1. “Pleasures Reign,” Los Angeles Times, April 10, 1894, 8, and Harris Newmark, Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853–1913 (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Bookshop, 1984), 604.
2. “Governor Neve’s Order for the Founding of Los Angeles,” in The Founding Documents of Los Angeles: A Bilingual Edition, ed. Doyce B. Nunis, Jr. (Los Angeles: Historical Society of Southern California, 2004), 157–60. William Estrada argues that no formal ceremony or celebration inaugurated the settlement, contrary to the story told by noted Los Angeles historian W. W. Robinson. See William David Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 31, and W. W. Robinson, Los Angeles from the Days of the Pueblo (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1959), 22.
3. David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), 6–9, quote at 8. See also Herbert E. Bolton, “The Iturbide Revolution in the Californias,” Hispanic American Historical Review 2 (1919): 188–242, and George Tays, “The Passing of Spanish California, September 29, 1822,” California Historical Society Quarterly 15:3 (June 1936): 139–42.
4. Weber, Mexican Frontier, esp. 242–72. Juan Bautista Alvarado became governor in 1836 and Pío Pico took over in 1844, symbolically moving the capital from Monterey to Los Angeles.
5. James M. Guinn, A History of California and an Extended History of Los Angeles and Environs (Los Angeles: Historical Record Company, 1915), 349.
6. Benjamin Davis Wilson, “Observations on Early Days in California and New Mexico,” manuscript written from the author’s dictation by Thomas Savage, Nov. 28–Dec. 6, 1877, 67, BANC MSS C-D, Hubert Howe Bancroft Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See also Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850–1890: A Social History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 25–28, and Douglas Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 177–80.
7. “La Fiesta de Los Angeles” Los Angeles Times, February 21, 1894, 6. For a trenchant discussion of the career of La Fiesta de Los Angeles, see William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Making of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), chapter 2.
8. “La Fiesta,” Los Angeles Times, May 6, 1894, 22. An earlier article estimated the crowd at 75,000, which historian William Deverell finds “impossible” as it “would have equaled the entire population of Los Angeles in the mid-1890s.” Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe, 58.
9. “Pleasures Reign,” Los Angeles Times, April 10, 1894, 8.
10. “The Parade,” Los Angeles Times, April 11, 1894, 4.
11. “Pleasures Reign,” Los Angeles Times, April 10, 1894, 8.
12. Whether or not other Yuma stood on this float or costumed non-Indians played Indian remains unclear.
13. “The Parade,” Los Angeles Times, April 11, 1894, 4.
14. Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 4.
15. Describing the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, William Cronon suggests that the fair’s organizers presented Chicago as “the fulfillment of a destiny that Columbus had long ago set in motion.” William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 341. Writing about La Fiesta 1894, William Deverell argues that “from the vantage of a century later, La Fiesta looks like the party white Los Angeles threw to celebrate the triumph of Manifest Destiny in the Far West.” Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe, 64.
16. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 3, 2.
17. “The Parade,” Los Angeles Times, April 11, 1894, 4.
18. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 2, 6.
19. Deverell argues La Fiesta offered Anglo Angelenos “the ideal vehicle by which to forget—to whitewash” the city’s complicated and often unpleasant past “as well as the entire bloody history of the Southwest throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe, 59.
20. Newmark, Sixty Years, 604. Also quoted in Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe, 59.
21. Rydell argues that all of the era’s fairs stand as “triumphs of hegemony.” All the World’s a Fair, 4. Antonio Gramsci theorized “hegemony” as an alternative form of state power over ordinary people. If direct domination by brute force lay at one end of a spectrum of power relations in civil society, Gramsci posited, then hegemony occupied the opposite end and arose from “the ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.” Gramsci argued that states normatively controlled citizens by way of hegemony and resorted to the “apparatus of state coercive power” only when “groups did not ‘consent’ actively or passively,” or when the state anticipated “moments of crisis of command and direction when spontaneous consent has failed” across the community. See Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Noel Smith, eds., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 12.
22. Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996), 5. Also cited in Estrada, Los Angeles Plaza, 7.
23. A borderlands approach further raises questions about the utility of the “nation”—as an idea and a geopolitical reality—as an organizing analytical category. For studies exploring the ways economic, cultural, and family ties connected locals to (and at times set them in opposition against) each other in ways that often eclipsed their link to any particular national identity, see Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011); Carlos Manuel Salomon, Pío Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010); Katherine Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor in the Arizona Borderlands (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Raul Ramos, Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Eric V. Meeks, Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Weber, Mexican Frontier. While I see strong transnational familial, cultural, and commercial connections in nineteenth-century Los Angeles, Michael González argues that Spanish-Mexican Angelenos actively stitched themselves into the young Mexican nation. Michael N. González, This Small City Will Be a Mexican Paradise: Exploring the Origins of Mexican Culture in Los Angeles, 1821–1846 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005).
24. Louise Pubols, “Born Global: From Pueblo to Statehood,” in William Deverell and Greg Hise, eds., A Companion to Los Angeles (West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 20–39, and Marissa K. López, Chicano Nations: The Hemispheric Origins of Mexican American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 2011). Specifically, López argues that Mariano Vallejo understood Spanish and Mexican California not as a distant frontier “but the red-hot center of the late nineteenth-century Americas” (61).
25. Tom Sizgorich defines borderlands as “a space in which no one cultural or political force is able to exercise uncontested hegemony, and in which one is likely to encounter discursive economies which incorporate (but do not necessarily assimilate) the influences of various cultural traditions and political interests.” Thomas N. Sizgorich, “Narrative and Community in Islamic Late Antiquity,” Past and Present 185 (November 2004): 9–42, 16. Writing about San Antonio, Texas, Raul Ramos suggests that “borderland” offers one way to describe the “relationship of a region to two or more nation-states and thus begs the question of what nationalism looks like on the border of a nation.” Ramos, Beyond the Alamo, 8. Nevertheless, borderlands exist in many Cartesian and discursive spaces remote (in both time and place) from nation-states.
26. For the concept of “spatial mestizaje,” see Chris Wilson, “Spatial Mestizaje on the Pueblo-Anglo-Hispanic Frontier,” Mass 10 (1994): 40–49. For work exploring the possibilities and peril of mixed communities in the Southwest, see esp. Brooks, Captives and Cousins.
27. A similar fluidity characterizes the present volume. Assigning labels to groups whose sense of themselves and others remained dynamic is only one of the challenges here. In addition, a commitment to avoid reinforcing a priori racial categories and the labels that describe them further muddies the nomenclatural waters. When possible and appropriate, I use words that the actors in this story used to describe themselves and others. When grouping on my own, I refer to indigenous residents of the Los Angeles basin as Tongva, Gabrieleno-Tongva (a blended term incorporating both indigenous and Spanish naming strategies), Gabrielinos, and Indians. I refer to those connected to the Spanish colonial project, subsequent immigrants, and their California-born offspring alternately as Mexican Californians, Spanish-Mexicans, and for those born into these families after 1848, Mexican Americans. I call immigrants from New Spanish and independent Mexico Mexicans, and later in the book I use “Mexican” as a racial term only once it seems to have crystallized. Immigrants to Los Angeles from the United States and Europe, and their Los Angeles–born children, present the most vexing naming issue. I most frequently use the term “European American” to refer to such individuals and groups, despite the fact that some Iberian immigrants to California and their descendants are also rightly European American. Intermittently, I use the terms “Yankee,” “gringo,” and “norteamericano” specifically because they carry with them cultural baggage as understood by Mexican Californians. Scholars in ethnic history frequently deploy the simpler term “Anglo,” which I use only sparingly because many Angelenos’ southern European origins and/or non-Protestant religious proclivities lose historical presence under the Anglo umbrella and because these people did not fully become “white” until after World War II. As with my use of “Mexican” as a racial marker, I only use the term “white” in the context of explicit negotiations regarding race. I do so in part because I argue that white as a racial marker emerged only in time and only in dialogue with the development of referential Indian, Mexican, and Chinese racial categories. Finally, readers will note that I go to great lengths to use the term “American” sparingly, despite the resulting stylistic awkwardness. In geopolitical terms, all residents of North and South America have claim to the appellation. More specific to this study, I refuse to yield the term “American” as a centered, normative, and uncontested label for immigrants from the United States to Spanish and Mexican California or to subsequent immigrants from lands east of Los Angeles during the U.S. period.
28. Anne F. Hyde, “The Disadvantages of Hindsight: A Re-Reading of the Early American West,” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History 19:6 (November 2005): 7–11.
29. La Estrella de Los Angeles and The Los Angeles Star, vol. 4, no. 38, February 1, 1855. See chapter 3.
30. In her landmark essay, Joan Scott describes gender as constructed and negotiated along axes of social, political, economic, and cultural power. Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91:5 (December 1996): 1053–75.
31. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), 42.
32. On the absence of biological racial difference among humans, see Jonathan Marks, Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History (Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995). The central works in racialization and new race theory are Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), and Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 1998). See also Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 1:181 (May–June 1990): 95–118.
33. Fine examples of historical studies that draw out this notion include Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Back Bay, 1998); Martha Menchaca, The Mexican Outsiders: A Community History of Marginalization and Discrimination in California (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995); and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1996).
34. Anthropologist Audrey Smedley, following Stuart Hall, argues that as people realize the “adaptive usefulness” of racial categories, “they become established as givens, as worldviews or ideologies.” Smedley defines “worldview” as “a culturally structured, systematic way of looking at, perceiving, and interpreting various world realities.” As a worldview, racial ideas become institutionalized and consequently “feed back into human thought and actions,” ultimately becoming “enthroned as mind-sets,” which “may even achieve the state of involuntary cognitive processes, actively if not consciously controlling the behavior of their bearers.” Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder: Westview, 1999), 18.
35. See Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedoms: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); George Fredrickson, The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988) and The Black Image in the White Mind (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).
36. While Douglas Monroy, David Gutierrez, and Philip Ethington suggest that elite Mexican Californians and European Americans jointly assumed a white racial identity and together dominated laboring Angelenos, I argue instead that they created a locally specific intercultural identity that followed neither californio nor U.S. strategies precisely. Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers; David Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Philip J. Ethington, “Ab Urbis Condita: Regional Regimes Since 13,000 Before Present,” in William Deverell and Greg Hise, eds., A Companion to Los Angeles (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 177–215, 190–91.
37. Henry Yu, “Mountains of Gold: Canada, North America, and the Cantonese Pacific,” in Chee Beng Tan, ed., Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Diaspora (New York: Routledge, 2013), 108–21. Yu’s work suggests that kin connections, places of origin within China, and shared Cantonese dialects bound Chinese immigrant communities together in North America. Moreover, Chinese immigrants, many of whom came from the same region in Guangdong, held a strong sense of their distinctness from Han Chinese, Hakka (guest people who had migrated into Guangdong from northern China), and foreigners.
38. Historical geographer David Delaney argues that “space and power are so tightly bound that changing one necessarily entails changing the other.” David Delaney, Race, Place, and the Law, 1836–1948 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 7.
39. Lefebvre, Production of Space; Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Culture, Power, Place: Ethnography at the End of an Era,” in Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds., Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 13.
40. More accurately, this is the southwest corner of the third Los Angeles Plaza, as floods forced it to be moved twice during the pueblo’s first three decades. Consequently, this particular spot took on spatial significance in relationship to the Plaza only after it settled in its third, and final, home. Estrada, Los Angeles Plaza, 9.
41. Until this time, the Plaza had been a strictly public place, hosting social, religious, and ceremonial functions. Carrillo’s adobe was also the Plaza’s first private space. Several other noted ranching families, including the Picos, Lugos, and Avilas, followed suit in the next decade. Salomon, Pío Pico, situates Pico’s development of the lot as commensurate with Pico’s ongoing commercial, real estate, and entrepreneurial engagement in Los Angeles.
42. Robinson, From the Days, 32.
43. Geographer J. Nicholas Entrikin argues convincingly that people’s “relations to place and culture become elements in the construction” of their “individual and collective identities.” Tracing the relationship between place and identity requires an approach that considers both the “social and economic forces” that “shape places and in turn are shaped by places.” J. Nicholas Entrikin, The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), quotes from 1 and 21.
44. Doreen Massey argues that “spatial differentiation … is not just an outcome: it is integral to the reproduction of society and its dominant social relations.” Doreen Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labor: Social Structures and the Geography of Production (New York: Methuen, 1984), 299–300. Cited in Entrikin, Betweenness of Place, 21. In this same spirit, I adhere to Dolores Hayden’s insight that “indigenous residents as well as colonizers, ditch-diggers as well as architects, migrant workers as well as mayors, housewives as well as housing inspectors, are all active in shaping the urban landscape.” A public historian, Hayden’s work suggests that all Angelenos be considered agents in the city’s construction and that an evaluation of their contributions can illuminate the meaning of the built environment. Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 15.
45. I do not mean to suggest that Los Angeles or notions of race there developed in complete isolation from larger historical phenomena. Indeed, Los Angeles was a node on multiple and overlapping transnational circuits. Spanish officials ordered Alta California’s settlement within the broader context of the Bourbon reforms, Mexico gained its independence from Spain against the backdrop of the Napoleonic invasion, and concerns about imperial projects sponsored by Britain, France, Russia, and the United States informed much of the city’s history during the nineteenth century. However, local rather than international issues determined Los Angeles’s social and spatial evolution.
46. For a transnational perspective, Nicholas De Genova, ed., Racial Transformations: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). For works centered in the Southwest, see Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans; Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Meeks, Border Citizens; and Maria Montoya, Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840–1900 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005). These trends are not limited to the “more complicated” Southwest. For stories that undermine, however unintentionally, the notion of stable black-white relations along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States during the nineteenth century, see Victoria Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free United States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). A sprawling body of work has appeared on the subject of transnationalism, much of it offering new ways to think about the issue of the nation itself as a fluid category. See Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick, and J. T. Way, “Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis,” American Quarterly 60:3 (September 2008): 625–48; Reséndez, Changing National Identities; Truett, Fugitive Landscapes; and a suite of excellent essays in Samuel Truett and Elliott Young, eds., Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). Marissa López suggests that if scholars adopt a hemispheric/transnational approach without recognizing the troubled past of American studies as a discipline, they “run the risk of falling into an intellectual solipsism that mirrors U.S. geopolitical dominance.” López, Chicano Nations, 11. Los Angeles was certainly a node on multiple and overlapping transnational circuits. Likewise, the town’s Cartesian plan and administrative structure had mixed Moorish and Spanish origins, crossed the Atlantic to Mexico City, and radiated outward into New Spain for over two hundred years (with ongoing modifications) before taking root in one Alta California pueblo. Over multiple generations, many Angelenos had similarly complex origin stories.
Nevertheless, this work remains rooted in Los Angeles and looks out from the city, based on the conviction that the relative significance of Los Angeles to transnational circuits proved less critical to the city’s history than did local actors and local circumstances.
47. A journalist, activist, lawyer, and essayist, McWilliams wrote numerous treatises exploring Mexican immigrants, agricultural work, and the Southwest’s Spanish fantasy heritage. His works have become increasingly popular touchstones among the region’s historians in the past decade. See, among many, Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land, 9th ed. (Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1980), and Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1949).
48. Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 1846–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).
49. The civil rights movement influenced the social and cultural foci of these works, and the new urban history’s statistical and spatial innovations influenced their methodology. Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848–1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 1979). Similar “barrio studies” appeared exploring Los Angeles in the early twentieth century at roughly the same time, including Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); Raymond Lou, “The Chinese American Community in Los Angeles, 1870–1900: A Case of Resistance, Organization, and Participation” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 1982); Pedro G. Castillo, “The Making of a Mexican Barrio: Los Angeles, 1890–1920” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1979); and Lawrence B. De Graaf, “The City of Black Angels: Emergence of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890–1930,” Pacific Historical Review 39 (August 1970): 323–52. This literature is largely congruent with the so-called ghetto studies works, which principally explored neighborhood segregation, black marginalization, and community resistance in the U.S. urban north. See Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle Class Reform, Chicago, 1880–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976); Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); and Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). All of these studies built on two germinal works in urban ethnic history: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899), and Horace R. Cayton and St. Clair Drake, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (London: Jonathan Cape, 1946).
50. Monroy’s consideration of Indians, missionaries, rancheros, vecinos, and U.S. immigrants in the formation and reformation of Los Angeles’s economy, society, and culture brought local Indians to the center of the story; illustrated moments of both cooperation and conflict; looked at Los Angeles’s career under Spain, Mexico, and the United States; and reframed Los Angeles as a dynamic place full of cultural, social, and familial mixing. Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers. For a more regional study of Southern California, see also Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769–1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Almaguer explicitly challenged the notion of a single, black-white racial binary and explored instead the multiple origins of racial identity and white supremacy in California through interactions between and among Indians, Mexican Californians, and immigrants from the United States, Mexico, China, and Japan. Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). For a similar work addressing Texas, see Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). For the new western history’s germinal works, see Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Patricia Nelson Limerick, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987); William G. Robbins, “The ‘Plundered Province’ Thesis and the Recent Historiography of the American West,” Pacific Historical Review 55 (1986): 577–97; and Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
51. Antonia I. Castañeda, “Presidarias y Pobladores: Spanish-Mexican Women in Frontier Monterey, Alta California, 1770–1821” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1990); Virginia M. Bouvier, Women and the Conquest of California, 1542–1840 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001); Miroslava Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004); and María Raquél Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820–1880 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2007).
52. In Nature’s Metropolis William Cronon offers a notable and pertinent exception. Cronon views the frontier not as “some implicitly racist ‘meeting point between savagery and civilization,’ but the ongoing extension of market relations into the ways human beings used land—and each other—in the Great West” (53). His book revolves around the core concept that “the ways people value the products of the soil, and decide how much it costs to get those products to market, together shape the landscape we inhabit” (50). Moreover, “geographical arguments do not explain” how Chicago transformed from a small Indian village in 1830 to a massive metropolis only decades later. “Only culture and history can do that,” Cronon argues, noting that “whatever the advantages of a particular landscape, people seem always to reshape it according to their vision of what it should be” (55). Regarding the ways Pío Pico’s life challenges the narrative of decline, see Salomon, Pío Pico, esp. 7–8. Writing specifically about Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo’s historical narrative, Marissa López writes that he offers “not just a narrative of loss but also a narrative of future possibility.” Moreover, she argues that “ignoring this future possibility means ignoring half of Vallejo’s narrative,” an idea worthy of being exported to the whole of nineteenth-century California history, as the scholarly emphasis on loss has ignored at least half of the story. See López, Chicano Nations, chapter 2, esp. 67 and 88–89. See also Ethington, “Ab Urbis Condita,” 189.
53. Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967). Forcefully argued and taking as its subject a city peripheral to the field of urban studies (in comparison to cities like Chicago, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia), Fogelson’s work stood unchallenged for nearly three decades.
54. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990, and New York: Vintage, 1992). For key theoretical texts exploring urban postmodernity and articulating the L.A. School, see Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989); Michael J. Dear, Greg Hise, and H. Eric Schockman, eds., Rethinking Los Angeles (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996); Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja, eds., The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000); Michael J. Dear, The Postmodern Urban Condition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Michael J. Dear, ed., From Chicago to L.A.: Making Sense of Urban Theory (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2001); Michael J. Dear and Gustavo Leclerc, eds., Postborder City: Cultural Spaces of Bajalta California (New York: Routledge, 2003); Greg Hise, “Border City: Race and Social Distance in Los Angeles” American Quarterly (2004): 545–58. For critical assessments, see David R. Diaz, Barrio Urbanism: Chicanos, Planning, and American Cities (New York: Routledge, 2005); the special forum “Historicizing the City of Angels,” American Historical Review 105:5 (December 2000): 1667–91; and Phillip Ethington, “Waiting for the ‘L.A. School,’” Southern California Quarterly 80:3 (Fall 1998): 349–62. For historical works addressing the environment, public policy, and the urban form (much of which is in direct conversation with Fogelson), see Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); William Fulton, The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Jennifer Wolch, Manuel Pastor, and Peter Drier, eds., Up Against the Sprawl: Public Policy and the Making of Southern California (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000 (New York: Vintage, 2004); William Deverell and Greg Hise, eds., Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006).
Some, but certainly not all, of these scholars are volitionally invoking a comparison to the noted Chicago School, which asserted the primacy of the city’s core and its power to organize the periphery. For the classic example of this see, Robert E. Park and Derrick Burgess, The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925).
55. As Philip Ethington has recently observed, “the abiding influence of the Uto-Aztecan, Spanish, and Mexican periods on the US regimes has been significantly underestimated by most scholars, who have likewise underestimated the shaping influence of the larger-scale regional context: the Spanish Borderland location of Los Angeles.” Ethington, “Ab Urbis Condita,” 179.
56. Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe; Estrada, Los Angeles Plaza; Hise, “Border City”; Stephanie Lewthwaite, Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles: A Transnational Perspective, 1890–1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009); and Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). See also Salomon, Pío Pico; Isabella Seong-Leong Quintana, “National Borders, Neighborhood Boundaries: Gender, Space, and Border Formation in Chinese and Mexican Los Angeles, 1871–1938” (Ph.D. diss., history, University of Michigan, 2010); Phoebe S. Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Mary Ryan, “A Durable Center of Urban Space: The Los Angeles Plaza,” Urban History 33:10 (December 2006): 457–83; González, This Small City; Cesar Lopez, “El Descanso: A Comparative History of the Los Angeles Plaza Area and the Shared Racialized Space of the Mexican and Chinese Communities, 1853–1933” (Ph.D. diss., ethnic studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2002); Matt García, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Greg Hise and William Deverell, Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); William Alexander McLung, Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Raúl Villa, Barrio-Logos: Space, and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000); and Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (London: Verso, 1997).
57. My use of “intercultural” here is an effort to adopt a term that accurately characterizes both the possibilities and perils that arose as Indians and immigrants from Spain, Mexico, the United States, China, and Europe made and remade Los Angeles between 1781 and 1894. Interactions deemed intercultural represent exchanges in which existing notions about one’s own culture and community change and are mediated by engagement with others. See, for example, Richard L. Wiseman, Intercultural Communication Theory (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995). I am also hoping to avoid more fraught but rightly appropriate terms, including “mestizaje” or “hybridity.” In The Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha argues that in colonial and postcolonial contexts in which multiple groups compete for space, resources, and power, the “representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation.” Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 2. Specifically, I use “intercultural” to depict familial, political, economic, and cultural interchanges in which Mexican Californians and immigrants from the United States both relinquished some of their key identity markers to build together a new society in Los Angeles. To be sure, these sometimes dynamic and fleeting formations never involved everyone in Los Angeles and always emerged within already existing fields of power. In particular, my analysis remains sensitive to the critique leveled by María Casas, who argues that intermarriages during the 1840s and 1850s “became false symbols of peaceful invasion and control by the United States” because they sublimated the choice of a few into a broader narrative (driven by colonial desire) that “reinforced white Euro-Americans’ cultural fantasies that racially ‘inferior’ peoples would accept and gravitate to the newcomers’ ‘superior’ presence and control.” Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land, 80.
1. William David Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 27–31; Miroslava Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004), 18. The settlement party divided into two groups in Alamos, Sonora. When the group crossing the Sonora Desert reached the Colorado River, they divided again. Most crossed the Mojave Desert immediately, while Fernando Rivera y Moncada, California’s lieutenant governor and officer in charge of this detachment, stayed behind with a small group of soldiers so the animals could forage and rest before the final desert crossing. However, they carelessly let the animals eat pasture and crops cultivated by Quechan Indians. Together with Mojave allies, the Quechan attacked the group, killing ninety-five, including Rivera y Moncada (Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 28–29).
2. Felipe de Neve, “Reglamento Para el Govierno de la Provincia de Californias, Aprobado por S. M. en Real Orden de 24, Octubre, 1781,” in “Documents Pertaining to the Founding of Los Angeles” Annual Publication (Southern California Historical Society) 15 (1931): 188.
3. Population data from Louise Pubols, “Born Global: From Pueblo to Statehood,” in William Deverell and Greg Hise, eds., A Companion to Los Angeles (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 20–39, 22. “Gabrielino-Tongva” brings together the Spanish name given to the local indigenous people (Gabrielino) and the preferred name used by contemporary members of the group, which originates in their own Shoshonean language (Tongva). As Pubols and others note, however, in the late eighteenth century “they identified themselves by village, clan, and family” (22). Bioarchaeologist Lisa Kealhofer suggests that although Gabrielino-Tongva likely faced population stress due to epidemic disease, the evidence indicates that the group’s health and population had stabilized by the time the Spanish permanently settled Southern California. Lisa Kealhofer, “The Evidence for Demographic Collapse in California,” in Brenda J. Baker, ed., Bioarchaeology of Native American Adaptation in the Spanish Borderlands (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 56–92.
4. Quote from Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest, 8. The absence of women accompanying Spanish explorers or Spanish settlements vexed indigenous people throughout Spain’s northern frontier. According to Juliana Barr, Caddo Indians in present-day Texas viewed strangers who arrived without women as intent on making war, whereas those who came to trade brought their families. There, the presence of the Virgin on several standards seems to have convinced the Caddo, at first, that the Spaniards came to trade. Eventually, however, men’s bad behavior and sexual violence led the Caddo to expel the Spaniards from their midst. Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), esp. chapter 1.
5. Virginia M. Bouvier, Women and the Conquest of California, 1542–1840 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001), xvi.
6. Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest, 5.
7. Ibid., 14.
8. Bouvier, Women and the Conquest of California, xvi.
9. Estrada, Los Angeles Plaza, 27–33, quote at 27.
10. Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest, 23. Angeleno women, who played a central role in reproducing “the social, physical, ideological, and institutional foundations of Spanish and Mexican society and culture on New Spain’s northernmost frontier,” nevertheless found creative ways to engage local laws and to challenge and modify gender roles and definitions in the pueblo.
11. María Raquél Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820–1880 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2007), 8–9. Casas writes that claiming “a timeless and natural association” with the territory justified “their acts of violence, conquest, and eventual development of the land for their own economic and social advantage.” See also Carlos Manuel Salomon, Pío Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 5–6.
12. William M. Mason, Los Angeles Under the Spanish Flag: Spain’s New World (Burbank: Southern California Genealogical Society, 2004); 71–73, 88–96.
13. Total for the 1836 census taken from Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850–1890: A Social History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). This count included an area broader than the formal city limits. The 1844 census can be found at the Los Angeles City Archives, vol. 3, folder 4 (entire). Archives of the City of Los Angeles, Records Management Division Offices, Los Angeles City Clerk’s Office, Los Angeles, Calif. (hereafter LACA). Documents cited as Los Angeles City Archives (LACA) consist of manuscripts that were formerly bound but have since been unbound. The individual sheets are kept in folders, although the former volume numbers are still used to reference particular manuscripts. Some manuscripts are divided into multiple folders.
14. Following field work in Costa Rica, Low argued that plazas express “systems of representation and social products” and as specific spatial forms confirmed rather than caused social differentiation. Setha M. Low, On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 180. Also cited in Estrada, Los Angeles Plaza, 8.
15. Nunis, ed., Founding Documents, 157, 160.
16. Estrada, Los Angeles Plaza, 44; Blake Gumprecht, The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 139–41.
17. Estrada, Los Angeles Plaza, 44–45.
18. News of Mexico’s independence took six months to reach Los Angeles, and the ceremony waited four months more. David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), 6–9, quote at 8. See also Herbert E. Bolton, “The Iturbide Revolution in the Californias,” Hispanic American Historical Review 2 (1919): 188–242; and George Tays, “The Passing of Spanish California, September 29, 1822,” California Historical Society Quarterly 15:3 (June 1936): 139–42.
19. Estrada, Los Angeles Plaza, 26.
20. William Wilcox Robinson, Los Angeles from the Days of the Pueblo (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1959), 32. The large building featured whitewashed adobe walls, one of the town’s few high, gabled, Spanish tiled roofs, and two wings. One extended west along Calle Principal (Main Street) and the other extended south and faced the Plaza. Cross walls in the rear enclosed a patio. Inside, there were several parlors, bedrooms, a library, and a ballroom large enough to accommodate gatherings of more than five hundred persons.
21. Robinson, From the Days, 32–35, 38–39.
22. LACA, September 12, 1837, untitled records series, vol. 3, folder 2, 196–97.
23. Robinson, From the Days, 32–35, 8–9; Harris Newmark, Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853–1913, Containing the Reminiscences of Harris Newmark (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1984), 98–111. Rancheros, merchants, and Yankee newcomers played monte, often for high stakes at Seguro’s gaming house. Due south, diagonally across the Plaza, stood Ocampo’s adobe. His quadrangular yard bore the moniker la plazuela, and frequently served as an arena for a variety of games in addition to cockfights.
24. “Note on Races and Castes of Mexico,” in Nunis, ed., Founding Documents, 164. Nunis takes as his source Mexico a Través de los Siglos (Mexico: Editorial Oceano, 1991), vol. 2, 471. Such complications became greater in successive generations, producing categories such as “Calpan Mulata,” the product of a mulata mother (defined as the product of Spanish and African) and a “Zambo” father, who would himself have been the descendant along the male line of a salta-atras scion whose male children, successively, produced children with mulatas for two generations, followed by an Indian, then an African woman, and then another Indian. Indicating the limits of the ability to keep track, the child of this Calpan Mulata would be termed “tente en el aire,” or up in the air, his grandchild “no te entiendo” (I don’t understand you), and his great-grandchild would bear the marker “ahí te estas,” or “and there you are” (all of this would only have been possible by these men having children with another Zamba, a Mulata, and finally an Indian coming down the generations, otherwise everything would have been different still). The casta system predicated every category on further mixing, establishing clearly that Spanish officials expected nothing less. Interestingly, the child of a mestizo and an español became a “castizo,” and if that child married another español, their children became sufficiently sanitized to return to full español status.
25. Historian Steven Hackel estimates that in 1790, besides Franciscan missionaries, “there were only ten persons living in California who had been born in Spain, and probably no more than twenty native Spaniards at any time lived in Alta California.” Steven W. Hackel, Children of the Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 57.
26. “Padrón of Los Angeles,” in Nunis, ed., Founding Documents, 161–63. Consequently, their offspring would have fallen into some of the more complex categories in successive generations.
27. This phenomenon was common throughout Spain’s northern frontier, although it went against the plan. In its conception, the casta system operated to “keep elements of a polyethnic society clearly identified and stratified so that the mixed progeny of Spaniards, Indians, and blacks could be kept in socially subordinate positions.” Almost from the start of Spain’s presence in southwestern North America, however, this plan proved impractical. Part of the problem can be located within the Spaniards’ other aim: to convert the Indians into citizens. Although the Spanish hoped to develop the area as a buffer zone, it could not do so with its own people and had no great supply of willing participants from Mexico’s interior. Consequently, they tried to slowly turn Indians into Catholics and villages into loyal pueblos. As people acculturated over time, and occasionally mixed with immigrants from Spain and Mexico, “the real or ascribed cultural characteristics of each group (casta) were not sufficiently stable to persist.” leading to a “muddled and largely ineffective” system. Adrian Bustamante, “‘The Matter Was Never Resolved’: The Casta System in New Mexico, 1693–1823,” in Laurie Weinstein, ed., Native Peoples of the Southwest: Negotiating Land, Water, and Ethnicities (Westport, Conn: Bergin and Garvey, 2001), 203. For more on the Spanish colonial plan in southwestern North America, see the classic work by Herbert E. Bolton, “The Mission as a Frontier Institution in the Spanish-American Colonies” American Historical Review 23:1 (October 1917): 42–61, and Weber, Mexican Frontier, chapter 5.
28. Hackel, Children of the Coyote, 59–60.
29. Maynard Geiger, “Reply of Mission San Carlos Borromeo to the Questionnaire of the Spanish Government in 1812 Concerning the Native Culture of the California Mission Indians,” The Americas 6:4 (April 1950): 467–86; and Maynard Geiger, “Reply of Mission San Antonio to the Questionnaire of the Spanish Government in 1812 Concerning the Native Culture of the California Mission Indians,” The Americas 10:2 (October 1953): 211–27.
30. Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest, 20. See also Douglas Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), esp. 22; and Gloria Miranda, “Racial and Cultural Dimensions of Gente de Razon Status in Spanish and Mexican California,” Southern California Quarterly 70 (Fall 1988): 265–78.
31. Hackel, Children of the Coyote, 60.
32. William Marvin Mason, The Census of 1790: A Demographic History of Colonial California (Menlo Park: Ballena, 1998), 61. Also cited in Estrada, Los Angeles Plaza, 28.
33. Estrada, Los Angeles Plaza, 30–31.
34. Hackel, Children of the Coyote, 310–12. An imperial Spanish measure of the dry volume of any given agricultural good, a fanega roughly equates to 2.5 U.S. bushels of produce.
35. Estrada, Los Angeles Plaza, 36–37; Kealhofer, “Evidence for Demographic Collapse,” 72.
36. Estrada, Los Angeles Plaza, 39.
37. Hackel, Children of the Coyote, 310–12.
38. Estrada, Los Angeles Plaza, 41.
39. This race-making project both paralleled and intersected with the dynamic development of gender in Los Angeles. On one analytical plane, ideas about gender—the emphasis on chastity for young women and their unyielding fidelity in marriage for female gente de razón as compared to the assumed promiscuity of all Gabrielino women and the fluidity with which they made and unmade nuclear families—permeate the new racial relationships. On another, many pobladoras who rose up from their own india, mulata, and mestiza pasts in the new racial system in turn employed Gabrielino women in their own homes. In doing so these Angelenas took advantage of their new racial privilege to lessen their own heavy domestic workload by transferring some onto the backs of exploitable Gabrielino women. See Bouvier, Women and the Conquest of California, and Chávez-García Negotiating Conquest.
40. The move to convert Indians to citizens accompanied several independence movements in Latin America during the nineteenth century, most famously José de San Martín’s 1821 declaration that “todos los indios son Peruanos.” See John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 181.
41. The battle between those who supported and those who opposed secularization reveals much about elite Mexican Californians’ impressions of the Indians. Mission fathers and their supporters considered neophytes unfit for full citizenship, doubted the sincerity of Indians’ conversions, and questioned Indians’ ability to discipline themselves without close supervision. Even the California Junta de Fomento, a group of liberals charged by the national government to chart a course for the territory’s development and the missions’ most forceful critics, characterized California Indians as so “easily managed, friendly, docile, and indolent” that “the use of military power for their subjugation is not often necessary.” Keld J. Reynolds, “Principal Actions of the California Junta de Fomento, 1825–1827,” California Historical Society Quarterly 25 (December 1946): 267–77, 347–56. That two different Spanish-Mexican factions squabbled for exclusive rights to determine Indians’ future clarifies the divide Mexicans, regardless of politics, saw between themselves and indios. For an extended discussion of secularization, see Weber, Mexican Frontier, 60–67.
42. Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 10.
43. Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest, 60–62, 76–78. See also Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers, 125, who estimates that nearly five thousand mission Indians perished during the secularization period, and Pitt, Decline of the Californios, 10.
44. Hackel, Children of the Coyote, 413, counted “at least 377” Gabrielino-Tongva living in the city proper. The 1844 census counted ranchería dwellers separately. LACA, Census of 1844, untitled records series, box b-1367, folder 2 (entire).
45. Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land, 98; Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers, 135; Weber, Mexican Frontier, 208.
46. Frederik Barth, “Introduction,” in Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), 15–16. Writing about relationships among settlers in New England and local Wampanoag and Narragansett Indians, Jill Lepore argues that weak boundaries were one reason why Indians, Praying Indians, and English settlers went to war. See her masterful The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York, 1998), esp. chapter 2.
47. Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land, 8–9; Salomon, Pío Pico, 5–6.
48. Chávez-García Negotiating Conquest, 68, 26.
49. Archaeologist Lisa Kealhofer found a variety of “lithic tools, faunal evidence of wild species, as well as other artifacts” on Southern California rancho sites, suggesting “that ranchos attracted many disenfranchised Native Americans as laborers and provided an alternative context for cultural adaptation and transformation.” Moreover, her evidence indicates “rancho sites commonly demonstrate a stronger tie with indigenous groups than is seen in the pueblos,” although both provided contexts “for indigenous transformation after contact.” Kealhofer, “Evidence for Demographic Collapse,” 72.
50. Father Narciso Durán to Governor José Figueroa, July 3, 1833, cited in C. Alan Hutchinson, Frontier Settlement in Mexican California: The Híjar-Padrés Colony and Its Origins, 1769–1835 (New Haven, 1969), 222–23, and Weber, Mexican Frontier, 211. Durán accused secularizers of false liberalism, claiming that “the equality with the white people, which is preached to them, consists in this: that these Indians are subject to a white comisionado, but they are the ones who do the menial work.” Yet Durán concluded that “the benevolent ideas of the Government with regard to the plan that the poor Indians should be proprietors and independent of white people, will never be realized, because the Indian evinces no other ambitions than to possess a little more savage license, even though it involved a thousand oppressions of servitude.”
51. Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest, 68.
52. Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers, 154. Amid Los Angeles’s dynamic social milieu, fiestas both differentiated society’s members and bound the community together. Usually hosted by californios or wealthier vecinos, fiestas remained always and intentionally open to the public and Angelenos mixed freely at these affairs. Interactions across group boundaries allowed the hosts to cultivate a stilted sense of social harmony and unity while reinforcing their own social position and displaying their wealth. A similar spirit loomed large in the rancheros’ legendary hospitality, whereby they proved their wealth by sharing of it freely with strangers. See Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers, 145–49. For a fascinating ethnographic and ethnohistorical account of the significance of fiestas to present-day Aymara communities in Bolivia, see Thomas Alan Abercrombie, Pathways of Memory and Power: Ethnography and History Among an Andean People (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).
