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• 1 2013-07-14T14:08:55-07:00 Regime VII -- La Conviviencia Inestable, 1848 to 1881. 20 Narrative Essay image_header 2017-07-25T15:07:11-07:00 The U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-1848 brought California under yet another new set of rulers. After a brief series of battles, in which control over Los Angeles passed back and forth between the flags of two nations for several weeks, Mexican commander Andrés Pico surrendered to United States Army Lt. Col. John C. Frémont in the Cahuenga Pass (where today the Hollywood Freeway crosses the Santa Monica Mountains) on January 13, 1847. These dramatic events, followed rapidly by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 (which enabled former Mexican citizens to obtain U.S. citizenship) and the discovery of gold in the Sierra foothills, have overshadowed the deeper continuities between the sixth and seventh regional regimes of Los Angeles. As late as 1852, out of a total Los Angeles area population of 2,500, only about 75 had come from the United States. Many more were to follow in the next few years, but as late as 1860 only about a third of the 5,000 Angelenos were of U.S. origin.[1]
  
  A paradox characterizes the rulership of the seventh Los Angeles regime.  It was, as historian William Deverell has shown, a period of the "never ending Mexican War," lasting well into the early 20th century, as Anglos asserted and re-asserted their conquest of California through legal and cultural means.  Former Mexican citizens, especially those of the working-class, often received little protection from the laws and instead faced arbitrary, race-motivated violence and vigilantism.  But this period was also, as the evidence of officeholding suggestions, a period of conviviencia, in which Californios and Anglos shared political power.  Cristóbal Aguilar, born in California in 1816, the husband of Maria Dolores Yorba, daughter of the Verdugo family that held vast rancho lands in LA and Orange Counties, held the Mayor's office three times (alternating with Anglo Mayors), between 1866 and 1872.  But he would be the last LA Mayor of Latino descent until Antonio Villaraigosa, who was elected in 2005 and held office until 2013.
  
  Reviewing the pages of the bilingual newspaper the Los Angeles Star / Estrella de Los Angeles in the early 1850s reflects all of the contradictions in this tension-filled conviencia.  Articles are as likely to document crimes against Californios by Anglos and harsh racial judgements against working-class Mexican-Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese.  But articles also demonstrate an orderly--if highly exploitive--world of business and trade in which Anglo and Mexican property owners and employers went about their daily lives in a bilingual world.
  
  it would be a mistake to exaggerate the generosity of the Anglos.  The estadounidenses brought a new bipolar racism to their regime, gradually reclassifying most Mexican-Americans into the disenfranchised non-white category.  Nevertheless, Californios remained powerful for decades after the conquest. The surnames of many of the region’s highest elected officeholders during the 1850s and 1860s were those of the ruling Californio elite families: del Valle, Coronel, de la Guerra, Sepulveda, Pico, and Ibarra. Even the key post of County Sheriff was held by Californio Tomás Sanchez as late as 1859. Andrés Pico, who led the fight against the yanquis in 1847, was elected State Senator in 1860. His brother, Pío Pico, financed the construction of the first high-class hotel in the city, the Pico House, in 1862. This protracted period of empowerment for the conquered was crucial for maintaining their claim to justice. As late as 1866, for example, 45% of jurors were Mexican-Americans.[2]
  
  As Douglas Monroy and David Gutierrez have shown, however, this ongoing partnership between Californios and Anglos was also an agreement to be “white” together, in common domination over the irreplacable source of their wealth: agricultural laborers.[3] As Monroy summarizes, “the old peonage system of the Californios was giving way to a forced-labor system of the conquerors,” thanks to harsh new laws passed in 1850 providing for the virtual enslavement of native peoples convicted of any offense or deemed to be loitering.[4] While the strategy of joining with Anglos as white Europeans worked well enough for one generation, it committed the old rancho families to the harsh form of white supremacy that plunged thousands of workers into a disempowered status as Anglos began to pour into the region during the 1880s.
  
  A long-running battle over land ownership eventually contributed to the "decline of the Californios," as Anglos challenged the legal proof of title to land held by former Mexican citizens, now U.S. citizens attempting to retain their rights as supposedly guaranteed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.  Claimants to rancho lands granted by Spanish and Mexican periods had far less vigorous surveys at hand than the precision expected in the U.S. court system.  A fascinating and yet also tragic archive of "Diseño" (pictorial, hand-drawn) maps were submitted to the U.S. Land Claims Commission in the 1850s onward.  Inspection of the Californios' Diseño maps, compared with those submitted by Anglo claimants, reveals stark differences in the perceived, conceived, and lived experience of Californios and Anglos vis-a-vis the Southern California landscape. 
  
  View digitized original Diseño maps as presented by the UCLA Department of Special Collections.
  
  Cattle, thanks to the Gold Rush and urban development in Northern California, was in great demand during the 1850s through 1870s, commanding extraordinary prices. $20 per head produced a sumptuary consumption competition among the rancheros and their wives. Fine clothing, oil portraits, public largesse marked this economic culture of public display. Aristocratic detachment from manual labor or bookkeeping also marked their culture. Don Manuel Domínguez rendered his accounts directly. He “always carried a chamois money pouch, and as each animal came up the ramp into the cattle-car, the agent was required to drop a twenty-dollar gold piece into the pouch.”[5]
  
  The rancho production system, the heart of the Los Angeles regional economy until the 1880s, was inherently dispersed and low-density. During the sixty years in which it thrived, Californios, commoner, elites, and middle classes alike, established the nuclei of the major settlements in the Los Angeles area. The Californios inscribed their institutional forms into the landscape, beginning with the structure of property boundaries, major roadways, and later municipal boundaries. Howard J. Nelson, Cornelius Loesser and coauthors found that “the vast majority” of rancho boundaries are still the boundaries between real estate parcels owned by different individuals. “Today,” they write, “about 173 miles of roadway in Los Angeles coincides with former rancho boundaries.” About 87 miles of municipal boundaries also coincide to the confirmed titles of the original ranchos.[6] Further, the average geographic scale of the ranchos is very representative of the eventual formation of municipal boundaries, and the peculiar shape of the City of Los Angeles can even be vaguely seen in the rancho shapes on the ground.
  
  [1] Pitt (1968: 122).
  
  [2] Griswold (1982: 118).
  
  [3] Monroy (1990); Gutierrez (1995).
  
  [4] Monroy (1990: 186).
  
  [5] Quoted in Monroy (1990: 184-5).
  
  [6] Nelson, Loesser, et al. (1964: 4-5).