Eternity Street Page 4
LATER THAT AFTERNOON a boy discovered the mare, still fully saddled, grazing in a field beside the river, about two miles north of the pueblo. Recognizing the animal as Doña Luisa’s, he led it back to her casa. Sitting under her arbor, the elderly woman saw them approaching and immediately feared the worst. “My heart tells me Don Domingo is dead, that he has been murdered,” she cried. The alcalde was summoned, and he raised a search party. Several hours later they discovered Don Domingo’s mangled body in a shallow gully between the river and the zanja madre, the pueblo’s main irrigation ditch. His face was disfigured with frightful gashes, his bandana soaked with blood, his neck badly bruised. Weeping bitterly, family and friends placed his body in a sling and slowly carried it back to the pueblo.
Gervasio Alipás was the obvious suspect. Several witnesses reported seeing him earlier that day, riding furiously in the direction of the crime scene. While authorities organized a posse, members of the Féliz family clustered about the victim’s body in the church rectory, surrounded by burning tapers. Late that evening their mourning was interrupted by the sound of horsemen on the Plaza. The posse had returned with Alipás, whom they found hiding in the rolling hills north of town. An angry crowd formed. The treacherous murder of such a important person, the people cried, demanded immediate punishment. Don Domingo was a direct descendant of the pueblo’s founders, the maternal great-grandson of original settler Roque Jacinto Cota, the paternal grandson of Corporal José Vicente Féliz, known as “the little father of the pueblo,” who for his service to the community was granted the seven thousand acres of rolling hills and grassland that became Rancho Los Féliz. The extended Féliz-Cota family included some of the most important people in Los Angeles.
“Death to Gervasio!” the crowd shouted. “Death to the monster!” But a minority of those present objected. They urged patience and argued that the manner in which guilt or innocence was established was as important as the punishment itself. The community required justice not vengeance. No one yet knew the fate of María del Rosario Villa. Had she too been murdered and her body hidden, or was she an accomplice to the crime, as many suspected? Let passions cool and allow the law to guide the people toward righteous justice. Those arguments succeeded in calming the crowd. Alcalde Requena ordered Alipás clamped in irons and secured in the adobe jail on the Plaza, beside the church.
The following day was Palm Sunday, the commencement of semana santa, Holy Week, when all parishioners were expected to attend confession and receive communion. Most families came in from the countryside for church services, and many remained for Don Domingo’s funeral the following morning. The horror of the crime and the prominence of the victim attracted one of the largest crowds in living memory. Following a requiem mass at the Plaza church, the shroud-wrapped body was laid on a wooden slab and carried to the adjacent campo santo (graveyard), where it was placed in a coffin and lowered into the grave. The priest delivered the final benediction to the accompaniment of a chorus of weeping and wailing women. Following the burial, the victim’s kinsmen lingered at the graveside, scarcely able to contain their anger and frustration. Charo was still missing and Alcalde Requena had yet to open an official investigation. After heated discussion the men present agreed to an oath: “We swear by the bloody remains of our compatriot to exterminate the odious villains who murdered him at the risk of our honor and our lives.” The desire for vengeance was strong.
The following morning searchers found Charo, wandering aimlessly in the hills north of town, disheveled and frightened. Alcalde Requena ordered her secured in a private house, then proceeded to interrogate the suspects separately. Both confessed their parts in the murder. Alipás told of his rage as he watched Charo depart for Rancho Los Féliz with her husband. He had taken a shortcut through the rolling hills and hid in the chaparral by the side of the road, waiting for them to come up. Charo admitted to hoping for rescue by her lover, but also her shock when Don Domingo was suddenly jerked from the rear of the mare by Gervasio’s reata. Looking back she saw her husband writhing in the dust, her lover standing over him, knife in hand. His intention, Alipás told Requena, was to kill them both, but that suddenly changed when he heard Charo urge him on. “Strike, Gervasio, strike,” she cried, “I shall be your reward.” Whipped into a frenzy by those words, Alipás hacked at the defenseless husband, reducing his face to a bloody pulp. Charo acknowledged helping Alipás drag the body into a gully before they fled to a hiding place in the hills. There they remained, barely speaking to each other as afternoon turned to evening. Finally, hearing the approach of the posse, Alipás allowed himself to be captured, leaving Charo hidden in the chaparral, hoping she might find a way to escape. It was his single act of gallantry.
