SONORATOWN AND EARLY SETTLEMENT WORK

Sonoratown took its name from the Sonoran-born Mexican miners who settled in Los Angeles during the Gold Rush. Bordering on Chinatown, Sonoratown fanned out eastwards from Broadway and Main Street to embrace the Plaza district west of the Los Angeles river. By 1880, 70 percent of the city's Mexican population resided in or near Sonoratown.Footnote ² Once the residential home of the Spanish-speaking Californio elite, Sonoratown by the 1890s had lost its aura as a romantic, aristocratic pueblo. However, the district retained its reputation as the heart of Mexican Los Angeles. Under Anglo-American rule after 1848, the Californio elite sold or lost their property. Their departure from the old pueblo left Sonoratown to working-class Mexicans, both immigrant and native-born, and, increasingly, to an array of European immigrants.

Mexican peasants, sharecroppers and migrant workers emigrated north of the border to escape cyclical unemployment, land loss and inflation. Originating from northern and northwest-central states, small towns and villages in Chihuahua, Sonora, Jalisco, Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Michoacán and Durango, Mexican immigrants arrived from predominantly rural, peasant communities that had witnessed rapid changes brought by the modernizing programmes of the Porfiriato, the railroads and the market economy. They were largely of mestizo origin – that is, they claimed a mixed ancestry derived from the intermingling over centuries of Indian and Spanish peoples and cultures. As Douglas Monroy claims, the mestizo was “mostly Indian,” with “a cultural [and linguistic] mix that was mostly Spanish.”Footnote ³ Thus in early twentieth-century anthropological parlance, these mestizo Mexican immigrants were often considered “acculturated Indians,” because despite retaining strong “village traditions” they originated from communities that had become Hispanized. The terms “Indian,” “Mexican,” and “peon” (manual labourer) served as social and racial categories, and often became interchangeable north of the border. Victor Clark argued that peons or cholos (another term for “low-caste” Mexican labourers) constituted the bulk of the Mexican immigrant population: these Mexicans were “Indians with a slight infusion of white blood”; “Indians in physique, temperament, character, and mentality,” added Clark, who were often “unwittingly admitted to Indian schools” in the US.Footnote ⁴

On arrival, most Mexican immigrants entered the seasonal agricultural labour force, or engaged in railroad construction and maintenance. Mexican immigrants began outnumbering native-born Californios by the turn of the century.Footnote ⁵ Numbering less than 15 percent of the city's total population in 1900, some three to five thousand Mexicans inhabited Sonoratown and smaller dispersed colonias.Footnote ⁶ While Mexicans, particularly those north of the Plaza, became increasingly segregated from Anglos after the 1880s, turn-of-the-century Sonoratown and the immediate vicinity housed an ethnically diverse population comprising Anglos, Italians, French, Spanish, Germans, Danes, Irish, Syrians and Chinese.Footnote ⁷

The contours of these central working-class, immigrant districts – already known as “the slums” by the 1860s – were rapidly changing.Footnote ⁸ As the interurban railroad system evolved, the central business district shifted to the southwest of the city. Sonoratown still occupied key real-estate territory, and as light industry invaded the area land values rose. The Sonora Wood and Coal Yard, Los Angeles Cornice Works, Metropolitan Steam Dye Works, a bottle yard, a tank pump factory and other warehouses dotted the New High, Buena Vista and Bellevue district in the heart of Sonoratown. On Alpine and Castelar Streets stood the Fosmir Iron Works, and a few blocks west, the Los Angeles Pressed Brick Company. The Pacific Electric Railroad's freight yard lay a block east of Castelar Street on Sunset/Bellevue and Buena Vista.Footnote ⁹ Other local industries included macaroni and biscuit factories, breweries, a gas and electric factory, oil refineries and ironworks, the Cudahy Packing Company and the Southern Pacific Railroad. The latter two companies drew heavily on Mexican male labour while Mexican women became increasingly visible in the district's laundries and boarding houses as domestics, cooks and seamstresses.Footnote ¹⁰ The expansion of industry and the arrival of new workers brought housing and lot congestion. As living space rapidly declined, Sonoratown's old adobes were remodelled, replaced or accompanied by brick tenements, lodging houses, shacks and back-to-back house courts, particularly along New High Street and Buena Vista Street (later renamed North Broadway).Footnote ¹¹

Casa de Castelar, arguably the city's first settlement house,Footnote ¹² lay a few blocks from Buena Vista. Established in 1894 under the Los Angeles Settlement Association (LASA) and later known as the College Settlement, Casa was staffed by salaried workers and volunteers, largely middle- and upper middle-class women – clubwomen and graduates of the Los Angeles Kindergarten training school and the State Normal School (now UCLA). Casa's evolution illustrates the increasing presence of civic-minded women in public life from the turn of the century, and notably at the forefront of social reform and municipal housekeeping.Footnote ¹³

Casa's eventual home in an old adobe on the corner of Castelar and Alpine Streets became a focal point in developing social work amongst Mexican and immigrant populations clustered in the city's core district. When the Los Angeles Settlement Association rented the crumbling Begon adobe on Castelar Street in December 1895, the settlement inherited not only the neighbourhood but also a stark emblem of its deterioration. Working “for better government, better sanitation, more intelligent citizenship, and higher intellectual and social development,” the settlement proposed itself as an alternative model neighbourhood home. Designed to “work with people not for people” and “share with rather than give to them,” Casa exemplified the “new” charity that rejected almsgiving and fostered self-help in the bid to restore community bonds.Footnote ¹⁴

LASA proclaimed itself a “non-sectarian” organization.Footnote ¹⁵ However, the Social Gospel Movement, a broad church encompassing liberals, radicals and moderates, frequently underpinned outwardly secular campaigns for municipal reform by clubwomen and settlement workers. As a city characterized by religious pluralism, or rather a variety of Protestant denominations and a waning Catholic culture, LA proved no exception. Much early charitable and benevolent work derived from the activities of churchwomen. The Catholic Sisters of Charity and the Protestant American Missionary Association both undertook missionary, health and educational work amongst the city's poor, immigrant and ethnic populations during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1858 the Sisters of Charity established the city's first hospital in an adobe near the Plaza.Footnote ¹⁶

After the 1880s church-sponsored welfare and educational organizations targeted the Plaza, Sonoratown and neighbouring immigrant districts. The Forsythe Presbyterian Memorial School (1884) and the Frances De Pauw Methodist Industrial School for Spanish-Speaking Girls (1900) created a basis for indirect evangelization through welfare and education.Footnote ¹⁷ In 1897 the Catholic Church founded El Hogar Feliz, “The Happy Home” kindergarten (later renamed Santa Rita Settlement), which quickly relocated to Buena Vista Street in the heart of Sonoratown.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1901 Mary Workman, ex-volunteer worker at Casa de Castelar and El Hogar Feliz, established the Catholic Brownson Settlement House just east of Sonoratown. Less than a block north of Brownson House lay Dana Bartlett's Congregationalist settlement, Bethlehem Institutional Church. Michael Engh argues that the city's settlements thrived in a climate of “unusual religious tolerance.”Footnote ¹⁹

These settlements also drew on the religious impulse present in LA's late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women's club movement. City clubwomen were invariably upper to middle class, Anglo-American and predominantly Protestant, and many sat on the board of LASA. One of these women, Caroline Seymour Severance, founded a Unitarian Church, the city's first woman's club in 1878, and, in 1895, the Los Angeles Free Kindergarten Association (LAFKA). As an organization dedicated to providing schooling and social services for the less privileged, LAFKA quickly became an integral part of LASA's campaign to support immigrant mothers and children. A Christian socialist and a member of the Union Reform League, Severance illustrates perfectly how socialist Christianity influenced the relationship between the Social Gospel and Progressive Era reform.Footnote ²⁰

