The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space

Introduction

 I n t r o d u c t i o n Memory of Place For generations of Angelenos, the old Plaza in downtown is a place of enduring personal and historical memory. I am a native Angeleno with family roots that run deep in the city, especially in the old downtown core around the Plaza. My great-grandfather Miguel Salazar, nephew of the legendary General José Ines Salazarof the Mexican Revolution, settled in Los Angeles in the late 1910s with his familyand began his long careeras a baker working for the Moreno family at La Esperanza bakery located on the first floor of the old Plaza House on North Main Street directly across from the Pico House and the Plaza. He was among the crowds of newly arrived immigrants and exiles who filled the restaurants, pool halls, theaters, and public gatherings at the Plaza and gave evidence to the dramatic social dislocation that was brought on by the Revolution and marked the rebirth of Mexican Los Angeles. As children of the Great Depression, my parents, Rudolph Estrada and Lillian Saenz, found economic opportunity and some measure of social acceptance in the theaters and soda fountains of downtown. Clifton’s Cafeteria on Olive, motion pictures and live performances at the Orpheum and Million Dollar Theatres, and the jazz clubs on Central Avenue still linger in  ˚ the los angeles plaza their memories. They also understood that Los Angeles was a smaller place before World War II and that the Plaza was a focal point for the city that people understood in terms of its spatial relation to other significant places and landmarks in downtown: Union Station, Fort Moore Hill, Old and New Chinatown, City Hall, Little Tokyo, and Broadway. For them, the old square was a place where daily shopping, courtship, weddings, funerals, traditional Mexican-patriotic observances such as Cinco de Mayo, and the simple pleasure of sitting in its shaded open space allowed Angelenos to temporarily soften the barriers of race, class, and ethnicity that divided other places of the city. The Plaza also served as a visual and visceral reminder that despite the physical transformation of downtown and the decline in the Plaza’s regional significance after the war, Los Angeles once was a Mexican city. My earliest memories of the Plaza area date back to my childhood in the 1960s while growing up in the city’s East Side barrio. This is where significant neighborhood landmarks comprised my first mental map of the city: the New Calvary Cemetery; Belvedere Park, where I learned to fish, swim, and play baseball; Whittier Boulevard, where I shined shoes and learned to cruise; the Golden Gate Theater; D. W. Griffith Junior High and Garfield High; and Saint Alphonsos Catholic Church. Weekend family shopping excursions downtown to the department stores on Broadway and the Grand Central Market and dinner at the Golden Pagoda Café in New Chinatown (our family favorite) would invariably lead us to the Plaza for rest, a visit to the old church, or shopping on Olvera Street. Walking through its historic structures and open spaces, my parents—a union construction worker and a secretary—served as my first tour guides. And whether or not I was paying attention, they drew on their own childhood experiences of downtown to point out significant historical markers and events that formulated an important part of my cultural DNA as an Angeleno and, given the times, as a Chicano. Among them were the Avila Adobe (built in 1818 and the oldest remaining house in the city); the Zanja Madre on Olvera Street, the bricklined ditch that brought precious water to residents during the early days of the pueblo; the three-story Pico House hotel, built in 1870 by Pío Pico, California’s last governor under Mexican rule (my father would proudly remind me with a soft whisper into my ear: “M’ijo, he was one of us”); the place where mobs of Anglo servicemen and Mexican teenagers (my father among them) clashed in the summer of 1943 in what became known as the Zoot Suit Riots; and the most sacred structure on the site, La Iglesia de Nuestra Introduction ˚  Señora La Reina de Los Angeles, affectionately known by locals as La Placita church. Paradoxically, these experiences were a sharp contrast to my gradeschool field trips to the old square, which were a requirement for all lowergrade classes in the Los Angeles...