossroads where Europeans, Russians, and Spanish Mexicans, among many others, created a dynamic cultural and commercial society.24 As the destination, intentional or accidental, of multiple and overlapping migrations of Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, Americans (North and South), Europeans, and Chinese, Los Angeles proved to be politically and socially dynamic because no single group marshaled sufficient power to completely control space or identity.25 These geopolitical and social borderlands in turn nurtured the emergence of a dynamic human and spatial mestizaje.26
For nineteenth-century Angelenos, overlapping narratives about people and place, both real and imagined, shaped their complicated history. In conjunction with the city itself, Indian, Mexican, U.S., and Chinese identities were made and remade during the 113-year period between the city’s founding in 1781 and 1894. Only in 1894, only with La Fiesta, did boundaries that distinguished and separated Los Angeles’s residents emerge in now-familiar ways. Throughout the nineteenth century, the meaning of labels like “White,” “Mexican,” and “Indian” remained fluid.27 Before thousands of immigrants from the United States streamed into Los Angeles in the 1870s and 1880s, Mexican Californian locals had developed their own racial nomenclature, which included words like “californio,” “vecino,” “cholo,” and “indio” and the broader appellations “gente de razón” and “gente sin razón.” When immigrants from the United States and Europe first arrived between the 1830s to the 1850s, the city’s increasingly heterogeneous residents developed exclusively local strategies for making sense of people’s identities. Even then, the boundaries between such categories and the people who inhabited them were often contested and always blurry. In the 1860s and 1870s, Chinese immigrants subsequently destabilized both spatial practices and race-making strategies, opening a new chapter in the city’s history. While all of these factors—multiple ways of making identity, blurry boundaries, places where and moments when the same words have multiple meanings—may seem unfamiliar to contemporary readers, they proved equally confusing yet utterly inescapable parts of nineteenth-century Angelenos’ lives. This book confronts rather than elides the city’s complicated past, arguing that Los Angeles residents forged a city precisely by negotiating overlapping layers of intent and meaning.
To share in this perspective, the viewer must not look back from the present but forward from the past. Only by looking forward from each moment in which individuals and groups made claims, pondered decisions, and took action in their familial, commercial, and social relationships can students of history overcome what Anne Hyde has called “the disadvantages of hindsight.”28 In this book I try to start in the past and to look forward, as clearly as possible, through the prism of Los Angeles during the nineteenth century. Doing so reveals a world of malleable identities and unexpected relationships between people and groups. There, Stephen C. Foster—a former invader and translator for the U.S. Army during the Mexican-American War—became mayor and earned the respect of the city’s Spanish-Mexican population. In one startling episode, Foster resigned his office to lead a lynch mob, then won reelection without opposition the following week. His actions delighted the city’s Spanish-language press, which gushed “mejor hombre ciertamente no se podría encontrar” (certainly, a better man could not be found), while drawing ire from the city’s most prominent English-language news outlet, on facing pages of the same edition.29
The relationships between people and space explored in this book are bound up in the concepts of “race” and “place.” Over the past twenty-five years, scholars have adopted a “constructivist” approach to space and identity. Constructivists argue that neither race nor place exist naturally but emerge from multiple social, political, and economic negotiations. In most cases, constructions of race and place occur within the broader context of struggles for power and domination by one group over another in a particular location.30 Henri Lefebvre encouraged scholars to “look at history itself in a new light” by bringing together histories of “space” and “representations of space” to analyze “their relationships—with each other, with practice, and with ideology.” Intertwining spatial and racial histories produces a new narrative of Los Angeles from its founding through the nineteenth century. My history considers the genesis of various city spaces and their respective “interconnections, distortions, displacements, mutual interactions.”31 Indeed, this study reveals race and place to be but two permeable circuits in the networks along which people negotiate intimate and public iterations of power, circuits that frequently commingle in my narrative with contests regarding gender, class, nations, and citizenship. Consequently, my story offers only one interpretive strategy by which to shed new light on the history of Los Angeles and other (North and South) American places.
