Anglo veneer on L.A.’s past

“Los ANGELES has been the city of the future for a long time,” as historian (and ironist) William Deverell points out in “Whitewashed Adobe.” “Even as far back as the 1850s, at the moment of California statehood, people thought and spoke and wrote about Los Angeles as urban destiny in the making.... [C]ome aboard and try out the future.”

The early vision of the city, as cherished by those who flocked to Los Angeles in the 19th century, was “shot through with presumptions of the racial superiority of self-identified Anglo Saxons.” What they found on arrival was a Mexican town, and they were confronted with the conflict between their fantasies and the facts on the ground. That conflict is the special concern of Deverell’s masterly book, which can be approached as a work of history, cultural criticism and social commentary.

“Understanding Los Angeles requires grappling with the complex and disturbing relationship between whites, especially those able to command various forms of power, and Mexican people, a Mexican past, and a Mexican landscape,” Deverell writes.

Nowadays, of course, we congratulate ourselves on the richness and diversity of the many communities that coexist, more or less peacefully, in Southern California. But Deverell notes that Los Angeles came to be the place it is today by “covering up places, people, and histories that those in power found unsettling” and, specifically, by “appropriating, absorbing, and occasionally obliterating the region’s connections to Mexican places and Mexican people.” Thus the wry title of Deverell’s book: “Los Angeles became a self-conscious ‘City of the Future’ by whitewashing an adobe past.”

The process, so deeply rooted in racist assumptions, began early. Richard Henry Dana, whose “Two Years Before the Mast” helped inspire a California frenzy that has never really ended, obliquely defamed the Mexicans he described: “In the hands of an enterprising people,” wrote Dana, giving voice to the notion of Manifest Destiny, “what a country this might be!”

Much of what Deverell describes in “Whitewashed Adobe” can be seen as a culture war, and sometimes that clash was bloody, even fatal. Not long after statehood, for example, Anglo vigilantes in Los Angeles turned against the Mexicans among them after Los Angeles County Sheriff James R. Barton and several of his men were murdered by a band of outlaws under gang leader Juan Flores. “In eerie foreshadowing of the notorious Zoot Suit affair during the Second World War,” writes Deverell of one incident in the 1850s, “house-to-house searches ... revealed hiding Mexican men and boys who

As it turned out, the fortunate ones ended up safely behind bars. According to eyewitness accounts, a hundred Mexican men seized off the streets were strung up or beheaded, and one man’s severed head was rumored to have been put to use as a bowling ball.

Still, “Whitewashed Adobe” illuminates a much more subtle phenomenon -- the replacement of Mexican reality with what Deverell, citing Carey McWilliams, calls “the Spanish Fantasy Past.” Long after the original Mexican population of Los Angeles was, quite literally, marginalized -- Deverell uses the term “ethnic quarantine” to describe the segregation of Mexicans in Los Angeles spurred by an epidemic of the plague in 1924 -- Anglo entrepreneurs, politicians and propagandists set themselves the task of inventing a pretty myth to replace the ugly reality. To attract both settlers and tourists, for example, one publication depicted a young Mexican flower seller atop a burro with the promise: “Here you will find true foreign color in your own United States.”

By the 1890s, myth-making was already a cottage industry in Los Angeles. The so-called La Fiesta de Los Angeles featured Anglo children attired as “Angelitas,” a float in the shape of a Spanish galleon and one decorated with “flowers and vines brought to the New World by the Franciscan padres” as a tribute to the Spanish missions. The crasser motives of the festival organizers were revealed in an advertisement that appeared in the Los Angeles Times: “Two Great Attractions: La Fiesta de Los Angeles and J.M. Hale & Co.’s Grand Annual Muslin Underwear Sale.”

But Deverell insists that far more momentous and even maligning meanings can be read into the whole affair. The only Latino faces in the parade belonged to the “caballeros,” the costumed equestrians who depicted the conquerors rather than the conquered peoples of Mexico. Native Americans who had been transported from Arizona to Los Angeles in boxcars were dressed up as “Aztecs.” “From the vantage of a century later,” writes Deverell, “La Fiesta looks like the party white Los Angeles threw to celebrate the triumph of Manifest Destiny in the Far West.”

Deverell cites the Los Angeles River as an example of how history, just like the river itself, was sanitized by Anglo settlement. “It is a river all about memory,” he rhapsodizes, “a place where nature and culture surely flow together.” And yet, as he points out, the natural cycle of flood and drought could not coexist with a modern Los Angeles. So the river was turned into a flood-control channel, thus rendering it safe but also severing its link to the settlement of the Los Angeles Basin. “Time was, a concrete river was a beautiful thing,” cracks Deverell in a characteristic aside. “Lining a river with miles and miles of cool grayness was heralded as ... the apex of twentieth-century urban design’s triumph over nature’s messy whim.”

The emblematic moment in “Whitewashed Adobe,” as invoked in the title of the book, is the replacement of adobe with brick and other modern building materials as the stuff of which modern Los Angeles was made. “Never mind that adobe made for the ideal construction material in the Southwest,” writes Deverell. “Adobe ... stood for the past, a dark-skinned past at that.” At the Simons Brick Co. Yard No. 3 in Montebello, a company town “looking like so many Assyrian temples neatly placed in the southern San Gabriel Valley,” the handmade past was obliterated by an industrial future. And yet, by a still deeper irony, the danger of building with brick in earthquake country ultimately doomed the industry that had doomed the adobe makers.

Deverell’s academic credentials are in good order. Formerly on the faculty of Caltech and now at USC, he was recently appointed director of the newly created Institute on California and the West, a joint project of USC and the Huntington Library. But what distinguishes “Whitewashed Adobe” is not only its solid scholarship but also its author’s lively prose style, sharp and often ironic wit, and willingness to tweak the sensibilities of his fellow scholars. Here is a monograph that has been made fully accessible, highly readable and both challenging and illuminating. *