El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  Chapter 14

  Los Angeles, California, ca. 1920s–’70s

  WHEN THE EAGER California conservationist Christine Sterling decided to explore the oldest part of the city of Los Angeles in the mid-1920s, she was disappointed to find the Mexican neighborhood of El Pueblo “forsaken and forgotten.”1 She was hoping to see obvious traces of the Spanish past, but there was nothing that matched her expectations. That is not to say this part of the growing city was empty—the main plaza itself had long been a place for political exiles from Mexico and Mexican-Americans to meet and debate, and over time it was used by socialists and communists, among others.2 The Mexican community that was based there had spread into neighborhoods to the east of the city, leaving El Pueblo with a growing reputation for crime, but it was still home to Mexicans, as well as other immigrants including Italians and Chinese. By 1926, however, the neighborhood was slated to be razed and the site used for a train station.3

  Sterling, unlike some earlier California boosters, was actually from the state, having been born in Oakland. She and her husband, a lawyer for the film industry, also fell under the sway of the Southern California myth. They were lured there—as she described it—by “the attractive literature” that was sent out to entice visitors. “The booklets and folders I read … were painted in colors of Spanish-Mexican romance … with old Missions, rambling adobes—the strumming of guitars and the click of castanets.”4 She fell in love with Los Angeles and became concerned about the future of El Pueblo. Of special interest to her was the Avila Adobe, built around 1818, the oldest known house in the city, which she found “down a dirty alley,” where the abode had a “condemned” sign on its door, though she thought the building was “dignified even in its decay.”5 Once the home of the mayor of Los Angeles, it had been used as a military headquarters in 1847 when U.S. troops occupied the state, housing John C. Frémont and Kit Carson. In later years it was a restaurant and hotel.6 Sterling wrote in her diary that this adobe deserved to join other landmarks, noting that “the homes of Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson have become truly American Shrines. This old adobe belongs to the history of Los Angeles.”7

  Her aim, however, was not just to preserve the area around Olvera Street, which was one of El Pueblo’s main thoroughfares, but also to re-create a “Mexican” village. In this sense, she at least acknowledged the city’s Mexican heritage—there had been some debate among city councillors over whether the town should be “Spanish” or even “Latin American,” but in the end “Mexican” won out as perhaps the most authentic.8 She joined forces with Harry Chandler, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, who supported a different location for the planned train station. With the newspaper’s backing, her campaign came to the public’s attention and was successful, although Sterling faced a great deal of antagonism from some quarters of the Anglo community, with one opponent taking her fight to the California supreme court. Sterling managed to overcome this, and convinced the city council that El Pueblo would be a profitable tourist draw. By 1930, she unveiled El Pueblo’s site, centered on Olvera Street: “A Mexican Street of Yesterday in a City of Today.”9 She wrote at the time that it opened with a “blaze of glory,” and she was pleased that it held “all the charm and beauty which I dreamed for it.” This was, to her mind, because of the Mexican people in whose hearts, she believed, “is spun the gold of Romance and Contentment.”10 It was an immediate success.

  For Sterling to make this Mexican village, she had to drive away one of its most authentic groups: the city’s tamale vendors, who had been hawking the traditional corn snack since the 1880s. By the 1920s, they had become mobile food vendors offering a range of foods to the growing Mexican-American community. Instead, Sterling pushed for Olvera Street to have a sit-down restaurant, and the tamale vendors soon disappeared. As an editorial in the Los Angeles Times noted: “They were born of the pueblo—they perish in the metropolis.”11

