El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula (Spanish for "the Town of , of the Porciúncula River"), shortened to the Pueblo de los Ángeles ("town of the angels"), was the Spanish civilian pueblo settled in 1781 which became the modern American metropolis of Los Angeles. The pueblo was built using labor from the adjacent village of Yaanga and was totally dependent on local Indigenous labor for its survival.
Official settlements in Alta California were of three types: presidio (military), mission (religious) and pueblo (civil). The Pueblo de los Ángeles was the second pueblo (town) created during the Spanish colonization of California (the first was San Jose, in 1777). —'The Town of the Queen of Angels' was founded twelve years after the first presidio and mission, the Presidio of San Diego and Mission San Diego de Alcalá (1769). The original settlement consisted of forty-four people in eleven families, recruited mostly from Estado de Occidente. As new settlers arrived and soldiers retired to civilian life in Los Angeles, the town became the principal urban center of southern Alta California, whose social and economic life revolved around the raising of livestock on the expansive ranchos.
Founding In 1542 Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, with a commission from Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, was the first European to sail along and explore the California coast. Although he claimed all he saw as territory of the Spanish Empire, no efforts at colonization were made for over two hundred years. Concerned about colonizing efforts by the Russians and French, Spain set plans in motion in the 1760s to establish a presence and defend its claim to the territory.
The Spanish settlement did not reach Alta California until 1769, when explorer Gaspar de Portolà reached the San Diego area via the first land route from Mexico. Accompanying him were two Franciscan Padres, Junípero Serra and Juan Crespí, who recorded the expedition. As they came through today's Elysian Park, they were awed by a river that flowed from the northwest, past their point and on southward. Crespí named the river El Río de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula, meaning, in Spanish, "the River of Our Lady Queen of the Angels of Porciuncula". The name derives from Santa Maria degli Angeli (Italian: "St. Mary of the Angels") which is the name of the small town in Italy housing the Porciuncula, the church where St. Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan order, carried out his religious life. The river that was called the Porciuncula is today's Los Angeles River. Because the future town's name was a take on this "Queen of Heaven" Marian title, various versions of Crespí's formula would be used for the town, including El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles sobre el Río Porciúncula.Historian Doyce B. Nunis Jr., has traced the longer name to the histories written by the Franciscan missionaries, especially Francisco Palóu, who wished to play up the region's connections to their Roman Catholic religious order. "City of Angels' First Name Still Bedevils Historians." Los Angeles Times (March 26, 2005), Sec. A-1.
During the expedition, Father Crespí observed a location along the river that would be good for a settlement or mission. However, in 1771, Father Serra instead commissioned two missionaries to establish the Mission San Gabriel Arcángel-San Gabriel Mission near the present day Whittier Narrows section of the San Gabriel River. The missionaries encountered resistance from the Tongva to their attempts to resettle the Natives on the mission. The mission encountered further trouble in 1776 when a flood damaged the mission, convincing the missionaries to move and rebuild the mission on a higher and more defensible location: its present site in San Gabriel. The first Spanish governor of Las Californias, Felipe de Neve had, as well, recommended to Viceroy Bucareli Father Crespí's location on the Río Porciúncula (Los Angeles River) for a mission. Instead, in 1781, King Charles III mandated that a pueblo be built on the site instead, which would be the second town in Alta California, after San José de Guadalupe in 1777. The monarch, disregarding the production and trade roles of the missions, saw a greater need for secular pueblos to be established as the centers of agriculture and commerce to supply the crown's ever-growing military presence in "Nueva California." The priests at the missions ignored the royal mandate and continued their ranching, trading and production of tallow, soap, hides, and beef, often in competition with new pueblo ventures.
Settlement
Governor de Neve took his assignment seriously and had a complete set of maps and plans drawn up by May 1780 for the layout and settlement of the new pueblo, including the placement of government houses, town houses, the church, the fields, the farms, and access to the river – the Instrucción and the Reglamento para el gobierno de la Provincia de Californias.Nunis, Doyce B. Jr. The Founding Documents of Los Angeles: A Bilingual Edition. (Los Angeles: Historical Society of Southern California; Pasadena: Zamorano Club of Los Angeles, 2004), 117–129 and 73–109. .Regulations for the Government of the Province of the Californias (Reglamento para el gobierno de la provincia de Californias) Spanish reprint plus English translation in Land of Sunshine magazine, volume 6, January 1897. Available online at Internet Archive (retrieved July 2018) But gathering the pobladores-settlers was a little more difficult. After failing to recruit the target number of families in Sonora, he had to go as far as Sinaloa to finally end up with 11 families, that is, 11 men, 11 women, and 22 children of various Spanish American castes: Criollo, Mulatto and Negro.The California Reglamento here was following Book 4, Title 5, Law X of the Recompilación de las Leyes de Indias and the 101st Ordinance of Philip II's Ordinances Concerning Discoveries.
