![]() ![]() In the ensuing years, many of Jackson's readers came to Sonoratown in search that Spanish fantasy past – never mind that most Sonoratown residents arrived after the American conquest. The publication of Helen Hunt Jackson's 1884 pastoral novel "Ramona" introduced Americans to a romantic reimagining of Southern California's history. In the late nineteenth century, even as white Angeleños scorned Sonoratown as a slum, tourists discovered it as a place to commune with Southern California's Spanish past. Cockfights were common, according to Newmark, and many saloons doubled as brothels. Among white Angeleños, meanwhile, the neighborhood developed a reputation as a rough part of town, where "every evening there was much indulgence in drinking, smoking and gambling," as Harris Newmark put it. Life in the house courts and crumbling adobes may not have been comfortable, but residents there preserved remnants of the city's original Latin American culture. Sonoratown became a vibrant if destitute Mexican community. ![]() Courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library Photograph Collection. In the distance, the mansion of retail magnate J.W. Men stand outside a Sonoratown saloon at Bellevue and Upper Main (now Spring), circa 1888. Many of the migrants moved into the adobes others built one-story shacks in adobes' backyards. In Los Angeles, the erstwhile miners settled in the area north of the city's old plaza, where native, Spanish-speaking Angeleños still occupied aging adobes dating from the city's Spanish and Mexican periods. ![]() (Despite the name, Sonorans were not the only denizens of the region's Sonoratowns Anglo-Americans then used the terms "Sonoran" and "Mexican" interchangeably, and immigrants from East Asia, South America, and Europe also called the Sonoratowns home.) Sonoratowns quickly sprang up across the region, from Santa Barbara to San Diego. Many returned to Mexico, but a significant minority lingered in Southern California, where the footprint of Anglo culture was still faint. In 1851 alone, approximately 8,000 Sonorans passed through Los Angeles, then a town of only 1,600.īut with the wounds of the recent Mexican War still fresh, a peaceful coexistence between the Mexican miners and their American counterparts was unlikely by 1850, most Sonorans had been evicted from their mining claims. Others came to work on Southern California's vast cattle ranches, which supplied the state's booming northern counties with meat. ![]() Beginning in 1848, when a ban on immigration from northern Mexico was lifted, thousands of Sonorans passed through Los Angeles every year on their way to the Gold Country. The neighborhood acquired its name during the years of California's gold rush, when a wave of miners and other migrants from the Mexican province of Sonora settled there.ĭrawn originally to Northern California's Gold Country, the Sonoran 49ers introduced several innovations, including the panning method, and quickly established themselves as some of the state's most successful prospectors. From the 1850s until the early twentieth century, the area now known as Chinatown was home to L.A.'s first barrio: Sonoratown. But among the area's first immigrant residents were new arrivals from the north of Mexico. Now known as Chinatown, the district has attracted successive waves of immigrants, many of them excluded from newer neighborhoods by overt racial hostility and discriminatory housing policies. Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries.Įthnic enclaves have long staked out the area immediately north of Los Angeles' historic plaza, one of the oldest settled areas in the city. Courtesy of the Title Insurance and Trust / C.C. ![]()
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