In concert with widely accepted scientific notions that all Homo sapiens constitute a single species without racial divisions, humanists and social scientists have developed a theory of “race making” or “racialization.” They argue that as people work to differentiate themselves from one another, to make clear “that ‘they’ are not ‘us,’” individuals and groups direct various ascriptions toward those from whom they hope to differentiate themselves.32 Over time, certain clusters of ascriptions stick because they become particularly useful in creating and maintaining difference. Those ascriptions and their bases (skin tone, status, dress, manner of speech, physical characteristics, and so on) are in no way preconditioned. Instead, racial categories are selectively assembled from a multitude of potential options and combinations; only those that gain power in particular moments and prove effective at creating, clarifying, and investing with meaning difference become enshrined as racial markers.33 That people in the United States relied on skin tone, or phenotype, as a marker of racial identity while those living on Spain and Mexico’s far northern frontier relied instead on entirely different criteria to create a similarly bounded system reinforces the argument that “race” is not “natural” or “biological” but is instead an invented social category whose creation and maintenance serves critical social, political, economic, and cultural purposes. Successfully constructed, racial identities permeate nearly all structures within society.34
In the United States, skin tone has served as the primary marker of racial difference, and privileges in the form of citizenship, economic opportunity, cultural capital, and spatial access have historically been granted to those qualifying as “White” and denied to “Blacks,” “Browns,” “Reds,” and “Yellows.”35 Along the frontier of New Spain and Mexico during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, residents relied on achieved status, social behavior, and dress to differentiate gente sin razón (people without reason, especially independent Indians) from gente de razón (people with reason, Spanish-Mexicans who enjoyed full citizenship privileges). Through the 1840s, those who settled Los Angeles—most of whom occupied the lower strata of Spain’s complicated casta system—rewrote their own racial identities while inventing and elaborating a new, local system that divided people into four distinct groups: indios, cholos, vecinos, and californios. “Indios” referred to independent Indians. “Cholos” stood as a derogatory term for recently arrived Mexican menial laborers. “Vecinos,” literally meaning neighbors, described long-term local householders, independent farmers, and artisans of respectable status even if their finances kept them in the ordinary and middling classes. “Californios” appeared as a term invented by the emergent elite as shorthand for their ownership of large ranch holdings, control over substantive indio and cholo labor, and sufficient surplus income to purchase refined goods and to host elaborate fiestas.
When immigrants from the United States arrived, they found their preferred race-making strategy—sorting members of society on the basis of skin color—ineffective for making sense of Los Angeles’s social landscape. Asymmetries in local Angelenos’ and immigrant European Americans’ respective strategies for determining race and citizenship meant that most Mexican Californians failed to meet U.S. standards for whiteness, and many newcomers, on account of their low social status and bad behavior, failed to pass Mexican Californians’ tests for classification as gente de razón. Despite these fundamental differences, the ways that old-time Angelenos and U.S. newcomers articulated new identity categories that drew on both traditions between the 1830s and early 1870s constitute one of this book’s key themes. Elite Mexican Californians and European Americans forged a common identity in Los Angeles based on shared power and strong familial and economic ties. They solidified their shared membership in this community by jointly relegating low-status Mexicans/cholos and Indians/indios to the bottom of the racial hierarchy, exploiting them for labor, and blaming them for local problems.36 During the 1860s and 1870s, Chinese immigrants to Los Angeles became the objects of racializing efforts by numerous Angelenos born under both the U.S. and Mexican flags, who drew on techniques they’d previously deployed to marginalize cholos and indios in creating a new “Chinese” category. Nevertheless, the ways Chinese Angelenos understood themselves and the array of other people with whom they shared Los Angeles’s spaces remain somewhat difficult to track. Building on the premise that Chinese Angelenos, and other Chinese immigrants to North America, acted as agents in the negotiation of their own identities, the question of how Chinese immigrants understood themselves and others in racial terms offers fertile ground for future research.37