53. This proved true even among those former neophytes who secured individual land grants. Although the opportunity to work their own lands prevented them from relying on rancho or pueblo labor and afforded Gabrielino property holders “a measure of upward social mobility and economic independence that distinguished them from other native peoples,” they remained at risk. Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest, 78; Michael J. González, This Small City Will Be a Mexican Paradise: Exploring the Origins of Mexican Culture in Los Angeles, 1821–1846 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), esp. chapter 4.
54. Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers, 138, and Weber, Mexican Frontier, 218–20.
55. Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers, 139. Monroy argues that vecinos “lived in relation to other vecinos. They were not independent citizens who lived in relation to the state.” Michael González explores the nuances of social markers in different terms, eschewing a discussion of vecinos in favor of examining differences between ranchers and agriculturalists. He argues that ordinary Angelenos disliked rancheros’ preference for living off of others’ labors, whereas agriculturalists had more in common, regardless of aggregate wealth, with other agriculturalists in the city, fostering a broader shared identity. Nevertheless, in his story Angelenos also identified themselves in dialogue with and in opposition to Indians. González, This Small City.
56. The first reference to “cholos” appears in Comentarios Reales de los Incas by Gracilaso de la Vega. Others speculate that its use to describe mixed people survived well past other casta categories resulted from its similarity to the Nahuatl word xolotl, or mutt.
57. Juan Bautista Alvarado, “History of California” (5-vol. manuscript held at the Bancroft Library as part of the Documentos para la Historia de California collection), 3:12–13. Cited in Antonio Maria Osio, The History of Alta California: A Memoir of Mexican California (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 267, n5; Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land, 127–28.
58. Osio, History of Alta California, 53.
59. Editorial annotations suggest Osio lived in Baja California until 1825. Osio, History of Alta California, 13.
60. Clear boundaries made it possible for californios, vecinos, cholos, and indios to freely drink and dance at fiestas. As anthropologist Frederick Barth argues, well-defined, stable boundaries “canalize social life,” facilitating rather than limiting interaction in mixed communities. Barth, “Introduction,” 15.
61. Salomon, Pío Pico, offers an original analysis of Pico’s economic, political, and social achievements within the context of California during the Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. periods. For a discussion of Pico’s family background, see esp. 12–16.
62. James Rood Robertson, “From Alcalde to Mayor: A History of the Changes from the Mexican to the American Local Institutions in California” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1908); 42–49. Although Mexican municipal structures did not impose a strict separation of powers, Robertson argues that among alcaldes’ duties, “the judicial functions were predominant, as his title of judge would suggest” (49). See also Theodore Grivas, “Alcalde Rule: The Nature of Local Government in Spanish and Mexican California,” California Historical Society Quarterly 40:1 (1961): 11–32, 11.
63. Grivas, “Alcalde Rule,” 18. Under this broad purview fell maintenance of public areas, including the town plaza and pueblo streets; regulation of weights, measures, and monies; community projects such as schools; record keeping for marriages, births, and deaths; and the making of laws to carry these purposes into effect. In carrying out these duties, the ayuntamiento under both Spain and Mexico reported annually to the territorial governor.
64. Robertson, “From Alcalde to Mayor,” 42–49; David J. Langum, Law and Community on the Mexican Frontier: Anglo-American Expatriates and the Clash of Legal Traditions, 1821–1846 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 30; Grivas, “Alcalde Rule,” 11; Richard R. Powell, Compromises of Conflicting Claims: A Century of California Law, 1760 to 1860 (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana, 1977), 29.
65. LACA January 4, 1833, untitled records series, vol. 2, 14–16. The growth of ranching and ranch living on Los Angeles’s outskirts led the ayuntamiento to establish positions for judges of the plains and auxiliary alcaldes, “for the better administration of justice and the Public peace.” Judges of the plains heard cases in rural areas, usually involving horses, cows, and tools. Auxiliary alcaldes oversaw “ranchos adjoining this Town,” including San Gertrudis (Juan Perez), San Rafael (Julio Verde), Santa Ana (Bernardo Yorba), and San Pedro (Manuel Dominguez). The ayuntamiento hoped to prevent “the utter poverty to which some families are reduced” by games of chance, fining both operators and players. First-time offenders paid fines and recidivists faced trial and possible imprisonment. See also LACA, January 9 and January 22, 1833, untitled records series, vol. 2, 18, 19.
66. For fees charged in relation to surveying and giving titles to pueblo lands, see LACA, July 1837, untitled records series, vol. 3, folder 1, 84–86. Accounts of license fees paid by owners of stores can be found at LACA, n.d. [1836], untitled records series, vol. 3, folder 1, 46–47. Records of license fees paid by liquor vendors appear at LACA, n.d. [1836] untitled records series, vol. 3, folder 1, 51–53. The ten men and one woman who sold liquor (a rather high number for a town of fewer than a thousand people) contributed more than 500 pesos of the city’s annual revenue, which rarely exceeded 700 pesos during the late 1830s.
67. Langum, Law and Community, 30. Ideally, alcaldes combined administrative skill with solid character, serving as agents “for the good government and police of the Pueblos, administration of justice, direction of the public works, [and] division of the ‘turns’ of water.” Governor de Neve, worried the rookie pobladores would prove untrustworthy, appointed Los Angeles’s first two alcaldes and required future governors to certify the people’s choice in subsequent years. Throughout the Spanish period, appointed military comisionados could veto ayuntamiento legislation and alcalde decisions, further limiting their power. Felipe de Neve, “Reglamiento para el gobierno de la provincia de californias,” October 24, 1781, article 14, section 18; Spanish originals and translation reprinted in Nunis, ed., Founding Documents, 105 (English), 216–17 (Spanish). Cited frequently elsewhere, with a slightly different translation, including Langum, Law and Community, 32; Robertson, “From Alcalde to Mayor,” 48; and Grivas, “Alcalde Rule,” 12.
68. I define civic ideals as a set of ideas and principles that inform the way individuals and groups conceive of and act to achieve that which they understand to be the public good. As Hugh Heclo points out, “ideas are a source of political power,” and people acting in the political arena “are constantly using certain conceptual lenses to understand what is happening around them.” Hugh Heclo, “Reaganism and the Search for a Public Philosophy,” in John L. Palmer, ed., Perspectives on the Reagan Years (Washington, D.C.: Urban Studies Institute Press, 1986), 31. Viewed in their wholeness, James W. Caeser argues, these ideas “set forth an entire conception of where society should be heading and of what arrangement of governing institutions and powers (as well as which policies) are supposed to get us there.” John W. Caeser, “Toward a New Public Philosophy,” Bradley Lecture delivered at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, March 8, 1999. Accessed at http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.10141/pub_detail.asp, August 12, 2006. Michael Sandel sees in civic ideals power to translate ideas into action, as they constituted the “political theory implicit in our practice, the assumptions about citizenship and freedom that inform our public life.” Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 4. Yet, as Rogers Smith established, civic ideals, much like race and place, do not exist a priori but are instead fashioned in dialogue with multiple ideologies and are often based on difference. Economic, political, and social theories, although sometimes expressed in absolute terms, are always steeped in discourses of difference, and they therefore often permit or mandate certain forms of exclusion. As principles that both shape and are shaped by practice, civic ideals create institutions that can be rooted in and subsequently impose ideas about difference and inequality. Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). See also Samuel Beer, “In Search of a New Public Philosophy,” in Anthony King, ed., The New American Political System (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1978); Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Dutton, 1963; orig. 1909); and the many works of John Dewey, including Reconstruction in Philosophy (Boston: Beacon, 1957; orig. 1920), The Public and Its Problems (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994; orig. 1927), and Liberalism and Social Action (New York: Putnam, 1935).
69. Felipe de Neve, “Order for the Founding of Los Angeles,” reprinted in Nunis, ed., Founding Documents, 157–60. Nunis translates propios as “lands that belong to a city or town and are used to pay for public expenses” (160, n3). Nunis further notes that the document printed in his edition is only a portion of the order, taken from a certified copy from the surveyor general’s office, “filed as evidence in Los Angeles District Court, Case no. 1344, March 11, 1869.” He adds that “there is no copy of the original Spanish-language document in existence” (157, n1).
70. Pedro Fages, “Distribution of Town Lots and Tracts of Land for Irrigation and Dry Planting,” Monterey, August 14, 1786, reprinted in Nunis, ed., Founding Documents, 165–66. Original held in Archives of California, State Papers, Missions and Colonization, tom. 1, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. “Crops” capitalized in original.
71. From then until 1837, alcaldes served without supervision by other civil or military authorities. Following a shift from Federalist to Centralist principles, the Mexican government in 1837 substantively reorganized frontier governance. The Centralists divided Alta California into prefectural and sub-prefectural districts governed by military officers, who were responsible up the chain of command to district commanders and ultimately the governor. Los Angeles retained the formal right to have elected civilian leaders, however, because its alcalde and ayuntamiento had been instituted prior to 1808. In practice, distance, poor organization, and overwhelming resistance kept the 1837 laws from full implementation throughout Alta California. See Grivas, “Alcalde Rule,” 13; and Weber, Mexican Frontier, chapter 2, esp. 32–40. The year 1808 held significance for lawmakers in Mexico City because it marked the date of the so-called Bourbon reforms, enacted by a liberal Congress operating as a fiat government following the Spanish king’s abduction by Napoleonic forces. Their decisive move toward democracy and home rule included Spain’s foreign colonies. In choosing 1808, the rather antidemocratic Mexican Centralists allowed only those local institutions that had subsequently received endorsement from the restored monarchy to remain in session after 1837. For an extended discussion of the Bourbon reforms, see Lynch, Spanish American Revolutions, 5–15.
72. Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest, 46; Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land, 114.
73. In most cases, lands needed only to be vacant, undeveloped, or previously unclaimed. Successful petitioners claimed categorically that they had both the means and the intention of developing or cultivating the lands. Some requested parcels as house lots and others for agricultural purposes. If vacant, the standing Committee on Vacant Lands visited the site and took measurements. If previously granted to another, the standing Police Committee investigated the plot to see if, due to a failure of the previous grantee to fulfill his or her duties in fencing and cultivating the land, the petition could be granted. In either case, the committee reported back to the ayuntamiento, which made final decisions. If granted land, solicitors paid nominal fees to the municipal fund and applied directly to the alcalde for a deed. Alcaldes recorded all grants in a book. Straightforward examples of this process can be found in LACA, untitled records series, vol. 1, folder 1, box 1366, 126–28 and 129–31. Grivas suggests that “the legal process at times was cumbersome; and therefore, extra legal grants were made, the result being that the question of land titles arose and became the most important legal controversy in the early statehood of California.” Grivas, “Alcalde Rule,” 18.
74. Vincent Ostrom, Water and Politics: A Study of Water Policies and Administration in the Development of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Haynes Foundation, 1953).
75. LACA, July 20, 1838, untitled records series, vol. 1, folder 1, 511. Lugo served as judge of the first instance in rural areas, heard cases related to ranch property, and oversaw annual rodeos (when cattle were rounded up, counted, and branded) and regular matanzas (sanctioned periods when cows could be slaughtered).
76. This further suggests that someone in town prepared petitions on behalf of those unable to write. When José Alejandro Lopes offered a petition claiming land previously granted to another resident but not yet fenced or cultivated, the investigating committeeman, Cristóbal Aguilar, specifically asked Lopes by what law he denounced said land, to which Lopes replied that “he did not know any such thing existed in his petition.” LACA, untitled records series, vol. 1, folder 1, box 1366, 338.
77. Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest, 53, 70–72, quotes from 72.
78. LACA, March 3, 1837, untitled records series, vol. 1, folder 1, box 1366, 468.
79. Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest, 75. The ayuntamiento held that vecinas, like other recipients of pueblo lands, “had to defer to the rights of the larger community, which, according to the local authorities, took precedence over individual rights.”
80. LACA, July 30–August 14, 1838, untitled records series, vol. 1, folder 1, 533–34.
81. LACA, March 17, 1836, untitled records series, vol. 3, folder 2, 146–47.
82. Neve, “Reglamento,” 188.
83. Ostrom, Water and Politics, 29. They built a weir of willow poles and diverted the Río Porciuncula into the mouth of the zanja, which then carried the water into the pueblo. Pobladores received their seeds and livestock only after completing this zanja madre. Over the next one hundred years, Angelenos added more and more zanjas, creating an elaborate network that conveyed water from the Porciuncula throughout the pueblo for irrigation and consumption. With the exception of a few private water sellers, who filled containers from private springs and sold them for domestic use, these zanjas served Angelenos’ domestic needs. Beginning in the 1850s, a series of individuals, syndicates, and corporations endeavored to create a delivery network, also in enclosed pipes, for potable water. These schemes met with varying degrees of success until the advent of the Los Angeles City Water Company in 1868.
84. Donald J. Pisani, Water, Land, and Law in the West: The Limits of Public Policy (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996), and Michael C. Meyer, Water in the Hispanic Southwest: A Social and Legal History, 1550–1850 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984).
85. LACA, November 13, 1838, untitled records series, vol. 3, folder 2, 265. Chávez-García notes that Sra. Sepúlveda subsequently appealed to Governor Alvarado, who overruled the ayuntamiento and restored her exclusive privilege. Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest, 74–75.
86. LACA, March 2 and March 23, 1839, untitled records series, vol. 1, folder 1, 303, 304.
87. Meyer, Water in the Hispanic Southwest, 163.
88. LACA, March 3, 1836, untitled records series, vol. 1, folder 1, 102–3.
89. Although at odds with the experiences most immigrants brought to Los Angeles, legal historian David Langum points out that similar combinations had been common in the northeastern United States following independence. In addition, U.S. frontier towns commonly “combine[d] these functions so as to achieve economies of operation.” Langum, Law and Community, 51. In addition, a few notes from Ygnacio Maria Alvarado bear the title of city attorney, suggesting some official separation. See the Los Angeles City Archives. LACA, n.d., untitled records series, vol. 1, 398–406.
90. Leonard Rudolph Blomquist, “California in Transition: A Regional Study of the Changes from Mexican to American Life and Institutions in the San Luis Obispo Districts, 1830–1850” (master’s thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1943), 162–63. In serious cases, higher authorities—the governor or a court when one existed—confirmed decisions. See also Grivas, “Alcalde Rule,” 16.
91. Spain instituted a nine-volume legal code that contained more than 6,000 laws representing a staggering 400,000 royal orders in 1760, but no Spanish court ever held session in Alta California. Instead, alcaldes practiced free from formal Spanish law. Langum, Law and Community, 31, 33. Mexico’s elaborate system of courts at the local, state, and national level similarly failed to take hold in California. In 1826 the Mexican National Congress fused California with the state of Sonora for legal purposes, establishing a district court for California and an appellate court for the region. But it took district judge Luis de Castillo Negrete eight years to arrive. He became embroiled in local politics and left in 1836 following a serious political dispute. Mexican officials never replaced him. There are no records of appeals from California being heard in the higher court in Sonora. When Centralist forces ousted the Federalists from Mexico City in 1837, they restructured the territories into military departments and established a centralized, hierarchical court system. Again, however, distance, finances, and general instability complicated efforts to implement the new structure. Two years passed before the prefecture system manifested in California, and three more before the new court system began to operate. Even then, parties presenting themselves to the newly constituted courts had to bring certification that they had attempted formal conciliation through their alcalde. The high court, or Tribunal Superior, began operating in California in 1842, led by four judges: Juan Mallarín, José Antonio Carrillo, José Antonio Estudio, and Antonio María Osio. In 1844, however, a Californian rebellion against the Centralists unraveled the new system after only two years in operation. Langum, Law and Community, 34–40.
92. Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest, 66.
93. Langum, Law and Community, 5.
94. LACA, n.d. [1833], untitled records series, vol. 3, folder 2, 130–33. In each case, the decision laid out the terms by which the offended parties would be compensated, almost always in the form of a payment in cash, kind, or labor. In one extreme case, the “foreigner Daniel” was conscripted to nearly eight months’ labor on the pueblo’s public works because his debt to Juan Bautista Leandri (another foreigner) had to be paid on his behalf out of the municipal fund.
95. LACA, July 1, 1839, untitled records series, vol. 1, folder 1, 50.
96. Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest, 26–51, quotes on 26. See esp. pages 39–46 for Chávez-García’s discussion of extralegal responses women and men pursued.
97. Langum, Law and Community, 5. He sees the preference for communal strategies as part of Mexican California’s legal objective—to advance its own ideal of jurisprudence and dispute resolution—and argues that conciliation among the parties had a larger cultural basis in the region.
98. LACA, February 23, 1837, untitled records series, vol. 3, folder 2, 237–38.
99. Langum, Law and Community, 75. He goes on to argue that banishment, in fact, “demonstrates the localized, community-based notion of criminal justice” (76).
100. LACA, January 22, 1833, untitled records series, vol. 2, 19. This comisionado was the subject of father Durán’s complaint noted above.
101. Alfred Robinson, “The Indians of Los Angeles,” 161–62. Also discussed in Weber, Mexican Frontier, 214–15, and Hackel, Children of the Coyote, 414. For a fuller discussion of the fraught relationship between the ayuntamiento, pobladores, and local indios, see González, This Small City.
1. Benjamin Davis Wilson, “Observations on Early Days in California and New Mexico,” manuscript written from the author’s dictation by Thomas Savage, Nov. 28–Dec. 6, 1877, 24, BANC MSS C-D 177, Hubert Howe Bancroft Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
2. Wilson also held a U.S. federal appointment as Indian agent for Southern California during his later years and served as a state senator.
3. Wilson, “Observations on Early Days,” 24.
4. Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850–1890: A Social History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 8.
5. María Raquél Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820–1880 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2007), 9.
6. My argument here follows Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land, esp. 10–16 and 76–80. Scholarly narratives cleaving to the protocol that Mexican Californian women and their fathers preferred mates from the United States and Europe stretch from Hubert Howe Bancroft’s California Pastoral, 1769–1848 (San Francisco: History, 1888) to Tómas Almaguer’s Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
7. Griswold del Castillo, Los Angeles Barrio, 35.
8. Although historian Philip Ethington notes in a recent essay that californios and U.S. immigrants forged an “agreement to be ‘white’ together, in common domination over the irreplaceable source of their wealth: agricultural laborers,” little evidence suggests they agreed on the terms by which they defined themselves as racially superior. Californios infrequently substituted their own complex methods for defining racial status for a color-based scheme, and few immigrants from the United States referred to Los Angeles’s rancheros and vecinos as “white.” Instead, Mexican Californians and U.S. immigrants forged an intercultural community based not on the notion of common phenotype but a series of social, political, and spatial compromises and innovations. Philip J. Ethington, “Ab Urbis Condita: Regional Regimes Since 13,000 Before Present,” in William Deverell and Greg Hise, eds., A Companion to Los Angeles (West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 77–215, 190–91.
9. Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land, 50, 51.
10. David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), 204.
11. Douglas Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 163.
12. Lansford Hastings, The Emigrant’s Guide to Oregon and California, containing scenes and incidents of a party of Oregon Emigrants; A description of Oregon; scenes and incidents of a party of California emigrants; and A description of California; with a description of the different routes to those countries; and all necessary information relative to the equipment, supplies, and the method of traveling (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1932; reprint of original, Cincinnati: George Conclin, 1845), 113–14.
13. Thomas Jefferson Farnham, Life Adventures, and Travels in California. To Which are Added the Conquest of California, Travels in Oregon, and History of the Gold Regions (New York: Nafis and Cornish; St. Louis: Van Dien and MacDonald, 1849), 358–59. First published in 1844 by Saxton and Miles in New York City, Life, Adventures, and Travels in California was Farnham’s third book, following earlier tomes on the western prairies and Oregon. He later wrote about California’s conquest and the gold regions. By 1848, publishers around the country began to compile Farnham’s works into omnibus volumes. Between its 1844 debut and 1862, at least eight different presses (in New York, Philadelphia, Saint Louis, and London) published the book in one form or another.
14. Hastings, Emigrants’ Guide, 113–14.
15. Farnham, Travels in California, 344.
16. Ibid., 363. Another writer in this vein, William Robert Garner, serially published his “Letters from California” in a variety of eastern newspapers and promoted the U.S. military conquest of California. Garner claimed that even the self-styled californios had “not the least forethought” and would “not look one day ahead. The greater part of the natives, I think I may say without exaggeration, nineteen-twentieths of them think of nothing in the world but gambling, dress, horse-riding, women, and stealing to maintain these vices.” William Robert Garner, Letters from California, 1846–1847 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 127–28.
17. For an analysis of the cultural work of conquest travel literature wrought, see Antonia I. Castañeda, “The Political Economy of Nineteenth-Century Stereotypes of Californianas,” in Adelaida R. Castillo, ed., Between Borders: Essays on Mexican/Chicana History (Encino: Floricanto, 1990).
18. At first, the mission fathers acted as the primary agents in these foreign exchanges, as they controlled vast herds of cattle that could be slaughtered on demand as trade goods. Following secularization, the californios succeeded the padres as primary traders.
19. John Walton Caughey, California, a Remarkable State’s Life History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 139. Cited in David J. Langum, Law and Community on the Mexican Frontier: Anglo-American Expatriates and the Clash of Legal Traditions, 1821–1846 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 21. For Carpenter’s petition for citizenship, see LACA, January 14, 1836, untitled records series (Spanish originals), vol. 1, 196–97.
20. Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of a Life at Sea (New York: Random House, 2001; orig. pub. 1840), 188.
21. Miroslava Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004), 60.
22. Several U.S. immigrants also became entangled in the rebellions provoked by Centralist-Federalist struggles during the 1840s. In 1845, Southern Californians organized under the leadership of Pío Pico in a rebellion against Manuel Micheltorena, a non-Californian dispatched by the centralist government in Mexico to serve as the territory’s governor. The forces on both sides claimed U.S. and European immigrants among their numbers. As the two parties prepared to face off in a canyon near Los Angeles, Pico deputized B. D. Wilson to treat secretly with English-speaking immigrants in Micheltorena’s force. Wilson convinced them to meet directly with Pico. Aware that Micheltorena had convinced them to fight in exchange for land grants, Pico asked if any among them were Mexican citizens. When all replied in the negative, Pico informed them that the “‘title deeds given you by Micheltorena are not worth the paper they are written on, and he knew it well when he gave them to you.’” After the murmuring subsided, Pico made a series of promises as to their fate if he should prevail and become governor. Pico offered those who would “‘abandon the Micheltorena cause’” his “‘word as a gentleman’” to “‘protect all and each one of you in the land that you hold now, in quiet and peaceful possession, and promise you further, that if you will take the necessary steps to become citizens of Mexico, I under my authority and the laws of Mexico, will issue to you proper titles.’” When Wilson interpreted Pico’s promises, the men who had marched with Micheltorena “bowed and said that was all they asked, and promised not to fire a gun against us” (Wilson, “Observations on Early Days,” 54). Although this story leaves an impression of these immigrants as little more than mercenaries prepared to exchange armed service for lands, they nevertheless swore allegiance to Pico and became invested in the future of Mexican Californian politics. At the same time, Pico’s overtures and promises indicate the importance of such men to the development of society and his desire (before it turned into fear a few years later) to include them into the larger Mexican Californian family.
23. Doris Marion Wright, A Yankee in Mexican California: Abel Stearns, 1798–1848 (Santa Barbara: Wallace Hebberd, 1977), 6–9.
24. Adele Ogden, “Hides and Tallow: McCulloch, Hartnell and Company, 1822–1828,” California Historical Society Quarterly 6:3 (September 1927): 254–64, and Adele Ogden, “Boston Hide Droghers Along California Shores,” Quarterly of the California Historical Society 8:4 (December 1929): 289–305. The English-owned McCullough, Hartnell and Company was among the first to engage in consistent business with the California coast, particularly with the mission fathers who controlled the lion’s share of the state’s economy. In the late 1820s, the balance shifted in favor of Bryant, Sturgis and Company, a Boston outfit whose ships took more than 500,000 hides away from California between 1822 and 1842, with some 400,000 transported in the 1830s alone.
25. Langum, Law and Community, 18.
26. Wright, Yankee in Mexican California. Stearns’s role in public life is described on 65–75, and his courtship and marriage to Bandini are detailed on 84–97.
27. Ibid., 18–28, 76–83, 68–70. Already branded cara de caballo (horse face), by his fellow Angelenos, the fight with Day left him with deep facial scars and a pronounced speech impediment, as one of Day’s blows had nearly severed Stearns’ tongue.
28. LACA, May 16, 1835, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 1, 5–8.
29. LACA, September 29, 1835, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 1, 9.
30. Langum, Law and Community, 49.
31. Fuller accounts of the vigilance committee can be found in James Miller Guinn, History of California and Extended History of Los Angeles and Environs (Los Angeles: Historical Record Company, 1915), 183–85; Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest, 43–45; and Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land, 129–32. Chávez-García argues that outrage over Villa’s willingness to challenge notions of female obedience and the sanctity of marriage by going so far as to be complicit in her husband’s murder informed the severity of her punishment. Casas argues that a Centralist takeover of the Mexican government and the questions such a takeover provoked regarding home rule in California generally and Los Angeles in particular served as context for the vigilante activities. Further, she suggests that the participation of thirteen naturalized U.S.-born citizens (including Temple, who both hosted and had an interest in the outcome as the murdered Felix’s brother-in-law through marriage) and their “sense of frontier justice” inspired the vigilantes’ violent response. (131). For a broader exploration of patriarchy in Spanish and Mexican California, see Louise Pubols, The Father of All: The De La Guerra Family, Power, and Patriarchy in Mexican California (San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 2010).
32. See, for example, LACA, August 7 and August 12, 1840, untitled records series, vol. 1, folder 1, 394, 395; LACA, October 7, 1847, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 1, 236, 238; and LACA, n.d., untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 2, 492–93.
33. Specifically, Carpenter and Laughlin complained that Julian Chavez, judge of the water, had hastily and incorrectly identified the most efficient route between the Zanja Madre and Coronel’s lands. Moreover, they claimed that Coronel’s father, the ayuntamiento’s secretary, had influenced the decision to save his son from the costs of building a new zanja on a different route. See LACA, June 3, June 5, June 8, and June 12, 1846, untitled records series, vol. 1, folder 1, 66–67, 69–71, 71–75 (quote at 74), and 81–82.
34. Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land, 76. For her discussion of the struggles some mixed couples faced, see 54–60, 77. Casas also suggests that a “second wave” of intermarriages after 1840 proved “less economically stable,” and that immigrant husbands proved “less willing to fully incorporate themselves into Californio society,” leading to instances of “divorce and separation” (144).
35. For example, California authorities worried that Isaac Graham and his militia company, the Rifleros Americanos, intended an uprising in 1840. The governor ordered all foreigners arrested, except those with legal permission to reside in the territory, married to hijas del país, or well known and doing honorable work. In all, sixty-five immigrants endured arrest and deportation. Such orders suggest the presence of an intercultural clique in which not all immigrants participated. Indeed, “Californios and Euro-Americans alike championed the removal of this group.” Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land, 136–37.
36. Historian Leonard Pitt playfully referred to these immigrants as “Mexicanized Yankees.” Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 124. Casas argues that “successful intermarriages became false symbols of peaceful invasion and control by the United States” and “reinforced white Euro-Americans’ cultural fantasies that racially ‘inferior’ peoples would accept and gravitate to the newcomers’ ‘superior’ presence and control” (Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land, 80). Although valid for the ways future immigrants to Los Angeles may have retroactively understood such marriages, it should not be applied to those men and women who engaged in such marriages and who actively participated in forging and elaborating an intercultural community before and after the Mexican-American War.
37. Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers, 179.
38. Guinn, History of California, 128; Harris Newmark, Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853–1913, Containing the Reminiscences of Harris Newmark (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1984), 168; Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California, vol. 5, 1846–1848, pages 311–14 (vol. 22 of The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft) (San Francisco: History Company, 1886). In an analogous yet opposite situation, brothers Salvador and Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, together with the latter’s U.S.-born son-in-law, Jacob Leese, endured imprisonment in Northern California, first under the leadership of John C. Frémont and his Bear Flag Party, then under the U.S. flag. As was the case with the imprisoned European Americans in Los Angeles who returned to their intercultural lives after imprisonment, so too did Mariano Vallejo continue his support for California’s inclusion into the United States after his ordeal. Alan Rosenus, General Vallejo and the Advent of the Americans (Berkeley: Heyday, 1995), esp. 105–76.
39. LACA, February 27, 1847, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 1, 46.
40. LACA, May 14, 1847, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 1, 78–79.
41. LACA, n.d., untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 1, 154.
42. LACA, July 31, 1847, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 1, 182.
43. LACA, October 29, 1847, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 1, 228–29.
44. Although many among Los Angeles’s Mexican Californian elite accepted incorporation into the United States because it offered greater opportunities for home rule, they undoubtedly looked down on ordinary U.S. soldiers with the same contempt they held for soldiers from the Mexican interior who had been frequently dispatched to rule over them in years past. For example, Rendon’s 1847 assertions bear a remarkable similarity to Antonio María Osio’s characterization of soldiers sent from Mexico to Monterey in 1819 as thieves, criminals, and generally coarse men who knew not the civilized ways of behavior that dominated life in Alta California (see chapter 1).
45. See, for example: LACA, February 19, 1846, and May 2, 1846, untitled records series, vol. 1, folder 1, 412, 414. (Spanish originals, LACA ayuntamiento records, vol. 1, folder 1, 527, 530.) On March 13, 1847, the council enacted the following ordinance:
Article 1st. Every person giving employment to Indian servants shall house them within his own property and in case they do any cooking they are to remain subject to the house discipline and sleep in the house, so that by these means the excesses may be kept in check.
Article 2nd. Indians that have no master but support themselves, shall be located on various lots on the outskirts of the City which shall be adjudicated to them as their property by the corresponding title, which lots, however, must be separated in a manner so as to prevent all gatherings of a scandalous character.
Article 3rd. Persons other than Indians are prohibited to take part in the diversions which the Indians may get up in their homes, and all mingling with them must be avoided, and the diversions shall be limited to the hours from eight to eleven at night.
Article 4th. And as it may happen that the Indians, seeing their excesses restricted, may want to move to some other place where they are under no restraint in their diversions, all owners of ranches and mission-overseers are notified that, under their strictest personal responsibility, they must not allow any vagrant or unknown Indian to live on their premises nor to assist at any entertainments of their servants.
Article 5th. That, these measures being conducive to the general welfare of the public, it is expected that every person, encharged with their fulfillment and strict observance, execute and carry out the same, bearing in mind that all transgressions will be punished according to their gravity and in conformity with the Police Regulations. (LACA, March 13, 1847, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 1, 283–84)
In June 1847, council members agreed that “the object of removing the rancherías is to suppress depredations and abolish crime” but pointed out that “this has often been attempted, but with indifferent success.” They pinned these failures squarely on the Indians, declaring them “so utterly depraved that no matter where they may settle down their conduct would be the same, since they look upon death even with indifference, provided they can indulge in their pleasures and vices. Pursuant to the committee’s recommendations, the ayuntamiento passed the following alternative legislation:
1st. To make every effort to reduce drunkenness among the Indians, and to let them remain in their present quarters until such time as they can be moved to some other place.
2nd. To stop their diversions at eleven o’clock at night, and not to allow any white people to mix with them.
3rd. To hold the councilmen and Peace Officers responsible should they fail to do their duty in the premises. (LACA, June 3, 1847, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 2, 328–29)
Interestingly, the English translator substituted “white” for Mexican racial terminology. The original Spanish for Article 2 reads “sin dejar mezclar alli a los de razón,” or literally, “without allowing them to mix there with the gente de razón.” LACA, June 3, 1847 (Spanish originals), ayuntamiento records, vol. 4, folder 2, 416.
The ranchería continued to vex the ayuntamiento during the summer and fall. At one meeting councilmen lamented “the impossibility of enduring [Indians’] scandalous conduct and excesses any longer.” LACA, October 30, 1847, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 2, 497. At another meeting Syndic Vicente Guerrero and Councilman Julian Chavez scolded ayuntamiento member Rafael Gallardo for over-policing the Indians, fining them without cause and depriving them of their Saturday aguardiente. LACA, September 11, 1847, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 2, 470–71. At other times the same men joined Gallardo in deploring the lack of enforcement at the rancherías, especially as such lapses had allowed mixing with non-Indians. LACA, October 23, 1847, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 2, 495. Looming over all of this was a central tension in the relationship between economy and society for the ranchero elite, in that Indian bodies were necessary to the success of the former while their beings threatened the stability of the latter.
46. LACA, November 3, 1847, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 2, 498, 499. The original Spanish describing the scheduled shooting match reads “entre los vecinos y los Americanos.” LACA, Spanish originals, ayuntamiento records, vol. 4, folder 2, 622.
47. LACA, November 3, 1847, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 2, 500.
48. LACA, November 6, 1847, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 2, 505–6. Emphasis preserved from original. “Citizens” appears as “vecinos” in the original Spanish. LACA, November 6, 1847, Spanish originals, ayuntamiento records, vol. 4, folder 2, 632. The phrase “maybe a soldier or maybe a native” appears as “o de los militares o de los del país,” LACA, November 6, 1847, Spanish originals, ayuntamiento records, vol. 4, folder 2, 632. The original Spanish suggests Stevenson both referred to local vecinos in respectful tones and separated vecinos from indios, indicating a sensitivity to local nomenclature. In addition, Stevenson’s use of the possessive in describing a mutual relationship between the soldiers and the citizens seems to further express a sense of connectedness between the two groups, a social relationship too valuable to be imperiled by the foolish behavior of drunk and disorderly men. Stevenson also subtly referred to having a preliminary conversation with “the police of that village.” The person in charge of that police was Rafael Gallardo, the ayuntamiento member who had repeatedly called for the disbandment of the ranchería over the past months and who had himself been chastised for treating the Indians too harshly.
49. LACA, November 8, 1847, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 2, 507.
50. Ibid., 507–8. Vagrancy, the subject of Article 4, was a failure to seek or acquire work for four consecutive days.
51. LACA, November 20, 1847, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 2, 510. At the same meeting, Guerrero reported having collected twenty-four pesos from the citizens in an effort to help the displaced Indians “move their shanties and belongings.”
52. Stephen C. Foster, “Angeles from ’47 to ’49 as seen by Stephen Clark Foster, translator with the Mormon Battalion, First Alcalde of Los Angeles Under the U.S., etc.,” manuscript, written from the author’s dictation by Thomas Savage, 1877, 55, BANC MSS C-D 82, Hubert Howe Bancroft Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Foster’s narrative includes a long discussion of “The Execution of Juan Antonio” (pp. 47–61), in which local Gabrielinos captured the renegade, delivered him to the local authorities, helped keep him incarcerated during the trial, and enacted the execution. Foster, acting as judge in the trial, empaneled a six-man jury and called a variety of witnesses, including Mexican Californians, U.S. immigrants, and the Indian alcalde.
53. LACA, February 4, 1848, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 2, 531–36, quote on 535.
54. J. Ross Browne, “Report of the debates of the Convention of California, on the formation of the state constitution, In September and October, 1849” (Washington, D.C.: John T. Towers, 1850), 62–73.
55. Reid’s life, his marriage to Victoria Comicrabit, and the complicated history of their relationship and their children’s lives has been the subject of both scholarly inquiry and serves as the basis for the wildly popular Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson. See Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land, 63–73, and Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest, 77–78.
56. Browne, “Report of the debates of the Convention of California,” 62–73. The issue of suffrage and whiteness at the constitutional convention is also discussed in Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 55–56, and Pitt, Decline of the Californios, 43–45.
57. Los Angeles Star, May 24, 1851.
58. Los Angeles Star, June 24, 1852.
59. Los Angeles Star, February 28, 1852, and Horace Bell, Reminiscences of a Ranger: Early Times in Southern California (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 80–82.
60. Raul Ramos, Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 91.
61. Mexican Californian–born people represented a substantial majority of Los Angeles’s total population in 1850, accounting for 1,215 of the city’s 1,610 residents. This three-to-one advantage meant that recent European American arrivals could not successfully play politics purely on the basis of national origin, as they did elsewhere in California.
62. Los Angeles Star, July 12, 1851. For more on Ogier’s background, see Newmark, Sixty Years, 53–54.
63. Los Angeles Star, July 17, 1852.
64. Bell, Reminiscences of a Ranger, 134.
65. In Bexár/San Antonio, Texas, following the success of Texas independence, Tejanos fared far worse despite their active support of the secessionist cause. Ongoing threats of a Mexican reconquista provoked a “transformation in social relations” in which “an ethnic connection to being Mexican stood in for a political connection to Mexico.” Pressures such as these forced Tejanos into turmoil that Mexican Californian Angelenos initially avoided. Whereas tensions in Texas before and after the Mexican-American War led Tejanos in Bexár to quickly form an ethnic Mexican identity that shaped their actions as policy makers and private citizens, californios and vecinos in Los Angeles operated more freely and faced fewer difficult choices through the early 1850s. See Ramos, Beyond the Alamo, 167–204, quote at 170.
66. In Los Angeles, as in other cities during the period, a small mayor’s court remained operational for small-scale civil disputes.
67. See LACA, May 25, 1849, and January 5, 1850, untitled records series, box b-1367, vol. 4, folder 3, 571, 753–58; LACA, August 30, 1850, November 20, 1850, and December 4, 1851, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 1, folder 2, 67–72, 104–9, and 201–2.
