Los Angeles' Cultural History
BY Liam Casey
If you’re diving into any locale’s history within the Americas, that means recognizing the area’s indigenous populations who prospered before brutal European colonisation, which decimated millions of lives. For generations, tribes like the Chumash, Tongva, Taaqtam, and Payómkawichum thrived in villages located throughout present-day Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange, and San Bernardino Counties.
Spanish missionaries enslaved whole communities of Tongva natives to construct missions. These structures systematically annihilated men, women, and children, who were baptised and proselytized to Christianity. In 1781, the Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles was founded.
Like much of the nineteenth-century Southwest, oil, agriculture and prosperity were hallmarks in developing the fertile lands which now make up the city and its environs. The twentieth century saw the rise of Hollywood, with studios and films proliferating at a rapid rate. In the midst of WWII, the metropolis morphed into a major hub for wartime manufacturing. Like many cities in the post-war years, major socio-political, racial, and cultural changes were underway.
We’ve all heard of The American Dream and post-war Los Angeles was the place to pursue it. L.A. offered physical space, job opportunities, and a pleasant climate, which attracted GIs and economically-advancing African Americans escaping the Jim Crow South, as well as many more chasing the “dream”. The newly constructed interstate highway system demonstrated the city’s zeal for a progressive future.
As you’re in town, though, you’ll see the highway systems aided in the endless sprawl. Like other cities in America at the time, racist housing covenants and redlining—often reinforced by the physical barriers of freeways—inhibited many Black Angelenos from experiencing upward mobility and the same facilities as middle-class whites, who began to move – faster and faster – towards the suburbs in the years of “white flight”.
Before the Rodney King Riots in 1992, the Watts Riots of 1965 saw the worsening urban crises plaguing America from governmental neglect. The sixties, seventies, and eighties saw a monumental influx of Koreans, Iranians escaping the Revolution, and Salvadorans fleeing their Civil War, respectively, further weaving the ethnic quilt of the city. As you’ll hear anywhere you go, LA estimates at least 185 languages are spoken in homes, the most common other than English being Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Armenian, Farsi, and Japanese.
The soul and aesthetics of each decade in the twentieth century determined the assortment of building styles and forms for neighbourhoods, business districts, and commerce. Anywhere you go you’ll see different styles of architecture; Spanish Colonial-style apartments and townhomes in Mid-Wilshire and modernist houses in Silver Lake, whereas Space-age Googie reigns supreme in diners. Los Angeles is a city built with cars in mind, something that’s most visible in the architecture of donut shops, fast-food establishments, and shopping malls.
Fictionally seen as the final frontier in the country and a place rife with disaster and post-apocalyptic madness in the form of wildfires, earthquakes, tsunamis, and drought, these literary harbingers may become more real than previously thought. Nonetheless, L.A. never ceases to bewilder and continues to be the beating heart of the film and music industry, a destination for food, and an all-around culturally rich, deeply complex city.
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