Los Angeles

Los Angeles. El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles was founded in 1781 at Yanga, a Tongva Indian village along the Pacific coast in present‐day California. Decades of Mexican rule gave way after the Mexican War (1848) to U.S. conquest and settlement. After a relatively tranquil interval in the 1870s and 1880s came a period of frenzied real‐estate boosterism, accellerated by the rise of Hollywood. By the 1920s, Los Angeles’ population surpassed one million—90 percent of European origin, two‐thirds transplanted Midwesterners. The Depression of the 1930s roused social tensions that included the forced repatriation of Mexican aliens.

During World War II more newcomers arrived to work in the city's defense industries. The war stirred further ethnic tensions, including a 1942 outbreak of violence against Mexican youths. The postwar years brought a vast urban sprawl and a tangle of freeways, along with increasing ethnic and class divisions. Wealthy areas coexisted with black ghettos and Hispanic barrios. Indeed, from 1848 through the 1960s, most non‐Anglos, including Native Americans, Mexicans, Asian Americans, and African Americans, were marginalized as a subordinate labor force. By the 1990s, with more than three million inhabitants, Los Angeles was a global city with immigrants from 100 nations. Hispanics comprised 40 percent of the population, African Americans 14 percent, and Asian/Pacific islanders 10 percent.

“Los Angeles” has always been in part a media creation. Health‐seekers and journalists celebrated it in the 1870s and 1880s as the Garden City; the Chamber of Commerce and real‐estate promoters of the 1920s called it the All‐American Pacific Metropolis. It was “Hollywoodland” in the 1930s and “America's first Global City” in the 1980s and 1990s—an image reenforced when it hosted the 1984 Olympic Games. From Aimee Semple McPherson's Angelus Temple in the 1920s to Forest Lawn Cemetery and Disneyland more recently, Los Angeles has long been a tourist mecca.

Countless filmmakers and television producers also appropriated the city. The celebrated final scene of Casablanca (1942) was filmed at Los Angeles airport. The 1950s TV series Dragnet made the Los Angeles City Hall an icon as well‐known as London's Big Ben. In literature, the mystery writer Raymond Chandler exploited Los Angeles locales to a high camp perfection, Nathaniel West offered a nightmarish vision of rootless, rioting masses in The Day of the Locust (1939), and Evelyn Waugh concocted a hilarious send‐up of Forest Lawn cemetery in The Loved One (1965). World War II expatriates such as Thomas Mann and Igor Stravinsky, by contrast, generally ignored the city except as a source of Hollywood largess. Columnist Herb Caen articulated a San Francisco/New York view of Los Angeles as one big parking lot. Stung, Angelenos pointed to their art museums and institutions of higher learning, including UCLA and the University of Southern California.

Rioting in the black district of Watts in 1965 burned through the media hype to reveal a divided city undergoing wrenching sociolcultural change. The election of Tom Bradley as the city's first black mayor in 1973 underscored the changes. The 1992 rioting that followed the brutal beating of a black motorist, Rodney King, and the acquittal of the white policemen responsible, made clear that the social tensions remained potent. But Los Angeles in the 1990s overcame a severe economic recession (related to the collapse of an inflated real estate market and to post‐Cold War cuts in the defense industry). With the economy booming and the city growing ever more diverse, Los Angeles seemed poised to reinvent itself once again.
See alsoDisney, Walt; Film; Hispanic Americans; Riots, Urban; Suburbanization; Urbanization; World War II: Domestic Effects.

Bibliography

Robert M. Fogelson , The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930, 2d ed., 1990.
Leonard Pitt and and Dale Pitt , Los Angeles A to Z: An Encyclopedia of the City and County, 1997.

Antonio Rios‐Bustamante