68. The officers, who reported to the council, received salaries from city funds. LACA, January 5, 1850, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 3, 753–58. For comparison to Mexican-era policies and enforcement strategies, see LACA, January 4, 1833, records of common council, box b-1366, vol. 2, folder 1, 14–16.
69. LACA, April 13, 1850, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 3, 813–14.
70. LACA, May 25, 1849, untitled records series, box b-1367, vol. 4, folder 3, 571; LACA, August 30, 1850, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 1, folder 2, 67–72.
71. LACA, January 5, 1850, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 3, 753–58.
72. Historian Donald Worster has characterized asymmetries in the relationship between culture and ecology as fundamental to water’s role as a motive force in the history of the U.S. West. In Rivers of Empire, Worster argues that lurking behind disagreements over nature’s role in society lay a conflict between two distinct environmental ideals. Agrarian states, like Mexico along its far northern frontier, “provided an adequate and dependable supply of water to the village, and in turn demanded a payment of tribute in the form of money or crops” (37). Capitalist states, like the United States, saw in water “no intrinsic value, no integrity that must be respected,” and so deployed modern technologies to control water as “purely and abstractly a commercial instrument” (52). Whereas agrarian states viewed water as the communal lifeblood of prosperous agricultural communities, capitalist states viewed water as a “commodity that is bought and sold and used to make other commodities that can be bought and sold and carried to the marketplace” (52). Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
73. LACA, April 6, 1850, May 18, 1850, and June 22, 1850, untitled records series, box b-1367, vol. 4, folder 3, 810, 825–26, and 854–58.
74. LACA, July 5, 1850, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 1, folder 2, 16–17.
75. LACA, July 8, 1850, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 1, folder 2, 19–23.
76. LACA, July 9, 1851, and July 23, 1851, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 1, folder 2, 178 and 183–85.
77. The accumulated debris of harvested crops and autumnal refuse had so outraged the council members that beyond castigating negligent citizens, they threatened the mayor and marshal that “a repetition of this sort of neglect will compel Council to resort to more serious measures even to the extent of its powers.” LACA, November 6, 1850, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 1, folder 2, 98–99.
78. LACA, March 6, 1852, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 1, folder 2, 213–14.
79. LACA, July 7, 1849, untitled records series, box b-1367, vol. 4, folder 3, 586.
80. LACA, June 3, 1852, and August 12, 1852, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 1, folder 3, 226 and 256.
81. LACA, May 14, 1853, and June 10, 1853, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 1, folder 3, 311 (quoted) and 317–18.
82. LACA, March 14, 1854, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 1, folder 3, 389–96.
83. On the rancheros’ large parcels roamed the vast herds of cattle that supplied both the cash and luxury goods upon which their status claims rested. Even though the number of titles revoked proved small, the process took time. Between payments owed to lawyers and squatters, many who successfully defended their lands in court nevertheless had to either sell or surrender what they had fought to preserve. Catalina and Julio Vergudo, for example, took out a loan of $3,445 to cover taxes and legal fees in 1857, but the debt grew to $58,759 by 1869, forcing the sister and brother to sell 31,500 of their 34,000 acres. In all “nearly half (46 percent) of the original owners in the Los Angeles area went bankrupt in the process of defending those claims.” Indians fared worse, losing their rancherías to the public domain. Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest, 139, 125. See also Pitt, Decline of the Californios, 89–103, 118.
84. Los Angeles Star, May 17, 1851.
85. Los Angeles Star, February 14, 1852.
86. Brent further pointed out that because the city itself owned much of the potentially excluded land, the municipal corporation “while having the rights of an owner” would be “debarred from all jurisdictional control thereof.” LACA, January 21, 1852, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 1, folder 2, 208–11. The progress of the city’s relationship with Brent and its negotiations with the Land Commission can be traced in LACA, October 8, 1852, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 1, folder 3, 267; and LACA, September 12, 1855, September 18, 1855, December 5, 1856, December 15, 1856, May 18, 1857, and May 25, 1857, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 55–56, 58–63, 331, 334, 410, and 415–17. The federal government appealed the city’s initial victory, causing still more legal costs until the situation ultimately resolved.
87. La Estrella, October 23, 1852. Original Spanish reads: “dando al nombre de americano una fama bien mala.” Indeed, the Board of Land Commissioners created by the Land Law at first declared it would only hold hearings in Monterey. Antonio Franco Coronel spearheaded a petition signed by fifty-three holders that ultimately persuaded the commissioners to visit Los Angeles. Los Angeles Star, February 28, 1852.
88. Los Angeles Star, May 17, 1851.
89. LACA, March 28, 1854, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 1, folder 3, 406–7.
90. LACA, August 13, 1852, “An Ordinance Concerning the Municipal Lands,” records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 1, folder 3, 248–51.
91. LACA, September 2, 1852, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 1, folder 3, 259.
92. LACA, August 13, 1852, “An Ordinance Concerning the Municipal Lands,” records of the common council, box b-1364, vol. 1, folder 3, 253. For a discussion of U.S. immigrant criticisms of Los Angeles’s spatial irregularities, see Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 24–29. For a more general discussion of the relationship between an even grid, development, and public philosophy, see Hendrik Hartog, Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730–1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), esp. chapter 11.
93. La Estrella, June 19, 1852. Original Spanish for Uno reads: “las leyes que asi disponian han dejado de ecsistir en California, y en su lugar estan en observancia otras que pertenecen a la Nacion y al Estado; por ellas son dueños de los terrenos en cuestion. … Y las Ciudades no tienen hoy mas derecho sobre aquellos terrenos que los que les señalan las mismas leyes, estas no las autorizan ni para recerbarse ese dominio directo.” Rojo’s reply reads, “el derecho de imponer esos canones es un derecho adquirido por el Concilio mucho antes que se dictaran las leyes que hoy rijen a nuestro Estado, y ni la Asamblea ni el senado de California tienen facultad para dictar leyes que perjudiquen los derechos adquiridos legalmente en epocas anteriores. Ademas, no hay en California una sola ley que nos contradiga en esta parte.”
94. Los Angeles Star, July 17, 1852.
95. Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest, 143.
96. LACA, May 4, 1850, untitled records series, vol. 4, folder 3, 824–25.
97. LACA, October 16, 1850, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 1, folder 2, 93. In a separate provision, the council members required everyone selling fruit or vegetables they did not themselves produce to carry “a paper proving his lawful acquisition thereof,” effectively targeting Indians as thieves.
98. LACA, May 21, 1851, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 1, folder 2, 164–66. Peon is a traditional game played both past and present by a variety of Indian groups in Southern California and the Southwest. By both historical and contemporary accounts, a member of one team conceals a white or black bone in one hand, with arms folded, while a member of the other team tries to guess in which hand the bone is held. Other team members sing songs to confuse members of the rival team as to where the bone is located. Correct guesses result in a stick being awarded to the other team from a pool of such sticks that determines the game’s length. After guessing, the teams switch positions, with the other concealing the bone and the former trying to guess in which hand it is held. In Los Angeles, wagers seem to have taken place during each round.
99. John Boessenecker, Gold Dust and Gunsmoke: Tales of Gold Rush Outlaws, Gunfighters, Lawmen, and Vigilantes (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999), 323. Boessenecker uses the FBI’s method of counting murders per 100,000 to come up with homicide rates comparable to present times. The 1851 murder rate in Los Angeles, he writes, “calculates to a gargantuan rate of 1,240 per 100,000. This is by far the highest known homicide rate ever reported in the United States, and utterly dwarfs modern rates of murder.” The county rates for 1854–59 work out to 200, 250, 160, 240, 110, and 140, respectively, compared with the 1997 rate of supposedly violent Los Angeles of 33 per 100,000. See also James Miller Guinn, “The Story of a Plaza,” Annual Publications 4 (Historical Society of Southern California, 1899), 247–56, quote at 253.
100. Los Angeles Star and La Estrella, July 24 and July 31, 1852.
101. The jurors represented the city’s U.S.- and Mexican-born elite: W. C. Winston, O. Morgan, Horace Hoover, W. L. Kennedy, S. Lazard, John Ward, José Antonio Yorba, Andrés Pico, Dolores Sepúlveda, Francis Mellus, Felipe Lugo, and Julian Chavez. Chavez came with the Rowland-Workman Party from Santa Fe to Los Angeles in 1841.
102. Los Angeles Star, July 24 and July 31, 1852.
103. The office of alcalde, like many other municipal posts during the Mexican period, originated with the Spanish settlement. In Spain, alcaldes had been elected locally to serve simultaneously as town judge and mayor since the 1400s, as centuries of Moorish influence left behind an Islamic institution, the position of qāḍī, or judge. After the expulsion of the Moors at the close of the fifteenth century, the hispanicized alcalde took on much the same role as the qāḍī had previously fulfilled. In New Spain, the position lacked the formality of U.S. municipal offices. Beyond basic rules, alcaldes relied on community norms to guide the execution of their duties. See Langum, Law and Community; James Rood Robertson, “From Alcalde to Mayor: A History of the Changes from the Mexican to the American Local Institutions in California” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1908), 42–49; and Leonard Rudolph Blomquist, “California in Transition: A Regional Study of the Changes from Mexican to American Life and Institutions in the San Luis Obispo District, 1830–1850” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1941).
104. Although “not required to know the law,” hombres buenos “were to be just what their name implied.” According to Robertson, “the good men considered the facts” with “the natural equity of a just heart, impartially, and with an eye to peace among [their] fellow citizens,” and gave their opinions to the alcalde before he ruled. Robertson, “From Alcalde to Mayor,” 52. Final quote taken from Juan Barqueña, Directorio politico de alcaldes constitucionales (Mexico City: J. B. Arizpe, 1820), quoted in Robertson, “From Alcalde to Mayor,” 52, n2. Original Spanish reads “pues para el efecto creo que basta la equidad natural en un Corazon recto, imparcial y amante de la paz de sus conciudadanos, porque esto quiere decir hombres buenos.”
105. In San Luis Obispo during the 1849 interregnum, Blomquist reported the substitution of a “juri” of “eight men, six of whom were Californians,” for hombres buenos. After hearing the case and the punishment recommended by the prosecution and defense, each of the eight men offered his separate opinion of the proper punishment to the alcalde, who, taking all of this under consideration, made the final decision. Blomquist, “California in Transition,” 164.
106. The Star beamed that throughout the incident, “there was no excitement among our citizens,” and admired that “all who took part in the subsequent proceedings did so with pain and anguish.” Los Angeles Star, August 7, 1852.
107. Newmark, Sixty Years, 141.
108. My argument here is inspired by Christopher Waldrep’s work on the community and legal dynamics that facilitated the regular lynchings that served to both mark and enforce the boundaries of Jim Crow. Christopher Waldrep, Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817–1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). Elliott Young similarly suggests that shared violence against Indians united Anglo Americans and Mexican Texans in Laredo during the late 1800s. In his story, that violence is symbolic and performed as part of the public spectacle that surrounds celebrations of George Washington’s birthday in Laredo. Nevertheless, during these celebrations “Anglos and Mexicans, in spite of their history of bitter conflicts, thus symbolically united in opposition to a common enemy” and “suppressed emerging racial tensions by simultaneously constructing a barbaric enemy and rendering it powerless.” Elliott Young, “Red Men, Princess Pocahontas, and George Washington: Harmonizing Race Relations in Laredo at the Turn of the Century,” Western Historical Quarterly 29:1 (Spring 1998): 48–85, 59. For another story of lynching, immigrants, and community formation in late nineteenth-century Texas, see Cynthia Skove Nevels, Lynching to Belong: Claiming Whiteness Through Racial Violence (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007).
109. Pitt, Decline of the Californios, 120.
1. Harris Newmark, Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853–1913, Containing the Reminiscences of Harris Newmark (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1984), 139.
2. Southern Californian, November 2, 1854.
3. Benjamin Wilson Hayes, Pioneer Notes from the Diaries of Judge Benjamin Hayes, 1849–1875 (New York: Arno, 1976), 107–8.
4. The high court offered Brown a temporary reprieve while considering his appeal. In a cruel twist, the court had also stayed Alvitre’s execution, but the order traveled separately and arrived in Los Angeles after both men had been hanged. Newmark, Sixty Years, 147.
5. Southern Californian, January 18, 1855.
6. In an agonizing moment the noose around Alvitre’s neck came loose, depositing the half-dead murderer on the ground. A flurry of insults and a hail of stones rained into the jail yard, but no one on either side fired a shot. The hangman retied the noose and affixed it again around Alvitre’s neck, successfully ending his life.
7. Southern Californian, January 18, 1855.
8. This summary is drawn from Los Angeles Star, January 18, 1855; Southern Californian, January 18, 1855; Newmark, Sixty Years, 139–41; and Horace Bell, Reminiscences of a Ranger, or Early Times in Southern California (Los Angeles: Yarnell, Caystile and Mathers, 1881), 279. Brown’s final comments were to disparage those making his noose and he “called to an acquaintance and requested him to get some Americans who understood it, to hang him.” Supposedly, Brown objected to “being hung by a lot of greasers.” Accounts differ as to whether or not any “white men” came forward to do the job. Brown’s request is especially ironic considering that the “Americans” who hanged Alvitre completely botched the knot.
9. Christopher Waldrep, Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817–1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). In a subsequent work, Waldrep argues that residents throughout California engaged in lynchings during the 1850s and 1860s, and that they defended their actions by pointing up the irregular and unpredictable operation of the official courts. Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), chapter 3. Michael Pfeifer argues that participants in western lynch mobs, and those who supported “rough justice” more generally, engaged an ongoing battle with reformers who championed due process. Michael Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
10. Newmark, Sixty Years, 38.
11. Bell, Reminiscences of a Ranger, 253–55. Butts edited the Southern Californian from its first issue until he and Wheeler sold the newspaper to John F. Brodie in 1856. Butts then embarked on a filibustering expedition to Nicaragua, where he suffered severe wounds that sent him home to Ohio and ultimately took his life.
12. Southern Californian, November 9, 1854.
13. Southern Californian, January 11, 1855.
14. The Star also covered Brown’s reprieve but offered a much plainer rebuke. Its editors wished to “express the public sentiment when we say the action of Judge Murray was very questionable policy, and should not have intervened to prevent the sentence of the Court being carried into execution.” Los Angeles Star, January 11, 1855.
15. Southern Californian, January 18, 1855.
16. William B. Rice, The Los Angeles Star, 1851–1864: The Beginnings of Journalism in Southern California, ed. John Walton Caughey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947), 14–15, 70. Rice refers to a February 2, 1855, article in the San Francisco newspaper Alta California praising Ramirez’s prose, indicating he had begun to write the pages of La Estrella by early 1855.
17. La Estrella, February 1, 1855. Original Spanish: “Nuestro Mayor. —El Señor Don Estevan C. Foster fué re-electo Mayor de la ciudad de Los Angeles. Mejor hombre ciertamente no se podría encontrar. El Señor Foster es un caballero que se ha probado desempeñando varios empleos. Como Mayor ha merecído los aplausos y aprobacion del peublo entero: y en la capacidad de representante a la legislatura la admiracion y aprecio de sus numeros amigos.”
18. Foster himself was no stranger to the office of alcalde, judging criminal cases, or overseeing executions, as he had done all three during 1849 as alcalde of Los Angeles. Stephen Foster, “Angeles from ’47 to ’49 as seen by Stephen Clark Foster, translator with Mormon Battalion; First Alcalde of Los Angeles Under the U.S. etc.,” manuscript written from the author’s dictation by Thomas Savage, 1877, BANC MSS C-D 82, Hubert Howe Bancroft Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See esp. pages 53–60.
19. Rice, Los Angeles Star, 59–60, 88–89. Quote at 59.
20. Los Angeles Star, January 11, 1855.
21. Los Angeles Star, January 18, 1855.
22. Bell and Newmark corroborate the Southern Californian version, and the records of the Los Angeles Common Council bear evidence of Foster’s resignation on January 12. The Star did cover Foster’s subsequent reelection.
23. Newmark, Sixty Years, 93.
24. Los Angeles Star, March 1, 1855.
25. For examples of the connection between booster activities and race making in Los Angeles during later years, see William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), and Deverell and Douglas Flamming, “Race, Rhetoric, and Regional Identity: Boosting Los Angeles, 1880–1930,” in Richard White and John M. Findlay, eds., Power and Place in the North American West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 117–43. For a more general treatment of individual business people and booster activity, see Daniel Boorstin, “The Businessman as City Booster,” in Alexander B. Callow Jr., ed., American Urban History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 94–102.
26. Los Angeles Star, February 15, 1855.
27. La Estrella de Los Angeles, February 22, 1855. Original Spanish: “Pronunciaron varios discursos en los que se declaró que por causa de la dilación de la ley—de la invación de los esquatas,—de las contribuciones exhorbitantes,—y una multitud de otras opresiones los Californios se están reduciendo a la mendicidad en la tierra que les pertenecia y gozában sin interrupción;—que los terrenos que sus padres poseian y que esperaban decenderán a su posteridad para siempre, son arrancados de ellos por algun abogado ladrón;—que estarán años enteros dudando si sus terrenos serán confirmados ó desaprobados;—que pagan impuestos onerosos sobre terrenos y que las mismas leyes que imponen esos impuestos permiten que los esquata los ocúpen y gozen; que son tratados como estraños en el país que los vió nacer—y finalmente que los nativos Californios no pueden tener justicia en este Estado.”
28. La Estrella, February 22, 1855. I have condensed the response somewhat for space. The complete original Spanish reads as follows: “Casi cada palabra de lo que dice … es verdad: los Californios han sufrido muchísimo desde la anexión de su país a la Confederación Americana. Ahora no poseen ni la cuarta parte de lo que tenían hace cinco años, y así cada año sus propiedades se han reducido á razon de cincuenta por ciento. Las contribuciones exhorbitantes que pagan anualmente los arruina, y la desolación habita en sus hogares. Esto lo prueba la lista que se verá en otra columna, de las propeidades que se venderán al remate para pagar las contribuciones. La Comisión de Terrenos los ha deprivado de sus ranchos—desaprobándoles las tierras que les dejaron sus abuelos—aquellos hombres intrépidos que colonizáron a California, y todos sus trabajos, todas sus privaciones seran gozadas por unos viles extrangeros. En cuanto a la dispensación de la ley, digan haber si le han hecho justicia. ¿Cuantas veces? Sucede con mucha frecuencia que [unreadable] justicia despues de haberles quitado hasta el pan de la boca. No hay ninguno que niegue esto. Y en este triste estado ¿sera mejor quedarse en California ó emigrar para México? No hay duda que muchos responderon ‘a México!’” Ramirez countered that the grass would not be any greener in Sonora, where long-established residents would be no more willing to share land, power, or justice with a group of refugees than were their newly arrived co-residents from the United States.