THE KINSMEN OF DON DOMINGO had little expectation of satisfaction from the drawn-out process of the law. Alcalde Requena, whose office combined executive and judicial responsibilities, was charged with carrying out the investigation, compiling the evidence, then conducting a hearing during which he questioned witnesses, made a determination of guilt, and pronounced sentence. An educated man from the Sonoran port of Guaymas, Requena operated a retail establishment near the Plaza and enjoyed a reputation for fair dealing. Angelenos trusted his judgment, but they knew that whatever his decision, it would not be final. In cases of homicide the law provided for automatic appeal. But since there was no higher court in California, the case would be heard in Mexico City, nearly two thousand miles away, a process that would take months, if not years. That was unacceptable. Justice delayed was justice denied. The murderers had confessed, and the family wanted a speedy hearing and summary punishment.
By Good Friday the public agitation had become so pronounced that Alcalde Requena convened an extraordinary meeting of the ayuntamiento, the town council, and persuaded the regidores, or councilmen, to adopt a resolution: “Whomsoever shall disturb the public tranquility shall be punished according to law.” The agitators responded, promising not to “shed blood so impure during the period when the Savior of the world poured forth his blood most holy.” But they accompanied that assurance with a call for a public meeting at the conclusion of Holy Week, making it clear that they had no intention of dropping their demand for summary justice. A spring storm blew up on Easter Sunday and heavy rain continued for several days, forcing postponement of the meeting. But the weather finally cleared, and on Thursday morning a group of several dozen Angelenos assembled at the house of merchant Jonathan Temple, a naturalized Mexican citizen from Massachusetts and husband of María Raphaela Cota, first cousin of the victim.
The meeting opened with the selection of schoolmaster Victor Prudon as presiding officer. Chosen for his skill with words, Prudon did not disappoint, with an opening address that staked out the moral high ground. “I am a foreigner,” he told the assembled Angelenos, “born in the free land of France, distant from your own. I reached manhood in Mexico City, the capital of your country, where I passed the florid years of my youth, my inborn sentiments of liberty and philanthropy made strong by the examples offered on the part of the Mexican people.” After a period of wandering, searching for a place to make his fortune, he had landed in California. “I have adopted as my own this land of yours,” Prudon said. “I wish to share your lot and I support your view of things.”
Unrestrained violence in the community, he declared, threatened public security, “the shield of protection for our rights, families, and possessions.” Decisive action was required. They could no longer afford legal formalities. Violent men must be shown that Angelenos would no longer tolerate their crimes. Their common objectives were “beneficent, just, and necessary,” and Prudon proposed that the assembled men constitute themselves as a junta popular, a committee for the defense of public safety, to ensure that justice was secured in Los Angeles. The men endorsed his proposal by acclamation. To avoid any charge that they were motivated by private vengeance rather than public justice, they selected as their leaders three men without any family connections in the commu
nity: Prudon as chairman, a Mexican attorney named Manuel Arzaga as secretary, and a retired army officer named Francisco Araujo as sergeant at arms.
