This article analyzes the early records of Mission San Gabriel to conclude that the missionaries replaced native identities with new categories of gentile and neophyte , based on religious criteria, and blurred the racial-social distinctions brought by the colonizers from Mexico into one California frontier class, the gente de razón , based on their roles in colonization and their adherence to Catholicism. The consequences can be measured in the 1769 explorers’ depictions of Indigenous, in native resistance, and most clearly in the mission register of baptisms, confirmations, and marriages. Christian Indians from Baja California who participated in the colonial enterprise complicated the frontier class distinctions. The early practice at Mission San Gabriel became the model for later mission practice.

The 1870 Pico House luxury hotel on Los Angeles’s historic Plaza has always been associated with Pío Pico, the last governor of California in the Mexican Era. Based on historical evidence in the Archive of the city’s El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument and further research, archives manager Michael Henderson traces the proprietorship of the hotel from its first conception as a partnership between Pico and Antonio Cuyas, through successive management and legal cases to its eclipse and the deaths of its original proprietors in the 1890s.

The new world of the automobile was a male domain, but women in Los Angeles broke gender-based barriers when they drove in endurance runs and car races, used automobiles to mobilize for the “Votes for Women” amendment, organized car parades to overturn a no-parking ordinance, and influenced auto manufacturers to add new features for safety, comfort, and custom design. Although all the founders of the Automobile Club of Southern California were men, Miss Sybil Geary emerged as the dynamic leader of the club by expanding the organization’s membership, hiring women service representatives, launching programs to install informational road signage, and leading research and lobbying efforts to enact the first comprehensive regulatory regime for the automobile in the state of California in 1913.

During World War II, Japanese American scientists and engineers imprisoned at the Manzanar War Relocation camp were engaged in an experimental project to grow guayule and process it into latex, a needed war materiel. In this way, they contributed to the American war effort, despite their race-based incarceration. The guayule research project undermines the rationale for the wartime confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans. The laboratory at Manzanar partnered with universities, private industry, and government bureaucracy as an early instance of the military-industrial complex.

Because of its complexity and length this article is organized into two parts. Part I, which appeared in the previous issue of the Quarterly , traced attempts to improve rapid rail transit in Los Angeles from 1895 to 1925. This concluding installment traces the political, civic, and taxpayer response to the 1925 comprehensive regional rapid transit plan. The plan was eclipsed by a seemingly unrelated controversy about a union station for the steam railroads. Meanwhile, though frustrated in its plan for a crosstown subway, the rapid transit provider, the Pacific Electric Railway (PE), was not passive: it worked cooperatively with other public-sector and private-sector agencies to create viaducts that separated its trains from busy intersections, bought new rolling stock, and installed safety measures. The emerging multi-destinational, automobile-oriented city of the 1930s and 1940s led planners to include rail rapid transit in freeway medians, but the politically powerful State Division of Highways opposed it, as did various civic and commercial organizations and the Automobile Club of Southern California (ACSC). Sectional differences in how residents perceived their interests divided city council and state legislature support. PE’s management, now discouraged, gradually abandoned and finally sold its passenger service. Part II concludes with an examination of the PE’s financial condition in the 1920s in refutation of the often-made claim that the PE’s high debt and unprofitable financial account sheets precluded it from making capital investments.

Despite a federal resettlement policy of dispersing Vietnamese refugees entering the United States after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, refugees resisted and resettled elsewhere. Within the first decade of settlement, the largest concentration of the refugees had formed in the Los Angeles area. This article identifies a number of factors in the rise of Vietnamese communities in Los Angeles, its San Gabriel Valley suburbs, and adjoining Orange County.

Early in the twentieth century, Los Angeles’s regional interurban electric railway, the Pacific Electric (PE), developed serious operational problems because the PE had been assembled from separate railroads that hadn’t been designed to fit together, and because Los Angeles’s explosive population growth overtaxed its facilities. The PE wanted to speed its trains and unify its system with a crosstown subway, but in 1923 the Los Angeles City 1 Council blocked the PE’s plan and instead commissioned engineers and professional transit planners to devise comprehensive regional transit plans to be operated for the public good, not for private profit. These plans all focused on bringing lots of people downtown quickly, something irrelevant in a decentralizing city. Part I concludes with two seemingly propitious developments: the PE’s opening of its own mile-long but isolated Hollywood Subway, a compromise design but still impressive; and the unveiling of the most detailed and elaborate of the transit plans, as required by the new city charter. Part II, in the next issue, will describe why that comprehensive plan failed, then trace how political, economic, and demographic changes in the 1920s and 30s affected transit planning and why a plan to locate rail rapid transit in freeway medians failed. Part II will end with an examination of the PE’s financial condition as a refutation of a common explanation of the PE’s long decline.

This article proposes that a history-of-knowledge approach offers innovative ways to study the use of domestic infrastructure in the household. More specifically, the article investigates the role of knowledge about water fixtures, such as meters, taps, and toilets, in the history of progressive-era Los Angeles. Building on the rich literature about how Los Angeles obtained its water, this article shifts the focus to the relationship that everyday consumers had with their water and how technology mediated this relationship. While the article analyzes three major fields of knowledge about the use of infrastructure (knowledge about personal and public hygiene, about the maintenance and repair of fittings, and about responsible levels of water consumption), it foregrounds users’ agency in construing bodies of knowledge. Taken together, this article argues, first, that practical knowledge about water as a modern convenience was mutually developed by the utility’s publicity department, meter men, municipal health authorities, elected officials, newspaper editors, middle-class reformers, property owners, working-class immigrants, and female householders. Second, the article emphasizes the dynamics, contingency, and locality of this knowledge, which was linked to the stunning growth of Los Angeles between 1880 and 1930.

This article explores the 1960s welfare rights movement in Los Angeles as one example of social justice activism based on Black-Brown coalition building and solidarity across various social movements. Within the larger welfare rights movement, a fundamentally feminist cause, Escalante advocated for the specific cultural, linguistic, and legal needs of the Spanish-speaking community. Participating in Black-Brown solidarity for multiple social justice causes in Los Angeles and nationally, Alicia Escalante faced arrests and police violence, modeling and inspiring her children and others, then and now, to militant dignity work.