The Forty-Four Founders: LA Before the Myth

Stand at Olvera Street today and you will see archways, striped awnings, craft stalls, and the architecture of a Spanish Colonial plaza. None of that existed here before nineteen twenty-six, when a civic reformer named Christine Sterling launched a campaign to rescue the crumbling Avila Adobe and turn the block beside it into a tourist experience. Sterling did save the adobe. What she also did was install a fantasy over the actual history of who founded this city and what they looked like.

On September fourth, seventeen eighty-one, forty-four settlers recruited by the Spanish colonial government from the provinces of Sonora and Sinaloa established the Pueblo of Los Angeles. Spanish colonial racial records documented the founding party's ancestry with the classification precision of the era. Historians working from those records have established that roughly half the founders were of Indigenous ancestry, roughly a quarter were of African descent, and most of the remainder were of mixed Spanish and mestizo ancestry. Two of the forty-four were classified as Spaniard.

The city's founding was multiracial by design. The Spanish colonial government was building outposts; they recruited whoever they could get.

Over the following two centuries, that founding was systematically erased. The American period constructed a mythology of Spanish grandeur: the Olvera Street reconstruction, the Mission Revival architecture, the brochures advertising sunny California. The African and Indigenous ancestry of the people who actually built the first pueblo was not part of the brand.

The Avila Adobe at the end of this block, built around eighteen eighteen, is the oldest surviving structure in Los Angeles. It is the nearest physical connection to the city that was actually here, before the city decided what story it wanted to tell about itself.