History of the Mexican Americans in Los Angeles

La Plaza, as seen from the Pico House, c.1869. The "Old Plaza Church" is to the left, the brick reservoir on the right, in the center of the plaza, was the original terminus of the Zanja Madre.

Mexican Americans have lived in Los Angeles since the original Pobladores, the 44 original settlers and 4 soldiers who founded the city in 1781. People of Mexican descent make up 31.9% of Los Angeles residents, and 32% of Los Angeles County residents.

History

Nuestra Señora Reina de los Angeles Asistencia was founded in early 1784 within the burgeoning Pueblo de Los Ángeles as an asistencia (or "sub-mission") to the nearby Mission San Gabriel Arcángel. The assistant mission fell into disuse over time and a Catholic chapel, La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora Reina de los Ángeles, was constructed in its place a mere thirty years later.

The city has witnessed a development of a Hispanic (mainly Mexican) cultural presence since its settlement as a city in 1769. Mexican-Americans have been one of the largest ethnic groups in Los Angeles since the 1910 census, as Mexican immigrants and US-born Mexicans from the Southwest states came to the booming industrial economy of the LA area between 1915 and 1960. This migration peaked in the 1920s and again in the World War II era (1941–45).

The city's original barrios were located in the eastern half of the city and the unincorporated community of East Los Angeles. The trend of Hispanization began in 1970, then accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s with immigration from Mexico and Central America (especially El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala). These immigrants settled in the city's eastern and southern neighborhoods. By 2000, South Los Angeles was a majority Latino area, displacing most previous African-American and Asian-American residents. The city is often said to have the largest Mexican population outside Mexico and has the largest Spanish-speaking population outside Latin America or Spain. As of 2007, estimates of the number of residents originally from the Mexican state of Oaxaca ranged from 50,000 to 250,000.

Today

As of 2010, about 2.5 million residents of Greater Los Angeles are of Mexican American origins/heritage.

As of 1996 Mexican-Americans are about 80% of the Latino population in the Los Angeles area. As of 1996 the Los Angeles region had around 3,736,000 people of Mexican origins.

There's a shift of second and third generation Mexican-Americans out of Los Angeles into nearby suburbs, such as Ventura County, Orange County, San Diego and the Inland Empire, California region. Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants moved in East and South sections of L.A. and sometimes, Asian immigrants moved into historic barrios to become mostly Asian-American areas. Starting in the late 1980s, Downey has become a renowned Latino majority community in Southern California, and the majority of residents moved in were middle or upper-middle class, and second and third generation Mexican-Americans.

Culture

Area Mexicans, along with other Spanish-speaking peoples, celebrate the Day of the Three Wise Kings as a gift giving holiday.

In the 1990s the quebradita dancing style was popular among Mexican-Americans in Greater Los Angeles.

The El Centro Cultural de Mexico is located in Santa Ana.

Notable residents

• Gustavo Arellano (publisher of the OC Weekly)
• Eric Garcetti (actor, Mayor of Los Angeles)
• George Lopez (actor, comedian)
• Cheech Marin (actor)
• Edward James Olmos (actor)
• Efren Ramirez (actor)
• Teresa Ruiz (actress)
• Rubén Salazar (journalist)
• Danny Trejo (actor)

Further reading

• Acuña, Rodolfo. Anything But Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles. Verso Books, 1996. ISBN 1859840310, 9781859840313.
• Alarcon, Rafael, Luis Escala, and Olga Odgers, eds. Making Los Angeles Home: The Integration of Mexican Immigrants in the United States (U of California Press; 2016) 280 pages; ethnographic and statistical perspectives in a study of Mexican immigrants' strategies for economic, political, social, and cultural integration.
• Balderrama, Francisco E. and Richard A. Santillan (editors). Mexican American Baseball in Los Angeles. Arcadia Publishing, 2011. ISBN 0738581801, 9780738581804.
• Lewthwaite, Stephanie. Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles: A Transnational Perspective, 1890-1940. University of Arizona Press, 2009. ISBN 0816526338, 9780816526338.
• Lopez, Eduardo F. "Catholic Education for Mexican Americans in Los Angeles: A Brief Historical Overview." Journal of Catholic Education 19.2 (2016): online
• McConnell, Eileen Díaz. "Hurdles or walls? Nativity, citizenship, legal status and Latino homeownership in Los Angeles." Social science research 53 (2015): 19-33.
• McConnell, Eileen Díaz. "Restricted Movement: Nativity, Citizenship, Legal Status, and the Residential Crowding of Latinos in Los Angeles." Social Problems 62#1 (2015): 141-162.
• Melero Malpica, Daniel "Indigenous Mexican Migrants in the City of Los Angeles: Social Networks and Social Capital Among Zapotec Workers" (PhD thesis, UCLA). ProQuest, 2008. ISBN 0549484930, 9780549484936.
• Monroy, Douglas. Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression. U of California Press, 1999. ISBN 0520920775, 9780520920774.
• Rendón, Maria G. "The urban question and identity formation: The case of second-generation Mexican males in Los Angeles." Ethnicities 15#2 (2015): 165-189. online

See also

• Los Illegals
• The Plugz
• Los Lobos
• Zoot Suit
• Sleepy Lagoon murder
• Zoot Suit Riots
• Zoot Suit (play)
• Lowrider
• Chicano
• East L.A. walkouts
• Chicano Moratorium
• Brown Berets
• East Los Angeles

External links

• Los Angeles County Chicano Employees Association
• Chicano Studies Research Center, University of California Los Angeles
• Chicano Rock! - PBS