CLS 1500

Whitewashed Adobe

Whitewashed Adobe

T h e R i s e o f L o s A n g e l e s a n d t h e R e m a k i n g o f I t s M e x i c a n Pa s t

William Deverell

U n i v e r s i t y o f C a l i f o r n i a P r e s s

B e r k e l e y L o s A n g e l e s L o n d o n

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2004 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Deverell, William.

Whitewashed adobe : the rise of Los Angeles and the

remaking of its Mexican past / William Deverell.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-21869-8 (alk. paper)

1. Mexican Americans-California — Los Angeles —

History. 2. Los Angeles (Calif.) — Ethnic relations —

History. 3. Los Angeles (Calif.) — History. I. Title.

F869.L89M515 2004

979.4'94046872-dc22 2003065066

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 09 08 07 06 05 04

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum

requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992(R 1997)

(Permanence of Paper).8

Frontispiece. The “city of the future” in

the late 1880s. Courtesy of the Huntington

Library, San Marino, California

For Albert Camarillo, David Gutiérrez, and Jenny Watts

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book

provided by the Lisa See Fund in Southern California History.

Americans have their leveling ways: La Ciudad de Nuestra

Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula has

become, in one hundred years, L.A.

R i c h a r d R o d r i g u e z

Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father

C o n t e n t s

L i s t o f I l l u s t r a t i o n s a n d M a p s / xi

A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s / xv

I n t r o d u c t i o n : C i t y o f t h e F u t u r e / 1

1 / T h e U n e n d i n g M e x i c a n Wa r / 11

2 / H i s t o ry o n Pa r a d e / 49

3 / R e m e m b e r i n g a R i v e r / 91

4 / T h e C o l o r o f B r i c k w o r k I s B r o w n / 129

5 / E t h n i c Q u a r a n t i n e / 172

6 / T h e D r a m a o f L o s A n g e l e s H i s t o ry / 207

C o n c l u s i o n : W h i t e wa s h e d A d o b e / 250

n o t e s / 253

I n d e x / 321

I l l u s t r a t i o n s a N d M a p s

x i

Frontispiece: The “city of the future” in the late 1880s / ii

1. Sonoratown, the “Spanish part” of Los Angeles, ca. 1870s / 16

2. The corner of Aliso and Los Angeles Streets in downtown,

1886 / 27

3. Racial types of “Life in the Feudal Era” of nineteenth-century

Los Angeles / 33

4. A page from an early twentieth-century diary of a mission-to-mission

tour / 35

5. Building Los Angeles, ca. 1910 / 37

6. Mexican workers in downtown Los Angeles, early twentieth

century / 38

7. “A Typical House-Court” / 39

8. “Greasers in Embryio”: Early twentieth-century tourist photograph

of Mexican boys in Los Angeles / 40

9. Troops marching in La Fiesta de Los Angeles, 1894 / 51

10. Float at La Fiesta de Los Angeles parade, 1894 / 55

11. Local royalty, La Fiesta de Los Angeles, 1894 / 56

12. Children marching in La Fiesta parade, 1894 / 57

13. Representing old Spain: “Caballeros” / 61

14. La Fiesta poster, 1896 / 63

15. Representing Aztecs? Native Americans and La Fiesta’s revival of a

mythic regional past / 67

16. The Chinese dragon parading at La Fiesta / 69

17. The river that was: The Los Angeles River, late nineteenth

century / 95

18. The Los Angeles River flowing next to the Elysian Hills, late nineteenth century / 96

19. The Los Angeles River in flood, 1880s / 104

20. Flood damage in the 1880s / 105

21. Los Angeles River, north from the Seventh Street Bridge,

February 19, 1914 / 112

22. Salt Lake Railroad at Macy Street and the Los Angeles River,

February 20, 1914 / 112

23. Photographer Charles Puck adrift following 1916 floods / 113

24–26. 1930s channelization of the Los Angeles River / 124 –125

27. Mexican workers, Simons brickyard, early twentieth century / 131

28. Making adobe, early twentieth-century Los Angeles / 134

29. The Simons Brick Company’s Yard No. 3 in Montebello / 140

30. The Simons company band / 157

31. Ernestina Macias on the lap of Walter Simons, 1920s / 159

32. Building industrial Los Angeles together / 165

33. Trucks ready to haul at Simons Brick Yard No. 3 / 167

34. Growing up in Yard No. 3: The young Walter Malone Jr. / 170

35. A “typical” postcard view of early twentieth-century Southern

California / 174

36. A photographic representation of supposedly “typical” ethnic traits,

early twentieth-century Los Angeles / 175

37. 742 Clara Street, Los Angeles / 177

38. 741 Clara Street, with siding removed to trap rats / 180

39. Plague survivor Raul Samarano / 181

40. The Baptist Mission church, plague abatement headquarters / 185

41. Plague abatement wrecking crew / 188

42. Mexican shack in rear of tortilla factory, 612 N. Alameda / 189

i l l u s t r a t i o n sx i i

43. Looking west on E. 6th Street from Imperial / 189

44–45. Wrecking crew at work, back of 2039 E. 7th Street / 190

46. “Negro shack in business section, near 2039 E. 7th Street” / 192

47. Plague abatement as erasure, 2039 E. 7th Street / 192

48. Plague eradication destruction in the Utah Street district east of the

Los Angeles River / 193

49–50. Vernon colonia burning / 194

51. John Steven McGroarty / 213

52. Act 1 of The Mission Play: Return of Portolá from Monterey / 218

53. Act 2 of The Mission Play: Fiesta scene / 221

54. Progress as linear tableau: A Mission Play advertisement / 222

55. Mission Play window advertisement, ca. 1920 / 227

M a p s

1. Southern California, ca. 1850 / 20

2. Los Angeles River, stream flow over time / 102

3. Bird’s-eye view of Los Angeles / 107

x i i ii l l u s t r a t i o n s

A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

I have had an enormous amount of help with this book. I never would have

finished it otherwise. I am most grateful to the dozens of friends and col- leagues who have been so generous with their time, patience, and knowl-

edge. This project also received significant institutional support, for which I am also very thankful.

Parts of Whitewashed Adobe have appeared elsewhere. My thanks go to

David Wrobel and Mike Steiner for soliciting an essay in which I tried out

many of the ideas from several of the following chapters; that essay appeared

in the Many Wests volume they brought out with the University of Kansas

Press. Portions of this work also appear in early form in a piece I co-wrote

with Doug Flamming in John Findlay and Richard White’s Power and

Place volume on the North American West published by the University of

Washington Press. I’d like to thank Blake Allmendinger and Valerie

Matsumoto for helping me refine ideas about the 1924 plague outbreak in Los Angeles; chapter 5 is a newer version of an essay that first appeared in their coedited volume Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, pub-

lished by the University of California Press.

Several institutions have generously aided in the research and writing of

this book. I’d like to thank the Getty Research Institute, where I spent a

period as a visiting scholar during the “Perspectives on Los Angeles” the-

matic year. The Institute staff and other visiting scholars made my time there extremely stimulating and enjoyable. I am grateful to the Office of the

x v

President of the University of California system for generous support in the

form of a President’s Fellowship in the Humanities, 1994–1995. With my

friend and colleague Doug Flamming, I spent an extremely productive

period as a visiting scholar at the Clark Library during its yearlong inves-

tigation of the American West. My thanks extend to UCLA’s Center for

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies for support during that year,

as well as to the Ahmanson Foundation, for its support while I was at the

Clark and at the Getty Research Institute. The first full draft of White- washed Adobe was completed while I was a Fellow at the Center for

Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences during the academic year 1998–

1999; the Center, the California Institute of Technology, and the Andrew

W. Mellon Foundation made that year possible, for which I am exceedingly

grateful. Neil Smelser, former CASBS Director, and Robert Scott, former

CASBS Associate Director, deserve special mention for their collegiality and

congeniality.

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the support of my friends in the history

department at the University of California, San Diego, where this project

first began a long time ago. I continue to be grateful for the tremendous support I have received from the Division of the Humanities and Social

Sciences at Caltech. John Ledyard, former chairman of the division, and

division administrator Susan Davis deserve special thanks in this regard. My

thanks to the members of the social history workshop at the University of

Chicago, particularly Gabriela Arredondo (now of UC Santa Cruz), who

invited me to present some of my work before the group. I am grateful to

the students and faculty of the history department at the University of

California, Davis, whose response to a paper I presented helped me rethink

a number of points in the book. I also thank the members of the Los

Angeles History Group, a collegial collection of the “usual suspects,” who

can always be relied upon to offer good words, good questions, and good ideas. The tragic death in 2003 of Professor Clark Davis, co-convener of this

group, robbed the history profession of a talented scholar and teacher, and

his passing stole from us all a man of abiding decency.

Research assistants George Ingersoll and Stacy Kamehiro helped me

track down valuable sources. Helga Galvan and Victoria Seas of the

Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Caltech assisted me at

several junctures. Professor Ralph Shaffer provided research help on the Los Angeles River and its flood cycles. George Miles, Curator of Western Americana at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, helped me locate terrific sources that I would otherwise never have encountered. Patti Murray,

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t sx v i

Walter Malone, Gene Chávez, Ray Ramirez, Ernestina Macias, and Jess

Garcia opened my eyes to the world of Simons Brick Yard No. 3. Historian

Charles Montgomery’s perceptive thoughts and writings, especially his

book The Spanish Redemption: Heritage, Power, and Loss on New Mexico’s

Upper Rio Grande, pushed my thinking forward in a number of ways.

My thanks to Howard Markel of the University of Michigan, who shared

with me work that shaped my ideas about ethnicity and illness. Dace Taub

of the Regional History Center at the University of Southern California

offered her usual generous research help and equally generous kindness. Monsignor Francis Weber, Andrew Sherman, Kevin Feeny, Sister Mary

Rose Cunningham, and Viola Carlson offered me help at a number of junc- tures. Caltech’s Interlibrary Loan staff, especially Shadye Peyvan, saved my research life on innumerable occasions. Thanks, too, to the entire Readers

Services staff at the Huntington Library, the librarians of the Center for Advanced Study, and Janet Clemmensen of the California State Library.

Others in the community of scholars deserve thanks for sharing ideas

with me: Jared Orsi, Jane Apostol, the late Martin Ridge, Jennifer Tucker,

Kevin Starr, Kevin Gilmartin, Alan Taylor, Roy Ritchie, Anne Hyde, Doug

Sackman, Michael Bellesiles, Laura Edwards, Jim Scott, Natalia Molina,

and Becky Nicolaides. Insightful readings by Virginia Scharf, Philip J.

Ethington, and Robert Dawidoff improved this book. Miriam Feldblum and Doug Smith reminded me to think about things in different ways and to pose different questions. Kate McGinn, formerly of the Fuller Theological Seminary Archives, helped me with my research. Philip Goff, Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at

Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis, also aided me in many

ways. Alan Jutzi, Avery Chief Curator of Rare Books at the Huntington

Library, helped me track down materials and deserves general credit for his

unstinting support of scholarship. Blake Gumprecht helped me under-

stand the Los Angeles River better. Janet Fireman never failed to offer a good idea or smart question. Dr. Ellen Bogen Alkon helped me with ques-

tions about her father, public health physician Emil Bogen. My friends in

the Social History Reading Group helped me sharpen ideas about 1920s Los

Angeles. Special thanks to David Igler, Philip Goff, Doug Smith, and Alan Jutzi for putting in long hours helping build our informal institute for the

study of the American West.

At the University of California Press, Monica McCormick’s good cheer,

good ideas, and patience buoyed this project. Also at the Press, former

Director Jim Clark and Director Lynne Withey deserve my gratitude for

x v i ia c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

their insights and loyalty to this book. Randy Heyman and Marilyn

Schwartz, both of the Press, aided me in the process as well. It has been my

good fortune to work with copyeditor Kay Scheuer once again, and I am

grateful as well to David Peattie of BookMatters for his help in shepherd-

ing this book from manuscript to hard covers. Friends and colleagues Ben

Johnson, Roberto Lint-Sagarena, Shana Bernstein, Michelle Nickerson,

Daniel Hurewitz, Clark Davis, and Mark Wild offered many ideas on the chapter addressing Simons Brick Yard No. 3. I owe a scholarly debt of no

small proportion to the two outside readers who commented on White-

washed Adobe for UC Press. The great western historian Robert Hine was

one of these readers, and I am grateful for his encouragement and advice.

Historian Edward Escobar lugged the manuscript around twice. I admit

that I was at first reluctant to recast the book along the lines he suggested. His second reading (and second set of comments) convinced me that I was

being stubborn at the book’s expense. While disagreements yet remain

between us, I know that his insights and care strengthened this book. I am

also grateful to Professor Vicki Ruiz of the University of California, Irvine;

Professor Ruiz read the book as a member of the editorial committee of UC

Press, and her detailed report offered a number of excellent scholarly and editorial suggestions.

It has been more than decade’s worth of privilege to work with talented

graduate students at UC San Diego. I want especially to thank former stu-

dents Phoebe Kropp, Mark Wild, and Sarah Schrank, whose fine work on the history of Los Angeles has shaped my own in lasting ways. Doug

Flamming of the Georgia Institute of Technology, my former Caltech col-

league and research partner at the Getty and the Clark, helped shape this

book more than he knows. His patient, insightful reading of draft chapters

improved them immeasurably. My friend Bryant Simon of the University

of Georgia is a font of penetrating insight, historical and otherwise. David

Igler of the University of California, Irvine, offered constant encouragement and support to the project; he also read the draft with care and wisdom.

Mike Davis has taught us all a great deal about Los Angeles, and I’m

pleased to acknowledge his unstinting support and generosity here. My

thanks as ever to friend and valued collaborator Tom Sitton of the Los

Angeles County Museum of Natural History, who read the manuscript and

reminded me that I really ought to get the thing published. I hope some-

day to know as much about Los Angeles as Tom does, but I know I’m only

kidding myself. David Gutiérrez gave this study the kind of sustained and

critical read that only he can provide; his ideas and uncompromising insis-

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t sx v i i i

tence on sharpening aspects of the book’s structure and argument were of

great help. Had I not started work on this book, I probably wouldn’t have

gotten to know Greg Hise of the University of Southern California as well

as I have, and I’d be the lesser person for it. Greg has taught me an enor-

mous amount about Los Angeles and other topics, scholarly and not, and

I’m proud to collaborate with him on a number of projects.

My mother, my father, and my sister have always stood alongside me in

what I do, what I teach, and what I think. As I have gotten older, the extent

of their patience and unwavering support become even clearer to me. I want

especially to acknowledge the expertise of my father, Dr. William F.

Deverell, who helped me locate and interpret medical documents related

to the 1924 plague outbreak in downtown Los Angeles.

This book is dedicated to three remarkable people. For more than twenty

years, the historian Albert Camarillo of Stanford University has helped

shape me as a scholar and a person. The same is true of two decades of

friendship with David Gutiérrez of the history department at the University

of California, San Diego. Jenny Watts came up with this book’s title. For

that, for sharing in the joy of Helen Watts Deverell, and for countless

other reasons, my river runs to thee.

x i xa c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

I n t r o d u c t i o n

City of the Future

Tomorrow shall be the flower of all its yesterdays.

M o t t o o f t h e S o u t h w e s t Mu s e u m ,

f o u n d e d 1 9 0 7 , L o s A n g e l e s

The adventurous pioneers, who were the warp and woof of that pueblo, even in the early days had a curious prophetic feeling about the destiny of Los Angeles. Always one of their favorite sports, indoor and outdoor, was to make bold prophecies about the future of California.

B o y l e W o r k m a n , The City That Grew, 19351

I am a foresighted man, and I believe that Los Angeles is destined to become the most important city in this country, if not in the world.

H e n ry E . Hu n t i n g t o n , ca. 19202

Can there be any doubt but what Los Angeles is to be the world’s greatest city . . . greatest in all of the annals of history? Can there be any doubt but what MAN wants her to so become . . . or doubt that she has touched the imagination of general public opinion as no other city in history has touched the millions?

S h e r l e y Hu n t e r ,

Why Los Angeles Will Become the World’s Greatest City, 19233

1

Los Angeles has been the city of the future for a long time. Even as far back

as the 1850s, at the moment of California statehood, people thought and

spoke and wrote about Los Angeles as urban destiny in the making.

Seventy-five years ago, John Steven McGroarty, journalist, playwright, and poet, wrote that Los Angeles was “the old new land of promise.” “The City

of Destiny,” McGroarty called it.4 Indeed the city seems almost able to bend

time, at least in the ways people described it and talk about it even today.

Los Angeles, they say, forges a relationship between the past and the pres-

ent that makes every tomorrow unnaturally close by. Even more auda-

cious, something about the place made people believe that their Los Angeles

present was the rest of America’s, if not the world’s, future. Los Angeles as

crystal ball.

How else to explain the signs? Readers of the city’s dominant newspaper,

glancing at its masthead eighty years ago, couldn’t possibly miss the clues. A

ship glides across the top of the paper, just above the relentless urging to “Sail

on, sail on, sail on, and on.” Starker and more telling was the tiny yet unmis-

takable printer’s bug at the upper left corner of the Los Angeles Times mast-

head: a bright star encased in a circle, with a band spelling out “DESTINY”

strung across its middle.5 Los Angeles has always been a city on the make. And

Los Angeles’ destination and Los Angeles’ destiny have always been the same:

the future. Sail on, sail on, sail on, and on.

Prophecy and its symbols sprang from relentless ambition. A century ago,

calculating city builders looked across the Los Angeles basin, even across the

Pacific Ocean, and saw their personal destinies inextricably linked to the future of a then-small city. They explained Los Angeles’ distinctiveness

simply by suggesting that it already existed in a space ahead of the tempo-

ral curve. The rest of the state, nation, and world would watch, copy, and

catch up. The city as time machine: come aboard and try out the future.

Eighty years ago, real estate tycoons and booster wannabes reminded every-

one of the city’s steep demographic trajectory, proud of the equation that

made population increase into the very definition of progress. “In 1901,” an advertisement chided, Angelenos “laughed” at projections of the city’s 1910

population. But Los Angeles hit that projected 350,000 mark with room

and years to spare. By 1911, the city had exploded and had thereby grown

full of true believers. A million people would be in the basin by 1920, “and

it will come true.”6 Thus it was. “Here will be the greatest civilization the

world has ever known,” promised the usually taciturn John Fredericks,

district attorney of Los Angeles, with all the unquestioning conviction of

one of the chosen.7

i n t r o d u c t i o n2

In the early 1920s, Los Angeles realtors trying to outboost one another

entered the “City of Los Angeles” poetry contest sponsored by their trade

magazine. In one breathless stanza after another, they described the city “of

eternal youth—a city without slums,” an “inspirational vision of destiny,”

“the fulfillment of history’s prophecy,” “the most famous city in the entire world.” Los Angeles: a place where “the best blood, intelligence and man-

power from every state in the Union, crystallized into a composite loyalty

for one city.”8

Even great poets felt the fever of the future. A dazed William Butler Yeats,

wandering around Los Angeles in the mid-1920s, wrote, “Here if anywhere

in America, I seem to hear the coming footsteps of the muses.” “Ask the

older congested cities of our country if they can parallel such a promise,” a

representative booster pamphlet of the period queried—“whether or not

their greatness lies in the future or in their proud achievements of the past.

Los Angeles has everything in the future.”9 “Greater Southern California,”

declared the slogan printed on Los Angeles newspaperman, power broker,

and real estate mogul Harry Chandler’s 1920s stationary, complete with an

arrow aimed at the future “Straight Ahead.”10

Prophecy, faith, and wide-eyed optimism, shot through with presumptions of

the racial superiority of self-identified Anglo Saxons. Los Angeles sailed on, through the 1920s and into the Great Depression, through the Second

World War and postwar suburbanization, and on through the upheavals

and violence of the 1960s, even unto today. Time only rephrased the in-

evitable as the slightly questionable. Thirty years ago, scholars and policy

wonks gathered at the Los Angeles campus of the University of California

for a symposium called “Los Angeles: Metropolis of the Future?” The ques-

tion mark only took up space, only made an academic conference slightly

provocative. Of course Los Angeles and the future worked together, the

notion insisted. The metropolis would inherit the future and other places

would grow to resemble Los Angeles. The future belonged to Los Angeles,

the future was Los Angeles. Or so presumption promised.

Prophecy in the city of destiny, like all prophecy, can have its portents of

darkness, even apocalypse. We need look no further for a recent version of

this than Mike Davis’s tremendously influential book City of Quartz, with its provocative subtitle “excavating the future in Los Angeles,” not to men-

tion its back cover suggestion that in Los Angeles “we may glimpse our own

future, mirrored with terrifying clarity.”11 Los Angeles just may be the city

of destiny, Davis argues, but that future is hardly a pretty one.

Yet myths die hard. Dire predictions—which in the case of the Davis

3i n t r o d u c t i o n

book came all too true in 1992—seem not to dispel faith in Los Angeles as

some kind of prophetic urban quilt, a fabric optimistically suggestive of

what America or the world could be, might be, will be. Associations of place

and time include assessment of the city’s ethnic and racial diversity as

somehow a precursor, anticipating what other cities, other places will be or

look like. In this way, Los Angeles trends supposedly become templates for

urban futures everywhere. A book like David Rieff’s Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World suggests, even predicts, as much. Immigration trends, cou-

pled with the region’s already stunning ethnic, racial, and national diversity,

will create a multicultural Los Angeles of the near future that global cities

will eventually come to mimic. Of course the question always remains,

posed either implicitly or explicitly, whether demographic complexity alone

can encourage peaceful interactions between people.12

But even this expectation, that the racial future of Los Angeles has spe-

cial meaning for other places, that ethnic and demographic features of the

city’s neighborhoods somehow foreshadow an “everyurban” tomorrow, is

not really new, at least not in its broadest characterizations. On the contrary,

an old theme in the city’s history posits, even expects, an explicit and inter-

twined relationship between race and time. Gone, however, are the social

mathematics in the old equations associating ethnicity with prophecy; they

have been reformulated in ways that render a different, a very different, sum. In days past, fortune-telling about Los Angeles commonly equated the

promise of the twentieth century with Anglo Saxon ascendancy and white

ethnocentrism. In the words of one representative booster from the 1920s,

sentiments unabashedly published in the region’s premier business journal,

it was merely grade school figuring that in Los Angeles “Anglo-Saxon civ- ilization must climax in the generations to come.”13

One of the winners in the 1924 poetry contest spelled out the racial

logic. Los Angeles was the spot—city leaders of the 1920s liked to call it,

without a trace of irony, the “white spot”—where prophecy met history,

where a place inherited millennial destiny. The poetry was tortured, but the

gist is concise: “Dominion over land and sea of this enduring Race —

Supreme Historic Prophecy—is now in final consummation.”14 It was not hard to imagine a world in which all this came to pass. We should not be

surprised that such pronouncements could be made. We may cringe at such

racial and racist determinism, but we should not think of it as happenstance

or merely the wishful thinking of bigots. On the contrary, such visions are

but the expected product in a city constructed precisely around racial cate-

gories and racial exclusion. Los Angeles is not so much a city that got what

i n t r o d u c t i o n4

it wished for. It is a city that wished for what it worked diligently to invent.

And that inventing in part entailed what this book is about, the white-

washing of other stories, other cultures, and other people’s memories on the

landscape.

Yet now, in much popular discourse, associations between city, future,

and ethnicity have fundamentally changed. On one hand, the “Los Angeles

as End of the World” race war phantasmagoria has been and remains, as

Mike Davis reminds us in his book Ecology of Fear, an important histori-

cal and cultural expression of the city’s darkest visions.15 Will such charac-

terizations accelerate in the twenty-first century? But there exists another temporal thread that extols Los Angeles (often

in neo-booster breathlessness) as the one place in America, if not the world,

where the “multicultural future” exists now. Somehow—no one seems too

inclined to offer the social blueprint—Los Angeles will by sheer example pave the way for a rainbow coalition future. Now it must be that this

future works or will work precisely because that older futurist vision of

Anglo Saxon ascendancy never got fully realized, derailed by second

thoughts or by collisions with civil rights activism or the hard facts of

demographic change. The same kind of language that once described Los

Angeles as the best urban example of eugenic hygiene is now supposed to

conjure up images of multicultural harmony. The Los Angeles future now

is championed as diverse for, it seems, diversity’s sake. As the notion goes,

the region has been brought fast to its egalitarian ethnic senses by the hard

lessons of Rodney King, the spectacle of the O. J. trials, or complacent

acceptance that majority and minority populations will soon (at least by

census reckoning) change places.

Yet a future foretold is not a future come true. Optimistic forecasts about

ethnic and racial common ground, about a common future for the city of

destiny, evince worthy aims. But as a historian, I am obliged to suggest that

the city of the past deserves concentrated study before that leap to the city

of the future is possible. It is imperative to continue digging into the soil

of the Los Angeles past. What we find is a city that, even in its expressions of institutional and infrastructural growth, adhered to patterns of racial

privilege and ethnocentrism. Pronouncements about a multicultural future

that works may only be so many naive words and empty phrases. Or they

may be lies, deliberate ones at that. We should be suspicious of the elastic-

ity of language to defy the concrete reality of social problems. In other

words, it was not at all that long ago that similar language and optimism

promised a very different Los Angeles of the future. Los Angeles was once

5i n t r o d u c t i o n

to be the world’s urban beacon because racial supremacy worked here,

because Anglo Saxons in charge worked so diligently to maintain particu-

lar lines of racial and ethnic privilege. If latter-day suggestions of racial and

ethnic harmony in the future are to prove at all feasible, it seems to me

important that we better understand the former expressions of racial sin-

gularity and supremacist triumphalism. Wrestling with memory and history

in this way just might be socially therapeutic. It certainly is overdue.

This book is about the interplay between cultural authority and ethnic

stratification in Los Angeles from the 1850s until the coming of the Second World War. It is primarily concerned with how processes of urban matu-

ration reveal patterns of ethnic relations. In particular, Whitewashed Adobe

focuses upon ideas and behavior of whites toward Mexicans. To narrow the

focus even more, the following chapters concentrate especially on those

whites with social, political, economic, and cultural power at their disposal.

It is the web of their actions and perceptions that concern me most in this

book. An earlier generation of scholars called them “city builders,” and that

description fits here as well. At the heart of Whitewashed Adobe are two assumptions. This book’s

scholarly objective is to make a convincing argument that Los Angeles

came of age amidst (and in part because of ) specific responses to Mexican ethnicity and Mexican spaces. This “ethnic stance,” one of the American

Southwest’s most important and troubling cultural markers, often at-

tempted to isolate Mexicans in time and space. Understanding Los Angeles

requires grappling with the complex and disturbing relationship between

whites, especially those able to command various forms of power, and

Mexican people, a Mexican past, and a Mexican landscape. The broader

point at the core of Whitewashed Adobe is that coming to terms with these

historical patterns—and thence, we can hope, deviating from them—is

critical to the forging of a city true to a different Southern California future. Modern Los Angeles is an urban phenomenon unlike any other in the

history of the United States. It has prompted numerous scholarly investi-

gations of its rise to metropolitan prominence. The city and region have

also generated numerous historical analyses of the resident population of

Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Both scholarly patterns are of great

importance. The city’s booming rise out of the 1880s, roaring on through

the 1920s, is a historical marvel. And there can be little doubt that the

region’s complex and very often troubling history of ethnic relations, of

which the history of Mexicans and Mexican Americans is of course a major

part, makes up an important urban chapter in the story of race relations in

i n t r o d u c t i o n6

America. My discussion starts from an assumption that these two themes

might analytically be joined or at least examined side by side. The chapters

analyze the growth of Los Angeles through prisms of ethnic relations, eth-

nic contact and conflict, and ethnic representations. Whitewashed Adobe is an exploration of the deep implications of what prominent Angeleno

Joseph P. Widney meant when he wrote that “the Captains of Industry are

the truest captains in the race war.”16

How did Los Angeles grow? Better yet, how did Los Angeles mature?

How did it reach a level of urban self-consciousness, and what are some of

the forms that urban identity took? Whitewashed Adobe examines the mat-

uration of Los Angeles by paying attention to ideas about race and ethnic-

ity, to ideas whites, particularly elite, city-building whites, held about

Mexicans. Its pages also explore the ways in which Los Angeles, once part

of Mexico itself, came of age through appropriating, absorbing, and occa-

sionally obliterating the region’s connections to Mexican places and

Mexican people. Six chapters investigate these processes from 1850 through

the Great Depression. At the dawn of California statehood, Los Angeles yet

seethed with the racial enmity characteristic of the recent war with Mexico.

Within a generation, Los Angeles business interests, looking for a com-

mercially viable way to establish urban identity, hit upon a way to borrow

Mexican cultural tradition in a brilliant public relations maneuver, an

urban carnival called La Fiesta de Los Angeles. Faced with environmental

catastrophe in the shape of an unreliable and occasionally unyielding Los

Angeles River, early twentieth-century city leaders found themselves forced

into a brief history lesson that demanded they listen to the Mexican voices

in the Los Angeles landscape, if but for an instant, if but for memory’s sake

alone. What Los Angeles of the 1910s and 1920s had rather do with the res-

ident Mexican population, as we especially see in chapter 4, was put them

to work on the job of literally fashioning modern Los Angeles by shaping

millions upon millions of clay bricks. When the resident population of

Mexican laborers became unruly, as a very few did by crossing paths with

a deadly disease vector in the 1920s, the city of Los Angeles responded with

a ferocious campaign that obliterated Mexican homes and neighborhoods.

But restraining the region’s ethnic history and ethnic peoples could be

done in ways more subtle than fire and destruction, as we will see in the final chapter.

Los Angeles matured, at least in part, by covering up places, people, and

histories that those in power found unsettling. Los Angeles became a self-

conscious “City of the Future” by whitewashing an adobe past, even an

7i n t r o d u c t i o n

adobe present and adobe future. That whitewashing was imperfectly, even

crudely, accomplished—adobe yet showed through—but it was nonetheless

a way by which white Angelenos created distance (cultural or personal)

between themselves and the Mexican past and the Mexican people in their

midst.

Thanks to the pioneering efforts of a collection of talented scholars, we know a great deal about the Mexican and Mexican American history of Los

Angeles. In the early twentieth century, sociologist Emory Bogardus and

economist Rockwell Hunt of the University of Southern California sent

dozens of graduate students into the field, and by so doing, into Mexican Los Angeles. These young scholars returned with studies rich in social

detail, detail still relevant these many decades later.17 Soon thereafter,

anthropologist Manuel Gamio and his assistants collected ethnographies

and oral histories of ethnic Mexicans in the region.18 Then came the his-

torical morality tales of the great Carey McWilliams. Later, the burst of

intellectual and political energy erupting from the civil rights movement

and infant Chicano studies programs in the 1960s and 1970s produced

insightful analyses of the social and political history of Mexicans and Mexi-

can Americans in Southern California.19 In recent years, scholarly investi-

gations of the ethnic history of Southern California (as well as the entire

Southwest) have grown increasingly sophisticated. We have a baseline

understanding of ethnic community and cultural development, to which

has been added a more complicated story of intra-community and inter-

generational fissures, conflicts, and divergence.20

Such scholarship, to which this book is deeply indebted, is rich and

important. It confirms Los Angeles as a site from which to gauge national attitudes and behavioral response to both Mexicans and Mexico. After all,

Los Angeles was once part of the Republic of Mexico: the abrupt transitions

of the 1840s and 1850s offer case-study insights into national opinion. What is more, Anglo Americans in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Los

Angeles exhibited the common tendency to use Mexico and Mexicans as

interchangeable identifiers and metaphors. Lastly, Los Angeles encoun- tered, again during the period from just prior to California statehood for-

ward into the new century, those various geographic and demographic

imperatives that forced the city to address what white Angelenos stub-

bornly persisted in describing as “the Mexican problem.”

Whitewashed Adobe has a slightly different purpose and a different his- torical angle to pursue than most of these other studies. It is a book less

i n t r o d u c t i o n8

about the resident Mexican population than about white (or, as this book

generally refers to the class, Anglo) perceptions of and behavior toward the

ethnic Mexican population of Los Angeles. A model for this study is found

in the work of the historian Alexander Saxton. As Saxton described it, his

classic 1971 monograph The Indispensable Enemy examined “the Chinese

confrontation on the Pacific Coast, as it was experienced and rationalized by the white majority.”21 This book proceeds from a similar vantage, exam-

ining contact between white Los Angeles, especially elite white Los Angeles,

and the resident Mexican population, even the Mexican landscape, over the

course of several critical generations. These perceptions, attitudes, and

behaviors are themselves woven in important ways into the very fabric of

the modern city of Los Angeles.

Along with a grateful nod to Saxton, this perspective owes a heavy debt

to the writings of the journalist, lawyer, and historian Carey McWilliams,

a scholar whose work seems to grow in importance with each passing year.

In his many books, McWilliams presaged much of modern western

American and California history. The single theme of McWilliams’s mul-

tifaceted work that most informs this book is his analysis of changing eth-

nic representations in the transition from Los Angeles village to Los Angeles

metropolis.

A full half-century has passed since McWilliams wrote about Southern

California’s preoccupation with what he termed the Spanish Fantasy Past

and the ways that preoccupation fostered ethnic assumptions and pre-

sumptions.22 I’d like to think that this book takes up where McWilliams left

off in describing and explaining the role of institutional racial prejudice in the maturation of metropolitan Los Angeles.

Like McWilliams, especially in his classic Southern California Country, I

am convinced that narratives about Mexico and Mexicans are integral to the

city’s cultural and economic rise during the period between the Mexican

American War and World War II. Woven into a particular Los Angeles

identity, these narratives can reveal an urban and institutional anatomy of

prejudice. Through an exploration of the roots and ramifications of ethnic bordering—the construction of cultural categories in which ethnic others

get placed—a great deal can be learned about the history of this city. Lest

that sound too academic, let me suggest that one cannot miss these con-

tainers on the historical landscape of Los Angeles. They are everywhere, and

Los Angeles grew up around them. These categories might take shape as

labor segmentation, as with the prevailing tendency to view Mexicans as the

region’s ever-present supply of unskilled (always unskilled) labor. They

9i n t r o d u c t i o n

might be the residential restrictions expressed at the boundaries of a

Mexican neighborhood. They might be the containers of school or religious

segregation. They might also be the bonds of memory or history, as in the

ways in which Los Angeles enshrined particular visions of the Spanish, as

opposed to the Mexican, past. If the city of the future is to work, we must

look more closely at how these categories and containers were built, who

built them, and how they got filled. Then we have to take them apart. By this approach, I do not mean to suggest that ethnic Mexican resist-

ance to such practices, however expressed, was not present and sometimes

effective on the historical landscape of Los Angeles, ca. 1850–1940. At the same time, I do not wish to underestimate or deemphasize the power of the

dominant society to limit and proscribe forms of class or ethnic resistance

to discriminatory representations or behaviors. The following chapters

concentrate almost exclusively on that latter phenomenon.23

Nor is my contention in these pages that powerful Anglos in Los Angeles

rendered Mexicans invisible by insisting that they inhabit these particular

cultural or other containers. It is the opposite view: borders created from

discriminatory wage systems, from public memory, and from political

exclusion all had to do with rendering Mexicans expressly visible, lest they

disappear into the polity, into the neighborhoods, into the city of the

future. Put simply, one important feature of the “Los Angeles future,” at

least as old as the city’s American rebirth in the middle of the nineteenth

century, has long been about race and keeping race in check. That is a com-

mon feature throughout the grim history of racial exclusion, discrimina-

tion, and segregation in American history, and the history of Los Angeles

proves no different. In pursuing this line of inquiry, we turn first to the 1850s and the bloody

aftermath of the United States war against the Republic of Mexico. It was

a little war, a war supposedly over only two years after it started. My pur-

pose in chapter 1 is to examine the ways in which an Anglo and newly

American Los Angeles grew amidst the brutal violence of Mexican-hating,

and in consequence furthered a fateful trajectory into the city of the future.

i n t r o d u c t i o n1 0

O n e

The Unending Mexican War

The Mexican race now see, in the fate of the aborigines of the north, their own inevitable destiny.They must amalgamate and be lost, in the superior vigor of the Anglo-Saxon race, or they must utterly perish.They may postpone the hour for a time, but it will come, when their nationality shall cease.

Democratic Review, February 18471

We accuse Californians and Sonorenos of being enemies to us—they are so in fact and in detail. And what wrongs are theirs? Where are their lands, their cattle and horses, and their money? Gone! They are nearly all paupers. And the mercenary avarice of American gamblers has made them such.

W i l l i a m Wa l l a c e , diary entry, 1857

The cut-throats of California and Mexico, naturally met at Los Angeles, and at Los Angeles they fought.

H o r a c e B e l l 2

Ugly reflexive characterizations about Mexicans are deeply rooted in the California past. The expressions of 1820s and 1830s American visitors such

as the sailor Richard Henry Dana anticipate the racial and ethnic pre-

sumptions of later generations. Once imperial designs upon Mexico had

been put into motion (exactly what Dana meant by his California com-

mentary, “In the hands of an enterprising people, what a country this

might be!”), it became an act of patriotism to refer to Mexicans in explic-

1 1

itly racist terms.3 The 1846–1848 war against the Republic of Mexico—a

nasty, brutal affair—drove home Manifest Destiny’s darkest assumption that racial and national supremacy went hand in glove.

Scholars have disagreed about the chicken and egg quality to such a per-

spective: was racial hatred followed by expansionist determinism or vice

versa? Tensions within this binary could seem subtle given the euphemistic

language of Manifest Destiny rising in the early-to-mid-1840s. Softened by

references to God’s hand in all this, expansionist aggression could be

painted in phrasings of divinity, glory, and the inevitability of Christian

(read Protestant) triumph. But any blessed sweetness fell away as the proj-

ect was rendered stark and grim by warfare and the lusty “All Mexico” cries

of antebellum expansionists. “The truth is,” declared one U.S. senator in

1847, “the Mexicans are a rascally, perfidious race.”4

Taken as mere fact, such perceptions of a nation, a place, and a people

had obvious ramifications in the far West. California, after all, was dragged to the brink of statehood by Manifest Destiny’s crude racial determinism.

First came the quixotic Bear Flag Rebellion against Mexican California by

John C. Frémont and confreres, followed by outright warfare between the

United States and the Republic of Mexico. But surrenders and treaties

hardly put a stop to the violence of racial enmity—not General Robert

Stockton’s capture of Los Angeles in early 1847 nor the 1848 signing of the

treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

For one thing, territorial aggrandizement continued, not limited to the

1853 Gadsden Purchase, with its addition of 29,000,000 acres to what

would become lower Arizona and New Mexico. Not long after peace, the

adventurer and land pirate William Walker rehearsed his later invasion of

Nicaragua with paramilitary campaigns in Baja California and Sonora.

Walker was hardly alone. The Mexican Republic faced invasion by land and

sea numerous times after 1848, and these expeditions often began in

California and continued, oddly enough, well into the latter part of the cen-

tury. As historian Robert May has written, “the racialist strains of Manifest

Destiny survived the peace with Mexico and helped inspire post-war

filibustering.” Californian Horace Bell, a follower of Walker in Nicaragua, fondly recalled the postwar era: “What wild schemes, what adventurous

plans were concocted overnight in those early years of the Golden State!”5

What happens to our understanding of California or Los Angeles history

if we suggest that, diplomatic or treaty assurances to the contrary, the

Mexican War did not end in 1848? “Poor Mexico!” an Angeleno confessed

in his diary between filibustering raids in the mid-1850s. “It is supposed that

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 2

she will now be permitted to breathe freely several times, before the next

heel is placed upon her neck.”6

It had all seemed so direct and simple, California moving step by step

toward its rightful American future. “The war between our government and

Mexico, in a short time after, ceased to exist,” the California chronicler

Benjamin Truman wrote. “California became a Territory of the United

States, and, legally, Los Angeles was no longer a Mexican pueblo, but a

‘burg’ of the great Yankee nation.”7 But as early Los Angeles historian

James Miller Guinn wrote in 1901, in a phrase succinct and on target, the

“process of Americanizing the people was no easy undertaking.” Laid atop

the Mexican War and its violent, racist exuberance were the postwar bru-

talities of the Gold Rush, the beatings, the criminalization, and the lynch-

ings of resident Mexicans, most of whom had, at least by treaty, become

Americans. “To shoot these Greasers ain’t the best way,” declared one

California vigilante in the Gold Rush period. “Give ’em a fair trial, and rope

’em up with all the majesty of the law. That’s the cure.”8

What’s more, the none-too-subtle extortions imposed by the “foreign

miner’s tax” stood as frontier-era precursors of more recent California pub-

lic referenda aimed at ethnic others. Such legal expressions of racial malice

make the ever-widening ripples of ugly discriminatory ideas and behavior

even easier to spot and track on the historical landscape. They also suggest

a posture that the Mexican American War had made all too obvious to

whites in California. Mexicans and Mexico were to be approached with

arms and martial readiness. “This southern California is still unsettled,”

wrote field scientist William H. Brewer in 1860. “We all continually wear arms—each wears both bowie knife and pistol (navy revolver), while we

always have for game or otherwise, a Sharp’s rifle, Sharp’s carbine, and two double-barrel shotguns,” hardly the paraphernalia of peacetime. Did the

Mexican War end?9

Horace Bell, soldier of fortune, rancher, journalist, and memoirist all

rolled into one, remembered 1850s Los Angeles as an immensely violent

place. First came vigilante action aimed at the sons of prominent rancher

José del Carmen Lugo (the vigilantes came up on the short end of that

deal). Then in 1851, with the lynching of a Mexican man named Zavalete,

again the “Los Angeles mob raised its horrid head.” Things only worsened

with time, as Bell notes with irony unchecked.

Such was the plane of civilization to which our people had attained in

the early period of the city’s American history. . . . American rule had

1 3t h e u n e n d i n g m e x i c a n w a r

certainly demonstrated to the benighted sons of Mexico the superiority

of our civilization. We had evolved a very simple rule for the classification of the population. A man was either a manhunter, or he was one of the

hunted. That is, if he amounted to anything at all. If in neither classifica- tion, then he was a mere nonentity. The decent minority—for there was

such a group of nonentities—wondered when and where it would all end.

It was barbarism gone to seed.10

By the middle of the decade, tensions between “Americans” and Mexi-

cans threatened to explode. Judge Benjamin Hayes, whose Los Angeles

diaries offer an especially illuminating glimpse into the years he called “a transition state to better order and more perfect security,” felt the pressures

of his times and judicial duties. In sentencing a Mexican man to death for

murder, Hayes made certain to have his remarks translated into Spanish,

read aloud, and then published. This was not for the condemned, he ar-

gued, so much as for “his young countrymen, who are betraying too many

signs of hostility to Americanos.” Yet wasn’t such hostility justified, given the legal system’s propensity for racial profiling, ca. 1850? After all, as an atten- tive journalist of the period noted, “punishment seems to be graduated by

the color of the skin, and not the color of the crime.”11

Itinerant schoolteacher and newspaperman William Wallace traveled

three times from New England to Southern California in the 1850s. His

journal, kept with meticulous care in small leather-bound books, is a

barometer of the social and ethnic tensions of the period. Looking out

across the expanse of the Los Angeles basin in the early spring of 1855,

Wallace could barely contain his excitement at being back in the West. His

entries foreshadow the later effervescence of Los Angeles boosters. “I love the country, the climate is incomparable, the scenery is grand, the plains are

beautiful, the flowers are everywhere.” Yet natural beauty could not fully mask the difficulties and the violence, “the dangers, the vices, the self- sacrifices, the cold-blooded crimes through which the pioneers have guided this unformed and malformed community.”12

Wallace felt the social hangover brought about by the recklessness of

American occupation, warfare, and statehood. “We are now like fast boys

upon their travels, and our imprudences have brought us into trouble,” he

mused. Rapid change marked everything. “The California of ten years ago

is not the California of to-day,” he noted. “The old country, with all its sim-

ple manners and customs, [has] all departed; everything has become new,

and is as yet unformed.” Riding out from the village center to teach school

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 4

near the San Gabriel Mission, Wallace encountered Gabrielino Indians

trying to maintain some semblance of their former lives and folkways. But

the racial future of Los Angeles would not likely tolerate such appeals to tra-

dition, he figured. “Fashion and folly are working their way in here—and by and by all these Indians will be shaped like white folks.”13

William Wallace feared the power of these mysterious social and racial

forces which could recast ethnicity, just as he admitted that he was afraid

of Divine Retribution revealed in the earthquakes that occasionally threw

him to the ground. He believed that the vengeance of God would offer rebuttal to the blood sports of 1850s ethnic conflict. All the signs pointed in that direction. Social niceties, which had seemed so much a part of

everyday life, now went unperformed and unsaid. Many of the genteel

Californios, those Latino rancho elites grappling with seismic marketplace

changes and quickening political obsolescence, displayed unusual, though

largely unspoken, hostility toward Americans. It was rumored that they

washed their hands after touching American money, “to wipe away the stain

from them before they are laid away.” “The curses upon the Americans are

deep and bitter,” Wallace noted, and “there is little sympathy between the

races.”14

In the summer of 1856, a Los Angeles deputy marshal named William

Jenkins killed unarmed Antonio Ruiz over “a petty two dollars.” In the

ensuing turmoil, William Wallace expected civil war to erupt as the com-

panion to natural disaster, a full-blown resumption of the Mexican Ameri-

can War. The incident provoked thoughts on Wallace’s part of the propen-

sity of Anglos to cast Mexicans as enemies and to use such categorizations

to justify the wrenching transitions of the era. “We accuse Californians and

Sonorenos of being enemies to us—they are so in fact and in detail. And

what wrongs are theirs? Where are their lands, their cattle and horses, and

their money? Gone! They are nearly all paupers. And the mercenary avarice

of American gamblers has made them such.”15

Wallace no doubt agreed with contemporaries who described Los Angeles

in the first years of California statehood as wracked by race war.16 The place also witnessed a curious conflict over names—wherein disputes over nam- ing reveal deeper antagonisms. What had been the Mexican American War

only a few years earlier became a war against Mexican Americans. The treaty

that ended the U.S.-Mexico War had been explicit about the citizenship

consequences of peace. Mexicans who stayed would become Americans.17

But diplomatic assurances have rarely meant less on the ground. As the his-

torian David Gutiérrez has noted, Guadalupe Hildago “could do little to

1 5t h e u n e n d i n g m e x i c a n w a r

transform the biased views of Mexicans that Americans continued to enter-

tain.” In some ways, enmity only increased, as “Americans” and “Mexicans”

still existed worlds apart, treaty or no treaty.18 Fig.1abouthere

Despite de jure citizenship status, Mexicans could not exercise the fran-

chise with anything close to the same ease as lighter-skinned Angelenos. On

the contrary, the poorest among the Indians and Mexicans of the village

might get literally corralled and violently coerced into casting bought votes,

as Wallace’s diary for 1857 detailed. “All shades of dark colors (the ‘piebald

classes’) were there, half breeds, Indians, Soñorenses. . . . They were plied

with bad whiskey, and when they became riotous were knocked on the

head.” Such civic obscenities further emphasized a paradox. Mexicans were

not Americans, even though they were.19 Mexicans, as Figure 1 suggests, did

not even live in Los Angeles. Mexicans still lived in Mexico, in Sonora or

Sonoratown, in “homes for the defeated.” Both logic and geography argue

that 1850s Sonoratown, north of the plaza, not far from the banks of the Los

Angeles River, was in fact in Los Angeles, in California, in the United

States. But logic and social reality do not of course always operate in tan-

dem. Sonora and Sonoratown were Mexico in the popular perceptions of

many an Anglo Angeleno, a Mexico gradually becoming surrounded by an

Americanizing Los Angeles (which, as the dominant spatial and political

category, did not need a corresponding “Anglo town” reference).20

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 6

Figure 1. Sonoratown, the “Spanish part” of Los Angeles, ca. 1870s. Courtesy of

the California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento.

Words again. Weren’t the 1850s all about exchanging one Californian, the

elite Mexican, for another, the Anglo?21 Who would become the Californians

of the new state? Californian, Californio: these had had specific contextual meanings. They had once been direct references to the region’s Latin popu-

lation in the vernacular of the pre-American period and just afterwards (the

references were even class coded, the latter being the elite designation). By

decade’s end, the sad conclusion could be offered: Californios “have passed away like our foggy mornings. There is nothing to show for their exis-

tence.” William Wallace’s diary entry might have been premature: Californios

would continue to exercise some authority, mostly social, in Southern

California for another generation. But his instincts were right; the transition

had begun and little could stop it.22 Within a few short decades, drought,

legal entanglements, intermarriage, the imposition of a new political econ-

omy, outright thievery, and the removal of Californios from positions of

political power had turned the world upside down. California, the spoils in

both place and name, belonged now to the victors. Nor could these former

elites play much of a role or profit by the nostalgic renderings of the California past (which, ironically, placed them at the center of much of the

romance). “Contained by Anglo newcomers and cut off from a reservoir of native folk traditions,” the historian Charles Montgomery has observed, the

Californio gentry “was forced largely to cede California’s Spanish revival to

the imagination of Anglo promoters.” “Perhaps never since Adam fell from

Eden,” wrote a sympathetic visitor to nineteenth-century California “has

there been a sadder realization of Paradise Lost than is afforded by these native Californians.”23

Not long after William Jenkins killed Antonio Ruiz, friends of the mur-

dered man gathered at his fresh grave. The Los Angeles Star called them

“among the lowest and most abandoned Sonorians and Mexicans.” When

they filled the streets, threatening violence against the Americans in the vil- lage, William Wallace must have thought his fears of civil unrest prophetic.

Nor was he alone in such trepidation. Judge Benjamin Hayes, the same

man who had recently ordered a hanging as a public deterrent to ethnic vio-

lence (despite the fact that his act was precisely that which he hoped to cur-

tail), fairly quaked with fear. “It must be admitted that about midnight a

deep apprehension of disastrous consequences did settle upon the minds of

the people,” he wrote.24 Trouble broke out. A melee, a horse shot and

killed, Marshal William Getman wounded. Rumors flew: three hundred or more armed Mexicans had gathered to lay siege to the town. Whites mobi-

1 7t h e u n e n d i n g m e x i c a n w a r

lized. Ozro Childs, a local tinsmith, volunteered to ride east about ten miles

to El Monte, local capital of anti-Mexican word and deed, for help from the

El Monte boys, ruffians always spoiling for a fight.25

With the arrival of several dozen heavily armed El Monte reinforce-

ments, white Angelenos quickly organized a Committee of Safety. William

Wallace lamented what he saw as the final breakdown of a society pinned between the retributions of nature and the havoc of racial enmity. “It

would seem as if heaven and hell were in league against us. The drought is

increasing on the plains and by the roads we are almost cut off from the world except by water or across almost impassable deserts. But the worst

feature of all is the moral depravity and the propensity to fight which increases among all classes. . . . the rifle and revolver are our trust.”26

“Blood flows in the streets—justice weeps,” Wallace wrote in his neat hand. “All is anarchy.” Matters got even worse. In the early months of 1857,

Wallace penned eyewitness accounts of two critical moments in village

history, powerful symbols of the period’s ethnic turmoil and violence. In

late January, the steamer Sea Bird, anchored off the coast at San Pedro, dropped off one hundred men under the command of one Henry A. Crabb. Crabb arrived in Los Angeles by way of Northern California and a

recent failure to win a seat in the U.S. Senate (he had been in the California

statehouse representing the San Joaquin Valley). “Colonel” Crabb’s band of

men included what were likely underemployed and unlucky gold miners

from the northern mines, as well as a smattering of former members of the

California legislature. They came to Los Angeles with a plan as ambitious

as it was misguided, having something to do with recently vanquished

Mexico.

“What do these men want in Sonora?” Wallace asked himself. Soon all

became clear. Crabb aimed to take a big chunk of what remained of north-

ern Mexico after the territorial surgery performed by the Treaty of

Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase. The men of the little army

wished, as did many of their filibustering contemporaries, to then turn their prize into a slave-holding region. Crabb had tried, impotently, the same

thing a year or so earlier. Now he and his band meant business.27

Crabb and his soldiers (the harmlessly euphemistic “Arizona Coloniza-

tion Society”), rumored to be just the advance team of a force twelve to six-

teen hundred strong, simply refused to believe that the Mexican American

War had ended nearly ten years earlier. Chronology’s truths meant nothing

against adventuring promise. Heeding Manifest Destiny’s earlier “All

Mexico” rallying cry, they went about stockpiling weapons, wagons, and

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 8

supplies in Los Angeles and the nearby hamlet of El Monte. There they

were delayed for several weeks, tending to the wounds of one of their own

who had been shot by his comrades aboard the steamer coming south

from the Bay Area. Hindsight suggests this as an apt omen of things to

come for Crabb and company.

Local men itching for glory, or those with nothing to lose, signed up for

the fateful journey, joining one of the various infantry “companies” (A, B,

C, etc.) or the “artillery.” Confidence ran high. Judge Hayes noted that one of the filibusters had neglected to inform his wife back in Kentucky what he was up to; he preferred that she know of his plans after Crabb and his

followers had attained glory in Mexico. The judge was less sanguine. “I

knew more of Sonora and Sonoranians then he did,” he later wrote.28

“They gained no sympathy here,” declared William Wallace, adding that

“the community felt relieved at their departure.” An official comment from the United States government offered the succinct assessment that the “expeditionists have certainly chosen an unfortunate time for their move-

ments as regards the interests of the United States in their relations with

Mexico.” Once encumbered with weapons and supplies, most of the

would-be heroes inexplicably refused to purchase horses or mules, appar-

ently preferring the more spectacularly martial, not to mention exhausting,

alternative of marching to Mexico all the way from Los Angeles. Once

there, Crabb and his “pedestrian crowd” expected, as Wallace delicately

phrased it, “to arrange the internal dissensions of the people,” albeit “at the

sword’s point.” Again, hindsight suggests this as dangerously wishful if not

downright stupid. Wallace hinted as much in his descriptions of the civil-

ian army. “Though gentlemanly in their manners, they did not appear like

men accustomed to Hardship.” Time would prove that assessment

prophetic. For now, though, Wallace surmised that the “fact that they find it unprofitable to remain longer in California is pretty good evidence that our social condition must be improving; although at our neighbor’s

expense.”29

But William Wallace was wrong. Even Crabb-less, the Los Angeles social

condition showed little sign of improvement. The local ramifications of heightened ethnic tension revealed themselves in newspaper headlines only

a day after Crabb’s departure. The bodies of Los Angeles County sheriff James R. Barton and several of his constables had turned up south of Los

Angeles near Mission San Juan Capistrano. Barton and his men had been

murdered by a roving band of outlaws under the leadership of Juan Flores,

a recent escapee from San Quentin. Despite the shock, Wallace thought

1 9t h e u n e n d i n g m e x i c a n w a r

that the murders, said to be done from ambush, might just be the tonic

Anglo Los Angeles needed in order to spring to life and claim the region

once and for all. “It is fortunate that Barton and confreres were killed—it

needed as great a calamity to move the selfish Anglo blood, that is here only greedy for money.”30Map1abouthere

“Will the people rise in their might, and sweep the villains and murder-

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 0

Map 1. Southern California, ca. 1850.

ers from the face of the earth?” asked the Los Angeles Star. “Or will the pres-

ent deep feeling be allowed to exhaust itself in idle complainings? Time will

tell.” Authorities trundled the coffins containing the bodies of the martyred lawmen back toward Los Angeles. A large crowd met the cortege at the

banks of the Los Angeles River. The blood of the victims, the Star mourned,

“cries from the ground for vengeance.”31 No surprise: violence begat vio-

lence. At the San Gabriel Mission (as much a regional central place in this

era as the plaza in Los Angeles), four men, supposedly members of the

Flores band, soon faced a hanging judge. At a hastily arranged hearing, the

judge asked those present if they believed the men in custody should be

hanged. Hands shot up all round, including that of the judge himself.

Justice will be done. But the grim affair was quickly botched. As one exe- cution went forward, the hangman’s rope broke, whereupon the judge

himself attempted to shoot the man who tumbled to the ground. The gun

misfired, prisoner seized both judge and gun, fired a harmless shot, and was shot dead by the phalanx of well-armed bystanders.

Then another rumor. Local Indians in league with the Mexican popula-

tion had mounted a violent conspiracy against the whites of the basin.

“Lock the doors and bolt the windows,” warned one frightened man, firm in the belief that the bandit Flores and company “were on their way to Los

Angeles, to murder the white people.”32 The darker races supposedly had a

plan of violence, rape, and destruction. Horace Bell had no doubts about

the ambitions of Flores; he believed the Mexican War to have flared anew. Flores would “go to Los Angeles, raise the standard of revolt and rid the

country of the hated gringos.”33

Dusk brought dire predictions of impending doom. “All the [white]

women and children at dark were seen rushing into central houses,” William

Wallace wrote. Four paramilitary companies, themselves ethnically delin-

eated, formed to defend Los Angeles whiteness: the Dutch (the Dutch!), the

British, the Irish, and the French. They spent time cleaning, loading, and

firing their weapons. “There were very few calm men,” Wallace noted. “Some cursed their guns. . . . others wanted guns. Some blustered and

cursed the Californians.” Word went quickly to Fort Tejon in the mountains

to the north: send soldiers.

The four companies of white sentinels, after leaving behind a detachment

to guard women and children in the center of town (twelve men hurriedly

answered the request for six guards), marched in formation to the Mont-

gomery Hotel, “where we expected to be sent directly against the enemy.”

Nothing happened. Los Angeles remained quiet under a bright moon.

2 1t h e u n e n d i n g m e x i c a n w a r

Within a day, the men, sagging under the weight of their pistols, rifles, mus- kets, and knives, organized themselves into a military cordon. Some now

feared that the little town would be attacked by an armed force of as many

as six hundred Mexicans bent on retribution. With pickets stationed thirty

paces apart, they surrounded the entire upper (white) portion of Los

Angeles. The standoff, Wallace noted, was ethnically explicit, between “the Americans” and “the Californians.”

In eerie foreshadowing of the notorious Zoot Suit affair during the Second World War, house-to-house searches in the lower part of the city

and down at the Los Angeles River revealed hiding Mexican men and

boys who, some forty in number, were detained, jailed, and then visited by

frightened and tearful Mexican women. “There is much anxiety among the

Californians,” Wallace noted. “What a joyous time we will have hanging

the rascals!” With the arrival of Fort Tejon’s United States troops, the “thirst

for blood” only increased. “If human sacrifices can give rest to the unquiet souls of the dead, they will soon be at ease, for a hecatomb of victims are

in readiness,” Wallace somberly predicted.34

White leaders convinced Californio Andres Pico to chase down those

“ruffians” left in the countryside, because “it was believed by many that . . . the face of a Californian was the only one that could operate.” Armed

improbably with lances, Pico’s men went out into the hills, determined to

demonstrate to Anglos that a difference between “Californians” and “Mexicans” yet existed. Pico, at the head of this “show of California force,”

did his work well, with, according to Wallace, biblical efficiency. “He came upon them in their fastnesses, and slaughtered them and captured them in

detail.” Pico killed some of his prisoners and chopped off their ears as tro- phies. Others lived and told of the ambush of Barton. The sheriff had been shot from his horse, they said; he had fallen into a sitting position and con-

tinued to fire his weapon. Juan Flores had yelled out, using both Spanish and English, “We have got you now. . . . God damn you.” Barton fired his pistols and a shotgun until his ammunition was exhausted. He threw the

empty pistols at his attackers and returned the insult, “Now kill me God

damn you.” They did.

With the capture of Flores, who was marched to the city jail tied hand

and foot, a rope around his neck, calls for retribution only increased.

“Americans are not amenable to the people,” Wallace wrote, while admit-

ting that “there are as many villains among them as the others.” Vigilante

posses fanned out across the Los Angeles basin and north toward Santa

Barbara, and “a broad distinction is made between Californians and Ameri-

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 2

cans.” Posses hanged captured men from whatever height convenience

offered. Others were beheaded. Estimates of the body count ranged to well over a hundred. Vigilante Louis Mesmer claimed that seventeen men

were hanged in seventeen days. A rumor swirled about that the El Monte

boys had been seen bowling with the head of a murdered Mexican.35

With the aid of the curate at Mission San Buanaventura, one of the cap-

tured signed a confession before he and ten others were executed for the

Barton murders. Teenager Jose Jesus Espinosa, “fully convinced that after

a few hours I shall have ceased to exist, and shall appear before the presence

of God,” stated that, the rumors notwithstanding, there were only a hand-

ful of “thieves and murderers” loose in the region. From Espinosa’s confes-

sion, it was unclear if the band of men so described even took part in the

murder of Barton and his deputies.

