Connecting the Pueblo and the City

A great city will find it hard to shake off the troubles it bypassed as a village.

--Leonard Pitt, “The Decline of the Californios”

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At certain times a city will be made to stop and look at itself, to recalibrate its trajectory and contemplate just where it might be headed. In the not-so-distant past the question of whither Los Angeles has been raised by riots, recession and, in a brighter context, by such grand civic moments as the 1984 Olympics.

At present new census numbers and the recent mayoral election seem to have inspired yet another round of municipal introspection. The shifting demographics captured by the census enumerate what’s obvious at street level: The ethnic quilt of the city is becoming ever more colorful, with the emergence of a nonwhite majority and Latinos moving toward ascendancy.

At the same time the mayoral race, in which Antonio Villaraigosa ran hard but failed to become the city’s first Latino mayor since 1872, arguably demonstrated that the redistribution of political power is moving at a pace somewhat slower than that of the raw population numbers--but moving nonetheless, and in a seemingly inexorable direction.

And so, then, whither Los Angeles?

One way to take a stab at the question is to avoid squinting into the future and instead look back to the past. To pick through almost any history of the city is to reject any notion of Los Angeles marching toward its future on a straight, clear line. Rather, it always has lurched along in ever-widening circles, repeating itself again and again.

“What is constant,” said Leonard Pitt, the historian who in the 1960s wrote “The Decline of the Californios,” a classic study of early Spanish-speaking Californians, “is that the city is an ever-changing kaleidoscope. The complexion is ever-shifting. The majority is ever-shifting--the majority becoming the minority, the minority becoming the majority. . . .”

Pitt, a 71-year-old native of New York City, came to Los Angeles after World War II and as a graduate student of history began to explore the early Californians, who saw their “halcyon days” overwhelmed by the Gold Rush and American expansion. As the son of Polish immigrants, Pitt said in an interview Tuesday, he had felt an affinity for “strangers in a strange land--or,” he corrected himself, tapping a paperback copy of his text, “in this case, strangers in their own land.”

In the concluding chapter of “Californios,” Pitt had observed that, while much had changed, Latinos of the 1960s still found themselves “in the presence of astonishing continuities and depressing parallels with the past.” In a state where the very city and street names bear witness to their place in the past, they nonetheless were stuck in--and here he borrowed a phrase from another writer--”a kind of limbo; neither accepted or rejected.”

And now, some 35 years later, seated at a dinner table in his Mar Vista home, the retired history professor was asked to revisit his theme of “astonishing continuities,” the connective tissue that runs from earliest Los Angeles to the current moment.

“I suppose,” he said, “you could plot a curve from where the city starts in 1781 as zero Anglo. There were no Anglos to speak of until 1821 or something, when the first jumps ship and comes to L.A. It then becomes partly Anglo. . . . It then becomes partly Anglo and partly Asian and partly Mexican.

“In the 1920s and 1930s you reach a kind of apogee where housing is segregated, recreation is segregated, swimming pools are segregated.” The city government in this time, he went on, was “white, business elites, downtown, mostly Protestant, mostly men, and they rule until about the Watts riot, 1965.

“And then suddenly they look around and they say, ‘Well, things have changed around here.’ And so the city begins, in terms of politics and government, to thrash around a bit.”

Pitt moved through the Tom Bradley era and into the mid-1980s, a point at which Los Angeles generally was perceived to have completed at last an evolution from village to “world-class city.” And yet, pueblo or megalopolis, the same fault lines and friction points remained. Many remain still.

“The constants,” Pitt called these recurring themes, and he listed some: “I think one is the experience of the striving ethnic group, striving to, first of all, survive, and then to more than survive, to really succeed.

“I also would have to say that the problem of crime and its ethnic and racial associations is a constant theme. That is going to be around for a long time.

“And the stereotypes, the terrible stereotypes at work.”

The familiar conflict between those who would lock out immigrants from the south and the economic realists who value their labor, the fights over who would control land and water and City Hall--all these were part of the early Los Angeles described in “Californios,” all seem terribly current today.

Pitt traced forward to the recently completed mayoral campaign, and the lingering racial and ethnic divides it seemed to expose. And then he asked himself a question.

“Will we ever reach a point where we don’t play racial games, and we don’t play ethnic games?

“We are not close to it yet. It’s a long way off. . . .

“Multi-ethnicity is a nice, innocuous concept. I think every person of goodwill agrees with that. But when push comes to shove, and there are jobs at stake, and there is political power at stake. . . . “

The historian did not finish the sentence.

He did not need to finish it.