Olvera Street

Los Angeles

Sep 09, 2020

This is a story about a street.

It’s also a story about a million deported citizens.

But let’s start with the story about the street.

This is a story about a street that, at first glance, is completely at odds with the city that surrounds it. Los Angeles’ freeways are infamous, but the street in question — Olvera Street — is entirely pedestrianized. In the city that invented Americana, Olvera Street is (at least in pre-pandemic times) filled with street stalls hawking Mexican trinkets, calaveras and Catrinas.

But it is exactly that dissonance — that sense that Olvera Street is atypical, out of place, exotic — which is why Olvera Street deserves a second look.

Against expectations, the heart of downtown Los Angeles is not a spiral of glassy skyscrapers under a neon sun. Los Angeles’ center is a low-rise red-brick plaza, where colored squares of papel picado are strung up from the iron bandstand. To the side a bronze plaque marks the spot where in 1781 el Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles was founded by 22 adult pobladores and their 22 children, sent north to California by the Spanish King.

Only two of those original LA settlers were white. The rest were mestizos; mulattos; indios y negros. Mexicans. The plaque commemorating their arrival is a reminder that from the moment of its birth, Los Angeles’ story has always been one about Mexican immigration.*

Olvera Street, branching north from the Plaza, was at the center of the Los Angeles pueblito that in just 200 years grew into a megacity. For a century the plaza remained central to city life.

But by the 1920s, the neighborhood was dilapidated, the buildings decayed. Olvera Street was now a barrio where new immigrants hustled. It was home not only to Mexicans but to Italian and Chinese newcomers. The unemployed massed in the plaza. Radicals like Emma Goldman and Sun Yat-Sen spoke there.

Yet even as Olvera Street fell into disrepair, Mexican immigration to the neighborhood “Sonora Town” rose sharply. Civil War and poverty pushed Mexicans to leave their homes, while American businesses — riding the economic boom of the mid-1920s — depended upon immigrant labor. The 1924 Immigration Act restricted immigration from almost everywhere else (apart from Western Europe), but it did not impost a quota on Mexican immigration — largely because the American economy could not function without Mexican labor.

Until the American economy collapsed.

Xenophobia and anti-immigrant nativism were already part of mainstream American politics by 1929, but the Wall Street crash accelerated racist public policy as a response to the Great Depression. President Herbert Hoover called for deportations to protect “American jobs for real Americans”. Across the US, Mexicans were harassed back over the border. To facilitate these removals, a new racial category was created for the 1930 US census: “Mexican”.

At least 400,000 and up to two million Mexicans were forcibly removed from the United States between 1929 and 1936. Here’s the kicker: at least sixty percent of those “Mexicans” were American citizens, born in the United States.

Olvera Street was at the center of this storm. The Los Angeles Police Department enthusiastically pursued a “repatriation” policy, raiding the city’s Mexican barrios and indiscriminately rounding up residents and visitors for deportation. Frightened residents would hide in the basements of the buildings surrounding Olvera Street. Women would emerge to find their husbands deported.

The American government has never apologized for the million Mexican “repatriations” — a misnaming that masks the gravity of the crime, because the “repatriations” were also American expulsions. And this history alone — the forcible removal of one million American citizens from their own country — would make Olvera Street an important memorial to the dark side of America’s immigration history. But the history of Olvera is more complicated still.

That’s because when you visit Olvera Street today, you find yourself standing in a colorful, noisy, kitsch version of an imaginary Mexico. There are café’s called “Mr. Churro” and “Juanita’s”: there are (at least in non-COVID times) a hundred vendors selling sombreros and skeletons. The impression is of something romanticized; invented; Disneyfied.

But don’t look away: the invention of Olvera Street is the point.

It’s no accident that the Olvera Street you see today resembles the “authentic” “Old Mexico” that has only ever existed in white America’s imagination. The makier of this “Mexican village” at the heart of Los Angeles was a wealthy, white American socialite, Christine Sterling. Sterling successfully campaigned against the planned demolition of Olvera Street’s old adobes, saving the buildings by promising to turn Olvera Street into a Mexican fiesta. The LA times wrote op-eds in support of her project — and the Sheriff’s department provided prison labor.

The reimagined Olvera Street opened to American tourists on Easter Sunday 1930. In that same year, over a hundred thousand Mexican-Americans were forcibly removed from the United States, including some residents of Olvera Street.

This is why Olvera Street matters. It matters because Olvera Street is the physical connection between those two sentences, a place that reminds us that the practice of eating tacos while deporting Mexicans is not new.

The history of Olvera Street is also relevant in more political and more urgent ways.

It’s a reminder that the fight over birthright citizenship isn’t just about who gets to be President.* A reminder that census categories matter, especially when the data collected feeds into the hands of a malign government.

Olvera Street is cautionary tale about about immigrants and unlawful deportations; about police violence and well-meaning white liberals. It’s a story that echoes painfully in the here and now. A story that asks us not only ‘what do we remember?’ but also, ‘what happens next?’

*Though just to be clear, Mexico may have lost California to the United States, but the Mexicans were conquerers too, displacing (and renaming) the Gabrielino-Tongva Indians from their ancestral lands.

**It’s worth noting that in his recent — and already notorious — Newsweek oped casting doubt on Kamala Harris’ eligibility for the vice-presidency, John Eastman used the Mexican Repatriations in the 1930s as “proof” that no one really intended the 14th amendment to include immigrants’ children.

Immigrants and Revolutionists

Discussion about this post

Immigrants and Revolutionists

Olvera Street

Los Angeles

*Though just to be clear, Mexico may have lost California to the United States, but the Mexicans were conquerers too, displacing (and renaming) the Gabrielino-Tongva Indians from their ancestral lands.

More reading

Discussion about this post