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“Writing Reform” in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles: The Sonoratown Anthologies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2007

Abstract

In early twentieth-century Los Angeles, Anglo-American women writers documented the emergence of a metropolis. Perceptions of race, ethnicity and culture became embedded in the struggle to depict and interpret a new urbanism. In capturing the changing cityscape, women writers constructed Sonoratown, the old Mexican Quarter of Los Angeles, as a place in the social imagination. This article examines representations of Sonoratown and its Mexican inhabitants in two anthologies. Women writers, many of whom moved in civic and reform-minded circles, rendered Sonoratown ambiguously: as a “picturesque” place to be preserved and yet a space earmarked for renewal, Sonoratown became entwined with the drive for social reform, assimilation and urban development.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1 I employ the term “slum romance” to refer to literature that depicted Sonoratown as a “picturesque slum.” Alan Mayne's identification of a “slumland genre” in city journalism influenced my use of this term. See Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870–1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993); Katherine Coman, “Casa Castelar,” The Commons, 7 Jan. 1903, 12.

2 George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 77.

3 Douglas Monroy, Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 113.

4 Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio, 7th edn (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998; first published 1983), 38; Sánchez, 23–30; Victor S. Clark, “Mexican Labor in the United States,” in Carlos E. Cortés, ed., The Mexican American (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 466–67 (first published in Bureau of Labor Bulletin, 78, Washington, DC: Department of Commerce and Labor, 1908). For more on the interchangeability of the terms “peon,” “Mexican” and “Indian” see Gilbert G. González, “The ‘Mexican Problem’: Empire, Public Policy, and the Education of Mexican Immigrants, 1880–1930,” Aztlán, 26, 2 (2001), 199–207.

5 Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890, updated with new Foreword by Ramón A. Gutiérrez (repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998; first published 1966), 266. Also see Sánchez, 70.

6 Romo, 29; Monroy, 15.

7 Sánchez, 72–76.

8 Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850–1890: A Social History (Berkeley: University of California Press, repr. 1982; first published 1979), 141; Pitt, 264.

9 Sanborn Company, Fire Insurance Maps for the City of Los Angeles (1894), Los Angles Public Library, Los Angeles (hereafter LAPL).

10 Romo, 76–77; Los Angeles City Directories (1895, 1900–01, 1908), LAPL.

11 Sanborn Company, Maps (1894, 1906), LAPL.

12 Coman, “Casa Castelar,” 12–13. Some suggest that George Henry Hewes's Church of the Neighborhood (established in the 1880s) was the city's first settlement. See Virginia Elwood-Akers, “George Henry Hewes and the Neighborhood Settlement in Los Angeles,” Southern California Quarterly, 83, 4 (2001), 377–98, and idem, “A Settlement in Adobe: Interesting Phases of Work in the ‘Casa de Castelar’ at Los Angeles,” The Commons (May 1897), 3–4.

13 Anastasia J. Christman, “The Best Laid Plans: Women's Clubs and City Planning in Los Angeles, 1890–1930,” Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 2000, Introduction, 11–19.

14 Los Angeles Settlement Association (hereafter LASA), First Report of the Work of the Los Angeles Settlement Association at Casa de Castelar, Ord and Castelar Streets (Los Angeles: Baumgardt and Company, 1897), 3.

15 LASA, First Report, 20.

16 Michael E. Engh, Frontier Faiths: Church, Temple, and Synagogue in Los Angeles, 1846–1888 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992), 60–61, 160–63; Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 224–42, 265.

17 S. Raynor Smith Jr., “The Attitudes and Practices of the Methodist Church in California with Reference to Certain Significant Social Crises, 1847 through to 1949,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1955, 158; Edward Drewry Jervey, The History of Methodism in Southern California and Arizona (Tennessee: Parthenon Press, 1960), 91–93.

18 Francis J. Weber, “‘Happy Home’ Aided Neglected Children,” The Tidings, 4 June 1965, 4.

19 Michael E. Engh, “Mary Julia Workman, the Catholic Conscience of Los Angeles,” California History, 72, 1 (1993), 9.

20 Judith Raftery, “Los Angeles Clubwomen and Progressive Reform,” in William Deverell and Tom Sitton, eds., California Progressivism Revisited (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 144–174, 145–47; Robert T. Handy, “Christianity and Socialism in America, 1900–1920,” Church History, 21, 1 (1952), 39–54, 53. I should emphasize that the Catholic Church also played a significant role in reform efforts amongst the Mexican population, as Michael Engh's research on Mary Julia Workman testifies.

