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Whitewashed Adobe
The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past
By William Deverell The University of California Press
Copyright © 2004 Regents of the University of California
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-520-21869-8
Chapter One
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 1847
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.
WILLIAM WALLACE, diary entry, 1857
The cut-throats of California and Mexico, naturally met at Los Angeles, and at Los Angeles they fought.
Horace Bell
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 presumptions of later generations. Once imperial designs upon Mexico had been put into motion (exactly what Dana meant by his California commentary, "In the hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be!"), it became an act of patriotism to refer to Mexicans in explicitly racist terms. 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 perspective: 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 project 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."
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 century. 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!"
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 she will now be permitted to breathe freely several times, before the next heel is placed upon her neck."
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." 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 brutalities of the Gold Rush, the beatings, the criminalization, and the lynchings 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."
What's more, the none-too-subtle extortions imposed by the "foreign miner's tax" stood as frontier-era precursors of more recent California public 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?
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 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 classification, 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.
By the middle of the decade, tensions between "Americans" and Mexicans 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 argued, 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 attentive journalist of the period noted, "punishment seems to be graduated by the color of the skin, and not the color of the crime."
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."
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 simple manners and customs, [has] all departed; everything has become new, and is as yet unformed." Riding out from the village center to teach school 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 tradition, he figured. "Fashion and folly are working their way in here-and by and by all these Indians will be shaped like white folks."
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."
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 companion to natural disaster, a full-blown resumption of the Mexican American War. The incident provoked thoughts on Wallace's part of the propensity 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."
Wallace no doubt agreed with contemporaries who described Los Angeles in the first years of California statehood as wracked by race war. The place also witnessed a curious conflict over names-wherein disputes over naming 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. But diplomatic assurances have rarely meant less on the ground. As the historian David Gutiérrez has noted, Guadalupe Hildago "could do little to transform the biased views of Mexicans that Americans continued to entertain." In some ways, enmity only increased, as "Americans" and "Mexicans" still existed worlds apart, treaty or no treaty.
Despite de jure citizenship status, Mexicans could not exercise the franchise 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. 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 tandem. 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).
Word again. Weren't the 1850s all about exchanging one Californian, the elite Mexican, for another, the Anglo? 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 population 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 existence." 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. Within a few short decades, drought, legal entanglements, intermarriage, the imposition of a new political economy, 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.
Continues...
Excerpted from Whitewashed Adobe by William Deverell Copyright © 2004 by Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission.
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