Eternity Street Page 7
The officers and sergeants among the Mexican soldiers achieved their positions of leadership by their martial charisma, their demonstration of fighting skill and valor. The same could be said of the culture of rancheros and vaqueros. Any gathering of them might become an occasion for riding or roping competitions. An hombre real was a man who refused to be dominated, who stood up for himself, who responded to the least sign of disrespect with an immediate counterstroke. To gain the esteem of their men, rancheros had to be skilled in the practice of violence and fearless in the face of opponents.
SECULARIZATION CHANGED THE RULES. Rancheros replaced missionaries as the principal suppliers of hides and tallow to foreign traders, most of them Americans. Hide broker Alfred Robinson of New England, representing the Boston trading firm of Bryant & Sturgis, quickly mastered the new game. Missionaries purchased basic commodities, but rancheros wanted fancy goods—Chinese silks, Brussels carpets, East Indian spices—things that distinguished them from the hoi polloi. Robinson’s business took off. “The country has entirely altered and the taste of the people has become more refined,” he informed his employers in 1835. “The richer the goods & finer, the more readily they sell.” Rich textiles and fancy clothing were the things most prized. “He or she that can make the greatest show in dress or fashion is noted as the gentleman or lady. We have dandies here as well as at home.”
American merchants dominated retail trade just as they controlled foreign commerce—the two went hand in hand. Trading vessels from the United States brought young men in search of their fortunes to southern California. Men like Jonathan Temple, a native of Massachusetts, who opened the pueblo’s first general merchandise store in the late 1820s, stocking his shelves with goods obtained through connections developed over several years in the Hawaiian sandalwood trade. Temple quickly adapted to life in Los Angeles, converting to Catholicism, applying for naturalization, and eventually marrying María Rafaela Cota, a cousin of José Domingo Féliz. Temple devoted himself to his business, earning a reputation, as Los Angeles merchant Harris Newmark put it, “as one of the wealthiest, yet one of the stingiest men in all California.”
Temple’s most formidable competitor was fellow Yankee Abel Stearns. Orphaned at an early age, Stearns went to sea, rising from cabin boy to master of his own schooner. After several years of itinerant trading in Mexico, he was drawn to California by secularization and its economic opportunities. Purchasing a lot south of the Plaza, he opened a store that catered to the whims of ranchero families. Stearns was a shrewd trader, famous for driving a hard bargain. In 1835 he got into a fight with a dissatisfied customer, a saloon keeper from Kentucky, who complained that Stearns had sold him a barrel of sour wine. The angry man slashed Stearns with a Bowie knife, leaving him with a badly scarred face and a permanent speech impediment. Known thereafter as cara de caballo, or horse face, Stearns shrugged it off, remaining sociable and gregarious, generous with his friends, and deeply engaged in local politics. He seized on every opportunity to expand his business. At San Pedro, the undeveloped harbor twenty-five miles south of the pueblo, he purchased an abandoned warehouse and within a few years made himself into the dominant commercial middleman in southern California. “I firmly believe that the future of the pueblo is toward the sea,” Stearns declared. “Blessed with a genial climate and surrounded by one of the most productive soils in the world, it will in the future be a place of great importance. But we must prepare a means of exporting our products, in order that we may get the benefit of our natural advantage.”
The man who exploited that advantage most effectively was French immigrant Jean Louis Vignes. A cooper and distiller from Bordeaux, Vignes spent several years running a distillery in Hawaii before teetotaling Protestant missionaries chased him off the islands. In the early 1830s he relocated to Los Angeles, where he purchased an old vineyard, imported cuttings and skilled vineyardists from his native France, and dedicated himself to the production of quality wines. Vignes was the first Los Angeles grower to raise oranges commercially, transplanting cuttings from abandoned groves at Mission San Gabriel. Like Stearns, he was a visionary. “With my knowledge of vine and orange cultivation, I foresee that these two are to have a great future,” Vignes told a friend. “This is just the place to grow them to perfection.”