The martyred sheriff took it upon himself to clear up some of the con- fusion. Wallace, a devoted table-rapping spiritualist, noted in his journal

that “we have had several spiritual meetings at which Barton appeared and

related his inward life.” It had taken the sheriff about six hours to realize that he was indeed dead and had “passed into the world of shadows.” “His

condition is much better than when here, but his feelings of revenge are so

powerful that he regrets death. He is strongly excited because he was killed

by such worthless outlaws. . . . Barton, like all spirits, advises decent men

to leave this country.”36 The Los Angeles future looked grim to both the

quick and the dead.

On Valentine’s Day, 1857, a triangle rung in the downtown plaza sum-

moned people from Los Angeles and its hinterlands to the trial of Juan

Flores. Officials read aloud the charges against him in three languages (pre- sumably English, Spanish, and French), and the presiding judge, dispens-

ing with legal niceties, declared that the will of the majority would prevail.

The vote was for hanging. “This, I think, was one of the most magnificent spectacles ever witnessed by man,” Wallace wrote. “The whole people, of

all colors, rose up together as one man, and shouted: ‘Let him be hung.’ ”

The crowd marched to the city jail, seized Flores (who had been “expect-

ing this visit”), and hanged him “like a dog” on gallows overlooking the vil-

lage.37 The hangman did his job poorly. Flores struggled with the rope, had

his arms restrained, and strangled to death.

Meantime, Henry Crabb and his filibustering associates (the Star called them, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, the “Gadsden Purchase settlers”) success-

fully navigated the desert, made it to Fort Yuma, and punched into Mexico.

They soon found themselves in deep trouble. The trip across the desert had

2 3t h e u n e n d i n g m e x i c a n w a r

been harsh and taxing. Of course, Crabb brought the travails upon himself.

In a letter to a Mexican official, he wrote disingenuously (and perhaps a bit nervously?) of his surprise at the hostile reception he had received from the

Mexican people. He came in peace, he said, “with the intention of finding most happy firesides with you . . . with the intention of offending no one.” Crabb shrugged off concerns about the weapons that weighed heavy on the arms and shoulders of him and his men. “You know that it is not common

for Americans, or any other civilized people, to go unarmed.” Indians were

about, Crabb wrote, so his men were naturally well armed. “I learn with

surprise that you are adopting measures of indignation, and are collecting

a force to exterminate me and my companions.”38

That was true. Mexican authorities moved rapidly to repulse the Crabb

invasion, drumming up support from the local citizenry by recalling the

recent state of war between the United States and Mexico. “Let us fly, then, to chastise, with all the fury which can scarcely be restrained in hearts

full of hatred of oppression, the savage filibuster who has dared, in an evil hour, to tread on the national territory, and to provoke—madman!—our

anger. No pity, no generous sentiments for that rabble!”39

American consular officials in Mexico City had gotten wind of the incur- sion, and predictions regarding the fate of Crabb and the adventuring

Americans were dire. John Forsyth of the United States delegation assumed

that in “the natural course of the conflict between the invaders and the Mexican troops, some of our misguided countrymen will fall into the

hands of the latter, and will, doubtless, be summarily dealt with.” He was

right. The “Arizona Colonization Society” got pinned down by a force of

Mexican soldiers and citizens at Caborca who sang out “long live Mexico!”

and “death to the filibusters!” Mexican authorities had insisted to the Mexican military that they, in the words of one official, “punish the audac- ity of those pirates who think to outrage with impunity the honor of the

Mexican republic by taking possession of one part of it like bandits. . . .

they will pay dearly for their rash enterprises.”40

Crabb remained ever defiant. “If blood is to flow, with all its horrors,” he wrote to Mexican official José Maria Redondo, “on your head be it, and not on mine. . . . I shall go where I have long intended to go, and I am only

waiting for my emigrants. I am the principal head, and I intend to act

according to the dictates of natural law and self-preservation.” Events

would soon prove Crabb’s unfortunate choice of leadership metaphors—

casting himself as principal head—particularly ironic.

Soon surrounded, cut off from their supplies, and with many wounded,

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 4

Crabb’s men opted for a white flag. They tossed aside their daggers, pistols, and rifles. But surrender meant nothing without a state of actual war. Mexican authorities responded by lining up the captives (“some of

California’s brightest ornaments,” wrote an American, “men of intelligence,

refinement, and character”) before a dawn firing squad. “The news from Sonora is not at all flattering to the revolutionists,” Wallace noted with admirable precision. “All of this class are shot without mercy — the

Soñorenses having no use for prisoners.”41 Hapless Henry Crabb ought to

have remained a California office-seeker. Mexican authorities cut off his “principal head” and stewed it in a jar filled with vinegar. Some said that the grim totem was sent back to Los Angeles as a very tangible warning

against further efforts at rearranging the Mexican border with the United States. Maybe Crabb, or part of him, did come back to Los Angeles, maybe

not. The critical fact remained: Crabb brought the enduring Mexican War

with him into Mexico.42

Hundreds of miles north in San Francisco, a young adventurer named

Charles Edward Rand, out to make his California fortune, sent home word

of Crabb’s demise to his parents: “Poor fellows, they met a horrid death. It

has caused a great deal of excitement here,” he wrote. He then made a

frightening prediction. The “feeling of revenge [though] smothered will

break out sooner or later and then woe to [the] ‘poor Mexican’ ’mongst the

crowd.” As one vengeance-minded journalist wrote, “the blood of the mar-

tyrs is the seed of the church.” 43

Blood did flow in Los Angeles, the putative “city of angels.” The place, historian James Guinn declared, was nothing but an “ungodly city.”

Morrow Mayo, following in Guinn’s footsteps, suggested that the “town’s

angelic name was too ridiculous for such a hell-hole.” More fitting yet was the sobriquet tossed about in the 1850s and 1860s. Los Angeles? No. Los

Diablos.44

“A Fo r e i g n T o u r a t H o m e” : R e c a s t i n g H i s t o r i c a l R o l e s

The bloody 1850s sent Los Angeles spinning with such ethnic hatred that it

has yet fully to recover. It may take some digging, some excavation beneath

the city’s contemporary social and political structures, but the 1850s are still

with us. The murderousness of that decade slowly faded, the rage that

Anglos adopted vis-à-vis Mexicans and, especially and overwhelmingly,

against Indians lessened, softened by a variety of economic and demo-

2 5t h e u n e n d i n g m e x i c a n w a r

graphic factors. Declining populations of nonwhites, in either absolute or

proportional terms, rendered seeming threats less palpable. The region’s

Native American population, worked to death, chained to logs outside jails

and places of labor, and struggling with unyielding demographic collapse,

fared the worst. Not even in death could they expect respectful treatment.

Mid-century Indian deaths, even if foul play was indicated, might be writ-

ten off as the result of a mysterious “visitation by God.” This did make grim sense, in a way, given Manifest Destiny’s assurances that expansion and

racial triumph went hand in hand, legitimated as if through holy writ.45

The number of Mexicans, too, fell off, at least in proportion to whites arriving in the Los Angeles basin. Whereas Mexicans in 1850s Los Angeles

may have accounted for as much as 80 percent of the total population, the

figure had plummeted to something like 20 percent in just a generation, a flip-flop of stunning magnitude and speed.46 The American ascendancy in Los Angeles—represented by such diverse moments as the arrival of the

Southern Pacific Railroad (1876) and simultaneous disappearance of Mexi- cans from electoral office (the last Mexican mayor of Los Angeles left office in 1872) — made the “boom of the eighties” an almost entirely racially

specific affair.47 These processes and benchmarks help to create a new ver- sion of both “the Mexican” and the “Mexican problem” in Los Angeles.

Part of the Los Angeles ascendancy came about through rewriting history.

In other words, to create the language of American-era, skyward trajec-

tory — in commerce, in outlook, in urban enthusiasms — some merely

resorted to casting even the recent past as the dark ages. Anything, then,

would be substantial improvement upon what came earlier. “A wonderful

change has come over the spirit of its dream, and Los Angeles is at present—

at least to a great extent—an American city,” wrote Benjamin Truman in his

exuberant Semi-Tropical California, typical of the genre.48 Truman’s use of

the dream metaphor was also common; Los Angeles resembled nothing so

much as Sleeping Beauty to legions of observers in the 1870s and 1880s. And

versions of this fairy tale did the work of racial pedagogy along the way.

Whereas white Los Angeles (always cast as feminine) would awaken to

embrace her future, the Mexican presence of old had fallen comfortably

asleep. Somnolence within the ethnic population occupied the attention of

Los Angeles writers, as “sleepy” became the watchword historical descrip-

tor of town, region, people, as if statehood and the transitions thereof sim-

ply exhausted everyone, man, woman, and child alike. And of course the

adjective stood in for all manner of other descriptions: pre-capitalist, pre-

modern, lazy, primitive, Catholic. A few examples should suffice. “I first vis-

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 6

ited Los Angeles in 1867,” wrote Benjamin Truman. “Crooked, ungraded,

unpaved streets; low, lean, rickety, adobe houses, with flat asphaltum roofs, and here and there an indolent native, hugging the inside of a blanket, or

burying his head in a gigantic watermelon, were the, then, most notable

features of this quondam Mexican town.”49

Angeleno Andrew Copp noted in his autobiography that the “half

Mexican” population of 1870s Los Angeles “were reported to walk in their

sleep most of the twenty-four hours.” Just like Richard Henry Dana long

before him, Copp alluded to the promise and potential of the region,

attainable if, and only if, “the people would ever wake up and develop

them.”50 In accounts such as these, Mexican Los Angeles—“the lethargic

going to and fro of a somnolent collection of human beings”—always gives

way to Anglo Los Angeles sometime in the 1870s: “an awakening came, and

behold a transformation appears.”51

The Los Angeles problem was of course not sleepiness or some kind of

weird village-wide narcolepsy. The “problem” was race and the nagging

symptomatic persistence of the so-called Mexican problem. That is, there

were too many of them for Anglo arrivistes, as yet uncertain in these pre-

industrial years if Mexicans could be cast as permanent laborers, yoked to

immutable Anglo presumptions about their place in the society.52Fig.2abouthere

Demographic change could briefly recast that “problem” as an opportu-

2 7t h e u n e n d i n g m e x i c a n w a r

Figure 2. The corner of Aliso and Los Angeles Streets in downtown, 1886.

Author’s collection.

nity toward the end of the nineteenth century. During the boom period of

the 1880s and 1890s, Los Angeles boosters championed the city to tourist

and settler alike, and part of that lure was precisely the region’s Latin past,

or at least a carefully restricted version of it. As migrant Anglos became,

Carey McWilliams writes, “obsessed” with the Spanish Fantasy Past,

Mexicans became (if temporarily) picturesque in Anglo eyes—especially

when they could stand in for those Spanish who had not lived on Southern

California ground for nearly a century. This phase of Los Angeles history,

critical to the growth juggernaut of tourism, allowed easterners to luxuri-

ate in the Southern California so brilliantly advertised: exotic, semi-tropic,

romantic. Los Angeles offered, as one tourist come-on promised, “A Trip Abroad in Your Own America,” as well as all manner of chances to see the

quaintness of ethnicity. In this imagery, a Mexican boy posed atop a burro

selling flowers becomes less an indication of urban poverty than an unwit- ting actor in a period romance. “Here you will find true foreign color in your own United States.” Come to Los Angeles, boosters insisted, and

enjoy what one writer called “A Foreign Tour at Home.”53

Demography certainly played a role in this recasting of Mexicans as

something other than the violent threat that they had supposedly consti-

tuted in the 1850s. So, too, did Anglo expectation of further population

dips. Mexicans were actually supposed to fade away, through both national

deference and epidemiological determinism like that assigned to the region’s

Native American populations. First the Southern California Indians were

to drift aside, then Mexicans, nodding silent and permanent good-byes to

the audience of tourists and newcomer settlers now occupying the city’s and

history’s center stage. The region, a booster pamphlet in search of Los

Angeles investment capital proudly (if euphemistically) declared, “has less

of the old California character than any other part of the State.” Chronicler

Jackson A. Graves devoted an entire chapter of his important autobiogra-

phy to just this wishful expectation. “The Passing of the Dominant Race”

explores exactly those transitions, both real and imagined, in local demog-

raphy. And of course the assessment has more to do with the ascendancy

of the Anglo Saxon than it does with the passing of the Latin.54 It was, in

the words of historian George Sanchez, the coincident coalescence of ideas

into a nifty plan. “By depicting the city’s Latino heritage as a quaint, but

altogether disappearing element in Los Angeles culture, city officials [and others of similar status] inflicted a particular kind of obscurity onto Mexican descendants of that era by appropriating and then commercializ-

ing their history.”55

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 8

Recall James Miller Guinn’s comment that “the process of Americanizing

the people was no easy undertaking.” In other words, Guinn knew full well

that one could date the American period of Los Angeles from early 1847,

when Robert Stockton captured Los Angeles or shortly thereafter when

Andres Pico capitulated to John C. Frémont. But, Guinn well understood,

military or diplomatic “Americanization” was a blunt cultural marker, more

indicative of process than culmination. The actual “transformation of the

old pueblo from a Mexican hamlet to an American city continued through

at least three decades after the conquest,” Guinn suggested to his friends in

the Historical Society of Southern California.56

The point is a subtle and important one, and it invites us to examine the

transitions at about 1880 every bit as closely as those of the 1850s, when Los

Angeles shuddered from the violence born of a sudden change in nation-

ality. The signs are there: greater Anglo demographic presence to be sure;

far less bilingual communication in the public sphere, in journalism, or in

city documents; fewer, far fewer, Latino municipal officials; less intermar- riage of elite Anglos into the once-elite Californio families, who had run out

of land, money, and prestige at a fast clip.

There are other ways to judge the transitions. The mere presence of the

Historical Society of Southern California, a distinctly white enterprise, is

testament to some kind of transition in local culture, some maturation of

a sort. Begun rudely in a dank police court office, the Historical Society nonetheless went about its work in earnest. Save everything, the society’s

president urged the membership in 1884, everything that will create a phys-

ical memory that the 1880s were important. No need to concentrate on ear-

lier periods, another society official advised. After all, the future did not belong to the Mexicans of those early years. They had lost in the blood

sports of war and politics, and thus deserved their place as quaint occupants

of an ancient past. “A score or two of names, a few crumbling adobes, and

all is told,” offered the society’s president in pithy dismissal. “Our civiliza- tion developed along the lines of early England, and still earlier Angeln [sic],

and Saxony; from the tribe and its chosen leader, not by the transmission

from a superior to an inferior race.” A publication of the era put the mat-

ter even more bluntly. Los Angeles had been founded by the “very scum of

Mexico.” Why celebrate that past and those founders, except when the

strains of make-believe and fantasy could render the racially unpalatable

somehow romantic?57

By the 1880s, with the real estate boom and swelling population of Anglo

arrivistes, that imagined past had started to exhibit its soothing potential.

2 9t h e u n e n d i n g m e x i c a n w a r

What had been once only “sleepy” was now attractive, mysterious, even

exotic. “The City of the Angels is a prosperous city now,” wrote Helen

Hunt Jackson. “It has business thoroughfares, blocks of fine stone build- ings, hotels, shops, banks, and is growing daily. Its outlying regions are a

great circuit of gardens, orchards, vineyards, and corn-fields, and its suburbs are fast filling up. . . . But it has not yet shaken off its past. A certain indefinable, delicious aroma from the old, ignorant, picturesque times lingers still, not only in byways and corners, but in the very centres of

its newest activities.” One would not, could not, truly know Los Angeles,

Jackson declared, unless one could penetrate the outward reserve of the “few

remaining survivors of the old Spanish and Mexican regime.”58

There is the merest suggestion of racial mixing in but a few of such obser-

vations, a notion that the diversity of peoples in Los Angeles might provide

a bulwark against unforeseen evil. This is perhaps carrying the notion too

far, especially since little mention is ever made of the violence of the 1840s

and 1850s. But E. W. Jones, president of the Historical Society in 1889, felt

it. “The blending of the races here is a theme of great significance. It seems at first sight as if the pioneer race, who brought the arts of civilization to these shores, is being extinguished by the flood of immigration which has prevailed for the last few years.” But this was not the case, Jones said. “The

blood of these adventurous people, strong in body and mind, still coursing

through the veins of thousands among us, will not fail to tell powerfully

upon the final homogenous race which is to occupy this region.” Perhaps it was all an exercise in dissonance and deliberately poor memory. Yet read

one way, Jones’s comments are a radical call for miscegenation. He later

congratulated Southern California’s “mixed and fraternized races” for cre-

ating a population marked by “manhood, patriotism and ability.”59

This is a rare observation to be sure, intellectually tantalizing precisely

because it stands out in such sharp relief from the record. Others, Historical

Society stalwarts among them, remained perfectly content in their belief

that the non-Anglo races could not compete and would just slip silently

away. As one tourist saw it, Mexicans lurking in the “obscure corners” on

“the edges of the displacing civilization” were disappearing, “as if a blight

had fallen upon them.”60 Or at least they would be outnumbered and

hence rendered quaint in the process of becoming a less visible minority.

“The old-time Spanish settlements found here and there appear like islands

in the sea of modern American progress,” sighed one representative tourist

pamphlet.61

But the emphasis was on complete disappearance, wishful though it might

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e3 0

have been. Thomas Kenderdine, who had first come to Los Angeles in the 1850s, discovered forty years later that the “one time Mexican tenants” of

the plaza district had “mainly died away.”62 By 1900, according to Angeleno

Mary Mooney, one could look “in vain, and in vain!” for Mexicans on the

streets of the city. “One by one they faded away,” wrote Jackson Graves in

his autobiography. Yet the requiems of course came too early. Mexicans in

Los Angeles and the Southwest did not disappear from history’s stage.

Even someone like Graves knew it. On the contrary, the pull effects of an expanding industrial economy in Southern California, as well as the push

effects of early twentieth-century revolutionary turmoil in Mexico, reversed population and demographic downturns. “Their children,” Graves writes

of the land grant class of Californios, “became day-laborers.” He may not

have been precisely correct, in that Californios maintained some social

prestige and, in a few cases, money enough to live well even after their land

was gone. But Graves knew enough to know that Mexicans had not melted

away. “Largely written off as a ‘vanquished’ element,” McWilliams writes, “the Mexican population of Southern California began to increase after the

turn of the century,” first through the labor demands of the agricultural hinterland and then in response to the workplace needs of early Los Angeles

industrialization.63

The dominant Anglo society set about creating certain cultural and

physical boundaries by which to contain this expanding population, the

sheer size of which troubled whites. Labor segmentation, which welded

class to ethnicity, had virtually assured a lasting Mexican presence in the

roughest ranks of manual or agricultural labor. But even that was not

enough to mitigate Anglo discomfort. “From 1907 to 1940,” McWilliams

reminds us (with concise though too-brief precision), “ ‘the Mexican prob-

lem’ was a hardy perennial in Southern California.”64

Part of that so-called problem revolved around culture and cultural space.

Anglos found it difficult to describe the growing population of Mexican workers who supplied much of the required labor in metropolitan Los

Angeles as “picturesque” any longer. A single workman, a scattered few:

these might be romanticized with relative ease. But the gathered dozens,

hundreds, thousands of Mexican day laborers looked every bit the shape

and size of a proletariat. How could that be pictured in the quaint rhymes

and images of Los Angeles boosterism?

Weren’t new categories thus required? Did Anglo Los Angeles have to

recast Mexican space and Mexican stereotypes once again? We would be

wrong to underestimate the dimensions and ambitions of the program

3 1t h e u n e n d i n g m e x i c a n w a r

that Anglo Los Angeles, consciously or not, embarked upon to answer

such queries in the affirmative. Following the crude mid-nineteenth-century period of explicit ethnic

violence (which of course had its own imperatives regarding ethnic bound-

aries), a sort of cultural backing and filling took place. Some of this was undoubtedly related to changes in Anglo perspectives about Mexico. As

such, we should briefly visit the heirs to Colonel Crabb’s filibustering adventures. Later Los Angeles perspectives, narratives, and images about

Mexico reveal ideas similar to those of the 1850s as regards Mexicans (on this

side of the border or that). Territorial filibusters from Los Angeles would continue to raid northern Mexico, though no longer on foot, and pre-

sumably with more wariness and less hubris than Henry A. Crabb.65 To be

sure, as journalist Harry Carr pointed out in the 1930s, “Los Angeles has

always been conscious of the fact that it is next door to Mexico,” and that

international proximity (as well as the definitions of that “door” and its placement) makes up an important part of the story told in this book. The

ubiquitous early twentieth-century Chamber of Commerce term “Greater

Los Angeles” takes on a whole new meaning if we consider it as a territorial

description every bit as much as a qualitative one. Such Angelenos as those

who sat in the Chamber of Commerce had long coveted Mexico, just as

they expressed simultaneous discomfort with Mexicans on either side of the

international boundary.66

In thinking of Mexico, elite Anglos deliberately muddied the distinctions

between what is “ours” and what is “theirs.” Much of this, by the turn of

the century at least, was imperialism of a different stripe from Henry Crabb’s quixotic incursion. But there are obvious semantic and cultural par-

allels to such possessiveness. For instance, the turn of the century marks the

arrival of Southern California’s somewhat startling geographic discovery:

“Our Mexico.” Nurtured in tandem by parlor writings and sophisticated

appraisal of northern Mexico’s raw land, raw minerals, and raw oil, this

diplomatic fiction became a commonplace corollary to the regional conceit that painted Southern California as “Our Italy” or “Our Mediterranean.”67

Ownership claims connoted by “Our Mexico” continued through the vio-

lent cycles of the Mexican Revolution of the early twentieth century, when

many a Southern Californian thought little of the conceit (not to mention

Crabbean danger) in ignoring the border to protect invested dollars. By the

late 1910s and early 1920s, Southern California businessmen and their allied

organizations firmed up the notion that what was south across the border might as well be considered part of Los Angeles. It was almost as if a kind of

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e3 2

3 3t h e u n e n d i n g m e x i c a n w a r

geographical fulcrum had been balanced. Los Angeles had once been Mexico

(and, in parts, like downtown’s Sonoratown, might be still); why not make

Mexico into Los Angeles? After all, as one realty publication phrased it,

“Western Mexico is in reality a hinterland to California.” Not to be outdone,

another agency heard its spokesman tell of his efforts to “solidify still further the supremacy of Los Angeles in the upbuilding of Mexico. . . . [Mexicans]

know that Los Angeles is anxious to grasp their hand.” Another representa-

tive business publication of the era, noting that Los Angeles would be “where

western civilization is reaching its ultimate goal,” declared that Mexican,

even all of South American, commerce “belongs to Los Angeles by origin and

heritage.” In other words, Los Angeles was Latin enough to create cords of

commerce, but the city would nonetheless see the ultimate conclusion of

Manifest Destiny’s racial promise! Topping the sentiment off, a powerful Chamber of Commerce leader offered his certainties regarding Mexican pol- itics in the mid-1920s. Of the candidacy of Alvaro Obregon for president of

Mexico, Chamber president William Lacy said that it was simply “impossi-

ble for him to lose” if the Chamber offered its weighty endorsement.68

And what of the Mexicans in, and continuing to arrive in, Los Angeles?

Were they “ours,” too? Much like darkroom alchemists, who fix and immo- bilize an image in time, place, and space, Anglos tried diligently to do the

same to the Mexicans in their midst, to fix them in space and around a par- ticular set of characteristics or traits tied ubiquitously to a social and ethnic

category known as “the Mexican,” or the even more reflexive “Our Mexi- can.” The specificity of the reference revealed tacit Anglo American agree- ment about representation, about representativeness, and about typicality,

and it was predicated upon distinct presumptions about ethnicity.69 Fig.3abouthere

Figure 3. Racial types of “Life in the Feudal Era” of nineteenth-century Los

Angeles. From Boyle Workman’s 1936 history, The City That Grew.

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e3 4

T h e T y r a n n y o f t h e T y p i c a l

How did these societal tendencies work? What did they mean? From the odd,

brutal days of racialized adventuring in the 1850s, turn the years forward but

a single lifetime and come meet some important characters in the drama of

Los Angeles history. It is a weekday evening in the mid-1920s or thereabouts.

Settled in for a quiet night in their Pasadena bungalow are the husband and

wife whom journalist Harry Carr refers to as “Mr. and Mrs. Los Angeles.”70

Or maybe we are in Hancock Park or Glendale this evening, behind the

wrought iron gates of a mission-style home, whitewashed stucco walls rising

from a newly paved asphalt driveway. Arrivals of no more (and probably less)

than a generation ago, the couple has on this particular evening been to din-

ner, seen a show, or maybe a motion picture. Mr. and Mrs. Los Angeles are

mildly prosperous. They are white. He is “a newspaper artist on a good

salary” and works in a seven-story office building in downtown. Mrs. Los Angeles belongs to several clubs. They have many friends, three children, two

cars. When they pronounce the name of their new home, Mr. and Mrs. Los

Angeles say “Loss An Guh Leez.” Mr. and Mrs. Los Angeles do not think

much about Mexicans. But when they do, their thoughts are programmed by

unexamined assumptions and reflexive representations. These people are the city’s Babbitts, not the “folks” as referred to by the

bitter 1920s student of Los Angeles, writer Louis Adamic. They are more

prosperous than the hardscrabble folks, more powerful, and less worn out.

Adamic’s “folks” were those people who turned 1920s Los Angeles into “a

huge, exaggerated village; an Iowa or Kansas small town suddenly multi-

plied by five hundred and some of its Main Street buildings grown twelve stories high.” “Racially fatigued,” Adamic called them.71

Mr. and Mrs. Los Angeles live above this weariness. They go to the the-

ater with regularity. They drive to the Pasadena Playhouse on El Molino

Avenue. When they have out-of-town guests, they like to venture across

town to San Gabriel to see, for the fifth or sixth time, the Mission Play, the nation’s most popular theatrical production in the years before the Second

World War. Mr. and Mrs. Los Angeles sometimes drive out to the Little

Theater of Padua Hills in Pomona. They especially like the Mexican Revue

that the Padua Players put on once a month, which one of their acquain-

tances recommended to them. “Every Mexican that I have ever known,” he

told them, “was born an artist and these shows are colorful, clever and

delightful.”72

3 5t h e u n e n d i n g m e x i c a n w a r

Mr. and Mrs. Los Angeles explore the Southwest. They read the Auto

Club’s Touring Topics with interest. They drive to Palm Springs frequently

in the winter, where Mr. Los Angeles enjoys a round of golf or two. Mr. and

Mrs. Los Angeles drive an hour east to Riverside to spend weekends at

Figure 4. A page from an early twentieth-century diary of a

mission-to-mission tour. Author’s collection.

Frank Miller’s famous Mission Inn, and they make exploring pilgrimages

to “Ramona country” outside San Diego, where they take in the annual

Ramona Pageant. They have seen a half dozen of California’s missions, and

they try to visit Mexico (Agua Caliente for car races, Tijuana for shopping

and horse races) at least twice a year. Fig.4abouthere

On the Fifth of May, Mr. and Mrs. Los Angeles go to Olvera Street “for

the hilarities of Cinco de Mayo,” and they also enjoy watching Mexicans

celebrate September 16 and the revolutionary heroism of Miguel Hidalgo.

When they think about the California past, and they do (they are barraged

with mission motifs in everyday advertising, city signage, etc.), they think

through the mist of romance. A cultural scrim hangs between them and the

Southern California past, smoothing the painful edges of a sad and bloody

history. The mission, they know, “was like one great family.” If anything

intruded on the myth, it was Mexicans themselves who, through anticler-

icalism or revolutionary zeal or both, destroyed the beautiful necklace of

coastal missions. But even that ancient era of Mexican California shim-

mered with romance. Everyone was happy then, everyone carefree. This is

what they believe. And they agree with their favorite Los Angeles Times

reporter Harry Carr, the man who wrote that Los Angeles was “an epic—

one of the greatest and most significant migrations in the long saga of the Aryan race.”73

There are tens of thousands of such people in Los Angeles in the first decades of this century. Identified with the racial and growth trajectories of their city so much so as to share its name, Mr. and Mrs. Los Angeles con-

stitute an apparently typical Anglo sensibility about culture, commerce, and

the metropolitan landscape. They think they know the Mexican present,

and they are sure that they know California’s “Spanish” past. It is an era they

think of as “a lost civilization.”74

M e e t Ju a n G a r c i a

My typical Juan Garcia knows no boundary. He does most of the

manual labor of the Southwest, and unless the quota bars him, he

will soon be standing beside the wheels in every industrial plant,

working on every section of the railroads, and bending in toil on

every farm. He is accomplishing a labor penetration of the United

States.

R o b e r t M c L e a n , That Mexican!, 192875

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e3 6

3 7t h e u n e n d i n g m e x i c a n w a r

It must be recognized . . . that the Mexican whom we find in Los Angeles is, as a class, of relatively low mentality; he is probably best

fitted for work demanding ability of an inferior grade.

S . H . B o w m a n , “A Brief Study of Arrests of Mexicans,” 192476

There are other typical people in the Los Angeles of seventy-five or eighty years ago. They are a bit harder to find. Down flat against the banks of the Los Angeles River, adjacent to a grimy repair yard of the Southern Pacific Railroad, sits an old railcar on a rusted spur track covered by weeds. A small,

neatly tended vegetable patch lies nearby. Smoke rises from a crude chim-

ney pushed through the roof of the car. A steep five-step ladder drops from the wide freight door to the ground. So do, this same imagined evening in

the late 1920s, several dark-eyed children, rushing to meet their father,

Figure 5. Building Los Angeles, ca. 1910. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San

Marino, California.

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e3 8

who trudges toward them along the track after a day’s work. A woman leans

from the doorway, whispers a greeting to her husband. He smiles and

climbs the ladder into his home.77Fig7abouthere

Meet Juan Garcia and family. Juan Garcia is a laborer and a Mexican. He

works on a railroad section gang. The railroad allows him to live rent-free

in the railcar home. Other laborers live nearby in small shacks and shanties.

The railroad may move him to another section, another county, another

state, at a day or two’s notice. The railroad might just lay him off when the track work is finished. Juan Garcia works in a brickyard, molding clay into bricks, carrying heavy pallets into the sun to dry. Juan Garcia melts and

pours asphalt on roads of dust. Juan Garcia does roadwork with pick and

shovel. He cleans streets. His work is unskilled, hard, and hot.

Los Angeles laboring work, a 1920s report forthrightly declared, was “the

occupation of the Mexican.” “The drudgery of county and city has been

his,” in the words of a social worker. But fortunately for Southern

California, Juan Garcia showed an “indifference to physical hardships and a supreme satisfaction in doing the menial.” He works for the city’s water

department, clearing debris from waterways. Juan Garcia is “the unskilled

laborer of the Southwest.” He makes, if he’s fortunate, between two and

three dollars a day. Maybe he doesn’t live with his family cramped into an

old boxcar, though it is widely believed that Mexicans will “put up with

Figure 6. Mexican workers in downtown Los Angeles, early twentieth century.

3 9t h e u n e n d i n g m e x i c a n w a r

almost any sort of living quarters.” The family might all live in a camp for

unemployed Mexicans that the Catholic Church has set up over in Griffith Park (there’s a white camp in the giant park as well, but the two groups are

separated, “the great difference in diet necessitating such separation.”).78

Social workers call the Garcias “peons” and “peasants” to drive home their

non-American status and reinforce the perception of these people as “indus-

trial assets.” Or they make lists of people in Los Angeles, singling out

Mexicans in taxonomies of visitors and Southern California types, as in “the

Mexican, the tourist, the health seeker, the migratory laborer, the settler.”79

The Garcias live in a rusty boxcar or cheek by jowl in an overcrowded house

or courtyard apartment (a “cholo court,” they are often called). Their house

court has one toilet for every six or eight families. Tuberculosis lives with

them. Juan Garcia might live with other single men—some who have left

their wives and families in Mexico—in a cheap boardinghouse. The ceilings

are low. The walls are uncovered, maybe even unplastered. “What should

be done for Juan Garcia?” wonder reformers of one stripe or another.80

Figure 7. Early twentieth-century living conditions for Los Angeles Mexicans

often resembled this collection of shacks and shanties, “typified” by the

photographer as ethnically representative.

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e4 0

The Garcias and people just like them do not have the same name as the

city they live in. They could never be “Mr. and Mrs. Los Angeles,” even

though they helped build Los Angeles, paved it, cleaned it, made it. Legions

of white Angelenos have never met, and will never meet, Juan Garcia, his

wife, their family. Some try to forget that they share the same city, believ-

ing as one social worker described the prevailing attitude that “the Mexican

is a problem of tomorrow.”81 Others judge “Juan Garcia” as a latter-day Juan

Flores, the social bandit of the 1850s, with a racial propensity toward crim-

inal behavior. Mexican boys are but “greasers in embryio,” as far as many

are concerned, just as they were to a young Anglo man who captioned his

1907 snapshot of Los Angeles Mexican boys with just this ugly flourish.82Fig.8abouthere A few whites, imbued with the optimistic Progressive-Era gospel of

Americanization, reach out to people like the Garcias from complex

motives mixed of compassion and enthnocentric nationalism. Perhaps

someone had been to the railroad camp this same hypothetical day, one of

the Americanization movement’s front-line warriors, the home teacher. A

Figure 8. “Greasers in Embryio”: Early twentieth-century tourist

photograph of Mexican boys in Los Angeles. Courtesy of the California

History Room, California State Library, Sacramento.

woman teaching sewing or English stopped by, instructing in phrases such

as “Swat the fly!” or “I scrub, I scrub.” If they think about it at all, white Angelenos do not believe that the Garcias can be assimilated.83

Los Angeles in the 1920s is no less polyglot than it was in the 1850s. On

the contrary, ethnic diversity had increased. But even more pronounced

change had occurred in ethnic proximity over the intervening two genera-

tions. The strictures on ethnic behavior and place are such that the intimate

ugliness of 1850s-era tensions has receded into segregated distances for the

bulk of the Los Angeles population.84 There are tens of thousands of Juan

Garcias in early twentieth-century Los Angeles, most of them recently

arrived from Mexico, but most Angelenos would not know it and would

not care in the least.85 The name—Juan Garcia—had by then become an

accepted, unquestioned representation by Anglos of the EveryMexican

caught somewhere between picturesque and proletarian. The identification of the Mexican laborer as Juan Garcia even suggested that individuation of

Mexicans into persons need not take place. Three-fourths of the Juan

Garcias in Los Angeles, in California, indeed in the entire American

Southwest, work as unskilled laborers.86

What Juan Garcia and his family most assuredly are not is Californian,

much less Californio. The former label had gone over fully to whites by

now, the product of transitions in the political economy of the region dat-

ing back to the 1870s and 1880s. The latter identifier had ceased to mean much in the twentieth century: there just weren’t many Californios around

any longer. They’d long ago run out of land and power.

Nor is Juan Garcia white. Though the U.S. Census Bureau may persist in

calling the Garcias white, few others do.87 Nor is Juan Garcia a Spaniard.

That descriptor has drifted away as well, victim of the twentieth century’s

belated realization that, lo and behold, few Spaniards called California home

any longer. Of course, there could yet be Spanish features in the region, even

typically so—places, roofs, buildings, or other nonpersons graced by roman-

ticism and decidedly non-Mexican attributes. It was a game, in effect, an ugly game in which false definitional precision and arbitrary attachment of meaning carried real cultural weight. That was Spanish, this is Mexican.

Juan Garcia was Mexican. A Mexican. The Mexican.88

Boosters got into the act, as boosters will. “In an effort to preserve the his- torical aspects of the Plaza and its immediate vicinity,” the Los Angeles

Chamber of Commerce decided in the 1920s “to establish a typical Spanish

village surrounding the park, which was the birthplace of the pueblo that

has come to be the biggest Metropolis in the Western Americas.” Making

4 1t h e u n e n d i n g m e x i c a n w a r

the plaza Spanish, then, could make it less Mexican—by definition. Or so the logic of commercialism and racial typicality went.89

The possibilities were endless! Following the manufacture of the typical

Chinese village, “China City,” Chamber leaders set their sights on the next

ethnic population. “Can we work with [the Japanese population of Los

Angeles] to set up in their section a typical Japanese city wherein their

native home life and artistic ability could be developed in their own inter-

est and in the interest of the community?” the Chamber eventually won-

dered, as it contemplated a metropolis of theme-park ethnic subdivisions;

an “it’s a small world, after all” congregation imagined into being by

notions of Los Angeles multiculturalism, 1930s-style.90

How does one group of people isolate and draw borders around another

group of people? The constellation of behaviors and ideas that make up an

Anglo cultural stance toward Mexicans (including legal, political, social,

occupational, spatial, and other strictures) worked as a kind of cultural

cryogenics. This allowed, even insisted, that the dominant society freeze

Mexicans in time and space, and that it describe them in particular ways:

childlike, simple, quick to anger, close to nature, primitive, hard-working,

lazy, superstitious, possibly criminal.91 They were, as a policeman put it with

firmness, bathed in a “decidedly unfavorable light.” It is instructive to con- sider how Anglo society made claims of ethnic Mexican representativeness

and to remember how it profited by such arguments.92

By the early decades of this century, reliance upon a descriptive reflex (i.e., what was typical ) had become an unquestioned trope in Los Angeles

images and in the self-actualizing descriptions of Los Angeles growth.93 The

examples themselves are legion. Always, there was the weather: a typical day

in Southern California, as depicted in photographs, on citrus crate labels

or other ephemera: a clear vista, perhaps orange trees set against a snowy

mountain backdrop. The built environment also attracted the “typical”

label. Sprawling, luxurious tourist hotels became “typical tourist hotels.”

Palm- or oak-lined streets in wealthy neighborhoods became “typical

Southern California boulevards.” Postcard after postcard depicted lofty

Tudors, giant bungalows, or stately mission revival mansions as “typical

Southern California homes.” And for each of these typical houses there

existed an equally prosaic “typical garden,” though one perhaps ambi-

tiously landscaped, touched with expensive Japanese flourishes, or thick with transplanted cacti and succulents.

No better example of this reflex can be found than in the publications and ephemeral paperwork of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce in

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e4 2

the first two or three decades of the twentieth century. A representative pamphlet—“Facts About Industrial Los Angeles, Nature’s Workshop”—

put out by the Chamber’s Industrial Department in the 1920s aptly illus-

trates the typical appeal. Glossy pages and crisp black-and-white photo-

graphs invite the reader (investor, tourist, settler) into a world of redundant

images, scenes, spaces, and places. Here we find in neat and stark repre- sentation the city’s “typical skyline,” its “typical textile plants,” “typical

views of clay products and glass plants,” even the odd industrial juxtaposi-

tion of “oil and oranges—a typical refinery.” Here, too, are “typical work- ingmen’s homes,” where, presumably, contented workers return after what

could be nothing other than a “typical day.”94

This is an important cultural tapestry that told a simple story. “Los

Angeles is most typically American,” wrote a booster reporter for the Los

Angeles Examiner in 1922—but added the wishful, decidedly atypical dec-

laration that “there are no poor in Los Angeles.”95 Southern California

was, then, a paradise where everyone, men and “typical women” alike,

could conceivably have a typical life.96 To do so meant, of course, under-

standing the unstated in the images, especially those that associated great

displays of wealth with the mundane and everyday. In Southern California,

almost everyone could have workers working for them. There were, after all,

apparently those typical workers who went to those typical worker jobs and

lived in those typical workingmen’s homes.97 And there was also Juan

Garcia, so typically a Mexican that he had an everyname synonymous with

Mexican ethnicity. Of course his was not the “typical workingman’s home”

as much as it was what social reformers and others codified as the “typical Mexican home.” And there was a profound difference: in housing quality, in regional geography, and most assuredly in the operation of local restric-

tive housing covenants. Even Olvera Street, that 1920s shops-and-stores

invention complete with picturesque Mexican troubadours and pushcarts,

can be found in the typical litany. An early promotional newspaper (the

“Olvera Street News: The Magazine from the Birthplace of Los Angeles”)

proudly referred to the avenue as “probably the most typical street in

America.”98

Making Mexicans fit into explicitly racialized containers revealed not only what they were (“always the laborer, never the citizen,” in the words of

historian Mark Reisler) but also what they were not as well. And what

Mexicans most decidedly were not were Anglo Saxon.99 This is not to say

that at certain points in its troubling history with Mexicans that Los Angeles

did not try to remedy that supposed cultural and ethnic (i.e., genetic) fail-

4 3t h e u n e n d i n g m e x i c a n w a r

ing. Los Angeles in the first decades of the twentieth century was one of the most important arenas of eugenics in the nation. Such attempts to de-

Mexicanize the Mexican—socially, politically, biologically, culturally—help

us to remember the kinds of boundaries constructed around typifying cat-

egories of what was or was not Mexican or a Mexican. The work could be

pursued by all manner of Los Angeles Anglos, on the left as well as the right.

After all, Americanization campaigns of the Progressive Era, at least in some

respects, could be seen as a kind of social eugenics.100

Take the example of Progressive and reform-minded Rev. G. Bromley

Oxnam. Like William Wallace fifty years before him, Oxnam kept a steady Los Angeles journal. A man whose brand of muscular Christianity made

him something of a Theodore Roosevelt in broadcloth, Oxnam was one of

the city’s most energetic housing and social reformers prior to the First

World War. It is a shame that Los Angeles has forgotten him. Mentored by

Rockwell Hunt, James Main Dixon, and Emory Bogardus at the University

of Southern California, and by the Rev. Dana Bartlett of the Bethlehem

Institute, Bromley Oxnam entered Mexican Los Angeles armed with a few

important, archetypal assumptions that he arranged into a kind of social

chemistry. From his University of Southern California courses and profes-

sors he learned sociology’s maxim that a problem defined was very nearly a problem solved. From the social gospel he drew Progressive insights about

uplift and noblesse oblige. “Along with our social work,” he wrote, “we

must not forget the individual. A man is a man, has certain capacities and

powers; these factors on the personal element will unite with your reagent

of social reform and give a different compound every time.”101

Bromley Oxnam also knew about Anglo Saxonism as a way to address

what whites in Los Angeles, if they thought of it at all, unconsciously

referred to as the Mexican problem. In the spring of 1913, Oxnam devoted

every Monday to work in the Mexican house courts of downtown Los

Angeles, east of Main Street. The district had tremendous problems: ram-

pant poverty, high infant mortality, illiteracy, and disease. “Truly the prob-

lem almost overwhelms me,” he admitted, if only to himself: “I hardly

know what to do.” Oxnam knew, too, of the Anglo tendency to essential-

ize Mexicans as implicated in their social position. He wrote of encoun-

tering a young Mexican boy at one of the courts, a youngster with “an

artist’s soul.” The deck was stacked against the boy, Oxnam knew: “he was

but a Mexican boy—fit for streetwork and nothing more—at least so some say.” Nonetheless, Oxnam imagined one way to proceed, and “God help-

ing me I’ll make those people better.”102

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e4 4

Within a few days of that private declaration, one of the city’s local

newspapers devoted a story to Oxnam and his expressly ethnic stratagem

for addressing the Mexican problem. “G. Bromley Oxnam’s Campaign in

Mexican Quarter is Showing Results” ran the caption next to a photograph

of Oxnam with four Mexican boys along with another heading: “Me An’

Manuel’s Knights’[;] Small Boys Foes to Dirt.” Oxnam had started a club

in a neighborhood where, according to the newspaper reporter, “an

American housewife would have thrown up her hands at the floor and the flies.” The club was called “The Order of Knights of The Round Table” with Oxnam as the young Arthur. “You believe in being very clean, don’t

you?” he asked his knights. “Yes, Mam,” and “Di Signor” they responded,

or so the reporter covering the exchange reported, no doubt somewhat lin-

guistically confused himself.103

“I chose Arthur as a model,” Oxnam told the reporter, “because he is

somewhat of a hero and one that embodies principles of right living in his

character.” Thus, with Arthur, King of the Britons, and Bromley Oxnam

entwined as their models, the Mexican boys of the Rhinehart Street Round

Table set to work becoming less Mexican. This transition to an Anglo

Saxon future required and was based upon rules: the boys (and they were

all boys) would always do right, “because it is right”; they would be “kind

to girls and ladies”; they would “not fight except for what is right, but when we fight we will never give up”; they would not lie; they would keep their bodies and their clothes clean; they would keep their houses clean (“Dirty

houses make sick people”); and they would “love each other.”104

This was Americanization hard at work, part of the reform juggernaut

that hit early twentieth-century Los Angeles every bit as hard as it did

Chicago or other better-known Progressive sites. Americanization is a com-

plicated beast, some of it arising out of deep wells of humanitarian regard,

and some of it, in Carey McWilliams’s apt phrasing, “stupid, morose, and

biased.” Regardless of motive, certain groups and individuals alike in Los

Angeles responded with a tremendously ambitious social and educational

program of trying to understand (and “reform”) “the Mexican.” As Oxnam

himself saw it, defining the problem was the critical first step on the jour- ney to solution. As such, the Americanization program in Los Angeles was

focused upon study after study of one “Mexican” trait or characteristic after

another. Ethnic uplift was no doubt a goal, but so too was the simple

scholarship of representation; as one 1920s report on Mexican families in

Los Angeles declared, the case study of thirty-five Mexican families “repre- sent[s], to a large extent, the entire group of Mexican families in Los

4 5t h e u n e n d i n g m e x i c a n w a r

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e4 6

Angeles.” Mexicans were easy, the logic went, to represent. They fit into boxes and stereotype because ethnicity was fate.105

As one University of Southern California instructor commented in 1916,

“the burden of Americanization falls directly upon Los Angeles.”106 But this

was a program without flexibility, already bounded at the start by the stric- tures of stereotype. Mexicans, read one early report on labor and housing

conditions, were “quick to learn as children but slow when grown up.

They are with us to stay; we can mold them as we will, and if we groom our

horses, feed them, give them shelter and a bed when they have toiled hard

for us at work which we would not do for ourselves—shall we do less for

the hard-working stranger within our gates whose sons and daughters will

soon be our American citizens?”107

Just as Bromley Oxnam imagined that substitution of Anglo for sup-

posedly essential ethnic traits could move Mexicans along the path to

progress, others opted for strategies more national (or at least semantic) in

scope. To be sure, these went together in the larger scheme of things: even

if the Mexicans in the house court were American citizens, they would not

yet be “Americans.” Birthright citizenship status was, in other words, meant

to be earned and learned before it could be incurred. But some

Americanizing Anglos apparently did believe that Mexicans could be

uplifted simply by being renamed, in a gesture to the waning days of

regional obsession with the ancient Spanish past. For instance, the Spanish

American Institute, a Methodist vocational school for boys started early in

the century in Gardena, ten miles south of Los Angeles, was assuredly not

for the benefit of the region’s Spanish Americans. The Institute, which some believed to be “the one great solution of the Border problem,” per-

formed its semantic and national sleight, first turning Mexican youths into Spanish boys, after which it became at least theoretically possible to com-

mit more social chemistry and show off these “Boys as New Americans.”108

Such sentiments were perhaps as coercive (or even cruel) as they were

wishful, in that the dominant society had already organized the urban

spaces where Juan Garcia and family lived into obvious architectural expres-

sions of a Mexican periphery attached to an Anglo core. Colonias leaning

against farmlands; barrios at water’s edge; a railroad shack; the Mexican

company town arrangements of a place such as Simons, just outside city

boundaries, where Mexican workers (“our Mexicans”) dug clay and made

bricks at the world’s largest brickyard. All these were Mexican spaces, and

they held fast.

4 7t h e u n e n d i n g m e x i c a n w a r

We should not forget the power of Anglo institutions to drive the point

home. Company towns, like that at the Simons brickyard, the focus of

chapter 4 of this book, were but one, albeit highly effective, way of creat- ing and solidifying Mexican space. Unspoken local custom and codified real estate restrictions also helped etch Mexican space sharp on the landscape.

“Race segregation is not a serious problem with us,” a Whittier realtor

proudly declared in the mid-1920s. “Our realtors do not sell [to] Mexicans

and Japanese outside certain sections where it is agreed by community

custom they shall reside.” A fellow realtor not far away in Glendale mixed

patriotism with exclusion, without even the slightest recognition of irony.

Through enforcement of “suitable race restrictions, we can maintain our

high standard of American citizenship,” he wrote. This was, presumably, all

the more critical in “an American town like Glendale.”109

Should the crudeness of such redlining present any unlikely moral dilem-

mas to the community, one could always fall back upon the supposedly

essential behavioral characteristics of the Mexican. Too many Mexicans in

your neighborhood? “Advocate and push improvements,” wrote realtor E.

Spurlock of Compton, “and the Mexican will move.” “The Mexicans can

be well handled,” wrote Charles Stewart of the Monrovia realty board,

sounding ever so much like a plantation overseer, “and [they] are quite reli-

able.” Barrioization allowed those concerned with segregation to offer that one could even count on the ethnic populations of Southern California to

do the work of segregation themselves! “The Japanese, Mexican and colored

population have segregated themselves in groups largely according to their

own wishes,” stated a satisfied realtor from Riverside. Such instances of blindness to the ugliness of exclusion must be examined not simply as

indications of dissonance but as examples of the dominant society’s con-

viction that there was such a static social and ethnic category as “the

Mexican” (“the Japanese,” “the Negro,” etc.) which entailed certain traits

and behaviors. It made it far easier to explain away barrios and colonias as

a Mexican habit, than as a response to segregation’s iron hand. “We have

provided a section expressly for Mexicans and Negroes,” wrote realtor R. P.

Garbutt, as if the action was an example of community pride or progress,

which, for many whites and many communities, it was.110

One “Mr. Los Angeles,” an important officer of the city’s Chamber of Commerce, said, “Juan Garcia has California agriculture and industry in

the palm of his hand.”111 But no one really believed that: there were too

many obstacles placed in their path for the “Juan Garcias” of Southern

California to have much, if any, power to confront the ambitions of the

dominant society to keep alive that indispensable “Mexican problem.”

� Contemporary Los Angeles yet has its Mexican problem, expressed in con-

tinued labor segmentation, in vocal and electoral expressions of discrimi-

nation, and in anxious attempts to mitigate or even block the demographic

inevitabilities of the twenty-first century. In paying close attention to the roots of that shifting problem, this book suggests that there may be prom-

ise embedded in the ethnic future of tomorrowland Los Angeles. But prom-

ise can be realized only as the result of difficult, even painful, history les- sons. Digging beneath the surface of the city’s present is the best way

historians know to shape ideas into potential action for the future. It is an

action—an excavation—predicated on remembering in hopes of forcing

change. In continuing that work, we turn next to the ways Los Angeles tried

to remake its troubled past as part of the effort to become the self-conscious city of the future. We turn to memory in and memory about Los Angeles,

and the ways in which constructions of historical memory shaped the city’s

sense of self. We turn to the 1890s, to La Fiesta de Los Angeles, and to his-

tory on parade.

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e4 8

T w o

History on Parade

No other medium has so successfully advertised to the world the possibilities of Southern California as has La Fiesta.

Fe r d K . R u l e , 19031

[The] celebration . . . is peculiar to Southern California, and could not be so successfully carried on elsewhere. . . . By the middle of April comes a time of comparative leisure . . . everything is at its best. It is a very old institution introduced into California by the first Spanish settlers; some even think that the Indians held some- thing of a fiesta as a token of appreciation of the bountiful conditions surrounding them.

A Business Venture in Los Angeles, or, A Christian Optimist (1899)2

Let us regard it as an established institution of Southern California, which means, experience and culture shall yet more fully perfect, and which shall become more and more fully in harmonious blending with the physical perfection and beauty of this modern Italy, this lovelier Greece of the New World.

Los Angeles Times, April 26, 1896

Our fiestas should conform more to the American than the Spanish idea of fiestas.

Los Angeles newspaper editorial, ca. November 19033

4 9

It is a curious feature of the history of Southern California that the Los

Angeles Fiesta belongs to the novelists more than the historians. Novelists

often write about historical events of course, and they can do so with every

bit as much accuracy as historians. But in the case of the Los Angeles

Fiesta, historians have barely stepped into the ring. Fictional accounts

abound which describe the citywide frenzy accompanying each springtime

Fiesta in the last half decade of the nineteenth century. Taking their cues

straight from the newspapers or their own eyewitness observations, writers

and the occasional poet added characters, situations, and dialogue to the

remarkable urban pageantry that made up this strange urban ritual called

La Fiesta de Los Angeles.

Take for example the case of “Z.Z.,” the author of the odd little 1899

novel A Business Venture in Los Angeles, or, A Christian Optimist. Z.Z. must

have seen an April Fiesta or two, because the several days of parade and

pageantry are important in her sentimental tale. The book’s protagonists,

sisters who run a small bookstore and curio shop in downtown Los Angeles,

prepare for the coming of the Fiesta at the anxious urging of a knowledge-

able friend. “Get out your best attractions to adorn your window,” he tells

them, “and make your store as alluring as possible.” Money is at stake.

Timed to coincide with spring citrus harvest, the Fiesta is “the harvest-time

of the Los Angeles merchants.” Thus encouraged, the expectant sisters

spruce up their bookstore, add various items of bric-a-brac, and proceed to

hit the jackpot of mercantile success. “Hurrah for stores in general, and this

little bookstore in particular!” the happy sisters exult.4

As for the Fiesta itself, a processional parade of several days duration, the

novel relays the courtly comings and goings in sequence. The Fiesta’s Queen

and court pass by in stately repose, the various military units march forward

in precision, and float after float after float moves through the major streets of downtown Los Angeles in numbing repetition: “afterwards Chinese,

Indians, the Fire department, Caballeros, prosperity floats, et cetera, et cetera.”

But the effect could be spellbinding to nineteenth-century observers. People jockeyed for position on packed Los Angeles streets, elbowing one

another aside as this or that float passed. Angelenos filled the second- and third-story windows of commercial buildings or homes lining the Fiesta

route, craning their necks as the parade moved by. The diversity of the

parade’s participants was part of the event’s excitement, something the

novelist Z.Z. well understood. “The mixture of races and nationalities tak-

ing part therein,” she commented, “gave a flavor of originality to the whole,

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e5 0

5 1h i s t o r y o n p a r a d e

rendering it entirely distinct from ordinary processions, so that, from first to last, the interest was sustained, especially with those to whom the sight

was a novel one.” Indeed, La Fiesta transcended mere spectacle. It was

“produced in such magnificence and with so much attention to detail, as not only to be beautiful to the eye, but valuable as object-lessons to young

and old.”5Fig.9abouthere

La Fiesta certainly looks, from the vantage of more than a hundred years

later, like spectacle. Exciting urban holiday, springtime ritual, harvest cel-

ebration, commercial boon, and tourist lure, yes, all wrapped up in the sev-

eral days of exuberance. But object lesson? In what? For what purpose?

The Los Angeles Fiesta should attract those interested in the Los Angeles

past at least as much as it once captivated audiences and fiction writers alike. There is much to explore, much to puzzle over about this striking rite

of spring in the City of Angels. Little is known of La Fiesta today except

that it was a parade. In the photographs in this chapter, La Fiesta looks

ancient. It looks innocuous, even silly. But this is not the case at all, nor was

it so a hundred years ago. On the contrary, the remarkably popular Fiesta

was at the center of a number of contests over the Los Angeles future and

Figure 9. Troops marching in La Fiesta de Los Angeles, 1894. Courtesy of the

Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Museum of

Natural History.

how the city ought to get there. And the Los Angeles Fiesta, no matter how

much its planners, participants, and observers wanted to think otherwise,

was about ethnicity, too.

This chapter examines La Fiesta de Los Angeles from a number of per-

spectives. Most important to the analysis will be features alluded to in the

passages culled from that hundred-year-old novel. What made the Fiesta

important as mercantile harvest (and who was buying)? What else was at

stake besides making money? What made it an object lesson? And how did

all this relate, inexorably to “the mixture of races and nationalities taking

part therein”?6 Most important is the question of when and why elites in

Los Angeles decided to utilize the past, particularly an unpleasant past

now sanitized and whitewashed, as a cultural tool, an advertising gim-

mick, and a history lesson all rolled into one. Within the parade’s repre-

sentations of people and history, we can discern the outlines of prevailing

ethnocentric notions that were themselves part and parcel of the growth of

1890s Los Angeles. By remembering La Fiesta, and remembering its literal

place on the Los Angeles cityscape, we can reconstitute its important role

in helping to build both the city and a particular regional identity. That will

require pulling the parade out of the historical fog.

L a F i e s t a I s B o r n

To understand the rise of La Fiesta de Los Angeles, we have to go back at

least as far as the founding of the Merchants Association at the end of 1893.

A collection of local merchants, most of them with stores in downtown,

sprinkled through with Los Angeles boosters and Chamber of Commerce

stalwarts, came together to promote local commerce. Hardly an unusual act

in cities across the nation, this melding was done largely as a wishful

attempt to yank the city from the economic doldrums first produced by the collapse of the 1880s real estate boom and made all the worse by the woes

of the depression of 1893. From such humble beginnings, the little

Merchants Association would grow to become the Merchants and

Manufacturers Association, or, as it was known colloquially, the M & M.

By the early twentieth century, the M & M would be among the most vehe-

ment anti-union, open shop organizations in the entire nation.7

But prominence and notoriety were a long way off in the first years of the 1890s, though the success of the Fiesta undoubtedly helped the Merchants

Association grow into the M & M bully it later became. The Merchants

Association in the early months of 1894 had far simpler plans and goals than

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e5 2

ferocious opposition to organized labor. The city had weathered, somewhat

unsteadily, the frenzied years of real estate boom and bust. The good years

of the 1880s had come and gone, leaving a depressed land and housing mar-

ket in their wake, and the region’s merchants faced problems making ends

meet. Improved rail connections near and far had opened markets, but the

transition also made certain that goods produced in Los Angeles now had

to compete with those manufactured elsewhere. No longer could local

commodities exist in the insulated bubble of far western commerce. The

growing population of Los Angeles, which would crest 100,000 by the

turn of the century—thus multiplying ten times in just two decades!—pre-

sented local merchants with an attractive market. Even better, at least to

some industries and retail outfits, were those rail tourists from the East, people with real money to spend. Yet despite commercial promise and

mercantile potential, the early 1890s were marked by the arrival of as much

worry as hope. Business leaders pondered the city’s economic future amidst

falling prices and expectations. An outbreak of smallpox, with its attendant

bad press, only made things worse.

The Merchants Association latched onto a clever idea. The city, the city’s

merchants, and the city’s goods could all be boosted through the vehicle of

pageantry and spectacle, with a healthy dollop of history tossed into the mix.

The idea may have occurred to many in the infant businessmen’s gathering.

After all, similar urban productions, such as Mardi Gras in New Orleans,

were by no means unknown. Even Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses, with-

out the football game yet, had been an annual event for several years by 1894.

It soon became clear, however, that the driving force behind the Fiesta was

downtown electrical fixtures merchant Max Meyberg. Meyberg pushed his plan of celebration and commercialization before his mercantile peers.8

The imagined event, whatever it was—carnival, pageant, parade, fan-

dango — had first to be named. The Los Angeles City Council offered fifteen dollars to whichever local newspaperman came up with a suitable name for the fete. Out of forty entries, La Fiesta de Los Angeles was cho-

sen the victor, thus marking the event as at least a tad unusual. Los Angeles

Times journalist and regional booster Harry E. Brook, a man already proven

good at naming things, proposed the event’s Spanish name. That same year,

Brook had named the region’s ambitious new literary and region-booster

journal Land of Sunshine.

Following the christening, La Fiesta momentum increased. Under the

capable leadership of “Director General” Meyberg, assisted by Frederick

Wood and Adolph Petsch, various committees made up of the city’s elite

5 3h i s t o r y o n p a r a d e

worked diligently to make the first Fiesta a success. More than a dozen com- mittees met regularly throughout the early spring of 1894 at the event’s

Board of Trade headquarters to work out the increasingly intricate program.

These included committees devoted to Finance, Honored Guests, Public

Comfort, Music, the Military, Advertising, Illumination (for the nighttime

processionals), Invitations, Hotels, Amusements, and the “Committee on

Transportation of School Children on April 12 for La Fiesta parade.”9 The

Committee on Invitations designated two hundred and fifty VIPs across the nation for special notice of the impending bash.

Advertising La Fiesta was, of course, advertising Los Angeles, marketing

the upstart city itself and doing so brilliantly. There’s little doubt that the

boosterism associated with the first Fiesta marked a coming of age for the city in this regard. Meyberg later recalled that it had been “our duty and our

salvation to make La Fiesta our incentive for advertising Los Angeles,” and

he spoke fulsomely of mailings “to every city and hamlet in the United

States.”10 The Finance Committee solicited Fiesta subscriptions, from busi-

nesses and individuals alike. The Southern Pacific Railroad, seeing perhaps a new tourist gambit in the Fiesta preparations, offered $500 to the infant venture. Few exigencies went unheeded or unnoticed. On the contrary, La

Fiesta’s planning moved with militarized attention to detail. Members of the

Artistic Committee regulated the various float entries: they could not be “gross” or “unsightly,” nor could they excessively advertise companies or

products. Floats could not exceed strict height and length requirements

(sixteen feet by twenty-five feet). Even the celebration’s especially created musical theme—“the Fiesta March”—echoed the event’s martial trappings.

