East of East

The Making of Greater El Monte

Romeo Guzmán, Carribean Fragoza, Alex Sayf Cummings, Ryan Reft

• Editorial: Rutgers University Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978805507
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World History

East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, is an edited collection of thirty-one essays that trace the experience of a California community over three centuries, from eighteenth-century Spanish colonization to twenty-first century globalization. Employing traditional historical scholarship, oral history, creative nonfiction and original art, the book provides a radical new history of El Monte and South El Monte, showing how interdisciplinary and community-engaged scholarship can break new ground in public history. East of East tells stories that have been excluded from dominant historical narratives—stories that long survived only in the popular memory of residents, as well as narratives that have been almost completely buried and all but forgotten. Its cast of characters includes white vigilantes, Mexican anarchists, Japanese farmers, labor organizers, civil rights pioneers, and punk rockers, as well as the ordinary and unnamed youth who generated a vibrant local culture at dances and dive bars.

Part I

Origins and Departures

FIG. 3 Phung Huynh, “In the Meadow.” El Monte Station. (Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.)

Historians make choices, and choices are neither neutral nor apolitical. When a study begins and ends, for example, can produce profound exclusions. For too long historians worked in the service of the nation-state by writing histories that celebrated the rise of the nation and privileged a temporal frame that was aligned with nation building.¹ El Monte’s early historians (much like its official historical museum) began their narratives of El Monte with the conclusion of the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848. Their romantic and uncritical perspectives of the so-called pioneers erased conflict, conquest, and the region’s previous inhabitants. The region was not only home to the Tongva but was also part of the Spanish empire and Mexican state and experienced profound social, cultural, and political changes. Far from the sprawling, multiethnic landscape of today, the colonial era witnessed a tumultuous clash between the native Tongva people and the Spanish, who faced fierce resistance from iconic rebels such as Toypurina. Throughout the nineteenth century, indigenous, Mexican, and American interlopers jostled for power. White vigilantes, who supported the Confederate cause during the Civil War, brought rough Southern justice to impose order on a new Anglo-dominated California, which was increasingly connected to the broader United States by markets and railroads. Through force and the law, Californios lost political power, land, and even their social standing in society. Through historical actors like Toypurina and the El Monte Boys, El Monte and Los Angeles residents remember the past and in the process reveal competing historical interpretations.

Note

1. 1 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

1

The Tongva People

AURELIE ROY

In recent years, the enduring legacies of the original people of the Los Angeles (LA) Basin, referred to as the Tongva or Gabrielinos,¹ have become increasingly apparent in the landscape of the region. Right behind LA’s world-famous Hollywood sign lies Cahuenga (or Kawenga) Peak, the Tongva’s “place in the mountains.” People can hike the Gabrielino Trail in Angeles National Forest, just north of El Monte, and up Tongva Peak² in the Verdugo Mountains, north of LA; go to the public Tongva Park in Santa Monica;³ go to the Tongva Memorial Garden at Loyola Marymount University;⁴ and see the San Gabriel Mountains on a daily basis. These markers of indigenous heritage are important reminders of the region’s roots as well as of indigenous life today. Our exploration of El Monte invites readers to think of the LA Basin as an indigenous space as well as to imagine how its heritage has interacted with other waves of migration, politics, and modes of cultural and artistic expressions over the course of its history.

Indigenous Life from Pre-European Contact to American Colonization

The Tongva or Gabrielinos migrated from the Mojave Desert to the current-day LA Basin around 7,000 years ago, displacing some of the Chumash who had been living in the area since at least 8,000 B.C.⁵ By 1500, present-day LA County had around twenty-five Tongva villages, each of which had a population of 300–500 hunter-gatherers who spoke one of the Shoshonean Uto-Aztecan languages and relied on nuts (particularly acorns and pine nuts), berries, game, and fish for subsistence. They settled on territories ranging from present-day Santa Monica to the northeast, the San Gabriel Mountains to the north, and Riverside to the east, stretching all the way southeast to Corona and southwest to Newport Beach and including the islands of Santa Catalina, Santa Barbara, San Nicolas, and San Clemente.

The Spanish started exploring the shores of Southern California in the early sixteenth century. They began with an expedition to Santa Catalina Island in 1520, followed by a series of failed expeditions sent by Hernán Cortés in the 1530s.⁶ The Spanish explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo traveled to the coast of California in 1542 and landed on Catalina Island, and Sebastian Vizcaíno was received peacefully by indigenous people of the LA Basin in 1602. But it was not until the travels by land in 1769 of Gaspar de Portolà, governor of the province of Las Californias in the Viceroyalty of New Spain, that Spanish settlement started. At the time, approximately 5,000 Tongva people were living in the LA Basin.

Between 1769 and 1823, Spanish Franciscan friars of the Catholic Church led by Junípero Serra replaced the Jesuit order’s control of Alta California and established twenty-one missions financed by the king of Spain. Spread along the Californian Camino Real, also known as California’s Historic Mission Trail and superseded nowadays by the long highways of the Californian coast, the missions stretched all the way from San Diego to Sonoma, just north of San Francisco. Misión San Gabriel Arcángel, the fourth of California’s missions, was established in 1771 some nine miles east of the indigenous village of Yangna, which in 1781 would become the site of the administrative pueblo of Los Angeles (in present-day downtown LA).⁷

The negative impact of the Franciscan missions on the indigenous population of the LA Basin loomed large, and indigenous groups immediately resisted the establishment of the missions, as exemplified by the crushed 1785 rebellion led by Toypurina, an indigenous female spiritual leader. Despite their acts of resistance and rebellion, however, the indigenous peoples were soon submerged by the wave of Christianization that swept the region. Of the estimated 310,000 Native Americans living in current-day California in 1769, only about one-sixth remained after a hundred years of colonization—a history that many missions still fall short of acknowledging.⁸

The missions relied on the original inhabitants of the LA Basin to gain power in the region, starting a movement of Christianization, exploitation, and decimation of the indigenous peoples and renaming the Tongva as Gabrielinos in the process. The Tongva served to build the missions and were often separated from their families and communities; many were Christianized and forbidden to speak their native tongue, while others ran away into the nearby mountains. Those who were captured had their feet or heads cut off and put on sticks for the public to see as examples of punishment inflicted by the Spanish on those who sought to escape. Many died from the diseases brought by the Spanish, while others were raped. The denial of Tongva identity remains evident today, as the bodies in mass graves remain nameless at the Missions of San Diego and San Francisco de Asís, among others.⁹ In 1859, Mission San Gabriel was returned to the Catholic Church by President James Buchanan, and it still operates as a Catholic parish.¹⁰

After Mexico won its independence from Spain, the Mexican government retained the system put in place by its predecessor. Alta California remained for the most part privately owned through land grants provided to rancheros, with indigenous workers serving to sustain the ranchos until the mid-nineteenth century. Thus, even with the secularization of the missions by the Mexican government in 1834, political, economic, and social freedom remained elusive for the LA Basin’s indigenous people.¹¹ Alta California fell under the protection of the Presidio of Sonoma, which replaced the older Spanish military forts of San Diego (1769; which had controlled and protected the San Gabriel Mission), Monterey (1770), and Santa Bárbara (1782).¹² And Los Angeles became an important hub of power as the new capital city of (Alta) California (1835–1854).

In 1848, under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded Alta California (present-day Southern California) to the United States. By the time the first American settlers arrived in the LA Basin, the indigenous population of California had declined by half.¹³ After gold was discovered in Placerita Canyon (on the western edge of present-day Angeles Nat...