Mexican Americans have lived in Los Angeles since the original Pobladores. The 44 original settlers, 22 children, and 4 soldiers who founded the city in 1781 were almost exclusively from the current Mexican states of Sinaloa and Sonora. The history of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles spans from the original Spanish pueblo through its evolution into one of the largest urban centers in the United States. As of 2010, Latinos groups make up 48.5% of Los Angeles residents with people of Mexican descent accounting for 31.9% of the Latino population.
History
Pre-colonial era The modern history of present-day Los Angeles began with its original inhabitants, the Tongva people. Later known as the Gabrieleño people, they maintained their village thousands of years prior to initial Spanish contact. During the time right before European arrival, the Tongva inhabited an area of about 2,500 square miles with around 75 settlements and 5,000 people. The primary Tonga village, Yang-na, was located on the west bank of the Los Angeles River, remarked as the wealthiest and most sophisticated social settlement in the region.
In August 2, 1769, the Gaspar de Portolá Expedition reached the Tongva. Spanish explorers Gaspar de Portolá along with Franciscan Padres Junipero Serra and Juan Crespí finished the first land expedition from Mexico to San Diego, reaching the Tongva settlements. The Tongva managed their land through controlled agricultural burning, leading to the initial Spanish christening as the Bay of Smokes. During the expedition, the Spanish took note of the Los Angeles River, renaming it as El Río de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciúncula. During the expedition, Spanish settlers took note of the surrounding fertile lands that would later ensure a permanent colonial output in 1781.
Spanish colonial era (1781) Governor Felipe de Neve was appointed governor by Viceroy Bucareli to establish independent settlements in Alta California. In 1777, after a visit north of Monterrey, de Neve commissioned plans for a new pueblo in a valley of the Poriuncula River. He kept in mind the motivations for agricultural industries to provide supplies locally instead of having them imported or transported from abroad.
Part of the establishment consisted of recruiting the first settlers of the new pueblo. Captain Fernando River y Moncada was tasked with finding a total of 24 families from the northwestern Mexican provinces to travel and eventually populate the new Californian settlement. He fell short of 24, finding 11 families from Sonora and Sinaloa to compose the pobladores of Los Angeles. The adult pobladores consisted of one Spaniard, one Criollo, one Mestizo, two Negroes, eight mulattos, and nine Indians. On September 4, 1781, when all of the original settlers had arrived to the settlement, it was officially founded as El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Ángeles. In its early years, the pueblo relied heavily on Indian labor from the Yang-a village, establishing an initial mutual relationship between the local populations and the settlers.
Nuestra Señora Reina de los Angeles Asistencia was founded in early 1784 within the burgeoning Pueblo de Los Ángeles as an asistencia (or "sub-mission") to the nearby Mission San Gabriel Arcángel.
Mexican rule (1821) Following Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, El Pueblo de Los Angeles entered an era of socio-political transformation. By this time, it had popularly become known as Los Angeles and expanded as a Mexican town through social influences from the south. The physical distance between Los Angeles and its ruling governments in Mexico City and Monterey allowed the city to shape its own legal and cultural identity. The pueblo managed most of its own affairs through an ayuntamiento (council) led by an alcalde. The town established itself as a prominent rancho center and started to draw in European and American men who assimilated into the local culture.
One of the most profound changes to the region's social landscape happened with the secularization of the missions and mission land in 1834. Secularization dismantled the socio-political structure that gave mission padres power and land, creating a new ruling class of Spanish-speaking settlers later named rancheros.
While mission lands was also intended to be kept in a legal trust for Indigenous people, a biased administrative system only ever distributed less than 10% of land to these groups. Instead, the Mexican government issued more than five hundred land grants to families in California, who transformed the agricultural region into extensive economic network. The new economy was centered on hide and tallow trade. Growth of the hide and tallow industry coincided and was supported by the industrial revolutions in Europe and the United States, where leather and tallow became popularized commodities for footwear and candles. The labor intensive aspect of the economy relied on indigenous workers who had become displaces following secularization. Many former mission indigenous men became vaqueros (cowboys) and domestic workers on ranchos, often living in a system of inherited debt.