From Meyberg’s title of “Director General,” down to the slips of paper—

“circular orders” from headquarters—detailing directions to various Fiesta

planners (slips which looked and read like battlefield dispatches), the Fiesta had very much the overtones of a military reenactment, a gathering where

even the schoolchildren marched “with soldierly precision.” Such over-

whelming attention to discipline, which occasioned charges of overkill

from surprising quarters, no doubt helped Fiesta officials consolidate their own regional influence as civic and commercial leaders.11

But Max Meyberg liked order, military order at that. With precise atten-

tion to minutiae, he continued planning the first Fiesta. Short of funds, he turned to the city government for assistance. He asked for help in making

the grandstands along the Fiesta route, he received permission to use Los

Angeles Park Commission horse teams and laborers, and he obtained the

services of the vehicles and manpower of the Street Department to fetch

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e5 4

5 5h i s t o r y o n p a r a d e

and tote and carry. Meyberg further requested that City Hall be appropri-

ately decorated in bunting and flags (the Fiesta reimbursed the city $50 for doing so), and he urged the City Council to endorse a public announce-

ment that the people of Los Angeles decorate their homes “for the coming

carnival.” “let us all unite and make the fiesta a grand success,”

the Council obliged in a message to the citizenry.12

As opening day approached, Los Angeles journalists took it upon them-

selves to further the spirit of civic sacrifice and boosterism. “Let us bury out of sight the mistakes of the past,” the Los Angeles Times editorialized. “In

place of looking to San Francisco for inspiration and example, it is time for

the merchants to cut loose and start a new era of prosperity upon a broader

plane. In the future the rotteness [sic] of San Francisco must shoulder her

own responsibilities. Los Angeles is a new world formed with higher

motives, broader principles, and greater ambitions. The Chicago of the

West—the ambitious, prosperous city of the western Hemisphere.”13

Sensing opportunity, the city’s merchants got into the act. J. M. Hale &

Co., a downtown store, took out big advertisements in the Los Angeles

Figure 10. Float at La Fiesta de Los Angeles parade, 1894. Courtesy of the Seaver

Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural

History.

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e5 6

Times trumpeting “Two Great Attractions: La Fiesta de Los Angeles and

J. M. Hale & Co.’s Grand Annual Muslin Underwear Sale.” Similarly,

Jacoby Brothers urged Angelenos to drop in for the “Great Fiesta Sale!”

Shoppers could choose from such displays as the “Fiesta Sale of Boys’ Short

Pants Suits” and the “Fiesta Sale of Men’s Hats and Caps.”14Fig.10abouthere

Planners divided La Fiesta into a week of specific daily events, Floral Day, Military Day, and Children’s Day among them. On Floral Day, carnival

carts and chariots brimming with children and flowers paraded downtown in the newer commercial districts of the city south and west of the original

plaza. First came the “Angelitas” float, festooned with Anglo children dressed as floral angels. In quick succession came the desert float, covered in cacti and succulents; the floral ship, a Spanish galleon manned by school- children; the missions, a float decorated with the flowers and vines brought to the New World by Franciscan padres; a mountain float of hilly terrain, complete with a rushing waterfall; the fruits and flowers of the irrigation float, showing the assembled crowds in Los Angeles streets “the actual results” of irrigation in helping to make the greater Southwest bloom; and

the Flower Queen and her court, twenty or thirty young girls dressed as

butterflies.15Fig.11abouthere

Figure 11. Local royalty, La Fiesta de Los Angeles, 1894. Courtesy of the Seaver

Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural

History.

5 7h i s t o r y o n p a r a d e

Other Fiesta floats included the “Busted Boom Float,” a recreated inte- rior from a real estate office, its broker and agent stalls empty, one sole and dejected realtor sitting with nothing to do. Adding to the exoticism of the

affair was the Indian float, complete with fifty Yuma Indians brought to Los Angeles from Arizona, each paid a dollar to participate. Southern California

Indian commissioner Francisco Estudillo, who had been contacted by

Meyberg about Indian participation in La Fiesta, had at first balked at the suggestion, responding that he would “furnish Indians only on orders from

the War Department at Washington.” Meyberg persisted, assuring the

commissioner that the Indians would be well taken care of and safeguarded

from what Estudillo referred to as the city’s “demoralizing associations.”

That these native peoples were imported from their pueblo to play ancient

Aztecs only heightened the event’s fantastic qualities.16

Fiesta planners worked to establish the pageant’s diversity as a kind of

racial rapprochement, up to a point. The presence of Native Americans

bespoke inclusion, but mostly an attraction to exotic spectacle, as did

Chinese marchers and floats. So, too, with the participation of African Americans. Fiesta planners were proud of this, boasting that “not many

cities could produce representatives of four out of the five human races—

Figure 12. Children marching in La Fiesta parade, 1894. Courtesy of the Seaver

Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural

History.

Caucasians, Mongolians, Africans, and red men from the residents of its

immediate locality.”17 Also present were those representatives of the region’s

“Spanish American” population. These were most obvious as the “gay

caballeros of the Spanish period” who “rode their fiery steeds with silver- mounted saddles and bridles and costumes of brilliant coloring,” as one

Fiesta planner later recalled.18

How many people witnessed this first Fiesta? There can be no sure way to know, but it seems likely that thousands gathered in the streets of down-

town Los Angeles during the most popular events and processionals.19

Contemporary accounts suggest that the crowds might have been as large

as seventy-five thousand people, an impossible figure (that would have equaled the entire population of Los Angeles in the mid-1890s). Whatever

the figure, it is probably true that the first Fiesta de Los Angeles witnessed the largest gathering in Southern California history to date.Fig.12abouthere

But what did it mean? And what, exactly, were all these people celebrat-

ing? What did they get out of the affair? There can be little doubt that peo- ple thought La Fiesta important beyond the flowers, the bunting, the floats, and the crowds. For one thing, contemporaries thought that La Fiesta

worked as an engine of Los Angeles growth, and they traced the city’s

upward trajectory from the spring of 1894 forward. In his important mem-

oir, Sixty Years in Southern California, Harris Newmark wrote “that this first fiesta and the resulting strengthening of the [Merchants] Association have been among the earliest, and in some respects, the most important elements

contributing to the growth and development of our city.” Even a far-off newspaper concurred: the Philadelphia Record suggested that it was precisely

events like La Fiesta that had transformed Los Angeles from a “sleepy

Mexican town” into the rising metropolis of the Pacific Coast. Max Meyberg himself recalled, nearly forty years later, that “an immediate

change in the condition of Los Angeles was created” in the wake of La

Fiesta. “People forgot their troubles,” he declared.20

Recent students of Los Angeles suggest that La Fiesta had been organized

to occupy — or preoccupy — the city during the midst of railroad labor

strife.21 While it is true that tensions ran high during the 1894 Pullman

strike, the nationwide rail boycott led by Eugene Debs began in June of that

year and thus postdated the planning and execution of La Fiesta by a good

six months. La Fiesta de Los Angeles owes its existence to more complicated

circumstances and motives than attempts to distract the city from a rail

strike or class strife (though planners would have thought this a good idea).

La Fiesta sprang from deeper wells on the cultural landscape of Southern

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e5 8

California, and contemporaries often pointed it out as a natural continu-

ation of patterns and traditions well established by the 1890s.

Certainly writer Charles Fletcher Lummis, who fell in love with La Fiesta

de Los Angeles as much as he fell in love with Los Angeles and the entire

Southwest, wished to see the event as continuity with the past. La Fiesta was

no “parvenu,” he claimed, for it was older than “the tallest palms beneath

which it is enacted.” “The Caucasian race has held fiestas in Southern California for over a hundred years,” he insisted, and the revitalized event

was “as much at home . . . as the chaparral on the hillside.”22

But the irrepressible Lummis ought to have known better. The 1890s

Fiestas were different, orchestrated by individuals and institutions far less willing than the often egalitarian Lummis to grant Caucasian status to any

but themselves. La Fiesta offered the opportunity to further— in highly public fashion—the racial and ethnic distinctions Anglos wished to make

between themselves and others. And it allowed these distinctions to be

made in ostensibly peaceful, soothing, even celebratory ways. La Fiesta

offered elite Anglos in Los Angeles the ideal vehicle by which to forget— whitewash—both the unpleasantness of recent decades as well as the entire

bloody history of the Southwest throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries. La Fiesta suggested, in name and practice both, that indeed a

kind of rapprochement had been worked out between the white city-builders

of Los Angeles and the Mexican past and people, and that it was time to

celebrate. But the peace was a suggested, contrived peace.

This isn’t to suggest that the event had no ties to the past whatsoever. But

it was a past cloaked as nostalgia. Even vague understandings of regional his-

tory played a role in the coming and Harry Brook’s naming of La Fiesta de

Los Angeles. Anglos in Southern California had long been fascinated by the

public and religious culture of the region’s Mexican people. Rituals and

events, both sanctified and secular, received Anglo comment, stares, and scrutiny from the early decades of the nineteenth century forward. Mexican

or Catholic holidays, weddings, funerals, christenings: all came to represent

part of the region’s exoticism in the eyes of the white tourist and settler. Anglos

evinced fascination with the springtime events leading up to Easter Sunday.

Masked horsemen dashed about here and there, and effigies (most often of Judas Iscariot) hung from trees and fence posts. Catholicism, especially dark-

skinned Catholicism, fixated new, lighter-skinned arrivals in Los Angeles. But public celebrations and secular excitements garnered the most atten-

tion. Fandangos and fiestas feature prominently in Anglo commentaries from the mid-to-late nineteenth century, especially for what seemingly

5 9h i s t o r y o n p a r a d e

preoccupied the revelers. “The people of Los Angeles were a dancing peo-

ple,” remembered one pioneer journalist. “Indeed, everything but a funeral

wound up with a dance.” No less an authority than Helen Hunt Jackson

wrote, in a moment of mindless fantasy, that the “Californian fought as

impetuously for his old way of dancing as for his political allegiance.” The

spectacle and sheer energy of the fandango delighted non-Mexicans, many

of whom relished (if from afar) the splendor of abundant food, drink, and

what they clearly took as exotic, if not erotic, festivity.23

Carey McWilliams characterized Anglo perceptions of the Spanish

Fantasy Past, and especially its inhabitants, in memorable imagery, as “one

big happy guitar-twanging family.” But the understanding of pre-Anglo or

pre-statehood California rests as much on what people supposedly did

while listening to all those twanging guitars, which was, from the perspec-

tive of Anglos, to sleep or dance. In other words, the Spanish Fantasy Past

doesn’t so much recognize dancing as require it. The sheer repetition of the

dancing trope as a concise way to describe the region’s post-mission period

and its inhabitants is remarkable; it was almost as if dancing was itself

organic, even vaguely biological. “It affected all, from infancy to old age,” the nineteenth-century California historian Hubert Howe Bancroft noted,

“grandmother and grandchildren were seen dancing together.” Los Angeles

journalist William Wallace left behind a similar account, made all the more

ironic given his reportage of the 1850s as a seriatim litany of violent and

bloody struggles. “How all our people are given to dancing. No matter what

the occasion—in joy or sorrow—famine or plenty—drought or flood—the propensity is to dance. They dance when one dies and when one is born—

they dance for politics and religion, for business and for pleasure—when

one goes and when one comes. Happy the people who can illustrate all their

sentiments by kicking!”24

Contemporary interpretations by whites of these affairs could do cultural work. Dancing imagery and language could easily play into notions of

racial primitivism, as practiced in the white gaze upon of African Ameri-

cans, for instance. Seemingly endless fiestas and fandangos could also be hitched to the indolence stereotype laid upon Mexicans in the post–

Mexican War Southwest. A race of fandango-throwing people might be

fun, Anglos imagined, but they weren’t fit to take the region seriously enough to make much of it. Richard Henry Dana had suggested as much

way back in the tallow and hide trade days of the 1820s and 1830s (“In the

hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be!”). Anglo

public perceptions had not much changed sixty and seventy years later. The

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e6 0

6 1h i s t o r y o n p a r a d e

genius of La Fiesta was that it appropriated, enviously, celebratory aspects

of regional Mexican culture for commercial and boosterish purposes of

white Los Angeles. La Fiesta made it possible for whites simultaneously to

borrow from and denigrate supposedly innate Latin cultural forms. Even

more remarkably, La Fiesta’s creators did so in a scripted atmosphere of pre-

sumed ethnic peacefulness, even progress.25Fig.13abouthere

Though actual regional fiestas continued well into the American period, they clearly had begun to recede from the landscape, probably because there

were fewer and fewer reasons to celebrate once statehood and its ethnic and

other transitions took hold. A few locales, especially those less affected by transitions in the racial and political economy of Anglo Southern Califor-

nia, persisted. San Bernardino, the tiny hamlet east of Los Angeles, threw

a big fiesta of its own in the mid-1890s, one far truer to regional culture and heritage than La Fiesta de Los Angeles. The San Bernardino fiesta included fandangos, a couple of bullfights, and the music of a Mexican band up from Sonora. The village’s Spanish American society even went to Los Angeles

to recruit, as a local paper phrased it, “Spanish American” spectators and

participants. That kind of outreach to local Latinos would not take place

in the Los Angeles version of tradition, not by a long shot.26

Figure 13. Representing old Spain: “Caballeros.” Courtesy of the California

History Room, California State Library, Sacramento.

Max Meyberg and his partners figured that Los Angeles could go San Bernardino several times better, that their adolescent city could throw a

fiesta of greater proportions, even one of lasting importance. Yet merely by insisting on a Spanish-language name for the event, these members of the

Los Angeles elite signaled aspects of a cultural game plan. The great Cali-

fornia literary critic Franklin Walker wrote brilliantly about the remarkable

ability of Southern Californians to whitewash history and contemporary

concerns with broad strokes of pageantry and romantic fiction. With par- ticular reference to the 1890s, Walker noted that nascent exaltation of the

Spanish past “also involved a painful association with the humble Mexican

laborer . . . already consigned to his Sonoratown on the other side of the

railroad track.” Yet Angelenos could make the problems go away, or so they

thought, by mixing together a cultural salve of equal parts dissonance and

romance. “The Franciscans could be accepted as pious and picturesque,

even when Catholics as a whole remained without the pale. The contem-

porary Mexican peon could be ignored by assuming that the leading figures of Spanish California had been of the best Catholic blood. And the drama

of history could be made more intense by dressing up the more spectacu-

lar elements in the story and by refusing to see California as but a com-

paratively unimportant sector of the much richer Spanish empire to the

south.”27 Thus it was with La Fiesta: invented tradition rolling by on the

streets of downtown Los Angeles for thousands to enjoy and absorb.Fig.14abouthere

Los Angeles, despite the recent real estate frenzy of the booming 1880s

and an infant manufacturing sector, was still predominantly an agricultural

center in the 1890s, devoted to growing, processing, warehousing, and

shipping citrus and other fruits and vegetables. This farm economy can eas-

ily be discerned in the first Fiesta’s color scheme. Planners festooned the streets of the city in red, yellow, and green, each to represent a different agri- cultural product upon which the growing prosperity of Los Angeles was

founded: grapes, oranges, and olives. City residents complied with the sug-

gestions of Fiesta planners to decorate their homes in these official agrar- ian hues, and city newspapers published a ditty about the Fiesta colors

splashed across Los Angeles.

Mary had a little lamb.

Its fleece could not be seen,

For Mary had adorned it with

The yellow, red, and green.28

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e6 2

Figure 14. La Fiesta poster, 1896. Courtesy of the California History

Room, California State Library, Sacramento.

The city responded in kind, wrapping municipal buildings and electric

poles in bright tri-color bunting.

As the first day of La Fiesta 1894 arrived, planners engaged in a weird political farce, drawing on none-too-subtle historical allusions. Apparently

it had been decided that the Fiesta, much like Mardi Gras in New Orleans,

would suggest that the world had been turned upside down. Accordingly,

the Fiesta Queen, Mrs. O. W. Childs, wife of a wealthy nurseryman in the

city, would be granted the right to rule as mayor for the week of the Fiesta.29

She would be assisted by her court, “well known society women” all, dressed

in Spanish finery with mantillas draped across their faces. Fiesta planners, in costume and masked, engineered the farcical coup on April 8. Substi-

tuting a carnival mayor and council for elected city officials, the Fiesta-ites engaged in a kind of mock revolutionary spectacle that harkened back to

the days of 1776. “Behold the beautiful citizens assembled to avenge your

wrongs,” one of the leaders shouted. “When a government, by its tyranny,

becomes unbearable, there is nothing to destroy it but revolution. We pre-

pare to destroy the tyranny of this government, and, in order that it may

be fair, propose to try it by jury. Whether it is right or wrong don’t make

any difference. We propose to arrest it and bring to trial this municipal gov- ernment and bury its officers one hundred and ten feet deep with their faces downward.” With that, the mock government took over the reins of munic-

ipal power and stayed in charge through the week’s events, and Southern

Californians flocked to the streets of downtown to see what they often could not pronounce. Linguistic variations on the Fiesta theme included

“fyesty,” “fester,” “fee-esty,” “fee-estay,” “fi-eestor,” “feestay,” “fiestor,” “fer Easter,” and “fi-ees-tor.” The limits of white engagement with the region’s Latin past, not to mention Latino residents, might be discerned in reference

to these tongue-twisting bastardizations of a simple Spanish word.30 What

remains compelling about the spectacle, especially with its whimsical ref-

erences to the traditionally lauded revolutionary past of the Founding

Fathers, is that Angelenos were engaged in the creation of a public mem-

ory fitted to their region. George Washington had a place to play in this memory. But so too did the patriotism, a kind of exuberant, regional patri-

otism of the adolescent western city, that championed the neat progression

of national and racial progress in the Southwest. From the vantage of a cen-

tury later, La Fiesta looks like the party white Los Angeles threw to celebrate

the triumph of Manifest Destiny in the Far West.31

La Fiesta leaders and urban boosters imagined that the several days would

offer lessons as well as fun to the throngs assembled in the thousands on city

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e6 4

streets. Meyberg himself characterized the Fiesta as a sensory extravaganza,

complete with “sights beautiful to the eye and instructive to the mind.” Part

of that instruction was apparently in relation to the spirit inspired by the

Revolutionary farce. The Fiesta ought to epitomize the democratic spirit of

the urban West. Meyberg congratulated La Fiesta (and himself ) for the

ways in which it fostered such apparent togetherness: “people met on a

common level and on equal terms.” Or, as one Fiesta official put it a few years later, the Fiesta offered people “a chance to comingle with and study multitudes of their fellow creatures.”32

But much of this democratic flavor and self-congratulation can be assigned more to wishful thinking and hindsight than to the ethnic or class

realities of 1890s Los Angeles. The case of the Chinese participation in the

first Fiesta is instructive. Apparently the decision to invite the Chinese to assemble a float or dragon entry for the parade had been met with great opposition. It had been, after all, slightly more than twenty years since the

notorious massacre of a score of Chinese in downtown Los Angeles, and

matters had not improved much since. One Fiesta planner recalled that the

proposal to include the Chinese provoked “anything but enthusiasm on the

part of many, some of the gentlemen going so far as to suggest that the mere

idea of having the Chinese in the parade indicated failure, that their pres-

ence would lend nothing to the celebration and might result in a serious

disturbance.” The lengthy and heated debate about Chinese participation

ended with an unusually egalitarian solution. The Chinese would be invited

only if the organizers also included “all representatives of other nations

within the city.”33 Lest that agreement sound too multicultural for the

age — too in keeping with democratic ideals referenced in nods to the

American Revolution—it was clear that wider ethnic participation in the

parade could, in fact, drive home assumptions of regional progress predi-

cated upon racial hierarchy. In other words, the Chinese participation had

to fit the narrow confines of the parade’s movement through time. As his- torian David Glassberg has astutely noted, in reference to a copycat Fiesta

in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, civic celebrations of this sort “are rep-

resentations of and for the [urban] collective but not necessarily by the col-

lective. Such representations primarily serve as tools that some groups use

to structure a common reality for others.” In this, they become (in the

absence or muting of counternarratives), “a framework for understanding

the workings of urban social and political life at a level once removed from

the immediate surroundings of neighborhood, workplace, or ethnic group.”

6 5h i s t o r y o n p a r a d e

La Fiesta offered a slice of Los Angeles society to interpret all of Los Angeles to all of Los Angeles.34

Charles Fletcher Lummis suggested that the Los Angeles pageant offered “a great deal more instruction” to its participants and viewers than did, for

instance, Mardi Gras of New Orleans. In this he was echoed by others.

Frank Van Vleck wrote in 1895 that the Fiesta was “such an object lesson as

has never before been seen in the country; a pageant second to none in gor-

geousness, and historically correct.” This was not just any standard of cor-

rectness: all would be accomplished with “strict attention to historic and

scientific accuracy of detail.”35

What did that mean? On one hand, it meant simply that the progression

of floats would be chronological—literally progress represented by move- ment and sequence. Most important to this was La Fiesta’s Historical Day,

the grandest processional of the entire week’s events. Discrete historical peri-

ods, broken neatly into “divisions,” worked their way through time, space,

and downtown streets. It all began with a float of “angels” accompanied by Spanish cavaliers and moved through to those pueblo Indians who had

been shipped in boxcars from Yuma to play the part of “Aztecs.” From there

the parade moved to and through the now trite historical periods: missions,

the “drowsy pueblo,” on through the peaceful ranchos, and into the

American period. Every period had its own descriptive adjective, though La

Fiesta had no space to give over to the mission period of genocidal conse-

quences or the grim 1850s. That history had no role to play on Los Angeles

streets. That past simply did not exist. All was neat, linear: history on

parade, history that worked, step after step, float after float, each giving way to the next stage of an inevitably progressive future.

The only glitch came when a spectator took the show too much at its

word and saw reality where there was only fantasy, or so an apocryphal tale

recounted. An old soldier, glimpsing the Fiesta’s Indian contingent, got

transported back to frontier days. An eyewitness described his reaction:

“There was a float bearing a genuine display of Indians imported from Arizona for the occasion. This was so realistic that an old soldier, who used

to be with Custer, took off his hat after they had passed and felt for his scalp to see if it was still there. He said he supposed it was all right to have Indians

in the parade, but all the same he didn’t feel like trusting too far.”36Fig.15abouthere

Despite planners’ attention to detail, the Fiesta careened off the highly organized track it had been placed upon at the end of the week. Drunken

rowdies, including some of the city elite, celebrated long into the wee

hours of the waning days of the event, and their excesses and revelries cast

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e6 6

6 7h i s t o r y o n p a r a d e

a sinister pall on La Fiesta’s conclusion. Out-of-control revelers threw things

at one another — handfuls of flour, pepper, even ammonia — and many tourists and locals alike believed that the Fiesta had fallen short of its prom-

ise of playful, peaceful fun. Another tense moment arose when men who

had been promised a dollar to lead parade horses down the city streets

appeared at Max Meyberg’s store for their money. When Meyberg de-

murred, apparently because local banks had closed in honor of the Fiesta,

there was potential trouble, so much so that Meyberg feared his store

would be wrecked.37

Despite this bumpy conclusion, the initial Fiesta received much attention

and fulsome praise. Joseph Crawley, a regional Southern Pacific railroad executive, loved it. It was, he wrote Director General Meyberg, “the great-

est week of carnival, pleasure and, I am sure, of benefit to the city of Los Angeles and the surrounding country, than ever before, and [you deserve]

the thanks of the people of Los Angeles and everybody.”38 Another observer

got more to the point, noting how well Anglo Los Angeles had found a way

to capitalize on Mexican culture. “Not only was our first attempt at the dis- tinctive gaieties of the people of the Latin race a spectacular success, but it

has had a pleasant pecuniary outcome.”39

Figure 15. Representing Aztecs? Native Americans and La Fiesta’s revival of a

mythic regional past. Courtesy of the California History Room, California State

Library, Sacramento.

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e6 8

T h e S e c o n d G e n e r a t i o n

As time came round to plan the second Fiesta, the Merchants Association

solidified itself into corporate status through state law. La Fiesta II accu- rately reflected the increasing bureaucratic nature of such change. An asso- ciation attorney approved and modified Fiesta contracts and advertising, and Director General Meyberg utilized the organization’s resources as he

planned the second annual affair. As in the first Fiesta, Meyberg delegated the planning of all manner of events and exigencies to a series of commit-

tees. La Fiesta organization had evolved, in only a year’s time, into a micro-

cosmic version of Los Angeles city government itself.

The Chinese community balked at appearing in the second Fiesta; per-

haps the overwhelmingly patronizing, even hostile, air that had accompa-

nied Anglo commentary about their participation in the 1894 Fiesta

exhausted their patience. But Fiesta planners recognized the touristic need

for spectacle. They pleaded with the Chinese. An argument was made that

the Fiesta was a table of multiple legs: one each represented by merchants,

capitalists, manufacturers, and the Chinese, as if Asian ethnicity were itself

an occupational category (which of course it very nearly was, given the

restriction of Chinese to particular, and particularly feminized, jobs).

According to this weird logic of civic balance, a Fiesta without the Chinese

float would tilt toward chaos. The Chinese could help maintain order if they again joined the parade. They did, in grand style. The Chinese dragon

in the 1895 Fiesta was eight hundred feet long; it took one hundred and fifty men, walking side to side, back and forth, to make it come to life.Fig.16abouthere

As La Fiesta settled into its institutional form, fundraising took on an

increasingly mercenary air. Businessmen who chose not to subscribe to the

appeals for money received letters from the Merchants Association that

spelled out the recalcitrant businessman’s errors in not rising to support the

cause. Meyberg and associates had less success the second time around

with the City Council. Attempts at garnering a municipal appropriation for

the Fiesta at first looked promising: Meyberg was able to get support for a council donation of $1,500. But when the matter was internally referred to

the Council’s own finance committee, Meyberg’s proposal went down to defeat in a close vote.

Nor did everyone in Los Angeles embrace the Fiesta. More telling than

the City Council’s apparent reluctance to pony up a large donation was the

opposition that the Fiesta garnered from Angelenos angry at the appropri-

ation of any public funds at all. A February 1895 petition to the Council

6 9h i s t o r y o n p a r a d e

spelled the matter out succinctly: “As true and loyal American citizens, [we]

earnestly protest against the appropriation of one dollar of the public funds

of this city at this time for any such unnecessary and useless purpose.” The

petition had been signed by dozens of Angelenos, their signatures lined up

in two columns, four pages worth in all. Civic gaiety was apparently one

thing; paying for it was another matter.40

In order to prevent a repeat of the previous year’s chaotic conclusion,

newspapers began a campaign calling for decorum throughout. Fiesta-

goers were urged to keep an eye out for pickpockets, and they were likewise

encouraged not to lower themselves into the ranks of the disorderly classes.

La Fiesta 1895 once again offered visitor and Angeleno alike an object les- son of historical progression, Victorian style. Chronological and cultural

sequences again began early, with a representation of the El Dorado vision

of five hundred years previous. The myth of El Dorado, the golden man, was enacted upon the Fiesta’s first float, complete with a man dusted by gold and surrounded by ersatz Incas, “those wonderful aborigines of Peru.” For accu-

racy, the planners of the El Dorado float studied the Bolivia and Peru pho- tographs of Charles Fletcher Lummis (untroubled by the fact that his depic-

tions were four hundred years later than the period conjured atop the float). After the Incas came, not surprisingly, the Aztecs. Three tableau per-

formances of Aztec life, scrupulously reproduced from available documen-

Figure 16. The Chinese dragon parading at La Fiesta. Courtesy of the California

History Room, California State Library, Sacramento.

tation, paraded before the spectators lining the streets of the city. History

continued on by. The Aztec float came just before that upon which was depicted “our own southwest and its romantic historic peoples.” Cliff- dwellers repulsed an attack of Apache; pueblo Indians (“actual Pueblos in

their picturesque national costumes”) stood or sat on their float as it slowly moved through time and space in downtown Los Angeles.

The neatness of such transitions, float to float, period to period, indicates the level of Fiesta planning. From the Indian float, time moved forward to the conquistadors and, quickly, to the mission period. Those missions of

Franciscan construction, those “noble piles” which “are our most roman-

tic possession,” allowed Fiesta planners a site upon which to stage their ver-

sion of the Spanish Fantasy Past. In the words of one observer and Fiesta

supporter, the transition from Coronado’s Southwestern search for mythic

gold to the Franciscan search for souls meant the visual display of “the

happy, patriarchal life of the Spanish occupation, with fair señoritas and

dashing cavaliers, hacendados and vaqueros.”41

From the mission era, the transition to the modern era was as seamless

as it was swift. John Sutter and his fabled millrace earned a place, as did “a

typical mining scene.” Each of the latter-day floats offered to the assembled thousands the spectacle of “gorgeous allegorical tableaux of the New Era in

this modern Garden of Eden.” As a moving exclamation point to the whole

affair, the Chamber of Commerce float, complete with Corinthian columns, rolled by: Los Angeles represented as the apex of European

American civilization in the American West.

The success of the 1895 Fiesta prompted Charles Fletcher Lummis to wax

eloquent about the cultural appropriateness of the event to the region. While

admitting that the 1894 Fiesta had its share of problems (“a fruit picked half

ripe, but it was no failure”), Lummis nonetheless figured that Los Angeles had hit upon the perfect vehicle for regional identification. “We have logically the keynote of Spanish America, with all its glamor and romance of the aborig-

ine and the conquest,” he wrote. “It is the intention to make the Fiesta de Los

Angeles characteristic and significant; not to ape Italy or Greece, but to have it historically and logically our own. Which is as much as to say that it will

be the only purely American affair of the sort in existence.”42 As telling a description of regional culture is that Lummis felt compelled to chastise

readers in a brief story adjacent to his Fiesta praise. It was, he wrote, “thought-

less speech” on the part of educated Anglos to utilize the term “Greaser” in

reference to Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Better to leave such bigotry

“to the class whose epithets in general do not see print.”43

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e7 0

La Fiesta II brought in some forty thousand visitors to the city, each of

whom, on average, spent more than ten dollars while there. Even so, the

event appears to have lost money, despite Meyberg’s ability to raise nearly

$20,000 in subscriptions.44 A letter from Los Angeles educator John Francis

to the Fiesta Finance Committee offered congratulations, as well as a con- tribution to help make up the shortfall. “I take pleasure in sending my

check for an additional hundred dollars towards clearing up the shortage,”

Francis wrote. “If it were ten times greater, you would still be entitled to the

warm thanks of every citizen, who has the interests of our city at heart.

Truly it was ‘A Magnificent Success,’ and to the hard work and business ability of our merchants—the workers who ‘scratched gravel’—Los Angeles

must always remain heavily in debt. Hurrah for La Fiesta ’95.” Francis

concluded his note with an enthusiastic endorsement for Fiesta III: “Dam

the River and Paint the town Red, for ’96.”45

But, once again, not all shared in the enthusiasm. The California Voice,

a “paper that dares to tell the truth,” called the 1895 Fiesta a “relic of hea-

thenism” and “great big nothing.” Stitching together the usual list of tar-

gets employed by anti-Catholic bigotry, the paper attacked the Fiesta’s tol-

erance of public drinking: “Every tin horn gambler, blackleg and pimp

within a hundred miles of the city was here. . . . The closing night was dis-

graceful in the extreme. Streams of drunken men and women went in and

out of saloons, and not a few girls were enticed to their ruin.” It also edi-

torialized that among the debauched event’s strongest supporters were “for-

eign, liquor-guzzling, drunkard-making saloon [keepers] who can scarcely

speak the English language.” Perhaps what the editor disliked most was the

Fiesta’s mingling of races. “It is certainly not to the credit of such a gather-

ing that . . . it was invariably admitted that the ‘heathen Chinee’ was far

ahead in the display — that American heathenism was far inferior to

Mongolian paganism.”46

Criticisms notwithstanding, with two largely successful Fiestas under its

belt, the Merchants Association felt justified in asking other civic organiza- tions for help with Fiesta III. Consequently, the association appealed to the

Chamber of Commerce and the Board of Trade for assistance. A new plan-

ning committee for Fiesta ’96 was organized—the Committee of Thirty—

with ten members from each of the three feeder business and commercial

organizations with the most at stake in the annual Fiesta. Max Meyberg no

longer would play a large role in the event he founded.

With the Fiesta now more or less ensconced as an annual affair—and with the concomitant rise of the Merchants Association to commercial and

7 1h i s t o r y o n p a r a d e

political prominence—larger and more powerful firms began to see the merit in associating with the pageantry. 1896 witnessed the arrival of Wells,

Fargo and Company into the group of supporting businesses. The banking

house offered to carry all the Fiesta flowers in from the outlying commu- nities for use by the Floral Committee.

“ L i k e R u n n i n g a C i r c u s a n d a Ne w s p a p e r a t t h e S a m e T i m e”

La Fiesta 1896 saw the inclusion of new faces into the planning operation,

including some that Land of Sunshine magazine called “the foremost men

of affairs in Los Angeles,” and the Los Angeles Express termed “men long identified with the progress of Los Angeles.”47 These included Executive Committee president John Francis (“a well known capitalist and a large

property owner”). Married to the daughter of Manuel Dominguez, Francis

was part of a waning group in the region, that of Anglo men who had mar-

ried into once-elite Californio clans.

None were as important in the day-to-day production of La Fiesta as

inveterate city booster, writer, and publicist Charles Dwight Willard.

Willard had started Land of Sunshine as a booster magazine and Chamber

of Commerce organ in the mid-1890s, and he was never shy about claim-

ing to personify the booster spirit in the Los Angeles basin. Sickly and syco-

phantic, Willard nonetheless brought to the task energy and organizational

skills. “A new honor with an accompanying burden of . . . magnitude has

been granted me,” Willard wrote to his father in the fall of 1895.

I am secretary, which means general manager, of the annual celebration

of So Cal that takes place in Los Angeles in April known as La Fiesta. It

resembles the carnival at New Orleans. It attracts a great many thousand

people from the East. It lasts four days and consists of processions games

balls concerts etc. The whole business costing $30,000 or $40,000. A

small army of people is employed including artists writers clerks collectors

laborers costumers carpenters florests [sic] decorators typewriters etc. etc. until your brain reels to think of it all. It’s a good deal like running a

circus and a newspaper at the same time with social functions of all sorts

and a few railway excursions on the side.48

Willard’s busy schedule accelerated with the planning of the Fiesta, so

much so that he wondered if his fragile health might break once and for all.

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e7 2

The work amounted to, in his words, “horrible strain,” hardly worth the

$600 or $800 he earned for it. “I expect to have the liveliest winter and

spring I ever saw,” he wrote, “and hope to live through to see the summer.”

The work likely did little to lessen Willard’s pessimistic, even macabre, sen-

sibilities, themselves decidedly unfestive. “If there is one thing in this world

that I do believe clear to the bottom it is that we would all be much better

off if we had never existed,” he wrote. He nonetheless claimed to have sin- gle-handedly revitalized, in part through his Fiesta work and connections,

the Chamber of Commerce, Land of Sunshine magazine, the Sunset Club

(which he did start), the Free Harbor League, and the League for Better

City Government.49

Charlie Willard clearly took the Fiesta work on as part of a booster plan

and operation. His canary yellow Fiesta stationary referred to the event as

“The Famous Annual Celebration of Southern California,” and publicity

flyers or postcards pointed out that a “pamphlet describing La Fiesta in detail and containing information about the City of Los Angeles and

Southern California will be issued.” Requests for more information about

the event were efficiently funneled directly to the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce.

As befits the Fiesta’s conception of hierarchical racial progress, C. D. Willard was no racial egalitarian. His published work on the history of Los

Angeles mirrors the same sort of progressions so obviously acted out in each

Fiesta. To Willard, the Indians who once gathered at the plaza in mid-cen-

tury Los Angeles were “idle, shiftless, and addicted to drink.”50

His work on the Fiesta did break his health. To his sister, he wrote just

prior to the opening that the “worst of all is yet ahead of me—probably the

hardest month I have ever lived. . . . We have 12 events to handle—any one

of them big enough to keep a good many people busy for many months.

You can have only a faint comprehension of what it is like to manage such

a menagerie of things all at once. I hope I don’t go mad.”51

Nonetheless, La Fiesta 1896 was much anticipated. “We need it,” stated

a Land of Sunshine writer (Willard, most likely, or maybe Lummis who had

by then taken over as editor), “not only in business, but in our lives. The

Saxon is too little a man of holidays.” Despite anxious letters from east-

erners interested in seeing La Fiesta who wondered if “a person who speaks

English [could] get around [in Los Angeles] without the aid of an inter-

preter,” whether a tourist needed a passport, and whether Indians posed a

threat, La Fiesta was of course a Saxon event. That was the whole idea. The

parade had become part of a “racial experiment,” according to Land of

7 3h i s t o r y o n p a r a d e

Sunshine. Could Anglos thrive in the exotic region of Southern California?

Could whites utilize the out of doors as a step toward further racial domi-

nance, could they appropriate the landscape, even the very sunshine of the

region? Could Anglos pull off a Fiesta? “La Fiesta de Los Angeles,” the jour- nal insisted, “is a step in the right direction.”52

The same sort of farcical behavior that had characterized the two previ-

ous Fiestas was present in 1896. For instance, a body of the “Queen’s

Maskers” raided local stores and “looted” them of merchandise—mostly

large advertising props in the shape of this product or that. Police or detec-

tives who stepped in between the “looters” and their task were placed in a

giant iron cage especially constructed for the purpose. Such highly ritualized

behavior, which turned the world upside down in a moment of revelry, did

not please all. The Minister’s [sic] Association, for instance, protested that the

looting by the Queen’s Maskers did anything but set a high moral standard

and tone for the youth of the city. They asked that it be discontinued as a

Fiesta event, being thus “immoral and corrupting in its tendencies.”53

Certain editorial commentators believed that the “Spanish features” of La

Fiesta ought to be emphasized in the 1896 celebration far more than they

had in the previous years. Trying, apparently, to do its part, the Los Angeles

Express used a Latinized cartoon character (white cotton pants and shirt,

sash, long hair and mustache) as illustration to its Fiesta stories and updates,

at best a weak effort at inclusiveness and at worst a cheap-shot ethnic car- icature.54 The Los Angeles Record, a big Fiesta booster, pushed the issue. “It

is particularly desirable that the Spanish features of La Fiesta—itself Spanish

in name—should be made as prominent as possible. California abounds in

reminders of the Spanish occupation, the nomenclature of the towns and

all the points of consequence in the country being of Spanish origin.”

Tourists had learned to expect this flavor, the paper declared. “Let them not be disappointed.”55

Yet even the Record evinced some discomfort with the Fiesta’s flavor. Just prior to La Fiesta 1896, the paper ran a contest among its readers for the best

Fiesta essay. Second prize went to a Dr. A. P. Miller of Los Angeles, no fan

of the event. Miller’s opposition to the springtime ritual sprang precisely

from the Fiesta’s preoccupation with those “Spanish features” some wished

to accentuate. Miller’s essay rehearsed standard Fiesta criticisms: it illus-

trated “foreign people, institutions, manners and customs.” The event

enshrined a “dead past much more than a living present;” it was, in short,

“un-American, un-Republican, and un-modern.” “If foreignism and the

past predominate La Fiesta never can become our annual festival,” he con-

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e7 4

cluded. He had a solution, though, of sorts. Future La Fiesta events “should

represent and illustrate the living American present, anticipating the splen-

did future which awaits Los Angeles and all California.”56 The editors of the

Record apparently felt similarly. Worried that the Fiesta might not be doing

its patriotic best, they insisted that the American eagle ought to be a regu-

lar feature atop one or more floats, and that copies of both the Declaration of Independence and the Monroe Doctrine ought to somehow be draped

around the eagle for all to see (if not read).57 In the eyes of such critics as

Dr. Miller, the Fiesta no longer needed to flirt with a Latin past. Los An- geles had outgrown that infatuation, and the time had come—even just two

years into the event’s lifetime—to drop the Fiesta’s “un-American” flavor. How “Spanish” should La Fiesta become? Those that disagreed with

Miller’s perspective found the “Spanish features” of La Fiesta among its

most attractive aspects. Even the Chicago Evening Post got into the act, writ-

ing a long story for its readers about La Fiesta opening ceremonies. “Mr.

Francis and his beautiful Spanish wife will be dressed in yellow Spanish cos-

tumes,” the paper commented, “and the native coachman, arrayed in som-

brero and a caballero cape, will look like a picture from old Spain.”58

The main parade event of 1896, which took place on April 22, was more

elaborate than any in previous Fiestas. A giant banner—“VIVA LA FIESTA

1896”—hung across the main parade route. Three hundred United States

Marines, anchored just off the coast aboard the man-of-war Philadelphia, marched alongside members of the California National Guard, the Spanish

caballeros, and squadrons of local police. Fifty Native Americans, brought

in from the California desert around Temecula, marched in native dress

(described by one local paper as “one hundred Yuma Indians with G strings

and paint”).59 The Chinese dragon, transported all the way from Marysville

in the gold country, made its appearance, carried on the shoulders of “150

Celestials.” The whole affair was graced by the music of the “La Fiesta March.”60

As always, the parade emphasized historical progression through linear

tableaux: savagery progressed to barbarism, barbarism became civilization.

Ethnic group representation garnered, as always, special comment. The first day of the Fiesta featured the exhibition of “a Mexican aged 115 years” rid-

ing in a carriage with a city official. Lest parade goers doubt the authenticity of his ancient status, he supposedly carried his baptismal certificate with him as proof of his age. Such representations of the Latin past, as if to say

“this is regional history personified,” could hardly have been lost on Fiesta audiences: the past was brown, the future is white. Perhaps even more

7 5h i s t o r y o n p a r a d e

telling was the admittance that this aged man, who had ridden with the

horsemen in La Fiesta 1895, “was forgotten till too late” in 1896, and thus

had to ride in the carriage.61 “The Tourist’s Paradise,” trumpeted a Pasadena

paper in regard to La Fiesta and Southern California history in general.

“Strange Spanish Scenes and Customs, the Happy Indolent Life of the

Early Settlers of Southern California.” Southern California history and

life were different, the stories insisted, exotic, romantic, and harmless. History could be whitewashed, especially that history that directly contra-

dicted La Fiesta’s story line. “There were a few bloodless combats during the

Mexican war,” this same Pasadena paper commented, “before Los Angeles

came permanently under American rule.” La Fiesta enshrined that view of

a pretty (sleepy, dancing) past, and added to it.62

Nor did the event traffic only in stock Mexican figures and the stock his- tory of Mexican California. Blackface was omnipresent in 1896, including

a parade skit in which a Simon Legree figure marched ahead of a slave (white in blackface, yet another whitewashing), complete with a rope

around his neck. And while the “real Indians” might have lent an air of

southwestern exoticism to the whole event, there was apparently room for

improvement regarding those that faked it. “Those that represent Indians,”

the Los Angeles Record stated, “should secure a real Indian to assist in their

make-up.” Too many individuals had simply played “circus Indian,” and

their inattention to authenticity had been challenged. If only they would

spend a bit more time on their representations of the ethnic other, all

would be fine. Playing at or appropriating ethnicity itself was not the prob- lem—that was a racial prerogative of Anglo Saxons in their city of the

future. All that was required was a little care, a little regard for detail. The

play had to be serious play.63

Did it work? As the ubiquitous Charles Fletcher Lummis himself saw it,

La Fiesta 1896 “far surpassed its predecessors. The floats had a logical theme—the development of civilization in sunny climes.”64 The Los Angeles

Times, the region’s strongest Fiesta promoter, viewed the event with pride

and expected that it would simply get better and better. “Let us regard it

as an established institution of Southern California, which means, experi-

ence and culture shall yet more fully perfect, and which shall become more

and more in fully harmonious blending with the physical perfection and

beauty of this modern Italy, this lovelier Greece of the New World.”65

In other words, the Fiesta wasn’t foreign in a dangerous way (how could

it be if many of the ethnic others weren’t ethnic at all, only wearing

makeup?). It existed as part of a master plan to render Southern California

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e7 6

into “our Italy,” to make Mediterranean allusions for an Anglo Saxon peo-

ple riding the wave of the future alongside the Pacific. Ethnic difference and diversity could be quaint and charming. La Fiesta offered “the Anglo-Saxon race” the opportunity “to learn what the Latin races know by intuition, how

to play.”66 As the legions of military escorts suggested, ethnic flavor and indulgence in non–Anglo Saxon behavior could easily be controlled. Flags

were everywhere, observers remarked (and contemporary photographs

make clear), as if to insist that the event’s ethnic or non-American back-

ground was simple play. Omnipresent, too, was the militaristic flavor of La Fiesta, no doubt related to the patriotism of the event. In keeping with its

Civil War sensibilities, La Fiesta 1896 even witnessed a Civil War reconcil-

iation of sorts, when three former Union soldiers and three former

Confederates raised the American flag together. But merriment and nationalism came at a price. Some people just did-

n’t appreciate La Fiesta, or perhaps they didn’t quite understand that the

parade’s narrative really was a story of national and racial progress. Attacks

continued. People, as essayist Miller had done, chastised La Fiesta for pre-

cisely the parade’s allusions to a Latin California past—not that it was

faked or romanticized, but that it was done at all. “Why the very name of

the thing leaves a bad taste in the mouth,” editorialized a paper in San

Bernardino County. “It is foreign. Indeed the whole business is un-

American, gotten up by an un-American crowd of adventurers in Spring

Street.” Calling the event “La Fake,” the editors of the Colton Chronicle

declared La Fiesta “an ‘exotic’ transplanted from foreign shores.”67

The watchdog anti-Catholic America Protective Association (APA) went

after La Fiesta as a dangerous throwback, a capitulation to “rags and rum.”

“Some day, when Los Angeles becomes civilized, our people will be

ashamed of all this monkeyism, this relic of medieval Romanism; the orig-

inal object of which was to amuse, and hold in check a people degraded and

impoverished by robbery and superstition.”68 The California Voice agreed.

Calling the Fiesta “unworthy of a christian people,” the paper condemned

the event for encouraging public drunkenness and debauchery. La Fiesta

was but “a waste of time and money, and leaves few if any lessons of real

value to anybody. It is a step backward toward heathenism rather than

advancement toward a higher plane.”69

Some clearly feared that the Fiesta was just going too far, that its mixture

of races and ethnicities, scripted though it was, did more harm than good,

especially as diversity might call into question certainties of racial hierarchy.

The Los Angeles Record put one perspective quite succinctly. “Either bar the

7 7h i s t o r y o n p a r a d e

Chinese altogether from participating in the parade lest spectators have

another chance to say that the display of those ‘heathens’ was the most elab-

orate of all, while this very public is looking down on the same as inferior

human beings, or acknowledge in other affairs their claim of rights and privileges enjoyed by all individuals of any other nationality living in this

country.”70 The statement is striking for its allusion to the mere suggestion

of equality, given that the experience of Chinese in Los Angeles had been

anything but egalitarian.71

The objections raised by such groups as the Minister’s Association, which

attacked La Fiesta as “a remnant of a lower civilization than now prevails

in Protestant Southern California,” continued to dog Fiesta planners, even

well after the week-long event had closed.72 Local Protestant clergy disliked

the end-of-the week carnival or All Fools’ Nite, finding in it too many objectionable practices (if not objectionable people). Many resented the

anonymity of the “maskers,” feeling that concealment encouraged antiso-

cial behavior, public drunkenness, and lewdness. Others struck out against

the gender-bending cross-dressing tendencies of those celebrants in the

final day of La Fiesta. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union lent its voice to objections. Others feared that mob action would be the natural

counterpart to the Fiesta’s ability to draw tens of thousands of people out

of doors and into Los Angeles public space. Not a few suggested that La

Fiesta, which had been seen as a different sort of festival than Mardi Gras, had in fact degenerated into just the sort of lawlessness and excess they

imagined characterized events in New Orleans.

“Good boys who never before had drank, smoked, or had enjoyed

women,” complained the Los Angeles Non Partisan, “fell as much so as his

sisters.” What was more, La Fiesta’s supposed beneficent effect in regard to the poor (especially at the time of national economic depression) rang hol-

low: “Great fun and the jails full of tramps and honest men, the streets full

of men hungry and homeless. Where were the benefits from the La Fiesta for charity? No a cent, not a crust. To hell with the poor so long as we can

make merry and enjoy ourselves.”73

The result of such worry, pledged in public venues like meetings and

newspaper stories, was a draconian Fiesta solution. Masks were forbidden

unless the wearer was part of an official function or parade. No longer could everyday Fiesta-ites don masks to create anonymity, lest they court the

unwanted attention of the authorities.

Despite the praise of such luminaries and regional commentators as

Charles Fletcher Lummis, it is likely that the reception of Fiesta 1896 was

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e7 8

less than the event planners and boosters would have liked. Only three years

old, the Fiesta seemed to have run out of steam; perhaps, as many have sug-

gested, city fathers could only focus so much attention on the event in the

face of other pressing municipal issues. A sense of waning interest in La

Fiesta prompted Lummis himself to, somewhat defensively, point out the

Fiesta’s benefits. The Fiesta marked an important racial and cultural tran- sition, that proverbial “step in the right direction,” in that it showed that

Anglo Saxons could take recreational advantage of the open space and

warm weather of the Southwest. As Lummis had stated before, by utilizing

the cultural traditions of the region’s Mexicans, Anglos could move racially

forward themselves by displaying an uncharacteristic playfulness in the

out-of-doors.74

By 1897, the Merchants Association had merged with the Manufacturers

Association to form, logically enough, the Merchants and Manufacturers

Association. The group, perhaps now weary of hosting the annual event,

called a public meeting in the spring of 1896—the recent Fiesta fresh in

their minds—to ask whether their sponsorship should continue into 1897.

Opinions, generally favorable, nonetheless tended toward arguments about

shortening the celebration to three, or even two, days. But most, if not all,

considered that the Fiesta had become part and parcel of civic pride and

should continue. One Angeleno put the matter simply when he suggested

that Los Angeles moved forward with the Fiesta and moved backward

without it.75 The event was considered a public relations necessity, a great

and powerful advertising magnet for capital and tourists both. It must

continue.

Therefore, not long after the close of Fiesta 1896 came the plans for

Fiesta 1897. A veritable who’s who of local business elites, the Executive

Committee met in La Fiesta rooms of the Chamber of Commerce. Led by

the Committee of Thirty, planners sought to determine what commercial

Los Angeles thought of the job they were doing. In a survey of local busi-

nesses, the Chamber asked whether or not the Committee of Thirty had

adequately managed the Fiesta just held. Should it continue to be the

major administrative body of La Fiesta de Los Angeles?

The survey relayed the local community’s support, and the Chamber of

Commerce added a plea for permanent status for La Fiesta, based on the

fact that it was “of great benefit to Los Angeles and to all of southern Cali- fornia in attracting visitors to this section from the eastern states and in

stimulating praiseworthy patriotism.”76 Accordingly, the “Fiesta Associa-

tion” was incorporated under California law in the summer of 1896; this

7 9h i s t o r y o n p a r a d e

group became an arm of the Chamber of Commerce, complete with ded-

icated “Fiesta Rooms” at the Chamber building downtown.

Planning La Fiesta, despite the seemingly endless need to raise money,

had become fairly straightforward by early 1897. The Committee of Thirty

and Executive Committee listened to entrepreneurs wishing to cash in on

the ethnic flavor of the event. For instance, they heard a plan offered by a Mr. Dunham to supply Indians for the 1897 event at $1 a piece, much as

Lummis himself had done in earlier years. The Executive Committee ten-

tatively agreed to let Dunham push forward with his plans but reminded

him that any Indians must be “gotten up in a manner satisfactory to the

Committee.” Ethnicity was good, but only “satisfactory” ethnicity counted.

The committee eventually contracted with a different purveyor, a Mr. Patton, “for the use of his Indians.” Fiesta planners also contracted with

local impresario L. E. Behymer to sell the official Fiesta program.77

Just before the 1897 Fiesta, planners, fearful that the event had become

somewhat stale, tried to drum up interest. Creating a new category of

Fiesta participant, the Executive Committee invented the “Sir Knights of

La Fiesta.” Three men would be selected each year, men who had distin-

guished themselves as great citizens of Los Angeles. The Knights would

serve as special liaisons to the Queen, and they would be “gotten up” in

outfits befitting their station. The 1897 planners again had to fend off the organized opposition of such

groups as the Woman’s Home Missionary Society of Southern California

and the WCTU, which vociferously objected to the masking practice and

the drunken revelries of All Fools’ Nite. Some journalistic entreaties against

the event used All Fools’ Nite to question whether or not Los Angeles

deserved the title “City of Angels.” Perhaps the days of Los Diablos had

returned? Such complaints were received both by the Los Angeles City

Council and the Fiesta’s own Committee on Public Morals. The City

Council responded by passing a municipal ordinance prohibiting “the

wearing of masks, false whiskers, or otherwise disguising the person”

between the hours of 11:30 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. Violators faced jail time or

fines (or both). The police decided to enforce order by placing masked officers amidst the rowdies. Clearly the WCTU’s vehemence over the mat- ter had everything to do with drunken men’s behavior toward women at the

Fiesta; the organization decried the actions of men and boys who “grossly

insulted and made outrageous advances on the womanhood of Los

Angeles.”78 The Evening Express offered a rhyming prescription for level- headed behavior:

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e8 0

Sail in for fun

Don’t wear a gun,

And to the rash give warning,

Not to get wild

Or be defiled

By a big head in the morning79

The 1897 edition went off much like previous La Fiestas. The Indians came again, camping at Second and Vine and using the streetcars to ride

to and from the Fiesta grounds where they danced. Angelenos pushed and

shoved one another trying to get good vantages to see the dancing. One

tourist thought that only a handful of natives understood or knew the tra-

ditional dances, and he repeated the supposed truism regarding their sure

disappearance from history’s stage. “With their death,” he wrote, “these

dances will have become a tradition to lighten the pages of some future

historian.”80

Fiesta 1897 did not make very much money, at least not for its incorpo-

rated self. Receipts tallied just about $150 in the bank, with Fiesta property

in the neighborhood of $6,500. Sniping in local papers increased. Maybe

Los Angeles could do without an annual Fiesta? Maybe the city had out-

grown its “saturnalia” and ought to concentrate instead on a more busi-

nesslike convention?81

With the close of 1897’s Fiesta, the M & M again called a meeting to decide

whether the event should continue into the next year. Many favored it, but

some objected that the municipal expense was wasted on the celebration and

ought be put to better use in civic improvements. It was felt that the Fiesta

“demoralized” the studies of the city’s schoolchildren, giving them an excuse

to skip school and closing each year as it did with the “grand and glorious

debauch” of All Fools’ Nite. Yet one supporter countered that the Fiesta’s bal-

ance sheet should consider not the impossible-to-figure bottom line, but rather the utility of “pleasure and education. We live for those things too,

don’t we?”82 In the end, planners simply opted not to endorse “All Fools’ Nite”

at all; better, they thought, to just keep quiet about it.

In the fall of 1897, the Executive Committee decided that yes, there

ought to be a Fiesta 1898. The theme would be wrapped around the Gold

Rush, marking as it did the fiftieth anniversary of James Marshall’s famed and fateful discovery of a gold nugget in John Sutter’s millrace. Plans for the

event, now scheduled for May, went ahead apace. Again, the worrisome

aspects of All Fools’ Nite became the focus of concerted action, prompting

8 1h i s t o r y o n p a r a d e

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e8 2

the City Council to toughen the anti-masking ordinance of the previous

year (it was broadened to include certain hours throughout the week-long

event).

By early 1898, funding had become a critical problem. Fiesta planners

couldn’t get the railroad corporations as interested as they had previously

been. Postponement seemed the best option. But within a few weeks, by the

end of February, optimism had risen anew, and the Committee of Thirty

decided to push forward with La Fiesta ’98. With only a month to go, the

committee felt it necessary to get a pep talk from General Harrison Gray

Otis of the Los Angeles Times. He came to the Fiesta rooms and addressed

the group “on the general features of La Fiesta.”83 Would that there were

notes from that address!

Other Fiesta opponents had more fierce objections. The Porcupine called the event the “Fiesta Farce,” and suggested that it was childish, un-

American, even shameful. The East Side News concurred: Los Angeles had

progressed far enough from its ethnic roots. The Fiesta was unpatriotic.

Flirtation with ethnic and racial cultures other than Anglo American had

made it so. It should be changed or postponed or even eliminated. The staid

Tournament of Roses in nearby Pasadena was a better celebration and

more in keeping with Los Angeles’ look to the future. Concentrate on that

event, Fiesta bashers concluded. La Fiesta de Los Angeles had done its

work well; it had advertised the city in a period when such publicity was

necessary. Now, at the brink of the new century, the event’s roots had

proven embarrassing. It was, the editor of a small paper east of the city

declared, the “Los Angeles Saturnalia,” and “that jaundiced jowl of jack-

assery.” In short, the color of the city of the future was white, and the

sooner the Fiesta organizers recognized and responded to that truism, the

better.84

One paper continued, not surprisingly, to wave the banner of La Fiesta.

The Los Angeles Times, by the late 1890s the preeminent paper of the region,

had adopted the Fiesta as its own boosterism tool. Harrison Gray Otis of

the Times, no shrinking violet he, championed the event as very Los

Angeles, timely and appropriate. Even if the major rail companies, the

Southern Pacific and Santa Fe especially, did not step up to the plate with their usual Fiesta contributions, Otis and his Times urged Los Angeles that

the Fiesta must go on. He became a driving force behind the event, taking

over, at least temporarily, as president of the Committee of Thirty. Needless

to say, the support of the Times, and its liberal use of ink in the matter,

8 3h i s t o r y o n p a r a d e

earned the Fiesta the opposition of those papers and those editors in the

labor camp.

Labor’s reaction to the Fiesta does not seem to have been overtly politi-

cal; rather, it seems that the Times’s support of the event, which clearly by

1897 had its problems, offered newspapers like the Los Angeles Citizen the chance to go after Harrison Gray Otis on a new front. This isn’t to say that

opposition was an empty vessel. On the contrary. As the decision whether

to hold an 1898 Fiesta heated up, more voices arose in spirited reaction.

Much was made, for instance, of Quaker opposition to La Fiesta, especially

when the Friends colony in Whittier (out of which would emerge the

young Richard Nixon some years later) condemned the event as “sinful and

demoralizing.” Such a perspective got further support when the California

Voice declared the Fiesta a “debauch,” representative only of “an effete civ- ilization,” immoral, horrible, and of danger to women. The city’s Methodist

ministers concurred, denouncing La Fiesta in group session.85

La Fiesta’s supposed “multiculturalism,” at least the 1890s version of the

concept, did not hold water with the event’s opponents. They attacked it

for, as they claimed, its tendencies toward race mixing. “The heathen

Chinee, Indians and Mexicans are appealed to join in the parade with

their heathen, savage and semi-barbarous costumes, implements of war,

etc., all of which are far from elevating in their character.” If only, the

California Voice seems to have pleaded, if only Los Angeles could have a

good honest Anglo Saxon parade, something other than “this relic of the

dark ages.” This nod to other groups in the society, in the city, in the state,

however mild, however calculated (however controlled!), was too much.

Best just to squash, in the words of the good Quakers of Whittier, the “per-

nicious influence of this spectacular view of an antiquated civilization.”86

“Give us an American Fiesta,” declared the East Side News.87

Then came the all-out attack on La Fiesta. In March 1898, amidst the

Times assurances that all was copacetic with Fiesta 1898 (dates had been

fixed for early May), the Los Angeles Record printed a bombshell of a story. Declaring that ninety-eight illegitimate births could be traced directly to All

Fools’ Nite in 1896, the paper went on record with the sharpest critique of

La Fiesta yet. Implicitly associating the event’s moral lassitude with out-

dated and uncivilized (i.e., ethnic) behavior, the paper insisted that the

Fiesta had run its course of popularity and importance.88 The Times tried

to fight off the wild accusation, essentially pointing out in polite language that if the charge were true, Los Angeles fertility rates would exceed those

of any other place on earth. “American girls are not brought up like hot-

house plants,” the Times declared.89

T h e S p a n i s h A m e r i c a n Wa r a n d t h e S p a n i s h F i e s t a : No w W h a t D o W e D o ?