Cultural geographers, historians, anthropologists, and critical theorists, among others following the work of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey, have come to understand the construction of “place” in similarly constructivist terms. Like making race, marking and differentiating space, either physically for infrastructure or culturally by ritual occupation and use, depend on and are determined by the exercise of power.38 Specifically, place making must be understood as a process that “always involves a construction, rather than merely a discovery, of difference.” In much the same way that race making leads to the formation of new individual and collective identities, place making leads to the transformation of previously neutral spaces into places with particular meanings that contain their own individual and differentiated identities.39
A brief look at the microhistory of a piece of ground located where Main Street intersected the southwest corner of the Plaza effectively illustrates the notion of place making in Los Angeles.40 In 1822, José Antonio Carrillo, owner of a substantial ranch just outside the city, received permission from municipal officials to build a house just southwest of the nearly completed Plaza church. In doing so, the comisionado (head public officer) surveyed, measured, and deeded the lot to Carrillo, on sealed paper, converting otherwise unmarked terrain into a house lot. Carrillo then built a substantial adobe home, creating place from bounded space. For four decades, Carrillo and his family resided there, but the house was abandoned following Carrillo’s death in 1862. Then Pío Pico—former governor of California under Mexico and Carrillo’s brother-in-law—bought the property, razed the building, and built an extravagant brick and stucco hotel on the site, reshaping the city’s built environment. Called the Pico House, the hotel opened on June 19, 1871. Its lavish lobby, restaurants, and bars quickly became the premier social destination for local residents and tourists alike.41
Recalling the history of this piece of ground suggests some ways that use and identity, place and race, give each other meaning. Carrillo’s adobe sported whitewashed walls and a high, gabled, Spanish tiled roof. Fashioned in the traditional U shape with an interior courtyard, one wing extended west along Calle Principal and the other sprawled south, facing out onto the Plaza. Cross walls in the rear enclosed a patio. Inside, its many parlors, bedrooms, a library, and a ballroom large enough to accommodate gatherings of more than five hundred persons provided structural proof of Carrillo’s wealth and success as a cattle rancher.42 In form, the home connected Carrillo to Spain, and in function the oversized ballroom and ample courtyards allowed him to lavish large crowds with food, drink, and entertainment, as he did for eight full days in 1834 in honor of his brother-in-law Pico’s wedding to Ignacia Alvarado. The townhouse thus reflected Carrillo’s material and cultural successes and marked his membership in the californio elite. By 1862, the deceased Carrillo’s abandoned and decrepit adobe offered symbolic witness to the imperiled californio identity. Both had nearly crumbled, together with the regional ranching economy, under the twin forces of the cattle market’s collapse and a killing drought. But expectations of the californios’ demise proved premature. Pío Pico leveraged assets and credit to revive his old friend’s home as the Pico House, returned californio influence to the city’s core, asserted his credentials as host par excellence of the city’s resident and visiting elite, and flexed his power as an American businessman. Like Carrillo’s adobe, Pico’s House stood among the city’s snazziest, although its lavishly appointed rooms were designed not for redistribution but for revenue.43 By redeveloping Carrillo’s lot, Pico changed both place and identity for himself and the city.
I trace an interdependent, mutually constitutive relationship between race and space that shaped nineteenth-century Los Angeles. In this L.A. story, ongoing negotiations in the realms of society, politics, commerce, and culture produced both place and identity. Documents carved the pueblo of Los Angeles from the fertile soil watered by the Porciuncula River and placed Los Angeles first on New Spain’s and Mexico’s far northern frontier, then on the United States’ southwestern periphery. These documents reflected not only spatial but social, political, and economic ideologies tied to identity: maps made the people living in Los Angeles Indians, then Spanish colonists, then Mexicans, and finally Americans. Within the city, the location and arrangement of residences, commercial outlets, and the streets that connected them informed the fluid racial identities of the people who paraded in the Plaza, worked at its adjacent businesses, and lived in its surrounding houses. Similarly, contests over the meaning of American, Californian, Mexican, Indian, and Chinese racial categories (negotiations that took place in diverse public and private settings) played out in a variety of spatial contexts, including the shape of roads and waterways; the kinds of buildings that dotted particular neighborhoods; and the location of underground sewers, paved streets, and public festivals. For example, Carrillo’s control over the people who built, maintained, and served at his Plaza townhouse marked them as indios, whereas Carrillo’s freedom to enjoy the company of his many friends in ample comfort while being served by indios helped mark him as a californio. In other words, race making and place making are not simply analogous but interrelated activities. Making race and making Los Angeles were the same project.
