Many of us learned it in history class. In 1781, 44 men, women and children traveled from Mexico under the banner of Spain, settling indigenous land to found what is now Los Angeles.
But did you know that over half of those pobladores, as they were known, had African ancestry? For decades, the information was repressed or derided by racist historians and civic leaders, eager to Europeanize the past.
“The Spanish, like most colonizers, had systems where they categorized people on racial grounds,” says Susan D. Anderson, History Curator and Program Manager at the California African American Museum.
“The census in Spain, like all European censuses, included information about the settlers that revealed this very complicated racial system of categorization. So, the reason that we know the background of the demographic background of the settlers is because of this ancient census-taking system.”
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According to El Pueblo: The Historic Heart of Los Angeles by Jean Bruce Poole and Tevvy Ball, in 1777, Felipe de Neve, Spanish governor of the Californias, asked the Colonial Spanish government in Mexico to help him establish a new pueblo near the flourishing Gabrieleño village of Yang-Na. The land was prime for farming — “a very spacious valley, well-grown with cottonwood and alders, among which ran a beautiful river,” Father Juan Crespi recorded.
Agricultural settlements were badly needed in fledgling Alta California, to provide food for the string of missions and presidios (military garrisons) being built across the colony. They were also needed as a buffer against Russian and British aggressors. Neve’s request was granted and agents for the Spanish crown began searching for “men of the field” who were “without vices or defects” to recruit as settlers.
Agents focused their recruiting efforts on what are now the Mexican states of Sonora and Sinaloa. According to America’s Black Heritage, one-third of the people living in Sinaloa were of African descent. Intermarriage was common in Spanish Mexico, leading to an elaborate caste system which classified people according to their racial heritage.
In the Sinaloan town of El Rosario, where most of the future settlers lived, two-thirds of the residents were of Spanish and African descent and classified as “mulattos.”
Enslaved Black people were essential to the success of colonizers all over the western world. “The only reason people were settling on Indigenous land is because of the slave trade,” Anderson says.
“And it doesn't matter if it's Uruguay or Mexico or the U.S., it's all the same. There were so many Africans that were brought to the New World. So, for us to think that Mexicans aren't of African descent or Chileans aren't of African descent? It's crazy.”
Compared to enslaved people in the United States, people in bondage in Mexico were often able to purchase their rightful freedom.
“In Mexico, slaves were permitted to marry, and no master could sell and separate wives and husbands or children, and it was relatively easy for a slave to obtain his freedom,” William A. Mason and James Anderson write in America’s Black Heritage. “There was a place in society for the freed slave in Mexico. He was not an outcast.”
By the 1780s, roughly 90 percent of those classified as “mulattos” in Sinaloa were free. Many had probably been free for generations. Spanish agents scoured the area, promising land, rations, salaries, and livestock to potential settlers. Those who signed up included the eleven families who eventually became known as the founders of Los Angeles.
Settlers of Black descent
According to the anthology Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California, of the eleven original families of Los Angeles, seven involved couples of different racial backgrounds, while two couples were of African Spanish descent.
Some of these couples were Luis and Maria Quintero, Manuel and Maria Tomasa Camero, Jose and Maria Guadalupe Moreno, Antonio and Maria Ana Mesa, and Basillo and Maria Manuela Rosas.
The pioneers left home and made the arduous journey to the Mission San Gabriel, around twenty-five miles away from the new pueblo of Los Angeles. Despite popular belief that they all arrived together at the new townsite on September 6, 1781, records in The Founding Documents of Los Angeles: A Bilingual Edition make clear they arrived in L.A. in waves, and each family received both a plot of land for a home and a field to till.
“The first homes, earth covered willow-and-tule huts, were soon replaced by adobe dwellings with flat roofs, which were later waterproofed with a coat of brea from the tar pits a few miles west on the Indian trail toward the ocean,” Poole and Ball write. “The pioneers constructed a dam and irrigation canals, including the zanja madre, or mother ditch, to bring water to the pueblo, and set about tilling and planting the fields.”
Life on the frontier was hard, and there were tensions between the settlers. In 1782, three families were “expelled” from Los Angeles. Antonio Mesa, who was said to be disillusioned with pioneer life, returned with his family to Sonora. Luis and Maria Quintero also left, but they didn’t go far. They settled in Santa Barbara, near three of their married daughters. Quintero became Santa Barbara’s first tailor, and his grandson Josef Rafael Gonzalez, served as alcalde (mayor) of Santa Barbara in 1829.