The California identity emerged around the prestige of ranching lifestyle. The new ruling class and social elite established a new social hierarchy where Californios considered themselves racially and socially superior distinct from the local Indians and Mexican immigrants. Social class was not determined by racial identifiers but was rather anchored in wealth, family alliance and political influence. The Pico family were part of the Californio class and one of the elite families of the time. Santiago de la Cruz Pico and his family were one of the first families to arrive in Los Angeles and became one of the most prominent settler families in Los Angeles. Pico's son Pío de Jesús was born in the San Gabriel Mission in 1801 and had distinct African, Indian, and Spanish heritage. His status as a Californio played a large part in his political career. Pío Pico served as governor of Alta California in 1832 and again in 1845, known as the last governor of Alta California. By the mid-19th century, Pío and his brother Andrés Pico owned a combined 532,000 acres of land, amassing part of the largest fortunes of the region before American conquest.
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 officially ended the Mexican-American War and promised protected property rights for Mexican citizens. Article IX specified that Mexicans remaining in ceded territory were guaranteed full rights as U.S. citizens with protected liberty and property rights. Under the treaty, Mexican citizens were legally categorized as "white", though their status and legal protections were often ignored in court battles to claim citizenship and land. The California Land Act of 1851 forced a burden of proof onto rancheros to legally validate their ownership of land titles. These aggressive legal processes left many Spanish-speaking rancheros at a disadvantage in English-speaking court. Senator William M. Gwin, the law's author, later admitted the law was designed to challenge and disposes Mexican rancheros off their land. Court litigations were expensive and drawn-out, forcing even elite families to mortgage or sell large parts of their estates to pay legal fees and property taxes.
Post 1849 Gold Rush, roughly 100,000 Anglo settlers flocked to Los Angeles and expanded establishments outside of the original plaza. As more Anglo establishments expanded around the plaza, the demographics of the town became clearly separated, concentrating the Spanish-speaking populations in a ten-block community named "Sonora Town". By the 1880s, "Sonora Town" or "Little Mexico" had become a physically and socially isolated Mexican enclave. While the barrio often provided a sense of cultural familiarity for its residents, it was also subject to economic prejudice and neglect by city officials. Anglo neighborhoods received better public services and city officials went as far as considering destroying cultural landscape to make room for the increasing Anglo populations.
In the 1850s, Los Angeles was characterized by the highest murder rate in the nation, with some years averaging about one murder per day. Vigilante groups like the "El Monte Boys" often targeted Mexicans and Indians in raids of local barrios. Vigilante groups like the "El Monte Boys" were often composed of Texans and anti-Mexican ideals, using the guise of maintaining legal order to justify lynching events. In one such infamous lynching, vigilante groups hung Reyes Feliz and Cipriano Sandoval under murder charges. Both were later proved innocent. Spanish-speaking press emerged in protest of lynchings and injustices committed around the late 1850s. El Clamor Público was the city's first Spanish-language newspaper. Its founder seventeen year old Francisco Ramirez was a vocal critic of the "Linchocracia" (Lynchocracy) and existing justice system.
At the start of the 20th century, much of California underwent a cultural trend known as the Spanish Fantasy, which was a cultural and artistic trend of embracing the Spanish heritage of California. This trend included architecture movements using Spanish architectural styles, mainly of which being the Spanish Missions. The Spanish Fantasy embraced Spain’s participation in the shaping of California while ignoring the role of Mexicans. Mexican heritage would be embraced later through Hispanization.
Early 20th century
1900-World War I During 1910-1920, Mexican immigrants came to the Southwestern United States settling in locations like Texas and Southern California as a result of the Mexican Revolution. In October 1913, numbers as high as 8,000 Mexicans crossed from Piedras Negras, Coahuila, to Eagle Pass, Texas. While many Mexican refugees were entering into the United States, State-sponsored jobs in partnership with the Mexican government motivated Mexican immigrants to migrate to Los Angeles.
Post-World War I (1920s-30s) Post-World War I fear of communism manifested itself in Los Angeles through an increased nationalistic, anti-immigrant sentiment that would be expressed in education programs aimed at Mexican Americans, as well as urban development aimed at removing Mexican identity. While prominent politicians such as former governor Hiram Johnson and activist Simon Lubin advocated for progressive policies, such as women's rights and labor rights, local politics of Los Angeles county and California at large leaned conservative, with governor Friend W. Richardson reallocating the Americanization programs to the California Department of Education in 1923. The goal of these Americanization programs was to assimilate immigrants into "the American way of life" and particularly targeted Mexican immigrants because of their perceived ethnic proximity to Europeans relative to other immigrant groups, such as the Chinese and Japanese; the main way this was achieved was through the instruction of the English language. At first, these programs prioritized Mexican men, registering them through their workplaces, but because of the seasonal nature of farm work, teaching English successfully was not possible.