Prudon managed to keep the meeting orderly despite some incendiary speakers, and after an hour of debate the Angelenos cast a unanimous vote in favor of the immediate execution of the murderers. Prudon and Arzaga prepared a petition addressed to Alcalde Requena to which fifty-five men affixed their signatures or marks. Don Francisco, the victim’s father, signed first, and many of those who followed were relations of the extended Féliz-Cota family. But a slim majority were unrelated to the victim. They included former municipal officials and prominent rancheros. Jonathan Temple, informal leader of the small émigré community and host of the meeting, enlisted the support of a score of extranjeros (foreigners), including a number of Americans, most of them married to daughters of the country. The signing completed, Prudon and Arzaga left to deliver the petition to the ayuntamiento, which was already meeting in emergency session, while Araujo marched the men to the pueblo’s small armory, ordered the door forced open, and supervised the distribution of arms.
It was two in the afternoon when Alcalde Requena read the junta’s petition aloud to the seven members of the ayuntamiento. Prudon had inscribed it with a Latin motto taken from French political philosopher Montesquieu: “salus populi suprema lex est”—the welfare of the people is the supreme law. Acting in the name of the people, the petition read, the undersigned citizens declared María del Rosario Villa de Féliz and Gervasio Alipás guilty of the brutal murder of José Domingo Féliz. While they took no pleasure in superseding the institutions of the Mexican republic, their action was necessitated by the frequency of lethal violence in Los Angeles, which threatened “a state of anarchy where the might of the strongest is the only law.” The petition continued,
The blood still reeks of other unfortunate victims. . . . Their bloody ghosts cry out for vengeance. Their trembling voices re-echo from the grave. The afflicted widow, the forsaken orphan, the ancient father, the mourning brother, the inconsolable mother, and the general public all demand speedy and solemn justice. We swear to have it today or die trying. The blood of the murderers must be shed today, or ours will be, to the last drop. The world shall know that if judges in Los Angeles tolerate murder, there are virtuous citizens willing to sacrifice their lives to insure those of their countrymen.
If Alcalde Requena declined to execute the “infernal couple” in the name of the state, the junta demanded that he hand them over to be executed in the name of the people themselves. Requena had one hour to decide. “If no answer has been received by then, he will be responsible before God and the public for what will follow. Death to the murderers!”
As Requena finished reading, the regidores heard a clamor on the Plaza and, looking out, they saw a large assembly of armed citizens. Assistant Alcalde Tapia went out to confront them. What was the meaning of this gathering under arms? Victor Prudon stepped forward. They had come in pursuit of justice, he said. The law made no provision for the direct intervention of the people, Tapia responded. Prudon declined to debate the point. The petition speaks for itself, he said. Tapia returned to the chamber. The regidores fretted, but they had neither the moral nor the physical authority to enforce their will. After some time Prudon sent in a note reminding them that the hour had nearly passed. “An immediate answer is desired, and if it is not forthcoming, the junta shall be obliged to take extraordinary measures.” Left without options, the regidores passed a resolution rejecting the junta’s demand and authorizing Requena to prepare a full report to the governor. Then they adjourned and went home. Juan Bautista Alvarado put it succinctly in his memoirs. The ayuntamiento “chose not to wage a lonely struggle against a people angry and armed”—airado y armado—“in defense of their rights.”
Prudon then ordered his men to surround the jail and disarm the guard. They found Alipás in his cell, shackled in irons. A blacksmith was summoned, and he quickly discovered that the prisoner, using a small file hidden in his boot, had nearly cut through the chain connecting his handcuffs. “You did well not to delay,” said Alipás with a smile. “Had I more time I would have cut my chains, and when the jailer came with my meal I would have delivered the stroke and secured my freedom.” Prudon read aloud the junta’s verdict, then ordered a detachment to escort the condemned man to the place chosen for the execution, at the summit of the hill behind the church.
Angelenos thronged the Plaza and crowded the flat roofs of the surrounding adobes to catch a view of the spectacle. Alipás did not resist, and a twelve-man firing squad completed the execution without ceremony. Prudon then sent several men to fetch María del Rosario Villa de Féliz. For the crime of husband-murder the junta had sentenced her to gaze upon the body of her dead lover for an hour before she too was executed. But she was so overcome with fear that the vigilantes took pity on her. They dragged her up the hill and dispatched her without delay.
