Los Angeles and the commodification of falseness

Los Angeles is a city shrouded by a reputation of falseness. With a great deal of its early growth being the result of the film industry’s move to Hollywood at the start of the 20th century, it is now known as a host to many who come to reinvent themselves for the screen (Sklar 1975). However as my History M155 class has illustrated, this reputation has far preceded the introduction of film to Los Angeles. In fact it dates back to the city’s very earliest days.

Founded in 1781 as ‘El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de Porciuncula’, or ‘the town of Our Lady of the Angels of Porciuncula’, Los Angeles’ history is marked with conflict, violence and racism (Pool 2005). Though the Spanish colonisation of California was more peaceful than some of their previous conquests, the Manifest Destiny of the Americans - the belief that the United States should stretch from coast to coast - brought with it great violence and the massacring of many indigenous communities (Stephanson 1995; Villa 2002). This peaked during the 1846-48 American-Mexican war whereby the wholesale destruction of many towns was an everyday occurrence. The 1847 razing of Tongva Village was a prime example. While Mexicans and indigenous communities were at the centre of such conflict, other ethnic groups also suffered severe violence. The 1871 Chinese massacre in Calle de los Negros was perhaps the most scarring case (Zesch 2012). In addition to violence, the gerrymandering of the city’s districts gave political power to the wealthy Anglo-American elite, leaving little for Los Angeles’ non-white residents (Sonenshein 1993).

However this history has been largely ignored. It was the belief of several of Los Angeles’ early American colonisers, such as Henry E. Huntington and General Harrison Gray Otis, that Los Angeles was destined to become the most important city in the country, if not the world (Friedricks 1992). These early ‘boosters’ of the city guided others in creating an image of Los Angeles that would attract people from across the nation to move West and help the city grow. In a similar manner to the screenwriters who would later occupy Hollywood, boosters essentially created a new narrative of Los Angeles. This was done by promoting a variety of positive aspects of Southern California including its climate, the year-round citrus trade, and perhaps most controversially, its ‘Spanish fantasy past’ (Zimmerman 2008).

Spanish fantasy past is an early example of Los Angeles creating a false image of itself. Rather than focus on the city's bloody history, boosters appropriated and commodified Mexican culture for the consumption of tourists and eventual immigrants. This marketing campaign focussed heavily on the built environment and Los Angeles soon became decorated by Spanish Mission Revival architecture, much of which still characterises the city to this day (Weitze 1984). Similarly, bells were placed along the El Camino Real - which straddles much of Highway 101 - to trace and commemorate the journey taken by the Mission padres from San Diego to San Francisco (Kurillo and Tuttle 2000).

Travel poster advertising Los Angeles' sunny climate and Mission style architecture

Poster advertising Los Angeles through its citrus trade

UCLA's Beta Theta Pi fraternity chapter influenced by Mission style architecture

Bell decorating the El Camino Real

This romanticisation of Los Angeles’ past was extremely successful. Between 1850-1930 the city’s population grew from 1,610 to 1,238,048 allowing it to quickly become a regional economic powerhouse (USCB 1853; USCB 1931). However this was done by covering up the savage destruction of the region’s preceding communities and, to add insult to injury, using their cultures to sell an altered version of history. Following a previous article I wrote regarding the commodification of place names, it is interesting to consider that I am currently living in a city which is itself the commodification of an entire culture pulled from beneath its feet. It thus seems appropriate that Los Angeles, whose ‘history’ is an inaccurate and romanticised facade used to disguise its brutal past, should be regarded by many as home to the fake and superficial.

References

Pool, B. (2005) ‘City of Angels' First Name Still Bedevils Historians’ (WWW), Los Angeles: Los Angeles Times, (http://articles.latimes.com/2005/mar/26/local/me-name26; 26 January 2016).

Friedricks, W.B. (1992) Henry E. Huntington and the Creation of Southern California, Columbus: Ohio State University

Kurillo, M. and E. Tuttle (2000) California's El Camino Real and Its Historic Bells, San Diego: Sunbelt.

Sklar, R. (1975) Movie-made America, New York: Random House.

Sonenshein, R. (1993) Politics in Black and White, New Jersey: Princeton University.

Stephanson, A. (1995) Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right, New York: Hill and Wang.

USCB (1853) The Seventh Census of the United States: 1850, Washington: United States Census Bureau.

USCB (1931) Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Washington: United States Census Bureau.

Villa, R.R. (2002) Barrio Logos: Place and Space in Urban Chicano Culture and Literature, Austin: Texas: University of Texas.

Walker, D.L. (1999) Bear Flag Rising: The Conquest of California 1846, New York: Macmillan.

Weitze, K.J. (1984) California's Mission Revival, Los Angeles: Hennessy & Ingalls.

Zesch, S. (2012) The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871, New York: Oxford University.

Zimmerman, T. (2008) Paradise Promoted: The Booster Campaign That Created Los Angeles, 1870-1930, Santa Monica: Angel City.