29. La Estrella, February 22, 1855. Original Spanish: “El referido diario de la tarde dice que los Californios son un atajo de lardones, y que han sido autores de los asesinatos mas horrible y alevosos, que las gavillas de malhechores que infestaban las rerranias se componian de ellos. Esto es un libelo sobre todos los Californios sin excepcion, y como nosotros tenemos la desgracia de ser Californio, tomamos la ofensa personalmente.”
30. La Estrella, March 1, 1855. Original Spanish: “No sin sentimiento tomo la pluma para refutar ligeramente la alevosía ó audacia con que el redactor del Evening Journal ataca generalmente a los natives de California, sin distincion, y aun con una torpe ofensa al mas caro objeto de nuestro cariño que son nuestras familias.”
31. Ibid. Original Spanish: “Esto es que, segun las trabas que se han impuesto a la justificacion del pecado de ser deuños de terrenos en California, apenas estamos my al principio y por lo que se vé, se tardara mucho para obtener la absolucion; que es como un caso de fortuna, cuando debia ser de rigorosa justicia.”
32. Ibid. Original Spanish: “Olvidandose que cuanto mas exageradas hayan sido sus producciones, tanto mas a riesgo se le ha puesto de que se le de credibilidad, mayormente cuando no ha podido contaner los impulso de una frenética passion.”
33. Ibid. Original Spanish: “Dice V. que los californios son ladrones, asesinos, ignorantes, e incapaces de comprender lo que es civilizacion, y que las consideraciones personales de ellos no merecen mas aprecio que el que se puede haver a los indios de las fronteras.”
34. Ibid. Original Spanish: “Pobre escritor del Journal, sus conocimientos no lo avanzan mas alla que a los de un hombre muy comun, pues no sabe prevenir que en todo el mundo conocido hay diferentes producciones naturales, unas que nos son útiles y otras dañosas, y la sencilla razón basta para distinguir lo bueno de lo malo.”
35. Ironically, the rancheros used remarkably similar terms to draw boundaries between themselves and Indians during the 1820s and 1830s. See chapter 1 for an extended discussion.
36. Such exercises of racial ascription usually include implicit or explicit comparative self-definitions. Compared to the californios, the Star rendered newcomers “clever,” “keen,” and “intelligent” entrepreneurs who easily mastered Spanish and let nothing stand in the way of economic growth and progress. Bandini, on the other hand, made it clear throughout his letter that color, phenotype, and language failed to appropriately cleave society. A person’s individual intelligence, actions, and demeanor mattered more to him as markers of one’s place in society. Using criteria other than color had the potential to resort the racial identities attributed to both Mexican Californians and European Americans, such that the Evening Journal’s editor would fall on the other side of the racial divide from Bandini, his Yankee sons-in-law, and his mixed-heritage grandchildren, all of whom he would have considered gente de razón.
37. Los Angeles Star, February 15, 1855.
38. La Estrella de Los Angeles, February 22, 1855. Original Spanish: “Y que el quedarse aquí por mas tiempo acarrea absoluta ruina, y es mejor buscar un asilo en donde no sean considerados como extrangeros ó como una presa conveniente para cualquier malvado que dese sus tierras y casas.”
39. La Estrella, March 1, 1855. Original Spanish: “Continue V. su oficio, señor editor, y si prosigue como va pronto tendremos que corer a las pistas que V. provoca, par aver quien se declara campeon del dia. Siga la danza y á dios, hasta otra vez.”
40. California Legislature, The Statues of the Sixth Session, 1855 (Sacramento: B. B. Redding, 1855), 217–18. For a discussion of the “Greaser Act,” see Tómas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 57.
41. Stephen J. Pitti, The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), chapter 2, esp. 29–40.
42. The council minutes suggest evidence of a mayor’s court, in which the mayor alone heard cases, passed judgment, and determined penalties. LACA, May 15, 1855, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 9. He also heard all suits relating to animal slaughtering regulations. LACA, February 28, 1855, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 2, 244–50. Regarding land, when Mascimo Valenzuela and Maria Trinidad Romero, a couple long living in Los Angeles, asked for a replacement deed to their city lot, the council “resolved that the petition be referred to his honor the Mayor, who may require any proof that he may think necessary—and thereafter, give the corresponding title.” LACA, June 19, 1856, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 292.
43. Minutes from the council meetings show accounts submitted regularly for “board of Indians as City prisoners,” for “guarding City prisoners whilst out at work for the city,” and for “superintending Indians on public works.” LACA, March 28, 1855, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 2, 272–74; LACA May 15, 1855 and May 22, 1855, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 8, 11.
44. James Lee served as the jailor and Indian overseer in 1854–55, drawing $62.50 per month in salary (LACA, March 28, 1855, and April 20, 1855, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 2, 272–74, 286) and Francis Carpenter occupied the same position, which carried a significantly higher salary, in 1855–56 (LACA, October 30, 1855, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 73).
45. LACA, May 15, 1855, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 3–5. Foster deemed the high retail license fees, designed to “suppress the unrighteous traffic in spirits carried on between small vendors and the Indians” a “failure” and claimed that the recently adopted system of auctioning the city lands “has been greatly abused by being taken advantage of by speculators, and fallen far short of an equitable and just disposal.”
46. LACA, May 15, 1855, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 4.
47. J. H. Stewart, H. Z. Wheeler, J. W. Ross, and Timothy Foster were absolute newcomers to local governance. Timothy Foster actually won election a month later, on June 13, 1855, to fill a seat unclaimed since May by a Mr. Lloyd. LACA, May 29, 1855, and June 14, 1855, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 19, 23.
48. Proposed May 22, 1855, passed May 29, 1855. LACA, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 10, 15–16.
49. Doing so required a special session, held July 6, 1855, and attention at the regular meeting on July 10, 1855. LACA, July 6, 1855, and July 10, 1855, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 31–33, 34.
50. LACA, July 3, 1855, and August 14, 1855, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 30, 46.
51. LACA, May 22, 1855, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 10. Although the notion of watering dirt roads in a desert may seem crazy, doing so kept the dirt stuck to the ground, especially on windy days.
52. LACA, May 29, 1855, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 15.
53. Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967). Mary Ryan, “A Durable Center of Urban Space: The Los Angeles Plaza,” Urban History 33:10 (December 2006): 457–83.
54. LACA, October 11, 1855, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 68–71, quotes on 69 and 70, respectively.
55. Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 37–52, quotes on 50.
56. LACA, October 11, 1855, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 71.
57. LACA, November 13, 1855, and November 28, 1855, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 77, 78.
58. The new council’s first act reflected enduring intercultural principles. It blocked P. Ord’s sale of a lot straddling the zanja madre as “detrimental to the interests of the City.” Instead, the council reaffirmed its power to determine the limits of private property by demanding the lot “be reserved for the benefit of the City.” LACA, December 11, 1855, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 80. At the same meeting, newly seated councilman Henry Uhlbrook proposed a repeal of the $1,000 bond required of liquor sellers, only to see the measure vetoed by Mayor Foster, whose understanding of the public good had evidently evolved such that his faith in unrestrained commerce had come to be checked by his desire to retain leverage against those who might otherwise sell alcohol to Indians with wanton abandon. LACA, December 11, 1855, January 8, 1856, and January 15, 1856, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 83, 93, and 97–98.
59. Aguilar, Uhlbrook, Stephen C. Foster, and Manuel Requeña joined the special committee on February 21, 1856. LACA, February 21, 1856, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 112–13. After several meetings and follow-up sessions, the ordinance passed on April 1, 1856. The minutes contained reference to the ordinance but not its text. However, El Clamor Público published the complete ordinance in English and Spanish on April 5. El Clamor Público, April 5, 1856 (Spanish on p. 2, English on p. 3).
60. Robert Fleming Heizer, The Other Californians: Prejudice and Discrimination Under Spain, Mexico, and the United States to 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 150.
61. The council responded to the submission of the draft in Spanish with a resolution “that the same be referred to the City for translation and the wording of the same in a legal manner—and in conformity to the statues of California.” LACA, February 26, 1856, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 114. Although official council minutes were not kept in Spanish after May of 1855, many petitions and committee reports were submitted in Spanish by both private citizens and public officials.
62. Newmark, Sixty Years, 161, 182, 282.
63. “Una reforma radical es la que piden todos.” El Clamor Público, April 5, 1856, 2.
64. El Clamor Público, April 5, 1856, 2. “Siempre hemos admirado el carácter de Don Estevan C. Foster, y nos causa infinito placer el saber que es un candidato para el empleo de Mayor de la ciudad de Los Angeles. Despues de una larga residencia en California es my concocido por todos nuestros compatriotas que lo veneran y respetan.” “Como Mayor creemos que nadie le ha igualdo, tanto en el conocimiento de las personas y las cosas, como en las necesidades actuales de la poblacíon.”
65. El Clamor Público, May 10, 1856, 2.
66. El Clamor Público, May 17, 1856, 1. “Siempre estaré listo para hacer en todas ocaciones las observaciones que sean necesarias e indispensables para el majormanejo de nuestros intereses municipales.”
67. Foster and his council decided to continue printing all ordinances in English in the Star and in Spanish in El Clamor Público even though a new state rule only required laws to be printed in English (LACA, June 2, 1856, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 285–86). Addressing the bereft municipal treasury, they directed receipts from a new 0.25 percent property tax and increased licensing fees for “Hawkers and Peddlers” into several specific accounts designed to ease the careful management of public funds (LACA, June 9, 1856, June 10, 1856, July 14, 1856, and July 21, 1856, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 288–89, 290–91, 300, and 301.) Longtime resident and former council member Dr. John Griffin became superintendent of the common schools, joined by Francis Mellus, Agustín Olvera, and William C. Wallace as school commissioners. Together they refused to sign off on their predecessors’ final report, asking for and receiving permission to paste new pages over the older ones “so that the indecorous language therein written, by the School Commissioners of the year 1855, can never again be read or seen” (LACA, July 7, 1856, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 297–98).
68. Los Angeles Star, July 26, 1856.
69. Ibid.
70. Another police officer, Ned Hines, had been charged and indicted for murdering a Mexican Californian in the line of duty but had jumped bail and had to be tried in absentia only a week earlier.
71. El Clamor Público, July 26, 1856. “Exigir seguridades que no dejarian escapar al reo, como frecuentementa ha sucedido.”
72. El Clamor Público, July 26, 1856. “Un francés, animado por algun patriotismo curioso.” In this instance, the patriotism El Clamor Público’s editor referred to was for the Mexicans dismayed by the death of Ruis.
73. Los Angeles Star, July 26, 1856. The “Frenchman’s” name appeared differently in the Spanish-language press as Judge Benjamin Hayes, who presided over Jenkins’s subsequent trial noted two spellings: Carierga and Carriaga. Hayes, Pioneer Notes, 108–9.
74. El Clamor Público, July 26, 1856. El Clamor Público also reported that the estimable Sr. Dr. Juan Hernandez had been overtaken at the entrance to the courthouse by the American mob, which was “armed and made many bellicose demonstrations” (“los americanos estaban armandose y haciendo otras demonstraciones belicosas”). An unnamed friend intervened to preserve Hernandez’s life, although rumors circulated that the “Americans” had killed Hernandez.
75. El Clamor Público, July 26, 1856. “En la noche de este dia una partida de cerca de cien mexicanos armadas, bajaron de la loma inmediata a la ciudad.”
76. Los Angeles Star, July 26, 1856.
77. El Clamor Público, July 26, 1856. “No se sabe cuales serian sus intenciones, pero se cree que pensaban hacer un asalto en la cárcel.”
78. Los Angeles Star, July 26, 1856.
79. Namely, J. S. Griffin, C. Sims, R. S. Drummer, John Shore, Andrés Pico, Wilson Jones, Edward Hunter, Francisco Mellus, Ira Thompson, Tomas Sanchez, Abel Stearns, Antonio F. Coronel, Juan Padilla, Louis Sainsevain, Jacob Elias, H. Penelone, Myron Norton.
80. Los Angeles Star, July 26, 1856. As an intermediate measure, any armed rider could be detained, disarmed, and questioned.
81. According to the Star, “a couple of mounted Mexicans,” riding through the Plaza on Wednesday night, fired on and injured “one of our citizens” slightly. Los Angeles Star, July 26, 1856. Another account of the Jenkins-Ruis affair can be found in Lawrence E. Guillow, “Pandemonium on the Plaza: The First Los Angeles Riot, July 22, 1856,” Southern California Quarterly 77 (Fall 1995): 183–97. For a different argument about the Jenkins-Ruis affair, see Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe, chapter 1. Deverell positions this incident as the first in a series of events that amounted to, in Leonard Pitt’s phrase, a “race war” in Los Angeles. In Deverell’s work, Jenkins-Ruis and subsequent events indicate the long duration of the Mexican war, one which in fact intensified as a war between Americans and Mexicans long after the ink on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had dried.
82. One could argue that the rancheros were also looking to protect other Mexican Californians, as their language assuring that no one would get hurt as long as they did not resist represented a poignant effort to separate their aims from Jenkins’s original act. This further serves notice that race also mattered to these men.
83. Los Angeles Star, August 2, 1856.
84. Los Angeles Star, August 9, 1856.
85. The Star rarely published or analyzed such statistics.
86. Getting a bead on Los Angeles’s demographics in 1856 proves tricky. The date lies between censuses and no other locally generated data exists. In 1850, Spanish-surnamed residents made up nearly three-fourths of the population (1,215 out of 1,610), but their relative size dropped to less than half by 1860 (2,069 out of 4,385). Richard Griswold del Castillo counted 242 Mexican-born (meaning not in Los Angeles) residents of Los Angeles in 1850 and 640 in 1860. Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850–1890: A Social History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 40. Consequently, people properly designated Mexican amounted to about 15 percent of the 1850 population and 14.5 percent of the 1860 total. Of course, there are good reasons to assume that a Spanish speaker committing a crime would almost automatically be considered Mexican rather than Californian, although the boundaries separating Californians, Mexicans, and Indians might have fluctuated. The population of European Americans likely rose by more than 1,000 by the mid-1850s as a consequence of the gold rush. Conservatively estimating the Los Angeles population at 3,000 in 1856, about 1,500 would have had Spanish surnames, including about 225 Mexican-born Angelenos. “Americans,” who represented nearly 50 percent of the population, were therefore charged with less than 10 percent of all crimes. Spanish speakers represented 50 percent of the population and were charged with more than 60 percent of the crimes. Ninety of the 110 crimes, or more than 80 percent, are attributed to either Mexicans and/or Indians—so frequently linked in reportage of criminal activity—clearly above their relative presence in the local population.
87. Los Angeles Star, August 9, 1856. To the Star’s credit, it ran the letter from “Consistency” in the column immediately next to the story containing the arrest statistics, giving readers a chance to see two sides of the debate.
88. Los Angeles Star, August 23, 1856. The jurors were J. H. Low, S. S. Thompson, S. J. Reynolds, A. J. King, Wm. Graham, Adam Kerns, George V. Dycke, J. W. Crandall, James Carter, John Dunlap, A. J. Henderson, and Samuel Elphinstone. The process of seating a jury gave the sheriff a great deal of discretion. The judge made a call for a designated number of jurors and ordered the sheriff to find suitable jurors and bring them into court on the appointed day. Considering population demographics (however difficult to pinpoint, Mexican Californians made up nearly 50 percent of the population), the exclusion of Spanish-surnamed jurors must have been intentional. Even into the 1870s, juries without at least one Mexican Californian member were extremely rare.
89. Hayes, Benjamin [signature] to B[enjamin] D[avis] Wilson, Los Angeles, 1856, July 19, Huntington Library, B. D. Wilson papers, box 5, WN 368.
90. Wilson, Benjamin Davis to Margaret S. Hereford Wilson, 1856, July 20–Aug 3, Lake Vineyard Ranch, Huntington Library, B. D. Wilson Papers, box 5, WN 1756.
91. El Clamor Público, July 26, 1856: “el inocente sufre las consecuencias de un populacho inmoral que se abalanza sobre sus víctimas con la rapacidad de salvajes desenfrenados.”
92. El Clamor Público’s reportage gives but little reason to suspect the truth of this characterization. Its report makes one reference to “individuos de diversas nacionalidades” who joined the Mexicans in their Tuesday foray.
93. El Clamor Público, July 26, 1856. Ramirez deemed Ruis’s killing an “assassination” and lamented the agitation of differences between the “Americans and the Mexicans.” “Pero todos estan convencidos que fue un ASESINATO—nada mas ni menos. … Sentimos mucho las diferencias que se han suscitado entre los americanos y los mexicanos. El desorden que tuvo lugar el martes solo ha servido para poner mas y mas distantes las barreras que por mucho tiempo existen entre las dos razas.”
94. Los Angeles Star, August 9, 1856.
95. LACA, June 2, 1856, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 285.
96. Although leading the military campaign against Mexico in California, Frémont’s willingness to leave locals in control of their own political future had earned him many friends among the hijos del país.
97. Los Angeles Star, August 16, 1856.
98. LACA, August 25, 1856, records of common council, box B-1364, vol. 2, 313. Born in Ireland, Downey came to California during the gold rush. In addition to serving on the city council, he had a long career as a Democrat in state politics, winning office as lieutenant governor and serving as governor at the outset of the Civil War.
99. LACA, September 22, 1856, December 15, 1856, and December 30, 1856, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 316, 333–34, 335.
100. El Clamor Público, October 4, 1856. “‘Aquí viene otro voto de Greaser, Aquí viene otro voto por el Negro. Si viene el negro Coronel a votar no lo dejen.’”
Esos eran los gritos infames que atronaban los oidos el dia de Eleccion para Mayor. Sepan Caliofrnios el medo de espresarse del partido Demócrata!
Mientras que vosotros andabais con ellos, solo alabanzas os eran prodigadas; pero ahore que aparece que queries votar a favor de Fremont, no encuentran palabras demasiado viles con que degradaros, esos demagogos cuya ocupacion ha sido buscar bueno empleos, (o mejor dicho) procurando “mamar las chiches del Gobierno.”
Tened esto presente, y acordaos del mal tratamiento que hebeis recibido de los oficiales Democraticos durante los siete años pasados, es incredible que pueda haber un nativo Californio, que todavía siga con ese partido malvado, y si se encuntra uno, será aquel que ha perdido todo el respecto a si mismo, y que conviene ser estirado por la naríz.
101. LACA, September 22, 1856, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 316–19.
1. Drawn from Los Angeles Star, July 11, 1857, and El Clamor Público, July 11, 1857. An advertisement for the celebration, including names of the Program Committee’s members appears in El Clamor Público, July 4, 1857.
