Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past

by William Francis Deverell

Chronicling the rise of Los Angeles through shifting ideas of race and ethnicity, William Deverell offers a unique perspective on how the city grew and changed. Whitewashed Adobe considers six different developments in the history of the city―including the cementing of the Los Angeles River, the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1924, and the evolution of America's largest brickyard in the 1920s. In an absorbing narrative supported by a number of previously unpublished period photographs, Deverell shows how a city that was once part of Mexico itself came of age through appropriating―and even obliterating―the region's connections to Mexican places and people.

Deverell portrays Los Angeles during the 1850s as a city seething with racial enmity due to the recent war with Mexico. He explains how, within a generation, the city's business interests, looking for a commercially viable way to establish urban identity, borrowed Mexican cultural traditions and put on a carnival called La Fiesta de Los Angeles. He analyzes the subtle ways in which ethnicity came to bear on efforts to corral the unpredictable Los Angeles River and shows how the resident Mexican population was put to work fashioning the modern metropolis. He discusses how Los Angeles responded to the nation's last major outbreak of bubonic plague and concludes by considering the Mission Play, a famed drama tied to regional assumptions about history, progress, and ethnicity. Taking all of these elements into consideration, Whitewashed Adobe uncovers an urban identity―and the power structure that fostered it―with far-reaching implications for contemporary Los Angeles.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Academic

349 pages, Paperback

First published May 4, 2004

About the author

An American historian and educator specializing in the nineteenth and twentieth century American West. Deverell is a professor at the University of Southern California.

Reviews

[Kkraemer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deverell uses five cultural touchstones to show how Los Angeles was invaded by Anglos both in terms of demographics and culture. He notes that Los Angeles was Spain, was Mexico, and somehow, not only politically with the Gadsden purchase and the Spanish-American War, but culturally, the people who had long lived in Los Angeles becomes ghosts in a sort of romanticized past.

The first was a parade and celebration held in Los Angeles in the late 19th century, a parade that was called the "Fiesta de Los Angeles" and was almost entirely white (except for people playing various roles drawn from the beautiful past, the lazy Mexicans and colorful Indians).

Then, there was the capture and correction of the Los Angeles river, a project that began with the idea that it would be a cultural draw for all people but ended up being a hideous scar that delineated ethnic sections of the city (among other things).

and the brickyards, company towns that resembled the plantations of the Southern Reconstruction, with all of the rules and "opportunities" therein, and the outbreak of the plague who, everyone knew, was carried by rats but somehow got attached to Mexicans.

and finally, there was the Mission Play that showed the history of Los Angeles to be one of holiness and beneficence, one of spiritual uplift. This revision of history is not unlike that of Hawaii, where King Kamemeha proudly points drivers to thoroughfares and the actual Hawaiians are relegated to the hinterlands, or the proud Nations of Oklahoma, which ignores its ignoble past.

This book is THOROUGHLY researched and very interesting.

[David Groves · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is quite a mixed bag. On the one hand, some of this material is vital to our understanding of the Mexican in early Los Angeles. Standard histories may outline what the city fathers did in the early years of this lovely and blighted metropolis, from Harrison Gray Otis to Andrew Boyle to E. L. Doheny to Henry Huntington to so many others, but this adds the Mexican to the mix. They provided the cheap labor that was so vital to the city's growth. They worked the railroads, the agricultural fields, the meat-packing plants. Their sweat was the grout that held together this idea of unfettered, damn-the-speed-limit economic growth.

A chapter on the Mexican laborers in the Simons Brickyard is a standout. In 1990s Montebello, the Simons brothers put together a brickyard and an adjoining company town that sold bricks for the building of the metropolis, and they were quite successful. However, Deverell shows the flipside of this success, outlining how Mexicans lived in a cheap and run-down company town with a wall around it. The company adjudicated family disputes, prohibited drinking, and shut the gates at night, letting nobody in or out. American freedoms didn't apply there. Isolation kept the residents away from outside knowledge and opportunities. Residents went into debt to the company store.

My favorite chapter was on the 1924 pneumonic plague outbreak, about which I knew nothing. Some stories can tell you things about the milieu that go well beyond the story at hand, and that was true of this chapter. It told me that there were enough rats in East L.A. to start a pneumonic plague outbreak. It told me that the barrio was filled with rickety old shacks clapped together from odds and ends of junk laying around. It told me that the government was so unresponsive to the Mexican voice that they didn't think twice about putting much of East L.A. in quarantine for several weeks, or establishing a quasi-military guard for the areas armed to the teeth, or destroying over 2,000 houses and shacks, some by burning, or not even reimbursing the owners for the destruction. It was a siege.

But Deverell as a writer is not quite up to the material. He is constantly harping on this "whitewashing" theme, which means reinterpreting the language the white culture used to cover up their racist and even genocidal policies. Look, it's clear to every reader that the language and policies were racist without going on endlessly about the exact manner in which they pulled off the racist lies. In addition, his sentences are just not as simple and elegant and direct as Richard Romo's in *East Los Angeles,* which is the definitive book on the subject. And there are chapters that evoke a tepid ho-hum, such as the first chapter on the original Fiesta of the 1890s, or the last chapter, on the Mission Play.

All in all, however, this is an essential book for our times. People need to know about this stuff, because much of it is happening again in the age of family separation and migrant prisons. I learned a lot about Los Angeles from this book.

[Brendan Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possibly the greatest, and most intelligible, reconstruction of early Los Angeles that I have ever read.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating material. The primary source material the book is built on makes it possible to learn from the book even if one draws different conclusions than the author did. Who knew there was a company town in Montebello? Who knew there was an outbreak of the Plague in L.A. in 1924?

[Sylvia Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was lots of new information for me here especially how Mexicans built Los Angeles in the early days and the way that the Anglos romanticized the Spanish ranchos and missions to entice tourists and settlers. The section on the Los Angeles River was surprising. I was amazed to learn that corralling the L.A. River in concrete was part of a beautification project and that it meandered and flooded quite a bit. Before the flood of 1825, the river went through the Exposition Park area and emptied into Ballona Creek in the Marina Del Rey region and not where it does today south to San Pedro. The early photos of the river were enlightening. Learning about the huge brick manufacturing plants and company towns (hovels) created to house the Mexican workers was fascinating. I had no idea how dangerous this work was. These bricks were used in the frenzied contruction locally and throughout the U.S.

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

A interesting look at racism and its effects on the telling of history in California, if not the actually of history. Although part of the author's point seems to be that the myth of history does, in the eyes of some, become reality through time. The whitewashing metaphor is poignant, as throughout the book, we see how the white Anglo-American population demonized and trivialized the existing Mexican population while exploiting California's exotic Hispanic past for its own capitalistic gains. Not a surprising story for those of us familiar with American history, but it is another interesting block in the 19th-20th century nationalistic structure that formed the myth of the American dream.

[Karen M.]

This book is an historical treasure trove of early Los Angeles.