The shared work of racial and spatial construction suggests two conceptual consequences. First, racial identities become embedded in both the physical and cultural foundations of urban life. This assertion applies to social spaces, such as the Plaza, which serve simultaneously as critical geographical locations and venues in which Angelenos negotiated and enacted their identities. In equally powerful ways, ideas about race inform the location and shape of physical marks on the landscape, such as buildings, streets, and sewers, and subsequently become permanently embedded into the very bricks, pavement, and pipes of which they are made.44 Second, racial categories and the boundaries that separate them are contested and negotiated locally. Race in Los Angeles—or anywhere else—emerges as and remains an expressly local product. Although race making occurs within larger state and national contexts, and although race makers often summon ideas about identity forged in other places, the ways in which race and place connect in Los Angeles’s history indicate that no stable, national categories determined Angelenos’ identities. Even when events like the 1894 Los Angeles Fiesta render local racial categories in ways congruent with widely acknowledged national standards, they nevertheless spring from local action by local actors wielding sufficient power to create such displays. The outward appearance of national homogeneity, I argue, conceals so many contested local circumstances and so many nuances that race remains an expressly local artifact.45
Rather than setting in a moment and staying fixed over space and time, racial categories remain subject to constant negotiation and change, much like the places in which they arise. At bottom, this assertion contradicts the longstanding scholarly tradition that enshrines racial categories as national, and which often considers black-white relations forged on the Eastern Seaboard as the “master narrative” of race in U.S. history. While numerous historians, especially those addressing the Pacific Coast and the Southwest, have demonstrated how the presence of Indians, Mexicans, and Asians dramatically complicates black-white and other binaries, I want to push the critique still further. My research indicates that the meaning of, and the boundaries marking, racial categories changed no fewer than three times in Los Angeles during the nineteenth century. Moreover, “White” itself had no meaning in Los Angeles as a racial marker before the Mexican-American War, and then stood as only one label—deployed by a substantial minority—among many and that in time took on specific local meaning. This ongoing dynamism belies the assertion that race, like place, is ever fixed over time and cannot be exported intact over large distances. In developing this interpretation, I hope to open new lines of inquiry for students of race and a perspective from which we can reexamine racial formation in different locales, at places and in times when nations have and have not been present. Rather than obstructing efforts to write new U.S. histories, a local approach considering race and space in tandem has the potential to illuminate new avenues for research that, by repositioning space, identity, and the nation as questions rather than preexisting parameters, would generate richer, more nuanced stories.46
Much as this book draws together theoretical work regarding race and place making, it also connects to a rich and growing historical literature addressing Los Angeles’s peoples and places. Carey McWilliams’s Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946) drew together workers’ lives with regional cultural analysis in a way that bridged the gap between material and representational perspectives, but studies deploying a similar approach appeared only infrequently until the twenty-first century.47 Instead, scholars focused either on people and their communities or the city’s spatial development. Leonard Pitt’s The Decline of the Californios, 1846–1890 opened the field of ethnic history in California.48 Richard Griswold del Castillo, Alberto Camarillo, and others subsequently produced ethnic-oriented histories focusing on social life and segregation in Southern California. They brought Mexican, black, and Chinese Angelenos out from the shadows, reenvisioned the barrios and ghettoes to which Mexican and African Americans had been remanded, and established the centrality of connections between race and space to the city’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories. Like other works of their generation, they attended principally to singular communities whose a priori racial status granted almost exclusive power to white residents as the agents of segregation and marginalization.49