The feeling is too anti-Spanish to enjoy caballeros or señoritas decked

in reds and yellows. It wouldn’t surprise us to see the thing hooted

off the streets.The citizenship of this favored section advertise their incompetency to entertain the public when they stoop to Spanish

models, such as mask carnivals and bull baiting, as on previous

occasions.

Los Angeles Independent, March 12, 1898

Long before Los Angeles or California embraced Progressivism’s initiative

and referendum proposals, those electoral innovations that allowed citizens

to make their voices heard above the chatter of the privileged, La Fiesta

acted as a public referendum. That much is clear simply by the amount of

attention it received, not only in the audiences that observed the springtime

ritual but in the din surrounding each year’s planning (or evaluating) as

well. It would of course be too easy to say that La Fiesta operated as a ref-

erendum on any single issue or concern. The event crossed too many

boundaries for that. It offered simultaneous discussion of any number of things: public drunkenness, monarchical hangovers, ritual, advertising,

privilege, the place of the city in the region, etc.

But there’s no question that La Fiesta was about race as well, or at least

about the place of race and ethnicity in the agreed-upon fictions of regional history. From the parade’s Whiggish presentation of floats moving through both space and time, to the ways in which people of color found themselves

portrayed on those floats, La Fiesta co-mingled racial triumph and regional identity. Given organized planning that insisted La Fiesta honor so-called

Spanish traditions in the region at the expense of the contemporary pres-

ence of Mexican people in Los Angeles, something was bound to give as the

United States contemplated war with Spain. La Fiesta 1898 died a-borning.

Opposition to the event began to converge from several different van- tages by the spring. Moral and religious outrage, especially at the supposed

excesses and lack of decorum induced by All Fools’ Nite — obviously

inflamed by the charges of illegitimate births—made up one line of attack. Local politics ensured that the Fiesta cheerleading performed by Harrison

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e8 4

Gray Otis and the Los Angeles Times would provoke a negative response

from labor and labor papers. Hinterland papers sniped at the Fiesta as too

expensive or too tied to downtown Los Angeles merchants and mercantile

ambitions. Atop all this came the rising tensions between the United States

and Spain.

Rumors of war obviously created a big problem for Fiesta planners.

Having tried to get La Fiesta 1898 onto solid footing, event planners found

themselves caught up in a patriotic bind. How could a supposedly Spanish

event remain overtly patriotic in the midst of jingoistic anti-Spain thought

and behavior? It was one thing to do away with All Fools’ Nite, which plan-

ners proposed to do (limiting masking to daylight hours), but what of the

overall feel of the thing? How could La Fiesta’s supposed “Spanish-ness” be

seen as anything but the wrong sentiment at the doorstep of war? As a

prominent U.S. Army officer offered, La Fiesta “being in name and other ways of Spanish origin makes the celebration especially in bad taste at this

time.”90 Ever the critic of the event, the Colton Chronicle put that matter

more succinctly, managing to take a swipe at La Fiesta’s artificiality and patriotic shortcomings in one sentence. “That Los Angeles Fiesta may have

to give way to a little real experience with the Spanish.”91

Possible war between the United States and Spain prompted the post-

ponement of Fiesta planning in late April 1898. The money already sub-

scribed to the event was turned over to the local National Guard brigade,

which was just then being outfitted for war. The United States declared war against Spain in late April, just about the time that the annual Fiesta would

have taken place.

Fiesta planners and local elites explained their decision to call the event

off, and they also took time to review the previous Fiestas. The organizing committee declared “that on account of war with Spain it was impossible

to hold the celebration for the reason that the best judgment of all con-

sulted was that a celebration at that time would be inappropriate.” “La

Fiesta Was Too Spanish,” ran a fairly typical headline.92 Then again, hav-

ing but $51 in the bank might have had something to do with the post-

ponement. Too, the retreat of the big railroad corporations so critical to the

success of previous Fiestas did not help much. The committee suggested

that the “moral effect of the refusal of these great corporations . . . produced a most depressing effect.” 93

Organizers figured that holding a celebration that was so self-consciously Spanish (as opposed, needless to say, to Mexican) would be, at best, ironic.

At worst, La Fiesta 1898 could be deemed insultingly unpatriotic, what with

8 5h i s t o r y o n p a r a d e

its tribute to monarchy and Spain. Such “frolic under partially Spanish col-

ors and a Spanish name would be not only ridiculous but an affront to the nation,” wrote the editor of Greater Los Angeles. The Committee of Thirty

felt that the “public mind would not be in harmony with the idea of a cel-

ebration, which, by precedent, partook in name and somewhat in charac-

ter of a Spanish celebration, [and] determined that it would be inappro-

priate and unadvisable to hold a Fiesta of the usual character under the

conditions then existing.” Fiesta colors came under attack as un-American;

they ought to be replaced with the red, white, and blue. Others felt that the

Fiesta’s posters and visual publicity were themselves un-American and inap-

propriate. Some, Harrison Gray Otis among them, thought that the show

ought to be turned to overt patriotism (which, actually, it always had been),

by restyling it into “La Reina Columbia.” But in the end, the decision to

donate money to the National Guard was deemed patriotic enough. “Those

Fiesta funds will be spent Spanish after all,” stated one paper. It probably

didn’t help matters much when a rumor began to circulate that the Fiesta

caballeros (who were most likely about as Spanish as Harrison Gray Otis)

had been called up for enemy duty in Havana.94

We should not ignore the ways in which patriotism was woven into the

event, even into its postponement. Flags and expressions of nationalism had

accompanied the various annual Fiestas since 1894; there is little doubt that

the carnival met a need for enthusiastic displays of “Americanism,” even as

those displays were themselves touched with slight features of ethnic or

national difference. With war threatened, and eventually arrived, La Fiesta had to respond or disappear. By spring of 1898, some in Los Angeles wor-

ried that the city’s coastal defenses were not sufficient to repel a foreign assault. Such were the fears induced by affairs in Cuba. La Fiesta could not possibly withstand that kind of environment; not only was the event can-

celed, but Los Angeles mounted a campaign for a wildly patriotic Fourth

of July parade and festival, one that removed allusions to Spain or the Old

World. “This cruel war seems to be death to everything Spanish, even in

name,” was the surmise of the Fallbrook Observer.95

The Fiesta was likely not the only victim. Some believed that the region’s

Spanish street names ought to be changed to English. Rumor traffic about such things as the caballeros riding to Spain’s aid no doubt offered others the opportunity to make a dig at the region’s Latinos. For instance,

Chamber of Commerce stalwart W. C. Patterson wrote that the frenzy of

life in Southern California in the 1890s had prompted a community-wide

need for relief. “As a result of this condition,” he pointed out, “and

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e8 6

influenced by the tendencies of the Spanish American citizens of Southern California, who are never so mercenary as to forego the opportunity of

indulging in a frolic festival or fiesta, the idea was evolved of establishing in Los Angeles an annual affair.” La Fiesta was, he said, “a breathing spell” from the hustle and bustle of life in the busy nineties. In other words, the

sleepiness of 1830s Mexican Los Angeles, Patterson claimed in this nod to

a traditional slur, could yet play a role in the Anglo Saxon city.

The city had put on four consecutive Fiestas, and W. C. Patterson found

them each unique, each instructive in its own way, layer after layer of rep-

resentation, each atop the other. “History, mythology and poetry have

been drawn upon most freely for themes, to be represented by floats . . . rendered not only attractive and beautiful, but educational. The system of

floats on each occasion represents a certain idea or connected series of ideas. Some of these representations have set many a person to renewed

study of the literature of the ages.”96

La Fiesta 1899 was also canceled, in favor of the Free Harbor Jubilee held

in celebration of the federal appropriation to build a harbor in San Pedro.

Fiesta officials and leaders loaned various items to the jubilee planners. In March 1899, the Fiesta Association disbanded. The association was in debt,

and it had a fire sale of lumber, seats, and other Fiesta accoutrements in order to raise money. It looked as though La Fiesta de Los Angeles had run

its course.

Charles Fletcher Lummis, ever a booster and fan of La Fiesta de Los

Angeles, had written of the pageant in the mid-1890s that if “by any chance,

it should be allowed to die out for a year or two, it would soon again be

renewed, for the people would demand it.”97 Lummis was both right and

wrong. In the fall of 1900, after a Fiesta hiatus of more than three years, it

looked as though the event might be revived. After all, La Fiesta did have

its fans. “Los Angeles made a great mistake when she abandoned her fiesta,” wrote the Los Angeles Herald, “although the brush with Spain rendered its

postponement imperative.” Should the city bring la Fiesta back?

Yes, supporters believed. But the parade and pageant needed, for a vari-

ety of reasons, to look different. The celebration even needed a different name. “La Fiesta de Flores” was the first, grammatically clumsy choice, an event that, like Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses, highlighted less the city’s

past than its floral present. The change, to a “new and improved Fiesta” pleased many, for it promised “to take the place of the old, European, un-

American, monarchical affair which died out a few years ago,” wrote the East Side News. “At last the merchants and business men are coming to their

8 7h i s t o r y o n p a r a d e

senses. The more sensible and more-American element having cried down

and laughed down the medieval, Southern Europe, La Fiesta, with its mock

queens and monarchical flummery, the city is now sobered and rational enough to inaugurate a Fair that will do as great credit, stimulate industry

and art and benefit all branches of business as much as the fool La Fiesta injured legitimate traffic.”98

To make the break with the past all the greater, Fiesta de los Flores (they

got the name right in short order) lasted only a few days, as opposed to a

week.99 To top it off, they even planned for the visit of a special outside guest: President William McKinley, the man responsible for U.S. involve-

ment in the Spanish American War. The symbolism was not lost on anti-

Fiesta papers, who urged the event’s organizers not to make McKinley “a

side show to a week of bacchanalian festivity, that should have passed out

of existence with the passing of Spanish influence in America.” In short, it was time for an “American” fiesta as opposed to a “Spanish” event.100 Thus it was: the Los Angeles Times “Fiesta number” of May 1901 utilized

“American” themes in its cover. Gone were the Latin, albeit highly stylized,

images of the last century. Just a few months shy of assassination, William

McKinley did come to Los Angeles for the festival, where flags waved just as much as flowers.

The spring of 1902 saw open ethnic controversy. Apparently in response

to unflattering remarks made by Caroline Severance, a prominent woman in Los Angeles civic affairs, a delegation of “Spanish American” women threatened to withdraw from that year’s festival. According to the historian

Gayle Gullett’s thoughtful analysis, Severance, a well-respected women’s

rights activist and former abolitionist now in her eighties, had painted her-

self into a corner with comments about race. White women, she said,

needed to learn to disregard race in social interaction in favor of respect for

“education, character and good breeding.” While obviously exchanging

racial assumptions for class hierarchies, Severance’s comments were

nonetheless at least somewhat at the front edge of racial thought and behav-

ior in 1902 Los Angeles. She ran into trouble, though, by pushing her

arguments into very touchy racial territory. Why, she wondered, were white

Americans so quick to draw the racial line between black and white when

they interacted socially or otherwise with “representatives of other dark

races,” including “Spanish, Italian, East Indian, etc.”?

At this, Californio women took great offense. Who did Caroline Severance think she was? How dare she call them black? As Gullett

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e8 8

describes their angry response: “They were not white, as were Anglo-

Saxons, but neither were they dark in the same sense as working-class

Mexicans, Indians, or African Americans.” “The Color Line Invades Fiesta”

ran the headline in the Los Angeles Times. But of course it had always been

part there, in precisely the terms that the Severance controversy had

revealed. Racial and ethnic categories were all about history and hierarchy

out here in the Far West, and being “white” or “Spanish” or “Mexican” mat-

tered a great deal. All this had perhaps previously been expressed a bit

more subtly or politely, or feebly disguised as playful fun. Convinced that

the presence of “Spanish American” ties to the past were critical to not only

the Fiesta but, by extension, regional understandings of race and racial hier-

archy, the Times and Fiesta organizers convinced the Californio women to

participate in the 1902 parade. But the parade was dying, and local con-

troversy that struck at the heart of the event’s assumptions could not have

helped matters much.101

In the twentieth century, the city held intermittent Fiestas de Las Flores,

up through the years of the Depression. While these flower festivals were popular, along with the increasingly popular Tournament of Roses, no cel-

ebration or pageant in the twentieth century matched the crowds and exu-

berance of the Fiestas of the late 1890s. Gone were those earlier days that saw

The City Fathers using all their power

To bring the past within the present hour

That their fair proteges might plainly see

The things that are, and things that used to be102

La Fiesta de Los Angeles, an important feature of the city’s growth and

increasing sense of identity, had done its work. As an icon in the invention

of regional tradition, the ambitious spectacle urged Angelenos to think cer-

tain ways about the past and its inevitable transitions. Along the way, the

event proved to be a brilliant advertising stroke, boosting the city it simul-

taneously explained. That part of the explaining had everything to do with

interpreting the Mexican history of Los Angeles cannot be denied. In the

events ordered, even militarized movement through the streets and crowds

of excited observers, La Fiesta offered pedagogical insights to those who would pay attention.

Within less than twenty years of its founding, La Fiesta would be the

model for another fascinating and iconic cultural phenomenon in the

8 9h i s t o r y o n p a r a d e

region, John Steven McGroarty’s famed Mission Play. But that is getting

ahead of the story. In chapter 3, our examination of the rise of Anglo Los

Angeles focuses on an environmental subject, one that runs through the

very heart of the city. We turn to the Los Angeles River and the role it plays

in regional memory. At the same time, we consider the role regional mem-

ory plays in the life and times of the river itself.

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e9 0

T h r e e

Remembering a River

I went to the River Station for an hour, and crossed over into the dirt and grime of Mexican Los Angeles.

G . B r o m l e y O x n a m , diary entry, Los Angeles, 1913

No scientist will quarrel with [the] belief that the experiment in Southern California will work out to the benefit of the Saxon.

C h a r l e s F l e t c h e r L u m m i s , 18961

The Los Angeles River is best known by historians of California and the general public for its great floods.

Los Angeles River Pollution Committee Report, 19492

walkin’ along by the l.a. river stepping on broken glass, kicking cans she’s tellin’ me i don’t even know her i guess there’s some things i won’t understand i’d love to float away like old tom sawyer i’d love to run away and be huck finn poor river empty river

E . , “l.a. river,” 19933

9 1

In 1906, a Los Angeles settlement house worker named Amanda Mathews

Chase published a book of stories about Mexicans called The Hieroglyphics of

Love: Stories of Sonoratown and Old Mexico. She dedicated the little volume

to her settlement house colleagues, offering that it was made up of senti- mental tales of “the Mexican peonada . . . a dark and lowly people, who are

yet rich with the riches of the poor, and wise with the wisdom of the simple.”

Amanda Mathews Chase liked metaphors about Los Angeles Mexicans.

She returned again and again in the book’s stories to one in particular:

water. The people in her stories lived close to water, down at the edge of the

Los Angeles River. Within sight of Los Angeles, “a handsome, bustling,

modern city,” their neighborhood existed in a world apart: “dirty, peaceful,

unprogressive.” In Chase’s eyes, the city’s Mexican residents not only lived

near water, they moved like water. Even one of her official reports as home teacher working with the Mexican families down near the river utilized

watery images. She referred to a class of Mexican women (prior to instruc-

tion) as “a timid, sloppy, baby-submerged lot.” It was clear from all these

metaphors sailing by that Amanda Chase expected Mexicans to know

about water, especially about the Los Angeles River, its courses, its move-

ments. The river’s temperament had become their own. It is as if the book’s

Mexicans were water themselves: elemental, each individual but a “drift

from the tide of cheap Mexican labor . . . a tide which seeps continually

through the ruinous adobe tenements of ‘Sonoratown.’ ”4

Chase’s naturalization of Mexicans as “river people” runs throughout

the entire book. A woman in a story spoke in a “sluggish but endless cur-

rent of conversation” that her husband—of course named Juan Garcia—

“was not interested in damming,” because he was lazy and drunk. The

watery repetition flows on. “Señora Garcia would have liked to argue the matter further, and had quite a notion insisting on Teodota’s giving up the

paper, but there was no anchoring her conversational bark. She floated on to relating how the rats once ate the rent receipt, and before one could learn

whether she had been obliged to pay the rent over again, she was adrift on

Teodota’s father’s aunt’s fear of the unpleasant rodents, and the paper was

left far behind.”5 Rats and water. Was this Mexican Los Angeles?

Adrift in liquid inertia, the “old Mexican life” down at river’s edge threat-

ened to be “overflowed by the tide of American progress.” One man in an Amanda Chase story even seeks an escape in the river. In doing so, Juan

Gallardo changes the Los Angeles River, and he becomes one with it: “Juan

turned in the direction of the river, thus giving time for escape. He was

merely acting in unwilling obedience to a habit grown too strong for him.

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e9 2

The separate acts of unselfishness, the daily and hourly cherishing of his sulky little mistress, had dammed the current of his selfish passion and turned it into a new channel of loving.”6

This chapter is an exploration not so much of metaphorical connections

between people and water, Mexicans and the Los Angeles River, but about

other, similar sorts of associations made by Anglo Los Angeles. “Remem-

bering a River” is about “new channels,” not so much of loving, but of the

river itself, about its startling transformation from nineteenth-century

stream to twentieth-century flood control device. Amanda Mathews Chase thought and wrote about Los Angeles Mexicans and a kind of curious eth-

nic affinity with the river. In doing so, she revealed ethnocentric patterns of belief that characterized Mexicans as primitive, close to nature. This in

turn led to a perception that Chase turned into metaphor, of Mexicans hav-

ing particular and proximate knowledge of the Los Angeles River. It would

seem as if she was not alone in her thinking.7 But that is getting slightly

ahead of the Los Angeles River story. To understand dimensions of ethnicity

and water, we have to start well before 1906, before Amanda Mathews

Chase, before any “hieroglyphics of love.”

T h e R i v e r a t t h e C i t y’s H e a r t

Were it not for the Los Angeles River, the city that shares its name would

not be where it is today. Were it not for the Los Angeles River, Los Angeles

would not be at all. The Los Angeles River has always been at the heart of

whichever human community is in the basin: Gabrielino village, Spanish

outpost, Mexican pueblo, American city. The river has been asked to play

many roles. It has supplied the residents of the city and basin with water

to drink and spread amidst their grapes, oranges, and other crops. It has

been an instrument by which people could locate themselves on the land-

scape. It has been a critical dividing line, not only between east and west,

north and south, but between races, classes, neighborhoods. As this chap-

ter will explore in some depth, the river has also been a place where ideas

and beliefs about the past, present, and future of Los Angeles have been

raised and contested.

Here where the river gently winds through the girdle of hills, lies a soil so

saturated with the past that however far back the mind roams one can

never detach it from its human background. . . . It is always there, quiet

and unobtrusive, like a great artery running through the human body.8

9 3r e m e m b e r i n g a r i v e r

Pulled from the pages of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, this requiem

describes the soil around every river as much as it does that of the novel-

ist’s beloved Seine. Believe it or not, it also conjures up the Los Angeles

River. Rivers are saturated with the past. They can tell stories as much as

they can be characters in stories if listened to and studied carefully enough.

What is especially significant is that rivers can reveal as much about cultural transitions and cultural conflicts as about economic, landscape, or politi- cal change. The puny Los Angeles River, so unlike the noble Seine, is also

a river in which human memory mingles with water. It is a river all about

memory, a place where nature and culture surely flow together. Ask Southern California residents today about the Los Angeles River, and

the response may well be quizzical. “What Los Angeles River?” As a river,

the Los Angeles River is an inside joke, an urban legend. It is something

that supposedly once was but rarely is, something that can be dismissed

with cynical humor (or, as in the case of a recent ad for Nike outdoor climb-

ing gear that made use of an image of the river as an entirely dry industrial

site, attached to hip, wry commercialism).9

There are good reasons for jokes. The river really isn’t much of a river

anymore, and it hasn’t been so for a long time. It still has water, it still has

flora and fauna, it can still drown the unfortunate or careless, the drunk, the young, or the unwary.10 But instead of a river, the Los Angeles River is

now a gray channel, concrete-lined at both sides and bottom, a sad ghost

that, wrote Lawrence Clark Powell, “no one would dignify with the name

river.”11 The Los Angeles River is today more flood control instrument than river, victim of a century-long “fluvial lobotomy.”12 The Los Angeles River is a mechanized, cold river, held firmly in place by concrete and engineer- ing logic.

This channel river is of course a human invention. Socially constructed

and physically engineered, it is, however, no less historically significant for supposedly no longer being a river than it was as a river many years ago. A

once-river can be important. As seeming proof of its non-river status, local

politicians, usually City Council members or county supervisors anxious to

make the papers, rise up every once in a while with an argument that the

river, precisely because it isn’t a river, really ought to be a freeway. That

would solve the Los Angeles basin’s overcrowded roadway problem, they

say. After all, city bus drivers do practice in it.13Fig.17abouthere

Just over two hundred years ago, there was the river without Spanish or

English name. With headwaters twelve miles northwest of present-day

downtown Los Angeles, the Los Angeles River is historically a lovely, if

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e9 4

9 5r e m e m b e r i n g a r i v e r

small, river. Alternately above and below ground until just north of

Cahuenga Pass, where it pops up above ground, the river gathers strength

and direction as it meanders southeast. Near where Glendale, once River-

dale, is today, the river turns to the south and runs east of present-day

Dodger Stadium through Elysian Gap. Just below where Elysian Park is

today, the river once made a graceful, lazy S-curve before straightening out

in its final stretch to the Pacific Ocean. The river’s entire course is about fifty miles. Once, almost before human memory records, it flowed far west of its current concrete bed, which now takes it through one of the city’s most

glaring deindustrialized shells out back of Union Station. Fig.18abouthere

Juan Crespi, the diarist of the late eighteenth-century Portolá expedition,

made certain to note the river’s delights. In the late summer of 1769, walk-

ing to a point somewhere near where the Pasadena Freeway approaches

downtown today, Crespi and party stumbled onto the little river. “We set

out from the valley in the morning and followed the same plain in a west-

erly direction,” he wrote. “After traveling about a league and a half through

a pass between low hills, we encountered a very spacious valley, well grown

with cottonwoods and alders, among which ran a beautiful river from the

Figure 17. The river that was: The Los Angeles River, late nineteenth century.

Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e9 6

north-northwest, and then, doubling the point of a steep hill, it went on

afterwards to the south. . . . We halted not very far from river, which we

named Porciuncula. . . . This plain where the river runs is very extensive.

It has good land for planting all kinds of grain and seeds, and is the most

suitable site of all that we have seen for a mission, for it has all the requi-

sites for a large settlement.”

Such an idyll had attracted others well before the colonists, people who

doubtless had a name for the beautiful little river. As Crespi and party

reached the river’s banks, “about eight heathen from a good village came to

visit us; they live in this delightful place among the trees on the river.”14 The

encounter proved peaceful. Gifts were exchanged, and the Indians blew

smoke in the faces of the Spaniards, a gesture of friendliness. Crespi’s diary

indicates that the land surrounding the river was rich and fertile, and he was

careful to note several times that grains and other produce would grow in

abundance with but a little concerted labor.

A decade later, acting on information like that supplied by Juan Crespi,

the Spanish governor of the Californias, Felipe de Neve, decided to build

a pueblo on the Porciuncula. This was in part to establish a beachhead

Figure 18. The Los Angeles River flowing next to the Elysian Hills, late nineteenth

century. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

southern settlement to support nearby San Gabriel Mission (Mission San

Fernando would be established not long after the 1781 founding of Los

Angeles). The region promised agricultural and, as important, livestock

potential, for as de Neve noted to his superiors, the river had “much water

easy to take on either bank and beautiful lands in which it all could be made

use of.”15

Made use of it was. The tiny pueblo, adopting a longer version of the

river’s name and sacred commemoration, came into being. The river, of

course, was a crucial component of the city’s growth and early prosperity.

Though not navigable, it proved a mostly reliable and convenient water

source. Untapped by many wells, the river ran far fuller than it does today.

Wandering Frenchman Auguste Bernard Duhaut-Cilly noted in the late

1820s that the tiny pueblo of Los Angeles, then comprised of eighty-two

houses, had been built along the banks of a river “which does not run dry

in summer.”16 It flooded now and again, or “boomed” as people remem- bered, but the landscape and the common sense of the people helped mit-

igate the inherent dangers of wintertime floods. Settlers generally built, if they moved away from the central plaza at all, on slightly higher ground

flanking the river. Anglo arrivals would wonder, in later years, why the region’s Indians and Mexicans did not live on the rich land at the river’s

edge. They would find out when floods came. The area that would become Boyle Heights, just east of the river, became

a bit more crowded with adobes after the floods of the 1820s. But topogra- phy and vegetation helped to blunt flood impacts. The water had to fight its way through thick brush and trees in the marshy flatlands or la cienaga. In those days, the river rarely made it all the way to the Pacific. It petered out somewhere west and south of the little pueblo in the countless tule

marshes and ponds of the grizzly bear’s terrain.

Where the river did run, near the plaza and to the north, it occupied a

vital role in village life and folkways. Women took washing to water’s edge

and, using large flat stones, beat and rubbed clothes clean. Families chose traditional locations against the riverbank reserved for their use, and it was

frowned upon to encroach. Children swam in the river as it flowed not far from the plaza. It was here, in the river or its irrigation canal tributary, the

zanja madre, that residents observed the annual “Bath of the Virgins” (El

Bano del las Virjines) ceremony to honor San Juan. Some Anglos, by folk

tradition at least, thought little of the ceremony except as an opportunity

to tease the adolescent girls who, dressed in white, took part in ritual

bathing.17 The centrality of the river for emergent Anglo culture and econ-

9 7r e m e m b e r i n g a r i v e r

omy was better represented in Abel Stearns’s mill, built in the 1840s to grind

local grain by river power.18 Sometime shortly thereafter, a waterwheel was

built in the dammed-up river waters not far from Stearns’s mill; the wheel

buckets dumped water into the tributary zanja so that irrigation could take

place at some distance from the river itself.19

In those days everyone noticed the river. It was a prominent feature of the

landscape and, unlike today, it occupied a critical place in the region’s car-

tography as a virtual compass helping to define direction on the basin landscape. Reading early Los Angeles descriptions, one is struck by the

repetitive presence of two critical directional landmarks, both long since

deemphasized in the modern city: the plaza—long ago the city center—and

the river. One went out from, or into, the plaza, and one went across, up,

or down the river.20

Buildings, homes, plots of land were on this side of the river or that.

People lived on the east side or the west side. Travelers went up the river

toward the San Fernando Valley or down the river toward the ocean. For late

nineteenth-century residents in the village proper, the Poor House loomed

just across the river, as did the City Orphanage. Here, too, on the banks of

the river, occurred one of the most important battles of the Mexican War

period, as Kit Carson and his ragtag body of soldiers defeated Mexican

troops in the January 1847 “Battle of the Mesa.” The school for Mexican kids

was upriver, and the children trudged to it by following or, depending on

the season, walking in the riverbed.

The Los Angeles River was the sole source of city water, either the river

itself or one of its tributary zanjas dug out by Indian or Mexican labor.

Women made daily visits to the river to fill clay ollas. A man with a heavy water jug resting in a wheeled cart or suspended from the handles sold river

water on the streets and doorsteps of the growing village.

Everyone noticed the river. Coming overland in the Gold Rush years,

Vincent Hoover made careful diary entries in his tiny leather-bound books.

Entering Los Angeles along the same route taken by Portolá seventy years

earlier, Hoover wrote: “Los Angeles is Situated on the river of that name

and contains about 1500 inhabitants. The town is built of adobe houses and

irregularly laid out. There are quite a number of American residents nearly

all of which are married to Spanish women.”21

James Clarke also knew this river, and he made sure to orient himself in

reference to it in letters to family members. In an 1854 letter to his brother,

Clarke explained his whereabouts by drawing a word-picture of mountains,

valleys, and waterway grids. “Our valley is from 30 to 40 miles long open-

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e9 8

ing to the Pacific between two high bluffs or mountain spurs fifteen miles apart on the very beach, and running back so as to make the valley from

25 to 30 miles wide which is watered by the two rivers of Los Angeles and

San Gabriel and by these rivers the valley is irrigated[,] ditches or zanjas

conducting the water all through the vineyards and fields.”22

By mid-century, the government of the United States had glanced upon

the Los Angeles River basin with a gaze more covetous, and more power-

ful, than that of any individual American settler. Even in the earliest years

of California statehood, federal agents and actors knew that a river basin

meant more than water, more than agricultural promise. Valley floors—level and straight—could provide the setting for a more ambitious wish for the

region, the railroad. Engineer and surveyor Albert Campbell noted the pos-

sibilities of the region in a report of 1853–1854, part of the much larger fed-

eral survey of possible transcontinental rail routes: “From El Monte, pass-

ing a few hills, we enter the valley of Los Angeles. The stream upon which

it is situated is about fifty yards wide and two feet deep. There were numer- ous acequias irrigating vineyards, orange and olive groves, peach orchards,

gardens, and corn fields.” The little town of five thousand inhabitants “had the sombre cast of a

Spanish pueblo, relieved, as it were, by innovations of American com-

forts,” Campbell noted. But already, a portent of the future, there “was the

bustle and activity of a business place. Many new houses were in process of

construction. Everywhere was indicated a thriving population and a land

of intrinsic wealth.”23

Making the river a critical part of the landscape made sense in the early

days of the little village’s history. Local knowledge, based on lived experi-

ence in the Los Angeles basin, incorporated the river into the rhythms of

everyday life. Indeed, the river was omnipresent. Los Angeles needed no

more water than the river could provide, and it was an especially prominent

landscape feature along with other local markers such as the Pacific Ocean or the San Gabriel Mountains.24

As late as the mid-1850s, even legal descriptions of property reveal a local-

ized culture dependent on time-honored tradition, tradition clearly, if wish-

fully, expecting the river as a constant. Property boundaries often utilized the

river as a fixed feature of the landscape, as in this description from the pages of the Los Angeles Star of a small lot not far from the plaza: “One lot of land

situate in the eastern part of the city of Los Angeles, facing on a road that

runs in front of the lands of Manuel Coronel, and on to the river of Los

Angeles, bounded on the north-east by the land of Francisco Ruiz. . . .”25

9 9r e m e m b e r i n g a r i v e r

The legal grid of the village itself included the following directional

sequence: “fifty yards up the Los Angeles River from the city dam, then a line drawn east 200 yards, thence south to the lands known as Felis Gallardo’s,

then southwest (following the garden of John Temple) to the streets of

William Wolfskill, south to the lands of Don Coronel, northwest to the road

of San Pedro, which will exit at the garden of Antonio Lugo, thence fol-

lowing that direction to the corner at Eighth and Principal streets, on to

block 30, all said to include the hill of Ft. Moore, both city cemeteries, the

spring of the college, the foot of the mountain at the dam, and the bank of

the Los Angeles River.” The four square leagues thus entailed were to remain,

supposedly, the city’s definition in perpetuity. These boundaries were them- selves dependent on the perpetuity and stability of the Los Angeles River.26

While these were no doubt legible methods of marking property and

boundary, rivers are hardly reliable as fixed entities. They move irregularly. Or they stop moving altogether. The Los Angeles River has been no excep-

tion. Henrique Abila, testifying in a land claim dispute in 1869, com-

mented on just this tendency. The disputed lands, marked off on an old hand-drawn map, or diseño, through reference to rock or tree landmarks,

could still be discerned. But the river had fallen down on the job: “the

springs have diminished in size, shortened in or disappeared altogether,

attributable to the change of course of the river Los Angeles.”27

The “change of course of the river Los Angeles” is of great importance in

the history of the region. For if rivers can have moods, can be tempera-

mental, then the Los Angeles River has proved the moodiest of all rivers in

Southern California: one year overflowing in seeming fury, the next becom- ing desperately dry. Periodic flooding of the major rivers of the Los Angeles basin (the Los Angeles, the San Gabriel, and the Santa Ana) once meant lit-

tle in terms of damage or danger. Topography, sparse settlements, and

native experience with local rivers all combined to allay flooding problems of dire seriousness.

Those patterns began to change as the basin changed. Floods and rains

and droughts have long been part of the climatological features of this part

of Southern California. Boosters used to boast that Anglo agricultural

prowess would eliminate drought (as in “rain follows the plow” assur-

ances), and engineers used to argue that they could eliminate floods. Seldom are such claims heard today. A table of Los Angeles River flooding throughout the nineteenth century reads, if not like clockwork, at least like

inevitability. One authority has argued that, square mile for square mile, the

Los Angeles basin is the most susceptible region of the nation as far as dan-

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 0 0

gerous floods are concerned.28 As early Los Angeles basin resident Sarah Bixby, whose pioneering uncle tried to coax the Los Angeles River into a

defined bed, noted, the Los Angeles River was really two rivers: one in sum- mer and fall, another in winter and spring.29 Tourists wanted to call the

region’s rivers “streams bottom side up,” but that description would be

found wanting every other February or so.

A great flood will occur in the Los Angeles area once every one hundred years. Or so statistical probability suggests. A large flood will occur six times more frequently. Moderate floods will strike once every ten years or so. In 1815 and again in 1822 and 1825, rains and floods proved so severe as to alter fundamentally the location of the Los Angeles River on the landscape.

Where it once flowed out toward the marshy flatlands surrounding Ballona Creek, and thence indirectly to the ocean, it now answered to a new geog-

raphy. Picked up by ferocious floods, the river moved from along Alameda Street in front of where Union Station now stands to an angled course head-

ing more directly south. Waters inundated the plaza, and Indian wickiups

from the nearby village floated away.30 Undaunted by the possibilities that the river might someday return to its old channels, some village residents

blithely erected buildings and roads in one of the former beds. The night-

time 1825 flood came with such a terrifying roar that people dashed from their homes and ran into what hills they could find nearby. After this great flood, residents later remembered, the only thing that could be seen stand- ing above the new downtown Los Angeles lake created by the floodwaters was a lone, giant sycamore tree. Don Jose del Carmen Lugo, scion of the

ranching Lugo family, remembered years later that the river near his fam-

ily’s house had become “a sea of water . . . running with great violence,

making enormous waves.” The 1825 flood scarred the landscape so much that its paths could still be seen nearly fifty years later.31Map2abouthere

Later floods moved the river less but did more damage to human habits and habitats. Eulalia Perez, a Mexican woman who would later be cele-

brated by astonished Anglos as the oldest inhabitant of the Los Angeles

basin—some claimed that she was well into her thirteenth decade by the

1880s—remembered the floods of the winter of 1833. Rising rivers in the basin became impassable, she recalled, and for weeks people on one side of

the river were prevented from crossing over to friends and family on the

other.32 Years later, the winters of 1859–1860 and 1861–1862 brought heavy

flooding (the latter saw rain of nearly thirty days straight), so much so that street corners in the village overflowed and became impassable. First came water, then came the mud. One resident recalled looking out a window in

1 0 1r e m e m b e r i n g a r i v e r

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 0 2

downtown Los Angeles and thinking that the streets, caked in a thick,

greenish mud, were laid in glass. The 1861–1862 floods—“the Noachian del- uge,” a later engineer called them—created a lake stretching from Ballona

to the Laguna ranch (now taken up by the city of Commerce) that covered

nearly twelve miles. “It seems incredible . . . to those who have seen year

Map 2. Los Angeles River, stream flow over time. Courtesy of Blake Gumprecht.

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after year the expanse of sand which we call a river,” a prominent city res-

ident remembered years later, “but on this Christmas day it was a torrent.”

One holiday affair on the west side of the river was in danger of failure until a “Sonorean” named Jesus was impressed into duty, swimming across the

swollen river to the east side to claim party provisions. Even then, Anglo

opinion, it seemed, was that Mexicans knew the river, and they didn’t hes-

itate to put them to the test, death-defying though it may have been.33

In 1867–1868, the Los Angeles River again changed course, moving boldly

into Louis Willhardt’s grapes in the flatlands and wiping out the orchards of neighbor Thomas Jefferson White. Residents cut down some of White’s trees in a hurried attempt to turn the river away from the Whites’ brick house. It

worked, but houses did float that year, ripped from flimsy foundations by waters cresting three and four feet on Alameda Street. The little city dam laid

against the river near the plaza washed away, and citizens were forced to

return to the old method of water delivery by cart and olla.

Floods returned in the mid-1870s. By the 1880s, it had become com-

monplace to hear warnings about building homes against the river’s banks

or, even, in the river itself, as a few people stubbornly persisted in doing.

Yet there were Angelenos who paid little heed.34 Wrote Alfred Moore, in a

burst of fateful hubris and poor memory in 1882, “I have lived on the Aliso

tract, the most central part, for the past eight years, and never saw a flood yet.” This same confident man congratulated one woman for her “pluck” in building a home within a few feet of the river. He also gave a good word

to a Mrs. Bigelow on buying, building, and improving her properties

amidst the orange groves on First Street, awfully near the river. “We need

not,” Moore concluded, “feel at all alarmed about a flood.”35

Fate enjoyed the temptation. The winters of 1884 and 1886 brought

floods as damaging as residents could remember. The river flooded with an “ungovernable fury.” The Los Angeles Times devoted a special extra (“2:45

O’Clock P.M.”) edition to the floods of February 1884, with a sort of son- net running down the entire left side of the front page.

The Flood. Los Angeles River Leaps its Banks, Sending Down a Mad

Current of Water, Sweeping Away Bridges and Houses, Deluging the

Lower Portion of the City, Destroying Human Life and Property, And

Rendering One Hundred Families Homeless. . . . 36

Whole vineyards washed away in the flatlands, where the river stretched to nine hundred feet wide. Horses drowned as unwise owners tried to ford

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buggies across watery streets. “The river is utterly uncontrollable,” warned

the Los Angeles Express.37 Milkman George Stoltz drowned in the river’s

tributary stream, the Arroyo Seco, which ran from Pasadena toward down-

town Los Angeles. J. J. Phillips, who ran a laundry establishment at the

river’s banks, watched helplessly as first his business and then his house dipped into the torrent and floated away. Dr. J. P. Widney’s house on Sansevain Street, recently built at a cost of $2,000, fell victim to the rush-

ing water. Most of the newly homeless were poor. Some of their houses had

been built in the riverbed itself. Concepcíon Parra lost her house and all

its furniture. Perdona Coma, one of those whose house was unaccountably

in the riverbed itself, lost (miraculously enough) only her bed. The extended

Diaz and Zernal families, tied together by marriage, were not so fortunate.

They watched their houses and everything inside of them wash away. Fig.19abouthere

Men labored to stem the tide of the river by hastily stacking sandbags at

the junction of the river and First Street. Alfred Moore, who had with such

confidence insisted two years earlier that Angelenos need not fear any floods, lost his Aliso tract house and all his possessions. So did his son and his son-in-law. Mrs. Bigelow’s cottages facing First Street had to be evacu-

ated, and the trees in her orange grove swayed under the pressure of the

floodwaters. A forty-year-old adobe, once a part of the Ramirez rancho but now on

the estate of land baron Matthew Keller, melted and drizzled into the

Figure 19. The Los Angeles River in flood, 1880s. Courtesy of the Huntington

Library, San Marino, California.

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floodwaters. The East Los Angeles bridge, full of as many as two hundred curious onlookers, shuddered and then fell into the churning river below.

No one knew if all had jumped clear. Water covered the valley stretching

from Boyle Heights to the plaza, where it stayed for weeks. The ground

was so wet, locals said, that it would “bog a saddle blanket.” Receding

floodwaters left all manner of debris and silt scattered across the landscape, amidst the battered orchards and orange groves below Alameda Street. Fig.20abouthere

When the floodwaters finally receded, public debate over how to “con- duct the Los Angeles River through our city when it gets on a bender” accel-

erated. Plans to reinforce the riverbank with a series of levees went forward.

Downtown streets were graded and scraped clean; workers and horses then

pushed and pulled the piles of dirt and debris up against the riverbank.

Some thought that the effort could be carried further, with the construc- tion of willow brush-nets. “While there is but little water in the river it can

be done,” wrote one citizen to the Los Angeles Times in December 1885, “as

no one knows but it may be a dreadful river again before the ides of March

come around.”38

The dreaded floods did come. Within weeks of the dire warning, and well before the Ides, the rising river produced familiar scenes of havoc.

Downtown Los Angeles slipped beneath the waters, as did railroad and trol-

ley tracks, hills, trees, and people. The river looked to one observer like a

“boiling yellow lake.” Lawman Martin Aguirre became a hero by wading

Figure 20. Flood damage in the 1880s. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San

Marino, California.

into the rushing waters to save two men trapped in a streetcar teetering on

a broken bridge. He then spent the whole day of January 19 going back into

the river over and over again to rescue a grand total of nineteen people

trapped one way or another in the raging waters.39

In 1889, floods carried stones of twenty-five pounds and more into the streets of downtown Los Angeles; boulders weighing as much as twenty tons

began answering gravity’s call in the San Gabriel Mountains. Rainfall from

high up in the foothills raced in minutes to the valley floor. Dogs in the city pound drowned in their cages. Bridges snapped and floated downstream. Wood from high in the San Gabriels and Santa Monicas came down with

the floodwaters, choking farmlands but providing easy-to-gather fuel for months and months. In the aftermath, various property loss cases went to

court. In one important decision, Judge Matthew Allen ruled that Los

Angeles River floods resulted from the whims of the Almighty, not the capriciousness of any locals or their planning decisions.40

Farmers never knew what to expect from periodic flooding. On the plus side, any good-sized flood promised a pay-off in driftwood and fertilizer. Receding floodwaters always left behind tons and tons of alluvial silt, so rich in nutrients that crop production and land values increased overnight. But

floods too strong could destroy a lifetime’s work. One local resident remem- bered one season’s heavy floods because he had never seen so many unusual things in the river: whole stacks of hay, entire fields of pumpkins, chicken houses, plows, horses, pigs, and cattle, houses, and barns.41

Yet despite these problems, new arrivals, encouraged by booster rhetoric,

happily figured the Los Angeles River—or a placid version of that river— into visions of the future. Because of its reliability as a water source, the river

promised to help Americans embrace what was once a foreign land. They

could use the river to claim the region. For the river basin was, one self-

congratulatory pamphlet gloated, “peculiarly adapted for farming opera-

tions by the Anglo-Saxon race.”42 Boom period maps inevitably character-

ize the river as a large and peaceful, centralized feature of the landscape,

always beautiful, full, and graceful. A representative lithographic depiction

of the river from the volatile 1880s shows it as a lovely ribbon of white across

and through the center of the city. “The Los Angeles River has been more

fully utilized than any other,” a booster pamphlet declared in 1876, “and yet

there is still plenty for all.”43Map3abouthere

The river proved immensely useful, not merely as a source of water. For

one thing, the riverbed had a seemingly endless supply of gravel, and gravel

could be hauled out for construction use or for dumping into city streets

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to combat knee-deep wintertime mud. Then too, the river, like any river,

made a terrific conduit for carrying things away even during nonflood sea- sons. People took advantage of this, and they saw the Los Angeles River as

an ideal sewer. Early Los Angeles sewers emptied straight into the river and

adjacent dry beds amidst the abandoned vineyards of earlier times near

Winston and Los Angeles Streets. If rains and the river cooperated, the

refuse was carried downstream beyond offense (the city would not build an ocean outfall until 1893–1894). As late as the late 1880s, citizens suggested

that the best sewer plans for the expanding city must consider utilizing the

convenient, almost intestinal, Los Angeles River. “The river runs directly

through the city from end to end, much as the Thames runs through

London, or the Seine through Paris, the Spree through Berlin, the Danube

through Vienna, the Tiber through Rome, and as the Euphrates ran

through Babylon,” offered the writer “Cosmopolitan” in a letter to the Los Angeles Times. As such, the river was “the natural and proper outlet for the

sewage of Los Angeles city.” Downstream residents ought to have little com-

plaint with what the river brought their way, nor could they expect the city

to build “a new river of brick” in order to control the river’s outflow.44

Map 3. Bird’s-eye view of Los Angeles. Note the peaceful ribbon of the Los

Angeles River in the background.

Locals used the river as a convenient trash dump (the city dump itself was

at river’s edge), tossing in not only the daily refuse of the living, but the

bodies of countless dead horses and dogs, picked up off the streets and thrown unceremoniously into the riverbed to await decomposition and

enough current to travel downstream. An 1887 stable fire, for instance, killed eighty horses. All were dumped, “to putrify and breed typhoid fever,”

in the riverbed.45 The local zanjas had protective laws that supposedly kept

people from washing or throwing refuse in them, or from slaughtering cat-

tle and pigs in or near them. The river offered the obvious and convenient alternative. “The carcasses of all dead animals,” reported the U.S. Census

for 1880, “are taken to the river-bed south of the city and there buried in

the sand.” Garbage, ashes, street sweepings, manufacturing wastes: all were

likewise dumped into the riverbed.46 More prosaic activities continued as

well, events that observers inevitably filtered through cultural lenses. An 1890s visitor to the city, for instance, appreciated the aesthetics that poverty,

more than likely ethnic poverty, presented. As he noted, “mid-stream, in the

Los Angeles river, I saw women washing clothes by beating and wringing

them; a picturesque scene.”47

But such romanticizing required a distanced view. The closer one got to

the river, the less picturesque its denizens and their actions became in the

eyes of observers. Before long, the river became known as a place of bad

smells and bad people, a place where, Anglos expected and insisted, crooks,

Mexicans, Indians, and Chinese congregated. Sonoratown, “Nigger Alley,”

and the first Chinatown were all not far from water’s edge. Long before Mulholland Drive became known as a place to drop off murder victims, the Los Angeles River and its zanjas seem to have been favored locales.48

Prostitutes loitered down near the river; boys smoked cigarettes and gam-

bled at water’s edge. Worried citizens wondered what else could be going

on in the deep underbrush at the river’s banks. During the infamous siege

of Chinatown in the 1870s, the first Chinese man to be lynched by the crowd had been plucked from the river’s bank, where he had tried to hide

unsuccessfully amongst the thick willows.49 In the 1880s, a group of fifteen to twenty teenaged and younger boys and girls passed the time down at the

river and its bridges, apparently “playing hoodlum” in those same willows,

much to the consternation of adults.50

As Los Angeles grew, particularly in the boom years after transcontinental

railroad connection, the river began to occupy a more important, if increas-

ingly troubling, role in city planning. Uncomfortable with the ways in which

the river attracted garbage and “the dangerous classes,” city officials began to

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 0 8

tie the river more and more to nascent city beautiful efforts, efforts that would find full flower, at least in the imagination, in the new century. In the late 1880s, with the increase in regional rail service, the city and the railroad

companies began to construct more bridges and viaducts that spanned the

river from various downtown streets. The increase in river vistas further

encouraged the city to clean the river up. By 1890, the viaduct on First Street,

over which the local cable railway ran, became a favored Sunday promenade

for strollers wandering into the city from Boyle Heights or vice versa.

Yet the river continued to be a problem every wet winter. It spilled over

its flimsy bank, water rushed through the streets of downtown, and storm sewers and drains backed up. “I thought we would be taken off our feet by the mad rush of water down the gutters and streets,” a nervous tourist wrote

near century’s end of his experiences on a February morning.51

Locked in a tempestuous battle over where to put, or even build, a union

railroad station, some planners suggested that the riverbed might make a

possible, though expensive (not to mention dangerous!) location.52 More

important, the river had become a critical dividing line for a new feature on

the urban landscape: industry. By the early years of the twentieth century,

the “river beautiful” competed with the “river industrial.” Once the orange

groves and vineyards of earlier years began to fade away, the river lowlands

began to look better and better for nascent Los Angeles industries and, as it

had for years, railroad corporations. In the various industrial zoning ordi-

nances adopted from 1908 forward (the first of their kind in the nation), the Los Angeles River helped to delineate industrial sites from nonindustrial

sites. Where the river had once been key to describing the boundaries of the

city itself, it now helped to break the city up into industrial parcels. For

instance, city ordinance 17135 declared that “Industrial District No. 1” would

include the following perimeter sequences: “northwesterly along the center

line of Buena Vista street to its intersection with the center line of the

official bed of the Los Angeles River; thence southerly along the center line of the official bed of the Los Angeles River as defined by Ordinance No. 6035. . . .”53 In short, the river had a newer cartographic role to play once the

twentieth century arrived, one which helped further divide Los Angeles

into specific ethnic and class spaces.54 “I went to the River Station for an hour,” social reformer G. Bromley Oxnam wrote in his diary in 1913, “and

crossed over into the dirt and grime of Mexican Los Angeles.”55

With the arrival of the new century, various city officials and reformers throughout the Los Angeles basin grew increasingly concerned about the

large numbers of Mexican laborers who had begun to live in colonias on

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riverbed lands. Pushed to these cheap lands by patterns of land use, segre-

gation, and poverty, Mexicans eked out lives “hidden,” as one official put it in 1918, “out of sight in the brush.”56

Zoning ordinances reveal one way in which the city elites thought of and

utilized the river. But the grandest plans for the river emerged less out of

engineering or zoning imperatives than from aesthetic and reform posi-

tions. In his classic book The Better City, reformer Dana Bartlett wrote of

the river’s ability to define the new—the better—city: “Think of what value to the city this river might yet become if placed under a special commis-

sion empowered to carry out a definite plan for its reclamation from base uses.” Bartlett, who had founded the city’s first settlement house, was noth- ing if not progressively wishful. The river could be adorned by many

bridges (“each a work of art”), parallel to steam and electric rail lines, and

further reclaimed to make a parklike esplanade for autos and pedestrians.

Adjacent factories and warehouses would be “hidden behind a wealth of

climbing vines and roses.” The riverbed, once cleaned of its rubbish and

properly graded, could even become “an extensive playground for the chil-

dren of the congested districts.” Or for at least “nine months of the year,”

lest those happy children get swept away by winter floods. At right angles to the riverbed (rigid adherence to geometry equaled order, as well as the

control of nature) extensive piers would support three “civic centers” with

lyceum halls, club rooms, athletic facilities, all with “steps leading down to

the riverbed playground.”57

The addition of nearly a dozen bridges for railroads and pedestrians

and, eventually, automobiles, did not do much in terms of making the river

beautiful. Taming and beautifying the Los Angeles River would require

more concerted effort than building bridges. The future beckoned, and Los Angeles might get there by paying close attention to the river.

T h e Ug l y S h a l l B e M a d e B e a u t i f u l , t h e C r o o k e d S t r a i g h t

The river along its entire length can be made into a line of beauty.

R ev. D a n a B a r t l e t t , The Better City, 1907

Time was, a concrete river was a beautiful thing. Lining a river with miles

and miles of cool grayness was heralded as the ultimate in city beautiful

rationalization, the apex of twentieth-century urban design’s triumph over

nature’s messy whim. Consider Joseph Mesmer, a turn-of-the-century shoe,

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1 1 1r e m e m b e r i n g a r i v e r

real estate, and brick magnate, owner of the palatial Linda Vista estate and

orchard overlooking the Los Angeles River, president of two powerful city

development organizations, and chairman of the municipal committee

empowered to fill the river with cement. A contemporary periodical left lit- tle doubt as to the civic dividends such a project would return:

This work . . . will be the crowning achievement of [Mesmer’s] life. No

other work could be projected that will have such beneficial results and mean so much to the city of Los Angeles. The transforming of the most

unsightly sight of the city into a beautiful parking [sic], lakes and espla-

nades. See the impression the visitor will get upon his arrival in the city

when he beholds this picture of artistic picturesqueness and beauty, also

being a park six miles long in the center of the city. Consider the pleasure

that will be afforded to thousands of our own people where they can enjoy their outing and recreation in walking over beautiful laid serpentine

walks amidst shady trees, beautiful shrubs and flowers, while others enjoy the pleasures of boating, sailing and swimming in the six lakes of 3000

feet long averaging in depth from two to fifteen feet.

Concrete was key to this plan, a plan designed far more with beautifi- cation and aesthetics in mind than flood control. Lest anyone doubt the all- inclusive nature of the plan, this booster publication spelled out the con-

struction details: “The river bed and sides are to be lined solidly with

concrete. The parapet sidewalks above the surface level are to be 3½ feet

high and of artistic design, on the top of which there will be placed at every

30 feet apart a beautiful electrically lighted gondolier, lighting the park at

night as light as in the day time.”58

This ambitious scheme, ca. 1910, planted an important seed. And it

helps us better understand the irony of Los Angeles’ appeal to natural liv-

ing epitomized so aptly by the popular Chamber of Commerce slogan

(also ca. 1910): “Los Angeles—Nature’s Workshop.”59 But before Mesmer’s

vision could be made real, certain things had to happen within the realms

of nature, memory, and culture. The first was easy: winter rains. In February 1913, heavy rainfall inundated downtown; one local confided to his diary that “many funny incidents happened on the wet streets, [or,] I should say,

rivers.”60

A year later, more rain fell. In late January and again in mid-February

1914, the Los Angeles basin got pounded by winter rains. The January

rains soaked the ground, which lost all absorptive capability. In February

came the deluge. On the night of the 18th alone, an inch and a half of rain

Figure 22. Salt Lake Railroad at Macy Street and the Los Angeles River, February

20, 1914. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Figure 21. Los Angeles River, north from the Seventh Street Bridge, February 19,

1914. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

1 1 3r e m e m b e r i n g a r i v e r

fell on the city. In just three days, nearly twenty inches of rain fell in the San

Gabriel Mountains. The mountains could only absorb so much of the del-

uge; the rest ran downhill as floodwater. Damage was severe; later estimates put the cost to the basin at well over $10 million.61Figs.21and22abouthere

Just as it had done in the past, the water came down, first from the skies and then from the mountains. But the basin had changed. Roofs and roads

had replaced open land. Water collected only long enough to gather more

strength and more vertical slope. In downtown Los Angeles, the Los Angeles

River flooded at a discharge rate normally used to describe the Colorado River. The river dumped four million cubic yards of silt into the harbors at

Long Beach and San Pedro. Los Angeles went without outside communi-

cation for a week. Rail traffic got knocked out, and telegraph messages to San Bernardino were sent via Chicago. Damage estimates reached into the tens

of millions of dollars. Many people died. Property washed away. And when

the rains returned two years later, they left in their wake flood control bonds

Figure 23. Postal worker and intrepid regional photographer Charles Puck

adrift following 1916 floods. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino,

California.

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and a wishful piece of legislation, the Los Angeles County Flood Control

Act, voted in by a worried, frustrated, water-logged citizenry.Fig.23abouthere

And what of memory? The people of Los Angeles, then as now, deal less

day to day with geologic or climactic time than with human time. And

human time has many a memory blind spot. Like the ever-confident Alfred Moore, who in the 1880s declared floods a thing of the past, people simply chose not to remember that the Los Angeles River posed a significant haz- ard. Instead, it was far too easy to continue to market Los Angeles as the

world’s capital of sunshine and perfect weather. And all that “menaced” land

that lay at the river’s edge, all those bowl-shaped spreading grounds atop

aquifers next to the mountains, proved too easy a target for real estate sale

and development. As the past century has shown, a flood will take advan- tage of developed land to wreak havoc all the more. The Los Angeles

growth machine of the early 1900s had virtually begged nature to provide

a terrible flood. By 1910, there were nearly a half a million people in the city who had never seen the damage a flood could do to the basin. There were probably an equal number who did not (or chose not to) remember.62

But it is within the realm of memory, and the larger realm of culture, that

we find an interesting and revealing variable in the flood control and con- crete equation. Obsessed with the Los Angeles future, elites paused to take

the past seriously, if only for brief moments stolen from a morning or

afternoon here and there. Joseph Mesmer’s plans for his river committee,

borrowing heavily from city beautiful prophet Charles Mulford Robinson’s

ideas, focused almost exclusively upon Los Angeles as the American city of

the future. But that new river in that new city could not become reality

without some attention paid to the ancient river, the real river. Planning to

beautify a river through concrete is one thing. Actually doing so, particu-

larly with a river as volatile as the Los Angeles River, required a different mindset, one that ironically contemplated, say, 1820 and 1850 as much as

it did 1920 or 1950. Because to do Mesmer’s “work of a lifetime” justice (or

to do it at all), the river had first to be known. It had to be remembered before it could be corralled.

T h e F l o o d s o f M e m o ry

“It was commonly understood and talked of in the early days by old

Mexican people that the Los Angeles river flowed out through the southwest part of the city by Ballona and into the Santa Monica

Bay until the flood of 1825.”

“Mr. Cate has heard the Mexicans talk of the Los Angeles river

having flowed into Ballona in early days, and he thinks it is entirely possible, even today, for the water to go over that way.”

Flood Control Interviews,William Workman and D. M. Cate.

In his majestic 1985 book Rivers of Empire, environmental historian Donald

Worster argued that historians could learn a great deal about the modern

West by strolling along the gray, artificial banks of any number of irrigation canals which criss-cross America’s arid regions. Such locales — which

prompted Worster’s insightful “reflections in a ditch”—offered both study and illustration of “ecological and social regimentation.” Living things

shunned concrete canals because, as Worster points out, a riparian ecosys-

tem has been replaced by the sterility of efficient civil engineering. What is more, the “hydraulic society” responsible for making straight channels out

of temperamental streams induces and supports a regimented social order,

which is itself “increasingly a coercive, monolithic, and hierarchical system,

ruled by a power elite based on the ownership of capital and expertise.”63

The modern canal becomes in this reading, then, both symbol and engine,

both cause and effect, of a rigid social structure predicated upon gain, growth, and mastery of nature. Such, then, are modern rivers of empire.

Yet social coercion and ecological manipulation are but two of any

empire’s programs. Imperial designs rarely suffer from any lack of ways or reasons to gain, swipe, or shore up power, and the American Southwest is

no exception. In other words, concrete canals may tell other stories in

addition to bald environmental destruction and coercive imposition of

economic order. Concrete might also tell us about ethnic clashes in the

West, about how Anglo visions of the future might have necessitated the

manipulation of Latino understandings of the past. Concrete might con-

vince us that infrastructural designs and schemes are inherently cultural (a

notion Worster would clearly support), and that the much-maligned,

laughable Los Angeles River is itself, ironically enough, if not a great river

of empire, then at least a river of great empire.

From his office in downtown Los Angeles, civil engineer J. W. Reagan chaired a committee (“Committee of Menaced and Flooded Areas”) and

oversaw an extraordinary history project. Agents were sent into the field (the field being the entire Los Angeles basin) to interview people, particu- larly those who made up the “dwindling remnant of the early pioneers of

this County,” about rivers.64 Blandly titled “Research Los Angeles County

Flood Control 1914 – 1915,” the dozens and dozens of interviews weave

1 1 5r e m e m b e r i n g a r i v e r

together an amazingly rich fabric of Southern California social history. We

learn a great deal about the growth of the Southland, the decline of regional

farming, folkways, and, of course, an immense amount about rivers: where

and when they flowed, what damage they did, what should, could, and would be done about them.

But we also learn something more. Because it turns out that those inter-

viewed were not necessarily ordinary people chosen entirely at random by

the field workers. There is clearly a presumption on the part of the com- mittee that age and ethnicity matter. Alongside the community leaders, the

powerful capitalists and planners (Joseph Mesmer, for instance, is inter-

viewed at length65), the Anglo pioneers, and the powerful farmers, are eld-

erly Mexicans. This cannot be an accident. It is as if instructions to inter-

viewers included the charge to “find the oldest Mexicans you can.”66

It is clear that the surveys were designed (if only accidentally) to validate

the past in an explicitly utilitarian, and yet oddly thrilling, sort of way. The

volume, the engineers proudly stated, had been “written in the language of

the pioneers themselves.”67 In other words, these engineers at work in

Reagan and the U.S. Engineer’s office on Figueroa Street began to map the courses of the basin’s rivers by deliberately establishing a cartography of

memory. Knowing everything there is to know about rivers requires

different sets of knowledge and information. The engineers, J. W. Reagan most prominent among them, knew hydraulics; they knew all about the

acre footage of river flow; they knew groundwater equations and aquifer storage capacities. But what they did not know was history, particularly the

“pre-history” of Mexican Los Angeles (to say nothing of the Native

American history and memory of and in the region). And there were pre-

cious few places to turn in 1914 to fill any gaps. Aside from the boosters extolling the sweetness of the mission period or the slow pace of “what

was,” Los Angeles had few repositories of local historical knowledge. Even

the region’s Historical Society had urged Angelenos not to spend too much

time pondering the Mexican or Spanish period of the basin. As the orga-

nization’s president had put the matter, with poignant finality, “a score or two of names, a few crumbling adobes, and all is told.”68 Newspapers were

unreliable; mission records were unattainable. The United States Weather

Bureau, the repository of scientific knowledge about Los Angeles floods, had a data bank that went back only thirty-seven years into the region’s past.