According to the LA Almanac, the Camero and Moreno families stayed in Los Angeles, where both Manuel and Jose served as city councilmen. They were joined by other settlers of Black descent, including Fernando Reyes, who was the first elected mayor of Los Angeles in 1793.
Pobladores' descendants
By 1790, census records indicate 18% of colonists throughout Alta California were of African descent. This number was probably incorrect, since many Afro Latinos had already begun changing their names and racial classification.
Maria Guadalupe Perez, the wife of Jose Moreno and the last of the Pobladores, lived to see California become an American state in 1850. She died in 1860. Her granddaughter, Catalina, became the life partner of Mexican soldier Don Andres Pico (who also had African ancestry), the brother of the last Mexican governor Pio Pico.
Maria Rita Valdez, the granddaughter of Luis Quintero, was a brilliant businesswoman who ran her family’s prosperous 4,500-acre rancho known as El Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas. She sold it to Henry Hancock and Benjamin D. Wilson in 1854. The area is now known as Beverly Hills.
But, by the time Maria Guadalupe Perez died, these women’s heritage was being consciously blotted out by the new xenophobic, racist American elites of Los Angeles. “Once the U.S. took over California and then getting into the 20th century, white historians started whitewashing California's history,” Anderson notes.
According to historian William M. Mason, the uproar began in 1884, when historian Hubert Howe Bancroft published the 1781 census of the Pobladores, which included their caste, in his book History of California. The backlash was immediate, with fellow Californian J.M. Guinn deriding the Pobladores’ contributions, claiming they “were mongrels in race…poor in purse, poor in blood, poor in all the sterner qualities of character that our own hearty pioneers possessed.”
Los Angeles boosters, eager to lure more white Americans to Southern California, increased their campaign to erase L.A.’s multi-ethnic beginnings, and paint the Pobladores as European Spaniards. This meant that many of the founders’ thousands of descendants were unaware of their Black heritage.
This campaign continued well into the twentieth century. “The racial background of the founders was in the textbooks in the 1940s,” Anderson says. “By the 1950s, when the district put out new textbooks, they erased that information.”
Reclaiming the city's Black heritage
There were some L.A. historians who insisted on reclaiming the city’s Black heritage. In the 1950s, Glen Price, a curator for the Plaza Park Project, commissioned a plaque which pointedly included the race of each of the original 44 settlers. “The plaque soon vanished without a trace,” Cecilia Rasmussen reported in the Los Angeles Times. “Rumor had it that several Recreation and Parks commissioners had been displeased by its public display of the role blacks played in the city’s founding.”
California historian William A. Mason also advocated for reclaiming the founders’ heritage. “In view of our great debt to the pobladores,” he wrote in 1975, “we should celebrate them for what they really were — a racially mixed group with a decidedly Black cast.”
But it was two Black women who would make sure the Black Pobladores were recognized and honored. “I would say that there are probably two heroes in my book who are associated with these campaigns,” Anderson says. “One is Charlotta Bass.”
Bass, the legendary publisher of The California Eagle, used her paper to tell the truth about the settlers’ heritage. “Of the eleven founding families, 56% would be classified as colored today!” she wrote in 1941, per Victoria Bernal of PBS SoCal. “These are no idle statistics, since the names, lot numbers and race of the founders are preserved in the archives of the State of California and City of Los Angeles."
“In 1948,” Bernal writes, “she opined about the city's 167th anniversary, ‘When celebrating anniversaries, the City of Angels has always avoided any mention of the fact that among the first settlers (the first 44 persons) there were some important Black angels…’”
As Anderson notes, the other hero in the story was the pioneering Miriam Matthews, who was the first certified Black librarian in California. Known as the “dean of Los Angeles Black history,” Matthews worked tirelessly to chronicle Black history in Los Angeles, including reclaiming the origins of the city’s founders. "It is a sad commentary when the names of these black families — Antonio Mesa, Manuel Camero, Luis Quintero, Jose Moreno — were omitted from many history books,” she wrote in The Los Angeles Sentinel.
When Matthews was appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley to the bicentennial committee to put together L.A.’s 200th anniversary celebration, she was determined to have a new plaque honoring the Pobladores placed near where the city began. “And that was my top priority: a proper founders monument to be erected in the plaza, in the State Historic Park” she later said in an interview.
On September 4, 1981, a plaque recreating the 1791 census, complete with the racial backgrounds of each settler, was unveiled on the southern side of the Los Angeles Plaza. There it stands to this day. “A result,” Anderson says, “of a a generations long battle to expose the historical truth.”