Within this religious milieu, settlement work and progressive reform flourished. The failure to evangelize Mexicans after the 1870s had already shifted the churches away from proselytizing and towards secular reform, welfare and education. Many early settlement houses were located in such polyglot, culturally and ethnically diverse, areas, that they had little choice but to advertise themselves as non-sectarian establishments.Footnote ²¹ The Social Gospel Movement bolstered this pragmatic shift: emphasizing the “perfectibility” of humankind and the “unity of the sacred and the secular,” the Social Gospel avoided theological controversy and championed “the law of unity in diversity.”Footnote ²² In turn, the movement also sponsored greater tolerance towards cultural pluralism and ethnic persistence. Christian social service, or applied Christianity, fused social ethics with social justice, allowing reformers to critique the existing system whilst seeking “common ground” with their brethren.Footnote ²³ LASA's women were no exception: “how like is human nature wherever found,” declared one worker, who adduced that “the social instinct of all men answers to the normal, natural outreach of human hearts in social fellowship.”Footnote ²⁴ LASA's women typified the Social Gospeller by adhering to “laws of service and sacrifice” and by articulating a faith that twinned environmental reform with salvation.Footnote ²⁵

LASA comprised several branches: Casa, the settlement house, a kindergarten established in 1895 under Caroline Severance's Los Angeles Free Kindergarten Association, and an Instructive District Nursing Department created in 1904 to extend nursing duties begun in 1898.Footnote ²⁶ The settlement house offered social, intellectual and educational opportunities together with basic health care, and Casa functioned as a semi-official employment and legal services agency. Facilities included public baths, clubs for males and females of various ages, entertainments, manual and industrial training, homemaking programmes, a night school, a library, a savings bank and a clothing department.Footnote ²⁷ LASA supported the municipal district nursing service by providing the first district nurse in 1897 and helped appoint the first public school nurse in 1904. LASA's members initiated and staffed a variety of pioneering municipal commissions and welfare offices: the Juvenile Court (1903), the City Playground Commission (1904) and, most critically, the first Municipal Housing Commission (1906).Footnote ²⁸

Settlement workers and the Instructive District Nursing Department witnessed “year by year … the evolution of the Mexican adobe and patio into … filthy courtyard[s]” and “ill-smelling, tuberculosis-breeding tenements.”Footnote ²⁹ In the face of deteriorating neighbourhood conditions, settlement women cultivated an anti-modern and anti-urban aesthetic by elevating local, domestic and particularly Mexican folk culture. The settlement movement's non-sectarian approach tolerated ethnic and cultural pluralism in the name of Christian social service. Distanced from Sonoratown's inhabitants socially and ethnically, Casa's workers emphasized a shared humanity with their neighbours, which involved evaluating Mexicans' ethnic and cultural “traits” positively. Kindergarten and settlement staff celebrated ethnic diversity and immigrant culture through fund-raising events that dramatized the artistic inheritance of Sonoratown's residents.Footnote ³⁰ Staff routinely celebrated Mexican national holidays, organized handicraft and folk-dancing exhibitions and marketed immigrant crafts and women's handiwork through mothers clubs and arts training schemes in a bid to foster a self-sustaining community.Footnote ³¹

These early social reformers and welfare workers contemplated the changing cityscape with marked apprehension and ambivalence. On the one hand, settlement women idealized Sonoratown as an Old World village, an antidote to industrial urbanism; on the other, Sonoratown was an emerging slumland, symbolizing the evils of the new urbanism and the perceived deficiencies of the new Mexican peón immigrants. Nowhere was this ambiguity more evident than in Casa's programmes and philosophy, which advocated cultural pluralism whilst pushing decidedly for assimilation and environmental reform.Footnote ³²

As the Old World village gave way to the slum, settlement workers formulated their commitment to social planning and housing reform by analysing ethnicity, class and gender relations. By 1906 Sonoratown was a rapidly de-cultured and proletarianized place in the minds of settlement workers. Like their counterparts on the East Coast and in the Mid-west, LA's settlement workers struggled to cope with the fluidity and heterogeneity of working-class immigrant districts. To integrate new and old populations into the frame of American citizenship, reformers tailored settlement programmes to the perceived cultural and racial traits of different ethnic and national groups whilst simultaneously preparing them for an Anglo-American mode of living.

Yet immigrant arts schemes and cultural pluralism ultimately took second place to environmental reform, assimilation, homemaking, health and hygiene projects. The settlement instituted monthly socials and lectures dedicated to “correcting” health habits and instructing mothers in childcare and homekeeping. Casa's “Little Housekeepers” club for girls included “healthful scientific cooking” and familiarity with the accoutrements of Anglo-American living – the first step towards “civilization,” according to settlement staff.Footnote ³³ The seeds of later Americanization programmes lay in these homemaking and assimilation schemes. Furthermore, reformers' analysis of ethnicity, class and gender in relation to the peón immigrant constituted an early appraisal of the “Mexican problem.” In shaping these twin debates, which eventually dominated the politics of health, housing, immigration and labour in Los Angeles, Casa's women were joined by their literary counterparts, who proved just as eager to explore the new “immigrant urbanism.” And like their settlement counterparts, they too struggled to negotiate the image of Sonoratown as a picturesque tourist spectacle in pushing for reform and assimilation.

SONORATOWN AS TOURIST HAVEN

Published in 1902, Saunterings in Summerland by J. Torrey Connor incorporated articles previously issued in the Los Angeles Times, in the Los Angeles Herald and in popular, regional travel magazines, Land of Sunshine and Overland. Given its wide circulation, Saunterings in Summerland was almost certainly intended for a popular audience, and served as an alternative tourist guidebook for southern California. Although not strictly fiction, Saunterings maps California's historical, cultural and ethnic landscapes by melding literary techniques, romantic imaginings and facts. In the opening section, “Los Angeles, Yesterday and Today,” Connor charts the city's transformation from a “sleepy pueblo … drowsing on the bank of the meandering stream” into a “bustling, wide-awake metropolis … push[ing] north, east, south and west.”Footnote ³⁴ Yet amidst the city's business blocks, “now and then one comes across a bit of sunny Spain.” Connor's Sonoratown is an oasis, a “garden” and ready-made utopia of romance and leisure, where “velvet black-eyed” children play against the backdrop of perfumed orange trees and “time-stained adobes.”Footnote ³⁵

However, popular fiction rendered Sonoratown, like Chinatown to the east, a quaint and mysterious place. As a showplace, Sonoratown invoked the tourist's curiosity for an “alien” and (seemingly) vanishing culture whilst supporting LA's image as a cosmopolitan city. Travelling by streetcar, tourists could peep into a bygone world offering scenes far from “everyday living” and “modern ways.”Footnote ³⁶

OLD MEXICO TRANSFERRED

From the turn of the century “a defined literature devoted to Mexico” found a “substantial niche” amongst a popular audience north of the border. Works by missionaries, travellers, journalists and academics established a repertoire of cultural, racial and ethnic images through which Mexico and Mexican-ness were imagined and interpreted by a reading public.Footnote ³⁷