  The centerpiece to celebrate the completion of El Pueblo was to be a large mural. In 1932—the year the city hosted the Olympic Games—a leading Mexican muralist, David Alfaro Siqueiros, was invited to paint a large work on a wall in Olvera Street. He was living in the United States in exile at the time, and the commission was highly anticipated by the city’s cultural and artistic community. The resulting work, América Tropical, was unveiled on October 9, 1932. The city’s artists and intellectuals came out that rainy evening to view the work at its opening. When Sterling saw the mural in its full glory, she was horrified. At the center of the work, a dark-skinned man was stretched out on a cross, his limp head resting on his extended left arm. Below, his legs were forced wide apart in a V shape, bound to a parallel piece of wood. Above him sat a bald eagle, though it waited with the demeanor of a vulture. The rest of the scene included pre-Columbian statues, jungles, and on the far right of the work, revolutionaries with their guns, crouching and ready for battle. Onlookers gasped in surprise when the mural was revealed, reported the Los Angeles Times art critic Arthur Millier, who was at the opening. In his review of the mural, he pointed out: “In the midst of our popular conception of Mexico as a land of eternal dancing, gayety, and light-headedness, this stern, strong tragic work unrolls its painted cement surface.”12 Sterling, for her part, found it “anti-American.”13

  The mural was painted over, and “whitewashed” out of the city’s history by 1938. Siqueieros later wrote that the central image was intended to be a “violent symbol of the Indian peon of feudal America doubly crucified by that nation’s exploitative classes, and in turn, by imperialism. It is the living symbol of the destruction of past national American cultures by the invaders of yesterday and today.”14

  By the 1970s, however, the whitewashing had started to fade, and local artists and preservationists took a renewed interest in the mural, trying to protect what was left of América Tropical.15 Today there is a small museum explaining the work’s trajectory in El Pueblo, where Christine Sterling’s legacy remains. Tourists continue to mill around a large Mexican-style craft market stuffed with piñatas and pottery, walk over to the main plaza, or visit La Placita, the Our Lady of the Angels Church built by Franciscans, trying to get a glimpse of this re-created “timeless” Mexican world in the heart of one of the nation’s most modern cities.16

  The treatment of Siqueiros was part of larger dynamics in Los Angeles, the one city in the United States where fantasy could live side by side with reality. By the 1930s, Hollywood was booming, and it fell in love with all things Mexican, a fashion that reached its peak during the Great Depression.17 Even the New York Times reported in 1933 on the “enormous vogue of things Mexican.”18 The daring romantic heroes of the Mexican Revolution, such as Pancho Villa, had captured the public imagination, and Mexico’s proximity played a part in the culture’s popularization as well. Angelenos had been going down to Tijuana and other border towns during prohibition, experiencing a form of Mexican culture at first hand.

  Mexico, too, was having its own “golden age” of cinema, which started in the 1930s, putting Mexican actors and actresses—including stars like Dolores del Río, who worked in both countries—on Hollywood’s radar. Indeed, she starred in a film adaptation of the novel Ramona—one of three made in as many decades. The first had been a silent version made in 1910, starring Mary Pickford and given the subtitle “A Story of the White Man’s Injustice to the Indians.” It was directed by D. W. Griffith, who would make the controversial movie The Birth of a Nation five years later. The 1928 version that starred del Río was also silent, but the final 1936 Ramona had color and sound and featured Loretta Young in the lead role. As moving pictures began to incorporate sound, Mexican composers like Juan García Esquivel and Johnny Richards (Juan Manuel Cascales) were influential in creating Hollywood’s sonic style.

  Around the same time, another dashing Californio won the public’s affection: Zorro. The masked crusader first leaped off the page in the 1919 story The Mark of Zorro: The Curse of Capistrano. Like Ramona, Zorro was not the produ
ct of a Californio; rather, his creator was an Illinois-born pulp fiction writer, Johnston McCulley. The story—and the many Zorro tales that followed it—focused on the exploits of the wealthy landowner Don Diego Vega, who by night is the masked vigilante Zorro, the Spanish word for fox. He acts in the name of justice, claiming to have “robbed none except officials who have stolen from the missions and the poor, and punished none except brutes who mistreat natives.”19 The series was set roughly between the 1820s, around the time of Mexican independence, and the arrival of the United States in 1848, among the missions of Southern California and the pueblo of Los Angeles. It reflected the influence of the mission myth, describing the tensions between the authorities and the priests at a time when “there was little peace between the robed Franciscans who followed in the footsteps of the sainted Junípero Serra … and those who followed the politicians and had high places in the army.”20 Zorro was a hit and was soon scooped up by Hollywood, with Douglas Fairbanks starring in The Mark of Zorro in 1920, and Tyrone Power in a 1940 remake.*