21 Thomas C. Marshall, Into the Streets and Lanes: The Beginnings and Growth of Social Work of the Episcopalian Church in the Diocese of Los Angeles, 1887–1947 (Claremont: Saunders Press, 1948), 37–55; Elwood-Akers, “George Henry Hewes,” 377–98.

22 Dorothea R. Muller, “The Social Philosophy of Josiah Strong: Social Christianity and American Progressivism,” Church History, 28, 2 (1959), 183–201, 184, 186–87, 190.

23 For a perfect example see Susan M. Yohn, “An Education in the Validity of Pluralism: The Meeting between Presbyterian Mission Teachers and Hispanic Catholics in New Mexico, 1870–1912,” History of Education Quarterly, 31, 3 (1991), 343–364.

24 Elwood-Akers, ‘Settlement in Adobe’, 4.

25 Muller, “The Social Philosophy,” 191, 196.

26 LASA, Report of Instructive District Nursing 1893–1913 (Los Angeles: n.p., n.d.).

27 Coman, “Casa Castelar,” 3–4; Robert Archey Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, eds., Handbook of Settlements (repr., New York: Arno Press, 1970; first published New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1911), 12; LASA, The College Settlement (Los Angeles: n.p., 1905), 8.

28 Woods and Kennedy, 11–12.

29 LASA, Report of Instructive District Nursing 1898–1907, 9.

30 “The Kirmess,” Los Angeles Daily Times, 17 Dec. 1897, 5.

31 LASA, College Settlement, 16–17; Bessie Stoddart, “Recreative Centers of Los Angeles, California,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 35, 2 (1910), 216–17.

32 For the tension embedded in settlement house philosophies I draw on Mina Carson, Settlement Folk, Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), especially Ch. 6, “Immigrants and Culture,” 101–21. For more on cultural pluralism within settlement and missionary work amongst Spanish-speaking populations see Sarah Deustch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), and Yohn, “An Education in the Validity of Pluralism.”

33 LASA, College Settlement, 19–23; Booth, “College Settlement,” 5.

34 J. Torrey Connor, Saunterings in Summerland (Los Angeles: Ernest K. Foster, 1902), 8.

35 Ibid., 8.

36 Ibid., 8. For Connor's depiction of adjacent Chinatown see 20–23. For similar discussion on immigrant urban neighbourhoods as “foreign” enclaves and tourist sites see Mayne, Imagined Slum, 143–46.

37 González, “The ‘Mexican Problem’,” Aztlán, 26, 2 (2001), 199–207; Gilbert G. González and Raúl A. Fernández, A Century of Chicano History: Empire, Nations, and Migration (New York: Routledge, 2003), 67–96. For a perfect example see Charles Flandrau, Viva Mexico!, rev. edn with Epilogue by Nicholas Shakespeare (repr. London: Eland, 1990; first punblished New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1908). Harvard-educated Flandrau conceived his travelogue whilst staying on his brother's coffee plantation near Jalapa.

38 J. Torrey Connor, “A Red Parasol in Mexico,” Out West, 28, 2 Feb. 1908, 89.

39 Ibid., 89.

40 Ibid., 295–96.

41 Flandrau, Viva Mexico!, 217–18, 222–29.

42 Connor, “Red Parasol,” Out West, 28, 4–5 May 1908, 374.

43 Ibid., 378.

44 Mayne, 143.

45 Ibid., 151.

46 Jane Apostol, Olive Percival: Los Angeles Author and Bibliophile (Los Angeles: Department of Special Collections, University Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 1992), 1–6.

47 Percival holidayed and dined with Mathews, and noted their collaboration in publishing a “book of Sonoratown stories.” Pervical's personal diaries, 2 and 17 June 1906, box 1, Olive Percival collection, item reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. For Percival's acquaintance with the Stoddart sisters see diary entries 19 Nov. 1908 and 20 June 1911.

48 Ibid., “books read section,” diary for 1899. Percival read several “Mexican” fictional pieces, White Umbrella in Mexico, and Aztec Land, as well as Prescott's Conquest of Mexico.