Knowing about the floods of 1878–1879 might have been useful, but a memory bank that thin could not much help engineers understand rain-

fall and hydrologic patterns on or in the landscape.69 What they needed to

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 1 6

know could be stated, certainly much more simply than the engineers

themselves put it: “If the year of maximum floods can be identified, it is possible from the information which exists as to other floods, to arrive by synthetic process at a rational approximate of maximum discharge quanti-

ties.”70 In other words, how big were the floods of memory? Where could engineer Reagan’s interviewers turn?71

The answer must have been obvious. They turned, in part, to the river

itself. William McEuen, who had just finished his M.A. thesis at the University of Southern California with Emory Bogardus, had declared that

most of the Mexicans in Los Angeles could be found “within a mile of the

Los Angeles River.” So the river was itself a vector of ethnicity, in that the

interviewers probably used it as a guide to finding Mexicans. But ethnicity was but one guide; it had to be supplemented by age. The interviewers’

work provided a meeting ground between past and future, between what

Los Angeles was and what Los Angeles would be. Their questions clearly

reflected a respect for memory and for age and for a period of local history that, already by 1914, must have seemed ancient. But in order to catch the

rivers where they would most likely be, in order to cement them in once

and for all, engineers had to know their histories. The engineers had to

know what river flowed where, when, and with how much force. They had to know how to, if only in a rudimentary fashion, create a hierarchy of

floods, particularly since it was suggested that 1914 was not as big as floods could, or did, get in the basin.72 Was the great 1889 flood the proverbial hundred-year flood? Should it provide the critical benchmark for hydro- logic planning? Or was it 1825? 1815? “To state that knowledge of the great-

est volumes of water carried by the various streams is fundamental to flood and conservation studies is to state an axiom,” is how one prominent engi-

neer put it. Even as the Los Angeles Times declared “Science to Reshape

County’s Waterways,” engineers recognized the necessity of other tools. Or,

put in another way, geology could reveal a great deal, but so could an

eighty-year-old Mexican woman.73

The interviewers asked their subjects about rivers. They were, in effect, looking to find private Mexican memory to go with the very public mem- ories that events like La Fiesta had already shaped in Los Angeles. Now their

effort was truly aimed at shaping the basin’s physical environment itself, and they needed historical help. They worked from a series of questions. Did

their subjects know about the basin’s rivers? Did they remember them?

What did floods do and, more important, where did floods go? And what they got in return was a wealth of information, often contradictory, always

1 1 7r e m e m b e r i n g a r i v e r

interesting. They learned about regional topography, that before massive

settlement the expanse of land stretching west from Los Angeles to the

Pacific had been grizzly bear country overgrown with willows, elders, cot- tonwoods. They learned about vast vineyards all along the banks of the Los

Angeles River. People told them about overland travel, about the arrival of

the railroad in Los Angeles, about the soldiers stationed over by the ocean

during the Civil War.

Judge Ygnacio Sepulveda granted an interview in his downtown office and was interrogated “as to the floods of his time.” He agreed that his lin- eage ran deep in local history, but that the truly knowledgeable members

of his family, those who could map a century of floods, were dead. The judge did point out something that other Mexicans said again and again:

the Los Angeles River had not always flowed where it did in the twentieth century. It moved in the early 1800s, not once but twice, and had once

found the Pacific by going out through what was now Exposition Park.74

Jose Ruiz, sixty-eight, recalled a time when there were but four or five ranchers between Los Angeles and San Pedro. “In the early days,” Ruiz

remembered, “the old people used to say that the Los Angeles river flowed out through the southwest of Los Angeles and into the Ballona.” His father

told him that he once saw the valley from Boyle Heights to the plaza one

solid sheet of water. In those days, though, given the lack of development,

“no one thought much of the floods . . . they would only cover the ground and not wash to amount to anything.”75

After admitting that old maps were terribly difficult to locate, Surveyor S. B. Reeve insisted that “memory maps” were the only way to proceed. “It

would not be too much trouble,” he said, “to get a few of the old timers

together and make up a map of the old flooded district, and make plans whereby the river could be readily controlled.”76

Joe Bernal, who remembered swimming in the river when it ran down

Alameda Street, talked of an old aunt who told him about the river’s his-

tory. “Yes,” he recalled she said, “the Los Angeles river at one time had its

channel near the plaza, passed at what is now 2nd and Alameda Sts., then

to near 6th and Los Angeles Sts. then in a southwesterly direction towards

the Ballona for a long distance, then swung southeasterly and skirted the

edge of the hills at Dominguez.”77 Mr. Bernal also remembered visiting the

home of the Lugo family and asking Mr. Lugo about the Los Angeles

River; he was told much the same story, that the river once flowed elsewhere and that one could know the route simply by looking closely at basin soils:

where there was sand there had once been a river.

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 1 8

“Years ago,” William Crain remembered, “when I was a young man, I

used to talk to the old people, both Americans and Mexicans. They inter-

ested me more than the young people. The Mexicans have told me many

times, and it is a sort of legend among them, that in the early days the Los

Angeles river ran out through the southwestern part of the city, and emp-

tied into the Ballona Bay. It is entirely feasible physically, and what has been

may come again.” F. Z. Vejar, eighty-four and a Los Angeles native, ratified this oft-told story and told many others as well, apparently. But these oth-

ers were dismissed: “Mr. Vejar has many stories of the early days, during the

Mexican rule and later that of the U.S., but they in no way bear upon the

subject.”78

Mr. J. Frank Burns spoke of being employed by the Santa Fe Railroad to

find out about floods in regards to certain legal cases. He said that he had interviewed Pio Pico at ninety-three and another man who was 137 years

old. Both had insisted that the river changed course radically in 1825.79

Mrs. Lopez had been born in Los Angeles in 1831. She had moved to the

San Fernando Valley at twenty, on her wedding trip, and had stayed ever

since. Speaking in Spanish translated by her daughter, Mrs. Lopez recalled

the big floods of 1858–1859. She remembered the date very well, she said, because she had to travel to Los Angeles to attend a christening, and she was

able to look the information up in her family Bible. She had been trapped

for two weeks in Los Angeles at that time and, upon returning to the val-

ley, noticed that many adobe homes had simply melted away in the rains

and floods.80

Jesse Hunter remembered the big floods of the 1860s. He also recalled asking his father, long ago sometime around mid-century, why “the

Mexicans always built their houses on the ridges and hills and carried water

up to them instead of building down by the water, and his father said he

didn’t know, but after 1861 – 62 he knew why they built on the high

ground.”81

Mr. J. R. Ramirez, interviewed at home on North Broadway, told of

growing up in Los Angeles in the 1840s. His grandfather’s grandfather had

come to the area in 1786 and made the first wine and brandy in the basin. His grandfather, an Avila, had made adobe bricks in a kiln down near the

river and had grown grapes where the Southern Pacific railyards stood. He had little faith in the utility of flood control efforts. “When Mr. Ramirez was told that we were looking for data to enable the engineers to perfect

their plans to control the river, he emphatically said it could not be done.

Then he showed where the water had been in 1825, and said that there was

1 1 9r e m e m b e r i n g a r i v e r

not money enough to control such floods. Those floods will come again, he said, and no one can keep them from it.”82

What Reagan’s engineers were after was evidence of the river’s wander-

ings and its excesses, a way to map reminiscence. They did just this: under

J. W. Reagan’s supervision, a map of Los Angeles basin rivers was drawn

which suggested cyclical patterns of flooding of greater and lesser extent since the nineteenth century. This is not to suggest that the engineers

placed inordinate faith in comprehensive Mexican, or any, memory. On the

contrary, Reagan made sure to point out that it was “quite possible that

there may have been other floods which were not recalled. It would be an exceptional memory which could recall every serious flood.”83

But exceptional memory was not the critical point. Simple, individual

memories of flooding and destructiveness were all that mattered. They could be aggregated. In the report drawn up following the oral history-tak-

ing, the Los Angeles County Supervisors introduced the important findings by suggesting that both physical and mental (i.e., “memorable”) evidence

dictated “that equally great and even greater and more disastrous inunda-

tions will occur in the future.”84

The engineers also wanted proof that the river could be corralled and

held. For it is in the wake of all this interviewing that plans were developed

that eventually led to the concretization of the Los Angeles River. What

planners and engineers in part wanted to do was protect the new Los

Angeles Harbor at San Pedro from the deleterious effects of river-borne silt. If they could move the river and send it into Alamitos Bay near Long

Beach, the new harbor—pride and joy of both engineering and commerce—

would be the beneficiary of modern flood control. One way to interpret the interviewers’ search for information is as mere

intelligence gathering from the past. But another way of looking at things

reaches for a broader interpretation than what might have gone on in any

given sitting room between an interviewer and an interviewee some ninety

years ago. Awareness, even validation, of the past was predicated upon ask-

ing about it. Interviewers quizzed their informants. When were you born?

Can you talk about growing up here? Do you remember the Los Angeles

River? Where did it flow? When did it flood? How big were those floods? Do you have any maps?

This sensitivity to the past had a purpose, one aimed directly at the

future and, more explicitly, the city of the future. These engineers did

appreciate the regional Mexican past. They did ask about it, and they did

write it down. But viewed through a fairly skeptical lens regarding ethnic

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 2 0

perceptions and the rise of Los Angeles, such validation can be seen as tak-

ing up but a cultural instant, worth only the time it took for Mexican mem-

ory to be put to work as science in the quest for the Anglo city of the future.

These unusual interview documents, as saturated with the past as

Porciuncula itself, nonetheless had within them ultimate designs on the

future. While these reminiscences are indeed oral histories, it is important

to keep in mind that the oral historians approached their work as engineers

first: the history they gathered was meant to be put to work, to make a bridge between memory and the future. That future—in the city of the

future—required that the river go away or at least go where it was supposed

to go. Similar behavior was required of the basin’s Mexicans as well. In the

end, the river of memory and Mexican memories of the river linked eth-

nicity and water far more intimately than any novelist’s metaphor could

possibly accomplish. And unlike most metaphorical wordplay, these asso-

ciations came complete with hard-edged realities, such as further ethnic seg-

regation, isolation, and destitution down at river’s edge.

All of this was part and parcel of those processes of cultural and ethnic

transference explored years ago by Carey McWilliams in Southern Cali-

fornia Country. As McWilliams notes, study of “the local annals” reveals “at

least the outlines of the process by which, through a kind of occupational

erosion, the Hispanos steadily declined in influence and power.” For McWilliams, the transitions are explicitly work-related: Mexican vaqueros

become sheepshearers following the demise of the cattle business; sheep-

shearers in turn become farm laborers; those farm laborers in turn become

street vendors and peddlers. Pushing Mexicans aside allowed them to

become that “picturesque element” for a short period of time until, by the

end of the century, “visitors had ceased to note the presence of Mexicans.”85

It is that erasure—or at least retreat from, or at least whitewashing—of the

region’s culture, politics, and political economy, which provides us with a

different lens through which to examine the life and death of the Los Angeles River. Because what is so striking about the flood control interviews of 1914 is the mere presence of Mexican voices and Mexican people, brought

back and made real by the infrastructural demands of “the better city” of

the future. Anglo Americans had interviewed elderly Mexicans before in

California history—Hubert Howe Bancroft’s early oral histories stand out

in this regard. But this was different. Antiquarianism had been replaced by utilitarianism. In the former case, the words and stories themselves were the

object. In the latter case of the young hydrologists talking to octogenarians,

the personal histories were but means to an engineered end.

1 2 1r e m e m b e r i n g a r i v e r

Carey McWilliams notes that the swamping of Mexican life and culture

took place with a “truly awful swiftness.” But in the case of the concretiza-

tion of the river into an Anglo icon, things would move slowly. The surveys

doubtless helped create a certain body of historical knowledge, but massive

flood control measures did not begin immediately. The receding waters of 1914 and 1916 floods left behind the bond acts that were to provide the financial and engineering wherewithal to channel and move rivers, build dams, and protect harbors.86 The work proved far less manageable than had

once been thought; more concrete would be needed.87 Despite (or because

of ) help from the Army Corps of Engineers, things moved slowly. Yes, the

Los Angeles River would be cemented in place. But it would take much

more time and much more money than anyone in early twentieth-century

Los Angeles could have imagined.

The introduction of tens of thousands of automobiles (Los Angeles had,

by the late 1920s, the highest per capita car ownership of any American city)

helped further to cement the river’s future. As early as 1924, the city and

county Traffic Commission had designed a “Major Traffic Street Plan,” adopted by the voters, which called for a “river truck freeway” to connect

the San Fernando Valley with the harbor district. Such a visionary plan

would also go a long way toward rationalizing the river; by the twenties, the

Los Angeles River had been virtually personified as a mischievous trouble- maker. “Was there ever anywhere a river more subject to ‘ups and downs’?”

the Los Angeles Times wondered. “It [will] never stay put. At one time it

flowed along Los Angeles street and then it deliberately moved to Alameda street.”88 The time was fast approaching for more concerted action against

such willfulness.

By the mid-1930s, Joseph Mesmer’s dream of a concrete river—the utilitar-

ian river if not the river beautiful—had new allies in the form of federal flood control funds and a more aggressive Army Corps of Engineers. By this time,

too, flood control as a civic problem had become an unquestioned given on the part of city engineers and politicians: Los Angeles had floods, Los Angeles had temperamental rivers, therefore Los Angeles must undertake drastic flood control measures.89 Just as the rains of 1914 had brought about concerted

action and regional “re-memories” of flood dangers, so too with the devastat- ing floods of the Depression years. What is more, the federal government proved more than willing to step in with both money and labor. Figs.24,25,and26abouthere

New Year’s Day, 1934, was among the worst, when the Los Angeles River

communities of Burbank, Montrose, and Glendale got hit by a massive and

deadly flood. Poor migrants from the southern plains had set up tent and

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 2 2

temporary communities in the bed of the river and nearby tributary

streams. It was “the natural thing,” according to Woody Guthrie, that

Okies would congregate in river and creek bottoms. But on “that fatal

New Year’s Night,” Woody sang in his mournful dirge about the flood, “a cloudburst hit the mountains, it swept away our homes. A hundred souls

was taken, a million hearts was grievin.” “This world will long remember,”

Guthrie sang, those folks “that crossed the golden river in that fatal New

Year’s flood.”90

The world has not long remembered those victims, nor the “wild Los

Angeles River” that flooded. But “immediate memory” did prompt the flood control engineers of Los Angeles to step up their actions following the devastation. By 1937, the Army Corps had $70 million to spend in Los

Angeles on flood control work. Momentum and money increased in the aftermath of the deadly 1938 flood, which killed close to a hundred people across Los Angeles County.91

Planners were quick, as they often were, to combine flood control plans with beautification projects if they could get away with it under the watch- ful eyes of the Corps. As one report of the era put it, with specific reference to the Los Angeles River, “large areas of proposed park lands in the rivers

and drainage channels will have double value to the public because they will

serve both park and drainage purposes.” In other words, the objectives were

mutually reinforcing: channel the rivers and develop them into narrow

urban greenbelts. The major recreational planning document of the period,

brought out just as the Depression hammered Southern California, rec-

ommended the construction of nearly one hundred regional “parkways,”

many of which were multiple designs bringing together flood control plans, freeway developments, and urban green space. The document pointed out

that much of the residential areas lying up against the river were “of low val-

uations and poor developments.”92

Despite some real concern on the part of certain city and county officials about the wisdom of turning the Army Corps of Engineers loose willy-nilly

in the rivers of the Los Angeles basin, the city did nonetheless plunge into

the paving project.93 At one point, the channel projects were to include “the

world’s highest dam” nestled cozily above Azusa in the San Gabriels, but that

particular endeavor was shelved when it ran into bad public relations, poten-

tially unstable geology, and an embarrassing kickback scandal which sent a

county supervisor to state prison after $80,000 mysteriously showed up in

his pocket.94 The Corps had some early problems with the Los Angeles

River: their first attempt at concretization washed away in March rains. But

1 2 3r e m e m b e r i n g a r i v e r

the die had long ago been cast, and the Los Angeles River, and its cousins

the San Gabriel and Rio Hondo, were paved over in about twenty years

of labor (though the work is ongoing), with the help of a virtual ocean of

thick concrete. Los Angeles basin flood control today represents the most ambitious, expensive, and concrete-intensive such project west of the

Mississippi. The Los Angeles River, Army Corps engineers say, is “the river

we built.”95

Is a built river dead, by definition? Of course not, despite indications within technical and legal literature that others believe it is.96 And few who

believe so are shy about suggesting foul play. The following is from a sharp-

eyed WPA observer in the mid-1930s. Notice how it reads like the obitu-

ary of a loyal civil servant:

[The] Los Angeles River has been pictured in recent years by local wits

as a stream whose bed must be sprinkled regularly to keep down the dust.

Despite all merry quips coined at its expense, the fact remains that, save

for a few scattering wells, the Los Angeles River, for a period of 133 years,

served as sole water source for this community. From the day the pueblo

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 2 4

Figures 24 – 26. 1930s channelization of the Los Angeles River. Courtesy of the

Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

was founded in 1781, the river continued faithfully to serve the town until

the increasing needs of a growing city exceeded its limited supply.97

Throughout the past century, city officials and planners have celebrated the control of nature as exemplified by their rationalization of the river. Sometimes they have been right, sometimes the river has surprised them.

If anything, the Los Angeles River is a stubborn stream. In the winter of

1907, assistant Los Angeles city engineer E. A. Tuttle wrote to his boss and

boasted that recent flood control measures had, for the first time in history, made it possible for the city to weather the rains of winter without fear of

the Los Angeles River. He was wrong, to be sure, but the mere fact that

Tuttle believed it illustrates how the city was firmly engaged in remaking the river and turning it to other than traditional uses.98

Engineer Tuttle has been echoed ever since, most particularly by the

truck river freeway enthusiasts of the twenties and again during the Second

World War. In early 1941, city planning documents argued that the river

would be a good defense industry ally in that trucks could be used to

transport war materiel in the riverbed (planners apparently got the idea by

watching construction trucks in the riverbed, busy supplying concrete for

the channels). Of course, planners noted, the river did have water two

months out of the year, but this was being taken care of by the “great con-

crete channel.”99 By 1943, the regional planning commission, in the pages

of its “Summary Report on Feasibility of Los Angeles River Freeway,” had

determined that truck traffic in the riverbed itself was not practical. “This conclusion was based on the fact that the channel was designed for one

purpose only[:] to carry the maximum runoff that occurs during periodic floods.”100 But they still thought they could construct wings on either side of the riverbed to carry traffic. In that way, though the river itself might be now unreliable, the channel would still flow. A new river had been, if not created, at least envisioned, one no longer filled with water but with cars and trucks. Planners could hardly rein in their enthusiasm.101

The newly industrialized river—what writer D. J. Waldie has called “the

river the Anglo city misplaced” — helped create more rigid pockets of

Mexican housing and neighborhoods.102 For in addition to acting as a

marker for industrial development, as in zoning legislation, the Los Angeles

River simultaneously “zones” ethnicity and class. It has of course been that

way for years, even long ago when the river’s moods made its banks risky

and thus cheaper land. But the process accelerated once the river was

assigned industrial chores. In the late 1930s, for instance, right in the heart

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 2 6

of the public works assault on the river, University of Southern California

student Charles Withers went looking for Mexicans in Los Angeles, as his

peers had been doing for decades. Like a watery magnet, the river drew him

to his subjects. He went first east of the plaza, “following the general line of the river and of the railroad tracks. This was perhaps the poorest district,

and the most frequently studied in the past twenty years by those interested

in the Mexican and his problems. It had a distinctly Mexican flavor, with shops, theaters, recreational facilities, and so forth, of a typically Mexican

turn. In this district were those localities known as the ‘Plaza,’ ‘Dogtown,’

and the ‘Flats’ of the packing house district. This last spread across to the

other side of the river in some places. . . . The houses were ancient, ram-

shackle, and crowded.”103 It was as if a sharp quarantine began in the low-

land flats running along Macy Street, falling down toward the river itself, a critical dividing line that exists even today.

� Maybe it is easy to pick on the Los Angeles River because it has always been

puny and never all that reliable. It looks like a creek next to other rivers of

the American West. But it clearly once was something that it is not any-

more, and the transition from what once was to what is now cannot be

divorced from political, cultural, or social currents. At least two certainties

are apparent. The first is that the river’s most critical transition (from river to flood control channel) is tied to a regional disassociation with a distinct ethnic past. The river displayed a disturbing propensity to flood, and such floods were all too obvious reminders of an unruly nature in a place that demanded—and claimed—control over nature in the name of the urban

future. A different future beckoned to the planners and builders of Los Angeles, if and only if the river could be corralled, contained, and con-

trolled. That process, precisely because it was predicated on knowing

regional history as a tool by which to embrace the regional future, revealed

attitudes and behaviors about ethnicity and race.

The second sure thing is that the concrete did not come down from the

mountains all by itself. A concrete river used to be a beautiful thing, a place

where exuberant Angelenos would be able to stroll placidly amidst the

visionary city that they had created, the city of the future, the city that had

beautified itself by perfecting Nature. But concrete rivers are not beautiful today. The enduring irony of the Los Angeles River is that those exuberant

future-obsessed Anglos do not inhabit the river’s spaces. It is the immigrant

1 2 7r e m e m b e r i n g a r i v e r

and homeless, mostly Latino, people living in a depressing deindustrialized

corridor who drink the water, swim and wash in it, and even farm its

banks and belly.104

But of course ethnic boundaries could be and most assuredly are drawn

with other markers in addition to environmental features like topography

and a river. In this, Los Angeles is no different than any other American city. One of these markers was, and is, certainly labor, as we will investigate

in chapter 4’s discussion of the making of modern Los Angeles on the

backs of several generations of Mexican laborers working at the biggest

brickyard in the world.

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 2 8

Fo u r

The Color of Brickwork Is Brown

As Walter let the soil fall from his hand, he knew that here he and his brother would build a brickyard.Walter contemplated the immensity of the place, the unlimited possibilities, the millions of bricks they could produce and the hundreds, thousands of men who would work for him. Here they will be happy, he thought as he grabbed another handful of red earth. Hundreds of people fell from his hand.

A l e j a n d r o M o r a l e s , The Brick People1

I have left the best of my life and my strength here, sprinkling with the sweat of my brow the fields and the factories of these gringos, who only know how to make one sweat and don’t even pay attention to one when they see that one is old.

S i m o n s B r i c k C o m p a n y e m p l o y e e Ju a n B e r z u n z o l o

Always,Walter Simons has interested himself in the individual concerns of his workmen and although it has been more or less of an onerous task he has been well repaid for keeping in close touch with his employees.

S a m u e l C l o v e r , Saturday Night, December 19, 1925

To the Mexican Los Angeles owes much.The drudgery of county and city has been his. He has handled the pick and the shovel, he has been the harvester. Upon his labor the prosperity of Southern California in large part rests.The charm and the fascination that distinguishes Los Angeles among American cities is largely his. Gardens and homes, streets and parks show the influence of Latin-American culture.The city is greatly in his debt.

K a r l D e S c h w e i n i t z ,

“Social Work with Families in Los Angeles,” 19272

1 2 9

The paved Los Angeles River—the river industrial—created an entirely new

environmental feature on the landscape of the city so proudly referred to as

“nature’s workshop.” As we have seen in chapter 3, engineers and urban plan-

ners cemented a new river into existence guided, in part, by building on the

seventy- and eighty-year-old memories of aged Mexicans. Reminiscence,

explicitly ethnic reminiscence, became a critical accompaniment to stark

hydrologic data gathered by servants of science. The irony, that a rural

Mexican past held information important to the race toward an urban, self-

consciously Anglo Saxon future, seems not to have occurred to the engi-

neers-turned-oral-historians, the politicians, or community leaders. This

should not be surprising. Irony had nothing to do with the desire to make

the river the key to city beautiful campaigns heralding the city of the future.

Regardless of any such insight, however, there can be little doubt that the

paving of the Los Angeles River, especially once the ambitions about mak-

ing the river into a scenic playground evaporated, helped to demarcate fur-

ther ethnic boundaries on the urban landscape. Proximity to the river had

long been one marker of Mexican Los Angeles, just as the river itself had

bounded (and continues to do so to this day) neighborhoods separate from

the commercial districts of downtown. Concrete and fencing drove the

point home. The riverbed itself, for at least much of the year, had also been

claimed as Mexican space, home to poor communities or colonias forged

from scrap wood or abandoned rail boxcars. With tons of cement, however,

came a much more glaring, literally concrete reminder about Mexican

spaces and places. It was as if the river itself was synonymous with Mexican

life in Los Angeles, an immobile vector which, much as Pacific Electric and Los Angeles Railway tracks had done for decades, segregated downtown Los

Angeles into rigid class and ethnic compartments.

But so, too, did work, as always, as everywhere in America. Fig.27abouthere

� There is no easy job in a brickyard. Digging hard clay from the ground, pul-

verizing it, adding water, shaping bricks from the mixture, firing them into solid, heavy rectangular blocks, stacking these into endless pile after

pile after pile—it is all backbreaking labor. A brickyard is a swarm of labor.

Men going here and there, pushing and pulling wheelbarrows, carts, and

dollies, moving earth and clay and brick. Each day is long. The work goes

on even after dark, the brickyard awash in the eerie shadows made by gas-

fired flames. Of course, work stops when it rains. Rain makes the yard

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 3 0

1 3 1t h e c o l o r o f b r i c k w o r k i s b r o w n

sloppy, slippery, and messy. The kilns that fire the damp clay into rock-hard bricks can’t do their work. But it does not rain much in Southern Califor-

nia, not outside of the few wet winter months. Brickyard work goes on and

on, day after day, brick after brick after millions of bricks. And when that

busy brickyard is located in one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas

of the nation, indeed of the world, the maxim rings all the more true: there

is no easy job in a brickyard.

There’s another brickyard truism, at least in Southern California during

the period under study in this book. The color of brickwork is brown.

By the early twentieth century, the San Gabriel Mission, that vaunted site

of Los Angeles nativity, had become an icon of the tourist experience.

Visitors tramped there by the thousands year in and year out. People could

see into the past from Mission San Gabriel, or so they told themselves or

read in their colorful guidebooks. The past beckoned, it called these tourists

from the pealing of the mission bells or the vistas seen from atop the mis-

sion’s famed outdoor stone staircase. That past, they learned, was a simpler

time. The people, they learned, were a simpler people. It was a pretty past,

a romantic time and place. It must have felt good to think about this

romantic past, particularly if you could almost see it.

Figure 27. Mexican workers, Simons brickyard, early twentieth century. Courtesy

of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 3 2

By 1912, along came someone to put that past on the stage. Mission

tourists could not only wander the quaint spaces of Catholic history, they

could see it all enacted in John Steven McGroarty’s hugely successful

Mission Play. “As you muse and ponder, it all seems a dream,” wrote one

woman of her time at the mission.3

But it was actually all careful make-believe, not a dream. Because if a

tourist with a little less imagination and a little more present-mindedness

stood at the top of what one local newspaper had once called that “queer

outside staircase,” he or she might have seen something different from the dreamscape of the pastoral past. The present loomed out there, a present

with very different conceptions of Mexicans and missions than the post- cards and curios on sale for a nickel or so at Mission San Gabriel.4

Standing at the top of that stairway and looking west, what did a viewer

see in 1900? In 1915? In 1928? A metropolis rose from the Los Angeles

basin, a city on the make. Smokestacks belched industrial smoke, synony-

mous with progress. High rises pushed five, then six, then fifteen stories into the sky. If one turned to look due south, or very nearly so, just a few

miles up and over the neighboring Montebello Hills there lay a commer-

cial operation that had everything to do with the ways in which Anglos in

Los Angeles thought about Mexicans. But it was not the wishful manipu-

lations of history that made this world. It was instead the dust and smoke

and clatter of the industrial present and future of Los Angeles that dictated

the story lines of this tale. Here, however, the equations were perhaps a bit

more straightforward than in the stage directions, characters, and plot of

John McGroarty’s treacly melodrama. Here racial logic offered an easy Los Angeles triptych. More Mexicans meant more workers. More workers

meant more bricks. More bricks meant more money.

That is how the Simons brothers figured it. Owners of a huge brick com- pany that operated plants all over the basin, from Pasadena west to Santa

Monica, with the biggest of all in Montebello, the Simons brothers (and

millions of their bricks) played a profound role in the industrial, residen-

tial, and commercial expansion of Los Angeles. They rode the growth wave

from the fabled boom period of the 1880s across the divide of the century,

through the slowdowns of the Depression and the Long Beach earthquake

of 1933, which damaged the brick industry, into the Second World War,

limping all the way to the 1950s. This chapter is about Simons brick, about

Simons brickyard workers, and about attitudes toward those workers and

others like them.

1 3 3t h e c o l o r o f b r i c k w o r k i s b r o w n

A d o b e t o B r i c k

An interesting chapter might be written upon the history and decay of

the old adobe structures, many of which were prominent land marks in

the city ten years ago, but have now disappeared.

E d w i n B a x t e r , “Leaves from the Last Decade,” 18935

Our story must open well before the Simons family migrated to Los

Angeles in the 1880s, alongside those tens of thousands of other midwest-

erners wishing to jump-start their futures. To understand brick in Los

Angeles, we need first to understand adobe, and the ways newcomers to Los Angeles saw transitions between building materials as synonymous and

simultaneous with transitions in racial realities. We have to start with an

assumption prevalent in Los Angeles, as in other places, in the middle of

the nineteenth century. Brick meant progress. Using brick as a building

material meant pushing the past away while beckoning the future. Brick

also meant Anglo America, which itself could be a stand-in, another

metaphor, for progress, albeit often slow progress. Of the 1850s, for instance,

acerbic writer Morrow Mayo once noted that “a brick building was started,

but before it was well under way six Mexicans were lynched, the preacher

left town, and the project petered out, leaving the Catholics as the sole sur-

vivors.” Brick was at least a step in the right direction, although Mayo seems

here to poke fun at Anglo assumptions that building blocks alone could

coax the arrival of “civilization,” even if the building in question was a

church.6

Adobe, on the other hand, that ubiquitous building material of water,

clay, and straw or weeds, stood for the past, a dark-skinned past at that, even

a different epoch. “Los Angeles in the Adobe Age” was the title historian J. M. Guinn used for his 1898 discussion of the pre-American city, a none-

too-subtle linking of time and mud.7 Historian Michael Gonzalez points

out that Anglo visitors to early Los Angeles “equated cracked adobe with

benighted citizens.”8 Never mind that adobe made for the ideal construc-

tion material in the Southwest. Never mind that it kept buildings cool in

the summer, never mind that it was relatively easy to work with and inex-

pensive. Never mind that adobe itself stood for home itself, as in “the Avila

Adobe,” the “Andres Pico Adobe,” or the “Lugo Adobe.”Fig.28abouthere

Maybe that was the point after all, at least at some deep cultural level.

Adobe meant home, but California was less and less a home to Mexicans

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 3 4

as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Rarely could even the elite of the

group count on being called “Californian” any more, as that signifier moved on over to describe Anglos, regardless of status. Those former Californios

found that theirs was an existence increasingly consigned to the past. As a

young Los Angeles photographer and amateur ethnographer noted in the

mid-1880s, “most of the Mexicans live in the old adobe houses which are

so rapidly disappearing.”9 Henry Workman Keller meant the houses were

falling away, but he could just as easily have meant the people: the linkage

was a common one. Adobe meant backwardness to American arrivals;

adobe was Catholic, adobe was the missions, adobe was the unusable past.

Its quaint revival qualities, especially when accompanied by red tiled roofs

and stout timber beams, would not be appreciated by Anglo arrivistes for

another generation or more.10 Tourist John Lauderdale, traveling through

Southern California at the very end of the nineteenth century, noted a con-

nection between architectural and human history. Visiting a friend near an

Figure 28. Making adobe, early twentieth-century Los Angeles. Courtesy of the

Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

old rancho, Lauderdale saw an adobe home where an “old Mexican” had

once lived. The structure was now used only for storage. “There are so

many instances of this kind,” Lauderdale wrote, where those that came

before had “to give away to the stronger white man.” Adobe could sym-

bolize those supposedly immutable transitions.11

Brick, on the other hand, meant progress as against dirty, ugly, unpro-

gressive adobe. Brick stood for the Anglo future. Brick was stolid, solid, and

firm. Brick—at least fired brick—could be counted on to be of standard size, regularized and identical brick after brick after brick. Brick was a

metaphor, there’s no mistaking it in the historical record, but it was much

more than that. Brick built modern Los Angeles, that Los Angeles before

the major earthquakes of the twentieth century consigned brick to its own

past. Brick took up where adobe left off or, more accurately, where adobe was left off, exactly at the moment of racial turnover, exactly at the moment California became American. Brick replaced adobe just as it had to, in the

equations of the era, so that Los Angeles could become the much-boosted,

much-boasted Anglo city of the western American future.12

We turn to the story of a place called Simons. It opens in the earliest years

of the twentieth century. In 1905 or thereabouts, before death and a bitter

family schism split their fraternal partnership, brothers Joseph, Elmer, and

Walter Simons embarked on an expansion of their Simons Brick Company.

Bricks, brickwork, and progress, growth and ethnic transformation: all

intertwined in the web of social relations that was the Simons Brick

Company. These plans of the brothers Simons, and their outcome, tell us

a great deal about elite Anglo attitudes toward Mexican labor in the City

of Angels during the first half of the last century. On a one-hundred-acre tract in Montebello, about seven miles southeast

of downtown Los Angeles and a couple of miles into Los Angeles County,

right against the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe’s tracks, the Simons Brick

Company planned an expansion of its brick-making operations. This

expansion was to include company housing for the Mexican labor force of

about a hundred and fifty men and their families. The Simons brothers sim- ply began to build barrack-like housing adjacent to the deep pit where

workers mined the reddish clay good for molding into bricks. By the late

spring of 1907, the newly christened Mexican village of Simons, almost

within sight of the first and ancient location of the 1771 San Gabriel Mis- sion (as well as the newer mission of 1775), had become a fully engaged

brick-making company town, turning out as many as 160,000 bricks a day.

The brick business boomed. The Simons brothers also needed to traffic

1 3 5t h e c o l o r o f b r i c k w o r k i s b r o w n

in workers to keep the operation humming along. They made certain that

the region’s itinerant Mexican railroad workers and agricultural laborers

knew of the availability of jobs at Simons. Through kin networks and local

employment agencies, word about brickyard work spread. But the broth-

ers Simons had a more fundamental plan in mind as well. Almost as soon

as they had put up the neat row of cheap company houses, they started the

Simons Company baby bonus. Every baby born to a brickyard family

entered the world with a shiny new $5 gold piece courtesy of the company.

So successful was the infant industry that by 1907 the Simons brothers had

grown uncertain of the cost-benefit ratio of the innovative program. They contemplated cutting the baby bounty in half, since already sixteen “five dollar babies” had been born to the wives of brick workers, including a set

of twins born to Manuel Garcia and his wife. In any event, as the Los

Angeles Times approvingly reported, the “baby prize fund” was but “one of

many striking features of the development of this new town of Simons.”13

Industrial paternalism had taken on a whole new meaning in the brickyards

of burgeoning Los Angeles, and the sequential and chronological logic of

the baby bonus is simple to discern. Have a baby, earn $5, make that baby

a lifelong worker in a company town brickyard.

As the brick baby bonus program abundantly shows, El Pueblo de Simons

was a company town, one of an extremely few in Southern California.14

Mexican railroad workers lived in numerous regional rail company colonias

scattered throughout the Southland, and many of these had a company

town look and feel to them. But Simons was different, an industrial village that put home right up against work, all beneath the authoritative gaze of

a company and a patriarch with the same name. Segregated by ethnicity

and geography, Simons would eventually grow to number more than three

thousand brickyard workers and their families. It would exist for nearly half

a century. It was, in many ways, an archetypical company town, albeit thou-

sands of miles away from the textile mill villages of the American South,

hunkered down in a clay pit hole below the Montebello Hills east of down-

town Los Angeles. The Simons Company, Simons brick, and Simons work-

ers built a fair amount of modern Los Angeles. Through fifty years of almost impossibly hard work, the Mexican laborers of the brickyard shaped,

dried, cooked, and stacked millions and millions of common bricks. These

bricks left the yard bound for construction sites in the expanding com-

mercial, residential, and educational avenues of greater Los Angeles. When

they were finished with each day’s long work, the workers walked from one end of the brickyard to another, from the clay pits or the drying racks or

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 3 6

the gigantic piles of stacked bricks to their small village of company

houses.15

As the historian Margaret Crawford has written, American company

towns, despite their variety, have been characterized by a fundamental pair-

ing of linked landscapes. “On one side is the industrial landscape, shaped

by the processes that engendered it; on the other, the model town, a con-

crete demonstration of a social or physical ideology.” The brickyard town

at Simons, California, was no different. It exhibited this fundamental, yet symbiotic, division. It was a modern industrial venture tied to a mush-

rooming metropolis, and it was as well what the Los Angeles Times admir-

ingly called “a model industrial town.”16

Telling the story of Simons requires that both landscapes be understood.

It might, in fact, be useful to talk of two places called “Simons Brick

Company Yard No. 3,” the one being a place where Mexicans lived and

worked, the other being what outsiders thought about when they thought

about “this new town” and its “many striking features.” The first Simons was a place shaped by the physical demands placed upon hundreds of low-

skilled laborers. The second Simons was a place that existed more as the

product of regional social attitudes, cultural idioms, and history.

T h e B r i c k M a n’s B u r d e n

It made sense for the brick-making brothers to put the new town of Simons

where they did. Critical components were already in place or on site: good

and plentiful clay deposits, a convenient railroad connection, cheap land,

and a labor force of unskilled, cheap, Mexican workers. In 1905, before the

Simons Company erected worker housing on site, a priest visiting the lit-

tle village of Montebello noted not only the region’s beauty, but also that

the village was “all Mexican,” populated by what he romantically called the

“sons of Montezuma.”17 For the Simons brothers, then, it was but a short

step from a village of Mexicans who worked in their brickyard to a brick-

yard village of their Mexican workers. The place had the clay, and it had the

men who could dig it from the earth. Company housing merely closed the

industrial circle.

Then, too, the Simons brothers had experience in brick making and

labor management that they learned from their father. Family patriarch

Reuben Simons came from Leicester, England, right in the grimy middle

of the industrial revolution. He immigrated to the United States and, after

a brief stop in Hamburg, Iowa, he and his family joined the midwestern

1 3 7t h e c o l o r o f b r i c k w o r k i s b r o w n

army marching west to Southern California in the late 1880s.18 He imme-

diately went into the brick business. Business proved lucrative and brisk.

By 1905, Reuben Simons and sons Joe, Walter, and Elmer (the latter

would die in 1913, not long after the expansion of the Montebello plant)

had been making bricks in the Los Angeles basin for nearly twenty years,

at operations not only in Montebello but in downtown Los Angeles and

near the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena as well. In Pasadena, especially, the

Simons family had been in the right place at the right time. That city’s

steady growth and big, sturdy houses, plus a few grand tourist hotels,

proved a boon to the local brick and construction trades from the mid-

1880s forward. By the close of the century, the Pasadena operation turned

out some forty-five thousand bricks a day at a twenty-acre plant just adja- cent to the streetcar line. Mexican workers went into deep pits to excavate

clay, and mules hauled the heavy loads out from the hole.19 The company

built small cottages for the fifty or so Mexican workers in its employ (and a honeymoon cottage for a Simons daughter) within sight of the Oak

Knoll mansions, some of Simons brick, which wealthy Chicagoans and oth-

ers had begun to build as refuges from eastern winters.20

Simons brick could be found in some of the important commercial

buildings of downtown Los Angeles business blocks and in the foundations

of the region’s best tourist hotels, the Carleton and Raymond among them.

When downtown San Francisco fell and burned in the earthquake and fire of 1906, Simons filled the first orders for Southern California brick used in Bay Area reconstruction.21 The Montebello plant was “Simons Brick

Company Yard No. 3,” and within a few years, it became one of the biggest

brickyards not only in the Los Angeles basin but also in the entire American

West. Especially in the 1920s, when building permits in Los Angeles ran

over $100,000,000 a year, brick played a critical role in metropolitan expan-

sion both “up” and “out.” Prior to the twin disasters of the Great Depres-

sion and the Long Beach earthquake, Simons Brick Company Yard No. 3

was said to be the world’s largest manufacturer of common brick.22

It is important to note the interplay of culture with commerce in the suc-

cess of the Simons Brick Company. The firm profited precisely from the creation and maintenance of that “Spanish Fantasy Past” that we have

examined in earlier chapters. Mission revival aesthetics created demand for

not only the company’s standard brick, but also the decorative “padre

brick” and “Simons Spanish Roof Tile.” The Simons Company had a hand

in the National Association of Brick Manufacturers’ publication “Homes

of the Spanish Type,” that listed a number of California models constructed

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 3 8

of brick, often in faux-adobe style. Homebuilders who chose the “San

Jacinto” model, for instance, could expect “a genuine whiff of the atmos- phere of Southern California where three centuries ago the adventurous

Spanish Padres were laying the foundation for an architecture which is just

now happily coming into its own.”23

Nowadays prized for their quality, distinctiveness, and connection to the

regional past, the Simons bricks of the 1910s and 1920s inevitably helped

push mission revivalism forward. And there were an awful lot of bricks by

which to build ostensible links to the mythic past. But that part of the myth’s

social ramification, which tended to create tangible dichotomies between the “Spanish past” and the “Mexican present” helped the Simons brothers as

well. Mexican laborers, not Spanish, not mythic, not part and parcel of some

quaint regional consciousness embraced by the Anglo elite, invariably and

inevitably occupied the bottom rung of the wage and social ladder, looking

for precisely the sorts of jobs that the brick industry provided. Bricks might

have been part of the Anglo perception of the Spanish Fantasy Past, but

brickwork certainly was not. There isn’t much romantic about a brickyard.

In fact, it probably took a fair amount of societal cognitive dissonance to dis-

tance the worker from the product in this regard (that is, if anyone buying

Simons bricks ever thought about Simons workers at all). But low wage rates,

harsh living conditions, and the mere presence of the company town in the

first place seem testimony enough that such dissonance did exist. Such were the complicated intersections between ethnic discrimination, labor value,

and elite cultural proclivities in the growing metropolis.

Los Angeles has a reputation as a city blind to its own history, and in the

case of Simons Brick Yard No. 3, the stereotype holds. Very little remains

to remind passersby of the once vibrant community that existed at Simons

through the first half of the twentieth century. The houses have long ago fallen or been torn down and burned, the clay pit filled in. Few remember the place or the people, and it is more likely that a Simons brick would elicit

comment today than a Simons brickyard worker. But time was that the

place was famous, less for the people who lived and worked there than for

the sheer volume of bricks that regularly left the brickyard in stacks of thou-

sands and thousands at a time. Even today, brick company officials in the Los Angeles region recall, “a Simons brick was a good brick.” From their

distinctive product, with every sixth brick stamped s i m o n s in the damp

clay, to their equally distinctive company town labor practices, Simons

and the Simons Brick Company—even the bricks themselves—were major

Southern California social and industrial institutions.

1 3 9t h e c o l o r o f b r i c k w o r k i s b r o w n

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 4 0

As testimony to the regional renown and curiosity of its Yard No. 3, the

Simons Company printed early twentieth-century color postcards that

proudly displayed the brickyard (transported across the county/city line by

caption to “Los Angeles, Cal.”). The unusual postcards, which mimic the

fashionable mission postcards of the day, came complete with text, describ-

ing the “industrial town of Simons” which “consists of more than 450 peo-

ple, housing accommodations, restaurant, general merchandise store, post-

office, school house, amusement hall, water works, electric plant, etc.” Turning out thirty rail cars of brick a day, ca. 1907, the yard owed its suc-

cess to “efficient labor used in all departments, the superior quality of clay and the fact that the most modern equipment is used.” Fig.29abouthere

The Los Angeles Times discovered Simons in the summer of 1907. By

then, the brick company had succeeded in amalgamating a little town with

a big industrial enterprise, in establishing those connections between the

Figure 29. The Simons Brick Company’s Yard No. 3 in Montebello. Worker houses

are in the background, bricks stacked into kilns are in the center, and drying racks

are in the foreground. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

two landscapes which Margaret Crawford points out as fundamental to

company towns. The newspaper approved. Laid out in neat right angles to

the railroad track, the village’s few streets had been graded and landscaped

with small trees. Flowers sprouted alongside the slightly sunken rail bed,

and little mission-style porticos graced the Simons rail stop. Fifty workers’

homes swung out neatly and tightly packed behind the company offices. Just a few hundred yards away, millions of freshly made bricks stood stacked

in gigantic rectangular piles or kilns, where they would be cooked by flames of natural gas. Each massive kiln (there were already twelve in place in 1907)

held an estimated 600,000–800,000 bricks, looking like so many Assyrian

temples neatly placed in the southern San Gabriel Valley.24

Walter Simons would later say that he built Simons in part so that brick-

yard workers could live “their way of life, away from towns.”25 Putting town

and industry together had been an experiment, but one that had paid off with great success, the Times crowed. Simons was nothing short of “a

model industrial town,” where “problems that have puzzled sociologists for

years are being worked out in a gratifying manner.” Lest readers wonder

what those puzzling problems were, the delighted anti-union Times spelled

them out: “It is a town without any labor troubles, for the workmen are so

content that walking delegates cannot reach them in an effort to create strife. Rents are low, there is no poverty nor want, there are no saloons,

there are no bad debts, there is a home with a little garden spot for every

one who wants it, with an abundance of land to till for garden purposes,

and plenty of good water.”26

The language here seems lifted from the booster literature urging Anglo

working-class and bourgeoisie settlement in greater Los Angeles. What is

striking is that this is supposedly the description of an industrial paradise

for Mexican laborers. They too, the Times reporter suggests, could, through

the good offices of their industrial patron, share in the California Dream. Shepherded by the kindly paternalism of their employer, landlord, and

majordomo, Mexican workers might experience some of that California so

gracefully extolled in the newspaper’s words and images.

Despite the Times assertion about contented nonunion laborers, it is

likely that the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) tried to get into the

brickyard to organize the workers at some point in the pre-Depression

days, but that history now seems lost. Some people with Simons memories

speak of failed organizing attempts as early as 1919, perhaps by the IWW,

which, given the period’s repressive antiradical climate, would indeed have

been a challenge.27

1 4 1t h e c o l o r o f b r i c k w o r k i s b r o w n

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 4 2

Ju s t L i k e W o r k i n g a r o u n d H o m e

In any event, everything about the experiment looked promising to the

chief anti-labor newspaper of the American West. The Simons brothers had

successfully reached out to the hinterlands of Los Angeles, just over the

county line in the flatlands east of the Los Angeles River. Here they had proven themselves “in the van of manufacturers who are turning to indus-

trial tracts near Los Angeles as the best places for conducting their enter-

prises.” The area’s fresh air, good and clean water, and freedom from the big

city’s attractions and diversions made the experiment all the more laudable.

The sheer isolation of the village (it was, after all, “down the hole” as well

as out in the countryside) offered the Simons brothers a virtual guarantee of paternalistic social control.

Workers were supposedly so pleased with their lot, so happily obedient,

that “one never hears a whistle blow or bell ring out there!” Indeed, “life

seems to agree with the inhabitants,” who “like working at home [and] seem

to enjoy their task” within constant sight of their small houses. It is almost

as if these workers had been magically transported back in time, back to the

era of romance and supposed ubiquitous happiness in early California. The

community’s women, the Times continued, were especially happy with the

state of affairs in the brickyard. For one thing, they enjoyed having credit at “the one store of the town” in order to buy groceries, shoes, and dry goods.

The store had been created, an admiring journalist later wrote, out of full

consideration of “Mexican preferences . . . stocked and operated by persons

thoroughly conversant with the national tastes of the Mexican.”28 The

women also appreciated that the men of Simons had only a relatively short

distance to walk once the workday was complete; company policy and size

made it impossible for the men to cross paths with any city vices by which

to diminish their paychecks. They’d also be unlikely to run across any labor

organizers. The workday ended, the workers trudged home.

The Times story of 1907 makes Simons into a virtual mission, twentieth-

century style. In many ways, the perception of the place seemed to conjure

up, at least for the anonymous Times reporter who visited that day, mission-

like images so popular during the period. In this case, though, the Indians

of old, supposedly so cared for by the Franciscan padres, had become

Mexican industrial laborers, now kept in place by the contingencies of a

restricted labor market and attractions offered by paternalistic employers. It was as if the dependent wards of one century had simply changed places

with those of another. Benevolent guardianship had been likewise trans-

ferred from church to capitalist. Like those early Californians, native or

Mexican alike, these people, too, were happy. Dissonance is a dark cloth

through which little light can shine.29

Even the sight of Simons children playing in the streets, the poorest of

them barefoot and in loose-fitting clothes of white muslin, evoked praise from the admiring Times reporter. A half dozen old burros, no longer

strong enough to pull heavy loads of brick in the yard, wandered among the

children. A little two-wheeled cart hitched to one or more of the burros

rolled the children around, offering the reporter a laudable representative scene by which to compare Simons to millionaires’ row. “Take that two-

wheeled cart with a tiny pickaninny driving and the box filled with varied sizes of black, brown and white children, with others trailing behind on

burros, and there isn’t a happier lot, even on Chester Place.”30

There’s no mistaking that the Simons yard and accompanying houses had

a vague mission look and feel to them. A sense of community self-con-

tainment and authoritative embrace of workers existed at Simons as it had

in the various missions of a hundred years previous. The brickyard even

boasted a central plaza. Company offices, red-tiled in vogue mission revival style, greeted visitors to the yard. A church was soon to be built, as well as

a school. Already by 1907, a company cafeteria had been established, where

a woman by the name of “Queen Ann” Creel, who had apparently been a

Red Cross nurse under Clara Barton, cooked meals for the seventy-five bachelors among the labor force.

Workers’ houses, which rented for three and four dollars a month, sat

closely next to one another, about fifteen feet apart.31 Houses were so close to one another that, as a visitor later recalled, “I don’t think you could have

gotten a Model T between them.”32 Built of rough-hewn lumber, the houses

stood in worked-out clay deposits. Houses had no foundations: moisture

seeped upwards and invaded in the winter. The houses had no electricity,

gas, or plumbing; electricity did not arrive in some until the 1930s.

Newspapers covered the interior walls of many (all the houses were single-

wall construction) as makeshift wallpaper. Outhouses stood out back.

Outside spigots drew water from the company’s on-site well or water tank.

Brickyard workers stacked pairs of bricks side by side beneath the spigot to

support large pots and burned fires to heat water for bathing and cleaning. Oil heaters—which occasionally exploded—or heavy wood stoves inside the

homes doubled for cooking and heating. Valley lumber companies occa-

sionally dropped scrap lumber in the yard, which Simons families scav-

enged for fuel.

1 4 3t h e c o l o r o f b r i c k w o r k i s b r o w n

Cows, pigs, chickens, ducks, and goats wandered around the front and

backyards of those with enough money to afford livestock. Some kept rab- bit pens. Roads were unpaved. Between the feet of grazing animals grew

gardens of chiles, pumpkins, squash, sweet potatoes, even sugar cane,

tended mostly by the community’s women. Some brickyard workers

worked double shifts, growing quantities of crops for sale as well as hold-

ing down brickyard jobs.33 Peddlers came around regularly; there was “el

gallino,” the chicken man, and Francisco Romo, the “watermelon man.”

Other vendors sold meat, since the company store mostly stocked dry and

canned goods. A woman called “the Jewess,” or “La Judia,” sold used cloth-

ing, and others wandered in selling vegetables or trinkets. Most sold to the

workers on credit. Simons women cooked throughout the day. One resi-

dent remembers that his mother made tortillas “three times a day, seven

days a week.”34

Machine foreman Genaro “Henry” Prado, a Simons fixture for decades, wore a gun on his hip, a star on his chest, and he carried handcuffs. “Don Genaro” acted as a kind of unofficial sheriff in the brickyard, every now and then getting help from watchman Thomas Armer or the Los Angeles

County Sheriff’s Department if he needed it for one reason or another. Prado and his family had started out living alongside the rest of the Simons

employees in the hoya, but before long he had been given a company house

among the casas de arriba, on the level ground above the clay pit. The Prado

house had running water, indoor plumbing, and a telephone. “Don

Genaro” also had, at least for some time, one of the few cars in all of

Simons. While it is tempting to interpret a Mexican foreman at Simons in

much the same light as an African American driver on an antebellum plan-

tation, there simply is too little information upon which competently to

assess Prado’s role or attitude.

For nearly thirty years, Walter Malone oversaw day-to-day operations at

Simons. Malone had arrived in Southern California shortly after military

service in the Spanish-American War, where he had been in combat in the

Philippines. For a brief time, he drove a six-horse tally-ho rig for local land

baron E. J. “Lucky” Baldwin, shuttling tourists and visitors from Los

Angeles to the Baldwin estate in the San Gabriel Valley, which had its own

version of a Southland company town.35 Malone began working for the

Simons brothers first as a muleskinner, probably around 1902. From there, he moved up the Simons ladder. When the big Montebello brickyard

expanded, Malone became general superintendent of all Simons yards.

This included the Santa Monica yard, off Pico Boulevard, which special-

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 4 4

ized in making roofing tile; the old Pasadena yard; the main Simons yard; and an adjacent one, “the Montebello yard,” over on Mines Boulevard,

which had a smaller operation specializing in wire-cut brick. Company

headquarters were at Eighth and Boyle in downtown Los Angeles, which

also had a yard specializing in roofing tile. The company kept a ranch near Calexico in the Imperial Valley, where they grazed livestock and grew feed

for their mules. Malone’s son remembers that his father had been told by

Simons workers that he would never last as yard superintendent: the work-

ers had run dozens of previous superintendents out, they would do the

same with him. Malone apparently responded that the time spent as a ser-

geant in the U.S. Army in the Philippines had taught him a thing or two.

In any event, he stayed until his death in 1933.

Walter Malone had a much higher profile in the yard than any other official for the company, more so, even than any of the Simons brothers themselves, who were not often seen. General Superintendent Malone

appeared in the yard each morning at seven, ever-present cigar chomped

between his teeth. Workers quickly figured out a Malone habit: if the cigar was unlit, he was in a good mood. If it was lit, Malone was in a foul tem-

per, and workers crossed him at the peril of their jobs, if only temporarily.36

But by all accounts, Malone was well thought of by the yard workers, as

were his sons Jack and Walter Jr.37 Henry Prado named his son after Malone

(Walter Leon Prado would later be killed in combat at the end of the

World War II). The Malone family home, still standing solidly in a mid-

dle-class neighborhood of Montebello, is built entirely of Simons brick.

M i g r a t i o n , Mu d , a n d Mu s c l e

The coming of the Mexican Revolution, coupled with the city’s rocketing

growth, proved of benefit to the Simons brothers. More immigrant work- ers began to arrive in the yard, especially from the Mexican states of Jalisco,

Michoacán, and Guanajuato. Guanajuato apparently supplied the major-

ity of Mexican-born workers, who may have not known what sort of labor

awaited them in the United States. “We wear ourselves out twice as fast

[here] as there,” were the words of one immigrant from the medium-sized

agricultural town of Penjamo, Guanajuato, which was a common home-

town for many Simons workers.38 Former yard laborers remembered that

they could board a train in southern Mexico, cross the border at El Paso,

grab a western-bound transcontinental, and get off the train almost in the brickyard itself. Simons did have a spur, off the Santa Fe line, but this was

1 4 5t h e c o l o r o f b r i c k w o r k i s b r o w n

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 4 6

a freight carrier for stacks of dried brick. People generally would disembark

at various stops nearby and walk to the brickyard to take up work.39 As nov-

elist Alejandro Morales reconstructed the migration of one family:

The signs were not what we were accustomed to so we asked, but no one

could help us because we asked for “Simones” and here they know the

place as “Simons.” We walked and walked until we found a man who

told us that we were far from our destination. He told us to go to a

movie house nearby and talk with a man who knew how to get to

Simons. We found that man and my father asked him for Simons.

And the man thought for a moment.

“Oh yes,” he said. “I believe I know where. I’m not sure but I think it’s

in that direction. Follow the tracks, the railroad tracks in that direction.

Follow them and where you see the houses from where you stand on the

tracks, that will be Laguna Road. When you are there, walk on and look

to the right. The houses are painted white.” 40

For their part, the Simons brothers encouraged chain migration, just as

they encouraged families to have children through their baby bonus pay-

outs of gold coins. They not only urged brick workers to contact relatives

in Mexico about the availability of Simons work, they also encouraged

Mexican laborers to write their families and the Mexican government

pleading for Mexico to stay out of the First World War. The tensions over

the publication of the infamous Zimmermann telegram, which suggested

a partnership between Germany and Mexico to reclaim the Southwest,

obviously worried men like the Simons brothers on more than one level.

Besides its frightening suggestion about bringing the world war very close

to home, the threat of Mexican involvement in the war created the specter

of a laborless brickyard. No Mexicans meant no bricks and no money. More

Mexicans meant more bricks and more money, and the Simons brothers

knew a boom building period when they saw one.41

Tensions south of the border apparently had some ramifications in the brickyard. A public health officer, sent to survey the brickyard during the Second World War, reported that, at the height of the Revolution in the

early 1910s, “some of the Simons Brick Yard employees took Mexican pol-

itics very seriously.” At one point, a fight broke out in the yard, a “minia- ture war,” the health officer called it. As many as eight men were killed in the ensuing knife- and gunplay. No other accounts of this event can be

found. It is true that tensions existed between workers at Simons. The

Revolution provoked hostilities and fights, as did disputes between native- born and Mexican-born workers.42

If nothing else, arrivals at Simons Brick Company Yard No. 3 could

expect to work hard. As Walter Malone Jr., the son of the Simons yard

superintendent from the early years of the twentieth century reminds us,

“there is no easy job in a brickyard.” In the words of Ismael Vargas, whose

father came to the United States in 1906 and worked on western railroads

until landing at Simons, where he spent the rest of his life as a laborer, the

workers in the yard were simply “beasts of burden” and “peons.” To fore-

man Henry Prado’s daughter, Simons workers were treated “like slaves.”

And to Simons worker Juan Berzunzolo, years and years of brickyard work

exhausted both body and spirit: “I have left the best of my life and my

strength here,” he told an interviewer in the 1920s.43 Perhaps a contempo-

rary student investigation, Ruth Ewald’s master’s thesis of 1922, put the

equation best. There were, she said, a number of “old-fashioned” capital-

ists in Los Angeles “who considered foreign labor in the same class with the

horse.”44

Carlos Almazan remembered going to an employment office in Los Angeles sometime in the 1920s and being told that there was work at

“Simons, Laguna,” the latter term referring either to the once-great rancho

of the region or the local lake (later called Sleepy Lagoon). He went. “They

paid me $4.00 for working eight hours, but what eight hours! I was left

almost dead, especially the first day.”45

Most of the brickyard work took place in the spring, summer, and fall.

Wintertime rains, if only occasional in Southern California, made it

difficult to dig clay and make bricks. Consequently, the Simons plant had to produce as many bricks as possible in a relatively short “season.” Laborers

generally worked a nine-to-twelve hour shift, depending on their actual

duties. Most, like those who worked in one of the brick-making machines,

began their day early, around 3:00 a.m., with a walk from home to brick-

yard. Around 7:30 in the morning, they broke for food brought out to them

by their wives and children. By the early afternoon, with the sun at its

hottest, most shifts were complete. One Los Angeles-area brickyard worker,

Bonificio Ortega, who probably worked at Simons, recalled that he came home from the yard too tired to try to learn English.46 Wages worked out

to about 20 cents an hour or less in the early years of the century. Juan

Berzunzolo worked for $1.50 a day in 1913. A Simons foreman estimated

that subsistence expenditures, for a family, ranged from $5 to $7 a week.

Despite the Los Angeles Times declaration of 1907 that Simons was a place

1 4 7t h e c o l o r o f b r i c k w o r k i s b r o w n

“without poverty or want,” it is hard to ignore the mathematics of destitu-

tion. Simons brick workers and their families epitomized the working,

Mexican poor of industrial Los Angeles.47

Some of the work, like that done by the men in the brick-making

machines and by the setters, who placed bricks in the kilns, was piecework.

Brick loaders got paid by the hour. By the late 1930s, brick burners made

something like $6 a day for a twelve-hour shift; Walter Malone Jr. remem-

bers working an hour-long delivery and unloading shift, taking bricks to a

construction site at UCLA, for which he picked up a 37 cent paycheck. His

cousin remembers Depression-era work in the Simons hay field at 18 cents an hour. In the late 1930s, a thousand Simons bricks sold for $12, up only

$2 a thousand from the early 1920s. Delivery added $2.50 to each thousand.

