Tongva: The People PCH Was Built Through

Before this road existed, before the Spanish renamed the coastline, before the missions and the ranchos and the subdivisions, there were the Tongva. Their territory covered the entire Los Angeles Basin, from the mountains to the sea, every mile of this coastline from Malibu to the South Bay and beyond, for thousands of years before Spanish colonization began in seventeen sixty-nine.

They called one of their most sacred freshwater sites Kuruvungna. The name means a place where we are in the sun. The springs are still there. They are on the campus of University High School, in West Los Angeles, about two miles east of here.

The name Malibu is a Spanish approximation of a Tongva village name. Topanga is Tongva. Cahuenga is Tongva. The landscape you are moving through carries their language in its geography whether or not anyone reading the road signs knows it.

In nineteen ninety-four, the state of California formally recognized the Gabrielino-Tongva as the aboriginal tribe of the Los Angeles Basin. Federal recognition is a different matter, governed by a different process, with different consequences for land rights, cultural preservation funding, and tribal sovereignty. As of twenty twenty-six, the Gabrieleno-Tongva Tribe remains without federal recognition, making them one of the largest unrecognized Indigenous groups in California. Their sacred springs are on a school campus. Their territory became the most expensive real estate market in the Western Hemisphere.

They are still here. That fact is not incidental. It is the most important thing about the history of this corridor.