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The sixteenth-century novelist Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo, whose mythic description of California as an island paradise inspired the first Spanish explorers, was not far off the mark. “Although physically attached to North America, California is still most accurately thought of as an ecological ‘island,’” explain historians Richard B. Rice, William A. Bullough, and Richard J. Orsi. “Its geographical history is distinct from that of the rest of the continent. Winds, currents, mountains , and deserts isolate the region biologically as effectively as if it were girded by an ocean moat.”1 Extending the metaphor, Southern California, which Helen Hunt Jackson a century earlier had likened to “an island on the land, . . . shut off from the rest of the continent,” can be thought of as an island within an island, with similarly “diverse and distinctive life forms unmatched elsewhere on the continent”—including human beings.2 Rhetorical flourishes aside, since its founding as a colonial outpost in 1781, Los Angeles has always already been uniquely multicultural. The twenty-two adults among the first forty-four pobladores consisted of one español (native Spaniard ), one Criollo (born in New Spain of Spanish ancestry), one mestizo (mixed Spanish and Indian), two Negroes (blacks of African ancestry), eight mulattos (mixed Spanish and black), and nine Indios (Indians).3 If we recall that American Indians themselves are likely of Paleolithic Asian ancestry, the ethnoracial spectrum is complete. A Tongva village until 1781, a Spanish pueblo until 1822, a Mexican ciudad until 1848, and in its first three decades as an American city still ethnoculturally Hispanic, Los Angeles, for all the whitewashing of its heritage, is rainbow-colored to the core.4 Moreover, each of these primary “colors” (red, brown, black, yellow, and white) has its own story to tell—or rather several, interrelated stories. Native Americans, Latinos, African Americans, Asians, and Anglos, beyond their instability and social constructedness as ethnoracial categories, can be broken down or disaggregated into a dizzying number of subcategories. Taking only the “Hispanic, Latino, Spanish” box in the 2010 U.S. census, for example, after 153 c h a p t e r 7  LAtinos 154 Multicultural L.A. identifying three primary subgroups (“Mexican/Mexican American/Chicano,” “Puerto Rican,” and “Cuban”), and an “Other” category (with space to write in a specific group), lists “Argentinean, Colombian, Dominican, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran , Spaniard, and so on.” In Los Angeles, the city with the highest percentage and second-highest number of Latinos in the United States (to New York), the list, broken down by percentage of L.A.’s total population in 2010, looks like this: Mexican (31.9), Salvadoran (6), Guatemalan (3.6), Honduran (0.6), Nicaraguan (0.4), Puerto Rican (0.4), Peruvian (0.4), Cuban (0.4), Colombian (0.3), Argentinean (0.2), and Ecuadoran (0.2).5 Following the city’s historical trajectory, and given that the book’s first two chapters are devoted to the Tongva, the first multicultural chapter deals with Latinos—more specifically, with the earliest arriving, most populous, and most significant subgroup from a sociocultural perspective: Mexicans/Mexican Americans /Chicanos. The Four Mexicos Each of L.A.’s ethnic stories has a backstory. For Mexican Americans it begins in the land, now sovereign nation, of Mexico, to which California and Los Angeles once belonged. As with any country, a complex mixture of cultural and historical strands, Mexico usefully lends itself, for analytical purposes, to a division into the four most dominant of these: Indian, Spanish colonial, revolutionary, and modern/American.6 Each strand, as with those of Los Angeles’s palimpsest, has a primary historical epoch—Indian, b.c.–1521; Spanish colonial, 1521–1821; revolutionary, 1910–1930; modern/American, 1930–present. Unlike L.A.’s several buried, forgotten, or distorted layers, those of the four Mexicos have been better integrated while also remaining more autonomous, and surviving more intact to the present. Indian Strand The Aztec Empire succumbed to the conquistadors two-and-a-half centuries before California’s Indians became subjects of New Spain in the late 1700s and almost four centuries before the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 marked the end of the military phase of the American Indian wars.7 Yet despite violence and discrimination comparable to that perpetrated against indigenous peoples by the Americans, Indians and Indian culture ultimately were absorbed into Mexican society to a far greater extent than in the United States. While legal and social barriers kept open racial mixing to a minimum in the British...

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