Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture

ONE: Creative Destruction: Founding Anglo Los Angeles on the Ruins of El Pueblo

Creative Destruction O N E Founding Anglo Los Angeles on the Ruins of El Pueblo . . . if in discourse the city serves as a totalizing and almost mythical landmark for socioeconomic and political strategies, urban life increasingly permits the reemergence of the element that the urbanistic project excluded. The language of power is in itself ‘‘urbanizing,’’ but the city is left prey to contradictory movements that counterbalance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power. —michel de certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life M I C A S A YA N O E S M I C A S A Bandido Blues: Terror and the Law Effect in Early Anglo Los Angeles Although California became a state in the American union (1850) shortly after the end of the Mexican-American War, the full cultural dislocation of the laboring poblador class and the displacement from power of the elite, landowning Californios was not immediately effected in Southern California, isolated as it was from the national economic system by the lack of a connection to the growing national railroad network. The demographic and infrastructural machinery for a generalized mexicano deterritorialization did not gain steam until the completion of the first transcontinental railroad trunk line from San Francisco in 1876, and the subsequent arrival of direct transcontinental links in F I G U R E 4 . ‘‘Sketch of the Battle of Los Angeles.’’ Courtesy of the Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. 1883 (Southern Pacific line) and 1886 (Sante Fe line). These determining developments compelled a massive in-migration of eastern and midwestern Anglos (whose uninterrupted and voluminous flow would not be checked until the 1930s), the wholesale reorganization of land use by residential subdivision , a radical makeover of the built environment, and the nascent industrialization of the regional economy. Prior to these dramatic trends, however, the residue of racial animosity from the war produced a protracted intercultural conflict for a quarter century and beyond that sometimes verged on race war. This lingering and violent antagonism served a foundational purpose in consolidating the sociospatial regime of power for the conquering ‘‘Americans.’’ Its first major expression , though, took place in northern California. There, the demographic minoritization and general subordination of mexicanos (and other non-Anglo ‘‘foreigners’’ such as the Chinese, Basques, and Chileans) began almost immediately , with the massive influx of Anglo-American miners, claim jumpers, and other opportunists drawn to the gold rush in 1849 (Barrera 1979:20). This original restructuring of the ethnic-cultural balance of population was not simply produced by the sheer quantity of the Anglo-American arrivals. Equally compelling were the legal and extralegal strategies for mexicano expulsion . For example, the 1850 Foreign Miners Tax was an administrative mechanism employed to pressure ‘‘alien’’ miners out of the region. Carey McWilliams notes that with this ‘‘act as the spearhead, a systematic campaign was launched to oust the Mexicans from their claims’’ (1976:58). Not content with the questionable legality of such ascendant political and juridical apparatuses, many Anglos took independent expropriating initiative to deadly extremes: In 1850 a mob of 2,000 American miners descended on the Mexican mining camp of Sonora and, ‘‘firing at every Mexican in sight,’’ proceeded to raze the town. The rioting lasted for nearly a week, with scores of murders and lynchings being reported. Following this major assault, individual Mexicans were singled out for attack. Every mysterious offense was promptly blamed on some unhappy Mexican. . . . Juries would convict greasers [sic] on very moderate evidence indeed, and the number of lynchings has never been computed. (McWilliams 1976:58–59) The consequent effects were felt in Southern California in at least two ways that were significant to the developing mexicano spaces of Los Angeles. First, Creative Destruction 2 1 Los Angeles became home to many of the dispossessed Sonorans, whose substantial settlement north of the central plaza (see Fig. 5) caused the nascent barrio to be derisively dubbed ‘‘Sonora Town’’ by Anglo Angelenos. Second, the horrific violations of Mexican human rights in the northern counties spurred a wave of Mexican social banditry in the north and south. Economic interest, sometimes merely for survival, certainly underlay many of the raids against cattle trains heading north to the mining camps and against an occasional mining settlement. However, many of these ‘‘primitive rebels’’ (Hobsbawm 1965) were compelled equally or more by a sense of cultural retribution...