Mission San Gabriel: The Labor Engine of Early Los Angeles

Mission San Gabriel Arcángel was founded in seventeen seventy-one, nine miles east of the Los Angeles River, on land belonging to the Tongva people. It was the fourth California mission, established by Franciscan padres with a military escort. Within years, the mission system was systematically bringing Tongva people into the neophyte community through baptism, a legal status that bound them to mission labor.

The Tongva built the mission's adobe walls. They tended its vineyards and managed its cattle. They operated the irrigation system that made large-scale agriculture possible in a landscape that received almost no summer rain. By the early nineteenth century, Mission San Gabriel had become one of the wealthiest of the California missions, controlling hundreds of thousands of acres. The historians who have examined the neophyte labor structure have characterized it as a form of coerced servitude: those who left were classified as deserters and returned by soldiers.

The pueblo of Los Angeles, founded in seventeen eighty-one to the west, depended on Mission San Gabriel's agricultural surplus from its first year. The city was downstream from the mission in every sense.

The Tongva population in the Los Angeles Basin declined catastrophically in the fifty years following Spanish contact, from disease and from the conditions of mission life. The Gabrieleño-Tongva Tribe remains without federal recognition as of today.