49 Ibid., 26 March 1906.

50 Ibid., 2 Oct. 1906.

51 Ibid., 18 March 1907. Harvard-educated Charles Fletcher Lummis founded the Landmarks Club, dedicated to restoring the Southwest's missions and adobe buildings. He also visited the College Settlement on behalf of the Archaeological Society of the Southwest to record California's “Spanish” folk songs. See LASA, College Settlement, 17.

52 Pervical diaries, 15 Oct. 1907.

53 Ibid., 26 Apr. 1911.

54 Ibid., 12 Dec. 1905.

55 Ibid., 15 Mar. 1906.

56 Don Parson, “‘A Mecca for the Unfortunate’: Housing and Progressive Reform in Los Angeles,” unpublished manuscript (2001), 20.

57 From the Old Pueblo, and Other Tales (Los Angeles: 1902); Amanda Mathews, The Hieroglyphics of Love: Stories of Sonoratown and Old Mexico (Los Angeles: Arroyo Press, 1906).

58 Connor, Saunterings, 10.

59 Mathews, “The Potter's Wheel,” The Hieroglyphics of Love, 24.

60 Mathews, “The Woman and the Idol,” The Hieroglyphics of Love, 31–39.

61 Mathews, “The Miracle of San Juanito,” Hieroglyphics, 102–06. Mathews's short story was also published in From the Old Pueblo, 9–14.

62 Coman, “Casa Castelar,” 13.

63 Percival diaries, Jan. 1906 (no date, page torn).

64 LASA, First Report, 20.

65 Arthur Mann, “British Social Thought and American Reformers of the Progressive Era,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 42, 4 (1956), 672–692, 679.

66 Ibid., 681.

67 Carson, Settlement Folk, 106–09; Christman, The Best Laid Plans, 297.

68 Peggy Glowacki, “Bringing Art to Life: The Practice of Art at Hull-House,” in Cheryl R. Ganz and Margaret Strobel, eds., Pots of Promise: Mexicans and Pottery at Hull-House, 1920–40 (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 5–29, 15; Sherry Katz, “Socialist Women and Progressive Reform,” in Deverell and Sitton, California Progressivism Revisited, 117–43; and Raftery, “Los Angeles Clubwomen,” 147–53.

69 In 1913 Percival's anti-union stance compelled her to change her subscription from the pro-labour Los Angeles Examiner to the Los Angeles Times. Percival diaries, 2 April 1913. For a similar type of progressive conservatism see Muller, “Social Philosophy of Josiah Strong,” 193, 199.

70 Gwendolen Overton, “The Reaping of Vanity,” From the Old Pueblo, 17–24, 17.

71 Ibid., 17.

72 Ibid., 17.

73 Ibid., 19–20.

74 Sabine Haenni, “Visual and Theatrical Culture, Tenement Fiction, and the Immigrant Subject in Abraham Cahan's ‘Yekl’,” American Literature, 71, 3 (1999), 493–527, 511.

75 Flandrau, Viva Mexico, 65.

76 Amanda Mathews Chase, quoted in “Immigrant Education Leaflet, No. 3,” in California Commission of Immigration and Housing, Second Annual Report (San Francisco: State Printing Office, 1916), 143; added/original emphases.

77 Coman, “Casa,” 14.

78 Monroy, Rebirth, 154.

79 On the Mission Myth and its social and racial order see James Rawls, “The California Mission as Symbol and Myth,” California History, 71, 3 (1992), 343–61; Abigail A. Van Slyck, “Mañana, Mañana: Racial Stereotypes and the Anglo Rediscovery of the Southwest's Vernacular Architecture, 1890–1920,” in Elizabeth Collins Cromley and Carter L. Hudgins, eds., Gender, Class, and Shelter: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 95–108, and Roberto Lint Sagarena, “Building California's Past: Mission Revival Architecture and Regional Identity,” Journal of Urban History, 28, 4 (2002), 429–44.

80 Mann, “British Social Thought,” 683.

81 Connor, Saunterings, 23.

82 Overton, 18.

83 Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 18, 24.

84 Haenni, 499–501.

85 Stange, 13; Haenni, 497.

86 Overton, 18.

87 For more on this trend and the application of colonialist discourses to the study of Mexico and Mexican-ness see González, “The ‘Mexican Problem’,” 199–207.

88 Robert E. Mensel, “Kodakers Lying in Wait: Amateur Photography and the Rights of Privacy in New York City,” American Quarterly, 43 (1991), 24–45, 28.