Indeed, much of the imagery employed in the Sonoratown anthologies derived from contemporary depictions of Old Mexico. During 1908 Charles Fletcher Lummis's magazine Out West serialized Connor's illustrated tale A Red Parasol in Mexico. A story of romance, lost cities and the search for Arcadia by a party of North American tourists, A Red Parasol was also a travel narrative that elevated the picturesque and rendered Old Mexico's inhabitants colourful but sometimes dangerous street types. In the opening scene, Peter Yeere, soon-to-be fiancé of Polly and cousin of archaeologist Weston, attempts to capture Mexico on camera only to discover that “one's very adjectives were soon exhausted in a country the picturesqueness of which defied description.”Footnote ³⁸ Connor mystifies the “real” Mexico as hypnotic and unfathomable; as Peter surveys the colours around him, his “gaze” becomes “fixed [and] trance-like.”Footnote ³⁹

Connor's party of North American tourists explores Mexico City. Polly becomes an expert navigator acquainted with the nooks of the city and its “fascinating quarter,” the marketplace. Connor's characters discover, digest and interpret Mexico primarily through artefacts and the buying of goods. In an almost sardonic tone, Connor describes how Polly buys a “zarape right off a Mexican's back,” even though “he may have had small-pox, for all she knew.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Connor's critical yet sensationalist portrayal reminds one of the Anglo-American tourists in Charles Flandrau's travel narrative Viva Mexico! (1908). Flandrau mocked his compatriots, who clad themselves in “enormous … sombreros” and “hideous ‘Mexican’ sarapes,” and who routinely exhibited “bad taste” and a “mania for being conspicuous” in their consumption of “local culture.”Footnote ⁴¹

In A Red Parasol Old Mexico is appreciated yet sensationalized; like Flandrau's tourists, Connor's “American” party demonstrate scant knowledge of the social conditions under which Mexicans live. Forming a “frieze-like procession,” the local women, peons and “lounging” youths are reduced to architectural motifs. Connor however, cautions the North American traveller: Old Mexico is an unpredictable, arbitrary world, a land of extremes and inversions. On leaving the city, the travellers see “another Mexico … before them – a city where poverty, albeit picturesque poverty, had its abode.”Footnote ⁴² Connor warns her readers, “sooner or later, there will come a day when the things that charmed, because of the novelty, charm no longer; when the picturesque street characters turn into dirty ragamuffins before your very eyes.”Footnote ⁴³

By exploring the ambiguities, stereotypes and extremes associated with Old Mexico – primitivism, disease, poverty and idyllic romanticism – A Red Parasol falls within a genre devoted to “showcase[s] of low life.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Although Connor's tale elevates the search for Arcadia in another land, its sensationalist and dystopian elements echo the tales of “foreign” immigrant slum districts in US city journalism and popular fiction. Indeed, A Red Parasol falls partially within the slumland genre identified by Alan Mayne in his analysis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century city journalism in North America, Australia and Britain.Footnote ⁴⁵ Connor's writing, like the Sonoratown anthologies, constitutes what might be termed “slum romance.”

ARTISTIC CIRCLES AND REFORM-MINDED WOMEN

Representations of Old Mexico framed perceptions of Mexican-ness across the border in Sonoratown. Furthermore, Connor's work and the Sonoratown anthologies emanated from similar artistic circles. Olive Percival, photographer and author of one of the Sonoratown tales, illustrated Connor's Red Parasol. Percival travelled to Mexico in 1899, and in 1901 published Mexico City: An Idler's Notebook, accompanied by her own photography. Born in Illinois in 1869 and resident of Los Angeles from 1887 until her death in 1945, Percival was a member of the city's first women's club, the Friday Morning Club founded by Caroline Seymour Severance. Her association with local artists, writers and book-lovers within the Arroyo Seco area – home to antiquarian, editor and founder of Out West Charles Fletcher Lummis – illustrates the interplay of art, reform and civic duty in women's club culture during the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁴⁶ Percival visited the San Pedro artists' colony with her Arroyo Seco neighbour, writer and Casa de Castelar resident Amanda Mathews, and was also acquainted with Mathews's settlement co-workers, Evelyn and Bessie Stoddart.Footnote ⁴⁷

Percival's diaries reveal an enthusiasm for the region's cultural and ethnic landscapes and her literary interest in Mexico.Footnote ⁴⁸ These entries exemplify how the overlap between art, reform and the fascination with Old Mexico permeated Percival's social circle. During 1906 Percival was engaged in arranging an exhibit of Spanish colonial and Mexican objects loaned to the Ebell Club to help raise funds for a fine-arts building.Footnote ⁴⁹ Percival also recalled attending a “Mexican luncheon” where “all the guests were Mexico enthusiasts.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Acquainted with Charles Lummis's wife Dorothea, an early sponsor of Severance's kindergarten movement, Percival attended “Spanish classes” at the Lummis household, which she described as an “exceptionally jolly one, with Spanish games and refreshments.”Footnote ⁵¹ Percival also visited the home of philanthropist John Randolph Haynes with “a number of other Mexico lovers,” and remarked upon the fine furnishings and artefacts of the Haynes's who were one-time residents of Old Mexico.Footnote ⁵² Percival's vision of Los Angeles's pueblo heritage sustained her interest in Old Mexico for many years. On witnessing a funeral procession at San Gabriel Mission in 1911 she wrote, “It all made me ‘homesick’ for Mexico City. How much I want to go there again.”Footnote ⁵³ Percival's search for cultural power and roots in an assumed kinship with non-European, indigenous cultures mirrored the anti-modernist, anti-urban outlook of other members of the city's Anglo cultural elite.

Percival was also fascinated by Los Angeles's Chinatown, accumulating photographs and notes from her numerous visits. She tried selling her Chinatown stories to the Los Angeles Times in 1905 for a “niggardly wage” of “twenty cents per inch.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Plans to publish her “Chinese-American” stories dovetailed with her desire to write “a story about city work-houses.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Although her manuscript was rejected in 1912, Percival published a book of verse and included one of her Chinatown short stories in From the Old Pueblo. This anthology included the writings of her friend Amanda Mathews, whose life also illustrates the interplay of art and social reform in early twentieth-century women's club culture. Author of several of the Sonoratown stories, Amanda Mathews taught at a private elementary school in Mexico City before settlement work. As co-pioneer of the 1915 Home Teacher Act, she played a critical role in the drive to Americanize Los Angeles's immigrants. According to Don Parson, Mathews wrote The Hieroglyphics of Love in homage to her Casa de Castelar co-workers.Footnote ⁵⁶

THE ANTHOLOGIES: TOURISM, THE PICTURESQUE AND THE MYTH OF AUTHENTICITY

From the Old Pueblo, and Other Tales (1902) and The Hieroglyphics of Love: Stories of Sonoratown and Old Mexico (1906) dramatize the tourist-cum-slumming expeditions of the early Progressive era. Several of Mathews's tales were published in From the Old Pueblo before reappearing in The Hieroglyphics of Love. From the Old Pueblo features Spanish-speaking residents of Sonoratown, characters from Chinatown courtesy of Percival, as well as an assortment of Old World European inhabitants from France, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Scotland and Syria. Both anthologies survey the changing urban landscape, Sonoratown's ethnic patchwork and the vanishing culture of the pueblo, whilst giving prominence to the Mexican element.Footnote ⁵⁷

