Los Angeles' Old Plaza and Olvera Street: Imagined and Contested Space

Abstract

Los Angeles' Old Plaza and Olvera Street: Imagined and Contested Space 1* Olvera Street might not be authentic Old California or even authentic Mexico but it runs better than the bulldozer -KEVIN STARR INTRODUCTION In the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, Paseo de Los Angeles-later referred to as Olvera Street was created through the efforts of Christine Sterling and city boosters in the oldest section of the city. Olvera Street was an imagined Mexican landscape not unlike the renowned tourist districts of Mexican border cities (Arreola and Curtis 1993). The theme was Mexico, pitting a timeless, romantic, homogeneous Spanish-Mexican culture against industrialization, immigration, urban decay and modernity itself. The street featured rows of curio shops, house museums, and Mexican eateries staffed by costumed Mexican merchants. As a constructed place, Olvera Street was the product of a social and economic agenda established by civic elites to transform downtown Los Angeles through the removal of undesirable residents. The opening of Olvera Street and the preservation of the old Plaza also popularized an emerging creation mythology for Anglo Los Angeles stemming from the defeat of Mexican forces in 1847, a heroic birth legend in which Sterling emerged as a symbolic mother figure and guardian of the city's birthplace. Finally, the creation of Olvera Street stimulated a nascent movement to preserve the city's oldest adobe and brick architecture surrounding the street and the old Plaza (Starr 1990, 205).2 Today, the Plaza and Olvera Street site comprise the forty-four acre El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument, a department of the City of Los Angeles. El Pueblo Monument is at once the historic heart of Los Angeles, a popular tourist site, a Mexican-American cultural symbol, and a complex microcosm for shifting cultural and political agendas in Los Angeles. However, during this era when writings about Los Angeles are noticeably in among scholars-especially studies which probe the city's dialectical nature-the long and complex social history of the old Plaza and Olvera Street area as a case study in the competition over cultural and political power has been long overdue. This essay, which is part of a larger study, is intended to contribute greater understanding of the significance of this unique space as a center for the discursive images and perceptions about Mexicans in particular, and also as an enduring cultural symbol for the City of Los Angeles. Furthermore, I hope to contribute to the ongoing explorations of heritage sites, the production and representation of romantic notions of folk groups-Mexicans and Chinese in this case-that occur in these places and the simultaneous, contested nature of those spaces (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). HISTORICAL ORIGINS The City of Los Angeles was founded in September, 1781 by forty-four racially mixed settlers from the present-day northwest Mexican states of Sonora and Sinaloa. The original town plan which was surveyed by Governor Felipe De Neve, in accordance with Spanish-colonial law and design, included a church and rectangular Plaza surrounded by house lots and planting fields (Guinn 1897, 247). The exact location of this first site is unknown, but it may have been several blocks southeast of the present location of El Pueblo Monument, along the banks of the Rio Porciuncula (Los Angeles River) (Mason and Duque 1981, 16). By the early 1800s, the town was moved to higher ground at least twice, due to the ravages caused by the Los Angeles River, and was finally placed in its present location (Mason and Duque 1981, 16). During the period of Spanish colonial rule, which lasted until 1821, the first streets, adobe buildings and the Plaza were constructed. During the period of Mexican rule from 1821 to 1848, the Plaza area was the heart of Mexican community life in Los Angeles and center of an economy based upon cattle raising and agriculture (Estrada 1996). …