If the mild climate was a crucial asset, cheap labor was even more important. With secularization, hundreds of emancipados from nearby missions found their way to Los Angeles, increasing the Indian population of the pueblo by 50 percent between 1836 and 1844. A surplus of workers kept wages low. Cheap labor allowed Vignes to develop more land and expand his operations, and within a few years he counted over forty thousand vines in cultivation and several vintages aging in his cellars. He employed a regular crew of skilled French vineyardists, and an army of temporary Indian workers for the harvest and the pressing. Other growers followed his lead. The ayuntamiento cooperated by authorizing an expansion of the zanja irrigation system, while owners put Indians to work clearing away the remaining timber along the river, making way for the expansion of production. By 1836 dozens of operations were producing for the local market, and large producers like Vignes were shipping casks of wine abroad. Soon trade was booming.
LIKE THE RANCHEROS, Temple, Stearns, and Vignes represented the new ruling order. Yet they sought inclusion in the traditional elite culture of California. Vignes enclosed his vineyard with imposing adobe walls, broken by a wide gateway that opened onto a vine-covered arbor, leading past his cellars to the river beyond. He named his estate El Aliso, in honor of a towering alder or sycamore that shaded his wine cellars. Years earlier the great tree had marked the center of the ranchería of Yang-na. Less than a mile away, just south of the Plaza, Jonathan Temple built a townhouse with a sala large enough to accommodate the assembly of fifty-five vigilantes in 1836. Nearby was el palacio, the Stearns mansion, renowned as the finest dwelling in all of California. Rancheros such as José Antonio Carrillo and Pío Pico also built fine townhouses near the Plaza during those years. But successful extranjeros (foreigners) turned the trick by purchasing ranchos of their own, for in Mexican California, the highest social position was reserved for the owners of the great landed estates with grazing cattle on a thousand hills. Stearns bought Rancho Los Alamitos and Temple acquired Rancho Los Cerritos, twin estates fronting the south-facing Pacific coast in what is today the city of Long Beach, making themselves into rancheros as well as capitalistas.
Many an extranjero was seduced by Californian joie de vivre. Dancing was part of nearly every social occasion. If the ranchero’s house was too small to accommodate a crowd, he might order his workers to raise a ramada, or arbor, enclosed on three sides. Women seated themselves around the perimeter while the men, many on horseback, clustered at the entrance. Once the small musical ensemble—guitar, violin, and perhaps harp—began to play, the tecolero, or master of ceremonies, would approach a young señorita and with a clap of his hands invite her to dance. If she accepted, she would stand, lift her petticoat or gown slightly to reveal feet and ankles, and swaying in time to the music take two or three turns about the arbor to the applause of spectators. When the tecolero announced the contradanza, men descended from their saddles, took off their spurs, and entered the arbor, hats in hand. Couples formed a line in order of social position, rancheros, elders, and honored guests in front, vaqueros and their partners to the rear, and when the music began—a slow and dignified tempo in 3/4 time—the tecolero would call out the figures and turns. The dance ending, the men escorted the women back to their seats and returned to their horses. According to Horace Bell, who resided in Los Angeles for more than half a century, “the women excelled in dancing to as striking a degree as did the men in horsemanship.”
The traditional California fandango was open to all classes, Indians excepted. But in the 1830s the nouveaux riches began holding exclusive balls of their own. One of the first of those occasions in Los Angeles was the 1834 reception hosted by José Antonio Carrillo at
his townhouse on the Plaza, celebrating the marriage of his brother-in-law Pío Pico to María Ignacia Alvarado, a kinswoman of Juan Bautista Alvarado. Governor Figueroa served as Pico’s best man. “As soon as the bridal pair arrived,” one participant recalled, “the fun commenced, which consisted of dancing, music, singing, and feasting. The bride was dressed magnificently. During the first evening of the fiesta she changed her dress at least three times. Her dresses were of the finest silk, beautifully made. . . . The groom was dressed in knee pants of velvet, trimmed with gold lace; his coat was also of velvet and gold.” The party went on for eight days and became legendary as the single most sumptuous and spectacular affair in the history of Mexican California. In effect, the event announced the arrival of a new ruling order.