In A Red Parasol and Saunterings in Summerland, Connor depicts Mexicans through folk art and architectural motifs, as static “people of the adobe” embedded in the landscape.Footnote ⁵⁸ Amanda Mathews's “The Potter's Wheel” also paints Sonoratown's cultural life and social hierarchy through the daily activities of craftspeople and the folk art of “bygone” days.Footnote ⁵⁹ Mathews's “The Woman and the Idol” features an Anglo cultural elite that interprets and appreciates Mexican culture by discovering archaeological artefacts. Maura becomes jealous of her lover's devotion to an ancient Aztec deity. She throws the idol down the steps, only for an unsuspecting Anglo professor of archaeology to retrieve it. Maura's lover Timeteo refuses to sell the idol to the professor for ten dollars; it is tantamount to selling his own family. Timeteo eventually relents, selling the idol for two gold pieces. In one transaction, he relinquishes part of his heritage; Anglo money makes the conquest and appropriation of Sonoratown's Mexican culture a seemingly innocuous, amicable transaction.Footnote ⁶⁰ Anglos also consume Mexican culture in Mathews's “The Miracle of San Juanito.” Pepita, the Mexican heroine, trades her drawn work to “the rich Americana” tourist for a silver milagro that “miraculously” returns Pepita's long-lost lover to Sonoratown.Footnote ⁶¹ However, here the purchase of Mexican craftwork represents a process of exchange, albeit highly unequal, which opens up redemptive and utopian possibilities for Pepita, and invokes cultural renewal in the return of her lover. Indeed, Mathews's “The Miracle” suggests that the politics of appropriation, objectification and the reification of culture were processes refashioned, subverted and inverted by Sonoratown's Mexicans.

The anthologies mirror the attitudes of settlement workers who elevated local culture and initiated manual-arts training schemes in the belief that Mexicans were “essentially artistic people.”Footnote ⁶² Olive Percival's philosophy of art mirrored Ruskin's democratic vision: “beauty should be in the home not in the gallery” and “art should be for the common labouring people, not for the aristocrats nor millionaires,” insisted Percival.Footnote ⁶³ Similarly, Amanda Mathews, like many of her contemporaries, elevated Mexican culture by instituting an immigrant arts policy at Casa de Castelar. LASA's settlement workers viewed immigrant arts as the “saving factor” of a neighbourhood economically, morally and spiritually crushed by the force of industrialism.Footnote ⁶⁴ Like the artists, poets and intellectuals of Ruskin and Toynbee's age who had descended into the slums, Percival and Mathews also condemned industrialism as “immoral and ugly,” and employed art to restore beauty, community and solidarity.Footnote ⁶⁵ Art was multifaceted – it shaped the relationship between environment and character; it palliated the ills of modernity, capitalism and industrialism; and it civilized, dignified and uplifted the immigrant worker in whose very being art and labour became one. Like their British predecessors, these women reformers-cum-writers and artists engaged in “moral and aesthetic muckraking”Footnote ⁶⁶ in their commitment to forging the City Beautiful.

Like their eastern and mid-western counterparts, LA's clubwomen appropriated the ideological underpinnings of the Arts and Crafts Movement to mitigate the exploitative, dehumanizing effects of an urban, industrial order.Footnote ⁶⁷ Yet whilst Ellen Gates Starr of Chicago's Hull-House found socialism through Ruskin and Morris, Olive Percival – unlike Caroline Severance and some of the other Friday Morning Club women – was no socialist.Footnote ⁶⁸ Vehemently anti-union and committed to preserving the past, Percival expressed a type of “progressive conservatism” that tempered large-scale reform.Footnote ⁶⁹

And like the Arts and Crafts Movement, where reform emanated from above, the Sonoratown anthologies depict Mexican women engaged in home industries under the paternalistic gaze of Anglo-American patrons. However, in these anthologies the patron all too easily becomes the intrusive tourist. In The Miracle of San Juanito it is unclear if Amanda Mathews intends to critique the corrosive impact of tourism on Sonoratown through the appropriation of Mexican material culture. However, “The Reaping of Vanity” by Gwendolen Overton explicitly condemns the tourist's search for the picturesque as destructive; Mexicans become material for the artistic sensibilities of Anglo-American visitors. “The Reaping of Vanity” opens with the archetypal tourist Miss Levering visiting Sonoratown “for the perfectly laudible [sic] purpose of studying the genius of its people and its life.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Levering seeks material for her camera and sketchbook, and loses little time in discovering Miguel. Studied in profile before a whitewashed adobe strung with chillies, tomatoes, plums, oranges and lemons, Miguel “made a picture of a good deal of artistic worth.” Even Miguel's clothing and crimson tie, “a thoroughly good bit of color,” made him “picturesque to the last degree.”Footnote ⁷¹ Miguel is passive, static – an object. Levering discovers him “leaning against a post, and doing nothing with all the perfection his race has, by dint of generations of practice, brought to the thing.”Footnote ⁷² And in one click of her Kodak camera, Levering “flatters” Miguel yet commits “a fatal mistake”: for Miguel, “stories and sketches – ‘material’ generally – did not enter into his scheme of things. How should he have known that he was a ‘type’ and hardly a man at all?” exclaims Overton.Footnote ⁷³

Miguel is objectified through the camera, and “confined to a pictorial timeless ethnic space” beyond the realm of assimilation.Footnote ⁷⁴ Indeed, Miguel is “hardly a man at all”: bound by a rural inheritance, the Mexican peón was perceived not simply as a docile labourer but as a child. The image of the Mexican as child was prevalent in contemporary travel narratives, reform rhetoric and slum romance: for Charles Flandrau, Mexicans were “like children” who insisted on “making naively preposterous demands upon one.”Footnote ⁷⁵ For Amanda Mathews most Mexicans were “cholos, a primitive people, more Indian than Latin,” who exhibited “child-faults with some Latin faults thrown in for good measure.” Mathews added, “These people are not a hopeless proposition … but they need education of a peculiar sort – education that shall be a disciplinary tonic – that shall give them standards – that amounts to evolution.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Similarly, president of the College Settlement Association Katherine Coman juxtaposed Sonoratown's Mexicans – “improvident children of the South” – with “practical, uncomprehending Americans.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The image of the Mexican as both child and Indian – or, more accurately, a “child of nature” – served varied social, political and economic agendas, and derived legitimacy from a Spanish colonial discourse that proclaimed the Indian in need of “civilization, training and discipline,” “gifts” to be bestowed upon the Indian by the Catholic Church and the Franciscan Missions.Footnote ⁷⁸ Anglo-American California reworked this history into a sanitized version of the past – a version known as the “Mission Myth,” a narrative replete with “docile” Indian neophytes working under benign Mexican padres.Footnote ⁷⁹ Evident in local-colour literature after the 1880s, the Mission Myth re-created the social and racial order by fusing traditions of pastoralism, paternalism and race. This mythical, idealized order dovetailed perfectly with the dictates of progressive reform, the Social Gospel and the Arts and Crafts Movement, which all insisted that progress emanated from a sense of “noblesse oblige.”Footnote ⁸⁰

In Overton's tale the camera also signifies the gap between the pastoral, folk Mexican and the technologically advanced Anglo-American. The invention of the camera allowed the “tourist with a propensity for kodaking … things quaint or curious” to inhabit a different world.Footnote ⁸¹ As Overton asserts, Miguel “knew well what a camera was. Their name was Legion.”Footnote ⁸² The camera functioned as a new means of classifying objects, as a means of creating an “inventory,” a new body of knowledge, and as a mode of social control and surveillance.Footnote ⁸³ Yet while the camera exemplified the new “science” and the increasing professionalization and bureaucratization that accompanied the rise of progressivism, it also became integral to the slumming experience by manipulating spatial distance between different ethnic and social groups. Like the city's new modes of transport such as the streetcar, central to Connor's Saunterings in Summerland, the camera brought the slum closer to upper- and middle-class outsiders and tourists, whilst making it a “potentially detachable spectacle.”Footnote ⁸⁴ In re-creating “the pleasures of reading,” photographic images became new texts that competed with the novel, the popular press and the theatre.Footnote ⁸⁵