Workers transferred their pay into household staples: a sack of beans, pork

chops, corn meal, cheese, bread, sugar, and salt. In the 1930s, Malone

remembers, bodybuilders and college students from the coastal beach com-

munities began showing up at the brickyard looking for work. They never

lasted long.

The Simons brothers took advantage of the availability of electricity and

steam early on. At the time of the congratulatory Los Angeles Times story of

1907, some machinery was already powered by electricity, though the lines

did not extend to the workers’ homes. The company ran electrical current

to the mills that ground and mixed the brick clay, to conveyors, and to a

small railcar that ran alongside the yard’s one hundred mules to bring the

clay to the mixers. Steam shovels dug clay from the pit, which sat some

fifteen to twenty feet below street level. Most of the work still had to be done with animal or human brawn.

Edison company electricity never completely replaced mules in the brick-

yard. Mules, at least in the 1920s and 1930s, were the responsibility of

Manuel Barber, who also kept the dusty brickyard sprayed with water. He

would harness the mules early in the morning, between 3:00 and 4:00

a.m., and make sure that their shoes were in good shape. Blacksmith Carlos

Arnold, whom Walter Malone Jr. remembers as “strong as an ox” and “able

to do anything,” helped with the shoeing of the 1,600-pound mules. Arnold

also made the molds that stamped the distinctive signature S I M O N S on

every sixth brick out of a brick-making machine. Around November 1

each year, with wintertime rains approaching, the mules would be de-shod

and herded up into the Montebello Hills or taken out east to the Imperial

Valley, where they’d be pastured till early spring. Brickyard work slowed in

the late fall and winter; the yard made do selling what brick it already had

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 4 8

on hand. Old-time Simons workers recall the smell of winter around the

yard; smudge pot smoke from neighboring citrus groves filled the air. Workers would look for other work in and around Montebello or at one

of the few year-round brick or tile companies nearby. Some would leave

Simons, in search of whatever agricultural or other work they might be able

to find near or far. One worker recalled picking lemons in the late 1930s, and the oddity of seeing Anglos picking alongside him. After speaking

with them, he learned that they were from Oklahoma, refugees from the

Dust Bowl.48

Brick making at Simons was divided among various arduous tasks.

Anthropologist Manuel Gamio, working in the 1920s on studies of

Mexicans in the United States, listed a dozen different classifications for brickyard labor in California. These included cortadores, dampeadores, mete-

dores de moldes, areneros, paleteros, templadores, arriadores, cargadores, asen-

tadores, pichadores, arregladores, and apiladores.49 The clay had to be dug

from the ground, then mixed with water, before being formed into bricks.

Bricks would be made in one of more than a dozen brick-making machines

that ran all day. New wet bricks would be hauled to open-sided drying A-

framed racks, where they would sit for a week or more. By the 1930s, a sim-

ple electric cable system was in operation at Simons that would carry small

pallets of bricks—six per pallet—to the drying racks. Pallets of bricks would

dry two abreast in the racks, which stood somewhere around six or seven

feet high. Bricks had to be watched in the racks lest they dry too fast; gunny

sacking would be hung over the edges of the racks if the weather got too

warm (which, in the southern San Gabriel Valley, happened often in the

summers). Young Simons kids and teenagers, boys and girls alike, earned

a penny a brick turning the drying bricks, or sometimes 32 cents per fifty- yard row. After drying, racked bricks would be stacked into “setter carts” by

two men, called cargadores. Each cart held around five or six hundred bricks.

Mules or small gas-powered rail cars (“dinkies” or dinkas) dragged setter

carts to “kiln seats,” open, graded spaces near the racks. Here the bricks

would be stacked by “setters” into the gigantic rectangular piles called

kilns. Four men would begin to stack the bricks, most of them on edge,

until they could no longer reach to the top. The crew would then split, with

two men climbing atop the kiln. Those on ground level pitched bricks, two

at a time, to those on top. Kilns were built adjacent to a three-inch main

line of natural gas. Dozens of small openings at the base of each kiln,

called arches, were then fitted with smaller, vertical gas lines branching off

1 4 9t h e c o l o r o f b r i c k w o r k i s b r o w n

the main line. The gas jets shot into the inside of the kiln in a blaze of heat

and flame. Peepholes above each arch allowed the “burner,” who was always on duty when a kiln was fired, to peer into the inside of the kiln from a healthy three- or four-foot distance to see if all was operating smoothly.

“Burners” occasionally miscalculated or were the victims of cantankerous

gas jets. Workers coated the outside layer of bricks with adobe mud to seal

off openings between individual bricks. The gas lines were ignited, and the bricks would cook for seven days and nights. Those on the bottom of the

kiln might get over-cooked and brittle; those on the top might not get

cooked enough. “The lighter the color, the weaker the brick,” Walter

Malone remembered.50 If the kiln got too hot, the bricks might melt

together. Sometimes this was done on purpose: the hacked-apart, sharp-

edged shards of “clinker brick” would be used for decorative masonry along

sidewalks, as edging, or for fishponds. The grounds of 1910-era craftsman- style homes, including some of the best known, utilized such clinker brick

with abandon. Even today, a walk around the Greene and Greene craftsman

neighborhoods of Pasadena reveals sidewalks, chimneys, driveways, and

walls which are full of Simons brick, clinker or otherwise.

After firing for a week, the kiln would have to cool for several days, some- times as many as five. The kiln might even be sprayed with water to cool it. Then the adobe-coated bricks, called casing brick, would be hacked off. Sometimes the kiln would be filled with gas that the burner would deliber- ately not ignite. Once the gas reached the top of the kiln, a spontaneous and

loud combustion would take place: this was called “smoking” the bricks,

which made them a different color from those cooked more conventionally. Stacking wet or cooked bricks required strong arms and backs. A wet

Simons brick weighed six pounds, a cooked brick weighed about four and

a half pounds. When unstacking, workers would toss bricks off the top of the kiln one or two at a time until the height of the kiln had come down

to about ten or twelve feet. Then they would grab four bricks at a time,

pressing them together as they picked them up, and throw them down to

be placed in the waiting truck. Throwing four bricks at once from the top

of a kiln, which could be twenty or more feet off the ground, was simply too dangerous to the men below. A bad catch could break a jaw or a nose

or do worse damage. Those catching the brick would do so by carefully

positioning the heel of their hand to blunt the force of the tossed bricks;

the other hand would then quickly be positioned to sandwich the bricks

together. Loaders and throwers swapped position every other load. Workers

pitching bricks from the bottom of a kiln to men in the bed of a truck did

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 5 0

so from their knees. Walter Malone Jr. still remembers with amazement the

day his brother, whom the brickyard workers affectionately referred to as “El Loco,” went down to the brickyard to load bricks. Jack Malone’s crew

consisted of himself in the bed of a truck and three old, arthritic Mexican

men in their seventies. These men proceeded to throw four thousand bricks

to Jack Malone in eighteen minutes. “There was an art to anything every-

one did in the brickyard,” remembers Walter Malone Jr. He also remem-

bers the forearm and chest strength of brickyard workers. “You didn’t mess

with those guys too much.”51

Brickyard work may have required a certain kind of muscular grace, but

it was also dangerous labor. Crushed fingers and toes, smashed hands: these were part of everyday life in the yard. Ismael Vargas remembers the

day that a clay grinder malfunctioned; a worker tending to it got his shirt

caught in the conveyor belt carrying clay to the grinder and had his arm

torn off.52

From the brickyard, Simons bricks went by truck or rail to construction

sites around the Los Angeles basin or further away. Most went to the freight

yard at First Street and the Los Angeles River. Simons trucks had Anglo

(and Teamster) drivers; the ethnic border operated at the limits of the yard,

with Mexicans filling the truck beds and white men driving the bricks to wherever they were headed.53

The Simons brothers knew how to make a company town, and they

knew more about industrial paternalism than simply to greet each new baby

with a gold coin. Simons executive H. B. Howarth described the company

town in the early 1920s, noting that Simons was at that point one of the

largest, if not the largest, brick plant in the nation. “The settlement is

entirely Mexican,” he said, “and has its own church and padre. There is a

county school with four teachers, a government post office; a company store and a contented employes’ [sic] list of nearly four hundred men, which is

to be increased to five hundred. . . .”54 From the workers’ houses to the workers’ recreation, the imprint of the company was upon everything,

even down to the “marital relations court” that Walter Malone held on

occasional Mondays to adjudicate disputes among workers and their wives.

Company scrip or company credit bought groceries, shoes, and dry goods

in the company store. Company invoices delivered monthly rental state-

ments for company houses. A company hall held boxing matches and

showed films. Ernestina Macias remembers seeing Wings and The Bridge of San Luis Rey when they first came out; bilingual moviegoers would whis- per translations to family members as they sat together in the darkened hall.

1 5 1t h e c o l o r o f b r i c k w o r k i s b r o w n

Only occasionally would Simons residents travel to downtown Los Angeles

by bus or streetcar, to cinema and grand showhouses like the Million

Dollar Theater. “Ernie” Macias remembers going to the San Gabriel

Mission to see The Mission Play many times.

As if taking their cue from the mill owners and company town overlords

of the South, the Simons brothers started a company semi-professional

baseball team in the 1910s. Workers wore their company uniforms—white

pants, white shoes, a green jersey with a red brick logo, inscribed in yellow

“Simons”—all across the Southwest as the Simons team took on all com-

ers and apparently beat most of them. Company officials even okayed the recruitment of several ringers, including Meusel brothers “Irish” (Emil) and

Bob, who worked brickyard jobs only for the length of the baseball season.

Legend has it that games could become so contested that Simons bricks

would occasionally be wielded as projectiles or weapons.55

Handball courts were not far from the Simons ball field; brickyard teams often played against other teams made up of Mexicans from different small barrios or industrial companies. There was a dancehall on Simons property

as well. Workers congregated there or at one of several nearby dancehalls on

weekends. Some attended, or participated in, bicycling races on the grounds

of the American Legion stadium, which also held boxing matches. Some

well-known regional boxers, including Jesus “Wild Man” Macias and

Manual Martinez (who fought as Bert Colima II) either worked in the

brickyard or came from families that did.

In another echo of the South, Simons also boasted numerous company

bands. At first these were casual gatherings of workers. But in 1924, the company started a more official band made up of a handful of yard work- ers that performed in the Rose Parade in Pasadena. The group also played

to acclaim at the tourist hotels of Pasadena. Within a few years, the band

grew into a forty-two-piece orchestra, complete with the importation of a

bandleader brought all the way from the National Band of Mexico City.

Workers living in Simons disobeyed company rules at the peril of their

employment. Thomas Armer, a former deputy sheriff from Gila Bend (and Walter Malone’s brother-in-law) helped to keep the peace and acted as night

watchman. Liquor was forbidden; not only did the company store not carry

it, it was against company rules to bring it in from the outside, though some

workers apparently smuggled it into their little houses and others made

their own white mule whiskey. The liquor ban, the admiring Los Angeles

Times editorialized, was “especially appreciated by the wives of the

Mexicans.”56 By the 1930s, the rules had been relaxed enough so that work-

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 5 2

ers congregated after their shifts in one of the several Simons houses that

sold store-bought or homebrewed wine and beer. George Armer recalls that

this was “not allowed but not disallowed either.”57

In keeping with the modern mission arrangement of the brickyard, the

Simons brothers made sure to make religious arrangements for their work-

force. In cooperation with the local Benedictine brothers, they established

a Catholic church at Simons not long after the plant began operation. The

Benedictines, whose religious charges up to that point had been mostly the

region’s Basques, began to minister to the Mexicans of Simons. By the end

of 1912, the Benedictine order finished building the new Our Lady of Mount Carmel chapel. Land grant heiress Arcadia de Baker, who had mar-

ried into an elite Anglo town-building dynasty (Robert Baker had helped

found Santa Monica), donated the land for it. Within a year, aided by yard

superintendent Walter Malone (who was, wrote one Benedictine years

later, “ever solicitous for the spiritual welfare of the little settlement”), the

chapel counted 280 parishioners.58 Mount Carmel, or Monte Carmelo as the

residents of Simons referred to it, would long be a central reference point

in the lives of the brickyard community members, especially under the tute-

lage of longtime church leaders Raphael Defives and Charles Espelete. “Father Charles” is still remembered for his festive church bazaars.

Mount Carmel, like many other such “Mexican chapels,” was the segre-

gated counterpart to the larger Catholic church not far away. That hardly

diminished its importance to the Simons barrio. Here, forty or fifty feet off the Santa Fe’s tracks, the workers of Simons worshipped (men in the left

pews, women in the right). Babies were baptized, most of them healthy,

some of them “graven infirmitatem,” some of them post mortem. Simons kids went to Thursday catechism classes at Mount Carmel after school;

there they received confirmation and later got married. Almost all of the Simons workers and their families, including Superintendent Walter

Malone, were Catholic. Residents remember that missing mass was frowned

upon, both by neighbors and by the company. The handful of Mexican

Protestants in the yard, derisively called “los aleluyas” by Simons kids, clus-

tered together in one corner of the community.

The Mount Carmel chapel had its counterpart in the Simons school. By

1914, the Vail School (locally referred to as “the Mexican School”) had

opened up just across the street from the yard. Built to educate the children

of brickyard workers, who earlier had to be carted by wagon to the

Montebello School, the school still stands today, one of the few remaining

structures from bygone days. Simons kids rarely went to the Greenwood

1 5 3t h e c o l o r o f b r i c k w o r k i s b r o w n

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 5 4

School in Montebello; they stayed at the Vail School. Even when they

reached junior high, and were supposedly integrated, the Mexican stu-

dents all had the same homeroom; some of the eighth graders could be as

old as seventeen or eighteen. One student remembers that his teacher sim-

ply sat at his desk and read a book all day. “He didn’t care.” The junior high

school principal threatened to send all the Mexican kids “back to Vail”

unless they quietly accepted their second-class status in the school.59 “The

only time we heard English was when the teachers spoke the language,”

another former student remembered.60 Another remembered a student

having his name changed by a teacher from Jesus to Joe; the former name,

the teacher said, “reminds me too much of our Lord.”61

As a result of such discrimination (and the fact that apparently many of

them were sick a good deal of the time) most of the Simons kids remained

illiterate or semi-literate at best. Not until military service in World War II

did most of them learn to read and write in either English or Spanish with

any fluency.62 At the end of the day, Ismael Vargas remembers, “the Anglo kids went one way, the Mexicans the other.”63

Such discrimination outside the confines of the brickyard was hardly lim- ited to schools. A health worker surveying the brickyard in the World War

II years learned that “Montebello City authorities are not desirous of hav-

ing the public playground and swimming pool operated by them used by

the Simons residents.”64 Ismael Vargas remembers Simons workers and

their families heading to the Vogue Theater in Montebello to see films on Sunday afternoons. At the entrance, the Anglo families paid and went one

way into the theater, Mexicans the other, just as at the end of a school day.

Even in the larger social world of Montebello and the southern San Gabriel

Valley, the region’s Anglos, Mexicans, and Japanese inhabited different worlds. They didn’t socialize, they didn’t interact, and they didn’t share

much except by accidents of time and space. Of course much of this was

by majority design. Racially restrictive policies and practices occupied cen-

ter stage in Montebello’s city planning through the prewar era, as they did

nearly everywhere else in greater Los Angeles. “It is the practice of the

[Realty] Board to watch carefully to see that undesirable races are kept out

of the older sections of town,” wrote a prominent Montebello realtor in the

mid-1920s. “Controlling race conditions and enforcing race restrictions”

stood at the top of the board’s goals.65

Not that many in Simons felt that they could push against the system. “We

were afraid to go to a restaurant,” remembers one Simons resident, “because

1 5 5t h e c o l o r o f b r i c k w o r k i s b r o w n

we didn’t know if we would be served.” Not knowing was almost worse than

knowing. Either way, there was little sense in pushing the boundary.

But people did come to the brickyard. A woman named Verona

Spellmire, along with ten other women she recruited, began to visit the

brickyard every week for a while, starting in 1919. Ms. Spellmire went to

Simons to lead the workers in Catholic religious instruction, and she later

branched out from the brickyard to wider missionary work among the

Mexican and Mexican American populations of greater Los Angeles.66

Social workers and society people wandered the three and a half miles east

from downtown Los Angeles to see what Simons (they also called it

“Simons Town”) looked like. Walter Malone remembers seeing rich young

Anglo women come out to the yard in their Buicks and Cadillacs, usually

accompanied by a reporter from one of the local papers. These women

came to the yard to see a slice of industrial life or a Mexican barrio, or to

get a taste of social work. Once the reporter had gotten his story, or the pho-

tographer his shot, the women would quickly leave.

A M a n w i t h a B i g H e a r t

Walter Simons presided over the brickyard operations with the racial pater-

nalism of a company town baron, a position and attitude that brought him

professional and social accolades. A respected and undoubtedly well-off industrialist (the brickyard became more or less his after a mysterious 1915

family feud split the brothers), Simons served several terms as president of

the Los Angeles Builders Exchange as well as the California Common

Brick Manufacturers’ Association and Los Angeles Brick Exchange. In

February 1924, he hosted the Common Brick Manufacturers’ Association

of America at the Biltmore Hotel (itself built of a million bricks), the first time that any large industrial body had come to the Los Angeles for its

annual convention.

At the opening of the meeting (after the Simons band had serenaded the

brick men at the train station), Walter Simons welcomed the convention-

eers to Los Angeles. Expressing his joy at hosting “my fellow-craftsmen,” he

spoke loftily of the brick industry and its role in the buildup of Southern

California. The mayor of Los Angeles, George Cryer, had spoken to the

brick men as well, and he had boosted Los Angeles in typical terms of cli-

mate, growth, and culture. Walter Simons attached the brick industry to

those sentiments. “We want to put in a program here to help along with

the great movement of rendering this city a more fireproof proposition,” he told his colleagues. And that meant brick, brick, and more brick.67

While in Los Angeles, convention attendees toured the film studios of Thomas Ince, wandered the seacoast at Venice and Santa Monica, and

gaped at the homes of movie stars. Special excursions included a visit to the

oil derricks (“thick as trees in a forest”) in Santa Fe Springs, basin brick

plants, and the Los Angeles harbor complex in San Pedro and Long Beach.

Conventioneers drove the streets of Pasadena where millionaires lived. On

one evening, they went to a special screening (“brick night”) of The Ten

Commandments at Graumann’s Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. The brick

men found the movie “one of the most powerful arguments for safe build-

ings that ever has been presented on stage or screen.”68

The brick people took in all the requisite sights of 1920s Los Angeles: the

remarkable oil fields, the “typical” homes of the wealthy, and the ostenta- tious displays of Hollywood. But they also saw the “fantasy past” mingled

with the Los Angeles present. They went to the San Gabriel Mission and

then immediately to the Mission Play, and they went as well out to the

Mission Inn in Riverside and “Ramona’s Marriage Place” in San Diego.

Convention attendees also spent time at Simons, touring the plant, getting

their photographs taken with children of the brickyard workers, listening

again to the Simons “Mexican band,” watching boxing matches between

Simons employees, and even taking in a film (a brick construction movie called The Great Idea) in the company hall.

If we juxtapose the conventioneers’ time at, especially, John Steven

McGroarty’s melodramatic Mission Play and Walter Simons’s Yard No. 3, it

seems as if the brick manufacturers availed themselves of the opportunity

to make bookends of their industrial tourism. On the one hand, they

could see Mexicans frozen in space at Simons, and on the other hand they

could see them frozen in time at the Mission Play. Fig.30abouthere

Some of the brick men from the East criticized shoddy home construc-

tion in Los Angeles, citing film sets as the apparent model for the work. “The eastern men here . . . ,” remarked a local official, “are in love with the city, with its residential possibilities and with what has been accomplished.

Their only criticism is of so much flimsy home building.” One would imagine that the homes of Simons Yard No. 3 workers might as well have

been used as the example of cheap housing.69 Architects, including the

noted Southern California architect Reginald Johnson, came before the

group to point out that mission and Spanish revival buildings might best

be produced with brick.

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No better representation of the regional regard for Walter Simons among

his racial and class peers can be found than that which appeared in a long

story devoted to Simons in the pages of Saturday Night, one of the more

prominent of the elite Anglo social weeklies in the pre–World War II era.

The profile, one of a series in the magazine’s “California Men of Con- structive Ability” stories of the mid-1920s, appeared at Christmastime,

1925. The timing was not coincidental. Walter Robey Simons, who had

once prepped for the Baptist ministry, received the praise due a saint.

Samuel T. Clover, the magazine’s London-born president and editor, wrote

the profile himself, and he wrapped Walter Simons in effusive praise. Simons was more than an industrialist; he was a humanist, a man with

a big heart, a man with abiding and deep love for his employees. And

Clover sought to demonstrate such by remarking about Simons’s regard for

Mexican children. For he was, at Christmastime at least, Santa Claus, sort

of. He did not actually pass out gifts to the Mexican children and Mexican

mothers who gathered in the main plaza of the town: “one of the trusted

Mexicans, long time in the company’s service enacts that role.” But Walter

Simons did oversee the action, accompanied by his wife and a number of

their wealthy friends. Gleeful Mexican children accepted their gifts of

Figure 30. The Simons company band. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San

Marino, California.

“dolls, toys, mufflers, frocks, shoes, hats and caps and other sensible pres- ents while their mothers rejoiced in the receipt of material for new dresses,

shawls, shoes and household necessities.” Clover could hardly contain his

enthusiasm, gushing in much the same way as the reporter from the Los

Angeles Times decades earlier. “To see those merry-faced brown-skinned

youngsters carrying off their treasures . . . is to get a new light on the melt- ing pot of America.”

Not all was such sweetness. Clover’s very next sentence casts an ominous

pall on Simons, darkens that “new light.” “Not a few among the children

were born in the town of Simons,” he observes, “and will be citizens of the

republic if they live.” It is hard to know, these eighty years later, what

exactly Sam T. Clover meant when he wrote those words. Likely he had in

mind a couple of features of Mexican life in Los Angeles: first, there is the strained association of American birth- and citizenship rights, apparent in

Clover’s assumption that the Mexican American children will somehow

grow and mature into citizenship, unlike Anglo children, presumably, who

were citizens already at five or ten years of age. In the words of historian Mark Reisler, Anglos generally perceived Mexicans as “always the laborer,

never the citizen.” At the very least, every one of the $5 gold piece babies

had been born American, though Clover seems not to have embraced that

fact. Then there’s the ominous “if they live” clause. What could it mean?

Likely it had something to do with public perceptions of Mexican mor-

bidity, and it is true that Mexican mortality statistics spiked higher than

Anglo in this period in Los Angeles history, especially as far as children were

concerned. According to one 1920 report, the “Mexican babe’s chance to

live is just one-third that of the average babe born in Los Angeles.”70Fig.31abouthere

In any event, the macabre statement hardly slowed Clover down. He

praised Walter Simons for building the school where “teachers impart

English and American ways” to the several hundred children. He singled

out the vocational instruction for special comment; older children worked

at a “model cottage,” where they made furniture for the houses of Simons

families. Their work was nothing short of “ingenious,” in that they fash-

ioned functional pieces out of dry goods boxes, shoeboxes, and rough scrap

lumber. “There are natty little bureaus, covered with chintz, neat benches,

kitchen tables, a lounge, bedsteads, a cradle, chests of drawers and a score

or more of miscellaneous articles for the home, calculated to lighten the

housework and afford comfort to all.” But this was not all purely function over form. On the contrary: “As an

object lesson to the Mexican tenants, this model display is invaluable. It

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suggests to untrained minds what is possible to do with material many

regard as only fit for kindling wood, thus subtly inculcating the virtues of thrift and economy.” With this statement, Clover again makes use of a pow-

erful regional metaphor. Whereas he opened his article with a discussion of

Walter Simons amidst the happy Mexican children (i.e., the father among

the workers), he moves here to remind his readers that Mexican stock itself

might be regionally viewed by Anglos as “only fit for kindling wood,” but such a view did not take into account such careful sculpting and forming

as that practiced by the prudent and beneficent Southern California indus- trialist cut from Simons cloth.

In fact, Clover’s article is all about building and forming and shaping,

about making bricks, putting up buildings, and creating “happy and con-

tented” people out of the more than 3,000 residents of Simons. Here, not

far from the San Gabriel Mission, Walter Simons became Southern

California’s twentieth-century version of Father Junipero Serra, except of

course that Native American neophytes had been replaced by Mexicans, just

as they had throughout the region and regional economy from the mid-

1850s forward. And the latter-day father to his workers sat in the back of his

Figure 31. Ernestina Macias (center, left) on the lap of Walter Simons, 1920s.

Author’s collection.

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large convertible, waving to the brickyard workers as he drove past the yard

every now and then.71

The mission parallels are striking, really, and in them we may find some possible answers to the question: why start a company town in Southern

California? Examples were, of course, around. The railroad colonias, for

instance, did put work and home together, sometimes literally, in the form

of boxcar homes provided for Mexican workers. But a company town like

Simons was rare, especially given its early roots, ca. 1906. Could the Simons

brothers have imagined a mission metaphor for the place, as, I think,

Clover suggests?

There’s no doubt that self-contained Simons (the gates into the company

housing tract were locked at night, to keep workers in or peddlers out, or

both) existed as a place where Mexican laborers could be closely attended

to, gradually brought forward toward “civilization.”72 This meant, at least

by the first decade of the twentieth century, less about Catholicism and gen- eral religious devotion than attempts at nationalism and Americanization.

Cleanliness swapped places with Godliness, at least in the minds of Walter

Simons and the public health care doctor and nurses who made regular

visits to the brickyard clinic housed in “Simons House No. 1.” The World

War I–era influenza epidemic carried off many Simons residents. Ernestina Macias remembers her childhood impressions of many a Simons “night

party,” which were in reality Catholic wakes held in the home of the

deceased. By the early 1920s, public health authorities had established a

health center in Simons, which was added to in a few years by a “prenatal

conference” in the brickyard to address neonatal and infant care, one of six

in Los Angeles County. The need for such a clinic was clear: according to

one survey, Mexican infant mortality in Los Angeles County in the years

1916–1927 ranged from death in nearly one in three births to a low of one

in ten.73

Simons workers bought Liberty bonds and war stamps at a furious pace

during the First World War; Clover reckoned that, per capita, the Simons

Brick Yard had purchased more than any other industrial plant in America.

The plant was, he assured Los Angeles, “the envy of all eastern business

men” who visited it.

Part of that envy, Clover suggests, came from the perception of worker

contentment at Simons. The wage system, “equitable, mutually-agreeable,”

created worker loyalty. It is almost as if Clover juxtaposed the mission

metaphor with a Mission Play metaphor to describe the brickyard as a place

1 6 1t h e c o l o r o f b r i c k w o r k i s b r o w n

of peace, ease, and Mexican repose. Here, as the workers trudged back from

their shifts in the afternoon, “one may hear guitars strumming lazily in the

evenings, see colorful, and not infrequent, fiestas, and in other directions discover that in addition to efficiency at the plant there is idealism in the community.”

“Never has the wise patron-employer sought to compel his workmen to

conform to his views, rather than their own, in the way of living condi-

tions.” It was a calculated operation, carefully constructed “step by step,”

or so Sam T. Clover believed, “to allow free rein to the employees in all mat-

ters outside of actual business affairs.” Such planning even extended to house construction (supposedly), in that undefined “Mexican preferences” were taken into account, and “as stores were opened Mr. Simons had them

stocked and operated by persons thoroughly conversant with the national

tastes of the Mexican.”

But Clover’s assumption that only in the workplace did Simons scruti-

nize workers falls apart after his own description of careful planning in the

yard: “Today the theaters, schools, churchs [sic ], restaurants, billiard halls,

and all other improvements are operated by Mexicans, or by Americans

[note that such national categorization negates even the possibility of

Mexican Americans] peculiarly sensitive to the likes dislikes, inhibitions and

prejudices of their Latin-American neighbors.”

How else to make the labor force “happy and contented”? “In this wise

way, Mr. Simons has tried to solve the problem of satisfying labor believ-

ing that, if he succeeded, production costs would be correspondingly sat-

isfactory.” Apparently, the modern mission worked. Walter Simons had

“amply justified his hopes and proved the wisdom of his course.” Certainly that was true in some terms. Walter Simons and his wife were able to turn

the daily 600,000 Simons bricks into enough disposable income to live in

a Hancock Park estate, maintain a vacation home in Balboa (“Walt-Mari”),

and travel to South America, London, Paris, the Mediterranean, and the

Nile. Walter Simons belonged to the elite social clubs of the Los Angeles

basin: the Jonathan Club, the Bel-Air Country Club, the Los Angeles

Athletic Club, the Newport Harbor Yacht Club (a vacation home stood

next door), among others. By the mid-1920s, with its operation now spread

over 350 acres, Simons Brick Company Yard No. 3 was being touted as the

world’s largest common brick manufacturing plant. More Mexicans, more

bricks, and more money: out of such equations was modern Los Angeles

built. The parent Simons Brick Company was, in this era, one of the six

largest employers of Mexican labor in greater Los Angeles. Not surprisingly,

another of the six was also a brick company.74

As countless community studies, particularly of mill and textile towns,

have shown, company paternalism inevitably helped to solder the bonds of

community, if only by making sure that employees lived and worked cheek

by jowl. As if to make the parallel all the more striking, one former Simons

resident, remembering his World War II training that took him for the first time to the Deep South, said simply, “Simons was Appalachia.” The work-

ers and their families living in Simons, “our little island surrounded by

‘them,’ ” spoke Spanish. He recalled that one mark of distinction between

Simons residents and those who lived in any of the small Mexican barrios

of Montebello was language. Simons people spoke Spanish. Always.75

Walter Malone, who knew some Spanish, nonetheless counted on brickyard

timekeeper and postmaster Gil Romo to translate for him when necessary.

To Ismael Vargas, who was a young boy of El Pueblo de Simons in the

early 1930s, “the whole world was Mexican.” He remembers that he even

suspected that “God was Mexican,” so tight-knit was the Simons commu-

nity. Children were brought up according to Mexican custom, and a father’s

authority in the home was rarely questioned. Those who had come to

Simons directly from Mexico rarely took out citizenship or naturalization

papers. They preferred instead, in the words of one former resident, to

“milk a cow both ways.” That is, they maintained lives both “here” and

“there,” in an apt instance of the maintenance of at least some agency

within the paternal setting that Simons enforced. As one Simons worker

reported, he had “always been with one foot in the stirrup.”76 At holiday

time, especially on Mexican Independence Day, September 16, the work-

ers held big celebrations, often organized by the “Comision Honorifica” specially established to put on Mexican fetes. Residents decorated their

houses; a platform would be put together in the plaza, speeches made,

queens crowned; music and dancing followed a parade through the yard.

As the area outside the yard, in Montebello and the southern San Gabriel

Valley in general, began to grow, the earlier, simple ways of addressing

each Simons house by number (as Simons no.1, no. 2, no. 3, etc.) gave way

to naming houses by street addresses.77 The company town displayed a mix

of national and nostalgic regard in its street names: there were, not sur-

prisingly, Jalisco Street and Guanajuato Street, but there were also

Plymouth Street, Ford Street, Date Street, Railroad Street, and Southworth

Street. Bachelor employees lived in the Simons boarding house or some of

the small “bachelor shacks.”

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T h e I n d u s t r i a l A g e I s H e r e

Some former Simons employees and their descendants have characterized

the arrangement of the brickyard as a Southern California version of the

Mexican hacienda, complete with a peon labor force and a racial hierarchy

of overseers and owners. That may have some validity, but it is also clear

that Simons was an up-to-date industrial manufacturing center, modern-

ized by electricity, Plymouth gasoline locomotives, trucks, and the nearby

railroad tracks. The several hundred acres of the Simons Brick Company

was itself a little industrial Los Angeles, both indicative of, and critical to,

the growth of the city in the early decades of the twentieth century.78

During the 1920s, especially, when local brick production increased expo-

nentially, the Simons Brick Yard hummed with the combined effort of brute labor and industrial innovation, an arrangement the company (like

many industrial concerns of the era) was quick to defend. For instance,

when challenged by the city of Los Angeles over a piece of their industrial

property, the Simons Company responded with claims about the industrial

future of Los Angeles. The city wanted to turn back time, Simons attorney

Richard Culver claimed, “to turn this municipality into a flower garden and kill all legitimate manufacturing enterprises.” Industry, Simons, and the

future of Los Angeles went together hand in hand, the attorney claimed, for

the good of the city, for the good of the region, and for the good of the

workers who made brick after brick after millions of bricks.79

Of course, Simons did mean something to the workers who lived there,

raised families there, and died there, and it is important for us to try and

reconstitute some of that meaning if we can. But it is also important to

recall that outside Simons, beyond el puerton, the plant stood for something

entirely different. Outside, Simons had virtually no Mexican meaning at all (except for those who once worked there, might again work there, or who

had family there). Of course these alternative, “outside” meanings (Simons

as modern industrial plant, Simons as part of the east side’s development,

etc.) were critically bound up in the reality of Simons as a place of back-

breaking Mexican labor, but the life and times of those “down the hole”

never occasioned much comment. On the contrary, it is as if the bricks

emerged from the clay pits already shaped, cooked, fabricated. Even the ads

the company placed in trade and construction journals rarely showed the

Mexican workers in the yard, choosing instead to focus on company trucks

or the Plymouth “dinkies.”80

I think that this other vision of Simons was part and parcel of the indus-

trial growth of the city and, especially, the region east of the Los Angeles

River; it was an industrial vision, at once inextricably tied to—and ignorant

of—Mexican labor. Whereas the praise heaped upon Simons, and Walter

Simons in particular, emanating from society publications and patrons,

made sure to mention ethnic noblesse oblige and the perceived progressive

care of Mexican workers at the brickyard, this newer appreciation had very

little room for praise of paternalism.

We should briefly explore this industrial gaze that envisioned Simons not as a company town but solely as a company. By the mid-1920s, Simons Yard

No. 3, which had once stood alone in the flatland hinterlands east of down- town Los Angeles, now existed at the center of an ambitious development

scheme. The J. B. Ransom real estate development company, plotting an

innovative melding of residential and industrial development, sang the

praises of “Montebello Park,” Montebello, and Simons itself in its promo-

tional vehicles. East side industrial decentralization (which in many respects

the Simons brothers pioneered) had become the wave of the future, the

Ransom Company crowed. Not only did the city of Los Angeles demand

industrial growth, the region offered unparalleled benefits in both actual and social climate, away from the “congested district” of downtown Los

Angeles. Workers worked longer and better in the Southland’s unending

sunshine. What is more, there was “almost complete freedom from labor

agitation,” in part because “a plentiful supply of lower grades of labor is

available from Mexico.” Industrialists of the era deliberately and proudly

structured discriminatory wage rates for laborers, slicing off 10–20 percent for Mexican workers, so that such availability would be seen as money in

the coffers of area industrialists. For instance, a period Los Angeles Cham- ber of Commerce report on regional industrial development bluntly spelled

out unskilled wage rates: 50–60 cents an hour for “American” laborers, 45–

50 cents for “Mexican” workers. “We have a Mexican population . . . in

excess of 50,000 people,” the Chamber told the world, “and these people

make excellent workers, the men as common laborers in different crafts, and the women make splendid workers in textile plants.”81

The key arena for new industry was a rectangle of “wonderful territory

lying east of the river.” Approximately twelve square miles made up this dis-

trict, bounded by Whittier Boulevard, Santa Fe Avenue, Slauson Avenue,

and the Rio Hondo River. The Ransom organization had purchased several

hundred acres of residential land in Montebello that it was now advertis-

ing for development into industrial workers’ housing. The parcel bumped

up against the “immense clay products plant of the Simons Brick Com-

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pany.” So proud was Ransom of the proximity of such mighty industrial

power that a photograph of the Simons yard, “the largest single unit brick

plant in the world,” graced the public relations pamphlet. Fig.32abouthere

Equally exciting was the development of Montebello, the “city of

flowers.” Ransom pointed out that the community had embraced all the best aspects of modern city planning: schools were contemplated, parks

begun; in short, “Montebello is amply equipped with all the civic features

Figure 32. Building industrial Los Angeles together. Author’s

collection.

of an up-to-date community.” “As workers pour into the East Side facto-

ries, they must find homes for themselves and their families; and they will create a tremendous volume of business for stores, banks, theaters, profes-

sional men and others. To the homeseeker, therefore, who wants an ideal

homesite, and to the investor who is looking for property with the likeli-

hood of maximum increase in value, we unhesitatingly recommend

Montebello Park.”82

Montebello took off in part because Simons had been so successful and could be pointed to as evidence of the region’s industrial promise (provided

the company town was not brought into the equation). But as the one com-

munity began to grow and expand, the brickyard faltered. Late 1920s price

wars between competing brick manufacturers, greater use of masonry block

building materials, and the 1933 Long Beach earthquake all combined to

hurt the brick business in Southern California, as did, of course, the arrival

of the Great Depression. Tougher post–Long Beach building codes hurt the

brick trade perhaps the most. As Los Angeles County planner William Fox

remembered, the new codes (subsequently amended) did not sit well with

Walter Simons. “The new code outlawed all brick construction,” Fox told

an interviewer, “and Mr. Simons of the Simons Brick Company—great big

fat guy, practically the head of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce—

just blasted me and the department and the board and everyone else. . . .

The Simons Brick Company was out near Montebello, where it had the

pits, and it did all the brick work in Los Angeles County. Now it was

obsolete.”83

Yard watchman Thomas Armer’s son remembers that by the early 1930s,

the “brickyard went to pot,” with the fall-off in regional building con- struction. Workers did what work they could find: some cut and baled hay in the fields adjacent to the yard.84 Some of the Simons men worked peri- odically, a day here and there, with the Works Progress Administration;

such work in the “outside” opened their eyes to a wider world. One worker

recalled that WPA or Civilian Conservation Corps work during the Depre-

ssion offered Simons residents a chance to “see how the other half lived.”85

The Simons Company still got important contracts, especially in the late

1930s, in part because Walter Simons patented an innovative type of brick,

called a groutlock brick, which was reinforced with steel and concrete. With

no small amount of hubris, Walter Simons declared his innovation “earth-

quake-proof.”86 The company’s contracts included Royce Hall at UCLA, a

massive, faux-mission-style Goodrich plant, part of Disney Studios, a

Uniroyal plant in Commerce, and some of the early public housing projects,

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such as Aliso Village and Ramona Gardens in East Los Angeles, and Rio de

Pueblo in Long Beach (originally designed to house World War II troops).

Simons brick also graced the walkways surrounding the new Mission

Playhouse in San Gabriel, where 1920s Angelenos and tourists went to see

California history staged as a tearful romance. The Ramona Gardens proj-

ect apparently kept the yard busy for a year, making and then hauling over

a million bricks to the construction site. Fig.33abouthere

General Superintendent Walter Malone died shortly after the 1933 Long

Beach earthquake. The Simons yard closed for a day in honor of his mem-

ory. Yard workers wished to shoulder Malone’s casket and carry it miles and

miles from Simons to Calvary Cemetery in East Los Angeles, but his widow

would not permit it. The workers did cover the gravesite with fresh-cut

flowers in tribute to Malone’s memory. During the Depression, when the Simons store no longer operated,

workers in the brickyard opened their own cooperative store, asking $5 dues

from each brickyard family. Other stores catered to Simons residents as well.

Constancio Macias, whose son became the well-known boxer “Wildman

Macias,” ran a store near “the hole,” where he hung the flags of the United States and Mexico (American-born and Mexican-born Simons workers did

not always get along, and appeals to both nationalities were both culturally

and commercially sophisticated on Macias’s part). The Immigration Service

occasionally wandered into Simons, stepping up their visits in the repatri-

ation era. But as one worker recalled, the overlap between racial stereotype

and assumptions about nationality worked in the favor of some workers: “if

you were light,” Jess Garcia says, “you were o.k.”87

Sometime in the late 1930s or early 1940s, brickyard workers apparently

organized a wildcat strike, either in the hopes of gaining union recognition

or in defiance of their union officials. In any event, many have suggested that the action simply resulted in wholesale firings of brickyard workers.88

Despite some big late-1930s contracts, the end of the 1930s and the

Figure 33. Trucks ready to haul at Simons Brick Yard No. 3. Author’s collection.

Depression did not mean that Simons roared back into action. On the con-

trary, the yard gradually fell into disarray. A survey done in 1940 listed

nearly 800 residents of Simons, with children outnumbering adults by 150

people. Of all these people, only 60 were counted as U.S. citizens. The

community’s 182 houses had a total of four flush toilets. No bathtubs could be found. Health inspector U. Troiano found 90 percent of the houses unfit for human habitation. Rats scurried to and fro, reawakening fears of dis-

ease transmission. The Simons dump sat in uncomfortably close proxim-

ity to workers’ houses.89

Within a year, health inspectors issued a stern warning to the Simons

Company to put the brickyard housing in order within thirty days.

Wartime conditions intervened, apparently, and the order was neither com-

plied with nor enforced. By the mid-1940s, the yard had emptied out.

Feeble attempts to find oil below the clay deposits amounted to nothing, and there wasn’t enough work in the wartime economy to employ more

than a skeletal crew of thirteen workers. Many of the brickyard workers had

already been drafted.90

S i m o n s E r a s e d

By the early 1950s, bricks and company towns were no longer so critical to

the industrial equation of Southern California growth. Walter Simons,

frail and in poor health, passed day-to-day control of the brickyard to his

wife. The yard limped along, facing increasing competition not only from

other products, such as masonry block, but from different kinds of brick (especially wire-cut). What is more, the small houses of Simons, which the

company did little to keep up, had long ago begun to show their years. In

May 1952, the Los Angeles County Health Department stepped in and

issued an order that declared the Simons housing substandard. Most had

not been improved for fifty years. A spokesman for the company told the Los Angeles Times that the houses were “just 1 × 10 frame buildings, tem- porary houses, really, although 50 to 60 years is not very temporary.” By

early August, the last remaining families, some 167, had moved out of “the

hole.” Some found work at nearby brick manufacturers like Vitrafax Brick

in Vernon. The local fire department used the homes, many of which had already been knocked down, for fire-fighting practice.91

Within six months, about 250 acres of the former Simons brickyard and

town of Simons had been sold for $2.5 million. One of the buyers was W. I.

Hollingsworth who, less than twenty years earlier, had been one of the prin-

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 6 8

cipals of the Mission Play Association, the consortium that had gained con-

trol of the play when John Steven McGroarty faltered. Simons land was

actually valuable, not so much for the clay deposits still there in the pit, but

because of the peculiarities of railroad law; the pit lay within the railroad’s

short-haul circle regarding freight pricing. The Bethlehem Steel Corpora-

tion eventually used the yard as a slag pit; its cranes and giant trucks filled in pits that had been dug out by generations of Simons workers. “Patron

employer” Walter Simons died in November 1954, felled by a stroke and old

age. His obituary observed that he had shown “great concern for the wel-

fare of his employees,” and that his death occasioned many a prayer “from

numerous inconspicuous little homes in all parts of Los Angeles County.”

The brick magnate’s estate added up to just over $2 million. Mrs. Simons,

acting in her late husband’s behalf, gave $3,000 to each of twenty-six loyal

Simons employees, and an additional $3,000 to nineteen employees who

had been with the brick company for twenty-five years or more. Henry Prado, by now an old man, was one of the workers who received the

$6,000 bonus; he had been with the company since 1899. “It’s the most

wonderful news I ever had,” foreman Lupe Martinez, who had started out

at Simons in 1908, told a reporter. Martinez, then sixty, stated that he

would use the money he received to buy war bonds, “for the day when I

won’t be able to work any more.” Judge Necomb Condee, who reluctantly

approved the distribution of money, shook his head and said such gen-

erosity was the “best answer to communism I’ve ever seen.”92

� A Spanish-language folk song, or corrido, from the early decades of the

twentieth century includes a stanza in which immigrant Mexicans, travel-

ing a working circuit across the great Southwest, arrive “at Laguna, with-

out any hope.”93 That this is a reference to the hard work and low pay of

unskilled labor seems likely, but I suspect that it also may be a specific ref- erence to brickyard labor at “Simons, Laguna.” Fig.34abouthere

The Simons Brick Company Yard No. 3 was a place of great importance

to the growth of Los Angeles in the first half of the century. The company literally helped to build the city: its hotels, its universities, its homes, and

its businesses. Yet ninety years after the construction of the brickyard com-

pany housing, Ismael “Mayo” Vargas recalls Simons as a place where human

potential was never allowed to flower. Workers at the brickyard worked entire lives trying to get hold of something approximating the California

1 6 9t h e c o l o r o f b r i c k w o r k i s b r o w n

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 7 0

Dream. But the odds were against them down there in the hole. One needs

to bear in mind the line from the 1925 story about Simons, which suggested

that citizenship might await those poor Mexican kids playing in the streets

of “el pueblo de Simons,” if they live.

The macabre statement suggests another enduring irony of Simons.

Because in a sense the reporter was right: a better world, a changed world,

awaited the workers of Simons if they lived. But the trial they had to pass

through was not so much living through a life of company town hard, seg-

regated work; that alone would not and could not change the world. No,

their world would change if they could live through the trial of the Second

Figure 34. Growing up in Yard No. 3: The young Walter Malone Jr.

Author’s collection.

World War, something the magazine reporter could not possibly have

anticipated. For it was that conflagration which forever changed the world of people who grew up at Simons and left it for military service and, in

many cases, combat in the Pacific and the theaters of Europe. If they lived through this, and many, like Walter Leon Prado and Ismael Vargas’s brother,

did not, they would return to a world less willing to accept the obvious divi-

sions of race and class enforced by a place such a Simons. But they had to

risk their lives to see that world change.

Today, more than a half-century later, Simons people still gather, though

today it is as often at rosaries or funerals as anything else. “We lived in

extreme poverty, yes,” remembers Ismael Vargas. “But to us it was Camelot.

Simons was home.”94

Simons brick is now a local curiosity in Southern California, somewhat

hard to find and prized by people who know anything about it for their gardens and walkways. One fairly sizable collection of Simons brick can be

found in Pasadena, just south of the major intersection of Lake and

California Avenues, in the courtyard of a coffee place and bagel bakery. It is a popular place on Sunday mornings. People gather with their Sunday

papers, their dogs, and their babies, sitting in the sun, chatting, passing the

time, and sipping coffee. At their feet, Simons bricks, with that distinctive S I M O N S embossing on the odd one here and there, merit hardly any

notice.

Simons, the brick, is barely remembered. Simons, the place and its work-

ers, is wholly forgotten.

1 7 1t h e c o l o r o f b r i c k w o r k i s b r o w n

F i v e

Ethnic Quarantine

Anglo Saxon civilization must climax in the generations to come. . . . The Los Angeles of Tomorrow will be the center of this climax.

C l a r e n c e M a t s o n , “The Los Angeles of Tomorrow,”

in Southern California Business, November 1924

Where else do you find the living conditions excelling those of Los Angeles?

R e a l t o r B e r n a r d R o s e n t h a l , 19231

“What is it, anyway? Diphtheria? Typhoid? Scarlet fever?” “Quien Sabe? How should I know? All I know is they’re dying.” Victoria heard anguished sounds of a man coming from the parlor

couch. She watched his final death agony.The man, his body bloated and black, took one last gurgling breath, shuddered and died.

“The plague,” whispered Victoria. “We are all dead.”

M o n i c a H i g h l a n d , Lotus Land 2

In this chapter, we again visit the districts around the Los Angeles River in

the early decades of the twentieth century, not all that far from Simons

Brick Yard No. 3. But our focus is less upon the dividing line of the river

(past and present, east and west, Mexican and non-Mexican) and less upon

labor. Rather, we turn to a different kind of boundary forcibly placed between Mexicans and non-Mexicans in Los Angeles. We address here a

form of segregation prompted or reinforced by more biological boundaries.

For just as taming an unruly river could produce tools by which to estab-

1 7 2

lish ethnic grids of place and memory, and just as laboring jobs could hold

people fast to preconceived ideas about ethnicity and ethnic traits, so too

could disease. For when nature in the form of disease rendered people

unruly and dangerous, even an entire ethnic subset of the Los Angeles

population, the response from organized authority in Los Angeles was

swift and heavy-handed. Not only would that disease have to be corralled

and controlled, so too would people.

� As discussed in the introductory chapter, booster marketing of Los Angeles

rested in large part upon repetition of simple images and symbols. Neatly

tended gardens, attractive boulevards, and large, lovely homes: all came to

represent apparently common sights of the “sunny Southland.” Without

doubt, the Southern California climate occupied a special and iconic place

in the booster lexicon, creed, and programs. Characterized especially by

warmth and dryness, the region’s weather proved a powerful tourist lure.

Boosters needed little convincing that sunshine merited a central place in

their sophisticated selling of a city in the “semi-tropics,” whatever those

were. This reliance can easily be discerned in myriad references to sunshine

and healthful aridity in promotional vehicles such as Land of Sunshine or

the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Sunset.3 A wider embrace of nature’s bounty and good health was exhibited by the hugely successful public relations firm known as the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, which adopted the

catch phrase “Los Angeles—Nature’s Workshop” as one of its slogans.4

Inherent in this campaign that sold a new commodity—Los Angeles

itself—was a particular method, that of incessant reference to typicality and

the typical. Image-making and, as important, image-remembering relied on

sameness, on repetition, and on typicality, and this theme exists as backdrop

to countless campaigns aimed at advertising Los Angeles from the railroad

era of the 1870s and 1880s through the coming of the Great Depression. The

marketing was hardly as complex as it was merely redundant, what with the

lithographic and other reproductions of the same photos of the same neigh-

borhoods, the same gardens, the ever-present palm trees, typical bungalows,

typical street scenes, the typical warm winter day, typical semi-tropic veg-

etation, typical orange groves, with equally typical snow-capped peaks in

the background, even “typical women.” Postcards—nothing more than

mass-produced and mass-distributed images of typicality—blanketed the

nation with stock pictures of Los Angeles life and Los Angeles landscapes.

1 7 3e t h n i c q u a r a n t i n e

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 7 4

What may seem like caricature today was critical repetition then, the con-

struction of important and identifiable regional idioms explicitly designed to encourage capitalization, tourism, and settlement by creating scenes of

the good life in Southern California. The idea was simply to represent, over

and over again, the supposedly representative.5 But is there more to the

story?Fig.35abouthere

The image in Figure 35 purports to describe both specific homes and a specific place (Los Angeles), sometime around the turn of the century. The image also describes order and neatness, every detail arranged to produce

an aesthetic sum. It claims to represent “the typical.” Los Angeles is like this,

the image claims. It looks like this, it feels like this, it is this. These are Los

Angeles homes, little different from other Los Angeles homes.Fig.36abouthere No better examples of this advertising reflex can be found than in the var-

ious publications and ephemeral productions of the Chamber of Com-

merce in the first two or three decades of the twentieth century. “Facts About Industrial Los Angeles—Nature’s Workshop,” put out by the Cham-

ber’s Industrial Department in the mid-1920s, aptly illustrates the power

Figure 35. A “typical” postcard view of early twentieth-century Southern

California for the wealthy tourist and potential settler. Courtesy of the

Huntington Library, San Marino, California. All photos from the Bancroft

Library in this chapter are the work of the plague abatement authorities.

1 7 5e t h n i c q u a r a n t i n e

and the appeal of the typical. Glossy pages and clear black-and-white pho-

tographs invite the reader, the investor, the tourist, and the settler into a

world of redundant images, scenes, spaces, and places—all rendered calm

and serene in stark neatness and order. Here we find the city’s “typical sky- line,” its “typical textile plants,” the “typical workingmen’s homes” of typ-

ically contented workers. Displayed proudly here are the “typical views of

clay products and glass plants” and the oddly juxtaposed “oil and oranges—

a typical refinery.”6

The image in Figure 36 is also from the mid-1920s, also from Los Angeles.

But it is disorderly—not neat, not beautiful. Yet the claim is that such views

are also somehow “typical,” apparently trustworthy representations of what

Mexican Los Angeles looks like, what Mexican Los Angeles is like. Our

concern in this chapter is to examine that assumption and the darker

dimensions of the booster project enshrining typicality. Behind careful

repetition of ostensibly benign representation of the typical this and the

typical that lay deeper and uglier assertions, less about gardens, trees, or

bungalows than about people, especially people of color.7

Figure 36. The photographic representation of supposedly “typical”

ethnic traits, early twentieth-century Los Angeles. Courtesy of the

Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 7 6

V e c t o r s o f D i s e a s e

A bubonic plague epidemic, like that which struck Los Angeles in the fall

of 1924, is a decidedly atypical event. But the municipal response to this

public health crisis, refracted through a prism of stereotype, revealed anew

the civic tendency to render Mexican lives, culture, and behavior as some-

how typical, universal, and thus unquestionably understood. This story of

plague and the people it attacked is also a story about terrifying disease and

family tragedy.

On October 2, 1924, Dr. Giles Porter of the City Health Department

answered a call at the small home of Jesus Lajun at 700 Clara Street, not

far from the Los Angeles River. A day laborer for the Los Angeles Railway,

Mr. Lajun was clearly ill, but Porter suspected nothing remarkable about

the flu-like symptoms or Lajun’s swollen and tender groin. Like her father, Francisca Concha Lajun, aged fifteen, seemed to be suffering from a bad case of the flu. She complained of a headache and a sore throat, and she had a fever. Francisca did not get any better the next day. A neighbor, Luciana

Samarano, dropped by to help care for her. On the 4th, now desperately ill,

Francisca was taken to the hospital, but she died on the way there. Cause

of death was listed as “double pneumonia.”

Weeks passed. Meantime, infection careened unseen through neighbor-

hoods, homes, and bodies. Toward the end of October, physician George

Stevens called Los Angeles General Hospital (the county facility) to report

his suspicion that some highly contagious disease was whipping through the

neighborhood where the Lajun family lived. He and another doctor, Elmer

Anderson, had recently seen patients over there, all of whom complained

of similar symptoms: chest pains, backache, fever. Stevens requested that a

quarantine ward be set up to receive patients.

On October 29, an ambulance accompanied by Dr. Emil Bogen, resident

physician of General Hospital, sped over to the same poor and predomi-

nantly Mexican district. There Bogen and the attendants found a group of

people clustered around the front porch of a little house. In the house’s only

room, an old Mexican woman lay crying on a large bed. Her cries were reg-

ularly broken by a hacking cough. A Mexican man of about thirty lay on

a couch against the wall. He did not cry, but he was clearly “restless and

feverish.” Several other people were in the room, and one agreed to trans-

late discussion. Bogen found out that the man had gotten sick the day

before, that he had a pain down his spine, and that he was running a dan-

gerously high fever of 104 degrees. He had red spots on his chest. The old

1 7 7e t h n i c q u a r a n t i n e

woman had been coughing for two full days. She spat up blood. The

ambulance took these two people to the General Hospital.8

At another house nearby, a man, his wife, and their young daughter com-

plained of the same aches and pains. They, too, exhibited disturbing symp-

toms, and they appeared extremely anxious. A cloud covered their corneas,

and their faces had a sickly blue tinge. Four boys, all brothers, were desper-

ately sick at yet a third house. Bogen learned that their mother and father

had already died of what was thought to be pneumonia. Still others were sick

nearby, the interpreter said. Authorities took the boys to the hospital.Fig.37abouthere

The little clapboard house at 742 Clara Street, where the boys had got-

ten sick, would become the death house.9 Before it was all over it must have

seemed as if evil possessed this house, which, in a way, it did. In addition

to the boys, others at 742 Clara complained of lingering sickness. Physicians

took cultures from two of the sick adults, and they inoculated a guinea pig

with the cell samples. The animal soon died, as did the two people. Worried

health investigators at General Hospital began piecing together information

about those who had already died, including the parents of the sick and

now-orphaned brothers. Original diagnoses of the sick people, running the

gamut from meningitis, influenza, pneumonia, and typhus, began to be reconsidered.

Figure 37. 742 Clara Street, Los Angeles, epicenter of the 1924 plague outbreak.

Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

“Lucena [it seems likely that her name was actually Luciana] Samarano,

age 39, female, Mexican, 742 Clara Street,” is how the medical inspection

began that described the boys’ mother. She had fallen ill in the middle of

October, shortly after she began to care for her teenaged neighbor Francisca

Lajun, and she died within five days at the tiny house where she, her fam- ily, and a handful of roomers lived. Six months pregnant, Luciana delivered

a stillborn infant shortly before dying on October 19.10 Doctors first ascribed her death to heart disease. Family members held a wake at the

Clara Street house that was attended by many family members and friends.

Burial followed at the Municipal Cemetery.

Luciana’s husband Guadalupe got sick a few days after his wife died. So did

Jessie Flores, a family friend and next-door neighbor who had nursed Luciana

Samarano during her illness. Guadalupe went downhill very fast. A Spanish

priest, Father Medrano Brualla from Our Lady, Queen of the Angels Church

in the nearby plaza, had been summoned. The situation looked hopeless, but

it was decided to send Jessie and Guadalupe to the hospital anyway. Father

Brualla administered last rites on that day, October 26. Jessie Flores and

Guadalupe Samarano died (of “lobar pneumonia”). So did Father Brualla.11

Unsuspecting health officials released Guadalupe Samarano’s body to remaining family members so that they might hold services at 742 Clara

Street, just as they had held them for his wife. Horace Gutiérrez, Luciana’s

young cousin, got sick next, and it was his illness and rapid death that

confirmed the presence of an epidemic. As Horace lay dying in the hospi- tal, Dr. George Maner, the hospital pathologist, happened to engage in a

conversation with several of the younger physicians who expressed confu-

sion over the symptoms of several critically ill patients, Gutiérrez and

Guadalupe Samarano’s brother Victor among them. At first facetiously, Dr. Maner suggested that perhaps the patients were suffering from plague and not meningitis, as many suspected. Maner had just finished reading about plague in Manchuria. But when he found evidence of just that beneath his

microscope after performing an autopsy on Horace’s body, the physician no

longer joked. He sought the advice of a colleague, who, upon seeing the dis-

tinctive, unmistakable microscopic representation of bacillus pestis, sup-

posedly exclaimed, “Beautiful but damned.”12 An ancient disease, the Black

Death, had arrived in the city of the future.

The four Samarano brothers tried to fight off the sickness. Ten-year-old Roberto had become ill the same day as his mother’s cousin. At the hospi-

tal, Roberto was hooked up to an intravenous drip of Mercurochrome. Like

Horace Gutiérrez, he died on October 30, his body “practically riddled with

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 7 8

plague infection.”13 Soon all the boys were deathly ill. Gilberto died next,

then Victor. Little Raul hung on. Horace Gutiérrez’s sixteen-year-old

brother Arthur died. Fred Ortega, a boarder at 742 Clara Street, died. Joe

Bagnola, another boarder, died. Alfredo Burnett, Luciana Samarano’s son

from an earlier marriage, was admitted to the hospital at the end of October

along with all the others, exhibiting “weakness, fever, irritability, and stu-

por.” He died on November 11.

Many more people would sicken and die, especially those who harbored

the plague infection in their chests, from where it could easily migrate, per-

son to person. People who had visited 742 Clara Street to help with chores

got sick and died. Luciana Samarano’s sixty-three-year-old mother, who

lived at 342 Carmelita Street, developed a cough, then a fever, and died in a

matter of days. Samarano relatives who lived next door at 741 Clara Street

died. Guadalupe Valenzuela, fifty-two years old, from Marianna Street in Belvedere Gardens, just across the city line into Los Angeles County, could

not fight off the disease. Neither did her son, Jesus, nor her daughter, Maria. Jesus and Maria were cousins of Guadalupe Samarano. At least one of them

had been to pay respects at Luciana Samarano’s funeral in the middle of

October. Jesus died first, at home, on Halloween. Health officials learned from Maria that relatives were expected from New Mexico. Guards rushed

to meet them on the train station platform and prevent them from coming

to the house.14Fig.38abouthere

Throughout the first week of November, now a month after the first vic- tim died, the body count rose. Fear and rumor spread through the neigh-

borhood. The Jimenez brothers lived at 742 Clara Street, but when every-

one in the house started getting sick and dying, they quickly moved to

nearby 730 Date Street. But they did not move quickly enough. One day

after moving, Mike Jimenez got sick. Then Jose fell ill with fever, aches, and

pains. Both brothers died within days. At the end of their lives, they turned

a dark color because they could no longer oxygenate their blood (hence the

“black death”). A Los Angeles novelist describes the chaos as people sick-

ened and died in one house:

She watched, her hand at her throat, as one man tore desperately at his

shirt collar, and then pitched forward, his face in his soup. Another man

looked at her in horror, sure perhaps that he’d been poisoned, stood up,

overturning his chair, and ran upstairs. He howled as he ran. The man who

had collapsed into his bowl straightened convulsively, his poor tortured

body bent back onto a crescent shape, and fell heavily under the table.15

1 7 9e t h n i c q u a r a n t i n e

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 8 0

Eulogio Peralta, twenty-two, from Bauchet Street, died. A credit slip

found among his effects from the Fox Outfitting Company, where he worked downtown, showed Peralta’s address as 742 Clara Street. Like the

Jimenez brothers, Eulogio Peralta had tried to outwit and outrun the plague

by moving away when people started becoming sick and dying. Like the

Jimenez brothers’ move, it was too little, too late, and the plague caught

him and killed him.16

Thomas Vera, a young man who lived in a shack out back of 712½ Clara

Street with three other adults and two children, died. He had been a friend

of the Jimenez brothers, Mike and Jose, and he spent a lot of time with

them. Emmett McLauthlin also died. With his brother Frank, Emmett ran

an ambulance service out of his home on Hope Street. He had helped move

Guadalupe Samarano from 742 Clara Street to the county hospital at the

end of October.

