Before the Spanish myth: LA moves to make amends to Indigenous people
LOS ANGELES — The city of Los Angeles was founded 240 years ago by a group of 44 settlers who had traveled overland from Mexico, or so the story goes. But like many origin myths of the American West, L.A.'s founding story is also one of erasure — a tale that conveniently elides what was already there for the fertile fiction of a blank slate. The pobladores called their settlement something ...
LOS ANGELES — The city of Los Angeles was founded 240 years ago by a group of 44 settlers who had traveled overland from Mexico, or so the story goes.
But like many origin myths of the American West, L.A.'s founding story is also one of erasure — a tale that conveniently elides what was already there for the fertile fiction of a blank slate.
The pobladores called their settlement something like "El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula," though historians quibble over the exact wording.
But the land already had