Whilst illustrating prevailing ethnic and class relations, the use of the camera by Miss Levering also inverts existing gender relations. Miguel is exoticized and almost feminized as a feline, “beautiful creature” with a musical voice;Footnote ⁸⁶ Levering paints Miguel firmly within an Orientalist framework that shaped early discussion of the “Mexican Problem” during the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁸⁷ Levering's control of the camera – “no longer the province of the professional”Footnote ⁸⁸ – suggests the increasing visibility of women in the reform, artistic and civic-minded public life of Los Angeles. Indeed, women photographers such as Olive Percival, who documented Mexico City and LA's Chinatown, and who illustrated Connor's Red Parasol, were not unique. In the drive for a municipal housing commission, Casa de Castelar's director, Bessie Stoddart, also employed photography and modern positivism in her 1905 exposé of the house courts of Sonoratown.Footnote ⁸⁹ For such women, the camera cut across not only social but gender boundaries.

Yet the democratization of slum spectatorship and authorship had its limits – in order to publish her Chinatown stories, Percival conceded that she must use a man's pen name.Footnote ⁹⁰ Moreover, the ambiguous status of the camera in Overton's text suggests that reform-minded women writers expressed anxiety about the role of art in the new methods of social science. As Peter Hales asserts, early reformers struggled to overthrow the “sentimental and grand style treatment” of the city prevalent within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photography and were initially wary of the value of camera work.Footnote ⁹¹ Not until middle-class settlement residents learnt the art of photography themselves and employed professionals did they fully embrace the camera as an integral means of publicizing reform work.Footnote ⁹² Certainly, Overton's “Reaping of Vanity” suggests that photography could support a “picturesque tradition” that militated against a “socially conscious art.”Footnote ⁹³

And it is this picturesque tradition, the elevation of the “authentic” Mexican, that confuses Miguel and foreshadows his downfall. Soon after being captured on camera, Miguel seeks to impress Levering further by buying a new set of clothes. Bought from an Anglo-American part of town at exorbitant prices, Miguel's new clothes transform him into a hideous, grotesque figure: gringo-ized and standardized, the clothes strip Miguel of his “natural” traits and aesthetic sensibilities. In popular, reform and politicized literature of the early 1900s, the Mexican often symbolized the antithesis of modern, industrial and commercial society. As left-wing commentator John Kenneth Turner declared, “Mexicans … exhibit stronger artistic tendencies than we and less inclination toward commerce and heavy mechanics.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Overton however, satirizes Levering's depiction of Miguel as a city-living peasant and, in turn, the wider “pastoral conception of ‘low’ subjects” prevalent in urban photography and popular illustration during the early Progressive era.Footnote ⁹⁵ Miguel's expensive tie is no longer “a good bit of color this time, but a gruesome striped thing.” Levering's disapproval is evident: she “was not pleased … he looked nothing less than absurd.”Footnote ⁹⁶

Discovering Miguel has sold his old colourful clothes, Levering is outraged: “Sold them! Sordid as a Jew! her beautiful Mexican was. He was spoiled to her now, by the trait and by the clothes.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Such references point not simply to fears concerning the disorganization of “authentic” folk culture under the weight of industrial urbanism and consumerism. They demonstrate clearly how the debate about Mexican-ness was shaped by existing ideologies of race and whiteness, which included not only an orientalist framework, but also perceptions of Jewishness. Jewish immigrants settling in Boyle Heights met great animosity, initially for the rapidity with which they entered the city, and later for their prominent role as real-estate agents in East Los Angeles.Footnote ⁹⁸ Furthermore, as greater numbers of Yiddish-speaking immigrants from impoverished parts of Eastern Europe, Poland, Russia and the East Coast accompanied the inward migration of more conservative Protestant Anglos from the Mid-west after the 1890s, Anglo-American–Jewish relations in Los Angeles deteriorated.Footnote ⁹⁹ Levering's exclamation exemplifies this animosity, and how hierarchies of race, in which European immigrants such as Jews were positioned along a sliding scale of “whiteness” and caricatured as distinct “foreign types,” shaped popular literature, reform rhetoric and slum iconography.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Similarly, in “Monsieur La Tribe,” Nancy Foster paints a variety of “white types” with associated behaviours that include “the boisterousness of the Kelt” and “the profanity and roughness of the Anglo-Saxon.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Likewise, women from LASA's Instructive Nursing Department often distinguished nationalities as distinct races, comparing the Slav with the Latin and the peón, for example.Footnote ¹⁰²

The persistence of anti-Semitism during the Progressive Era is well documented; anti-Semitism was not merely an expression of reactionary populism, but evident in popular fiction, drama, the press and sensationalist reform literature – and in the writings of Social Gospellers and tenement reformers such as Jacob Riis. The Jew became not simply “the ultimate symbol for predatoriness and dissoluteness” during the Progressive Era, but a “symbol of the afflictions of modern industrial society,” of “social disintegration” and, critically, of the refusal to assimilate. As opposed to Judaism, Christianity represented everything “human, personal, universal and open, not narrow.”Footnote ¹⁰³ The “sordid” Jew in Overton's “Reaping” resembles the “stock villain” of popular slum fiction, an unassimilable being belonging to a separate race, one associated with criminality, avarice and perversion, all peculiarly “un-Christian” behaviours.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The corrupted Mexican reincarnated as the “sordid” Jew exemplifies perfectly Levering's perception of race, gender and self in an age riddled with anxiety about chastity, morality and woman's changing status as wage-worker – Miguel's decline reinforces conceptions of white womanhood as well as the peon's inability to assimilate. And Miguel's second attempt to “become American” by acquiring a new wardrobe is doubly disastrous. Levering shuts her sketchbook “in disgust” at the inauthentic Mexican she has unintentionally created and whom she ultimately destroys.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Thus, in Overton's tale, the Mexican becomes racialized and de-cultured through tourism, “an invasive infection, spreading the viruses and microbes of inauthenticity and commodification.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

MODERNITY, PROGRESS AND THE METROPOLIS

Whilst Overton condemns tourism for perpetuating the myth of authenticity, the anthologies collectively situate Sonoratown and its inhabitants within an overarching narrative of modernity and progress. Progressive reformers, settlement workers and Social Gospellers inhabited an age that straddled the City Beautiful and the City Useful. Reformers sponsored not simply the beautification of the city, but also a rational city, underpinned by scientific methods, efficient planning and new technologies – the very hallmarks of modernization. Indeed, aesthetic and social harmony in the city could only be achieved through “rational growth.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ And in the anthologies, Sonoratown's residents become curiosities, remnants of a vanishing age and/or one radically at odds with the emerging metropolis. Connor's Saunterings in Summerland evokes a pueblo submerged by the growth of a new city, where the streetcar overwhelms the sound of the mandolin.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In “The Hieroglyphics of Love” a house court on Sonoratown's Buena Vista Street, aptly the “Street of the Good View,” looks beyond the pueblo towards the burgeoning city. A highway tunnel links Sonoratown, “a Mexican pueblo, dirty, peaceful, unprogressive, with a handsome, bustling modern city.” An “unroofed adobe hovel” nestles nearby, accentuating the close proximity of dwindling pueblo and city.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The “ruinous” adobe is an architectural motif that recurs throughout Mathews's anthology. In “The Potter's Wheel” the craftsman's adobe home is “submerged to the eaves by the grading of the street, just as the old Mexican life of Los Angeles has been overflowed by the tide of American progress.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Time, space and ambience create a bygone era in Overton's “The Reaping of Vanity”; Sonoratown's streets are “drowsy and ablaze with sun, quiet with the quiet of a dead and gone life and time,” yet Overton reminds us that “not more than half a dozen blocks away” is “all the noise of a pushing Western town.”Footnote ¹¹¹