Thus ended the first episode of popular justice in Los Angeles. As the crowd watched in silence, the men carried the bodies down the hillside to the Plaza and laid them on the ground before the jail, exposing them to public display in the fading light of the spring afternoon. The following morning they were interred in the campo santo beside the church. Father Pedro Cabot, Franciscan missionary at Mission San Fernando, some twenty-five miles northwest of the pueblo, tersely recorded their deaths in the parish register. “Both died by execution,” he wrote, “without receiving the sacraments.”
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CHAPTER 2 •
REDUCED TO OBEDIENCE
THE ARCHIVE OF MEXICAN LOS ANGELES, although incomplete, records five homicides committed in the pueblo and vicinity during the two years preceding José Domingo Féliz’s murder in 1836. For a community of only several hundred residents, that amounted to an alarmingly high frequency of homicide, at least three times the rate of the more established communities of the Mexican heartland, an order of magnitude higher than that in the most violent of American cities today. High enough to rouse the sleeping lion.
People kill other people for all kinds of reasons. For big causes, for petty trifles, or just for the hell of it. But social forces contribute to the frequency of homicide. Frontiers throughout North America were characterized by rampant conflict, and Mexican Los Angeles was no exception. The conquest of Indian homelands left a bitter legacy of continuing struggle, not only between indigenous peoples and colonizers, but among the colonizers themselves, who grew habituated to bloodshed. Ineffective law enforcement and feeble institutions of justice on the periphery of the nation-state meant that disputes were often settled privately, resulting in ongoing feuds and vendettas. In the absence of state authority, social order was more often a function of honor than of law, and honor frequently amounted to little more than one man’s ability to dominate other men, to live by the declaration, as Mexicans put it, “a me no me manda nadie”—no one orders me around.
Interpersonal violence also increases during periods of rapid social change, when institutions are challenged and communities transformed. And despite the persistent fiction that Mexico was a “lax, lazy, land of mañana”—a place where everything was put off until the morrow—during the two decades that preceded the American conquest, Mexican California experienced a remarkable social and economic transformation. Some months before the Féliz murder Alcalde Requena conducted a census of the Los Angeles region—from the mountains to the sea, from the jurisdiction of Santa Barbara in the north to San Diego in the south—and counted a total of 2,228 residents. Although that number is minuscule compared with the great metropolis that would later arise, it marked a growth of more than 60 percent in only six years. Californios were very fertile and their families quite large, but that had long been true, and it did not account for the growth over such a short period.
The surging population was part of the social and economic revolution overtaking the region. California’s Franciscan missions were undergoing “secularization”�
��their lands transferred to private ownership and their labor force, the converted mission Indians, or neófitos, released from bondage. Emancipados, as former mission Indians were called, were going to work for the rising landowing class of rancheros and vineyardists. The number of Indian workers residing in and around the pueblo more than doubled from 1830 to 1836, by which time they accounted for nearly a quarter of the population. The convulsive birth of a market economy also attracted migrants from the south, and by 1836 migrants from Sonora made up some 20 percent of the district’s residents. Educated men such as Manuel Requena or Victor Prudon were welcomed warmly by Angelenos. But vagabonds and unemployed vaqueros were regarded with a wary eye.
Californios attributed the increasing violence in their community to emancipated Indians and migrants. “I am disgusted to see my country so much under the influence of these devils,” one ranchero wrote. They were “out of control,” another agreed, “committing robberies and other crimes.” The case files of the alcalde’s office support these concerns. Emancipados were responsible for considerably more than their proportional share of violent crime, although for the most part they targeted other Indians. Mexicans were even more combative, and what was worse, much of their violence was directed at Californios. “There are here a greater number of scamps than of honorable men,” one official reported from Los Angeles a few weeks before the Féliz murder. “They will stick the blade and hilt into us, so long as the administration of justice remains paralyzed.”