When scholars in the United States confronted the cultural turn, the linguistic turn, and the postmodern challenge leveled by critical theorists, the West as a place, its ethnic and ethnoracial residents, and Los Angeles as a city became, suddenly, the focus of a great deal of new research and writing. The self-styled New Western historians torched Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis”; emphasized the centrality of race, gender, and ethnicity to the western experience; reconceptualized the West as a place or region rather than a process; and insisted that people of color are not only victims of oppression but also agents of history. Douglas Monroy and Tomás Almaguer, among others, brought these insights to bear on the study of Los Angeles and California.50 Enriching this new intellectual terrain, Antonia Catañeda, Simone Bouvier, Miroslava Chávez-García, and María Casas foregrounded the centrality of women and gender relations to California’s pre-colonial, Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. histories.51 Although women served as their primary subjects, these scholars fruitfully brought gender analysis to bear on inter- and intraethnic relations, opening new avenues for family, social, and legal histories in cross-cultural economic and political contexts. Like earlier works, however, these studies treat both place and white racial identity as static and retain the metanarrative of decline.52
In The Fragmented Metropolis, the first serious urban history of Los Angeles, Robert Fogelson argues that the city’s spatial history revolved on two axes: the ceaseless waves of growth and industrialization, and the rejection of a vibrant civic center in favor of a network of suburbs.53 Like its contemporaries in social history, the book cedes overwhelming agency to immigrants from the United States and considers people of color as marginalized outsiders with little power to shape the urban landscape. The cultural turn provoked a new mode of urban inquiry and gave rise to a new “L.A. School” of urban studies, anchored to an affinity for multiplicity, local specificity, relationships between domination and resistance, and the willingness to “read” all things, including built spaces, as narrative “texts.” Although its many permutations resist easy summary, they are seemingly bound together by a common insistence on the absence of racial, cultural, or ideological hegemony; the connections among people, place, and the environment; and an exploration of the ways that the city’s periphery (be they neighborhoods, people, economic strategies, social movements and so forth) have organized its core.54 Too often, however, writers in the L.A. School fall into La Fiesta’s trap, beginning their studies with a late-nineteenth-century Los Angeles that springs forth fully formed from its pre-urban ether. Consequently, the entire field misses out on a century of urban engagements with borders, hybridity, and other dynamics relative to articulated notions of space, identity, politics, and economy.55
Recent works by William Deverell, William Estrada, Greg Hise, Stephanie Lewthwaite, Natalia Molina, and others have united race and place. I share their attention to the centrality of public policy, space, and violence in the city’s history, the making and remaking of citizenship categories, and the importance of organizing Los Angeles’s history from within rather than without.56 My focus on the critical connections among public policy, the built environment, and local racial projects offers new pathways to situate Angelenos’ locally specific strategies for reckoning space and identity within the broader histories of other locales critical to the histories of Mexico’s far northern frontier and the U.S. Southwest, including Bisbee, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, El Paso, San Antonio, Tijuana, Nogales, and Ciudad Juarez. Throughout the region during the nineteenth century, projects regarding race, gender, and the nation overlapped, U.S. citizens and the United States as a geopolitical nation entered as immigrants, and towns occupied both isolated frontier districts and dynamic global crossroads. Exploring the fluid and consequential bonds between space and identity affords a perspective from which to reenvision the region while remaining sensitive to the determinative specificities of individual locations.
This book explores Los Angeles in a variety of contexts, focusing especially on families, episodic violence, infrastructure, and public policy. Throughout the nineteenth century, local Indians, Mexican Californians, and immigrants from the United States, Europe, Mexico, and China negotiated the creation, definition, and institutionalization of difference. These people’s overlapping race- and place-making projects generated panoplies of racial and spatial formations that frequently proved either fleeting or extremely fluid. Understanding how these projects embraced cultural and material components of urban life requires sensitivity to both private action and the civic ideologies that envisioned an ideal Los Angeles, offered pathways to achieve the public good, and substantively influenced public policy.
