Constructing and Reconstructing Race in Nineteenth-Century California

Stacey Smith and David Torres-Rouff provide new perspectives on how diverse racial populations shaped politics and policy at the local, state, and national levels in nineteenth-century America. Building on the work of groundbreaking scholars such as Neil Foley and Natalia Molina, Smith and Torres-Rouff both consider the ways in which nineteenth-century racial politics emerged out of the relative social positions of Anglo Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese Americans. In Before L.A., Torres-Rouff argues that local policies and urban-planning decisions shaped the city’s spatial development along racial lines. Tackling state and national policy making, Smith argues that California’s diverse population and the state’s struggle over slavery shaped Civil War–era politics and Reconstruction-era immigration policy. Both studies build on the “relational” approach to understanding the construction of race and ethnicity, one that considers how manifold racial or ethnic groups defined themselves in relationship to one another. Smith and Torres-Rouff sharpen this approach by examining the ways in which the presence of diverse populations in Los Angeles and California radically shaped nineteenth-century American political debates and public-policy decisions from city council rulings to national immigration law.

In this vein, Torres-Rouff’s study of Los Angeles over the span of the nineteenth century makes important contributions to the history of Los Angeles, urban regions, and the borderlands. First, his work delves into the city’s understudied nineteenth-century history to demonstrate that Los Angeles’ early residents divided urban space along racial lines with implications that stretched far into the twentieth century. Second, Torres-Rouff draws from underutilized Los Angeles City archives to offer detailed evidence about how racial ideologies determined Los Angeles’ urban contours. In other words, Torres-Rouff deciphers issues of power and race through the city’s built environment, from sewer systems to paved streets. Finally, Torres-Rouff is one of the first to bring Los Angeles history into conversation with the vibrant historiography of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Although he does not discuss the border explicitly, Torres-Rouff borrows from borderlands studies to argue that early Los Angeles was a borderlands space, a city where no single ethnic or racial group yielded enough political power to completely control space or identity until the end of the nineteenth century. Instead, interactions between the various social groups who inhabited the region created a “mestizo city” or a municipality built on the mixing of Spanish, Mexican, and American traditions.

Using the arrival of eleven families from Sonora and Sinaloa in 1781 as a starting point, Torres-Rouff then jumps somewhat quickly to the city’s Mexican period to argue that elite Mexican Angelenos, a class often described as Californios, developed identities based not only on their ethnic backgrounds and class positions but also on their ability to regulate the movement of non-Californios through municipal space. These groups included the city’s small middle class (vecinos) and larger laboring population (cholos). For example, in 1833 city officials passed an ordinance allowing authorities to round up Indians found present in the city center and deem them “vagrants.” Torres-Rouff also maintains that while civic policies shaped racial and class hierarchies, they also prioritized communal well-being over individual gain. In contrast to Anglo American traditions, Mexican-era Angelenos protected resources such as land and water for communal use. This tradition shaped the city’s geography by designating some assets and spaces as communal resources.

In an excellent reevaluation of Los Angeles’ Mexican period and the arrival of Anglo Americans, Torres-Rouff argues that Anglo Americans and Mexican Angelenos built strong commercial and civic alliances that translated into the city’s urban development...