La Cañada’s ‘Mexican Quarter’

From the 1880s through the ’20s, La Cañada had a neighborhood of poor laborers, mostly people of color. Most people don’t realize that La Cañada, now one of the highest income suburbs of Los Angeles, started out as a largely rural and working-class community. It was mostly small farms and ranches and as such had a need for cheap labor. The labor force was made up of a wide variety of races and ethnicities: Spanish-speaking Californios (descendants of the original Spanish settlers), Native Americans, immigrants from Mexico, African Americans, plus a wide variety of immigrants from Asia and Europe. But to the Anglo ranchers of La Cañada this cheap labor force was simply and wrongly lumped under the broad term of “Mexicans.”

The life of these laborers was hard and brutal. The economics of American rule kept them in degradation and poverty. Their status excluded them from any other jobs. The Anglo population generally looked down on them. They worked 16-hour days in the hot sun, and lived in shacks and hovels. From the 1880s until the Great Depression there was a sizable population of these poor laborers in La Cañada. Their stories are for the most part lost to us today, save for a few news accounts of their crimes and one or two oral histories that describe them. These are invariably in unfavorable terms, reflecting the prejudices and ignorance of that era. Please bear with me.

The 1893 Los Angeles Herald carries two examples of crimes attributed to the laborers in La Cañada. The first details a shooting by one of the laborers who was drunk. He and another man were drinking wine at Tom Hall’s winery, which was located in what is today the upper Alta Canyada neighborhood. A 17-year-old boy Mitchell Pettit passed by the two men. Words were exchanged and one of the drunk laborers raised a shotgun and fired both barrels into the boy’s face. As it was birdshot, the boy was severely injured, but not killed.

In another case, the sheriff was summoned to La Cañada because of a knife fight between three men. One of the men was badly cut up, and was judged the victim of the other two. The results of the trial were reported under the headline of “A Mexican Row.” When the victim declined to testify against his attackers, the newspaper declared that he was “naturally too stupid to do so.” The paper finished by proclaiming, “The people of La Cañada complain of a crowd of Mexicans and Indians who hang around camping in huts and tents.” In other words, they were complaining about their own labor force.

Another insulting account of La Cañada’s “Mexican Quarter” comes from an oral history from one of the pioneers of La Cañada, speaking about that community in the 1920s. His words reflect the prejudices of that era.

“They did all kinds of manual labor. There was quite a group of them living here at that time. After we got here they were pretty well concentrated just south of Huntington Iron Works, from Union Street to Alta Canyada Road.” (This would have been the area just below Magpie’s Grill, an area largely taken by the 210 Freeway.)

“In the early ’20s there must have been 20 or 30 families in there. The community was really quite concerned about it because they didn’t try to keep their places looking like anything. They didn’t even care if the house leaks on them or not, I guess. That situation was quite bad in the ’20s. We thought it was bad with all those Mexicans there, although they didn’t hurt anyone really. They had a lot of fights among themselves. They’d get drunk and knife each other up and all that sort of thing. But they stayed to themselves and didn’t cause any trouble in the community. But anyway, they gradually drifted away.”

With the hard times of the Depression, this mixed ethnic work force left the valley, and the freeway construction erased any trace of that lost and forgotten community.