Water use, ethnic conflict, and infrastructure in nineteenth-century Los Angeles

Pacific Historical Review

Volumn 75, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 119-140

  Torres Rouff, David S ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b University of Colorado College of Nursing   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CONFLICT MANAGEMENT; ETHNICITY; NINETEENTH CENTURY; WATER;

CALIFORNIA; LOS ANGELES; NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES;

EID: 32144436789     PISSN: 00308684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/phr.2006.75.1.119     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. I use the term "brown," rather than "people of color," to avoid granting a naturalized centrality to whiteness.
2. Writing about New York, Matthew Gandy has recently theorized that putting questions of environmental justice at the center of analysis "compels us to see urban environmental change not simply as a function of technological change or of the dynamics of economic growth but as an outcome of often sharply different sets of political and economic interests." Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 4.
3. Los Angeles City Archives, April 4, 1873, vol. 10, pp. 269-273, Archives of the City of Los Angeles, Records Management Division Offices, Los Angeles City Clerk's Office, Los Angeles (hereafter LACA). Documents cited as Los Angeles City Archives (LACA) consist of manuscripts that were formerly bound but have since been unbound. The individual sheets are kept in folders, although the former volume numbers are still used to reference particular manuscripts. Some manuscripts are divided into multiple folders. The term "LACA" and the date are as close to a title as many of the documents have.
4. Historian Thomas Sugrue has argued that the infrastructural boundaries established in a city's adolescence often persist even in periods of high immigration and thus dictate city growth. Consequently, future immigrants to Los Angeles arrived in a city already structured by racial inequality. Thomas J Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J., 1996).
5. Felipe de Neve, "Reglamento Para el Govierno de la Provincia de Californias, Aprobado por S. M. en Real Orden de 24, Octubre, 1781," in "Documents Pertaining to the Founding of Los Angeles," Southern California Historical Society, Annual Publication, 15 (1931), 188.
6. Vincent Ostrom, Water and Politics: A Study of Water Policies and Administration in the Development of Los Angeles (Los Angeles, 1953), 29.
7. Beginning in the 1850s, a series of individuals, syndicates, and corporations endeavored to create a delivery network, also in enclosed pipes, for potable water. These schemes met with varying degrees of success until the advent of the Los Angeles City Water Company in 1868. There is no known map of the system, and evaluation of its diligence in delivering water equally to all Angelenos is not currently possible.
8. On March 3, 1836, the ayuntamiento declared that "all owners of crops and orchards be invited to appoint a Zanjero who must be paid from the products of their soil." LACA, March 3, 1836, vol. 1, pp. 102-103, folder 1.
9. After the United States took control of the city, its hybrid city council decided to pay the zanjero from public funds. LACA, June 26, 1847. vol. 4, pp. 350-352, folder 2.
10. Regarding washing in the zanjas, see LACA, April 24, 1847, vol. 4, p. 300, folder 1.
11. Michael C. Meyer, Water in the Hispanic Southwest: A Social and Legal History, 1550-1850 (Tucson, 1984).
12. Under English common law, which held sway throughout the eighteenth century, property rights equaled a right to "absolute dominion over the land" and empowered an owner to block any use of a neighbor's land in order to protect the "quiet enjoyment" of his own. The nineteenth century witnessed a radical change in water jurisprudence as the accelerated pace of economic development drove jurists away from the common law's anti-developmental tendencies and toward the two new doctrines of riparian rights and the right of prior appropriation, both of which entailed a "a dynamic, instrumental, and more abstract view of property that emphasized the newly paramount virtues of productive use and development." Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 31.
13. Appearing first, riparian rights doctrine held that "the use of water was reserved to those people who owned land bordering streams. Those rights...existed only in relationship to each other - as a pool of conditional rights." Under this umbrella, the flow of downstream users could not be diminished by an upstream user. A competing idea, one drawing particularly on the rising emphasis on improvement and progress, evolved as the right of prior appropriation. Donald Pisani defined this as "the legal principle that the first to put water to a 'beneficial use' has the paramount right to the future use of that water." Donald J. Pisani, Water, Land, and Law in the West: The Limits of Public Policy, 1850-1920 (Lawrence, Kans., 1996), 1.
