A Just Los Angeles (Part 2)
Last week I wrote about the fate of Native Americans who, before the arrival of Europeans, inhabited the area that has become Downtown Los Angeles. The traces of those lives are hard to find along our paved streets and tall buildings. What I wrote didn't impress everyone. What impact does any of that have to do with Los Angeles today? This question brought to mind a quote from William Faulkner,
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.”
The past is never dead. It’s not even past. The quote is from the novel Requiem for a Nun, which was published in 1951. It is the history of one night’s tragedy expanding over time into a trail of shame, regret and death. Maimonides in his Hilkhot Teshuvah teaches that we cannot make full Teshuvah until we find ourselves in the same situation and choose not to make the same mistake. When my teacher, Rabbi Alan Lew, was teaching this one of the people at the table questioned this. “When will we ever come back to the exact place again?” and Rabbi Lew replied, “We ALWAYS come back to that place.”
When one comes to a new place one can try to keep oneself separate and try to remain of one’s place of origin, or one can try to make oneself of that place. It may not be unfair to see me as one of those who separate themselves, but if so, I am an odd exile, having spent the time I have been here reading extensively about the history of the place. Unlike Randy Newman, I don’t love LA, but I would like to. I didn't really intend to be here, but it looks more and more like I’ll be here for the rest of my life. My own Teshuvah is wrapped up in finding a path for LA as a body to make its own Teshuvah, to reach towards new ways of being that raise up those who have been pushed down to the bottom. LA is a place where people come to redefine themselves. So perhaps I can redefine myself by helping LA to redefine itself.
The old world can look down on the US for its lack of history, but the real difference between LA and much of the rest of the US is the enormous will and desire the city has to forget. For so many Angelenos, history starts with their arrival. For those who trace their family roots in LA further back than themselves, history begins with the first appearance of their family on the scene. I rarely meet someone who is from Old Los Angeles though surely such people do exist. Back east Old Money is a thing. The closest LA seems to come to that is nepo-babies.
And yet, knowingly or unknowingly both those who have been in LA for sometime and those who are newly arrived are the heirs to the products of the history that formed LA. Everyone wants to see a solution to the homeless problem and everyone has their own ideas about how to resolve the situation. But it is a situation with a long history. Knowing that history is the first step in developing a solution that could actually resolve it, a situation that builds from the roots.
The Oldest Los Angeles we can name is Yaanga, a Tongva village in the area known to its inhabitants as Tovaangar. The Tongva claim to the place is their creation story. Creation stories aren’t history, but they are a simple statement, “We neither know nor can we imagine being any other place but here.” The Tongva had an “old world” mindset about this place.
When I was writing last week much of the emotion and ideology was influenced by the book, “A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions,” by Elias Castillo. Castillo wrote the books as part of the efforts of the unrecognized tribes in California to gain recognition from the US government. As Valentin Lopez, Chair of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band of the Costanoan/Ohlone Indians says in the introduction,”A Cross of Thorns offers a comprehensive look into the thinking of the mission system’s Franciscan friars and vividly describes their scant regard for the Indians’traditions and culture. We look forward to the day when the Roman Catholic Church, the state of California,and the Franciscans tell the true story of the missions.”
Castillo’s purpose was advocacy. His argument was that the information that the US government required of the tribes to achieve recognition was lost due to the destruction of their culture by the Franciscans in the Mission era. The bias in his writing is that he seeks to indict the Mission system as the sole cause of the destruction of Indian culture.
The larger place of the Indians in future California within the indigenous world of the American West and Mexico is completely outside of his range of vision. He makes the Mission system Californa’s original sin. In this he underplays the problems that began with the first encounters with Europeans and the cultural change in native lands that began earlier on as knowledge of Europeans, both their culture and their trade goods, advanced ahead of them. He ignores the effect of the spread of disease that occurred before the arrival of the Europeans that came through native trading routes along the Colorado river.
Another bias in his writing is that he centers the actions of the friars rather than the native tribes. Damon B. Akins and William J. Bauer Jr. in “We Are the Land: A History of Native California,” center native experience. They point out the disease had already caused population change and resettlement of some tribes before 1767 when the friars arrived. Some villages had already been abandoned. The appearance of horses as a trade commodity caused shifts in power and settlement among the tribes in the Colorado river area to the east of California and those shifts affected California tribes. So, the process of change brought on by the European settlement of America began well before the establishment of the Missions. What changed was the degree to which the native tribes interacted and were directly affected by Europeans.
“We Are the Land,” is much better at explaining the ways that the native people resisted cultural destruction within the Missions and the way that they accepted parts of Catholicism that fit into their own religious traditions. “Crown of Thorns,” deals with the decline of the Missions during the early period of Mexican revolution and independence, but it does not explain the degree of chaos that existed in the Californio period. Native tribes were trying to recover themselves and some groups relied heavily on horse thievery. It was a period of great uncertainty. Alliances among different groups were constantly shifting. “Crown of Thorns,” portrays the natives who abandoned the Missions in this period as lacking in technical skills and literacy. This was less true than Castillo claimed.
Even less is said about the early American period. 1846-1873. The Franciscans created a genocide through religious arrogance, technical backwardness, and willful ignorance of public health and hygiene. Their goal was cultural genocide rather that physical genocide. That they succeeded in physical genocide was actually perceived as an inconvenience by them. This was not true in the early American period. The 150,000 surviving natives were the subject of a legally sponsored genocide that left a remaining population of only 30,000. This second genocide nearly matches the scale of the Holocaust. The efforts to erase both the native population and their memory continued in other ways. Nevertheless, native resistance has continued throughout this time.
We can look at the fate of the natives of this place as a story that is somehow walled off from the experience of others in Los Angeles subsequent history, but the endurance of the civic behaviors that have harmed the natives has made them available as practices to be enacted on other groups that the local powers have had issues with. In “City of Inmates” Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965,” Kelly Lytle Hernandez shows how incarceration is one of the methods of social control that the powerful have used to exercise brutalizing control on those it feared and/or had targeted from labor exploitation or removal. However, the Mission era provided the foundation for the habitual practices endemic in Los Angeles of the expropriation of lands, the use of disease and health related practices to reduce populations, physical removal under force of law and environmental injustice as methods of social control and financial confiscation.
Within Los Angeles Jewish history, Jews have been the victims of these tactics and the beneficiaries of their use. We have been the victims and beneficiaries of Los Angeles’ will to forget. It is my hope that we take ourselves out of both cycles through the development of civic memory and resistance to some of our older, more unpleasant civic habits.
