Los pobladores del pueblo de los Ángeles (English: The townspeople of Los Angeles) refers to the 44 original settlers and 4 soldiers from New Spain (Spanish Mexico) who founded the Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles in 1781, which is now the present-day city of Los Angeles, California.
When the Governor of Las Californias, Felipe de Neve, was assigned to establish secular settlements in what is now the state of California (after more than a decade of missionary work among the natives), he commissioned a complete set of maps and plans (the Reglamento para el gobierno de la Provincia de Californias and the Instrucción) to be drawn up for the design and colonization of the new pueblo.Nunis, Doyce B., Jr. The Founding Documents of Los Angeles: A Bilingual Edition, pp. 73–109, 117–129. Finding the individuals to actually do the work of building and living in the city proved to be a more daunting task. Neve finally located the new and willing dwellers in Sonora and Sinaloa, Mexico. But gathering the pobladores was a little more difficult. The original party of the new townsfolk consisted of eleven families, that is 11 men, 11 women, and 22 children of various Spanish castas (castes).
The castas of the 22 adult pobladores, according to the 1781 census, were:
1 Criollo (Spaniard born in New Spain) 9 Indios (Indigenous people from New Spain) 1 Mestizo (mixed Spanish and Indian) 8 Mulattos (mixed Spanish and black) 2 Negros (blacks of full African ancestry) 1 Peninsular (Spaniard born in Spain)
Rediscovery of the Pobladores William M. Mason, historian of Los Angeles and early California, uncovered the ethnic richness of the Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles through extensive research. Mason, one of three founders of the Los Angeles Historical Society, authored six books and several articles regarding the early history and cultures around Southern California and he is credited with helping to uncover the ethnic facts about the original families of Los Angeles.
The official foundation date of Los Angeles is September 4, 1781, when tradition has it the forty-four pobladores gathered at San Gabriel Mission along with two priests from the Mission and set out with an escort of four soldiers for the site that Father Juan Crespí had chosen over a decade earlier. El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, (Spanish for The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels) is the original, official long version of the name of the town founded by the Pobladores.
The earliest Hispanic settlers of all of California, not just Los Angeles, were almost exclusively from New Spain, precisely, from the current Mexican states of Sinaloa and Sonora. The author and historian, Dr. Antonio Ríos-Bustamante, has written that "the original settlers of Los Angeles were racially mixed persons of Indian, Spanish, and African descent. This mixed racial composition was typical of both the settlers of Alta California and of the majority of the population of the northwest coast provinces of Mexico from which they were recruited." Dr. Ríos-Bustamante relates that in the century preceding the founding expedition of 1781, many Indians in this region of Mexico had been "culturally assimilated and ethnically intermixed into the Spanish-speaking, mestizo society."Rios-Bustamante, Antonio. Mexican Los Ángeles, 43. Other settlers from Mexico, Central and South America, Asia, Europe, and the United States would follow in the decades to come.
Opportunity and social mobility in a frontier society
Racial origins changed over time Of the 44 original pobladores [colonists] who founded Los Angeles, only two were white, […] Of the other 42, 26 had some degree of African ancestry and 16 were Indians or mestizos [people of mixed Spanish and Indian blood]. — William M. Mason, 1975William Mason, Op-Ed, Los Angeles Times, September 4, 1975, cited in Mason, William M. Los Angeles Under the Spanish Flag: Spain's New World
Alta California, as the province was known then, marked the northern frontier of the Spanish empire in the New World. The story of California's African heritage began in 1781, when the forty-four settlers founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, and more than half of these original pobladores—Antonio Mesa, Manuel Camero, Luis Quintero, José Moreno, their wives, and the wives of José Antonio Navarro and Basilio Rosas—had African ancestors, as was typical in the northern provinces of New Spain.Alfred "Ed Moch" Cota, of The Los Pobladores 200, an organization of descendants of the founding families of Los Angeles, agrees that they "were mostly mixed" back then, that is some limited African ancestry is present within the founding families. However, Cota suggests that we have to discern the difference between those of having part Black-African and those having part Moorish-African origin. (Although the use of terms like mulato, or negro in the 18th-century Spanish America were never applied to people with "Moorish" [moro] background.) Personal communication by Aedwardmoch, August 11, 2008. The descendants of these early settlers eventually developed their own culture and sense of place and became the Californios. Some became owners of large landed estates, granted to them by the Crown, others became government leaders.