14. The Mexican city council rejected claims based on priority of use; benefit to the population at large always had the advantage. Riparian rights would also have been dismissed under the Mexican rubric: Since water in the streams was explicitly reserved for communal use, no single landholder could monopolize its use.
15. In 1846 two U.S. immigrants, Richard Laughlin and Samuel Carpenter, claimed that Antonio Coronel (a future mayor of Los Angeles) had caused "serious injury" to their property by unjustly bringing water over their land, through zanjas on their property that they could not use, to irrigate his own fields. After Judge of the Water Julian Chavez ruled against them, they appealed to the ayuntamiento, which found that the ditches were the "only ones which the party in interest [Coronel] could use without injury to anyone." But rather than let that argument suffice, the body asserted that "the individuals using said ditch [Laughlin and Carpenter] affect drainages which they do not receive and consider themselves owners of an element [water] which under no circumstances should be withheld by two or three persons, with injury to the progress of agriculture in this city." LACA, June 3, 1846, vol. 2, pp. 731-732.
16. Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York, 1985), 37.
17. During the Mexican period (1822-1850), the ayuntamiento, or town council, ordered that "all the owners of crops and orchards be compelled to contribute, with their person or an Indian to perform" improvements to the zanjas. To achieve this, the committee recommended that "all owners of crops and orchards be invited to appoint a Zanjero" and ordered each of the owners to pay the zanjero "from the products of their soil." The order clearly applied to all owners, not simply those on the land affected by the improvements, and was strictly enforced. This exemplified the pueblo system of communal rights, in that all of the pobladores, in common, bore the responsibility for maintaining the waterway, as they also retained in common the rights to the water flowing in the zanjas. LACA, March 3, 1836, vol. 1, 102-103.
18. Specifically, Worster has argued that water in the capitalist state is a "commodity that is bought and sold and used to make other commodities that can be bought and sold and carried to the marketplace." Worster, Rivers of Empire, 52.
19. This sentiment appears below in a report to the city from its water officer regarding the potential for salable water to provide substantial revenue for the city while attracting a wave of new business development. City of Los Angeles, "Zanjero's Report, 1883," Los Angeles Municipal Reports, 1879-1896 (Los Angeles, 1885 and 1897), 115
20. these are separate originals that have been bound together, and the only copy of which the author is aware is in the basement of the Los Angeles Public Library. In addition, literature encouraging immigration to Los Angeles painted the area as one ripe for economic prosperity. Most of these ideas, from concentrated single-crop agriculture to manufacturing, would have required a change in the relationship between people and water along the lines Worster has described. Among a vast selection, see especially Lansford Hastings, The Emigrant's Guide to Oregon and California (Cincinnati, 1845)
21. William Robert Garner, Letters from California, 1846-1847 (Berkeley, 1970)
22. and Wilson Hamilton, The New Empire and Her Representative Men (Oakland, Calif., 1886).
23. Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 26.
24. LACA, April 4, 1873, vol. 10, pp. 269-273.
25. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis, 32-34.
26. City of Los Angeles, "Zanjero's Report, 1883," Los Angeles Municipal Reports, 1879-1896, 115.
27. Although C. M. Jenkins had an European American name, this does not seem to have any special significance; European Americans had begun holding the post in 1854, starting with the service of Henry Cardwell.
28. While the idea of pueblo rights may have remained operational in a legal sense, it did so under a new set of rules that privileged hygiene and revenue over communal use, changing the meaning of pueblo rights on the ground. Between 1850 and 1881 Los Angeles labored to confirm in U.S. law its right to the corpus of the Los Angeles River. The state legislature supported the city with laws in 1854, 1870, and 1874. In 1870 the legislature amended the city's charter to ensure that the city "shall succeed to all the rights, claims, and powers of the Pueblo de Los Angeles in regard to property"; see William McPherson, Charter and Revised Ordinances of the City of Los Angeles (Los Angeles, 1873), 7.
29. In 1874 an amendment to the city charter granted "to said corporation, to be by it held, used, and enjoyed in absolute ownership, the full, free, and exclusive right to all of the water flowing in the river of Los Angeles at any point from its source or sources to the intersection of said river with the southern boundary of said city"; see California, Legislature, Statutes of California Passed at the Twentieth Session of the Legislature, 1873-1874 (Sacramento, Calif., 1874), 633.
30. Yet the State Supreme Court repeatedly denied these rights to the city in adjudicating claims brought by others; see City of Los Angeles v. Leon Mac L. Baldwin, 53 Cal (1879) 469, among others.