The increasing wealth and status of the few sometimes roused the jealousy of the many. Angelenos typically celebrated Mexican independence day—el diecieséis de Septiembre, the sixteenth of September—with a public celebration on the Plaza on the eve of the holiday, an occasion that included patriotic speeches, fireworks, and dancing, with a recitation at midnight of el grito de Dolores, the legendary shout said to have commenced the Mexican independence struggle from Spain in 1810. Independence day was a holiday intended for all the people. So when Abel Stearns invited prominent Angelenos to a private independence eve celebration at his townhouse in 1840, ordinary residents were deeply offended. A group of inebriated celebrants from the festivities on the Plaza marched on el palacio, throwing stones and breaking windows, “angry at being treated with such contempt,” in the words of one observer.
THE MOST COMMON source of disorder in the pueblo was the hundreds of Indians who came to Los Angeles for work. There were always more emancipados than there were jobs, which kept wages low and resentment high. Indian men and women alike worked the vineyards and groves or took jobs as domestic servants in the households of gente de razón. Indians in Los Angeles, president of the missions Narcisco Durán reported to Governor Figueroa, “live far more wretched and oppressed lives than those in the missions. There is not one who has a garden of his own, or a yoke of oxen, a horse, or a house fit for a rational being.”
On Saturday evening, to celebrate the end of the workweek, large crowds of emancipados gathered at the cantinas and dives clustered along the short street known as Calle de los Negros, southeast of the Plaza. Fueled by aguardiente—cheap, rotgut brandy—the raucous partying continued through the night and into the next morning. Public drunkenness led to brawling that frequently turned lethal, provoking an outcry from gente de razón. But rather than restrict the sale of alcohol—a profitable business for vineyardists and saloonkeepers, and the principal source of municipal tax revenue—the ayuntamiento authorized the roundup of drunken Indians, who were herded into an open corral to sleep it off. On Monday morning the offenders were summarily fined, with those unable to pay sentenced to forced labor, repairing the zanjas or sweeping the streets.
Indian disorder and violence—reflecting the broken promise of secularization—provoked some Angelenos to call for a pueblo without any Indians at all. But this was impossible, since vineyardists and other employers relied almost exclusively on their labor. Instead, the ayuntamiento instituted a policy of residential separation, setting off an area near the vineyards where all Indians were required to live. Ranchería de poblanos, as the barrio was known, soon became the principal vice district, a center of prostitution and gambling, and a favorite resort of dissolute Angelenos. In response to continuing complaints, the regidores instituted a more comprehensive policy of de jure segregation, ruling, for example, that “dirty and filthy” Indians be confined to the back rows of the Plaza church during mass and that the Indian dead be buried in an isolated section of the new graveyard opened at the terminus of Calle de Eternidad, in the rolling hills north of the pueblo. Finally, in 1845, the ayuntamiento voted to require the relocation of all native households across the Río Porciúncula to a place that became known as el pueblito. Vineyardists purchased the site of the Indians’ former barrio and converted it to the production of more grapes, wine, and aguardiente.
None of these measures had any significant effect in reducing emancipado violence. The records of the alcalde’s office document an accelerating pace of Indian assaults, rapes, and homicides. Over the fifteen years from 1830 to 1845 at least twenty-five Indians were murdered in the Los Angeles district, most of them by Indian perpetrators. Many of those crimes took place in the vicinity of Calle de los Negros, a short walk across the Plaza from the church. “The sign of Indian murder,” one observer wrote, was “heads mashed beyond recognition.” Death-dealing blows to the head—delivered in the belief that this would drive the spirit from the physical body—was the forensic hallmark of Indian assault. José Domingo Féliz was the victim of a native Californio, not an Indian. But his mutilated head and face were dramatic evidence that the gente de razón had been infected by the plague of Indian violence.
WITH CALIFORNIA SOCIETY in the midst of rapid change, the code of honor took on even more significance. The deadly struggle between Gervasio Alipás and José Domingo Féliz came as no surprise to anyone. It was a violent contest for honor, a zero-sum game between two men over a woman. Ni modo, what can be done? Alipás was an assassin and he deserved to die. No, what made the Féliz case extraordinary was the role played by Don Domingo’s wife, that “abominable monster,” in Victor Prudon’s florid prose, “who cruelly destroyed her unfortunate husband that she might give herself over to her immoral passions.” When wives murder their husbands, men take notice. The execution of María del Rosario Villa could not await the lengthy process of law. Honor demanded her immediate death.