Thirty-two-year-old Mary Costello almost died. The pneumonic ward’s

attending nurse when Guadalupe Samarano and Jessie Flores had been

admitted to the county hospital in late October, she complained of head-

ache, backache, chills, and pains in her chest. Exhibiting “marked general

malaise,” Costello was hospitalized in an isolation ward at the end of the

month. By Halloween she was spitting up blood. Doctors hooked her, and

Figure 38. 741 Clara Street, with siding removed to trap rats. Courtesy of the

Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

1 8 1e t h n i c q u a r a n t i n e

nine other plague sufferers, up to an intravenous injection of a Mercuro- chrome solution. This “desperate measure” did not kill nurse Costello. On

the contrary, physicians noted an improvement in her condition. After a

week, she was slightly better. By month’s end, still exhibiting the symptoms

and characteristic weariness of a bout with pneumonic plague, Mary

Figure 39. Plague survivor Raul Samarano. Courtesy of the

Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Costello had seemingly beaten the disease. Raul Samarano also fought off the pneumonia consistent with this strain of plague bacillus. He was the

only member of his family to escape death.17 Fig.39abouthere

The 1924 plague outbreak in Los Angeles was the last major outbreak of

the disease in the United States. Nearly forty people died, most all of them

connected by networks of kin or neighborhood. Dr. Emil Bogen later

described the epidemiological chain, or vector, originating from Luciana

Samarano: “During the following two weeks, her mother, sister, uncle,

nurse, and the nurse’s sister, and her four sons, and her husband, his

mother, brother, five cousins, six boarders, four friends, his priest, nurse and ambulance driver and a neighbor all developed similar symptoms, and

only the nurse and one son survived.” Ninety percent of those killed by the

disease were of Mexican descent.18

V e c t o r s o f E t h n i c i t y

The situation calls for drastic action.

D r . Wa l t e r D i c k i e to the President of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, November 15, 192419

Plague is a mysterious, especially frightening disease. Its arrival in Los

Angeles in the mid-1920s, in a poor neighborhood within sight of down-

town, elicited a powerful response from the city’s worried leaders. It took

them by complete surprise; plague was not the sort of thing expected in the

proud city of tomorrow. Any suggestions or even predictions that plague

might pop up in Los Angeles, and there were actually a few, would have been

ignored or unnoticed by the city’s powerful and prominent.20 To say the least,

the plague startled Los Angeles. In an era and city rife with Americanization

programs, many of which were explicitly concerned with purity and hygiene,

plague represented the height of uncleanliness. Its presence demanded des-

perate cleansing measures.21 The intravenous injections of Mercurochrome

that nurse Mary Costello and others endured, for instance, were thought to

be a way of sterilizing the body’s infected organs and blood.

A similar activity took place in particular Los Angeles neighborhoods,

where authorities attempted cleansings as well, often with agents no less

fierce than Mercurochrome. Not unlike patients in an isolation ward at the county hospital, these neighborhoods underwent physical isolation, quar-

antined by force and heavy rope. Ironically enough, many had already

been virtually quarantined by the restrictions imposed upon populations

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 8 2

socially and politically ostracized by ethnicity and class. Plague presented

another method by which to enforce isolation of Mexican neighborhoods

and Mexican people. In ordering and describing this work, city authorities

let ethnocentric blame creep into their reasoning and their documents, not

to mention assertions of white supremacy over and above supposed

Mexican typicality. To follow the city’s response to the plague, we must turn

our view to facets medical, political, and military.

Dr. Walter Dickie, Los Angeles resident, secretary of the California Board

of Health, and the man who would take charge of medical affairs sur- rounding the outbreak, apparently first read about the epidemic in his morning newspaper at the end of October or beginning of November.

The as yet unnamed disease had taken nine lives and seemed to be a kind

of especially virulent pneumonia. Dickie immediately wired an official of the city health department, inquiring as to the cause of death of Luciana

Samarano. The reply read simply: “Death L.S. caused by Bacillus pestis.”22

Word began to spread now, in both official circles and the infected neigh- borhood. Benjamin Brown, a surgeon attached to the United States Public

Health Service, wired the U.S. surgeon general of the gravity of the situa-

tion in early November, his telegram encoded for secrecy. “Eighteen cases

ekkil [pneumonic plague]. Three suspects. Ten begos [deaths]. Ethos [sit-

uation bad]. Recommend federal aid.” The surgeon general responded by

dispatching a senior surgeon to Los Angeles to monitor the situation and

make regular reports.23

Acting on the basis of their own diagnosis, the city health department

ordered a quarantine of the “Mexican district,” a downtown section of small

homes and industrial sites around Macy Street and near the river. The

quarantine began at midnight on the October 31. Patrol of the roped-off area, housing an estimated 1,800 to 2,500 people, was left to the Los Angeles

Police Department and guards employed by the health department. With

rope supplied by the Los Angeles Fire Department, authorities blocked off the Macy Street neighborhood. In and out traffic was forbidden. Guards were placed at both the front and back of any home known to house or

have housed a plague victim. Authorities urged residents to clean their

homes inside and out. Public health physicians told people to wear thick

clothing at all times. Everyday activities ceased, and “gatherings of all

nature” were prohibited. Children were to stay home from school and

keep away from movie houses. Pacific Electric trolley conductors, running their cars down Macy Street, shouted to riders that no one was to get on

or off the cars at any of the regular stops.24

1 8 3e t h n i c q u a r a n t i n e

Los Angeles city government also responded. Mayor George Cryer called

an emergency meeting for Monday afternoon, November 3. Present were

medical personnel representing federal, state, and local agencies, as well as

others less versed in the particulars of infectious disease transmission or pre-

vention: various “members of the Board of Directors of the Chamber of

Commerce, the local publishers, and the business and financial interests of the city.” These civic and commercial leaders understood that the plague

outbreak might make the city a victim as well. The hastily convened com-

mittee of experts, which constituted nothing less than the ruling oligarchy

of the city, would meet more than once during the scary weeks of the epi-

demic’s virulent phase.25

All medical and preventive work in connection with the epidemic was

placed under the direction of Walter Dickie of the Board of Health. He

suggested that the city adopt or continue various emergency procedures. All

cases of possible plague were to be sent to the county hospital, and a labo-

ratory was to be set up immediately; “all undertakers [were] instructed not

to embalm any bodies of Mexicans or others dying suddenly or of unde-

termined causes until the bodies [could] be examined by a representative

of the State or City Health Department”; and rodent trappings would

begin immediately in order to establish the boundaries of the epidemic.26

The quarantine continued and grew to include other neighborhoods.

Rumors spread that a hundred, two hundred, Mexicans were dead and

dying. Between residents and the police powers stepped the Los Angeles

County Charities, trying to ensure “cubicle isolation” of homes. Nurses told

parents to prepare a mixture of hot water, salt, and limejuice for their chil-

dren to gargle with several times a day. Charities staff made a card index of every member of every home, and they delivered packages of food and bot-

tles of milk to each house.27 Catholic Charities sent a priest into the field, alongside a Spanish-speaking social worker. Physicians and nurses began

daily house-to-house tours, hailing occupants, who by public health stan-

dards of the day were called “inmates,” from streets and sidewalks to deter-

mine if anyone within had fallen sick. People caught outside their homes

or neighborhoods had to sleep in the Baptist Mission church at the corner

of Bauchet and Avila Streets, because the authorities would not let them

pass through the ropes. Fig.40abouthere

The quarantine, which lasted two weeks, would eventually stretch to

include five urban districts. There can be little doubt, given the way in which these neighborhoods were described, by language and by perimeter,

that officials perceived an overlap between ethnicity and disease: as Walter

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 8 4

1 8 5e t h n i c q u a r a n t i n e

Dickie put it to the Chamber of Commerce on November 6, “We hope

that the city and the Chamber will insist that all of that area where

Mexicans live is put in sanitary condition and undoubtedly there is a great

deal of that area that ought to be condemned and destroyed.” The aim was

to ensure that large and small congregations of Mexican people got snared

within the net. The quarantine comprised the Macy Street District, largest

of the five and site of the Clara Street address; the South Hill Street District, which included “one large apartment house, occupied by Mexicans”; the

Marengo Street District, “including several isolated Mexican homes”; the

Pomeroy Street District, with “two isolated Mexican homes”; and the Belve-

dere Gardens District, just outside city boundaries, where an unknown,

though considerable number of Mexicans lived. Macy Street and Belvedere

had verifiable cases of plague; the others had only verified cases of ethnic- ity. In other words, Mexicans lived there.28

Records from Belvedere Gardens describe the perimeter established by

Carmelita Street, Brooklyn Avenue, a ravine just off Marianna Street, and Grandview Street. Like the city’s efforts, the county quarantine was highly militarized, the imposition of order upon the chaos of an epidemic. Health

authorities later boasted that the epidemic ended so quickly precisely

because the county’s eventual four hundred quarantine guards and support

Figure 40. The Baptist Mission church, plague abatement headquarters. Courtesy

of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

personnel “were placed on a military basis and the organization was per-

fected.” Some quarantine guards, most of whom were paid $5 a day (except

those working in closest proximity to the plague contagion, who were paid

more), had been soldiers in the First World War. Some even had wartime

quarantine experience.29

Although they were dealing with an emergency situation, county officials gave the quarantine careful thought. The plans reveal ethnic as well as epi-

demiological attitudes. The Belvedere operation was placed in the hands of

the county health chief, J. L. Pomeroy, a man with significant quarantine experience who believed that special guard details were “the only effective method of quarantining Mexicans.” Because Pomeroy worried that Belve-

dere residents might disrupt quarantine procedures, he and his men “worked

quietly” throughout the day of November 1 “so as not to unduly alarm the

Mexicans.” Pomeroy wondered about “a general stampede” and admitted

that “we feared [the Mexicans] would scatter.” The quarantine was estab-

lished in the neighborhood with stealth. “We waited until midnight so as to

give them all a chance to get in. . . . then the quarantine was absolute.”30

Guards, sworn in and issued badges, took up field patrol on one of three eight-hour shifts. Shifts had captains as well as quartermasters, guards

“walked post,” and surplus military and armory equipment provided the

materiel of guard camps. Guards complained of run-of-the-mill soldiers’ ail-

ments. One burned himself when a coffee pot blew its top. Another rushed to get a dose of “lockjaw preventive serum” when he stepped on a nail.

Guards did more than prevent the daily comings and goings of people

in the neighborhood. Despite general orders that listed rule number one as

“No Shooting,” they spent a good deal of time killing stray cats and dogs,

a handful of chickens, a donkey or two, even a goat.31 They also damaged

or destroyed a considerable amount of property within the militarized

perimeter. Mrs. Pasquale Moreno, for instance, had her sewing machine

requisitioned by quarantine guards, who broke it. Firewood, at least in the

early days of the quarantine, proved scarce, and quarantine guards, trying

to stay warm under chilly November skies, looted the neighborhood. Mr.

L. S. Camacho, who lived on Brooklyn Avenue, later sought damages from

health authorities for the destruction of a house he owned on San Pablo

Court. There quarantine guards in search of combustibles ripped off plas- ter boards and an entire door, and stole a stepladder, all of which they

promptly burned. Neighbors swore that they had seen the guards attack the

little house. In a later investigation of the claim, the county health depart-

ment’s special agent agreed that “half of the rear of the house was torn out

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 8 6

1 8 7e t h n i c q u a r a n t i n e

by the guards.” Mr. Camacho was granted his compensation request of $15.

Officials also saw to it that Mrs. Moreno’s sewing machine got the repairs it needed.32

We do not know what came of Benigno Guerrero’s claim for damages in

the amount of $60 for the Mexican food destroyed at his business, the

name of which he translated as “Quality Tamales Home” in Belvedere. But

we do know that he wrote a letter to health officer Pomeroy.

My dear Dr. Pomeroy,

Enclosed you will find the bill of food that I have being forced to destroy. That food was my only capital to keep my business going and I am sorry

not to possess your language to impress you with the idea, than such

small amount of money was the only means to provied [sic] food for

my family, wife and four children; 8, 6, 3 and 1½ years old. Bring your

attention to that situation, my dear Dr. Pomeroy and you will grant than

the bill be payed.

Sincerely very truly yours,

B. Guerrero.33

Most of the property destruction was by plague-fighting design, and not the result of individual action by quarantine guards. The overall plan,

borrowed from San Francisco’s program of plague eradication earlier in the

century, was a combination of slash-and-burn destruction and a campaign

to lift structures well off the ground with blocks so that cats and dogs, those lucky enough to escape execution as strays, could run under the buildings

hunting rats. In the words of Walter Dickie, “The quickest and cheapest

[method], the one we are adopting, is to take everything off the ground in the blocks infected and raise it 18 in. above the ground and take the siding

off all sides of the house except the front so dogs and cats can go under, so when you get through, you can see all under.” Fig.41abouthere

Accordingly, various sanitary details in both the city and county ripped

the siding from homes, especially at the foundation level, buried garbage,

and burned spare lumber, old furniture, clothing and bedding, even entire

shacks. Workers sprayed houses and other buildings with petroleum or sul-

fur, and they scattered lime and rat poison everywhere. Some squads uti-

lized hydrocyanic gas, a cyanide mixture. Others rigged hoses to truck

exhaust pipes and pumped carbon monoxide into buildings. By the end of

1924, quarantine guards had performed well over ten thousand plague

“abatements” of greater and lesser destruction. The men, it was later

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 8 8

reported, “had to destroy a large part of Los Angeles.” Photographs suggest

that this was not an exaggerated comment.34Figs.42-45abouthere

The destruction of these homes and shacks without compensation was

likewise part of the overall plan. In conversations with the City Council and

Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, which had

quickly established its own health and sanitation committee, Dickie advised

that the structures to be “cleansed” first be declared nuisances. This meant that no compensation would be paid to property owners, no provisions

made to house the homeless. “I wouldn’t advise any compensation at all,”

said Dickie. Council members wondered aloud about the legality of such

a move, but once assured by Dickie that “no compensation” was the way

to go, they assented and agreed that it would be simple to have these struc-

tures declared public nuisances. Nor were destroyed houses or buildings

replaced. An official report less than a year after the plague outbreak stated that over a thousand shacks and old houses, “housing Mexican wage earn-

ers mostly,” had been destroyed and that, all told, roughly 2,500 buildings

had been yanked down, burned, or carried away as scrap. It is clear from

the photographic evidence of this early example of urban renewal—renewal

as urban clearcutting—that the destruction was widespread and ferocious.

Figure 41. Plague abatement wrecking crew. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library,

University of California, Berkeley.

Figure 43. Looking west on E. 6th Street from Imperial. Courtesy of the Bancroft

Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Figure 42. Mexican shack in rear of tortilla factory, 612 N. Alameda. Courtesy of

the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 9 0

Figures 44 – 45. Wrecking crew at work, back of 2039 E. 7th Street. Courtesy of

the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

That little, or nothing, was done to replace the thousands of structures

destroyed in the quarantined districts was made clear in the follow-up

report of the city health department. The Bureau of Housing and

Sanitation bluntly declared that “no new construction has been undertaken

to house the people thus dispossessed, [and] they have been scattered to

other parts of the city and county, many of them into other houses or quar-

ters that are unfit for home habitation, a menace to the city at large and a barrier to the progress of the life and character of the persons living in

them.”35

It is not hard to imagine that the plague offered the city the opportunity to remake the landscape, to smooth it out along easily defined lines of race and ethnicity. This was, after all, a Southern California experiment with eth-

nic cleansing in several senses of that grim phrase. Fire, sledgehammers, and

sanitary detail commanders did their work with brutal efficiency.36 Figs.46and47 Not only did buildings have to be destroyed. Rats had to be killed, thou-

sands and thousands and thousands of them. The Chamber of Commerce

appointed a committee to explore, in conjunction with the City Council

and medical personnel, ways to raise the money needed to kill plague-

carrying rats and squirrels. The City Council eventually granted the

extraordinary sum of $250,000 for November 1924 through July 1925, and

twice that for the next twelve months, to be used primarily in rodent erad-

ication programs. An entirely new city department arose to wrestle with the

rat problem. Like some sort of latter-day Hudson’s Bay Company, the

department hired hunters and trappers, and it placed $1 bounties on dead

rats and ground squirrels. When it became clear that the bounty would not

ensure enough dead rats, officials opted to pay rat killers a salary of $130 a month. The staccato “pop pop” of small-caliber weapons could be heard

throughout city and county day and night, and rodent poison appeared

everywhere. Workers spread the poison, a thick syrup containing phos-

phorous or arsenic, on little squares of bread and cast them about entire

neighborhoods, both quarantined and not. Its resemblance to molasses

apparently caused rat killers some concern that the poison atop “dainty poi-

son croutons” would find its way into the mouths of children (later, the officials of the federal Public Health Service would discontinue the practice for just this reason). Once the city began killing rats, people in the infected

neighborhoods, who had been kept in the dark about what was killing

them, knew that the epidemic had a name: plague.37

Plague preventive work took on the appearance of a desperate fire- fighting operation as the city tried to extinguish both bacillus pestis and the urban rat. Squads worked their way and spray through entire neighbor-

hoods in lock-step formation, attacking rats, structures, and unfortunate

stray animals house by house, block by block.38 This militarized sweep was

not entirely limited to ethnic neighborhoods. “It is important to remem-

ber,” a report noted, “that the danger from infected rats exists . . . even in

residence districts occupied by native Americans [i.e., native-born whites],

1 9 1e t h n i c q u a r a n t i n e

Figure 47. Plague abatement as erasure: The obliteration of the “Negro shack” on

E. 7th Street. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Figure 46. This shack near downtown Los Angeles was essentially given a racial

identity by the plague abatement authorities, who captioned this image “Negro

shack in business section, near 2039 E. 7th Street.” Courtesy of the Bancroft

Library, University of California, Berkeley.

1 9 3e t h n i c q u a r a n t i n e

and these must be dealt with as definitely as the foreign districts.” Be that as it may (apparently inhabitants of “foreign districts” could not, by

definition, be “native Americans”), rat eradication work tended toward particular intersections of ethnicity and poverty. The program would work

best “especially in the foreign quarter . . . in the Mexican, Russian, Chinese

and Japanese quarters by the destruction of all structures not worth rat

proofing.”39 Photographic evidence of the campaign suggests that this was done with alacrity and comprehensive thoroughness. Figs.48,49,and50

The carcasses of countless rats stacked up at an emergency laboratory

established in the Baptist Mission at Bauchet and Avila, where people ren-

dered homeless by the quarantine sought shelter. Later moved to a more per-

manent location on Eighth Street, the lab (the “ratatorium”) acted as head-

quarters for the ferocious rat-killing, counting, and testing operation. The

sheer exuberance of the rat-proofing work came in for praise, while the destructiveness of the effort was neatly sidestepped. The Arizona Republican, for instance, while admitting to have “jibed” Angelenos “for their self-

assertiveness,” thought the rat-proofing work worthy of praise and emula- tion. No other city in America was “so guarded” as Los Angeles, and the rat

killing was the city’s “greatest exhibition of readiness and efficiency.”40

Back at the county hospital, health care workers tried to ward off the

Figure 48. Plague eradication destruction in the Utah Street district east of the Los

Angeles River. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Figures 49 – 50. Just southeast of downtown Los Angeles, between Alameda Street

and the Los Angeles River, the industrial town of Vernon had a number of

impoverished Mexican communities. Plague abatement authorities burned this

Vernon colonia to the ground in the fall of 1924. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library,

University of California, Berkeley.

chance of infection. Anyone suspected of either having plague or coming

into contact with a plague victim had been immediately shuttled from the

quarantined neighborhoods to the county hospital. There, in isolation at

the recently completed contagious disease building, hospital personnel

labeled them with red tickets to distinguish them from other patients.

Physicians unaccustomed to wearing gloves during autopsy procedures

took up the habit. Hospital workers wore gowns, rubber gloves, caps, and

gauze masks. When that protection was deemed insufficient, they started wearing face masks made from pillowcases, eye holes cut out and covered

over with clear celluloid. Physicians later noted that “procuring and work-

ing in these masks was a matter of considerable exertion, and also of con-

siderable comment and divertissement.”41

Plague victims awaiting almost certain death in the quarantine ward

underwent all sorts of treatment. Doctors stimulated them with caffeine, digitalis, adrenalin, and pituitrin. Morphine, codeine, quinine, and

atropine depressed them. They were rubbed, vaccinated, and injected with

alcohol, “Murphy drip,” calcium lactate, leucotropin, and extract of leu-

cocytes. Anti-plague serum, which did exist in 1924, arrived only in time

for use in one case. Emil Bogen mentioned that some had suggested use of

the bacteriophage for plague, which had been “popularized by Sinclair

Lewis in his recent novel Arrowsmith.”42

T h e P e r i l s o f B a d Pu b l i c i t y

The thing that interests us and probably you more than this list of

fatalities is what is the cause of this outbreak.

D r . Wa l t e r D i c k i e before the Board of Directors, Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, November 6, 192443

By the middle of November, although occasional plague deaths would

continue into the new year, public health officials believed the epidemic over.44 Declaring the outbreak officially ceased, the Herald Examiner wrote that the “pneumonic plague . . . is no more. It came suddenly, struggled fee-

bly, and passed away after a remarkably short life.”45 By Thanksgiving, the

Chamber of Commerce had received a signed statement from Dickie that

the plague was over, a document that the organization deemed “just the

thing to be good publicity.”46 Dickie even went out of his way to thank local

business and newspaper leaders for the role they played in keeping word

about the plague mum. Damage control, already underway by then, accel-

1 9 5e t h n i c q u a r a n t i n e

erated. The Chamber’s Publicity Committee put forth a number of plans

for combating unfavorable reports about Los Angeles. The Los Angeles

Realtor in its December 1924 issue ran a feature by Chamber president

William Lacy. Entitled “The Truth about Los Angeles,” the article urged

readers not to believe all that they had heard about the city’s recent prob-

lems. Hysterical talk about “a slight drought,” a power shortage, a foot and

mouth epidemic, and “a slight epidemic of pneumonic plague” ought not

deter people from visiting or investing in Los Angeles. It was a credit to the

people of the city, Lacy continued, that concerted and cooperative work

stamped out “the few cases of pneumonic plague.”47

Commercial figures such as Lacy found themselves in a propaganda war with the East, mostly of their own making. For years, as eastern papers and

publications pointed out, Los Angeles boosters crowed about the unique

symbols of Southern California living. Sunshine, fat oranges, equally fat

babies, pretty little bungalows, palm trees: boosters bombarded eastern

cities and eastern folk with these ever-so-familiar images. But now, as Los

Angeles found itself in a public relations tight spot, competitors and crit-

ics seized the opportunity to point out booster hubris in the City of Angels.

Even typicality had its limits, if not its opponents. Advertising the city of

the future as it battled a medieval epidemic proved a challenge.

In a hard-hitting piece for the Nation, the former editor of the Los

Angeles Daily News, William Boardman Knox, took the Chamber of

Commerce to task for keeping the plague epidemic, as well as other health

problems, under journalistic wraps. According to Knox, the plague and

resulting quarantine provoked a mass exodus from the city as well as an eco-

nomic collapse: “land values dropped 50 percent; bankruptcy courts were

flooded with yesterday’s millionaires; bank clearings were cut in half.” In other words, Knox intimated, “don’t believe all you hear (or see) about Los

Angeles.” The typical might, after all, be but self-serving artifice, less than what met the eye. “What are a few broken children, probably of people who

don’t count anyway,” he wrote of a recent polio outbreak, “compared to the

welfare and prosperity of a great metropolis?”48

The city’s commercial elite attempted to combat the rash of unfavorable

publicity. At stake was the continued viability of the campaign to establish

the yardstick of typical Los Angeles places, diversions, and scenes. Worse,

winter tourism from the East to the West was threatened. But Chamber of

Commerce stalwarts were, if anything, masters at spin. Even before the

plague epidemic had become known at all, the organization had pledged

to redouble its efforts at selling Los Angeles after being chastised by one of

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 9 6

its leaders for not doing enough. “I think the Chamber is in the most dan-

gerous moment in its career,” Paul Hoffman told his fellow Chamber direc- tors exactly one day before public health officials learned of the epidemic. “We have got to impress the people of Los Angeles with the fact that we are

going on to bigger things—If we go on as we have been doing, I don’t think

that is enough.”49

Action apparently became all the more imperative in the wake of the epi-

demic. The Chamber’s Publicity Committee, as Knox intimated in his

Nation essay, was not about to let unfavorable news get in the way of

advertising Los Angeles. And they had certainly kept bad news about the

city’s health record quiet before. Earlier in 1924, the Chamber had wrestled

with news about a smallpox outbreak. Chamber directors exchanged fears

about what widespread knowledge of smallpox would mean. “It would be

a black eye we couldn’t get over for years,” said one. Another added that “it

is my personal feeling to suppress publicity.”50 An outbreak of bubonic

plague only cemented the Chamber’s position. All through November

Chamber directors reiterated the desperate need to counteract eastern news

of trouble in the Southland, even to the point of agreeing to print up spe-

cial postcards (what else?) that every Chamber member could then rush

east—a booster shot if ever there was one.

The local press stood by ready and willing to help. George Young, man-

ager of the Examiner, eased the minds of the Chamber’s Board of Directors

when he assured them, with specific reference to the plague, that editors all along the Hearst chain “would print nothing we didn’t think was in the

interest of the city.” Indeed, one resident of Los Angeles, who would grow

up to be a local physician, remembers the plague as “a big hush up.” Even

his father, who owned a suitcase factory on Los Angeles Street, within

walking distance of the Macy Street quarantine, knew little, if anything, of

the outbreak. It was as if knowledge of the epidemic had been consigned

to a “need to know” hierarchy of individuals and institutions.51

The Spanish language paper El Heraldo de Mexico, which generally sup-

ported the plague suppression efforts, referred to “the hermetic silence in which authorities have locked themselves.” News of the plague dominated

El Heraldo’s headlines for days and days in November.52 Not so with the

English-language papers, which tended to downplay the path of the disease

and the eradication efforts. Examiner editor Young, backed up by Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times, even thought that a virtue could be made

of “the close squeeze we just had.” Once the rat eradication program did its

work, “we could then advertise Los Angeles as the ratless port.”53

1 9 7e t h n i c q u a r a n t i n e

Faced with a medieval problem like Black Death in their “Los Angeles

of Tomorrow,” nervous boosters from the Chamber sought out health

officials for briefings throughout the month, even after the various quar- antines had been lifted. For instance, at a Saturday meeting on November

15, Walter Dickie spoke at length about the plague in front of directors of

the Chamber of Commerce and the Los Angeles City Council.

Standing before a map of greater Los Angeles, Dickie pointed out that

the black pins jabbed into it were “pneumonic plague cases.” His few yel-

low pins represented bubonic cases. Though they certainly knew it, Dickie

nonetheless pointed out to the assembled civic leaders that the epidemic,

and the rats that helped spread it, were “not only a health problem but an

economic problem.” In this, Dickie made explicit reference to the port of

Los Angeles. “I realize that the dream of Los Angeles and the dream of

officials and the Chamber of Commerce is the harbor. Your dream will never come true as long as plague exists in Los Angeles and as long as there

is any question of doubt in reference to the harbor.” Unless the harbor

received a clean bill of health, as soon as possible, Dickie warned, “half of

the commerce of your harbor will quickly vanish.” “No disease known,”

Dickie stated ominously, “has such an effect upon the business world as the plague.” Chamber leaders and councilmen must have blanched.54

Desperate times did indeed call for desperate measures, Dickie warned.

Even if the determination of plague foci or origins of each case looked to

be complete, no one could be sure about much of anything, at the harbor

or anywhere else. The proximity of the Macy Street quarter to downtown

Los Angeles and important industrial sites made the problem all the more

acute. Dickie did not want any rats from the Mexican quarter chased into

downtown. “You are not a great way off from [the] Baker building,” he pointed out, obviously gesturing to his map and the heart of the city’s com-

mercial district.

Just as Dickie did not want Mexican rats coming downtown, Anglo

Angelenos did not relish the thought of Mexican people from the plague

districts or other districts coming into downtown, as they did every single

day for work or shopping. Mexican cafe, restaurant, and hotel workers who

lived in the Macy Street district lost their downtown jobs. Others who did

not live in plague districts but who were nonetheless Mexican, and there-

fore somehow dangerous, did so as well. Management at the Biltmore

Hotel, for instance, fired its entire Mexican labor force of 150 when they arrived at work, regardless of the home addresses of these men and women,

and notwithstanding the obvious fact that had they lived in a plague dis-

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e1 9 8

trict the quarantine would have kept them from reporting to work in the

first place. The action provoked outrage and threatened to become a prover- bial international incident. A delegation of Mexican government officials and journalists met with the Chamber of Commerce to protest the action.

They spoke with Clarence Matson, whose 1924 prophecy about the city’s

Anglo Saxon future (printed precisely at the moment the epidemic broke

out) opens this chapter. The Chamber pledged to look into the matter.55

Dr. Dickie wanted more laboratory support, more manpower for rat

killing and rat proofing, and more medical teams for autopsy work. The lat- ter request was “so that all Mexicans that die and all suspicious deaths that

come into the Bureau of Vital Statistics shall be examined.” The association

of disease with ethnicity could not have been made more grimly explicit:

“If it is not a general rule to autopsy all Mexicans that die of acute illness

and are suspicious, many foci are going to be overlooked.” In other words,

this plague outbreak had become (indeed had been since the beginning)

peculiarly Mexicanized. The epidemic was, according to a public health

official, “confined to the Mexican quarter in the northeasterly section of the city.”56

Dickie oversaw the placing of thousands of rat traps and would need

thousands more. But he admitted that the Macy Street district—where 90

percent of the plague victims had encountered the disease—had not received

as much attention, for instance, as the harbor. In a remarkable admission

and plea for help, Dickie implored his audience of elite Anglo businessmen:

“I wish you gentlemen would go down to the Macy St. district. We haven’t

done anything because it is a question whether that area is worth the money

you will have to put on it to clean it up and after you clean it, whether it

will pay the property owner to put it into shape for human habitation. That

is something [that] should be considered by the city.”57

Dr. Dickie did not mean that nothing had been done in the Macy Street

quarter. After all, the houses and structures there had been attacked by the

sanitary squads who sprayed, burned, knocked down, and lifted up. But he

did mean to ask the Council and Chamber whether or not they would see

to it that the area be, essentially, razed and rebuilt. “All has to be gutted out

and destroyed and go back to the original structures and each original

structure must have the ground area all exposed so that there can be no

place for harboring rats.”58 Those assembled assured the physician that

they well understood his warnings. “We are thoroughly alive to the situa-

tion,” they said, and they would support clean-up efforts even if they cost a half million dollars.

1 9 9e t h n i c q u a r a n t i n e

Dickie ended his comments before the assemblage by arguing that the

city must do more about the housing conditions of “the foreign popula-

tion.” “There is no reason why these Mexicans shouldn’t be housed in san-

itary quarters in the environment they are used to living in,” he pointed

out. Conditions such as those that existed threatened the ability of indus-

trial Los Angeles—and Los Angeles industrialists—to turn the resident

Mexican population into “an asset to this city.” The city risked epidemics

of smallpox, plague, and typhus of far greater proportion than the current

crisis. Dickie chastised the city’s elite for their shortcomings in noblesse

oblige. “As long as you have the foreign population, Mexicans, Russians,

and various nationalities, you have to take care of them.” City/county

boundaries did not make any difference. Elites may not have wanted to think about the population of nonwhite workers, but those very people had

become both indispensable and, at least for the moment, troubling. “You

have an opportunity now, seeing that you have this condition here, of

cleaning that section from one end to the other. . . . you should have decent

housing for these Mexicans. . . . It has never been done.” Nor would it be.

Like other such plans for renewal in these districts of Los Angeles (recall the

Rev. Dana Bartlett’s vision of the Los Angeles River as urban park), Dickie’s

suggestions would go unheeded. Far easier and cheaper was urban renewal,

1920s-style: knock them down.

Over in Belvedere Gardens the situation was just as bad as, if not worse

than, that within city limits. Chamber members expressed concerns about

a public school on the east side, over toward Belvedere, which one referred

to as “the largest Mexican school in the world.” The river—“your river bed,”

Dickie called it—was at the center of a huge rat infestation across city and

county lines. “I haven’t seen anything in my life to equal it,” Dickie said,

whereupon Councilman Boyle Workman piped up that houses in Belvedere

Gardens were “built out of piano boxes.”59 If anything, the plague offered a crash course in the economics of poverty and ethnicity to an important

slice of Los Angeles elites.

Destruction would have to take place before construction, an activity that

the city and county officials pursued with enthusiasm, despite later findings that this was not necessarily the best plague-fighting tactic.60 Furthermore, the publicity problem occupied a great deal of time, and this seemed to take

precedence over any committed plans for renewal. Even health officials got into the act. In his report describing the city’s health care response to the

plague, City Health Commissioner George Parrish listed each plague vic-

tim and his or her address, hoping in some way to combat what he called

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 0 0

“the grossly exaggerated reports published in the Eastern newspapers, with

the evident intention of stopping the ceaseless migration of tourists to this

wonderful city.”61

Officials also engaged in a congratulatory discussion of their own in explaining why this had been but a “slight epidemic.”62 For one thing, it

seemed as if the plague had limited foci, with at least ten cases, including

most of those in the county, traced directly to 742 Clara Street. The alacrity

with which Angelenos began killing rats also proved fortunate. And lastly,

officials thought that they had been lucky in another respect, again couched in terms of supposed ethnic typicality. “The Mexican,” read one contem-

porary report, “unlike the Oriental, does not attempt to hide his sick or

dead. Being a Catholic people, they always, when ill, call the Priest, and

generally are prompt in securing medical aid.” Officials saw this Catholic practice in marked distinction to the Chinese response to the deadly plague

outbreak in San Francisco’s Chinatown a generation earlier. What they did

not reflect upon was the irony of their position, in that they relied upon cer- tain supposed Mexican traits (i.e., Catholic practice) to help them abate the

outbreak at the very same time they expected many of those self-same

essential ethnic traits—reduced to simple Mexicanness—to be so suscepti-

ble to disease and disease transfer.63

T y p i c a l R a t s , T y p i c a l M e x i c a n s

Revelation of cultural practices such as Catholic wakes and burials, and,

more important, revelation of the tendency of the dominant culture to

stereotype such practice as typical of Mexican ethnicity, encourage us to

read the reaction to the plague epidemic of 1924 as part of the typifying

project that city elites furthered during the period. Knowing how those

inside the various quarantines felt or acted in the face of organized, even

militarized, public health or police authority is a difficult task. Outside of official pleas for reparations, there is little information or documentation in quarantine or political records. It is equally—if not more—difficult to know what the epidemic and fear of disease meant to these thousands of

people caught behind the quarantine ropes, though we can safely assume

that they were terrified.64

In an analysis of the plague couched within a broader social and cultural

context, we may see Anglo authority’s reaction to it as an important part of

a veritable public relations campaign to validate the booster paradigm of

typical Los Angeles. Conventional reduction of things, events, landscape

2 0 1e t h n i c q u a r a n t i n e

features, and individuals to archetypical representation both created and

reinforced cultural tendencies toward ethnic stereotype.65 For instance, in

attempting to determine how certain plague victims encountered the dis-

ease, officials relied upon reflexive assumptions about Mexican behavior and Mexican attitudes. How did teenaged Francisca Lajun, who lived down

the street from 742 Clara Street, contract the plague that quickly killed her?

The answer was unclear, but ethnic stereotype supposedly could explain

some part of the mystery. As such, Mexican-ness, or simply being Mexican,

created an environment that could foster disease.66 In the Board of Health’s

opinion: “That evidence could not be obtained to connect these two cases

[Francisca Lajun and anyone at 742 Clara Street] may be explained by the

reluctance of the Mexican to impart information, especially when he does

not fully comprehend the reason. If the tendency of the Mexican to visit rel-

atives and friends during their illness is recalled, the explosive nature of this

outbreak, limited to friends and relatives, is partly explained.”67

Similarly, Chamber of Commerce leaders declared before health per-

sonnel that they knew about the living conditions of Mexicans, or at least

enough to understand the transmission of the disease, even though it is

clear that most had never been into the Macy Street Mexican quarter

before. By their reckoning, this knowledge alone could rightly be substi-

tuted for epidemiological expertise. Experience as capitalists and paternal-

ists, and even as tourists, provided the necessary skills and reference points.

Describing a Mexican vector would not be hard for these people to do, and

they would assume themselves to be right in so doing.

“I am not only familiar with the housing conditions of our [sic]

Mexicans,” William Lacy said, “but familiar with the Mexican peon’s way

of living in Mexico.” There, fifteen years previous, Lacy had witnessed an outbreak of plague on the West Coast in which, he said, the “Mexican pop-

ulation died like fleas.” The only recourse had been to “blast practically half the city down and drive the people into the country in order to clean up

the city.” Los Angeles had better not repeat that history. On the contrary,

the aim was to keep the population quarantined in place. “As we are bound

to have that population,” Lacy said, “we must assume the responsibility of

providing them a place to live peaceably.” He seemed not to realize the odd

juxtaposition of peaceableness with health, as if the plague had made the

docile Mexicans of Los Angeles unruly.68

But of course that was true. The plague had rendered Mexicans unusu-

ally unruly, dangerous in the eyes of many whites, not only because they

had the disease but also, I suspect, because the disease was seen to be pecu-

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 0 2

liarly Mexican, as if nonwhiteness itself had some of the same connotations

as disease. Perhaps Anglo anxiety in this chicken-and-egg manner helps

explain the even more interesting language of some of William Lacy’s col-

leagues. D. F. McGarry closed one discussion by pointing out that the

city’s Mexican population could not easily be dislodged from the poor dis-

tricts. “In many instances they are there because of cheap rent contiguous

to their work. They cannot afford to live in quarters that would be accept- able to us or as should be for the ordinary citizens.”

The assumption that Mexicans were somehow not “ordinary” is inter-

esting enough itself, as if they naturally existed in some special category

reserved for them as Mexicans. But McGarry followed this remark with a

fascinating slip, by referring to “this particular plan of eradicating them

from those districts, which is highly proper and wise.” Rat killing and

potential solutions to a Mexican problem merged, with eradication as the

verb, if not action, of choice. Perhaps it was just too difficult for the Chamber of Commerce member to think about where to put them should

the quarantines, be they social, economic, or medical, ever be lifted? For his

part, Dickie agreed with McGarry, pointing out that “your [sic] Mexicans

should not be permitted to live next [to] certain industries like food pack-

ing establishments and slaughter houses”—even though it was those very

Mexicans who were doing the work in these industries.69

There is little doubt that the cross-over of words and concepts between

rats and Mexicans occurred. Recall Dr. Pomeroy’s fear that the Mexican

population in Belvedere “would scatter” or “stampede” if they knew of the

plague or of quarantine plans. Even the militarized response to the plague—

best expressed by the quarantine and sanitary details—had as its purpose a

goal of aggressive cleanliness aimed at both rats and Mexicans. Just as

Mercurochrome was thought to be a cleanser for the plague’s internal man-

ifestations, so too with petroleum spray and chloride of lime aimed at the

lives of those within the confluence of poverty and Mexican ethnicity, effectively quarantined well before the epidemic hit. The metaphors, at least, had been around awhile, and their use wasn’t limited to city officials. Even housing reformer John Kienle of the University of Southern

California, part of the corps of young progressives under the wing of soci-

ologist Emory Bogardus, slid words around in troubling ways. In his impor-

tant 1912 thesis, “Housing Conditions among the Mexican Population of

Los Angeles,” Kienle wrote that he “inspected” local barrios “in order to

show the spread of the Mexicans.”70

This is not to suggest that, given the epidemiological history of the 1924

2 0 3e t h n i c q u a r a n t i n e

plague outbreak, the specifics of such associations had no validity whatso- ever. Certain links of sociability, ethnicity, neighborhood, and kin obviously

contributed to the patterns of plague vectors. Tracing these made sense in

public health practice, and the physicians and other health care personnel

acted quickly in stamping out the epidemic and saving lives, Mexican and

others. Yet the irony of an extraordinary event like an outbreak of the

Black Death is that it offers us a glimpse into the everyday life of the past, if only because of the large fissures the uncommon event opens into that society’s rhythms. In this case, it is in the generality of elite Anglo comment

and point of view, the instinctive, reflexive reach to such phrases and social categories as “the Mexican” that we recognize the broader implications, the

broader assumptions of ethnic and racial typicality, epidemiology and dis-

ease. The most obvious expressions of Anglo categorization in this regard

were also the simplest and most graphic. Illustrations that accompanied the

contemporary public health document describing the plague outbreak

explicitly labeled such environments as the “typical interior of [a] Mexican

home” and a “typical back yard.” It is as if the photographer—in this case

probably a public health official—merely wandered over from his Chamber of Commerce assignment of shooting “typical factories” or “typical palm

trees” to take pictures of “typical Mexicans” (although the absence of peo-

ple is interesting; they were likely either dead by then or behind quarantine

perimeters). So-called typical images of Mexican lives and homes, homes

far removed from the stock bungalow images, no doubt served to relieve a

fair amount of anxiety in the health or civic community. Reaction to such

images might accomplish two related tasks. First, if the plague indeed ren-

dered Mexicans something other than peaceable, those photographs that

repositioned them into typical spaces and places might serve to render

them less unruly in the minds of elite Anglos. Second, typical images of

degradation and filth could seemingly help solder the perceived connections between plague transmission and Mexican ethnicity. Any of these photo-

graphs would inevitably co-mingle disease with poverty, poverty with

Mexican ethnicity, Mexican ethnicity with disease. It was, after all, typical.71

Descriptions of the districts, really nothing more than extended captions

to the images, confirmed patterns of seeing and believing. Quarantined neighborhoods, bulging under an “ever increasing Mexican population,” ex-

hibited the “usual number of over-crowded rooming houses and temporary

shacks on the back lots.” Even the cumulative collection of typical Mexicans

could create a homogeneous group. “The unobstructed and uncontrolled

immigration from Mexico tends yearly to increase this class of inhabitants.”72

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 0 4

The practice of assigning ethnic Mexicans to rigid social, cultural, and

occupational containers, boxes even more rigid than those created by street

or district boundaries, encouraged Anglos to look at Mexicans in particu-

lar ways. Plague in 1924 offered a kind of proof of the theorem. If the dom- inant view tended toward an image of all ethnic Mexicans as a class of

equally degraded, poverty-stricken laborers living in rat-infested congrega-

tions, what could offer greater affirmation than a nasty outbreak of pneu- monic plague that killed mostly Mexicans? Even these many years later, it

isn’t difficult to discern the outlines of ugly circular logic.

� The 1924 plague epidemic in Los Angeles killed people in a few distinct

neighborhoods, it killed people who came into contact with one another,

and the dead were nearly all ethnic Mexicans. These were not mutually

exclusive categories. But nor were they part of an essentialist triangle, where

the one category (place, culture, ethnicity) naturally led to the other. Yet an

examination of the reaction to the plague reveals a tendency on the part of

the dominant culture to view and to explain the plague epidemic along

such lines, lines of familiarity and lines of typicality.73

Such a response could do little to break down conventional understand-

ings of ethnic life and culture in Los Angeles. On the contrary, contempo-

rary language certainly helped reinforce ideas about the typical Mexican and

restricted laborer space in the industrial economy, and not just in Los

Angeles. This was a Californian practice, a southwestern practice. By early

1926, for instance, a zoology professor at the University of California had no

qualms whatsoever about linking plague and Mexican ethnicity. Blaming

“the Mexicans, with their various diseases . . . their tendencies to huddle

together,” Professor Samuel Holmes fairly insisted that the plague outbreak

was the product of essential ethnic traits. Mexicans would, he declared,

“increase our mortality, increase our infant mortality, be the means of spread-

ing various epidemics throughout our population, and in general, deterio-

rating the physical welfare of the people. I do not believe there is any doubt

about that.”74 Tableabouthere

Having embarked upon a booster city-building journey that demanded

iconic images and symbols, Anglo Los Angeles produced an ambitious

glossary of typical images and places, a project that, alongside obvious

socioeconomic stratification, effectively snared ethnic Mexicans and held them fast. Just as Anglos in Los Angeles felt certain that they understood

2 0 5e t h n i c q u a r a n t i n e

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 0 6

the bungalow and the palm tree, so too did they self-consciously assert that

they understood this Mexican, frozen in time and quarantined in space. In

the very year that American immigration restrictions drew lines across

which certain Europeans could not move, a West Coast epidemic por-

trayed a Los Angeles desperate to restrict Mexicans—if not by immigration

law, then by other means. The 1924 Los Angeles plague outbreak was cer-

tainly—tragically—about vectors of disease. But it was just as certainly and

every bit as tragically about vectors of ethnicity. City leaders effectively worked to eliminate the former, but they did little, even when they had the

chance, to think more broadly and more humanely about the latter.

Infant Mortality Rates by Race and Ethnicity

Los Angeles County, 1925 and 1926

1925 1926 1925 + 1926

White 5.5%a 4.5% 5% (2,592 births,b (2,839 births,

144 deaths) 119 deaths) Japanese 6% 4% 5%

(383 births, (256 births, 23 deaths) 11 deaths)

Mexican 15.8% 12% 14% (1,283 births, (1,340 births, 203 deaths) 167 deaths)

Black 15.3% 26.6% 21% (13 births, (15 births, 2 deaths) 4 deaths)

a. Expressed percentage is total annual (reported) deaths of infants less than one year old over

total annual (reported) births by race/ethnicity.

b. Raw numbers from Annual Report of Health Department, Los Angeles County (Los Angeles: Los

Angeles County Health Department, 1926).

: Undercount of both births and deaths is highly likely and almost assured, especially for

nonwhites. For instance, the African American figures (13 births in 1925; 15 in 1926), as expressed

against total African American population in Los Angeles County for the period, appear much too

low and may help account for the spike in African American infant mortality in 1926 (reported fig-

ures are four infant deaths in 1926 expressed against 15 births). The raw data from the period

nonetheless indicate a striking difference in infant mortality among whites and those of Japanese

descent as opposed to African American and ethnic Mexican Angelenos.

S i x

The Drama

of Los Angeles History

The story of Junipero Serra and the Missions for dramatic purposes has been lying around since 1833, at least, for anybody to grab. But no one grabbed it until I did so in 1912. Now it is mine.

Jo h n S . M c G r o a r t y to Charles F. Lummis, 1916

The plays could be made most touching and instructive at the same time, without connecting the Fathers in an unholy way with everlasting, silly femininity, as some would-be poets have done with no foundation in fact, but merely as a manifestation of their own unclean dreams. Godspeed to your work in that line.

Fr . Z e p h y r i n E n g l e h a r d t to John S. McGroarty, 1910

Both as Business and Art, it is intolerable to have in your beautiful pageant some of the frightful anachronisms now there.The Babbitts don’t realize them; but every once in a great while some one will go to see the Mission Play who will know that Father Serra didn’t teach the California Indians to weave dam [sic] bad Navajo blankets!”

C h a r l e s F. L u m m i s to John S. McGroarty, 1926

2 0 7

In the spring of 1912, the ocean liner Titanic clipped an iceberg in the

Atlantic Ocean and sank. Newspapers across the nation and the world cov-

ered the Titanic story with tabloid zeal. Who lived? Who died? Who was

brave, and who was cowardly? Who was to blame? What were the last

moments aboard the doomed ship like for those on the brink of icy eternity?

It all made for compelling reading, as the papers featured story after story

about the tragedy. Papers in Los Angeles proved no exception to the aggres-

sive coverage of the event. After all, the tragedy had all the right elements,

foremost among them the premature assurances that the Titanic was not

supposed to, and in fact could not, sink. The fateful iceberg collision

offered high drama. Passengers on the ship included members of the American aristocracy: Guggenheims, Astors, Denver’s “Unsinkable” Molly

Brown (initial reports mistakenly placed her among the casualties; she

lived, hence the sobriquet). Well-known Los Angeles poet John Steven

McGroarty did his level best to memorialize the dead.

They were soldiers and sailors and masters,

Of the Arts and the gentle graces:

Shrine them, O God! In Thy memory,

As they died, with smiling faces1

Were it not for the Titanic disaster, it is likely that Los Angeles newspa-

pers would have devoted more space to a local event of greater importance

to poet McGroarty than his Titanic eulogy. As it was, this Los Angeles hap-

pening still merited significant coverage even with the ocean liner’s disas- trous descent to the bottom of the sea. The story is there, bouncing from

the news and editorial pages back and forth to society and entertainment

reports. In between stories of the Titanic’s fate peeked a regular set of arti-

cles about the coming of an important event to Los Angeles, the debut of

a play written by none other than John McGroarty.

Advance fanfare suggested the opening of McGroarty’s Mission Play was

no ordinary premiere. Out on a limb, the Times called it “the most unusual

dramatic event in the history of the Southwest.”2 Adding that “profound

public interest has been aroused” in the opening night performance, the

newspaper predicted a long and healthy run before packed houses. On the

evening of April 29, 1912, the show had its anticipated debut. It was, one

theater critic noted, “a pageant-drama unprecedented in the annals of this

country.”3 Acted out on a stage said to be the largest west of Chicago, on

the grounds of the San Gabriel Mission, with a cast of well over a hundred,

The Mission Play entered the hearts and minds of Southern Californians for

the first time. It was by all accounts a virtuoso performance. The audience shouted and cheered. People laughed and wept. They even hauled the

elated playwright into the glare of the footlights for an ovation, not at the

conclusion of the drama, but at the end of only the second of three acts.

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 0 8

When the play did end, the audience shrieked and shouted all over again.

The playwright, weeping, stood before them and accepted their praise.

Over the course of the next generation, the drama would evolve from an

evening’s festive entertainment to a regional institution, and it would grow

to become the single most successful American theatrical performance of

the age. It is this institutional role of The Mission Play that occupies our

attention in this final chapter.4

An extraordinary event like the plague epidemic of 1924 disrupted, as we

have seen, prevailing notions of Mexican “peaceableness,” and Los Angeles

responded to this threat with destructive vigor. Yet other regional idioms

already existed that operated as bulwarks to keep ethnic boundaries solid

and intact. The Mission Play was one such feature of Southern California

culture, and, unlike the plague abatement work of only a year or so, it did

its work over the course of decades.

H i s t o ry i n t h e A c t i v e V o i c e

Without even knowing it, the Los Angeles Times predicted much of The

Mission Play’s later impact by simply pointing out that the drama’s script

“has been taken almost literally from the history of California.”5 Before

long, that qualifying “almost” would be excised from public perceptions of

the play. The ever so slight distinction between drama and history would

be erased, and regional culture would canonize the play as Southern

California history itself, come back to life exactly where all assumed it had

begun, under the stars at the San Gabriel Mission, that ancient engine of

civilization. Within two months of the spring 1912 opening, the play’s first important critic, Willard Huntington Wright, stated simply that watching

The Mission Play was like watching history itself.6 In other words, the play

allowed viewers to travel back in time.

There can be no doubt that the play had its historian, or at least a kind

of amanuensis, in John Steven McGroarty. A reporter for the Los Angeles

Times, staunch Irish Catholic, and sentimental poet, McGroarty had

finished a history of California—California: Its History and Romance—at the close of the first decade of the twentieth century. He may have in fact begun writing The Mission Play at the same time that he was finishing the California history volume, but regional lore has told the story differently. According to later versions of Mission Play genesis, McGroarty finished his state history, then cast about for something else to do. Along came Frank

Miller of the Mission Inn in Riverside, a red-roofed Spanish revival hostelry

2 0 9t h e d r a m a o f l o s a n g e l e s h i s t o r y

of international fame, with an idea. Someone, Miller felt, should write the

history of California as the drama it so obviously was, as an epic produc-

tion that could be tossed into the widening stream of the region’s tourist

trade. Miller had been to Oberammergau and seen the Passion Play in 1910.

Surely Southern California’s dramatic past deserved similar enshrinement?

But who could do it?

Wealthy and well connected, Miller sought advice. Ivy League scholars

were suggested, including Henry Van Dyke of the literature department at

Princeton. But Miller either did not like the options or failed to entice any

members of the academic elite to come west long enough to write the

epic. Stanford University president David Starr Jordan, as famous a

Californian as there was in 1910, suggested a different path. Believing that “a Western man is an Eastern man who has had some additional experi-

ences,” Jordan recommended that Miller find himself a writer born, or reborn, in California.7 Why not get John Steven McGroarty to do it? After

all, McGroarty had been writing Californiana for the Times, he knew the

region, he could put words together. Miller knew McGroarty. He had

already overlooked him for one reason or another. But David Starr Jordan

had made a convincing argument. A deal was struck. McGroarty got time

off from the newspaper from his boss, the mercurial Harrison Gray Otis, another friend of Miller’s, and the poet/newspaperman/now-playwright

traveled east from Los Angeles to a writing desk at the Mission Inn.8

Expectations, his own and Frank Miller’s, dictated that McGroarty write

a blockbuster. Such expectations apparently did not induce writer’s block:

McGroarty supposedly finished the project in just eight weeks.9 Subject matter for the drama could hardly have caused him worry. By 1910,

Southern California lay drenched in the glare of the Spanish Fantasy Past,

prefixing things right and left with “mission,” and working diligently to cre- ate monuments to a faded, though glorious antiquity, by propping up and

painting the crumbling missions.10

While writing, McGroarty paused long enough here and there to seek

advice. He wrote plaintively to the Rev. Zephyrin Englehardt, author of The

Missions and Missionaries of California. Had he portrayed things right? “I

am finishing the manuscript of a production which is to be known as ‘The Mission Play,’ ” McGroarty wrote proudly. “It will be brought out in

December, and I trust to make it worthy of the great theme it portrays.”

McGroarty had already shown the manuscript drama to the archbishop,

“our beloved Bishop Conaty,” who had expressed pleasure in it. Could Fr.

Englehardt make time to look at it if the playwright traveled to Santa

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 1 0

Barbara to meet with him? “I know that you are working hard,” McGroarty

apologized, but “for the sake of the cause and for the sake of truth and his-

tory and the love I, as well as yourself, bear the sons of St. Francis, I trust

you may find it possible to grant my request.”11

Fr. Englehardt quickly wrote back, saying that he would be pleased to

assist McGroarty “get out ‘The Mission Play’ historically accurate.” He

hinted at some competition between McGroarty and another writer and

added prophetically that the drama “ought to take with the people here.”

Clearly the project intrigued the cleric, and he saw it as a way to popular-

ize the legacy of Fr. Serra and the mission system. “I can furnish but the dry

skeleton of history, because I must cling to the bare truth; but it would be

like putting on flesh and skin by acting it all on the stage. This would be a supplement of priceless value.” Not that the project came without chal-

lenges. Fr. Englehardt insisted that McGroarty not render the Franciscans

“in an unholy way with everlasting silly femininity.”12

A year passed, during which time McGroarty tried out an early version

of The Mission Play before an audience in San Diego. By early September

1911, the playwright sent a completed draft to Englehardt in hopes that the

priest would “tell me if it contains anything objectionable.”13 McGroarty

took seriously Englehardt’s views, but it is equally clear that the playwright

wished to make certain that the play’s dramatic impact not be diminished.

A letter from McGroarty in answer to some of Englehardt’s criticisms is

especially telling. “Nearly every change you point out,” McGroarty admits,

“I must, somehow, make, but there are one or two things I would love to

retain—especially the Spanish dancers from Monterey in the second act.

You know, the Play must catch the public—our separated brethren as well

as our Catholic people.”

McGroarty wanted it both ways. He admitted to Englehardt that “of

course I never meant to take chances on [The Mission Play],” yet he wished

to hold onto whatever spark the thing might have in terms of attracting a

broad audience. This ambition shattered his friendship with Englehardt,

who clearly felt taken advantage of by the playwright.14 Another friend, the

irrepressible man of letters Charles Fletcher Lummis, the single most

important publicist of the state’s mission past, recognized the perils of

McGroarty’s relentless ambition. “In my 53 years, I have never even found

so Irresponsible a Cuss as you,” Lummis chastised McGroarty in a letter

about the playwright’s work. “Now you’ve got to learn—not for my sake but

for yours—not to go crazy when an idea hits you. That’s the time to get

sane. You’ve got to learn to keep your Word, to be Responsible, to have

2 1 1t h e d r a m a o f l o s a n g e l e s h i s t o r y

some Balance. Else you’ll wind up a Total Failure. Your Mission Play, [and]

everything else, will crumble unless you learn the Common Law. Wake

Up!”15

Despite the harsh words of friends and critics, McGroarty did what oth-

ers before him had not succeeded in doing. He captured the historical nar-

rative and the pageantry of La Fiesta de Los Angeles and corralled it all onto

the pages of a theatrical script. He then set up a ticket office. It worked. The Mission Play made John McGroarty famous, if not rich, and it helped to

launch him on a career as Southern California’s representative man, in

symbol and, eventually, in the halls of the United States Congress as well.

T h e M a n a n d t h e P l a y

John Steven McGroarty came from hardscrabble Pennsylvania coal coun-

try. He had been born in 1862, into a big Irish family.16 As a young man,

McGroarty took a great interest in temperance, remembering years later

that, while still a teenager, he marched at the head of a temperance parade

of ten thousand coal miners.17 He tried teaching, then moved on to jour-

nalism. Then he went into law, as a justice of the peace, and was admitted

to the Pennsylvania bar near the end of the nineteenth century. Shortly after

marrying Ida Lubrecht of Wilkes-Barre, McGroarty grew restless, left the

East for the excitement and opportunities offered by the West, and relo- cated to Butte, Montana. There he worked as a legal adviser to Marcus

Daly, the Butte copper king who made millions from the Anaconda Mine.

McGroarty and his wife also operated a boarding house, and McGroarty

may have managed the Anaconda Water Company. Following Daly’s death,

and on the lookout for the main chance, McGroarty traveled the Southwest,

invested in Mexican mines, and even went to Mexico alone near century’s

end to oversee his investment. The venture, like so many others made by

countless Americans during the period, failed. From Mexico, McGroarty

traveled next to Seattle, where a telephone venture also failed. Fig.51

Business losses, perhaps even broken health: the McGroartys joined the

march to Los Angeles. He started as an itinerant bookseller, then found work

under Harrison Gray Otis at the Times, where he moved up the ranks and

became an editorial writer. He also edited a journal in which he had a stake,

West Coast Magazine. In between editorial duties, McGroarty published

sentimental and undistinguished, albeit successful, poetry about his adopted

state. He was, as Kevin Starr nicely phrases it, of “the lo! hark! school.”18 Just

California (1903) and Wander Songs (1908) helped establish him as a recog-

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 1 2

nized regional writer. McGroarty also developed an eye for spotting literary

talent. In the same year in which The Mission Play appeared, he sponsored

publication of Robinson Jeffers’s first book, Flagons and Apples. McGroarty’s editorial tenure with West Coast Magazine no doubt helped

prepare him to write The Mission Play. The journal published all manner

of sentimental and romantic Californiana; it was in many ways a smaller

clone of Charles Fletcher Lummis’s Out West, minus Lummis’s quirky bril-

liance. Lummis would in fact write briefly for McGroarty, bringing his “Lion’s Den” column over from Out West into West Coast. Amidst the

fiction and local interest stories, the magazine took a small role in trying to explain or comment on social and political issues. It published such pieces,

2 1 3t h e d r a m a o f l o s a n g e l e s h i s t o r y

Figure 51. John Steven McGroarty. Courtesy of the Regional

History Center, University of Southern California.

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 1 4

titled in the popular pseudoscientific argot of the day, as “Problem of the Emigrant,” and of course “The Mexican Problem.”19

Grafton Publishing brought the journal out, and they also published

McGroarty’s California: Its History and Romance. By the early 1910s, the

magazine operated as an advertising vehicle for John Steven McGroarty.

