A Just Los Angeles (Part 1)

I was born on the East Coast, but I spent most of my life in San Francisco. I put a lot of effort into understanding the place, both its general history and its Jewish history. When I came to Los Angeles, I refocused that effort into understanding a new city. San Franciscans have a harsh and condescending attitude towards Los Angeles which is not mirrored in the feeling that Angelenos have towards San Francisco. To them, San Francisco is a fun little playground, a more temperate alternative to a weekend in Vegas. There does seem to be a mutual cultural incommensurability. There is a way that San Francisco plays at being a place of the old world that Los Angeles scorns. However, the differences between the two cities today mask the commonalities in the way that the two cities grew.

Both Los Angeles and San Francisco stand on Native American landholdings which were taken from them by the Spanish Friars with the aid of Spanish soldiers, or by Spanish civil authorities with the aid of Spanish soldiers. Spanish colonial claims, on what they referred to as Alta California, go back to the expedition of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo in 1542, but there was little interest in the territory until until the appearance of Russian fur traders in the 1700s, and as a result of changing relations between European powers at the end of the Seven Years War.

The effort to create a governing structure that could defend Spanish colonial claims “was made through a combination of military forts (presidios) and mission churches overseen by Franciscan fathers led by Junípero Serra. In 1769, the first parties set north from Baja California, and the line of Spanish settlement along the coast was inaugurated when soldiers and priests established a presidio and mission church at San Diego. By the end of the Spanish colonial period, Alta California had three more presidios (at Monterey, San Francisco, and Santa Barbara) and no fewer than twenty-one missions. In addition to the missions, where the Franciscans ministered to local converts, and the military presidios, small towns or pueblos sprang up. The earliest of these were associated with the missions and presidios, but in 1777 an independent civil pueblo was created at San Jose, and others followed. The pueblos tried to attract settlers with land grants and other inducements and were governed by an alcalde (a combination of a judge and a mayor) assisted by a council called the ayuntamiento.” (https://www.loc.gov/collections/california-first-person-narratives/articles-and-essays/early-california-history/spanish-california).

The process began with the creation of the Mission system under Father Junipero Serra. Serra lobbied for the job. His goal, quite separate from that of the Spanish crown, was to baptize as many of the indigenous population as he could. He was an extreme religious conservative in an era when the enlightenment was dawning. He was building the Missions and enslaving the native population at the same time as the American and French revolutions were taking place. The native population was drawn into the Missions by gifts and then by force. Ultimately, the Missions attracted more of the native population where their village populations had been fatally destabilized. Also, as their traditional food supply had been cut off due to the environmental destruction of their traditional food sources by the large animal herds belonging to the Missions.

The native peoples in the Missions died at extraordinary rates due to exposure to European diseases, the brutality of their servitude, their confinement and profound despair. The friars had to continually expand the range of territory from which they sought to dragoon native “neophytes.” Serra viewed the deaths of these neophytes as positive outcomes because death hastened their redemption in the next life, a perverse theological rationalization for his own cruelty.

There was resistance to the Mission as well as to Serra and his successors. There were some priests and friars who were opposed to the harsh regime of corporal punishment and imprisonment that was ubiquitous. There were those who actually wanted and at times tried to teach the neophytes to speak and read Spanish.

The development of the Pueblos were attempts by the Spanish crown, and later the Mexican state, to establish more productive models for the development of Alta California. Sadly, the friars were able to resist all efforts to create an economy that was based on something other than the extractive, and arguably genocidal, use of the native population as a slave labor force.

After Mexico gained its independence, the authority of the Missions over the natives was ended and status of the missions was downgraded. The friars were no longer permitted to restrain the neophytes and the missions were rapidly depopulated. Here the histories of Los Angeles and San Francisco begin to divide. San Francisco occupies the end of a peninsula and is close to the north end of the chain of Missions. The local Yelamu band of the Ohlones was close to extinction by the time that the Mission system ended. There was no reason for other native groups to come into the upper San Francisco peninsula.

The Tongva village of Yaangva was the space where El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula was established and the city of Los Angeles grew from. The geography of Tongva and other Los Angeles Basin tribes was centered on a sacred tree that grew within Yaangva. Thus, there was a broader history within the Gabrielino/Tongva, the Fernandeño/ Tataviam peoples of identification with that specific location.

In the first years of American control the presence of Native Americans was not frequently noted in San Francisco. In Los Angeles the presence of Natives Americans was a regular aspect of daily life. San Francisco grew quickly in that period. The population of the Yelamu in what became San Francisco is estimated to have been about 1600 when Mission Dolores was established. That healthy population number would have been overwhelmed by the inrush that occurred in 1849. The native population was still much more significant in the Los Angeles Basin in 1849 than it had been in San Francisco in the 1700s.

The first municipal building in San Francisco was the office of the Alcalde (Mayor) which was located at the edge of Portsmouth Square. The first municipal building in Los Angeles was a jail, as Kelly Lytle Hernandez points out in “City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965.” The primary use of that jail was to gather Natives over the course of the week so that their services as slave labor could be sold off at auction weekly (with terms of service being a week) on the steps of the jail. The jail itself was a dark, dank and filthy space where communicable illnesses were accumulated and spread through out the local native population, both incarcerated and free. This was a return of the sort of eliminationist activity that occurred under the Mission system.

Both Los Angeles and San Francisco began their evolution towards becoming modern cities with the subjugation of the native populations around them. Both started their history as parts of the United States with widespread violence and disorder, but the leaders of the two cities focused on different things. San Francisco’s leadership valued broad economic development and relied on promotion to draw the labor that was needed to allow it to grow. Los Angeles developed more slowly, still tied primarily to agriculture and the sourcing of local labor through exploitation and out-right slavery.

The degree to which San Francisco is a just society is a discussion that has a different shape than the same discussion for Los Angeles. San Francisco is just and unjust largely within the ways we judge a modern capitalist entity. Los Angeles needs to be judged on issues of race and ethnic prejudice, physical displacement and involuntary population controls which impinge acutely on any discussion of the distribution of economic benefits.

The primary injustice of San Francisco has evolved into soul-crushing economic disparities that go without genuine commitment to remedy. It is a small city that has grown so wealthy that there is no excuse for it to fail to provide quality housing, a guaranteed minimum income and quality healthcare to all of its residents. The suffering of the poor and disenfranchised in San Francisco is both solvable and unforgivable.

Los Angeles is burdened with a weak moral heritage. It has a continuous history of inter-racial violence, exploitation and environmental injustice. It has a history of crime and the criminalization of resistance to oppression. The sense that Justice and the institutions that administer Justice in Los Angeles are corrupt is hard-wired into local self-understanding. When I speak about the project of creating a Just City I am speaking about a responsibility that falls on us as Jews, following the arguments made from Talmudic texts by Rabbi Aryeh Cohen in his book, “Justice in the City: An Argument from the Sources of Rabbinic Judaism.” It has taken me some time to adjust my thinking to suit the local situation as it exists in Los Angeles. What I have intended to do today is to identify a significant foundational problem in creating a Just City here. It is my belief that, to be effective, we need to recognize root causes of the problems we would like to fix. That said, study without practice has little value.