As local lore tells it, on September 4, 1781, the 44 pobladores gathered at San Gabriel Mission and, escorted by a military detachment and two priests from the Mission, set out for the site that Crespí had chosen. In reality, several of the families were probably already working on their plots of land as early as late July.The families arrived at San Gabriel Mission in two groups. The first in early June and the second in mid August. The second group had to be quarantined for a few days due to an outbreak of smallpox among it. The September 4 date seems to reflect the day the formal foundation documents were drawn up. Ríos-Bustamante, Mexican Los Ángeles, 50–53. Governor de Neve gave the new town the name El Pueblo de la Reina de los Ángeles-The Town of the Queen of the Angels. In accordance with the Laws of the Indies and Reglamento the new towns in Alta California were to have four square leagues of land; that is a distance marked by one league in each cardinal direction from the town center.Guinn, J. M. A History of California and an Extended History of Los Angeles and Environs, Vol. 1. (Los Angeles: Historic Record Company, 1915), 74. Book 4, Title 5, Law VI of the Recompilación de Leyes de Indias and Ordinances 88 and 89 of the Ordinances Concerning Discoveries. The streets, however, were laid out at forty-five degrees from the cardinal directions, a plan which is still preserved in Downtown Los Angeles.See Map Of The City Of Los Angeles Showing the Confirmed Limits… below in External_Links. The old town limits are still marked by Hoover and Indiana Streets in the west and east respectively. In 1784 an asistencia or sub-mission of the San Gabriel Mission was established on the central plaza, to provide religious services to the settlers.
Government
The pueblo came under the jurisdiction of the Commandancy General of the Internal Provinces in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. As a pueblo, Los Angeles was granted a cabildo (town council). The first municipal officers, the regidores (council members) and alcalde (municipal magistrate), were appointed by Governor de Neve. Subsequent ones were elected annually by the settlers, the vecinos pobladores. Since the government of Las Californias had a strong military orientation in this early phase of colonization, the civilian cabildo was originally supervised by a commisionado (commissioner) appointed by the comandante (commander) of the Presidio of Santa Barbara, who was charged with making sure the alcalde and regidores carried out their duties correctly. The first commisionado was José Vicente Feliz, one of the soldiers who accompanied the original 44 settlers to the pueblo. The first recorded alcalde was José Vanegas, who served in 1786 and 1796. Vanegas was first listed as an Indian in the original 1781 padrón (register) but then as a Mestizo in the 1790 census.Unfortunately the records of the Spanish-era cabildo were lost and the relevant parts of the Provincial archives were burned in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, so the surviving list of alcaldes is incomplete. Caughey, John and LaRee Caughey. Los Angeles: Biography of a City. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 74–75. . The next few alcaldes reflected the mixed population of the small settlement: José Sinova, a Criollo, 1789; Mariano de la Luz Verdugo, a Criollo, 1790; and Juan Francisco Reyes, a Mulatto, 1793. Among the first regidores were Felipe Santiago García (a Criollo) and Manuel Camero (a Mulatto in the 1781 padrón, and a Mestizo in 1790 census). In judicial affairs, both military and civil cases were appealed to the Audiencia of Guadalajara.Bancroft, Hubert Howe. The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft. Vol. XVIII (The History of California, vol. 1, 1542–1800) (San Francisco: The History Company Publishers, 1886), 337 and 461–462.
La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles
On 18 August 1814 Father Luis Gíl y Taboada placed the cornerstone of a new Franciscan church amidst the ruins of the original asistencia. The completed structure was dedicated on 8 December 1822.Ruscin, p. 49. A replacement chapel, named La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles (The Church of Our Lady of the Angels) was rebuilt utilizing materials of the original church in 1861. The term Reina (queen) was added later to reconcile the church's name with that of the town.Ruscin, p. 50. The small chapel, also called "La Placita" and "the Plaza Church," served the total Californio and immigrant Roman Catholic community as the only church in the vicinity of the City of Los Angeles until the 1876 construction of the Cathedral of Saint Vibiana. Saint Vibiana Cathedral became the English-speaking parish and La Placita became the Spanish-speaking parish.Poole and Ball. El Pueblo: The Historic Heart of Los Angeles, 111. "The Plaza Church" still stands today, exhibiting Spanish Colonial and Carpenter Gothic architectural styles.
The Los Angeles parish was under the Diocese of Sonora until 1840, when a new Diocese of the Two Californias was established to serve the Baja California Peninsula and Alta California. Both the dioceses of Sonora and the Two Californias were suffragan of the Archdiocese of Mexico.
Mexican independence and era
After Mexico's War of Independence (1810–1821) from Spain, life began to change in Los Angeles and Alta California. With the secularization of the missions, their land was distributed for the establishment of many more ranchos. The Native population was displaced or absorbed into the Hispanic population.
Beginning about 1827, Los Angeles, now the largest pueblo of the territory, became a rival of Monterey for the honor of being the capital of California; was the seat of conspiracies to overthrow the Mexican authority; and the stronghold of the South California party in the bickering and struggles that lasted down to the American occupation.