The pobladores did not arrive on empty land. The Tongva people had lived in the basin for centuries, and the village of Yaanga stood near the chosen site; the pueblo was laid out on ground that was already home. Under the Spanish governor Felipe de Neve, the eleven founding families built their town beside the Porciúncula — the Los Angeles River — raising crops to supply the nearby presidios and missions, and drawing water through an open ditch, the Zanja Madre, that served the town for a century. A flood washed the first riverside settlement away around 1815, and the town was rebuilt a little higher, at the Old Plaza that anchors El Pueblo to this day.
What's with Anna May Wong? One of those arrival stories produced a film pioneer. She was born in Los Angeles in 1905, the daughter of a laundryman on North Figueroa Street, and grew up between her family's business and the city's old Chinatown. She talked her way onto film sets as a teenager and by the mid-1920s was the first Chinese American movie star — then spent a career pushing against the narrow parts the studios offered her, leaving for London and Berlin in 1928 to find better ones and returning as an international name. In 1951 she became the first Asian American to lead a United States television series. In 2022 the United States Mint honored her on a quarter in the American Women Quarters Program, the first Asian American to appear on U.S. currency.
Why People Visit Los Angeles
Travelers come for the climate, the coast, and the culture, but the quietest surprise is the history: a two-hundred-and-forty-year-old pueblo tucked into the middle of a modern metropolis. History and everyday life sit side by side here in a way few American cities can match, and the founding block asks nothing but a walk.