2. El Clamor Público, July 11, 1857. Excerpted from the following original text: “El cuatro de Julio fue celebrado en esta ciudad de una manera que jamas se habia visto en esta parte de California. Desde mucho tiempo todos los extrangeros habian sido invitados a participar en la celebracion de esta fiesta patriotica que debe despertar tantos noble recuerdos a todos los ciudadanos norte americanos. La poblacion francesa y California, sobre todo, fue invitada con las mas vivas muestras de simpatía; y así pocos de nuestros compatriotos fueron los que no concurrieron a esta cortes invitacion.”
3. El Clamor Público, July 11, 1857, “Comunicado.” “En varias partes de la ciudad, y principalmente en los hotels se hallaban reunidos muchos caballeros, celebrando con brindis y discursos la memoria de sus valientes padres, que a costa de su noble sangre consiguieron legarles una república libre y hermosa. Fue tal la animacion y entusiasmo que estos gratos recuerdos infundieron en la mente de nuestros conciudadanos, que creyeron estar no entre sus amigros, sino enmedio del enemigo en la batalla de Bunker Hill, y comenzaron a descargarse unos con otros, tanta multitud de bofetadas como que no les costaba ninguna dificultad levanter la mano para dejarla caer sobre el que se presentaba primero. … Me aseguran que huvo algunos balazos, pero por fortuna ninguna desgracia que lamentar.”
4. El Clamor Público, July 11, 1857, “Comunicado.” “No puedo explicar a Vdes. el gusto esperimenté al ver que mis paisanos empiezan ya a tomar una parte activa en los negocios Públicos, y Dios quiera que así suceda siempre.”
5. Los Angeles Star, July 11, 1857, “Celebration of Fourth of July.”
6. Ibid.
7. Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
8. Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850–1890: A Social History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 76. At least forty-nine Mexican Americans, mostly women, married non-Mexican Americans between 1856 and 1866; forty more did so between 1867 and 1870.
9. Castillo, Los Angeles Barrio, 85–9. Antonio Franco Coronel tried unsuccessfully to institute bilingual public education in 1854, and the City Council failed to act on petitions for Spanish-language instruction in 1855, 1857, and 1858. Because bilingual people themselves controlled some of those councils, it is possible that they viewed mastery in English to be an advantage for their own and their compatriots’ children.
10. Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 226–27.
11. El Clamor Público, June 5, 1858, 2.
12. On April 4, 1857, the Star offered a blisteringly sarcastic review of a week’s violence by asking, “Who will say we are in want of amusement? Who thinks of supplying such want by a theatre? How tame, flat and unprofitable such mimic scenes would be!” For good measure, the editor added, “If the players can afford to spill the crimson flood every night, they may come along, but we must have no shamming. We are used to realities and will be satisfied with no make-believers.” Los Angeles Star, April 4, 1857. Three weeks later, in a much more severe and sober mood, the paper lamented, “A thousand things are of daily occurrence here—are smiled at approvingly, or passed over unheeded—certainly un-checked, which would condemn men to disgrace and infamy, did a high moral tone prevail in the community.” It followed with a deep meditation on the shortcomings of society and the need not for better laws but better citizens to uphold them. Los Angeles Star, April 25, 1857.
13. Castillo, Los Angeles Barrio, 35. Of the 4,385 people living in Los Angeles in 1860, 2,069 were Mexican or Mexican American, or about 47.1 percent.
14. Castillo, Los Angeles Barrio, 141, 149.
15. Harris Newmark, Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853–1913, Containing the Reminiscences of Harris Newmark (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1984), 31.
16. William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 16.
17. Castillo, Los Angeles Barrio, 140.
18. Newmark, Sixty Years, 335, 518.
19. Ibid., 226.
20. Los Angeles Star, April 4, 1857.
21. Robinson, From the Days, 66.
22. Los Angeles Star, April 25, 1857, 2. Newmark and Cohen also desired “particularly to inform the LADIES of Los Angeles and vicinity, that they have received and will constantly keep on hand, many articles and delicacies which heretofore have never been found in the city.”
23. John Steven McGroarty, Los Angeles from the Mountains to the Sea (Chicago: American Historical Society, 1921), 916–17.
24. Los Angeles Star, June 6, 1857, and July 3, 1858.
25. Newmark, Sixty Years, 342–46.
26. Ibid., 421–22.
27. See, for example, Los Angeles Star and El Clamor Público on October 16, 1858, and September 3, 1859, for overlapping advertisements from Solomon Lazard, Hellman and Co., Francis Mellus, Fleishman and Sichel, Workman Bros., Ducommun, Jonas and Clark, and others.
28. Newmark, Sixty Years, 50–51.
29. In the same session, former mayor Benjamin Davis Wilson offered a lot and house to the city for use as a common school for only $375. LACA, August 14, 1855, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 47.
30. LACA, October 9, 1855, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 67.
31. LACA, May 23, 1853, and June 21, 1853, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 1, folder 3, 315, 322; Newmark, Sixty Years, 116–18; Los Angeles Star, March 15, 1856. In 1853, the Common Council objected to both the principle of separate distribution and the two square leagues (roughly 9,000 acres, or half of the size of the municipality itself) that Dryden demanded in exchange for construction costs. Harris Newmark, however, supported a replacement for the unclean water running in the zanjas and sold by the town’s two water vendors. Bill the Waterman and Dan Schieck sold water from sixty-gallon barrels atop horse-drawn carts during the 1850s and early 1860s. Customers stored water in terracotta urns called ollas, which originated in Spain and, due to their porous material, kept water cool even on hot days.
32. LACA, October 4, 1856, and December 30, 1856, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 322, 335.
33. Blake Gumprecht, The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 63.
34. LACA, February 18, 1857, February 23, 1857, and February 24, 1857, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 341–42, 343, 345–46.
35. LACA, March 16, 1857, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 351–52.
36. Mellus also asked for “the further permission that should he move his present business location he shall have the right to remove his Plat-form scale likewise.” LACA, August 30, 1858, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 4, 29.
37. LACA, January 25, 1859, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 4, 51–52. The city retained an option to buy at any time during the ten-year period. The council read Temple’s proposal and referred it to a special committee (comprised of Stephen C. Foster, John S. Griffin, David Porter, and Antonio Franco Coronel) eight days earlier. LACA, January 17, 1859, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 4, 48.
38. LACA, December 5, 1856, June 29, 1857, and April 12, 1858, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 331, 428–29, 490.
39. LACA, July 20, 1857, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 431–32. This would have required an extension of one block to the northwest, from Main to New High Street across the lands of Jonathan Temple, and by two blocks to the east, from Los Angeles Street to Alameda over the properties of Francis Mellus, Soledad Coronel de Yndart, Ralf Emmerson, Paubla Romero de Pryor, and Manuel Requeña.
40. LACA, August 10, 1857, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 438–39.
41. LACA, May 26, 1858, and May 27, 1858, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 4, pages 6, 7. Doing so would have required “all the interested parties in the rear of said new line so changed” to agree to the new plan. In addition, Abel Stearns, Horace Bell, and Antonio Franco Coronel would have had to relinquish pieces of their land along Calle de los Negros to form a right angle where it intersected Los Angeles Street’s new line.
42. In one example, Jean Louis Sainsevain and his neighbors brought their dispute regarding a broken zanja to the council. The officials ordered the zanjero to make the repairs in such a way that Sainsevain’s property “may not be injured.” The ruling departed from past precedent in that it presumed the city’s liability for damages to Sainsevain’s land and in that it offered the zanjero’s labor to protect such property. Under earlier strategies, Sansevain should rightly have handled the project himself and the notion of damages would not have entered into the equation; LACA, June 22, 1857, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 426. In another instance the council had to reject a petition requesting tighter control over a particular zanja because of “rights already acquired” that “ought not to be interfered with.” LACA, August 4, 1856, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 306.
43. Newmark, Sixty Years, 218.
44. Los Angeles Star, June 20, 1857.
45. LACA, August 31, 1857, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 442.
46. LACA, November 13, 1857, January 4, 1858, and February 15, 1858, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 452, 466, and 480.
47. LACA, February 22, 1858, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 482–83. By March the council selected a contractor, received the survey, and charged the special committee to resolve all issues relating to routing and financing. LACA, March 8 and March 29, 1858, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 490, 494.
48. Los Angeles Star, May 15, 1858. Nichols likely wanted to ensure that new irrigators took advantage of the extended water works and probably hoped rising property values would generate greater tax revenues. In heeding the new call to action, the council departed from a purely communal ethos and established a pay-for-use precedent. The members declared “all owners of land North and above the Garden of José Sepúlveda” completely “exonerated from all Taxation for the construction of said water canal” because they did not stand to receive any new water; only those who would “receive water from the said canal” had to pay “one dollar per acre on the lands by them irrigated.” LACA, May 31, 1858, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 4, 8.
49. LACA, July 26, 1858, August 2, 1858, August 9, 1858, and November 29, 1858, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 4, 20, 22, 23–24, 40. Several other claimants rejected the city’s first offers. In response, the council established a separate commission to mediate solutions, which ultimately resulted in an aggregate payment of $693.33 to various parties in August 1858. LACA, August 2, 1858, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 4, 22.
50. Few U.S.-born women brought petitions before the council on any matter during the entire 1850s, even though state law made such action permissible. For example, supporters of Mrs. Hoyt, a female teacher in the public schools, asked the Common Council to pay her a monthly salary equal to that of her male colleagues. Mrs. Hoyt did not make the request herself. LACA, April 29, 1857, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 365. For an excellent discussion of women, property, and the connections between gender and power, see Miroslava Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004).
51. LACA, August 10, 1857, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 439–40; LACA, March 9, 1858, March 22, 1858, and July 19, 1858, untitled records series, box b-0093, vol. 6., 286, 287, 312.
52. LACA, September 22, 1856, and December 3, 1857, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 316–19, 458–59; LACA, May 31, 1858, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 4, 8.
53. LACA, May 26, 1858, untitled records series, box b-0093, vol. 6, 302. Received in council and read on June 7, 1858. LACA, June 7, 1858, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 4, 11.
54. LACA, July 5, 1858, untitled records series, box b-0093, vol. 6, 303. “La comicion nombrada para examinar la solicitud de Benj. S. Eaton por el asunto a que se le conseda el pribilejio de sacar dos pulgadas de hagua de la sanja principal; informa que con las pocas maquinas que se an puesto en la dicha sanja sin un pribilejio como el que se solisita, las mas de hellas no an dejado de aser algun trastorno al huso de la hagua, y si sebá aumentando este negocio de poner estorbos en la sanja, y comensando á ora aconseder pulgadas de hagua al menudeo al fin llegara a ser un grabe perjuicio a la agricultura, por lo que ese dicha comicio no es de consederse la presente solicitud.”
55. LACA, January 4, 1858, and January 5, 1858, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 467, 468. See also LACA, May 18, 1857, November 23, 1857, and November 30, 1857, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 411, 454, 456.
56. Prudent Beaudry asked the city to cede him ten feet of land on the north side of Aliso Street where it intersected with Calle de los Negros so he could erect a new building square with the streets. Francis Mellus opposed Beaudry’s request, claiming the property was his own, that the intersection’s line had already “been fixed and established by the proper and competent power,” and that “no subsequent ordinance” could deprive him of the property. Although Requeña served on the Street Committee to which the council referred both petitions, it supported Beaudry over Requeña’s dissent. During an extended discussion, the council made no effort to find a middle course between the two competing claims. Requeña cast the lone vote against Beaudry, then demanded “to have spread upon the minutes ‘That the Common Council has no power to divest any person or persons of vested rights, guaranteed by Ordinance.’” Requeña then excused himself from his seat as president and walked out. Prudent Beaudry, petition to City Council, LACA, April 12, 1857, untitled records series, box b-0093, vol. 6, 245. Francis Mellus, petition to City Council, LACA, April 23, 1857, untitled records series, box b-0093, vol. 6, 252–53. Minutes, LACA, April 29, 1857, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 363–65.
57. LACA, June 2, 1857, untitled records series, box b-93, vol. 6, 256–57. The petitioners further asked the council to keep Gregorio Fraijo’s zanja, from which they were accustomed to drawing their irrigation waters, intact and essentially private in its own right. Seeking support for traditional water access by the somewhat unusual argument against declaring public a zanja that ought never, by similar tradition, have been considered private, the petitioners offered an oddly mixed presentation that nevertheless supported irrigation over machinery. As “vecinos,” the petitioners seemingly made a distinction between themselves as “public” citizens who contributed to the general public good (despite relying on a private water source to do so) and others pursuing “private interests” and who therefore did not merit city government attention.
58. LACA, July 29, 1857, untitled records series, box b-93, vol. 6, 263–64.
59. LACA, January 25, 1858, and February 1, 1858, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 473, 475.
60. LACA, February 21, 1859, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 4, 56–57.
61. LACA, March 14, 1859, and April 18, 1859, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 4, 63, 70.
62. LACA, February 21, 1859, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 4, 56–57.
63. LACA, May 21, 1860, untitled records series, box b-0093, vol. 6, 416–20. This document follows a pasted, printed copy of the 1859 proposal onto the pages of the new report.
64. When the council appointed a Water Improvement Committee in August 1857, it included Manuel Requeña. LACA, August 31, 1857, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 442. In composing a group to investigate problems with McLaughlin’s iron foundry in November 1857, Antonio Franco Coronel served. LACA, November 30, 1857, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 457. Coronel also sat on the committee tasked with the previous effort to dam the river and renovate the zanjas. LACA, February 15, 1858, records of common council, box b-1364, vol. 3, 480.
65. LACA, May 21, 1860, untitled records series, box b-0093, vol. 6, 416–20.
66. See Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), esp. 37–52.
67. LACA, May 21, 1860, untitled records series, box b-0093, vol. 6, 416–20.
68. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), 44.
69. LACA, August 9, 1860, untitled records series, box b-0093, vol. 6, 431–32.
70. In June 1861, the Water Committee needed an additional $4,000 to fund a wheel and other infrastructure to complete the domestic supply system. LACA, June 26, 1861, untitled records series, box b-0093, vol. 6, 481–83. Six months later, funds remained short and the Water Committee estimated a further infusion of $15,000 would be required to complete the works and liquidate existing liabilities. This amount included completing the domestic supply, erecting a new waterwheel, installing pipes, and building a brick house for the water overseer at the site of the dam. LACA, December 23, 1861, untitled records series, box b-0093, vol. 6, 495–96.
71. LACA, February 4, 1860, and August 9, 1860, untitled records series, box b-0093, v0l. 6, 395–97, 432. In another instance, the Morris Brothers and Prager, entrepreneurial mill operators and vineyardists, spent $1,300 fixing an old, ill-functioning zanja in the hopes of selling it to the city in exchange for a new flume, but they failed to persuade the council to buy it back. At first the Water Committee refused to build the new flume because the city would “receive no benefit from the construction of such flume” because “the benefit to be derived therefrom” would “accrue only” to the petitioners. After investing in preliminary repairs, the city subsequently declined to buy the zanja back for $500 and then $100, on the grounds that the consortiums’ zanja was so “badly constructed” it would “require considerable outlay to [be] put … in order.” LACA, March 11, 1861, October 21, 1861, and June 23, 1862, untitled records series, box b-0093, vol. 6, 471–72, 491–93, 498–99.
72. LACA, July 16, 1860, and August 20, 1860, untitled records series, box b-0093, vol. 6, 424, 343–45.
73. LACA, April 15, 1861, untitled records series, box b-0093, vol. 6, 474–75.
74. LACA, June 3, 1861, untitled records series, box b-0093, vol. 6, 476–77.
75. LACA, May 21, 1860, untitled records series, box b-0093, vol. 6, 417.
1. Los Angeles Star, January 25, 1862, 2.
2. For a discussion of the longer history of such storms, see Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Vintage, 1999).
3. Los Angeles Star, January 25, 1862, 2.
4. Harris Newmark, Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853–1913, Containing the Reminiscences of Harris Newmark (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1984), 309.
5. Los Angeles Star, January 25, 1862, 2.
6. Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850–1890: A Social History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 42; Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 244–48.
7. Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 32–33.
8. Ibid., 42.
9. Ibid., 47.
10. As soaring cattle prices in the early 1850s brought the rancheros an unprecedented windfall, their interest in seeking municipal office waned to the point where not a single Mexican Californian stood for elective office in 1855. Nevertheless, local officials generally enacted policies commensurate with intercultural civic ideals.
11. Pitt, Decline of the Californios, 241. Olvera won the county judgeship, Manuel Garfías became the county treasurer, and Ygnacio del Valle won office as recorder.
12. “Los Angeles City Officials, 1850–1938,” unpublished compilation, held at LACA.
13. Pitt, Decline of the Californios, 241.
14. Castillo, Los Angeles Barrio, 35. Castillo calculated the total Mexican American population of Los Angeles at 2,160 people in 1870. The federal census that year counted 5,278 inhabitants for the city.
15. Donald J. Pisani, Water, Land, and Law in the West: The Limits of Public Policy, 1850–1920 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996), 1.
16. Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 31.
17. The complex story of water law and policy in California and the U.S. West is carefully documented in Donald Worster’s pathbreaking study Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon, 1985), and elsewhere. At first, the Supreme Court of California and the state legislature moved in different directions. For a discussion of the ways the court pursued a dual jurisprudence in key decisions in 1853, 1855, and 1865, see Pisani, Water, Land, and Law, 15, and Eddy v. Simpson, 3 Cal. 252 (1853). Meanwhile, the legislature, by then composed in part of Hispano-Americans, passed laws in line with communal rights doctrines, establishing commissions to ensure maximal and equitable distribution. See State Legislature of California, The Statues of the Fifth Session, 1854 (Sacramento: B. B. Redding, 1854), 76. More in line with the courts, the law did not apply to counties where mining was the key industry and also prohibited interference with downstream riparian owners. In 1868 lawmakers established the “California Doctrine,” which accepted riparian principles but also made room for the nationally legislated Mining Acts of 1866 that acknowledged the right of appropriation in the public domain. For owners of state land or a Mexican grant, their water rights were declared riparian. All water claimed from the public domain before 1866 was granted rights of prior appropriation (this came from the Mining Acts). All state or federal lands granted after 1866 came under riparian rule: appropriators could divert only as much as the riparian flow would allow, even if rights were reclaimed by the riparian owner after significant improvements had been made by a downstream prior appropriator. This scheme superseded the communal rights granted to Los Angeles and other cities in 1854, until the special amendment to the Los Angeles charter in 1870. Worster, Rivers of Empire, 107–8.
18. William McPherson, Charter and Revised Ordinances of the City of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Star Press, 1873), 7.
19. The legislators clarified their intent in 1874 by further amending Los Angeles’s charter to mandate “that there be and hereby is granted to said corporation, to be by it held, used, and enjoyed in absolute ownership, the full, free, and exclusive right to all of the water flowing in the river of Los Angeles at any point from its source or sources to the intersection of said river with the southern boundary of said city.” State Legislature of California, Statutes of California Passed at the Twentieth Session of the Legislature, 1873–1874 (Sacramento: C. H. Springer, State Printer, 1874), 633.
