You wouldn’t know it from the sea of skyscrapers hemmed in by traffic-clogged freeways. Or from the flashy Hollywood studios, the multi-million-dollar celebrity homes or the Dior parading down Rodeo Drive. But a little over 200 years ago, Los Angeles was a wilderness, just sea and mountains and big sky. Back then, what’s now considered the quintessential US city wasn’t even in America, but in Mexico.
“In 1781, 44 settlers moved to this area from New Spain, further south,” explains Edgar Garcia, as we wander through El Pueblo on a sunny morning. A couple of blocks bookended by Downtown’s office buildings and grand Union Station, sandwiched between Chinatown and Little Tokyo, this small district is the oldest part of LA. It’s where the global metropolis was born. Now protected, the pretty, low-rise buildings and streets of El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument (the area’s full name) form the heart of the city’s Mexican-heritage community. “When the settlers arrived, this was the frontier of the frontier,” continues Edgar, the monument’s assistant manager. “They had to resettle several times before they built the church, around 1820.”
The church, along with several other early-19th-century buildings, is still here. It’s Sunday morning and families are pouring towards its whitewashed exterior, distinctly Spanish in its simple curves and tiled roof. Nearby, in a square containing a bandstand and fringed with thicktrunked trees, artisans sell sweets dusted in the Mexican lime-chilli seasoning Tajín. A plaque lists the names of the 44 founding pobladores, or settlers — mostly impoverished people driven to find a new life at the cutting edge of the Spanish empire. El