  The Mexican vogue applied not only to popular culture such as films but across the spectrum of the arts. The composer Aaron Copland, for instance, had been inspired by Mexico, writing El Salón México after visits there to see his friend, the fellow composer Carlos Chávez. Like many Mexicans during this period, Chávez had spent time in the United States, living for a few years in the late 1920s in New York. He had come to public attention after the debut of his 1921 ballet based on pre-Columbian themes, El fuego nuevo (The New Fire).21

  While in the United States, Chávez also met photographer Paul Strand, who would make the reverse journey into 1930s Mexico. Strand captured the reality of peasant life throughout his travels in the country, showing the beauty and hardship of the more remote areas. His images from this period show a stern, resilient Mexico: straw-hatted farmers exhausted after a day in the fields, women tending their babies, solemn statues of Mary in the many churches he visited, and the dusty streets of quiet villages. Strand would stay in Mexico for a few years in the 1930s, aided by Chávez, who had become head of the National Conservatory of Music and of the government’s Department of Fine Arts. Later, in 1936, Strand made a film about a fishing community for the culture ministry, Redes (called The Waves in English), now considered a classic of Mexican cinema.22 Strand, like other foreign photographers before him, captured Mexico at a time of great change, and in 1940, after returning to the United States, he exhibited and published a portfolio of that work.23

  The Mexican attempt to merge the present and past to resolve the question of national identity could perhaps be seen with the most clarity in the work of muralists of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, and their famed contemporary, Diego Rivera. Their forms and themes came out of concerns of the time. Murals were thought to be a more democratic medium for communicating with the public. In addition, the idea of mestizaje had been popularized after the Revolution, with the Mexican mestizo being a symbol of modernized Mexican politics. The mestizo was meant to represent the “ideal” mixed citizen, though later reassessments have highlighted the inherent discrimination of mestizaje. While appearing inclusive at one level, it excludes on another level people who were not considered “mixed,” especially blacks, Asians, and indigenous Mexicans.24

  At the time, however, mestizaje manifested itself in murals, which sought to celebrate the new, postrevolutionary Mexico, and to look forward. Rivera’s work blended the present, past, and future, combining symbols of the Mexica people with more recent national heroes, workers, peasants, and revolutionaries.25 He attracted commissions in the United States but controversy as well. His 1933 mural Man at the Crossroads was intended for Rockefeller Center in New York, but after Rivera, a supporter of communism, included a depiction of Lenin and refused to paint over him, he was forced to stop work on the project and it was later destroyed. Rivera had saved the design, however, and the following year he returned to the project, painting on the walls of the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, where this work can be seen today, with a new title: Man, Controller of the Universe. An unmissable Lenin is featured to the left of the central image of a worker, while farther left Leon Trotsky holds a banner calling for workers of the world to unite, with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels looking on.

