City of Inmates

Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965

Kelly Lytle Hernández

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469631196
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration. But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation's carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.

1: An Eliminatory Option

Stringent vagrant laws should be enacted and enforced compelling such persons [Natives] to obtain an honest livelihood or seek their old homes in the mountains.—“Presentment of the Grand Jury, February Term,” Los Angeles Star, March 12, 1859

Nocuma held the world in his hands and created everything within it: the animals, trees, land, and seas full of fish. Since the world was in constant motion, Nocuma placed a small black rock in the middle to hold it in its place. Then he grabbed a chunk of clay and made man (Ejoni) and woman (Áe). Ejoni and Áe had children, and their children had children, and so on until a man named Weywoot was born. Weywoot was a cruel and ambitious man who tried to control all life from his home in Povuu’nga (near Long Beach, California). The people rose up and killed Weywoot, burning his body on a pyre at Povuu’nga. Following Weywoot’s death, a rational deity named Attajen arrived and granted shamanic powers to people charged with controlling the food supply. Years later, a man named Chengiichngech was born and taught all the people the laws and rituals needed to preserve life on the land. When Chengiichngech died, he took the name Quagaur and ascended to heaven, where he remains watching over the descendants of Ejoni and Áe, the Kumivit. This is how life came to be in the Tongva Basin.¹

Western scholars tell different tales about the origins of life in the Tongva Basin. According to some, humans first arrived in the basin after their slow migration out of Africa thru Asia and across the Bering Strait into the Americas.² Sometime around 11,000 B.C., successive generations of small family groups called “bands” turned right at the southern tip of the Great Basin (Utah/Nevada/California). They gradually pushed across Death Valley, the continent’s driest and hottest desert, before penetrating a narrow break between northern and southern mountain ranges. On the other side lay a vast and flat grassy basin set between desert, mountains, and the sea. Some bands stopped and settled along the creeks and rivers that pour into the basin from the mountains.³ On plots ranging from fifty to hundreds of square miles, they built dozens of communities and villages. Nestled between the San Gabriel Mountains and Saddleback Peak were Pashiinonga, Wapijanga, and Tooypinga.⁴ Down near what are now the cities of Watts and Compton, members of the Tajáuta village lived. And the current downtown Los Angeles area was home to the Yaanga village. Other lineages and communities journeyed farther west until they encountered the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific. Along the rich coast and its wetlands, they halted at the shore, establishing villages such as Topaa’nga and Povuu’nga. Some still pressed on. Felling trees and carving them into ti’ats (canoes), they paddled across the sea to reach three small islands located sixty miles from the shore.⁵ There, across a petite coastal archipelago, they established communities, such as Pimu on the largest island, Pemuu’nga.⁶

More recently, Western scholars have begun to tell another story. Many now believe that human life began in the Tongva Basin when Natives sailed south along the great “Kelp Highway” that lines California’s Pacific Coast. In time, they peopled the islands, then the mainland, trekking east across the desert and toward the Colorado River Basin.⁷

However life began in the basin, archaeological evidence suggests that Tongva communities have lived in the region for at least 7,000 years.⁸ By A.D. 1769, when small groups of Spanish colonists began to arrive with hopes of permanently settling in the region, up to 10,000 people were already in the basin and on its islands. Speaking a shared Uto-Aztecan language, the independent bands of the basin loosely identified as members of a broader social and cultural group called the Kumivit, or as they are commonly called today, the Tongva-Gabrielino Tribe.⁹

Settled across 1,500 square miles stretching from islands to desert, most Tongva villages clustered around the rivers, creeks, and tributaries that wound through the basin. In every community, parents and elders used stories and songs to teach children about the boundaries and bounties of their village’s homeland. As archaeologist Brian Fagan puts it, California was an “edible landscape.”¹⁰ Along the southern coastline, Tongva families harvested a steady and diverse supply of food. Wetlands and tide pools nourished mollusks and waterfowl. Freshwater rivers and creeks were gathering places for minks, otters, deer, and rabbits. Coastal and inland waters also nourished expansive riparian forests, which hugged the shore and bent along the rivers through the Tongva Basin. Armies of oak trees rose from the beaches and the riverbanks, marching for miles across the basin and punching toward the sky. Around 2500 B.C., Tongva families began reaping nutrient-dense acorns from these mighty oak trees. With each family claiming individual trees and parcels, men, women, and children worked together to collect acorns, but it was Tongva women who performed the hard work of remaking the bitter jawbreakers into food. For days and days, women crushed, washed, and leeched the tannins from the acorns, transforming the tough seeds into nutrient-rich breads, soups, and mashes. Their labor fueled a culinary and nutrient “revolution” that rolled up and down the Pacific Coast, creating a period of robust population growth among the Indigenous peoples of California. By the mid-eighteenth century, the region that would become California was home to more than 310,000 people, making the coastal region one of the most densely populated areas on the North American continent. Only central Mexico maintained a higher population density.¹¹

The Tongva Basin. Researchers estimate that there were at least fifty villages in the Tongva Basin at the time of Spanish conquest. This map reflects some of the villages’ approximate locations as well as the territories of neighboring tribes. (From McCawley, First Angelinos, 24, 36, 42, 47, 56)

What is today California was also one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse regions of the world. Of all the Native languages originally spoken within the present borders of the United States, California was home to more than one quarter of them. Most had Uto-Aztecan roots, but one was entirely unique to the region. These languages mapped tribal affiliations. The estimated sixty different tribes living within the present boundaries of California spoke as many distinct languages. Moreover, each village also developed a distinctive dialect of its own. Therefore, within a single day’s walk in the Tongva Basin, a traveler would encounter numerous languages and even more dialects.¹²