The front and back covers, the photogravures, the articles, reviews, and edi-

torials often related to one McGroarty story or another: his history book,

his book on the El Camino Real, the much-anticipated Mission Play,

McGroarty’s verse. Even as McGroarty labored over his script, regional

anticipation grew almost palpable, as if the Los Angeles basin’s population

engaged in a collective holding of breath: The Mission Play is coming!

Writing The Mission Play was, of course, only the first step toward mak- ing theatrical history. Even though Frank Miller had backed away from the

play before its debut, for reasons that are unclear, McGroarty had the sup-

port and the experience to make his play into a public relations event, an

experience. In this he rested upon the example of such phenomena as

Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona and La Fiesta de Los Angeles, both of

which had connected profoundly with a narrow regional perception of the

past. But it would be inaccurate to call The Mission Play a mere imitation

of previous theatrical or literary productions. McGroarty organized The

Mission Play Association, which borrowed money and issued stock in the

venture.20 Then, acting as producer and director, he worked to raise addi-

tional money, build a playhouse, and put on the play.

The Mission Play as cultural phenomenon broke new ground even as

McGroarty and others, literally, broke ground. Having received the okay

from Bishop Thomas J. Conaty, McGroarty went ahead with his plans to

build his playhouse and a miniature replica of the El Camino Real, the

famed “King’s Road” upon which the state’s missions had been built. At the

groundbreaking ceremonies for the Mission Playhouse, built just adjacent

to the San Gabriel Mission on the full-sized El Camino Real, McGroarty

and Miller made sure to add spectacle to construction ritual. Those pres-

ent to turn earth included the Catholic bishop, the president of the Native

Sons of the Golden West, a representative of the Los Angeles Chamber of

Commerce (foreshadowing that organization’s later involvement with the

play), and two Franciscan friars, returned now to California to mark the

commemorative celebration of their good works and their goodness.

Wielding hoes and giant hatchets, of all things, and tools supposedly used

in the founding of the San Gabriel Mission, the men stabbed at the earth.

2 1 5t h e d r a m a o f l o s a n g e l e s h i s t o r y

A band played the Spanish National Hymn before a large crowd of smil-

ing onlookers.21

The playhouse, with its thin facade of mission architecture and roofline, looked every inch like a motion picture backlot. The building (one reviewer

called it a sort of “monastic refectory”) apparently shook when the nearby

trains roared past; actors held their lines until the noise faded. But it did its

job. As many as fifteen hundred people could see The Mission Play within its confines. McGroarty and staff added one additional enticing feature that made the Mission Play experience into the first California history theme park. In a short walkway alongside an outside wall of the Playhouse—the

Mission Walk—the state’s twenty-one missions, each rendered in careful

miniature, sat in geographical sequence. The mini missions were a brilliant

interactive innovation, a triumph of cultural tourism, and they rarely

escaped comment. Playgoers could see the play, make a short pilgrimage on

the tiny El Camino Real to look at all the missions, and thus experience the

past, even, as they often reported, see it before their eyes.22

Creating anticipation for The Mission Play around such staged events as

the groundbreaking and Mission Walk helped prime the pump of regional

excitement. McGroarty also chose his actors carefully. It is important to

remember that many of the play’s personnel, not only at the outset but for

years afterwards, included some of the best, or certainly the best-known tal-

ent the American theater could offer. For director, McGroarty picked Henry Kabierske, well known in theatrical circles and also head of the

famed Philadelphia Historical Pageant. The combination of McGroarty

and Kabierske particularly thrilled critics. “With such a patrician patriar-

chate of Illuminati, could the Mission Play be anything but the unqualified success it is?” asked one.23 Shakespearean veteran Benjamin Horning played

the role of Junipero Serra, founder of the California mission system. For the

lead female role, McGroarty chose an actress already steeped in romantic

readings of Southern California history. Eleanor Calhoun, who had

recently, through marriage to a Serbian prince, become the much longer-

named Princess Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich, came from fairly humble set-

tings in California’s Central Valley. Her father, Ezekiel Ewing Calhoun, had

been a judge in the country town of Visalia. Her mother had written

“Scenes of Early California Life,” as well as what her daughter later called

“other biological writings.” Her sister Virginia had written and acted in a

stage version of Helen Hunt Jackson’s world-famous Ramona, the source

from which most fantasy blessings of Southern California flow.24 Years ear-

lier, Eleanor had been William Randolph Hearst’s girlfriend. Now, as Prin-

cess Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich, she apparently helped underwrite the show

with her new wealth (and received a hefty salary for her acting).25

Accompanying the star talent were locals: members of various Spanish and

Mexican families, as well as what the Los Angeles Times called “a company

of genuine Indian supernumeraries.”26

Again it all worked, it all came together. Or at least it was a good start.

The opening show witnessed the attendance of local notables, clergy, and

members of the society set, launching the play on its long career. There were

a few problems. The flimsy playhouse threatened to topple like a house of cards. Newfangled automobiles cluttered the site, and exhaust from their

engines proved a vexing and unanticipated problem. But playgoers loved

the drama, cheering themselves hoarse when Benjamin Horning as Fr.

Serra declared that he would fight to maintain the missions against all obstacles.

McGroarty expected that the first year’s production might last a week. The play instead did a run of ten weeks, 127 consecutive shows, thus shat-

tering the American theater record. Within a year, it had become a South-

ern California phenomenon, neatly hooked into, and thus expanding, the

mission fantasies of the region. Railroads incorporated The Mission Play

into their advertisements, both locally and across the nation. Playwright

and play became almost synonymous: McGroarty kept a tiny office at the Playhouse and received mail addressed simply “John McGroarty, The

Mission Play, San Gabriel.”

Critics fell over themselves in praise of the play and its author. “It is a ser-

mon in action presented with historical fidelity,” read one representative Mission Play advertisement. It was, the Catholic journal Tidings proclaimed,

“an historical pageant and sermon in action.” Professor Richard Burton of

the University of Minnesota, author of How to See a Play, declared that

the entire history of California could now be seen in an afternoon.27

McGroarty bathed in the bright light of renown. He was “a Celt and a

Californian, a poet and a journalist, a man of sincere faith and fertile fancy,

unspoiled by literary fads, and fashions, capable of feeling the beauty and

pathos of the mission-story, and willing to tell it on the stage so simply that

a child could see its meaning.”28 In their early appraisals of The Mission Play

and its success, a number of critics found it necessary to point out that what

made the play so remarkable was that it took seriously the regional back-

ground of Southern California. It enshrined and thus rendered immutable

a set of historical conceptions and arranged them into a single narrative.

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 1 6

The play was both a discovery and celebration of regional heritage, one that

its audiences—largely white and Protestant—could nonetheless claim as

their own. Writing in the pages of West Coast, critic Willard Huntington

Wright pointed out that conventional American historical pageants along

the lines of the Passion Play were a virtual impossibility. “We have no his-

torical background distinctly our own. Our racial beginnings are too near

to us to have become invested, as yet, with the atmosphere of romance.”29

Whatever Wright’s precise meaning, it is clear that he believed that

Southern California’s racial environment had indeed reached that level of

maturation to become invested with the “atmosphere of romance.” The

arrival of McGroarty (“a documentary historian,” wrote Wright) and The

Mission Play on the local scene seemed to Wright (and other critics) the

long-awaited solution to an American historical problem. How could his-

tory serve romance, how could romance serve history? Because Wright—

not to mention McGroarty—accepted the notion that California history

and California romance were the same thing, The Mission Play solved the

problem. The story of race, the story of ethnicity, the story of California:

all could be played out on stage in San Gabriel in perfect adherence to

truth. The past had its share of poignancy, yes, but it was the poignancy of

sacrifice, faithful devotion, or self-abnegation. The play’s appeal lay precisely in the willingness of its audience to suspend disbelief, to mis-remember

everything about the dark ground of the region’s even recent past.

McGroarty’s supposed scholarly fidelity paid off; it would be difficult to uncover anything but unqualified praise for the drama. A typical pub- lished response: “The Mission Play is nobly conceived, splendidly exe-

cuted, a prose-poem for beautiful diction, a living page of stirring history,

a glowing picture of days gone by, a potent sermon of faith and hope and

self-abnegation.”30

The play could even do more, seemingly. When a San Francisco journal

accused Southern California of neglecting the needs of its local Mexican

population, The Tidings fired back that, on the contrary, Los Angeles Catholics were “shouldering the white man’s burden . . . so stoutly.” Part of

this had to do with the fact that the downtown Plaza Church “is almost

exclusively given to the Mexicans,” as Tidings wrote. As well, the town of

San Gabriel, an “almost . . . wholly Mexican settlement,” featured a great

deal of Catholic relief work among the Mexican population. Though the

defensive writer did not come right out and say it, the implication was clear;

in San Gabriel, The Mission Play did the work of the church among the

Mexican population.31

2 1 7t h e d r a m a o f l o s a n g e l e s h i s t o r y

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 1 8

Writer Mary Austin loved The Mission Play and saw in it religious labor

as well. In a letter to McGroarty in the winter of 1913, she echoed the ser-

mon metaphor, saying that he had dealt with religion with “courage and

delicacy.” “I wish to congratulate you on the way in which the religious

spirit, which was the mainspring of the Mission Enterprise, was felt all

through the play and yet never obtruded.”32 Energetic social reformer

Bromley Oxnam, already a force in Los Angeles housing reform in his

early twenties, felt much the same. “I saw the Mission Play,” Oxnam

wrote in his diary. “The play is good, very good. . . . I had learned to love

Junipero Serra and his faithful fathers thru the pages of history.” But see-

ing history staged offered greater uplift and example. “I have learned what sacrifice means and truly these men were inspired with a gospel of serv- ice. . . . may I serve as truly as they served.” Another viewer put it more

succinctly. The Mission Play, he wrote the playwright, made people want

to go to mass.33 Fig.52abouthere

So what was The Mission Play? In simplest terms, the play was a three-

act drama, impressively staged if not acted. Several hundred people made

up the acting company. Costumes, most made by Ida Lubrecht McGroarty,

the playwright’s wife, were bright and designed, at least in part, for histor-

ical accuracy. An intermission between Acts 1 and 2 offered playgoers the

Figure 52. Act 1 of The Mission Play: Return of Portolá from Monterey. Author’s

collection.

chance to stroll the tiny El Camino Real and look at the mini missions, or

to sit and listen to period music provided by the company’s Mexican band.

The university professor who declared that one could see the entirety of

California history in a San Gabriel afternoon actually had a point. The

Mission Play shrink-wrapped history into palatable sections, easily enough

linked by quaint notions of progress. Every bit an invention of tradition,

The Mission Play primly avoided the bloody ground of the state’s past. A

prelude offered a fitting metaphor to the play’s historical point of view. Ghostly figures pantomime scenes from the “misty past,” standing behind a scrim curtain. In this case, though, the curtain was more of culture than

fabric, as the play proceeded on to its melodramatic narrative of “the three

great epochs” of California history. First, the state’s coastal natives

(“Savages” in the script), lurking off stage—history’s and the playhouse’s— sense the approach of their “White Conquerors.” Ave Maria plays as back-

ground music. A Spanish soldier enters, looks about imperiously, and exits.

Bells peal in the distance. A Franciscan enters: “Spirit of the everlasting

Faith of the Cross of Christ.” He assumes a prayerful attitude, then extends

his hands to the audience in benediction. He exits, and Act 1 commences.

The play opens in 1769, “when California began.” Set on the Pacific’s edge at Pt. Loma, south of Los Angeles, Act 1 featured a sleepy Franciscan

and several lazy Spanish soldiers bemoaning their fate, fearful of the natives.

Gaspar de Portolá, head of the expedition, is out looking for Monterey Bay.

The soldiers epitomize the waning days of Spanish imperial greatness.

They don’t like California much, nor do they have any energy to make any-

thing of the place. The pious Junipero Serra dominates the scene, as

McGroarty showers him with selfless goodness. The state’s natives do not appreciate the founder of the mission system, or his project, in the manner

they should. Serra and his assistants wish to baptize a native child; with that

act, they will believe that their efforts have found favor in God’s sight and that the mission necklace can be strung north from San Diego. “God grant

that we shall now really begin the evangelization of California,” Serra prays,

gazing aloft, crucifix at his breast. Unlike Serra, de Portolá feels no kindness toward the state’s natives.

“California is filled with Indians,” he tells the padre. “But they are nearly all like these wretched natives in San Diego.” The conquistador wishes to

depart, to return to Mexico. Serra forbids this with an exhortation (audi-

ences loved it): “We shall NOT abandon California.” With the arrival of local

Indians at the camp, bringing a child for baptism, all appears saved. Serra

prepares to anoint the child with holy water, naming him Ubaldo for a

2 1 9t h e d r a m a o f l o s a n g e l e s h i s t o r y

Spanish captain lost at sea. At this moment, the assembled Indians, con-

fused and apparently frightened by Serra’s baptismal gestures, rush from the

stage in alarm, taking the child with them. The tumult stuns Serra. He

blames himself—“O mea culpa! Mea culpa!” The mission experiment fails

as a ship appears to take Serra and company back to Mexico. Curtain.

Act 2, fifteen years later, celebrates the flowering of the mission system. It did not die on the San Diego coast after all. The Spanish found Monterey

Bay, near where Serra founded Mission San Carlos to further the Christian-

izing work among the natives. The effort has paid off: even young Ubaldo, the object of the first act’s baptism fiasco, has grown up Christian, devoted to Serra as much as he is to the church. Amidst flowers and music, Chris- tianity flourishes in California. No longer are the Indians savages, no longer are they “so stupid, so dirty, so hopeless” as they were fifteen years previous.

Serra is now an old man. Yet he refuses to cut back on his work; he sleeps

on a bare board, he goes without food, he walks from mission to mission.

He plans mission strategies with his underlings, he hears progress reports

about the number of Indians brought to the faith. He hears a fellow

Franciscan boast about the utility and beauty of Mission San Luis Obispo’s

red-tiled roof—“now used in all parts of California.”

The crux of Act 2 is Serra’s accomplishment; near death, he reflects back on his work in California as a tribute both to God and to the native peo-

ple of California. “To be remembered in California—Oh, God grant that

I shall not be forgotten in this dear and lovely land,” he cries.

In opposition to Serra, whom McGroarty renders part George Washing-

ton, part Jesus Christ, is the evil Spanish Commandante, head of the

province’s military installations. He rides to Mission San Carlos in search

of a bride, a young woman of Indian and Spanish parentage. Serra forbids

the soldier from fulfilling his mission, claiming that because she has at least a drop of Indian blood, Anita is under the authority of the mission fathers.

Serra offers that the Commandante may marry the Indian girl provided she give her uncoerced consent. The Commandante balks, arguing that it is

beneath him to marry a half-breed. Serra then quickly performs a marriage

between Anita and the Indian Pablo, to whom she is engaged. The enraged

Commandante threatens anew to take the girl, whereupon Serra upbraids

him ferociously. Serra and the other Franciscans run the Commandante off. In celebration, the young Indians of the mission, shouting “La Fiesta! La

Fiesta!” dance a dozen numbers. Serra, a silhouette at prayer, offers a bless- ing to a young Indian. Curtain. Fig.53abouthere

Act 3 makes a large temporal jump. It is now 1844. Serra is long dead. The

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 2 0

2 2 1t h e d r a m a o f l o s a n g e l e s h i s t o r y

act opens amidst mission ruins at San Juan Capistrano. Ubaldo is now an

old man, the caretaker of the broken, dilapidated mission. Anita, the for-

mer object of the Spaniard’s lust, is an old woman (no longer, it would

appear, half-Spanish), a basket maker. Ubaldo sleeps, dreaming of the glo-

ries of the mission past. The entire act is a mission requiem. The secular-

ization of the missions by the Mexican government has caused them to col-

lapse, both as institutions and buildings. The central character of the final act is Señora Josepha Yorba, a member of an elite Californio family who, like

Ubaldo, mourns the destruction of the once-grand missions. Señora Yorba

and Ubaldo reminiscence and mourn the loss of the romantic past, and

they both wonder what the presence of so many “Americanos” means to the

missions and California.

The scene darkens as Señora Yorba begins to talk of Monterey, site of

Serra’s triumph in Act 2. “There is nothing there now but—memory.” As

the evening grows later, Indians who live nearby are seen coming into the

mission property carrying a burden. Ubaldo, under orders not to allow

Indians access to the secularized missions, panics. Señora Yorba intercedes

and allows the Indians to enter. They carry the body of a dead Franciscan

friar. The padre has starved to death in this time of drought and want. As

they prepare him for burial in sanctified ground, Señora Yorba discovers the gold chalice of the mission hidden in the Franciscan’s robes. That the

Figure 53. Act 2 of The Mission Play: Fiesta scene. Author’s collection.

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 2 2

Indians have meant to bury it with the friar (and not steal it) astonishes her,

and she exclaims to God that His “dusky neophytes” have “kept the faith.”

At the finale, Señora Yorba cries that “the dream is done . . . gone to return no more. The dear and lovely dream that was so bright and fair.”

What lives is the Cross and the Faith. The missions have gone, but God’s

Mission remains. As the play closes, Ubaldo stretches out his arms and cries,

“O Cross of Christ!” Curtain.34 Fig.54abouthere

Buoyed by his first year’s success, McGroarty doubled the play’s run in 1913 to twenty weeks. Kabierske was by now gone. Benjamin Horning

took over directing duties in addition to his portrayal of Junipero Serra.

Gone, too, was the Princess. The female lead was assumed by Lucretia del

Valle, daughter of Reginaldo F. del Valle, scion of a Californio land grant

family and, not incidentally, vice president of the Mission Play Association.

In her role as Josepha Yorba, Lucretia del Valle added artifactual accuracy

to the role. It was widely reported that she wore family heirlooms as part

of her costume: her mantilla, other clothing, her jewelry. She reportedly

played the role nearly a thousand nights. “Chief Sheet Lightning,” said to

be a Sac and Fox Indian, was described as “the Mission Play cicerone.”35

McGroarty, who later claimed to be as much as $100,000 in debt on

opening night (which seems a wild exaggeration), doubtless sensed that the

play might be a moneymaker of serious proportion. He was, after all, the

same man on the lookout for the main chance that he had been wander-

ing across the mining regions of the Rocky Mountain West. He had dab-

bled in Los Angeles real estate (who hadn’t?), and West Coast Magazine had

given him space to write such pieces as “The Value of Property and

Sentiment in the Real Estate Business.”36 Now he had hit upon mining his-

Figure 54. Progress as linear tableau: A Mission Play advertisement from the early

twentieth century. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

tory, and it seemed to be working. Clearly the play could bring in money.

Gross receipts for 1913, for the first ten weeks of the show, amounted to over $35,000.37 Yet McGroarty made pains to claim poverty as well as motives

more exalted than the pursuit of lucre. In a long letter to Archbishop

Thomas Conaty, who rented McGroarty space at the mission, the play-

wright threw himself on the mercy of the church. If the archbishop could-

n’t reduce the play’s rent ($5,000 a year), it would prove the play’s “undo-

ing as a factor for the propagation of religion and the uplift of the drama.

I trust you will feel, as I do, that the American stage as at present conducted

is a menace to the morals and religion, and that such Plays as the Mission

Play are the best weapons for battling this menace.” The playwright knew

melodrama.38

The Mission Playhouse began hawking autograph copies of McGroarty’s

history of California at shows, and McGroarty hatched an idea to take the

romance on the road. During the 1914 season, the Mission Players went to

San Francisco and San Diego. In 1915, out-of-state tourists going to those

two cities for their respective Pan-Pacific Expositions probably made plans to see The Mission Play when in Los Angeles.

The traveling Mission Play must have made at least some money, because

by 1916 McGroarty could pen harsh words about protecting his show

against perceived threats from others wanting to make history pay. Charles

Fletcher Lummis, an on-again, off-again friend of McGroarty’s, had notified the playwright of plans to make a motion picture of the life of Fr. Junipero Serra. Portions of the proceeds were to go to Lummis’s cherished

Landmark’s Club, an energetic effort to restore dilapidated missions. Would McGroarty support the effort? McGroarty left little doubt as to his position. “The story of Junipero Serra and the Missions for dramatic purposes has

been lying around since 1833, at least, for anybody to grab. But no one

grabbed it until I did so in 1912. Now it is mine and I purpose [sic] to have

and to hold it against all comers, with all the law there is to back me. And,

there is plenty of law of that kind.”39

Maybe it was time to take The Mission Play outside California, McGroarty

reasoned, perhaps thinking that he could evade those wishing to capitalize

on his drama and, in the process, make money from curious easterners. What

he learned was that the play’s popularity with tourists visiting California did

not translate into popularity with non-Californians. The trip, which

included stops in Reno, Salt Lake City, St. Louis, Kansas City, Omaha, and

Chicago, failed miserably. Lucretia del Valle supposedly tried to salvage the

show by turning her entire salary over to the play. A historical pageant about

2 2 3t h e d r a m a o f l o s a n g e l e s h i s t o r y

California meant apparently little to non-Californians, at least not as long

as they were not in California doing those things tourists wanted and were

expected to do. “The poet’s dream has gone to smash!” wrote the Los Angeles

Times, adding that while “California may fascinate its tourists with its

mission heritage,” the romance “cannot be exported.” One critic in Kansas

City went so far as to question the play’s historical measure, blasting

McGroarty as a simple booster and “hysterical Californian, dyed-in-the-

wool. The Mission Play suffers a good deal by being saddled with the cult of the professional Californian,” the critic surmised. “By itself Mr. McGroarty’s

play picturing the rise and fall of a vivid religious life in California, is quite

interesting to anyone who has a sense of values in the theater, who likes

pageantry, and who can make out the difference between the shrewdly art- ful and professional drama and the drama which is artfully simple. . . . It is

the missions the play speaks of, just as fundamentally its chief charm is its

atmosphere rather than its historical or religious qualities.”40

Kansas City’s shrewd critic suggested, at least between the lines, that The

Mission Play was not the great rendering of California history that Cali-

fornia critics seemed all too ready to believe and champion. What’s more,

the critic’s antagonism to the California boosterish qualities hinted that the

play might not attract Kansans in Kansas, Chicagoans in Chicago, or

Missourians in Missouri. If they were in California, tourists doing the

Southern California tourist circuit, The Mission Play might be an obvious

attraction, because the audience—knowing what it wanted of California’s

past—could play the role of Greek chorus. But maybe things were different elsewhere?

Apparently so. Broke, stranded in Chicago, and down $40,000, the

embarrassed Mission Players hitched a ride back to Southern California

with the Southern Pacific Railroad. The humiliation of the trip bothered McGroarty for years, and it supposedly brought on a nervous collapse for

Ida Lubrecht McGroarty. History could sell, but only if it was packaged and

offered with some discretion; maybe it would do best if the play stayed closer to home.

The disastrous 1916 tour hurt the play’s finances badly. Once back home, the play and McGroarty tried to regain footing, although McGroarty’s

business abilities were clearly not his strong suit. He did, however, make the

shrewd move of hiring E. K. Hoak, a talented and well-known figure in Southern California tourist hotel management (his son would later be the

chief designer of Union Station), to take over some of the organization of

the production. Tyrone Power Sr. joined the troupe, as did his wife, Patia,

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 2 4

cast as the new female lead. McGroarty also worked hard to replace George

Osburn, Junipero Serra in the previous season, who died just prior to the

fateful road trip east. He approached Frederic Warde, another famous

Shakespearean actor, about the possibility of taking on the role. Warde read

the play and loved it. In his memoirs, he wrote that he had never before

“read a manuscript that made such a deep impression upon me as this

simple, unconventional, dramatic composition. The character is so com-

pletely sympathetic and full of dramatic possibilities there is little credit due

for my success, but I will confess that I felt particularly gratified when John McGroarty publicly announced that when he was writing the play I was in

his mind for the part.”41

Warde proved, apparently, a good choice, if not a coup, among the play’s

fans. George Searle of the Los Angeles Soldiers’ Home, for instance, wrote

that Warde could “feel proud in that he has [compelled] the Native Cali-

fornian the Mexican and myself to believe in [the] reincarnation of Fray

Junipero Serra.”42

The Mission Play a n d t h e 1 9 2 0 s

I count the day I spent at the Mission Play as one of the happiest days

of my life.

T h o m a s R . M a r s h a l l , vice president of the United States43

Those old days mark the Golden Age of California. In that wonderful

time, everybody was happy, well fed and content. Nobody was poor.

Nobody was rich. It was an age of easy toil, of prayer and sun and

peace and laughter.

Jo h n S . M c G r o a r t y, 192144

Despite the abysmal failure of the 1916 road trip, The Mission Play made it

through the decade and into the 1920s. McGroarty tightened up the play’s

contractual powers with actors, and he moved the drama along the path

toward becoming an institution. Part of that process, at least as McGroarty

figured it, was to make certain that history and drama be performed “in a correct and painstaking manner,” as he put it in an actor’s contract. Already

by 1916, McGroarty seems to have realized that the drama’s appeal lay in its

ability to portray history, and he knew as well that that ability rested upon

the fragile foundations of theatrical performance. As such (and as with La

Fiesta’s staging years earlier) great care and attention to detail extended

2 2 5t h e d r a m a o f l o s a n g e l e s h i s t o r y

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 2 6

to “strict regard” of makeup and “the proper dressing of the characters

assigned.”45

Playgoers continued to make the journey from the big city to “the little

Spanish town,” or, as McGroarty later referred to it, with euphemistic care,

“a sleepy old adobe pueblo.”46 Once there, they could park their automobiles

in the Mission Garage (“official parking for the Mission Play”) at the corner of Mission Drive and Ramona Avenue. On their way into the theater, the

audience members might stop to look at “Ramona’s Home” (a real house for

a fictional character, designed to lure fans of Helen Hunt Jackson’s melo- dramatic novel) and the old grapevine of Mission San Gabriel (“Mother of

all the Grapevines in California”). Playgoers continued to pay their $1,

$1.50, or $2 per seat; they continued to walk the miniature El Camino Real

before and between acts; and they continued to weep and cheer and applaud.

They stopped for trinkets at the Mission Curio Shop, and they drank tea at

the Ramona Tea Shop. And when they got back to the workaday world, the

world of the twentieth century, they wrote John Steven McGroarty and told

him what a fine thing he had done in writing The Mission Play. Fig.55abouthere Not all the fan mail came as a result of The Mission Play. McGroarty con-

tinued to write for the Los Angeles Times, and he had, by the early 1920s,

become a well-known public figure in Los Angeles. He spoke often at pub- lic events, school commencements, and banquets. He had cards printed

that advertised a visit from McGroarty and the Mission Play Artists for var-

ious events, “with or without costume.” He turned down offers to write his- torical dramas for Texas (about, not surprisingly, remembering the Alamo),

Florida, and the Pacific Northwest. His books continued to sell. But it was The Mission Play that had made him a public figure, and almost any printed reference to him included the phrase “author of the Mission Play.” More

than any of his other projects or books, the play earned for McGroarty a

reputation as a man who knew Mexican life and culture precisely because

he had staged it. Walter Malone, the general superintendent of the Simons

Brick Company nearby in Montebello, admitted as much in a letter he

wrote to McGroarty—tellingly in Spanish—in the mid-1920s. Play and

playwright clearly went hand in hand in the public consciousness, and thus

it would be until McGroarty’s death in 1944.47

McGroarty’s public utterances, not unlike his columns for the Los Angeles

Times, tended toward platitudes and simple morality tales. “Some day

California will be a place where there are no criminals,” he told the no

doubt delighted, if surprised, dinner guests at a Pomona banquet. “All the

2 2 7t h e d r a m a o f l o s a n g e l e s h i s t o r y

natural beauties and wonders of this state tend to take the evil and little-

ness out of human nature.” In regional journalism and public circles, John

Steven McGroarty seems every bit the kindly, naive precursor to longtime

Los Angeles Times fixture Jack Smith.48

Letters McGroarty received, carefully preserved in the pages of his

“Happy Book” scrapbooks, reveal an adoring public. Countless missives

refer to him as “Conductor,” a nickname picked up from his Sunday news-

paper column. Others salute him as Dear Brother, Brother John, St. John,

even, as one lengthy salutation put it, “the Mental and Spiritual Stabilizer

of California.” It is clear that letterwriters loved McGroarty (his importance

in their lives is a bit unsettling), and they loved The Mission Play as well.49

Not only did they write in explicitly religious terms to McGroarty—“the

play was better for my soul than a thousand sermons . . . altogether sublime

and uplifting,” wrote one—they also described their experience again and

again not as seeing or attending The Mission Play, but as witnessing it. It

was as if (and playgoers weren’t shy about relaying this to McGroarty) the

Figure 55. Mission Play window advertisement, ca. 1920. Courtesy of the

Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

past and the present changed places, and those lucky enough to be in the

Playhouse could—in what seems to be a religious admission—witness the

transition. Harry Peterson, director of the Stanford Museum, an early fan

of the play, thought that it was “one of the greatest missionaries for arous-

ing that sentiment for early and historic things. . . . it stands out as clearly

to me to-day as it did the evening I witnessed it.” Even an out-of-towner

like W. E. B. Du Bois, the famed African American writer, historian, and

civil rights advocate, felt moved to write McGroarty, thanking him espe-

cially “for the beautiful experience of witnessing your Mission Play. I shall

not soon forget it.”50

The profoundly provincial cast of McGroarty’s admiring letters helps us

to recall something that usually is neglected in writings about The Mission

Play. In addition to its obvious appeal to tourists, The Mission Play was a

very local institution as well, and people in Los Angeles responded (and

“witnessed”) it over and over again, schoolchildren and adults alike. “I

enjoyed it very much,” orphaned schoolgirl Maisie Marjenhoff neatly wrote in 1922, “and I will never forget it as long as I live.”

Nor did teachers miss the chance to praise the playwright for his peda-

gogical work. The play offered lessons to (and not just about) Latinos as well, apparently. “These Mexican boys and girls have profited,” Princi- pal C. A. Pugsley of the John C. Frémont School in Pasadena wrote to

McGroarty, “by the new impressions they have formed of the ability and

skill of their own countrymen. They are glad as a race they have figured in the history of a country sufficiently well to deserve such recognition as the Mission Play gives.” The ironies swirling around such a discussion are

almost too many to keep up with: Mexican children at a school honoring

a Bear Flag soldier of fortune learning from a melodramatic rendering of

the good old days of California that they “have figured” in the history of California “sufficiently well to deserve such recognition as the Mission Play gives.”51

Good press and fan mail rolled in through the early-to-mid-1920s (along

with two honorary doctorates), even as The Mission Play lost steam and,

apparently, money.52 Devoted fans wrote poems, sent drawings, and told

McGroarty how wonderful he was. The Mission Play, one enraptured let-

ter writer exclaimed, “is not a play to me, not an imitation, a makebelieve,

it was real. It was the thing itself.”53 Masons wrote McGroarty telling him

that they loved the play, and that they could see where he had slyly incor-

porated Masonic rituals and secrets into it. A. N. Palmer, of the Palmer

Method of Penmanship, wrote a beautifully scripted letter to McGroarty

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 2 8

congratulating him on the play, which he admitted to seeing at least once

a year on his annual Pasadena vacation.54 Catholics and Protestants alike

praised McGroarty for holding up “the great spiritual ideals that we know

must prevail if a community spirit of the highest type is to be developed.”55

Not everyone believed that the play merited such praise. Charles Fletcher

Lummis, whose own friendship with the playwright went back and forth,

had reservations about The Mission Play. As he wrote to McGroarty, “Both

as Business and Art, it is intolerable to have in your beautiful pageant

some of the frightful anachronisms now there. The Babbitts don’t realize

them; but every once in a great while some one will go to see the Mission

Play who will know that Father Serra didn’t teach the California Indians to

weave dam [sic] bad Navajo blankets!”56

But Lummis, for all his booster blather, had long been a stickler for accu-

racy, particularly regarding his beloved Southwest, and few could be

counted upon to be as critical. Such snipes about the play’s accuracy were

rare (even though Lummis was undoubtedly right about the looseness with

detail). Ella Rebard, a Los Angeles resident spending time in Mexico City,

thought that she had discovered a kindred spirit in the playwright. She

wrote McGroarty a fan letter in March 1922, at about the same time that

the playwright boasted of the show’s 1810th performance. Rebard praised

all McGroarty’s writings. She, like he, recognized “the countless virtues” of

the Mexican people: “their loyal friendships, kindness of heart, patience and

fortitude in the petty ills of life deserve high appreciation and encomiums.”

Rebard had gone to Mexico, she said, “to study the traits of the people,

and . . . shall endeavor to convince the world in general that the virtues of

the Mexican far exceed his faults.”57

A number of the letters in McGroarty’s Happy Book volumes came from

African Americans, many of whom, like W. E. B. Du Bois, wrote in the

early 1920s to thank the playwright for his work. McGroarty was actually

a well-known friend to the black community of Los Angeles: his columns

in the Los Angeles Times were marked by a refreshing sense of racial egali-

tarianism, and the city’s African Americans took time to express their grat-

itude. “I have not forgotten that when the Negro has needed a friend to

speak out for him in those days when the Negroes of the south were look-

ing toward to west for relief, that it was your pen, that rift of dark clouds

of public sentiment through the columns of the times in our favor.”58 The

playwright even apparently arranged a special excursion to the Mission

Playhouse in the mid-1920s for African Americans, a night that seems to

have been a business failure for the organization.

2 2 9t h e d r a m a o f l o s a n g e l e s h i s t o r y

(McGroarty’s egalitarian racial attitudes extended only so far. In a 1925

speech that revealed a curious understanding of California history, as well

as real racial animus, McGroarty told the Kiwanis club of Highland Park

that if it had not been for Father Serra and the Franciscans, “the state

would have been taken over by the Mongolians who were migrating here.”

One wonders just which “Mongolians” were migrating to California at the

end of the eighteenth century.)59

Amado Chávez, former mayor of Santa Fe, saw The Mission Play in the

spring of 1923 while on a Los Angeles vacation. Upon his return home, he

wrote McGroarty to thank him “for the noble work you have done in

writing that magnificent play. You are fair, impartial and just.” Chávez told McGroarty at some length about the Fiesta in Santa Fe (“that prom-

ises to become famous”). And while the commissioner of Indian Affairs had recently prohibited Indians from taking part in the Santa Fe Fiesta’s many

dances (Chávez was certain that McGroarty had read of this decision “with

indignation”), Chávez was convinced that the Fiesta was something

McGroarty should see and hoped that he would visit Santa Fe.60

McGroarty also worked to create a larger dramatic context for The

Mission Play by making it part of a California history dramatic trilogy. He

wrote and produced La Golodrina, about Mexican California, and he added

El Dorado, about the Gold Rush era. But none of McGroarty’s dramatic

writings (he wrote non-California dramas as well) came close to approach-

ing The Mission Play’s popularity. Despite the paradox offered by the play’s apparent inability to make a lot of money, it did become famous and it did

become something of a regional institution. It clearly outgrew, in terms of

regional regard, the little “Spanish town” of San Gabriel. By the early 1920s,

the play had become part of the cultural fabric of the growing metropolis.

In his folksy newspaper columns, McGroarty often made a point of dis-

paraging Los Angeles as “roaring town.” But his Mission Play, by the 1920s

at least, had become an important institution in just that place (and in the

cultural construction of that place).

The vice president of Southern California Edison Company gave words

to this institutionalization in a 1923 speech. “In the course of a day’s work

I come very closely into personal contact with many of the men who are

very justly considered the builders of the Southwest. These men give due

credit to our wonderful climate, to our port, and to many other of the assets

of the Southwest which are making it one of the world’s great centers of

population, and creating corresponding prosperity for all of us. The point

I wish to make is the intangible asset which has its most concrete expres-

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 3 0

sion in The Mission Play.” The speech concluded with a glowing tribute to

the playwright that seemed to grant him the creator’s role for the entire mis-

sion revival phenomenon. “Ride with me some day through the cities and

towns of California,” R. H. Ballard continued, “and you will see the reflex of the Mission Play wherever you go. To whom is the Southwest indebted

for its individuality which has become world famed?”61

Other expressions of the play’s incorporation into the urban frame

included advertisements. “Time has left the sandal-footed padre and sturdy

pioneer who followed him only a memory,” a Mission Play program ad for

the California Bank declared awkwardly in 1923, “but has builded for him

in these large cities now thriving on our western shores everlasting monu-

ments to their zeal and courage.” McGroarty had staged the story of “bar-

barism to civilization in California,” the bank copy continued, and

Californians could take an active role in that latter stage by banking with

California Bank.62

Yet despite widespread fame, despite the attendance counts that claimed

all was fabulously successful in San Gabriel, The Mission Play began to

sputter sometime around the early-to-mid-1920s. There are probably

many reasons for the decline. Despite his often obvious wishes to get rich,

McGroarty seems not to have had much business sense. Plans for a new,

much-needed, playhouse, designed by famed architect Arthur Benton,

moved very slowly due to financial problems and poor decision-making that muddled the finances of a building program with day-to-day produc- tion costs. A cornerstone for the new playhouse had been laid in early 1923,

but construction stalled. Also, McGroarty’s new home in the hills of

Tujunga, north of Los Angeles, burned to the ground during the night of

the party celebrating its completion, which no doubt affected the play- wright’s ability to mind The Mission Play store. What’s more, as a veteran

Mission Play staff member pointed out, the play was, by the 1920s certainly, up against “modern Movie Theaters” and “downtown Motion Picture

palaces.” Mission Play staff were forced to make stop-gap repairs to the playhouse, the costumes, and the props. By 1924, the play stumbled into the

season $11,000 in debt.63

By 1925, the enterprise was in deep trouble. McGroarty began to look

around for help. One direction he turned was to well-off and well- connected friends. One such friend, T. C. Peck, an executive with the

Union Pacific rail system in Los Angeles, took the matter up with none other than the membership of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce.64

No doubt recognizing the public relations benefits of the play, which staged

2 3 1t h e d r a m a o f l o s a n g e l e s h i s t o r y

the Spanish Fantasy Past so explicitly, stalwart leaders within the Chamber

took notice of the play’s plight and made ambitious rescue plans. The idea

itself is fascinating: the most successful public relations body in the history

of Southern California, recognizing the financial and cultural potential within a simplistic theatrical production, reaches out and grabs that vehi-

cle. In the language of one of the documents produced by the Chamber in

1926, the organization “manifested immediate interest in this crisis of affairs of the Mission Play.”65 In quick order, The Mission Play went from being

an institution to being institutionalized. By early 1926, the Chamber of

Commerce, in a letter to business affiliations across the region, declared that it was “cooperating with other interested parties in the effort to rehabilitate this ‘PLAY,’ that has so much of historical and romantic value to the South-

land as to be an asset to us all.”66 How did all this come about?

The Chamber of Commerce, upon hearing of the plight of The Mission

Play and its parent association, did what it could do best. It appointed a

committee (“The Mission Play Committee of the Los Angeles Chamber of

Commerce”) to study the problem, chaired by wealthy businessman W. I.

Hollingsworth. Not unlike similar Chamber committees that analyzed var-

ious local industries and capital opportunities, the Mission Play Committee

made a comprehensive study; though this time the subject of the scrutiny

was a pageant/drama. The committee determined several critical things.

One, The Mission Play was a profitable, or potentially profitable, investment opportunity, with a potential return of $20,000 a year. Two, the play could

be handled on a profitable basis for a season of twenty weeks. And three, the play had become so important to the region and the region’s sense of

self, that the desire for its continuation was “universal.”

Recognizing that time was of the essence, the Mission Play Committee

acted quickly. It did so in full recognition that The Mission Play represented

a serious business proposition, one that had already sucked in significant capital. The sheer amount of money tied to The Mission Play in one way

or another is stunning. The Mission Play Committee noted that $190,000

had been spent in attempts to get a new playhouse built; the committee

expected that another quarter of a million dollars would be necessary before

the play could be housed in a new, multipurpose, playhouse. When finally completed in the early part of 1927, the playhouse was said to have cost

three quarters of a million dollars.

The Chamber of Commerce could not, by the provisions of that orga-

nization’s charter, produce the play. But it could own it. In fact, it already

did. The Chamber held “an option of the entire assets of the Mission Play

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 3 2

Association—real estate, production rights and physical equipment.” The

next step was easy and, to the business leaders in the Chamber of

Commerce, old hat. They would form a corporation. But this corporation,

for all intents and purposes, would not sell land or manufactured goods.

This corporation would sell tickets to history.

Incorporation papers of the new Mission Playhouse Corporation (alter-

natively called the Mission Play Corporation) began by noting the play’s

important role as a regional cultural and historic institution. The play had

long been “the point of contact between our people,—together with count-

less thousands of visitors,—and the beginning of the history of California.”

That special role, that contact, could be subdivided. Further documenta-

tion stated that “the Mission Playhouse Corporation has been organized

within the Mission Play Committee,” complete with a stock offering of 4,000 shares at $100 a share. All aims could be expressed in a simple motto:

“To make the Mission Play safe and preserve it for future generations.”

Three-fourths of the stock in the new corporation was to be preferred

stock, and the remaining one thousand shares were to be common stock

that was not to be sold. The preferred stock would pay stockholders a 7 per-

cent annual dividend from the net profits of the corporation before any additional dividends were to be distributed on the common stock. Holders

of the preferred stock could retire or redeem their investment at any time

within five years. Upon the retirement of the preferred stock, the common stock was to be allocated to a nonprofit corporation that had two purposes: to perpetuate The Mission Play and to perpetuate “the old Southern

California landmarks,” or at least those not devoted to religious services.67

For his part, McGroarty tried to drum up interest in the new corporation

rising from the ashes of his once-proud Mission Play Association. In an

appeal to railroad and land magnate Henry E. Huntington, McGroarty

suggested that Huntington would likely “know all about the struggle” to

keep The Mission Play alive. After all, McGroarty reminded him of a walk

the two men had taken through the grape vine grounds adjacent to the San

Gabriel Mission years earlier, when they had discussed the play and its

financial future. “I remember,” McGroarty wrote, “that you showed me a pair of shoes that you had half-soled because you could not afford to buy a new pair.” Be that as it may (and despite the fact that Henry E. Huntington

had not been poor at any time during his adult life), McGroarty knew that

Huntington in the mid-1920s was one of the nation’s richest men. Could he,

“out of your love for California,” help The Mission Play and make it “safe for

all generations to come?”68

2 3 3t h e d r a m a o f l o s a n g e l e s h i s t o r y

Huntington did not leap into action, but he must have offered some encouragement. Within a few weeks, McGroarty appeared again at his San

Marino doorstep, in the form of a letter and a blank stock subscription.

“We can’t truly say we love California unless we take care of the Mission

Play,” the playwright pleaded. And of course all was not philanthropic

altruism: “the beauty of it is that we are making a good 7% investment at

the same time that we are performing a patriotic duty. . . . Please do this,

dear Mr. Huntington. Do it for me, for the Mission Play, for California.”69

Huntington was not the only businessman to receive such encourage-

ment. Wealthy insurance company executive George I. Cochran, who played

a role in the Chamber of Commerce takeover of the play, also thought

about kicking in some money. In a letter to W. I. Hollingsworth, president

of the Mission Playhouse Corporation, Cochran described his faith in the

play, as both a financial and historical treasure. His purchase of preferred stock, Cochran wrote, “is not a subscription but a loan. I claim some busi-

ness sense, and I firmly believe that in time all money subscribed will be repaid in full, both interest and principal.” In short, Cochran believed in the

resurrected play. “This enterprise seems to me to have real business merit,

and will not only return one’s money but result in establishing an institution

which will add to the attractions of Southern California and furnish an

endowment to perpetuate both the Playhouse and the old landmarks of our

State.”70

Pleading could pay off, and history could pay! A significant cross section of the elite Anglo businessmen of Southern California reached for their

checkbooks. Preferred stockholders bought in: Henry E. Huntington and

E. L. Doheny put in for $10,000 apiece, the Retail Merchants Association

pledged $6,000. Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times opted in for

$5,000, as did George Cochran of the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Corporation and land baron Samuel Rindge. The same amount was

pledged by W. I. Hollingsworth (he had made his money in real estate and

ship building), banker Henry M. Robinson, the Title Insurance Corpora-

tion, and transportation mogul Eli Clark. Frank Miller, who started the

whole operation years earlier at his Mission Inn, put up $3,000. Old-time

settler and Los Angeles chronicler Jackson Graves put up $2,500, as did

Pacific Electric executive D. W. Pontius and electric power millionaire A. C. Balch. Impresario L. E. Behymer came aboard with a $100 investment in

the play’s future.71 A holding company on Wilshire Boulevard, the William

E. Hampton Company, that had been involved with the faltering play for

several years (and actually owned a portion of the play’s equipment), acted

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 3 4

as a kind of liaison from the Chamber to The Mission Play dramatic staff and other personnel.

Did these men support The Mission Play because it could make them

money, or did they do so because they loved its romance? We cannot fully

know, but it does not make any difference. The point is that the institu- tionalized Mission Play represented an important cultural feature of the

region. The Spanish Fantasy Past had been cleverly staged and, now, in a

process nearly as clever, it had been commodified as a joint stock scheme. The play had become, at least for some of these investors, not just histori-

cal theater, but history itself. It was, Hollingsworth boasted, “the very

foundation and history of California and one cannot gather, from months

of reading and study, so much education in the early history of California

as can be secured from one witnessing of the play.”72 Hollingsworth praised

the play, and he himself received praise for saving it. The Los Angeles

Chamber of Commerce Bulletin, customarily the venue for reporting dry

stories about the local economy, gushed: “His splendid work in placing the

Mission Playhouse Corporation on a substantial financial footing and securing the construction of a magnificent new Playhouse as a permanent home of the Mission Play, is worthy of the highest commendation.”73

Amidst the oil mania of the mid-1920s, amidst the scandals offered by Julian Petroleum (in which Hollingsworth was implicated) and other

fiascos, the newly constituted Mission Play stands out as a stark example of how the Southern California past, carefully massaged and constructed,

was part and parcel of the orderly maturation of the city. But the effort was a bit like trying to do cultural taxidermy: The Mission Play had had a good

run, and it had been important. But could it be institutionalized and

remain alive?

To superintend and manage their new venture, the businessmen hired (at

one dollar a year) probably the only person in Southern California who had

the kind of experience and reputation necessary for the play’s resurrection.

Lyndon Ellsworth Behymer, impresario extraordinaire, had been involved

with Los Angeles show business since the late nineteenth century, when he

had helped produce La Fiesta de Los Angeles. Known throughout the

nation and well respected for both his promotional skills and his prodigious

energies, L. E. Behymer would attempt to resuscitate history. Behymer

(“the tireless Behymer,” Lummis called him) believed that he alone could

pull The Mission Play back together, less because of his theatrical experience

than owing to his public relations and publicity skills. In other words,

Behymer wished to take the play in a different direction than McGroarty

2 3 5t h e d r a m a o f l o s a n g e l e s h i s t o r y

seemed willing or able to do. “We consider the Mission Play one of the

greatest assets of So. California, not only from a cultural viewpoint,” he

wrote in January 1926, “but from a purely advertising viewpoint.”

This was a new Mission Play, or it was the recognition that The Mission

Play’s importance lay less in great drama than in its inimitable ability to

attract people to its simple morality tales, its so effectively told, uncompli- cated stories of the past. Specific actors, very important to McGroarty’s con- ception of the play, meant little to Behymer. The play had transcended mere

drama, if, indeed it had even been mere drama. “There has been no pag-

eant in American history,” Behymer confidently continued, “that means more to the ear, the eye, the religion or the history of this country than that

produced by the Mission Play. The Eastern public looks for it, expects it.

It is the only advertising medium that I know of that an Eastern paper or

magazine will mention because they have nothing of that character amid

their own surroundings. . . . they have no Missions or no Mission Play and

are always glad to speak of this remarkably distinctive asset.”

That enthusiastic assessment apparently spoke volumes to the Chamber

of Commerce leaders. Within a few weeks, Behymer wrote that “I am

working under the instructions of people who have perfect faith in my abil-

ity as a showman.”74

John Steven McGroarty stayed with the play, in a kind of emeritus role,

working with the actors and getting paid $500 a month for his services. His

wife, too, remained, working to revamp the costumes for the winter open-

ing of the 1926 run. But things had clearly changed; McGroarty was in the

way (as was his brother-in-law, who had been with the play since 1912), and

had been informed that he had to step aside. The play belonged to the com-

pany now, and, in a way, so did John Steven McGroarty. Behymer declared

that he did “not feel it is necessary for me to report anything to Mr.

McGroarty.” There’s little doubt that The Mission Play’s inventor resented

the treatment. Behymer’s staff reported that McGroarty consistently missed speaking engagements, luncheons, and even radio addresses—“he always

had an excuse.” Perhaps his old friend Reginald del Valle tried to urge

McGroarty to retire gracefully; he wrote McGroarty in the spring that the

play had itself become a landmark, “a living monument to you,” and that

it was now under the “protection of the State and shall serve as a heritage

to those who shall follow us in the life of our state.”75

Yet despite its vaunted backers, and their equally vaunted expectations,

the play did not do so well in its first rejuvenated season. For one thing, not much maintenance had taken place in the many years since the 1912 pre-

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 3 6

miere. Behymer had come on board very late (perhaps only a week to ten

days before the start of the season). And maybe the play had become dated?

Even the irrepressible Behymer did not expect much from the 1926 sea-

son. “It is going to be very hard to reach the general public,” he wrote to

his boss. “The clubs I have visited so far are enthusiastic but it takes time

to penetrate the consciousness of the public and overcome previous

engagements made before this proposition was presented to them.”76 When

the play opened under the organizational aegis of Behymer on February 7,

right in the middle of a very wet winter, the receipts for the evening

amounted to just over a thousand dollars. The totals for the rest of the week

fell off from there, sometimes sharply. The evening show on the 10th brought in only $223, and the nighttime performance three days later only

$200. In a letter to his Mission Playhouse Corporation bosses, Behymer

complained that The Mission Play had become an empty shell, almost

unable to generate any publicity of its own: “No pictures, no publicity,

nothing but what we managed to create.”77

Impresario that he was, Behymer felt that the play could not longer be

expected to draw an audience simply by word-of-mouth or because tourists

would expect to see it. On the contrary, he wanted to mount an ever-

aggressive publicity campaign to push the play. And for the most part, the

Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, confident that “Bee” knew what he was doing, backed him with funds. The organization sent out mailers to all

associated Chambers of Commerce, three hundred in all, asking them to

make The Mission Play known to their members and constituents. But the

appeals were also enthusiastically local. The Mission Play could, Behymer

fervently believed, still speak to Angelenos. He oversaw the posting of

3,000 posters in Los Angeles, the distribution of 28,000 circulars, 1,000

window cards, and special advertising placards placed at apartment houses

by someone who drove around the city. Behymer wrote hundreds of letters

from the “Mission Play Association” to all manner of local groups and asso-

ciations: the Civitan Club, the Optimist’s Club, the Democratic Club. To

each he urged Mission Play loyalty, hoping that they would support “this

splendid advertising medium, this historic institution.”78 Behymer or his

few assistants, who made up the entire “Department of Publicity and

Excursions,” also visited thirty-eight clubs, ten department stores, two uni-

versities, and eight “manufacturing establishments.” Behymer worked hard,

and he expected the same of his underlings. “It isn’t talk I want,” he wrote

to one who was not meeting his expectations, “but results.” “We are only

getting started,” he assured his bosses.79

2 3 7t h e d r a m a o f l o s a n g e l e s h i s t o r y

His representatives tried to visit all the major organizations, conferences,

meetings, and conventions in the area. They stopped in at the annual Iowa

picnics of midwestern migrants in Lincoln Park in east Los Angeles (where,

astonishingly enough, as many as 100,000 Iowans might gather together to

celebrate their roots). They made their pitch to the National Association of

Harpists. They took the idea to the Southern California Retail Hardware

Association, the National Horse Show Committee, and the Pickwick Stage

Company. To the Tile and Mantle Contractors Association of America,

about to come to a Los Angeles meeting, Behymer made an especially fer-

vent appeal. Your members, he wrote to the president and local host, will

have no doubt heard of “the wonderful epic of California, this pageant of

100 years down the road of yesterday.” Behymer definitely knew his busi- ness: “The Mission Play of San Gabriel is the Oberammergau play of

America, only more so—because it not only tells the story of the early

Padres and the building of the Missions, but in its great fiesta scene it por- trays the folksongs, the dances, the music, the avocations, the religion of the

early days when California was merely a province of Mexico and a legacy

of Spain.” In short, “the book ‘Ramona,’ was only a reflection of the glo- ries of the period which the play exemplified. . . . The Mission Play is just as much an American institution as the Grand Canyon, the Yosemite

Valley, the Niagara Falls or the capitol at Washington.”80

To other groups, Behymer made the simple pitch that The Mission Play

was history come alive and made accessible to all. “The greatest authority

on California, its early history, its Missions and its customs is the Mission

Play,” he informed one convention official.81 In keeping with the play’s his- torical appeal, Behymer’s publicity assistants often went in “Spanish” cos-

tume to their advertising assignments and made sure to distribute their

flyers, circulars, even sets of color Mission Play postcards which McGroarty had pioneered.82 Advertising boards, thirty in all, publicized The Mission

Play on sidewalks and walls throughout Los Angeles and Hollywood.

Behymer even employed an “Official Lecturer,” R. Hayes Hamilton, who, armed with a dozen Mission Play lantern slides, gave nightly lectures at

the expensive tourist hotels in Pasadena, Los Angeles, even San Diego.

Hamilton also showed a Mission Play motion picture at tourist hotels, and

he gave a history lecture, “California under Four Flags,” designed to in-

crease interest in the drama. Behymer advertised the play in eastern papers,

and he worked closely with travel bureaus, Ask Mr. Foster and Ames

Brothers particularly. He even convinced Ames Brothers to work The

Mission Play into their “See America First” system of western tourism.

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 3 8

Displays and artifacts helped advertise the play. Through the graces of

John McGroarty, Behymer supplied one advertising firm with “priceless relics of great historical value,” which were proudly displayed in the win-

dows of downtown Los Angeles banks. The Owl Drug Store proved a

good friend of the play, turning some window display cases over to the pub-

licity department as well as advertising the play at the well-attended “Owl

Drug Company Fashion Show.”

Behymer also used the radio to advertise the season. For instance, in a let-

ter to the management of Anthony Radio in Los Angeles, Behymer asked

that the six o’clock announcer read a prepared statement, both for the

benefit of “the tourists and our home people.” The radio station apparently obliged Behymer free of charge, seeing the service as a kind of professional

courtesy extended from one advertising medium to another, and aired the

announcement:

The Mission Play, the epic of 100 years of history of the origin and build-

ing of the Missions, the life of Junipero Serra, with its beautiful and alle-

gorical first part, the picturesque, exciting and interesting fiesta scene in the second act, and its tribute to the early history of California in the

third act, may be seen every afternoon (excepting Monday) at the Mission

Play House, San Gabriel, at 2:30, and at 8:30 the evenings of Wednesday

and Saturday of each week. There is no other opportunity of hearing the

songs of yesterday, or seeing the attractive dances and typical scenes of

early California.83

In keeping with the play’s pedagogical character, Behymer sent a letter to

every public school in Southern California, announcing the coming of the

rejuvenated Mission Play. He even invited former Mexican president

Obregon, who sent his regrets. Undaunted, Behymer counted on an even-

tual head of state visit to San Gabriel that would provide priceless public-

ity and photograph opportunities.84

It was, Behymer later remembered, “tough sledding.” The rain didn’t help

matters, nor did regional outbreaks of both influenza and smallpox, which prompted physicians to warn against large public gatherings. Weekly

receipts in 1926 never rose much over $5,000. And the transitions inevitably

left John Steven McGroarty a bit “out of the loop.” Behymer even wrote to

the playwright to assure him that he was still a critical part of the drama,

at the very least in spirit. “We are aware of your deep interest in the work,

in every word, song and note, the same as we are aware of the necessity of

2 3 9t h e d r a m a o f l o s a n g e l e s h i s t o r y

making this a permanent institution. It matters not whose fault it is that it

has failed in the past; it is up to us to build it up artistically and in a busi-

ness-like way so there will be no failure in the future.”85

Expressions of loyalty aside, however, it is clear that McGroarty had

become something of a liability. Mission Play personnel complained to

Behymer that McGroarty had lost either interest or energy or both. He

seemed uncomfortable with the business and production transitions inher-

ent in the Chamber of Commerce take-over, and he was petulant about

promotional affairs. One staffer complained to Behymer that McGroarty had behaved poorly at a performance designed specifically to advertise Ford automobiles. Apparently the Ford Motor Company had agreed to fill the hall for The Mission Play performance. When they did not do so,

McGroarty decided against driving a new Ford onto the stage at the close

of the play, as had been agreed. Staffers also resented McGroarty’s racial egalitarianism. Sometime around “Ford night,” he staged a special per-

formance of The Mission Play to which he invited an African American

audience. Attendance was not what he expected, apparently, and some

Mission Play staffers never forgave him for it.86

By March 1926, the publicity blitzkrieg seems to have begun to pay div-

idends, at least local ones, even though Behymer still feared that the play

might yet fall completely “into the hands of speculators.” Of course, The

Mission Play had already fallen into the hands of speculators, but to

Behymer they were the right kind of speculators.87 Audiences grew, if only

slightly. Many of the tickets belonged, as ever, to schoolchildren and locals.

The tourist crowd in Mission Play seats was, Behymer figured, lower than it had been for decades. It was not that he needed the tourist trade to

account for so many tickets. Rather, tourist dollars were like dominos

standing next to one another. Get a few moving, and they’d be an economic

boost to the whole community. “Without [tourists] it is difficult to pro- ceed—not that their patronage amounts to so much, but the money they

spend enables other people to patronize entertainments.”

It is tempting to wonder if tourists and locals saw the play for different reasons or saw the play differently. Might tourists have seen The Mission Play because it was on their list of things to do in the exotic, semi-tropic

paradise? And might locals have chosen to see it again and again for its ped-

agogical meanings, both about time and about race and ethnicity? That the

play could teach history—in fact was supposed to be a history lesson—

remained an important perception. “When one realizes that over two and

a half million people have witnessed the play,” Behymer wrote in the mid-

w h i t e w a s h e d a d o b e2 4 0

1920s, “it gives an impression of what people from the East and Middle

West have obtained regarding the founding of the Missions.” Surely that

was just as true, even more so, for the residents of Los Angeles who bought

Mission Play tickets over and over again.88

The special bookings of 1926 reveal just how many locals Behymer and

Co. enticed to see the play or to see it again. Chambers of Commerce from

all over the Los Angeles basin sent delegations to The Mission Play as did,

curiously enough, department stores. Bullocks Department Store sent a

party of over three hundred people. Robinsons added more than a hundred,

and the May Department Store brought nearly five hundred people to the show.

Many who saw the play were schoolchildren and their teachers, coming

both together and separately. Children came from all over the Los Angeles

basin and outside of it. They came from nearby Montebello, from San

Dimas, and David Starr Jordan High School in Watts; from Rosemead,

Santa Monica, Yorba Linda, John Muir Junior High in Pasadena. The

March bookings included three to four hundred children from Alhambra

grade schools, several hundred Rotarians, employees from banks and

department stores, a bloc of Southern California Edison tickets, the Los

Angeles City Teachers Club, and the Chambers of Commerce from

Pasadena and Long Beach, as well as the students of the Lincoln Park

School, Alhambra High, Rose Hill Grammar School, and Jefferson High, many of whom had either decided or been required to “attend in Spanish

costume.” The Los Angeles City Teachers Club brought 190 teachers to the

play. A delegation of Los Angeles County employees came in a bloc of 213.89

The publicity effort, which Behymer placed above all other tasks of pro- ducing the play, exhausted everyone. “It took hundreds of visits to clubs and

schools, many talks over the radio, and a thousand and one things to try

and put the Play back where it belonged, with an unresponsive public,

because many Los Angeles people had seen it and there were no new

patrons coming in,” Behymer remembered. The mere fact that he had

been able to make a run, albeit with a rusty or indifferent cast, for as long as fifteen weeks: that was the success. Nearly seventeen thousand people came to The Mission Play in 1926, at just over a thousand per week. Each

person brought in between $3 and $4 a week to the corporation. The sea-

son lost money, about $5,000, but it was “a success because it was only a

question of saving [The Mission Play] for the future.” Losing only several

thousand dollars “was almost a miracle.”90

Behymer had his hands in every Mission Play pie. He traveled all over

2 4 1t h e d r a m a o f l o s a n g e l e s h i s t o r y

Los Angeles County trying to drum up interest. He wrote press releases. He

oversaw advertising copy. He worked with scenery and costume design, and

he supported the hiring of an actress who could sing “Spanish songs in a

Spanish way.” With his publicity machine up and running, he turned his