The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space

3. From Ciudad to City

81 C h a p t e r t h r e e From Ciudad to City The 1870s signaled the beginning of several cultural, technological, demographic, and economic transformations that further defined Los Angeles as an emerging American city, and they were most reflected by the changes at the Plaza. Railroads were central to the growth of this new economy based on agriculture, oil production, real estate, and tourism. Blake Gumprecht has observed: “The completion of a transcontinental railroad line to Los Angeles in 1876 changed Southern California forever.”1 Los Angeles was an isolated community until the Southern Pacific roared into town. More lasting than the violence of the previous decades that made international headlines, the railroad put the city on the map. It is not just that it brought thousands of people—it was the harbinger of the urban-industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the overall specter of change during the last two decades of the century brought an end to the rancho economy and culture along with the significance of the Plaza as the civic center. Gradually, the old square and the city were thought of as two separate spaces in the public mind—one represented the past, while the other represented the present and future. Anglo population growth and increased segregation of Mexicans north of the Plaza in Sonoratown also meant that the historic 82 ˚ the los angeles plaza community-wide Mexican fiestas, patriotic celebrations, and other forms of recreation were discontinued or replaced by modified, usually more exclusive forms of entertainment. Historian Albert Camarillo found a similar set of circumstances occurring at Santa Barbara: “In the years following the Gold Rush, for example, the Barbarenos had been entertained annually by a traveling Sonoran-Mexican circus; this circus was actually a troupe of acrobats and musicians who performed feats of physical ability and other entertainment. In 1874 the Mexican circus discontinued its performances in the community and were replaced shortly thereafter by an American circus from San Francisco.”2 Other traditional forms of cultural recreation that once unified the Mexican pueblo were modified as well, reflecting the larger social transformations taking place: “By the mid-1870s, Anglos [were capitalizing] on the commercial value of the horse races by introducing new, alien forms of competition (i.e., the steeplechase and the Irish hurdles). A formal racetrack was constructed, and an admission charge ended the customary free Sunday amusements.”3 Some traditional Mexican public rituals and fiestas were therefore discontinued or modified as a response to dramatic demographic changes. Other activities were initiated as a means for greater community cohesion and as expressions of a growing sense of mexicanidad (nationalism) among Californios and more recent immigrants from Mexico. The Plaza was the center of the community and would be the scene where these modified activities occurred, placing less emphasis on religious ritual and more on political expression. It would also be the place that most reflected the change in the overall look and direction of Los Angeles from a Mexican ciudad to an American city. And if one year epitomized this change, 1876 was marked by three events that signaled the rise of Anglo cultural and economic dominance and the declining significance of the Plaza. The first was religious and spatial, the second was symbolic, and the third was everything that came with the railroad. Construction of the Cathedral of Saint Vibiana, Los Angeles’ second Catholic church, was begun in 1871 and completed in 1876. Under Bishop Amat, the cultural alienation of the Plaza’s Mexican parishioners that had been taking place since the 1850s also became spatial.The newchurch was an imposing edifice for its day and was located far south of the Plaza on Second and Main Streets “in the increasingly fashionable, affluent, English-speaking From Ciudad to City ˚ 83 residential district of the community.”4 Amat’s plan for the new cathedral was based upon the memory of his own childhood parish, San Miguel del Puerto in Barcelona, Spain. The architectural style of Saint Vibiana’s was neo-baroque. It was constructed of brick rather than adobe with disregard for the Hispanic colonial heritage and materials of the old Plaza church.5 Thus, Saint Vibiana’s came to symbolize the cultural and geographic separation between the city’s new political and economic center near the junction of Temple and Main Streets and the Mexican “past” that remained at the Plaza...