Happy Belated Birthday, L. A.!

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Latino Heritage Month is well underway.  Independences have been celebrated.  Excuses for celebrating good Latino music, liquor, and hot people continue! I was hip, slick, and cool enough to begin my blog by posting my first post about Los Angeles on the city's 234th birthday. I had a beautiful tribute all set up (which you will see in a minute :-)) and, after 1.5 painstaking hours, I lost it all when my server decided to get hardening of the arteries and freeze.

Since I believe in second (and third and 87,659th) chances, here is my tribute to the city of my birth, youth, and middle age:

Happy Clumpeanos, L. A., El-Lay, 80 Suburbs in Search of A City, The Big Orange (incomprehensible to anyone under 40), Land of No Culture and Where NoOne Walks, Entertainment Capital of the World, the World City, el Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula:

LOS ANGELES

The city where Calvin Klein model lookalikes climb up mountains, pubs. city staircases (and over each other :-)) in search of a careerhttp://www.facebook.com/MrLAToursHappy Cumpleanos, El-Lay! and where selling and buying multimillion dollar homes is as "whatever" as shopping at Walmart, was, 234 years ago,  a Tongva Nation village, "Yang-na". Yang-na was laid out in four smaller communities governed by a chief. The villagers cut oak and cottonwood trees from Elysian Park and the Los Angeles River; used that same river water to grow corn, squash, and other vegetables; hunted rabbit and deer that lived where goodtimers splatter beer on each other for $35 a pop at Dodger Beach; protected themselves from bear and mountain lions that lived nearby. What they couldn't protect themselves from was Antonio de Bucareli.

Antonio de Bucareli was a man, like fewer of us in America today, who had to please his boss to keep his job. Antonio's boss was King Charles III of Spain. Charles hired Antonio to carry out what he wanted in his part of the Spanish Empire called New Spain (what we know today as Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Costa Rica....not to mention Florida and everything from Texas to the Pacific Ocean). Charles definitely knew his real estate! Antonio de Bucareli was managing those lands for Charles. By 1780, Charles knew the Russians (even then called by non-Russians, especially non-Russian kings, as the "Evil Empire") were settling on the west coast of North America. Charles didn't want anyone cutting in on HIS territory (never mind that his ancestors killed native Americans to get HIS territory, it was HIS :-)). Charles told Antonio to get people up to the Pacific coast to keep the Russians out as soon as possible. Antonio palmed the job off to one of HIS men, Felipe de Neve, who was already building new towns, new churches, and new communities along the Pacific.

Rather than recruiting Spain's greatest families, minds, and movers and shakers to carry out Charles' plan, Felipe de Neve practically chained and held guns to a poor, isolated, illiterate group of racially-mixed farmers and craftsmen from the high deserts of what is now Sinaloa and Sonora, Mexico to make a 5-month trek across the Sonoran Desert, through Arizona, the Colorado River and the Imperial Valley, leaving corpses bleaching in the sun, until they arrived at the San Gabriel Mission in August, 1781. After eating off the orange, pear, peach, plum, and other orchards, feeding off beef, mutton, being tended to for wounds and diseases caught on the trail, the 44 families (+1 baby born on the way) making the trek gathered their oxen and horses, escorted by Spanish soldiers along what is now Mission Road in San Gabriel and Alhambra, Alhambra Avenue and Valley Boulevard past Lincoln Park and L. A. County-USC Medical Center, crossing the full, lush, wooded river to the riverbank on the other side (what is today the train tracks at Union Station). The heads of the families said their prayers of thanks to God, on behalf of their families and the Charles III of Spain.

Owing to the Catholic custom of saints days on the calendar and naming everyone and everything for a saint, the naming (renaming, but the Tongva were not consulted) of the new Spanish settlement was named after Our Lady, Queen of Angels, of Porciuncula (a city in Italy where this virgin was said to appear). So, on September 4, 1781, one of the most beautiful, desired, improbable, spectacular, cosmopolitan, avant-garde, maligned, degraded, raped, underestimated cities in the world turned from Yang-na into Los Angeles, the city that New York and San Francisco never forgave.

Families with surnames such as Rojas, Villavicencio and Quintero turned the earth and built the first European-style homes in the area. The Avila Adobe, on Olvera Street was built 37 years after the city was founded but is an excellent and rare survivor of the earliest years of the city, when the flag and language of Spain spread throughout California. If any of you trace your families to those 44 that founded the city, I would love to hear from you.

To you, Los Angeles! Para ti, Los Angeles! Salud, amor y pesestas y el tiempo para gozarlos! Health, love, and money, and the time to enjoy it all! You and your inhabitants have been doing that since September 4, 1781. Que viva!!!