Some historians and people in general have emphasized a difference between "Spaniard" and a "Mexican" in terms of race. For example, "colonial Mexicans" are "persons of mixed blood." As Magnus Mörner has observed, the seven centuries prior to the discovery of the New World in Spain "witnessed extraordinary acculturation and race mixture." Furthermore, at one time in the history of Mexico there were more African slaves held in Mexico than in the colonial United States north of the border. Moreover, "Mestizos" born in wedlock, at least during the sixteenth century, were accepted as "Criollos", that is, as 'American Spaniards'." In short, the definition of "Mexican" often confuses race with nationality in the modern period and with caste in the colonial period. In addition, by this definition of "Mexican," neither an Indian, nor a Criollo, nor a Black would be Mexican because they are, by social definition at least, of "unmixed blood.""Unfortunately, the subjects of California's early African heritage and extensive interracial mixture both remain controversial among nonscholars." Forbes, Jack D. "The Early African Heritage in California" in Lawrence Brooks de Graaf, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor, eds., Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California (Los Angeles: Autry Museum of Western Heritage, 2001), 74. See Mitchell, John L. "Diversity Gave Birth to L.A." for the debate among contemporary Angelenos.
Like the original settlers of other parts of California and the American Southwest in general, the Pobladores reflected varied backgrounds: Peninsular (born in Spain), Criollo (born in the Americas of Spanish ancestry), Indian, Black, Mestizo (of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry), Mulatto (of Spanish and African ancestry), and Zambo (of mixed Indian and African ancestry), among other combinations. Most of the colonists were of mixed racial backgrounds, and the process of mestizaje (racial mixing) continued in California, to include mixing with the various California Indian societies. Many Mestizos and Mulattos strove, sometimes successfully, to become identified as pure-blooded Spaniards, and many Indians and Black became Mestizos and Mulattos, because racial identity affected and reflected socio-economic mobility. At least seven of the 22 original, adult settlers managed to do this in the 1790 census of Los Angeles. In general, this meant that the descendants of the original settlers came to identify themselves as either Mestizo, or among the more socially prominent, as Spaniards.
From settlers to civic leaders, alcaldes and governors The descendants of the settlers and soldiers naturally played a prominent role in developing the Los Angeles area. As colonial soldiers retired, the government granted them vast "ranchos" as partial or full payment, or in gratitude, for their services. Other settlers also acquired ranches. Compared to the size of the pueblo, these land grants were massive in size and rivaled the land holdings of the missions. They were instrumental in developing a local economy based on cattle ranching and their owners, later referred to as "rancho dons," became the predominant figures in Southern California's society. Among those exercising considerable political and economic power were Andrés Pico, and Alcaldes Francisco Reyes and Tiburcio Tapia. Pío Pico, the last governor of California under Mexican rule and the builder of the Pico House, was a large landowner and businessman. Grandchildren of Luis Quintero included Eugene Biscailuz, who served as sheriff of Los Angeles, and María Rita Valdes Villa, whose 1838 land grant is now Beverly Hills. Throughout the nineteenth century, the "rancho dons" and their families would intermarry with each other and with immigrant, Anglo-American merchants from New England, who arrived to trade in hides, creating strong family alliances.
Contemporary commemoration
Historic Walk of Los Pobladores "Los Pobladores Historic Walk to Los Angeles" occurs each year over the Labor Day Weekend, which coincides with the September 4 anniversary of the city's founding. It is organized by the Los Pobladores 200, an association of the descendants of the original forty-four settlers and soldiers that accompanied them. The cities of San Gabriel and Los Angeles join to celebrate Los Pobladores' last nine-mile trek to the city center. Claremont columnist and administrator T. Willard Hunter and the descendants of the original founders of the city began the tradition of the walk in 1981.
Olvera Street Monument The original plaque at the El Pueblo de Los Ángeles Historical Monument commemorating Los Pobladores, installed in the 1950s, mentioned their ethnicities but was quickly removed under suspicious circumstances. A second plaque installed in the 1970s omitted any reference to the African heritage of many of its members. Eventually, scholars from the Los Angeles area, including professors from the University of Southern California and California State University at Dominguez Hills, were part of a subcommittee formed during a citywide effort to commemorate the Los Angeles' 200th anniversary and they helped to erect the current plaque in 1981, which accurately depicts the multiracial makeup of the founders. The City Council refused to fund it, after which librarian and researcher Miriam Matthews paid for it out of her own pocket.
Telling the history of the original families, known as Los Pobladores (the settlers), turned out to be "a political hot potato," according to Doyce Nunis, the USC professor of history who asked his former student Hata to chair the subcommittee.
"The descendants of Los Pobladores were very sensitive to the prospect of being revealed as having African roots," Nunis says. "But history is history, you can't change it. And the subcommittee found the evidence."
Also serving with Hata on the subcommittee was Miriam Matthews, the first African American to earn a degree in library science at USC, and who went on to have an illustrious career as a librarian and archivist of African American history in Los Angeles. The group also included David Almada, a Los Angeles Unified School District administrator serving at a time when few Latinos served in such positions, and Leonard Pitt, an emeritus professor of history at California State University, Northridge and author of Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890. […]