Matters of gender and honor came up frequently in Mexican Los Angeles. Women were victims in a fifth of all the cases of criminal violence considered by the alcalde. In 1842 María Ramona Véjar appeared before Alcalde Manuel Domínguez to report frequent attacks by her husband, Tomás Urquides. “He has hit me so many times with a reata or whatever else he can find,” she testified, “that I can not recall the exact number.” Summoned to explain his conduct, Urquides admitted beating his wife, but argued he did so only “when she gives me cause.” An honorable man ought to temper his passion, but what he did in his own house to his own wife was his own business.
That point was made forcefully in the case of Enrique Sepúlveda, charged in 1835 with the murder of Juan Jenkins, an English extranjero who operated a carpenter’s shop in the pueblo. The altercation began when María Pascuala García, Jenkins’s twenty-three-year-old wife, appeared on the veranda of the Sepúlveda house seeking refuge. Her face was bruised and bloodied, the result of a severe beating she said had been delivered by her husband. Sepúlveda, a prominent but quarrelsome man whose family owned Rancho de los Palos Verdes, accompanied the young woman back to her home and confronted Jenkins, who told Sepúlveda to mind his own business. The confrontation threatened to turn violent, but neighbors separated the men and Sepúlveda returned to his casa. A short time later Jenkins appeared at his door, brandishing a knife. Sepúlveda knocked the weapon from his hand, but Jenkins grabbed a club and smashed his opponent in the head. Reeling from the blow, Sepúlveda drew a short sword and plunged it into Jenkins’s belly. He died after several hours of agony. Sepúlveda argued he had acted in self-defense, but after a lengthy trial Alcalde Francisco Javier Alvarado found him guilty of manslaughter and sentenced him to five years in prison. By intervening in what was “un asunto de su familia” (a family matter), Alvarado ruled, Sepúlveda had become the aggressor.
Patriarchal authority was founded on the control of women. On this, all men agreed. No one questioned the extralegal execution of María del Rosario Villa, murderess and adulteress. When Alcalde Requena commenced an investigation of “los linchamientos,” the men of the junta stood together in solidarity. If any were guilty, they insisted, all of them were. Requena’s report, which he submitted to the territorial authorities in early May 1836, consisted of little more than a
transcription of the junta’s petition, accompanied by the names of the men who signed it.
GOVERNOR FIGUEROA died unexpectedly in the fall of 1835. Californios deeply mourned his passing, for he had championed the secularization policies they favored. They felt quite differently about his successor, Colonel Mariano Chico, who arrived in California only a few days after the vigilante executions in Los Angeles. Governor Chico was a committed militarist with an authoritarian personality, cut in the mold of Manuel Victoria, whom he claimed as a mentor. “He was a man of very bad temper,” one Californio wrote, “and he arrived like someone who comes to conquer a lawless country.” Reading Alcalde Requena’s report on the Los Angeles vigilantes, Chico was outraged. Those “scandalous events,” he declared, were signs of anarchy and treason. At that same moment, in the Mexican province of Texas, American settlers and Spanish-speaking Tejanos were rising in revolt against the central government in Mexico City, and those unfolding events colored Chico’s thinking. Usurping state authority to impose summary punishment, he believed, was but a pretext for a movement by “anarchical spirits” to “overthrow the government.” On his orders, Lieutenant Colonel Nicolás Gutiérrez, the highest-ranking military officer in California, arrested the leaders of the junta and clamped them in irons, and when Chico arrived in the pueblo a few weeks later, he threatened them with banishment or worse. He even railed at Alcalde Requena, accusing him of violating his sworn duty to protect the laws. But Chico’s thundering only consolidated Angeleno support for the vigilantes and encouraged their growing contempt for the government. Finally realizing that virtually all the residents of the pueblo backed the junta, the governor beat a quick retreat and pardoned the vigilante leaders. The incident proved a template for his short term as governor. By July 1836, after only four months in office, his pattern of furious attack and humble retreat had so thoroughly alienated the legislature, it demanded his resignation. Governor Chico followed Victoria’s example and returned to Mexico, promising to return with an armed force to punish the unruly Californios. But he never did.