When Europeans first began to explore the Tongva coast in the sixteenth century, they marveled at the region’s bounty and diversity. In their travels along the coast, they noted surpluses of foods and goods. Dried meats hung from roofs, behemoth granaries stored acorns, and large homes built of tule reeds were filled with rabbit skin blankets, grass mats, and colorful baskets. Some of the travelers attributed the abundance to the region’s Mediterranean landscape, but it was work, family, and the teachings of a shaman-hero named Chengiichngech that sustained life in the Tongva Basin.¹³

Everyday labor was highly gendered in the Tongva Basin. Women gathered and cooked foods. Men hunted. To perform their tasks effectively, men and women received training from their parents and elders about the land, the seasons, and the resources in their community, which often included a principal settlement, numerous hunting and gathering camps, religious sites, and large fields for games and celebrations. From their principal settlement, families would migrate seasonally to orchards and hunting grounds. Generations of experience guided their labor, but ongoing study was also important as epiphenomenal ecological events changed the landscape of their lives.¹⁴

Skilled work was also gendered. Men taught their sons how to build boats or craft arrowheads. Women taught their daughters how to weave the basin’s sturdy grasses—some of which grew to six feet high—into baskets. Crafted to store water, warehouse acorns, hold babies, and so much more, their baskets were vital social and economic commodities. Those made by well-trained women from the grassy Tongva Basin were extremely valuable and were traded up and down the coast and across the desert as far as the Great Basin region, bringing everything from beads to slaves into a village.¹⁵ In addition to the organization of labor by gender and family, a Tongva chief, often known as a tomyaar, served as the social, political, and economic leader for his, or sometimes her, village. Inheriting the position from his or her father, a tomyaar was trained since childhood to speak multiple languages, negotiate social relations, and intimately understand the specific ecology of the village. With this knowledge, tomyaars were responsible for directing the community’s seasonal migrations for hunting and gathering and for receiving, storing, and redistributing from hunters. The tomyaar, in other words, guided the community’s labor and stewarded its economic well-being. To regulate behavior and relations within a community, a tomyaar would correct misconduct with supernatural warnings, persuasion, banishment, and fees, requiring men or women guilty of wrongdoing to pay fines in the currency of shell-beads, food, or animal skins. Only rarely would a tomyaar order an execution. Murder and incest as well as misbehavior in religious sites and the mishandling of community food stores could all be punished by death in many Tongva communities. But execution as well as imprisonment, forced labor, or any form of corporal punishment was rare within California’s Indigenous communities. The lack of physical coercion extended into parenting practices. “Parents rarely, if ever, beat their off-spring,” writes historian Steven Hackel.¹⁶

Another important role served by a Tongva tomyaar was to maintain diplomatic relations with other villages and tribes. By speaking multiple dialects and traveling widely across the basin, a tomyaar engaged in trade, maintained political alliances, and also helped community members find spouses. In hard times, intermarriage and trade relations proved essential. For example, when tempests struck and destroyed a community’s food surpluses, trade and diplomacy provided access to emergency food supplies. In times of strained political relations, a tomyaar could mobilize men for war, but constant trade and extensive intermarriage generally mitigated the lethality of conflict.¹⁷

Although a tomyaar’s leadership depended on his or her knowledge and able stewardship of a community’s economy and social relations, a complex spiritual system firmly undergirded social order in the Tongva Basin. Across southern California, the Tongva and nearby tribes shared a spiritual belief system in which Chengiichngech, a shaman-like hero, set and enforced the rules of everyday life. Trained to care for the sick and mediate between the natural and supernatural worlds, shamans used rituals and guides to help community members worship Chengiichngech. Hunters and fishers, explained shamans, were barred from eating their own catch because Chengiichngech required them to give their catch to the tomyaar, who would redistribute the catch across the community. Hunters and fishers obeyed. If not, injury, illness, or a natural disaster could result when Chengiichngech ordered his “avengers,” such as bears, serpents, and supernatural deities, to descend from the mountains and strike against the disobedient. As one member of the Tongva Tribe explained in the early nineteenth century, Chengiichngech, who took the name Quagaur when he ascended to a life in the stars, watched carefully to make sure every person heeded his counsel: “Those who obey not my teachings, nor believe them, I shall punish severely. I will send unto them bears to bite and serpents to sting them; they shall be without food, and have diseases that they may die.”¹⁸

Careful research with Tongva oral histories, archaeological evidence, and linguistic analyses are still revealing many of the complexities of the millennia of life in the region today known as Los Angeles. However, what this work has already made indisputably clear is that life in the Tongva Basin was ordered, dynamic, and generations deep before Europeans began to explore the Americas. Tongva life was grounded by an earned and intimate knowledge of the edible landscape and enriched by extensive social, cultural, political, and spiritual relations across the region. Therefore, when a Spanish ship first appeared on the Tongva horizon, local tomyaars knew more about the Spaniards than the Spaniards knew of the Tongva. Their extensive trade networks had long carried news of a powerful new band of men traveling by land and sea.¹⁹

SPANISH INVASION

After the Spanish conquest of Mexico (1519–21), stories of bearded men and towering beasts cascaded along trade routes in the Americas. Some of the stories were frightening. The travelers had powerful weapons. They sliced up humans and blasted balls of fire. So fearsome were their weapons that the new tribe had broken the mighty Aztecan Empire and occupied its land. They raped women and stole children. But other stories told that the new trading partners carried unique and valuable goods. Therefore, when the Spanish explorer Juan Francisco Cabrillo and his crew anchored their ships along the Tongva coast in 1542, the women fled and the men from the local village jumped into ti’ats and paddled out to meet the ships. The men were prepared to fight or trade. When Cabrillo signaled that he had no interest in battle, Tongva men boarded their ships to inspect and exchange goods with the stran...