Sonoratown's physiognomy symbolizes a vanishing age. The ageing señora is a recurring figure. She appears in Connor's Saunterings wrapped in a “faded rebozo” and “bowed beneath the weight of her years.”Footnote ¹¹² Connor exclaims, “Could she ever have been young!”Footnote ¹¹³ Her counterpart is Manuel, the dashing caballero. No longer the “picturesque figure of olden time,” Manuel now wears “commonplace garb that bears the stamp ‘ready made’ in every ugly fold.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Manuel represents the Mexican who “dreamed in the shadow of his adobe, as a city grew up about him” and the “tide of progress swe[pt] by.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ In “The Miracle of San Juanito” Pepita the heroine remembers her lost love José. She stares into her mirror, “seeing only images of by-gone days.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ José eventually returns to the pueblo “bent and wrinkled.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Although Monsieur La Tribe takes a Frenchman as its central character, Nancy Foster's tale reiterates Latin and Old World themes. Hippolyte La Tribe's “faded blue eyes,” “quaint equivocal speech” and “shabby yet genteel clothes” identify him as a remnant of an Old World aristocracy.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Yet the time–space continuum underpinning the Sonoratown anthologies functions beyond mere sentimentality for a vanishing age. By expressing the values of a wider city culture, the anthologies affirm the dominance of “market place progress” over Sonoratown's supposedly mañana attitude and yesterday ambience. Furthermore, they push for urban development and renewal. Space and historical time are juxtaposed – city tower blocks overshadow Sonoratown's low “ruinous” adobes – suggesting that renewal is a natural, inevitable process.Footnote ¹¹⁹

A “NEW URBANISM”: SONORATOWN AS SLUM

The anthologies push for reform and rehabilitation more emphatically by spotlighting less discreet changes in the urban landscape. Monsieur La Tribe's mysterious learned Frenchman befriends Sonoratown settlement worker Miss Chester. Chester searches for La Tribe in the pueblo and finds herself in “another world.” On entering a house court behind a set of adobes, Chester stumbles across a “large barren quadrangle, surrounded by a series of small doors that opened into filthy, low studded rooms.”Footnote ¹²⁰ The house court is a world away from Connor's romance of gardens and orange blossom trees: “The square itself was of dirt, – no vestige of grass, no flower or tree, not a trellis remained to intercept the sun's glare or to lessen the contrast between the undefiled blue overhead and the vileness beneath. All was hopelessly dreary and unclean.” Yet Chester finds the old señoras “patiently, silently” making tortillas in the courtyard, a scene whose “melancholy” gives “dignity to the squalor.”Footnote ¹²¹ Despite “unsightly glimpses of misery and disorder,” Chester finds many of the houses “clean and exclusive.”Footnote ¹²²

In Foster's tale, the woman is as much a “type” as the Mexican. As in wider slum fiction, Foster's female slum-dwellers achieve some semblance of respectability through hard domestic toil: as the obverse of “fallen women,” the old señoras render the slum acceptable for a wider and more socially privileged audience. As industrious slum-dwellers they also become potentially assimilable members of the “deserving poor.”Footnote ¹²³ In a similar act of rehabilitation, Foster exoticizes certain inhabitants and stylizes their poverty; “in her splendor,” Saadi the Syrian woman reminds Miss Chester of an “Odalisque,” while despite his “dire poverty” La Tribe remains an “immaculate Frenchman” whose “aloofness [and] distinction … promised respectability and prompt payment of rent.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Poverty cannot debase La Tribe's refinement or his learning: as the lone scholar in Sonoratown, La Tribe donates his parchment copy of Tacitus to Miss Chester and recounts his aristocratic lineage dating back to twelfth-century France. His home is in “exquisite order” and a “contrast to any room in all Sonoratown,” exclaims Chester.Footnote ¹²⁵

Comparing the pueblo with his old home in the Parisian Latin Quarter, La Tribe provides the link between Old World Europe and Sonoratown. Yet the “impenetrable” La Tribe represents something else.Footnote ¹²⁶ He mysteriously vanishes while his contemporaries, Saadi and Carmelita, also depart Sonoratown. “Monsieur La Tribe” exposes the “paradox of Sonoratown” faced by contemporary settlement workers: “It is steadfast and unceasing in the fluctuation of its people. They are birds of passage. Six months, six weeks, and the personnel of the adobes and the courts is completely changed,” claims Foster. She continues, “All have vanished. A gang of greasy, tractable peons, thick-lipped, stolid, bestial, have appropriated the cosmopolitan rendezvous.”Footnote ¹²⁷ Furthermore, even the virtuous female Carmelita becomes tarnished by the new urbanism. On leaving Sonoratown, Carmelita jilts her fiancé Ybarra, “a shame [and] a sin” according to the remaining Basque resident Mrs. Echevarría.Footnote ¹²⁸

Sonoratown is no longer an idyllic “bit of Sunny Spain,” but a slum, and, significantly, a low-caste Mexican slum. Mexican peones rather than Spanish Californios or Europeans embody the new “immigrant urbanism.” In Mathews's “The Woman and the Idol” the “tide [of immigration] which seeps continually through the ruinous adobe tenements” brings new inhabitants but specifically peones.Footnote ¹²⁹ Like Foster, Mathews highlights the class and ethnic schisms dividing Sonoratown's inhabitants into old and new, European and non-European, civilized and primitive. In “The Potter's Wheel” Mathews underscores these class and ethnic differences by contrasting the elderly Señora Ortega, a California of “fine white clay,” with the Mexican cholo potter of “patio mud.”Footnote ¹³⁰ In the opening scene to “Manuela's Lesson,” Mathews offers tangible evidence of these class and ethnic distinctions by juxtaposing two urban forms. Ex-landowner Californio Don Francisco Gonzales rents his courtyard – “once … the spacious backyard of an old adobe dwelling” – to “low-caste Mexican immigrants occupying the cabins about his back door.”Footnote ¹³¹ Mathews sets The Hieroglyphics of Love amongst the tenement courts of LA, where tents housing transient Mexican populations from “distant grading camps” crowd vacant lots.Footnote ¹³² In Mathews's “The Kidnapping of María Luisa” Juan and his bride-to-be María arrive in the city, residing first in a squalid boxcar, and then amongst Sonoratown's house courts. Mathews revisits Sonoratown's “widest social gulfs”; the adobes of Californios such as Don Francisco Gonzales, “descendants of proud old Spanish families, poor now” yet not entirely de-cultured or deracinated, conceal the house courts to the rear, “swarming with the despised cholos, imported by the railroads for cheap labour.” Mathews remarks, “Here the low life of Mexico is duplicated.”Footnote ¹³³

The anthologies capture the ways in which reformers demarcated Sonoratown as a slum and reformulated Mexican ethnicity in the process. Sonoratown is proletarianized, de-cultured and Mexicanized. The anthologies obscure Sonoratown's ethnic diversity and complex urbanism whilst employing ubiquitous slum signifiers. Dangerous, intractable urban forms and secret, maze-like places protrude from the ruins. Carmelita takes Chester to Monsieur La Tribe's home hidden behind the adobes. “None but the initiated could have found it,” claims Foster. Indeed, accessing such places demanded special knowledge, and hence the intervention of the social reformer.Footnote ¹³⁴