31. When the high court reversed itself in 1881, it specifically referred to pueblo rights as a basis for granting the city the right to the entire corpus of the river. The justices declared that, "from the very foundation of the pueblo, in 1781, the right to all the waters of the river was claimed by the pueblo, and that right was recognized by all the owners of land on the stream, from its source, and under a recognition and acknowledgment of such right, plaintiffs' grantors dug their ditches, and, by the permission and consent of the municipal authorities, plaintiffs thereafter used the waters of the river. Can they now assert a claim adverse to that of the city? We think not. The city under various acts of the legislature has succeeded to all the rights of the former pueblo." Anastacio Felíz v. City of Los Angeles, 58 Cal (1881) 73, 79.
32. It bears noting, however, that while this seems to confirm pueblo rights, it does so with language that follows the doctrine of prior appropriation. The pueblo had "claimed" the river from its founding and therefore was first in time; moreover, the pueblo had improved the flow and used the water consistently since then. In this sense, Los Angeles had a claim of prior appropriation against any riparian owners. Consequently, while some may argue the use of pueblo rights as a myth, it seems more accurate to say that the meaning of pueblo rights had become somewhat distorted over time and was possibly misunderstood by the high court. Under Mexico, the pueblo meant the community, but under the United States, the pueblo came to mean the corporate entity of the city. As water historian Vincent Ostrom has astutely observed, "no right can have the same meaning under another system of law." Ostrom, Water and Politics, 32.
33. Map "Showing the Varieties and Lengths of Sewers Laid on December 1, 1891," by J. H. Dockweiler, Los Angeles City Engineer, submitted and bound with City of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Municipal Reports, 1891, bound between pages 53 and 54.
34. Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850-1880: A Social History (Berkeley, 1979), 139-150; map appears on 147.
35. LACA, April 4, 1873, vol. 10, p. 272.
36. LACA, May 16, 1873, in ibid., 304.
37. LACA, May 23, 1873, in ibid., 299-300.
38. LACA, April 4, 1873, in ibid., 272.
39. Historian Richard Griswold del Castillo's work would largely support such an interpretation. He has argued that the Mexican Californian elite often worked with powerful Anglo leaders to consolidate political power in the city, consequently blending the objectives of both groups and often encouraging Anglo conformity among working-class Mexican Americans. He was particularly critical of the elite in this respect, noting that "Usually the upper classes led in attempts to smooth over cultural and racial differences and to pledge their allegiance to the American flag." Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 151-153.
40. LACA, July 3, 1887, vol. 29, p. 231. By 1887 the city clerk filled in the details of individual sewer ordinances on a form that already contained the cited language. Sewers like these came into being after enough landowners along the proposed line signed a petition to the city. Such projects became frequent by the late 1880s. On this day alone, the city council authorized ten other sewers, all laid out on preprinted forms.
41. Although frequent, petitions from owners were not a prerequisite for the use of special assessments to fund improvements. In an act to amend the Los Angeles City Charter, passed on February 20, 1872, the California State Legislature granted the city the power to impose special assessments "upon the petition of a majority of the owners of real estate fronting upon any street or avenue of said city, or upon a vote of two thirds of the Common Council." Consequently, the city could impose its will on owners even if they had not petitioned the council for a project. For the full text of the amendment, which also granted the city the power of eminent domain, see Records of the Common Council, vol. 7, p. 476, Archives of the City of Los Angeles, Records Management Division Offices, Los Angeles City Clerk's Office, Los Angeles. In the mid-1870s the city archival records were split into two groups, one containing ordinances, petitions, etc., and the other minutes of the council meetings.
42. Drawing from my own analysis of the 1880 census, only fifteen of sixty-one households in Chinatown's most crowded block were without lodgers. Of these, it is doubtful that more than a handful actually owned their homes. Census Office, Tenth Census, Manuscript Census of California, 1880, roll 67, pp. 12-17.
43. In Sonora Town, according to Griswold del Castillo, only about 10 percent of the district's 1,000 residents owned real estate. Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 141-150.