Los Angeles’s multiple and overlapping borderlands proved meaningful at the moment of its founding and remained so between 1781 and 1840. Implementing the most recent strategic invention in a long history of Spanish colonial efforts—the recruitment of entire families to settle towns in an effort to diffuse toxic gender relations resulting from Spanish soldiers’ egregiously bad behavior—mestizo settlers established a pueblo according to a Spanish vision on a piece of ground immediately adjacent to Yaanga, an independent Gabrielino-Tongva village. The pobladores entered an already dense social, political, and economic landscape shaped by increasingly specialized Tongva strategies for environmental management, food production, and trade. To that space, the newcomers carried spatial, racial, cultural, and commercial practices that had grown out of long-lasting Islamic influence on Spanish institutions and culture. Chapter 1 chronicles the ways Los Angeles’s early settlers produced race and place in Los Angeles under Spain and Mexico. Erstwhile liminal and impoverished mestizo pobladores marginalized Gabrielino-Tongva residents and transformed themselves into wealthy rancheros and self-sufficient vecinos through strategic developments in the pueblo’s institutional, spatial, and commercial infrastructure.
In chapter 2, I suggest that even as Angelenos worked to weave racial boundaries into the fabric of their lives as Mexicans, they also began to build new kinds of relationships with U.S. and European newcomers. From these relationships many Angeleno families gained members with particularly useful commercial and craft acumen. Immigrant men, hailing from the United States and Europe, acquired entry into Southern Californian social and economic circles, without which they could not have organized and orchestrated the local hide and tallow trade so successfully. But these were not simply relationships of political or economic convenience or expedience. Locals opened their homes, businesses, and lands to the newcomers, and the immigrant men converted to Catholicism, swore allegiance to Mexico, and learned local strategies for cultural and economic production. Most important, immigrant U.S. men and Mexican Californian women joined in marriage and had children together. In doing so, Mexican Californian women served as a pivot in familial and gender relations. Those who married immigrant men incorporated their husbands into the complex circuits of Angeleno life, mediating the ways Yankee newcomers and established californios reworked the boundaries and meanings of their own identities and forged a new, locally specific intercultural society.57 Their relationships produced a series of shared obligations, for child rearing, labor control, land use, and municipal governance.
The members of these nuclear and extended kin networks became particularly well positioned to mediate between U.S. and Mexican Californian cultures when war turned Los Angeles from a Mexican pueblo into a U.S. town. Much as recent scholars have argued that Indians in the Southwest retained primacy through the first century and more of their encounters with the Spanish, so too did Los Angeles’s Mexican Californians hold advantages during and after the Mexican War, retaining sufficient power to challenge, contest, and collaborate with newcomers from the United States from the 1840s until the 1870s. Both before and after Los Angeles’s annexation to the United States, Angelenos’ intercultural families, businesses, and social networks demonstrated the possibility of fruitful coexistence. The very bases of these earlier relationships—agreement about land use, the importance of water management, the centrality of commerce, and shared discipline over poor laborers and Indians—became the building blocks of much more elaborately intercultural communities that developed in the late 1840s and early 1850s. To be sure, the californios’ intolerance of not only Indians but also other Mexicans born outside the province, and Euro-Americans’ insistence on white racial purity as the foundational qualification for citizenship, presented a recipe for conflict. Yet they found a way forward together. Even though Angelenos born in the United States and Mexican California never completely agreed about how to how to draw racial boundaries or on the criteria upon which membership within various categories would be determined, they didn’t have to. Instead, they agreed that their disagreement didn’t matter enough to keep them from building businesses and making families together.
But could such a society last? Considering the amount of emotional, personal, economic, and political capital so many Angelenos invested in developing local interculture during the 1840s and early 1850s, asking why so many decided later to go their separate ways seems more appropriate. Chapter 3 examines 1855 and 1856, focusing specifically on developments in the realms of popular violence, municipal policy, and public life that fractured and undermined long-standing social relationships. Extralegal justice, land use strategies, water laws, and the public press had until 1855 served as venues in which Angelenos reinforced their commitments to local racial and spatial arrangements. In 1855, they suddenly became arenas in which long-unsettled racial and commercial questions came to the fore, leading to injuries of words and wounds on both sides. A mayor resigned to lead a lynch mob; a police officer killed an upstanding vecino seemingly without reason; and citizens complained, in both English and Spanish, more loudly and more publicly than before about government, law enforcement, and one another’s qualification for citizenship. When numerous Mexican Californians endorsed John Frémont and the upstart Republican Party in 1856, national tensions related to sectional conflict stretched out over Los Angeles, dividing the city in much the same way it had divided the nation. Increased political and social friction, resulting from both national and local events, left the old coalitions teetering upon cracked foundations by late 1856. Relationships as long in the making and as deeply intertwined as those in Los Angeles could not be easily unmade, but local actors needed to actively maintain them if they were to endure.