Women writers and settlement workers began critiquing these new urban forms concurrently. Like many of her female contemporaries, Olive Percival viewed the vicissitudes of the city with personal disquiet. According to Jane Apostol, Olive's diaries served as a “Baedeker” to Los Angeles and its changing terrain.Footnote ¹³⁵ Percival opposed the changing of street names from Spanish to English as well as plans to build a Union Depot Station near the Plaza. She vented her protest by writing to the city press, yet conceded this was unlikely to alter the plans of local politicos: “the utilitarians are so active, so loud, so powerful! I am but one of many, a beauty and peace loving child, bruising my poor body against jagged rocks, quite futilely.”Footnote ¹³⁶ And despite elevating “colour” and championing the rights of Chinese and Japanese residents against “intolerant ‘Americans’” (she declared her own “civilization … entirely inconsistent at present,” acknowledging that such “utter liberal, democratic views on the Oriental Question … brought [her] the accusation of being ‘un-American’”Footnote ¹³⁷), Percival did not endorse social, racial or political equality where environmental stability was challenged. Surveying the process of urbanization near her “so very pretty” home in Lincoln Park, Percival exclaimed, “alas! How many, many shacks have gone up near it and around the approach to it and Negroes live in two of them!”Footnote ¹³⁸ On another occasion, Percival declared, “Ioathe the city and its exactions; it makes of me a captive, a slave. But how could I exist in the country?”Footnote ¹³⁹ Whilst embracing the city as a stimulus for her own creativity and literary ambition, Percival expressed deeply anti-modern sentiments that necessitated preservation as opposed to change and urban development.

THE AMBIGUITIES OF REFORM: PRESERVATION AND ASSIMILATION

The Sonoratown tales express a similar ambiguity. As William Alexander McClung declares, “anglophone Los Angeles sought to reconcile two contradictory visions of ideal place and space: an acquired Arcadia, a found natural paradise; and an invented Utopia, an empty space inviting development.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ McClung explores the artistic and architectural manifestations of this contradiction, one that underpinned the geographical design of Los Angeles. The anthologies also attempt to square preservation with change in the city. On the one hand, the authors support the “immigrant-gifts” discourse associated with the settlement movement: they elevate examples of craftsmanship and the vernacular within the Mexican home, and endorse a “new theory of aesthetics” based upon “simplicity, honesty, naturalness and organic unity.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ In The Miracle of San Juanito and Monsieur La Tribe the old adobe's austerity and beauty delight the Anglo eye and evoke a far from congested, slum-like home. In “The Miracle” Pepita's “great bare whitewashed room contained only the altar and a long mirror in a tarnished gilt frame.” In “Monsieur La Tribe” Miss Chester describes Carmelita's Sonoratown home as “fantastic with its tiny decorated altar and two vases of bright paper flowers.”Footnote ¹⁴²

Sonoratown's working-class Mexican inhabitants were certainly not beyond redemption. Indeed, in the foreword to The Hieroglyphics Mathews explained why she chose the “Mexican peónada” as her subject: to express “love, for a dark and lowly people who are yet rich with the riches of the poor, and wise with the wisdom of the simple.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Like Katherine Coman, head of the College Settlement Association, who compared the peon's “grace” and “courtly” virtues to the Californio elite, Mathews's peon represents an equally noble civilization.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In “The Hieroglyphics” Teodota's lover is a “tall, handsome Aztec,” while Teodota herself is dignified by the “civilizing power of love.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Like settlement workers who promoted a vision of shared humanity, the Sonoratown authors create Mexicans civilized by love and art and moved by the universals of life. Wary of the “inconsistencies” in their own “civilization,” these women viewed assimilation as an exchange, albeit one underpinned by quite unequal power relations. As Percival exclaimed, “We have not assimilated the foreigners who have been coming here for two generations; they have assimilated us!”Footnote ¹⁴⁶

In the absence of a planning apparatus in early twentieth-century Los Angeles, social reformers functioned as unofficial planners. Settlement workers participated in planning new homes and spaces in which to inculcate “correct” American modes of living, family and gender relations. By elevating Sonoratown's Mexican inhabitants, the Sonoratown anthologies publicized them as worthy subjects for reform. The narratives of progress and modernity underpinning these stories imply a certain commitment to a rational, efficient city. Yet, troubled by the effects of industrial urbanism, these women writers hoped to achieve reform and urban renewal without obliterating Sonoratown's cultural inheritance and, in turn, their own heritage.

PROGRAMMES FOR REFORM

Several tales focus specifically on reform and settlement work. Monsieur La Tribe involves a settlement worker, Miss Chester, who belongs to the “Casa” in Sonoratown, possibly a reference to Casa de Castelar. In An Aztec Biography Mathews prefaces the reform efforts taking place in Sonoratown by exploring the Home Board's settlement work in Mexico City. Other stories deal less overtly with settlement work while emphasizing housing, family and gender issues. The stories range from muted to unequivocal support for reform. Most frame their narratives within the picturesque and slum romance genres employed by tourist guidebooks, popular fiction and city journalists. As Alan Mayne suggests, the “entertaining sensationalism of journalists far from the ‘sad pictures’ of earnest reformers, constructed the slum in the popular imagination.” Significantly, Mayne contends, “the influence of reform discourse upon public opinion and lawmakers was greatest when it overlapped with and was appropriated by the entertainments of city journalism.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Indeed, the Sonoratown anthologies structure their case for reform using elements drawn from popular fiction and journalistic vignettes. Although some of the writers ultimately challenge the efficacy of this framework, the basis of city journalism allowed them to access a wider, popular audience. In some respects, the anthologies constitute a poignant, sober form of entertainment wrapped within a framework of moral protest. They also exhibit some of the central features of the Social Gospel novel, which often placed the female settlement worker as protagonist and heroine, a figure who sacrifices her traditional role as mother and wife to serve and enlighten the needy through “social salvation.” Not only does the heroine establish strong affinities with those she seeks to help – predominantly women and children – but she is also juxtaposed with the morally corrupt “rich” woman – clearly Miss Levering in Overton's tale.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Much of the writing manipulates yet ultimately satirizes and rejects Sonoratown's romantic image as jeopardizing the case for reform. In “An Aztec Biography” settlement worker Miss Gillifan “wished her heathen to be clean and moral and respectful and picturesque and interesting, then she did not mind adding Christianity as a final adornment.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ As in the Social Gospel novel, social action takes priority over orthodoxy and doctrine. However, Gillifan's vision of her Mexican charges also embodies a contradiction: she wishes to assimilate yet preserve Mexicans in an image anticipated by the many tourists who visit Sonoratown. Gwen Overton explicitly challenges this view. The Reaping of Vanity absorbs many aspects associated with slum sensationalism. Yet Overton manipulates the genre, enveloping it within a firm moral framework to push for reform. “The Reaping of Vanity” is a moral satire on the consequences of slumming, tourism and the elevation of the picturesque. Overton demonstrates how these forces – embodied in the figure of Miss Levering – ruin one Mexican family, and urges Anglos to embrace their social responsibility.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

After touring Sonoratown, encountering and then discarding Miguel, her “picturesque” Mexican, Miss Levering meets settlement worker Miss Allingham. Allingham offers Levering some “real” knowledge about the district and its people, and in the process exposes the dangers of objectifying Sonoratown's residents as little more than picturesque. Typical of the Social Gospel novel, Overton contrasts Allingham and Levering:

Overton reserves disdain for Levering, whose privileged position as the “gringa tourist” allows her to manipulate Miguel and precipitate his ruin. As the narrative unravels, we learn that the case study Allingham offers Levering in an attempt to expose the “real” Sonoratown – an “aggravated case” of a Mexican woman mourning the death of her baby with four children and a sick mother to care for – is entwined with Miguel's downfall. The woman's husband was Miguel, a “brute” who had “had his head turned” by a “gringa,” and squandered the family income on extravagant clothing.Footnote ¹⁵² Overton's narrative is laden with the “sad pictures” of the “earnest reformer.”Footnote ¹⁵³ Levering and Allingham enter the adobe to find a woman lying on a bed of straw over an earthen floor. Her face, “etched with pain,” is one “of strength … of the purest Indio type.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Surveying this scene, Allingham completes her tale of moral decline: Miguel gambled away the family shop, and brawled with a man who retaliated by shooting and killing him. Overton uses but subverts the sensationalism of the slumland genre: Allingham predicts that the city press will headline Miguel's death as “Mexican killed in Sonora Town den.” Ultimately, Allingham's supposition remains closer to the truth: “More likely it was only some tourista making a fool of the man.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵

Overton's moral message is clear: romanticizing and sensationalizing the “real” Sonoratown compounded the work of the reformer for whom the district was not a picturesque idyll but a “promising field for the gospel of hygiene and the district nurse.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Like Connor's warning in The Red Parasol, Overton reveals the gravity of the “day when the things that charmed … charm no longer [and] when the picturesque street characters turn into dirty ragamuffins before your very eyes.” Sonoratown is not quite what it seems beneath its picturesque façade.

Overton sanctions reform through guided assimilation. Yet her formula offers Sonoratown's Mexican residents little agency. Miguel is easily manipulated by Levering; he appears unable to handle modernity and the trappings of American consumerism. Miguel's family fall victim not merely to poverty but to the tragic misappropriation of American culture. Indeed, reformers habitually complained that Mexicans adopted the worst aspects of US culture, and heavily criticized attempts to imitate an American home aesthetic that involved excessive materialism and the buying of modern conveniences. Reformers encouraged thrift-like attitudes, particularly in family homes struggling to subsist on low-waged, sporadic employment, and sought to reorientate the family budget towards hygiene and diet rather than consumerism. These attitudes reflected reformers' anxieties concerning their own materialistic culture. They also derived from assumptions that groups from rural folk cultures experienced social disorganization, maladjustment and de-culturation in an urban environment.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Overton promotes a selective process of assimilation and heralds the beginnings of Americanization. Although most of the Sonoratown narratives offer less stark and tragic conclusions, they champion the benefits of assimilation. In The Hieroglyphics Teodota's lover alters his appearance with a set of new clothes. Like Miguel, he is transformed, but Mathews clearly admires Teodota's lover; although the peón still resembles a “tall, handsome Aztec,” Teodota mistakes him for “gente decente” (as belonging to a “respectable” class of people). He replies, “Didst thou think, queridita … that here in America I would be wearing white cotton trousers and leather sandals? No indeed! This is another day.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Despite the tragic case of Miguel, the peón can be assimilated. Teodota's impending marriage also signals her own upward social mobility: wearing a “silk and velvet” wedding dress, Teodota will become a “grand señora.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ “The Hieroglyphics” echoes the days of the Californios whilst promoting the moral values of Anglo reformers keen to restrict the practice of common-law marriage, which was deemed rife amongst Mexican immigrants.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Women and children invite the possibility of regeneration and rehabilitation in the Sonoratown slum, and mexicanas, in particular, offer the possibility of attaining some form of “bourgeois domesticity.”Footnote ¹⁶¹ The feminization of social reform and the kinship settlement staff cultivated with their charges – an affinity expressed in the structuring of the settlement house around a surrogate family of women – exemplify the critical role of the female. In “Monsieur La Tribe” Miss Chester expresses “delight at again seeing her friend,” Carmelita. In “An Aztec Biography” head settlement worker Mrs. Hammond is referred to as “mamacita.” Hammond dedicates herself to moulding Crescencia, her most recent charge. Crescencia's devotion to Hammond becomes almost spiritual; terminally ill with cancer, Crescencia prays to the Virgin of Guadalupe and dreams of meeting her Mrs. Hammond in heaven.Footnote ¹⁶²

This maternalist emphasis echoes the ways in which contemporary Anglo cultural patrons elevated the image of the “good Mexican.”Footnote ¹⁶³ The anthologies also illustrate how settlement workers grappled with the “woman-problem” of Sonoratown.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Reforming Sonoratown and the Mexican family became a shared female predicament. Like the district's Mexican mothers whom they hoped to liberate from traditional, patriarchal and authoritarian structures, reformers had just emancipated themselves from the confines of the domestic sphere to influence a wider, public world. These women identified with their Mexican charges. Mathews's idealization and elevation of the Mexican woman is striking. Although she dedicated her book to the “peónada,” Mathews almost feminizes the term, an expression of how early settlement work largely bypassed Mexican men.

The struggle for female emancipation became entwined with the battle against Mexican “fatalism.” Contemporary political and moral debate concerning Porfirio Díaz's Mexico infused early twentieth-century reform discourse in Los Angeles. Reformers and activists agreed that the Mexican's “philosophy of life” emanated from centuries of peon-slavery.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ These women writers-cum-reformers were evidently conscious of political developments across the border – in “An Aztec Biography” Mathews discusses Mexican fatalism within the context of pre-revolutionary Old Mexico. She traces the life of heroine Crescencia prior to entering a settlement house. Born amidst war and poverty, Crescencia becomes conditioned to instability and endures tragic events impassively. Of Crescencia's childhood, Mathews writes,

Crescencia eventually marries Pancho, a “brutal jawed” man, who drinks and brawls his way through their wedding day. Crescencia follows her husband's regiment before meeting Miss Gillifan of the Home Board. By the time she takes her fatalistic attitude to the settlement, “everything human had been crushed out of her.” Crescencia retains her faith in Miss Hammond, and her “stoicism” during her terminal illness becomes her defining trait.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

Although “An Aztec Biography” is set across the border, reformers struggling to reconstitute family and gender relations encountered similar situations and family histories in Sonoratown. In “The Reaping of Vanity” Allingham takes Levering to meet Miguel's wife and family. “These women can't get out, when their men folks abuse them, and shift for themselves. They don't know how,” explains Allingham.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Invariably, Mexican men are painted negatively, like Miguel and Crescencia's husband Pancho. Teodota's stepfather in “The Hieroglyphics of Love” is a “Mexican Caliban,” an idle man who “hates work like the very devil.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Foster also draws male peons en masse in unflattering, even inhuman, terms as “greasy … thick-lipped, stolid, and bestial.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Women become the tragic victims of outmoded and “primitive” family and gender systems demanding radical change.

In many cases the Mexican women become victims. However, when the women themselves are deemed responsible, the outcome is invariably one of successful rehabilitation and social salvation. In Mathews's Manuela's Lesson a College Settlement headworker takes a Mexican woman to court for cruelty to her child. Headworker Miss Brady commits herself to “making a real mother” of Manuela, who eventually repents before the Virgin of Guadalupe after her child is sent to an orphanage.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Such narratives achieve the settlement worker's dream of reconciling assimilation with cultural preservation; Manuela's cultural resources prove critical in allowing her to attain some semblance of an American home and family.