  Although Hollywood may have been undergoing an affair with all things Mexican on-screen, the mood was somewhat different on the street. Between 1920 and 1930, the Mexican and Mexican-American population in the United States doubled to around 1.4 million, as recorded in the 1930 census, with the vast majority living in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Colorado.26 Much of this immigration soon ground to a halt with the start of the Great Depression, in part because Mexicans were blamed for rising unemployment but also because workers had started to organize and relations were turning sour. At the turn of the twentieth century, many labor bosses considered Mexicans to be strike-breaking outsiders, but now, faced with increasing prejudice and economic disadvantage, some Mexican workers attempted to set up trade unions in the 1920s and into the 1930s. The Confederación de Uniones Obreras Mexicanas (Confederation of Mexican Workers’ Unions) was established in 1927, and the Mexican Mutual Aid Society of Imperial Valley in 1928. The latter started demanding better pay and conditions, and its cantaloupe workers went on strike later that year.27 Local police were quick to level charges of communism, and arrests were made.28 In 1930, the Mexican Mutual Aid Society led eight thousand out on strike—in addition to Mexicans, they included Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and Sikh workers—and this strike, too, was followed by roundups and arrests.29 In 1933, a number of strikes occurred in California, including one in October of cotton workers in which three men were killed and nine were injured. As that standoff wore on, workers’ families were evicted from their homes. They returned to the fields by the end of the month.30 The strikes died down after another violent suppression, this time in San Francisco in 1934, when the National Guard was brought in.31 They continued to take place, however, and were not limited to California. In Texas, for instance, Emma Tenayuca led more than ten thousand pecan shellers in San Antonio out on a strike over low wages and poor conditions in 1938.32 The growing national hostility to communism made union activity difficult for many workers, including Mexicans; every strike had the potential to turn into a witch hunt.

  Matters were not helped by the progressive policies enacted in Mexico under President Lázaro Cárdenas, who took office in 1934. After the end of the revolution, investment from the United States in Mexico had continued despite initial concerns about the 1917 constitution’s Article 27, regarding state ownership of the land. Direct U.S. investment was higher by 1929 than it had been before the conflict started in 1910.33 With the arrival of Cárdenas, however, that relationship would experience some significant changes. In 1935, Cárdenas closed brothels and declared gambling illegal, shutting down the casinos in Tijuana that had lured so many Southern Californians to the border—two of those casinos were partly owned by former president Abelardo Rodríguez.34 His real focus, however, was on land, the redistribution of which had slowed down since the revolution, and he wanted to build up the communal ejido farms. By 1940 he had redistributed some eighteen million hectares, taking the number of ejidos from 15 percent of cultivated land to 47 percent.35 In other sectors of the economy, Cárdenas faced ongoing strikes, including one by oil workers in 1937. They wanted better wages, and an arbitration board found that they should be paid more. The British and U.S. oil companies that owned most of the firms took the matter to the Mexican supreme court. When it, too, ruled in the workers’ favor, the foreign companies tried to defy the decision. Cárdenas decided to expropriate the oil industry in 1938, a move that delighted sectors of the public, but caused a diplomatic row with Britain. With the Second World War looming, President Roosevelt did not make overt threats toward Mexico, but he supported U.S. oil firms’ ongoing demands for compensation from the Mexican government. Private U.S.
investors became uneasy and some began to divest themselves of their interests in the country.36

  The 1930s would be a brutal decade for Mexicans and Mexican-Americans within the United States. Worsening job prospects and growing hostility meant fewer Mexicans were crossing legally, and the recorded numbers fell from 61,622 in 1928 to 2,058 in 1932.37 Throughout the decade, the tide of migrants turned, repelled in part by discrimination and given an extra impetus in some places by rumors of imminent deportation. In Los Angeles, officials conducted raids in Mexican neighborhoods—including El Pueblo on February 26, 1931—further raising fears and sending a strong message to the Mexican community.38 It worked: in 1931, some 40,000 Mexicans left California, and that year more people were sent out of the United States than had entered.39 The Immigration Service continued to operate sweeps and roundups of Mexicans at places all over the country, including cities such as New York, Chicago, and Detroit.40

  The Mexican government also became involved, offering free transportation from the border inland and waiving duties on U.S. goods brought back to Mexico by the deportees. The result was the repatriation, voluntary or by force, of at least four hundred thousand Mexicans in the 1930s, though some calculations suggest that more than one million returned. Underneath that figure is a more surprising statistic: up to 60 percent of these people were born in the United States and were thus full citizens. It was a traumatic time for many of these deportees, especially those who had never lived in Mexico before and felt themselves to be—and indeed often were—American.41