Los Angeles Pobladores - Rediscovery of The Pobladores

Rediscovery of The Pobladores

William M. Mason, historian of Los Angeles and early California, uncovered the ethnic richness of the Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles through extensive research. Mason, one of three founders of the Los Angeles Historical Society, authored six books and several articles regarding the early history and cultures around Southern California and he is credited with helping to uncover the ethnic facts about the original families of Los Angeles.

The official foundation date of Los Angeles is September 4, 1781, when tradition has it the forty-four pobladores gathered at San Gabriel Mission along with two priests from the Mission and set out with an escort of four soldiers for the site that Father Juan Crespí had chosen over a decade earlier. El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora La Reina de los Ángeles sobre el Río Porciúncula, (Spanish for The Town of Our Lady Queen of the Angels on the Porciuncula River) is the original, official long version of the name of the town founded by the Pobladores.

The earliest Hispanic settlers of all of California, not just Los Angeles, were almost exclusively from the Mexican states of Sinaloa and Sonora. The author and historian, Dr. Antonio Ríos-Bustamante, has written that "the original settlers of Los Angeles were racially mixed persons of Indian, African, and European descent. This mixed racial composition was typical of both the settlers of Alta California and of the majority of the population of the northwest coast provinces of Mexico from which they were recruited." Dr. Ríos-Bustamante relates that in the century preceding the founding expedition of 1781, many Indians in this region of Mexico had been "culturally assimilated and ethnically intermixed into the Spanish-speaking, mestizo society." Other settlers from Mexico, Central and South America, Asia, Europe, and the United States would follow in the decades to come.