89 See Bessie D. Stoddart, “The Courts of Sonoratown,” Charities and The Commons, 2 Dec. 1905, 295–99. On East Coast women photographers see Peter B. Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839–1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 237–41. Hales discusses wealthy Manhattan amateur photographer E. Alice Austen, who, like Percival, took images of urban “street types” in 1894 and used “photography to objectify the city.”

90 Haenni, 514; Percival diaries, 10 Feb. 1908.

91 Hales, 244–45.

92 Ibid., 244–50.

93 Ibid., 185.

94 John Kenneth Turner, Barbarous Mexico (London: Cassell and Co., 1911), 290.

95 For more on the city-dwelling peasant as a “picturesque,” “natural” alternative to modern, industrial society see Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 184.

96 Overton, 20. Interestingly, Olive Percival also referred to men's clothing when expressing concern that the Chinatown “colony ha[d] sadly dwindled” since her first visit in 1887 (6 March 1908). She exclaimed, “The men wear tan shoes, fedora hats; trousers and frocks of American wool, instead of black linen, blue cotton, pagan brocades!” Percival diaries, 21 Oct. 1910.

97 Overton, 20.

98 Cloyd Gustafson, “An Ecological Analysis of the Hollenbeck Area of Los Angeles,” Master's thesis, University of Southern California, 1940, 41.

99 H. Mark Wild, “A Rumored Congregation: Cross-Cultural Interaction in the Immigrant Neighbourhoods of Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles,” Ph.D. thesis, University of California, San Diego, 2000, 42–43.

100 Mayne, Imagined Slum, 193–96; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 65–68, 174–75, and especially Ch. 5, “Looking Jewish, Seeing Jews,” 171–99.

101 Nancy K. Foster, “Monsieur La Tribe,” in From the Old Pueblo, 27–44, 32.

102 LASA, Report of Instructive Nursing (1898–1907), 9–11.

103 Michael N. Dobkowski, “American Anti-Semitism: A Reinterpretation,” American Quarterly, 29, 2 (1977), 166–181, 176–78.

104 Jacobson, 65–68, 171–99; Mayne, 193–96.

105 Overton, 24.

106 Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West,” in Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger, eds., Over the Edge: Remapping the American West (Berkleley: University of California Press, 1999), 15–31, 17.

107 Wild, “A Rumored Congregation,” 92; Roy Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums (repr., Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974; first published 1962), 220; M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 66, 116.

108 Connor, Saunterings, 8–9.

109 Mathews, “The Hieroglyphics of Love,” The Hieroglyphics of Love, 13–21, 19–20.

110 Mathews, “The Potter's Wheel,” The Hieroglyphics of Love, 22–26, 22.

111 Overton, 22.

112 Connor, Saunterings, 8.

113 Ibid., 8.

114 Ibid., 10.

115 Ibid., 10.

116 Mathews, “The Miracle of San Juanito,” From the Old Pueblo, 9–14, 10.

117 Ibid., 12.

118 Foster, “Monsieur La Tribe,” 27–31.

119 Mayne, Imagined Slum, 4, 167–75.

120 Foster, 32.

121 Ibid., 32.

122 Ibid., 33–34.

123 Mayne, 190–91.

124 Foster, 40, 33–34.

125 Ibid., 31, 34–36, 41.

126 Ibid., 41.

127 Ibid., 40.

128 Ibid., 40.

129 Mathews, “The Woman and the Idol,” The Hieroglyphics, 32.

130 Mathews, “The Potter's Wheel,” The Hieroglyphics, 24.

131 Mathews, “Manuela's Lesson,” The Hieroglyphics, 50.

132 Mathews, “The Hieroglyphics of Love,” Hieroglyphics, 15.

133 Mathews, “The Kidnapping of María Luisa,” The Hieroglyphics, 66–67.

134 Mayne, Imagined Slum, 181–84; Foster, 32.

135 Apostol, Olive Percival, 38.

136 Percival diaries, 24 Oct. 1911.

137 Ibid., 27 Jan. 1908.

138 Ibid., March 1907 (no date, page torn).

139 Ibid., 22 Jan. 1907.

140 William Alexander McClung, Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), xvi.

141 Kathryn Dethier, “The Spirit of Progressive Reform: The Ladies' Home Journal House Plans, 1900–1920,” Journal of Design History, 6, 4 (1993), 253.

