Making Los Angeles: Race, Space, and Municipal Power, 1822-1890
PhD Dissertation, Department of HIstory, UC Santa Barbara
David S. Torres-Rouff

(entire dissertation in pdf here ~35mb)

ABSTRACT

         Exploring the nexus of society, politics, economy, and ideology, this dissertation argues that an ongoing and reflexive relationship between race, space and municipal power generated and determined Los Angeles’ growth and development during the nineteenth century. By investigating the interrelation between processes of racial construction and city building, I hope to more fully elaborate both the city’s particular racial structure and its physical makeup as they evolved between 1822 and 1890. Having only recently fashioned their identity as Mexicans independent from Spain, elite Mexican Californians engaged immigrants from the United States in a sustained battle for control of the city’s future between 1840 and 1872. Out of this struggle between divergent visions of the good society grew locally specific “White” and “Mexican” racial categories built from a cluster of ascriptions regarding ancestry, gender, economy, and fitness for citizenship. In the early 1870s, what had been a closely contested battle became a rout. European Americans gained a significant demographic majority and secured a political monopoly that enabled them to put their long-contested vision into practice. Sewer building, street grading and surfacing, and other infrastructural projects became only the most visceral manifestations of a larger effort to transform Los Angeles from a Mexican pueblo into a bustling U.S. city during the 1870s and 1880s. Try as they might to homogenize and Americanize the physical city, European Americans could not completely contain the vibrant and heterogeneous social life of the city center. Even as built spaces established new racial boundaries and imposed often hidden inequalities, Mexican, Chinese, and Black Americans maintained a powerful cultural presence and began to organize socially and politically. In all, this project tells a tale of competition, contest, and contingency whose outcomes for race, space, and municipal power were never predetermined, however predictable they might seem in hindsight. Throughout these chapters, I argue that the ongoing cycles of conflict and compromise that manipulated identity, the environment, and the concept of the public good brought meaningful changes to the nature of social relations, the demarcation of physical and cultural space, and the institutional configuration of city government in Los Angeles.

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