20. The reaffirmed right to control the flow of the Los Angeles River did not impress all riparian claimants against the city. Twice in five years the city attempted to bring pressure on an owner found in conflict with its rights. Both times, the target of the suit was Leon Baldwin, who owned land above the city and had diverted some water from the river to irrigate his own land. In each case the California Supreme Court ruled against the city. In its 1879 decision upholding the verdict of the lower court, the high court ruled that “the claim set up by the city in this action—that the city is the owner of the corpus of water in the Los Angeles River—finds no support in the evidence.” The court based its findings in part on the Eddy v. Simpson ruling from 1853, and also found that Baldwin was an “upper riparian owner” and as such was making lawful use of the water. (City of Los Angeles v. Leon Mac L. Baldwin, 53 Cal. 469 [1879]. This ruling also conformed to the California Doctrine described above.) Clearly, the state’s highest court proved either unaware or unmoved by both the concept of communal rights and the letter of the law in Los Angeles’s charter.
To convince the court, the city cast its arguments in language more familiar to the bench. As defendants against Anastacio Feliz in 1881, city lawyers jettisoned Mexican communal rights doctrine. During a severe three-year drought, the city had cut off some upper riparian farmers in order to increase the municipal water supply, and Feliz successfully enjoined the city’s efforts. On appeal the state supreme court reversed the injunction on the basis of a new conception of “pueblo rights.” The justices declared, “From the very foundation of the pueblo, in 1781, the right to all the waters of the river was claimed by the pueblo, and that right was recognized by all the owners of land on the stream, from its source, and under a recognition and acknowledgement of such right, plaintiffs’ grantors dug their ditches, and, by the permission and consent of the municipal authorities, plaintiffs thereafter used the waters of the river. Can they now assert a claim adverse to that of the city? We think not. The city under various acts of the legislature has succeeded to all the rights of the former pueblo” (Anastacio Felíz v. City of Los Angeles, 58 Cal. 73, 79 [1881]). Although the high court referenced the city’s history, its decision rested not on Spanish and Mexican communal rights but on prior appropriation. The pueblo “claimed” the river from its founding and therefore was first in time, and it had improved the flow and used the water consistently since then. Consequently, Los Angeles had a claim of prior appropriation against any riparian owners.
21. LACA, November 22, 1865, Council Minutes, box b-1364, vol. 5, 476.
22. Vincent Ostrom, Water and Politics: A Study of Water Policies and Administration in the Development of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Haynes Foundation, 1953), 41–42.
23. LACA, May 25, 1868, Council Minutes, vol. 6, 668–69.
24. LACA, May 27, 1868, Council Minutes, vol. 6, 682–83. The concern over fire prevention reflected the spatial changes U.S. immigrants had wrought in the city, preferring wood to adobe as a building material.
25. LACA, June 1, 1868, untitled records series, box b-0095, vol. 10, 677, 680–81.
26. LACA, July 5, 1858, untitled records series, box b-0093, vol. 6, 303, see chapter 4.
27. LACA, June 6, 1868, Council Minutes, vol. 6, 684–85.
28. Petition to City Council, n.d., box 2, item 105, 7 pages. Antonio F. Coronel Papers, Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.
29. Aguilar subsequently served as zanjero of Los Angeles before returning to the mayor’s office in 1870. When the federal census taker visited him as part of counting the 1870 census, Aguilar gave as his occupation “ex-mayor of Los Angeles.”
30. LACA, September 23, 1869, and October 28, 1869, Council Minutes, vol. 7, 8, 20.
31. LACA, July 21, 1870, and July 30, 1870, Council Minutes, vol. 7, 133–34, 706–7.
32. LACA, December 9, 1870, Council Minutes, vol. 7, 216–20.
33. The Second Ward poll list can be found in the Los Angeles Daily News, December 2, 1870, 2, and the Third Ward Poll List in Los Angeles Daily News, December 3, 1870, 2.
34. Los Angeles Daily News, December 6, 1870, 3.
35. I assembled the preceding narrative by drawing on several previously published works, including Chester P. Dorland, “The Chinese Massacre at Los Angeles in 1871,” Southern California Quarterly 3:2 (1894): 22–27; Newmark, Sixty Years, 432–35; Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991; orig. pub. 1939), 48; Paul De Falla, “Lantern in the Western Sky,” Quarterly of the Historical Society of Southern California 42:1 (March 1960): 57–88 (part 1), and 42:2 (June 1960): 161–85 (part 2); Scott Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles in 1870–1871: The Making of a Massacre,” Southern California Quarterly 90:2 (Summer 2008): 109–58; Victor Jew, “The Anti-Chinese Massacre of 1871 and Its Strange Career,” in William Deverell and Greg Hise, eds., A Companion to Los Angeles (West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley, 2010), pp. 110–28; and Zesch, The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). The names of the dead and how they died are drawn from Zesch, Chinatown War, 132–44, and Jew, “Anti-Chinese Massacre,” 122–23.
36. Recently Scott Zesch and Victor Jew have broken this silence. As Jew astutely observes, the “largely uncritical and unreflected on” transmission of nearly the same narrative for 130 years “has had the practical effect of foreclosing the interpretive outlook necessary to see the massacre for its broad significance beyond its bloody excess.” Jew, “Anti-Chinese Massacre,” 113. In noting the ways that Kevin Starr argued the massacre sparked boosterism and how Allen Scott and Edward Soja plotted the massacre as the genesis of a long history of mistreating minorities and the precursor to subsequent disruptions including the Watts and Rodney King–related uprisings, Jew further argues, “If the stakes are raised and the massacre is put forth as the epicenter of a possible new start to Los Angeles’s modern history, then new ways of telling its history need to be imagined” (113).
37. Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles,” 110; Newmark, Sixty Years, 123.
38. Los Angeles Star, March 27, 1852.
39. Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles,” 110; Newmark, Sixty Years, 298.
40. Questions addressing the presence and occupation of Chinese women in California have provoked scholarly debate for several years. George Peffer, Erika Lee, and Judy Yung have offered a clearer picture of Chinese women in nineteenth-century California. Peffer argues that immigration laws targeted women and consequently kept the percentage of female Chinese immigrants to the United States much lower than comparable percentages among female Chinese immigrants to Hawaii, Australia, Singapore, Penang, and Malaca. He also chronicles intentional undercounting of women by census takers. Lee suggests most male Chinese immigrants came to California not as bachelors but as married men who left wives and families behind in China. Yung, writing exclusively about San Francisco, teases out Chinese cultural traditions that led married women and daughters who accompanied their husbands and fathers to the United States to remain largely in private spaces and out of public view, which in turn created a false perception that the only Chinese women in San Francisco were those prostitutes seen on the streets and in the windows of their brothel rooms. George Anthony Peffer, If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Working with raw census data, Scott Zesch argues that “more than half of the thirty-four Asian women living in Los Angeles may have been wives or concubines” in 1870. Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles,” 118.
41. Dorland, “The Chinese Massacre,” 22–27; and Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles,” 139.
42. Raymond Lou, “The Chinese American Community in Los Angeles, 1870–1900: A Case of Resistance, Organization, and Participation” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 1982), 27; and Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles,” 130. Writing about Chinese migration to Mexico, Grace Delgado notes that “in the absence of generational ties on which to draw,” the earliest immigrants “were compelled to create alternative mechanisms to establish connections to their new home and neighbors” and so their “sense of social belonging and residential permanency was initially tethered to relationships mostly with Mexicans.” It might therefore be appropriate to consider the possibility that the numerous connections early Chinese settlers in Los Angeles forged with English- and Spanish-speaking Angelenos represented a similar effort to establish a sense of belonging. Grace Peña Delgado, “Neighbors by Nature: Relationships, Border Crossings, and Transnational Communities in the Chinese Exclusion Era,” Pacific Historical Review 80:3 (August 2011): 401–29, 406.
43. Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
44. Henry Yu, “Mountains of Gold: Canada, North America, and the Cantonese Pacific,” in Chee Beng Tan, ed., Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Diaspora (New York: Routledge, 2013), 108–21.
45. Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles,” 115–17, quote at 117; and Lou, “Chinese American Community,” 25–27.
46. Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles,” 131–36. Hing pursued various strategies of retribution against See Yup, including orchestrating the kidnapping of Yut Ho.
47. Elmer Sandmeyer offered one of the first scholarly treatments of the anti-Chinese movement in California in 1939. He outlined multiple causes for the growth in white hostility toward Chinese immigrants, pointing especially to the hot-button issue of the coolie trade’s threat to free labor and a simultaneous effort by whites to reserve the labor market for themselves. Others have followed this general trend, including Kevin Starr in his omnibus history of California. I join with the recent work of Victor Jew and Scott Zesch, among others, who have similarly dismissed the labor market argument on the grounds that Chinese and European American workers infrequently competed directly for the same jobs. Most Chinese who worked for wages did so as cooks or domestic servants, arenas in which they did not compete with other males, and the rest worked as entrepreneurs of one sort or another, running stores, laundries, and vegetable businesses. Jew and Zesch also note, drawing on earlier work by William Locklear, that the anti-Chinese movement didn’t really take hold in California until the mid-1870s. See Sandmeyer, Anti-Chinese Movement; Kevin Starr, California: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2005); William Locklear, “The Celestials and the Angels: A Study of the Anti-Chinese Movement in Los Angeles, 1882,” Quarterly of the Historical Society of Southern California 42:3 (September 1960): 239–56; Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles”; Jew, “Anti-Chinese Massacre.”
48. Eric Avila, “Social Flashpoints,” in Deverell and Hise, eds., A Companion to Los Angeles, 95–109, 99. Avila’s arguments fit with scholarship that argues northern Europeans racially marked Asian and African immigrants as “other” prior to their respective arrival in North America. For the two classic works on this subject see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), and Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: Attitudes Toward the American Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968).
49. In an innovative and insightful essay, Nicholas De Genova elegantly elucidates the ways that the English-European colonial encounter with North American Indians served as a longitudinally significant experience in racialization, components of which have been strategically redeployed in subsequent moments of identity negotiation. “While it is certainly necessary to attend to the respectively irreducible particularities of the specific historical experiences of all the groups that have come to be crudely homogenized under the generic racial umbrellas Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians,” De Genova argues, “It is, nevertheless, productive to emphasize the broad analogies that reveal compelling continuities among these experiences because such comparisons facilitate theorizing the social relations that historically conjoin them despite their apparent divergences.” He also argues that Asian racial formations in the United States “have been constructed like [those] of Native Americas, to be essentially not ‘American’ at all. Like American Indians, therefore,” De Genova concludes, “Asians have each served as a constitutive outside against which the white supremacy of the U.S. nation-state could imagine its own coherence and wholeness.” Here I seek to add to De Genova’s discussion by suggesting the local specificities of this broader trend and by illustrating the ways that, in Los Angeles, two groups with distinct colonial histories and national traditions similarly drew on their memories of anti-Indian racialization to make sense of and exclude Chinese immigrants. Nicholas De Genova, “Introduction: Latino and Asian Racial Formations at the Frontiers of U.S. Nationalism,” in De Genova, ed., Racial Transformations: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 1–20, quotes at 7–8, 11.
50. Los Angeles News, May 21, 1869, quoted in Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles,” 126.
51. Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles,” 128. Here too, Angelenos created a link between 1871 and previous decades. Throughout the Spanish, Mexican, and early U.S. periods, the suspicion that Indians might behave beyond the established boundaries of acceptable behavior provoked concern and, at times, municipally sanctioned preemptive violence.
52. My argument here follows one David Nirenburg advanced in his book Communities of Violence. Writing about relationships between Christians and Jews under the Crown of Aragon during the fourteenth century, Nirenburg compellingly demonstrated that although Christians held strongly anti-Semitic feelings throughout the period, these feelings erupted into anti-Semitic violence only at specific moments when such talk and action offered particular traction in specific circumstances. David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities During the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
53. Los Angeles Star, April 27, 1871, 3. Also quoted in Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles,” 128.
54. Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles,” 118–22. In 1870, a See Yup rival had Sing Yu, a prostitute under See Yup’s control, arrested in Santa Barbara to prevent her from testifying in Los Angeles. See Yup’s attempt to recapture her resulted in an exchange of gunfire between members of the Los Angeles and Santa Barbara huiguan and spread into the carriage where a Santa Barbara police officer and a U.S. marshal held Sing Yu.
55. Such an argument fails to explain why the mob targeted not the provocateurs but indiscriminately slaughtered innocent Chinese Angelenos who had no history of violent behavior or legal manipulation. However, the note posted at the First Ward boundary and other, increasingly common, acts of random violence against Chinese on the streets suggest that Mexican and European Angelenos failed to distinguish when choosing their victims.
56. Jew, “Anti-Chinese Massacre,” 116. As Jew rightly asserts, “the invocation of ‘posse’” on that evening “harnessed the vigilante power that had already ordered and disordered Los Angeles for at least twenty years.”
57. In his pathbreaking study of Vicksburg, Mississippi, Christopher Waldrep argues that a deep distrust of formal law and courts combined with anti-black racism to create white communities bound together by the administration of extralegal violence and lynchings. Such choices could be made safely, he argues, only in tightly knit communities in which everyone agreed with the principle of vigilantism and protected each other from the legal consequences of committing murder in public places. Christopher Waldrep, The Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817–1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). See also Michael Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
58. Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles,” 138–39. Zesch takes the quotation from the testimony given by N. L. King and published in the Los Angeles Star, October 27, 1871. Isabella Seong-Leong Quintana makes a similar observation about the potential motives for Mexican Americans’ participation in the riot. Isabella Seong-Leong Quintana, “National Borders, Neighborhood Boundaries: Gender, Space, and Border Formation in Chinese and Mexican Los Angeles, 1871–1938” (Ph.D. diss., history, University of Michigan, 2010), 41–42.
59. Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles,” 141. This was a small portion of Yuen’s evident wealth. When Sam Yuen posted $6,000 bail for Ah Choy (no less than $100,000 in contemporary equivalence), rumors swirled that “thousands of dollars were to be had, if only the right circumstances could be worked to pry it from some hiding place within the Chinese quarter.” Jew, “Anti-Chinese Massacre,” 116.
60. Dorland, “Chinese Massacre at Los Angeles,” 27; Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles,” 139–40.
61. Henry Hazzard, Cameron Thom, James Goldsworthy, Judge Robert Widney, and Sheriff Burns stand notably alone for their valiant efforts to quell the crowd’s fury.
62. Newmark, Sixty Years, 434–35.
63. Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles,” 144.
64. I am suggesting a third interpretive alternative to those offered recently by Scott Zesch and Victor Jew. Zesch considers the massacre “the expected result of a collapse of the communal forces that usually operate to keep the sinister side of human nature in check,” as part of a larger argument that unrestrained racism undergirded the grizzly events of October 24, 1871 (Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles,” 143). Taking a different approach, Jew attributes the excesses of the massacre to the fact that “law utterly failed. It failed to stop the massacre. It failed to dispel the crowd. It failed to disburse the mob. After a good number were killed, the law failed thereafter to prosecute the full compass of those involved, and in the end, it failed to incarcerate even the few who were convicted” (Jew, “Anti-Chinese Massacre, 120). Within the larger history of extralegal violence in Los Angeles, I am making a far more troubling argument: that the actions of the posse reflected not the collapse but the volitional exercise of communal forces, and that law did not fail because the mob did exactly the kind of work it was expected to do, even if the extremity and randomness of the violence created such post hoc horror it produced recriminations and outrage.
65. Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles,” 144–45; Jew, “Anti-Chinese Massacre,” 121; and De Falla, “Lantern in the Western Sky,” 178–84.
66. I deliberately summon one of the core arguments Jill Lepore formulates in The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Making of American Identity (New York: Vintage, 1998). Lepore argues that English colonists resorted to extreme violence, far outside that normally sanctioned, to wage and win King Philip’s War, then created published accounts that blamed Indians for forcing them to employ savage tactics, thereby winning a second victory in the battle for the war’s memory.
67. Only one year earlier, a vigilance committee and trailing mob of more than three hundred Angelenos had executed a Frenchman named Lachenais for multiple murders. The grand jury refused to investigate the participants, telling Judge Ygnacio Sepúlveda “that if the law had hitherto been faithfully executed in Los Angeles, such scenes in broad daylight would never have taken place” (Newmark, Sixty Years, 420).
68. The men sentenced were L. F. Crenshaw, a drifter from Nevada; Louis Mendel, Polish-born and working as a clerk; A. R. Johnston, recently arrived from Ireland and working as a plasterer; Patrick McDonald, also a recent Irish immigrant; Charles Austin, a Maine-born farmer; Refugio Botello, a Mexican-born butcher; Jesus Martinez, and Estevan A. Alvarado. In addition, Adolfo Celis and D. W. Moody, an immigrant farmer from Missouri, were acquitted during the same trial. One additional Mexican American, Ramón Dominguez, was to face trial with the others but filed a motion claiming he could not be tried fairly, and the case against him was evidently dropped. William David Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 76–77; Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles,” 144–45 and n225.
69. Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles,” 142. See also Quintana, “National Borders, Neighborhood Boundaries,” 51–52.
70. Los Angeles Star, October 28, 1872, 3, and Star, November 20, 1872, 3. The events broke the letter of the law and the bull-and-bear fight may have been unsavory as the bear had reportedly been kept in captivity since its infancy and had little fight in it.
71. Los Angeles Star, November 21, 1872, 2.
72. Los Angeles Star, November 28, 1872, 3.
73. Los Angeles Star, December 2, 1872, 2.
74. Los Angeles Star, November 30, 1872, 3.
75. Los Angeles Star, November 28, 1872, 2.
76. William Estrada, “The Last Latino Mayor of Los Angeles: José Cristóbal Aguilar, 1866–1868, 1871–1872,” Center for Law in the Public Interest, digitally published on The City Project Blog, June 30, 2005. Last accessed May 9, 2011, at http://www.cityprojectca.org/blog/archives/117.
77. LACA, December 5, 1872, Council Minutes, vol. 8, 132–35. The Star reported a different tally for the First Ward, to wit: twenty-eight more votes for Aguilar. I have chosen to use the final tally recorded by the council here. Los Angeles Star December 3, 1872, 2.
78. Los Angeles Star, December 3, 1872, 2.
79. Although mid-nineteenth-century municipal politics were characteristically rough-and-tumble, the 1872 election was among the first after a suite of new laws imposed a far more orderly balloting environment. The Star’s editor complained heartily in the same issue that he was “thoroughly and utterly disgusted with the new and uninteresting character our laws have given to elections.” He declared, “There is no fun in them,” and reckoned election day as being “as staid as a Quaker meeting”; Los Angeles Star, December 3, 1872, 2.
80. Los Angeles Star, December 12, 1872, 2. The Star further characterized these problems as creating “nurseries of disease.”
81. Los Angeles Star, December 12, 1872, 3.