44. LACA, Feb. 21, 1887, vol. 29, p. 497.
45. City of Los Angeles, "Public Health Officer's Report, 1884," Los Angeles Municipal Reports, 1879-1896, 52.
46. City of Los Angeles, "Sewer Committee's Report, 1884," in ibid., 106.
47. Ibid., 107, 111.
48. The following discussion of community control addresses only Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in Los Angeles. The city's Chinese never possessed sufficient community power in relation to municipal politics to make a similar analysis possible. Although the Chinese actively contested efforts at racially based subjugation in the legal and economic arenas, the public record does not reflect a Chinese influence in the realm of politics or policy.
49. These data represent numbers from the census and from Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 35.
50. Ward Ordinance from LACA, July 30, 1870, vol. 7, pp. 706-707.
51. The state legislature further amended the charter in 1878, expanding the city to five wards. In 1889 the state granted Los Angeles its first home rule charter, and the city adopted a nine-ward system. California State Senate, "Joint Resolution No. 2," Jan. 31, 1889.
52. Griswold del Castillo has compiled data for each ward and found that Mexican Americans comprised over 86 percent of the population in the city's first ward in 1880. Not surprisingly, this ward's boundaries were roughly analogous to those of Sonora Town. Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 145.
53. Officeholding data come from lists of city officer roles (elected offices, appointed offices, and committees and their members), held at the Los Angeles City Archives in their own notebook.
54. Griswold del Castillo would not agree with this assessment. He has argued that the political representation provided by the Mexican Californian elite was little more than superficial, claiming that "there is no evidence of any effort on their part to ameliorate the pressing social and economic ills that plagued the barrio." Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 160.
55. Elite Mexican Californians, whose economic power grew out of their vast lands and substantial herds of cattle, spent the 1860s confronting a two-headed monster of record drought and the federal government. The Federal Land Law of 1851 directly attacked the power of the Mexican Californian elite by establishing the Board of Land Commissioners and requiring verification of all Spanish and Mexican land grants in California. While most successfully defended their ownership, the process was both costly and time consuming. In addition to significant legal fees, the courts forced many of the elite to compensate any squatters who had improved the property while ownership had been in dispute. As their wealth lay in their land and cattle, members of the elite often were forced to sell their land to pay their lawyers and were compelled to turn land over to squatters rather than compensate them monetarily. This loss of land was complicated by the crash in the cattle market in 1857, a devastating drought lasting from 1862 to 1867, and a shift to agribusiness that undermined the value of their pastoral economy. Together, these factors caused the economic and social status of elite Mexican Californians to all but crumble by 1880. Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley, 1994), 65-68.
56. See also Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936 (Berkeley, 1995), chapter 2,
57. and Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846-1890 (Berkeley, 1971).
58. In his 1893 annual report, the city engineer noted that only 965 feet of sewer had been laid using the bonds, at a cost of only $7,752. Considering that the total amount of bonds authorized exceeded $1 million, this does not indicate much of an effort by the city to put the bond funds to immediate use. City of Los Angeles, "City Engineer's Report, 1893," Los Angeles Municipal Reports, 1879-1896, 34.
59. Writing about New York, but thinking more broadly about urban infrastructure during this period, Matthew Gandy has suggested a possible alternative. He has argued that "the modernization of nineteenth-century cities in Europe and North America was not carried out in order to improve the conditions of the poor but to enhance the economic efficiency of urban space for capital investment." In this framework, the absence of sewers in Sonora Town and Chinatown would derive from those areas not being part of this larger economic plan. Further, Gandy has argued that, "in this sense, the scale of new public works and the pace of technological change masked the persistence of [extant] social and political inequalities." Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 37.
60. Sarah S. Elkind, Bay Cities and Water Politics: The Battle for Resources in Boston and Oakland (Lawrence, Kans., 1998), 10-18; quotation on 15.
61. Robin Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833-1872 (Chicago, 1991), 137-140.
62. The board argued that, although sewering downtown had been a matter of public health and had benefited the whole city, building sewers in outlying areas would serve only local interest. Einhorn has noted that the public works board, composed of business leaders and wealthy private citizens, made its plea only after "Chicago's most valuable property already had been sewered with general funds." Ibid., 140.
63. Chicago's propertied public works officials therefore believed that projects that enhanced the value of their lands and enterprises generally served the public interest because they improved the overall economic standing of the city. Efforts to extend sewer services outside their area of influence, on the other hand, were seen as serving more limited interests rather than the city as a whole.
64. Craig E. Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge, La., 2005), esp. 77-107.