Over the next decade and a half, Angelenos’ actions demonstrated their ambivalence about making repairs to their cooperative relationships. As discussed in chapter 4, many Angelenos married across national boundaries, sent their children to school together, engaged in joint business ventures, and experimented with new building and spatial arrangements. However, newcomers from the United States and Mexico, who had no stake in the intercultural society forged by their predecessors, built their homes and businesses farther and farther away from the old Plaza, adding considerably to the city’s overall spatial diversity but fracturing its structural homogeneity. These spatial changes provoked further alterations to the city’s water network, closing off intercultural choices and altering the municipality’s economic orientation. Similar dynamics made choosing continued intercultural innovation in public life more difficult, even if such choices remained readily available in the private realm.
Chapter 5 chronicles party politics and policy choices during the late 1860s and early 1870s. Most U.S. immigrants stood by the Democrats, while Mexican Californians joined the Republicans, recaptured political power in 1864, and remained formidable until the mid-1870s. Public policy turned acrimonious as Angelenos shed their penchant for compromise and became increasingly willing to fight about land, water, and the use of public space. This resulted in a spate of closely contested elections, maneuvering in the Common Council to neutralize the Spanish-speaking vote, and an intense debate regarding the water supply. In the midst of these battles, Angelenos engaged in a brutal anti-Chinese riot in 1871, which although commensurate with earlier episodes of cooperative vigilante discipline nevertheless amplified differences of ancestry and culture among European, Mexican, and Chinese Americans. When, amid charges of voter fraud on both sides, James Toberman defeated Cristobál Aguilar in the 1872 mayoral election, he carried an exclusivist Anglo ideology with him into office. While private cooperative ventures endured, intercultural civic ideals perished.
Even though shared politics had come to an end, Los Angeles’s mixed social and cultural life survived the political tumult of 1872. Ethnic community organizations flourished, Mexican- and Chinese-owned businesses drew multiethnic crowds of evening and weekend revelers to the Plaza district, and all Angelenos celebrated religious and secular events there for some time. As much as shared work, recreation, and nightlife offered all Angelenos public venues for defining and contesting their own identities, chapter 6 argues, they ultimately could not withstand the ways the city literally changed beneath their feet. Moving aggressively, Mayor Toberman and the ascendant Democratic majority remade Los Angeles’s infrastructure and Cartesian landscape in line with an exclusivist racial vision immediately following their 1871 electoral victory. By 1894 the Common Council had enclosed dozens of irrigation canals in pipes, built a comprehensive sewer network, and graded and paved hundreds of miles of city streets. But the council built unevenly, depriving Mexican and Chinese Angelenos of access to these new services. The spatial marginalization nurtured and reinforced stereotypes of Mexican and Chinese Angelenos as dirty and backward, and the absence of sewers and paved streets in the immediate eastern vicinity of the Plaza eroded its desirability as a locus of recreational, communal, and festival gatherings. These asymmetries ultimately broke the city’s intercultural community and ushered in now-familiar racial boundaries separating White, Mexican, and Chinese Angelenos.
The book ends where it began, with an analysis of the ways that La Fiesta 1894 marked the closing of one period in Los Angeles’s history and the opening of another. Only there will this story of Los Angeles conclude, lost in a swirl of dancing Indians, bags of money, and the artifice of a repackaged local history. But the story of race and place in Los Angeles now turns back from the eighth attempted conquest to the first, and joins a band of socially liminal mestizo colonists as they mark off a plaza, draw an irrigation canal from the Porciuncula River, and build a slew of mud huts, or jacales, in which to make their homes and raise their families.