142 Mathews, “The Miracle of San Juanito,” 102; Foster, 33.

143 Mathews, “Foreword,” Hieroglyphics.

144 Coman, “Casa Castelar,” 13.

145 Mathews, “The Hieroglyphics,” Hieroglyphics, 19–20.

146 Percival diaries, 6 March 1913. Also see 14 Feb. 1913.

147 Mayne, Imagined Slum, 146. Similarly, Haenni quotes one writer of tenement fiction who claimed, “Nothing in life is real unless it has the elements of … realism and romanticism blended.” Haenni, “Visual and Theatrical Culture,” 494.

148 Susan H. Lindley, “Women and the Social Gospel Novel,” Church History, 54, 1 (1985), 56–73.

149 Mathews, “An Aztec Biography,” From the Old Pueblo, 63–64. Also published in The Hieroglyphics, 83–92.

150 Overton, “The Reaping of Vanity,” 17–24. For more on slumming expeditions and their origins in social reform circles see Kevin J. Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 142.

151 Overton, 21–22.

152 Ibid., 22–24.

153 Mayne, 146.

154 Overton, 23.

155 Ibid., 24–26.

156 Coman, “Casa,” 13.

157 For example, see LASA, College Settlement, 22. The report declared, “As a rule these newcomers have thrust upon them only the worst phases of our social and political life, thus crushing the ideals that have brought them to a new land.” For more on the Mexican's rural, “Indian” background and adaptability to city living see Clark, “Mexican Labor in the United States,” 506, 510. These views share striking similarities with later studies of “folk society” by the Chicago School. See Robert Redfield, Tepoztlán, A Mexican Village: A Study in Folk Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), and idem, “The Folk Society and Culture,” American Journal of Sociology, 45, 5 (1940), 731–42.

158 Mathews, “The Hieroglyphics,” 20.

159 Ibid., 21.

160 See LASA, Report of Instructive District Nursing 1908–1910, 6. LASA claimed that the “‘unmarried’ type,” which constituted “case[s] of neglected and deserted” women, was “peculiar to the peon element.”

161 Mayne, 199–203.

162 Foster, “Monsieur La Tribe,” 32; Mathews, “An Aztec Biography,” 62–68.

163 For more on “maternalist politics” with reference to Native American and Mexican women in the Southwest see Karen Anderson, “Changing Woman: Maternalist Politics and ‘Racial Rehabilitation’ in the US West,” in Matsumoto and Allmendinger, Over the Edge, 148–59. On the notion of the “good Mexican” see William D. Estrada, “Los Angeles' Old Plaza and Olvera Street: Imagined and Contested Space,” Western Folklore, 58, 2 (1999), 107–29.

164 This term is taken from LASA, First Report, 8.

165 See J. K. Turner, Barbarous Mexico, and Flandrau, Viva Mexico!, 17, 61. According to Flandrau, Mexicans had “never enjoyed any large measure of freedom.” Flandrau added, “even now with an acute, patriotic, and enlightened president at the head of the nation, Mexico – and quite inevitably – is not a republic, but a military Diazpotism.” For Percival's reference to Díaz's Mexico see Percival diaries, 29 May 1911. However, not every woman writer critiqued Díaz's rule. J. K. Turner claims that J. Torrey Connor was “in praise of Díaz” because she failed to denounce peon-slavery in the Mexican Herald, 9 May 1910: “Slavery, doubtless, is known to exist in Mexico – that is generally understood,” claimed Connor. Turner, Barbarous Mexico, 196.

166 Mathews, “An Aztec Biography,” 57.

167 Ibid., 59, 64–66.

168 Overton, “Reaping,” 22.

169 Mathews, “Hieroglyphics,” 15–16.

170 Foster, 40.

171 Mathews, “Manuela's Lesson,” 51–58.

172 Coman, “Casa Castelar,” 12–13; Katherine Kia Tehranian, Modernity, Space, and Power: The American City in Discourse and Practice (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1995), 116–17.

173 Stoddart, “The Courts of Sonoratown.”

174 Mathews's later fictional vignettes on Mexican Los Angeles include “Pancha: The Flag of Her New Country,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, 4 July 1920, 7, and “Santa Susana,” Survey, 66, 3 (May 1931), 161–62, 190–93. Both pieces document how Mexican women successfully overcome the resistance of “authoritarian” husbands to attend local Americanization classes.