The Brief

Many of us learned it in history class. In 1781, 44 men, women and children traveled from Mexico under the banner of Spain, settling indigenous land to found what is now Los Angeles.

But did you know that over half of those pobladores, as they were known, had African ancestry? For decades, the information was repressed or derided by racist historians and civic leaders, eager to Europeanize the past.

“The Spanish, like most colonizers, had systems where they categorized people on racial grounds,” says Susan D. Anderson, History Curator and Program Manager at the California African American Museum.

“The census in Spain, like all European censuses, included information about the settlers that revealed this very complicated racial system of categorization. So, the reason that we know the background of the demographic background of the settlers is because of this ancient census-taking system.”

According to El Pueblo: The Historic Heart of Los Angeles by Jean Bruce Poole and Tevvy Ball, in 1777, Felipe de Neve, Spanish governor of the Californias, asked the Colonial Spanish government in Mexico to help him establish a new pueblo near the flourishing Gabrieleño village of Yang-Na. The land was prime for farming — “a very spacious valley, well-grown with cottonwood and alders, among which ran a beautiful river,” Father Juan Crespi recorded.

Agricultural settlements were badly needed in fledgling Alta California, to provide food for the string of missions and presidios (military garrisons) being built across the colony. They were also needed as a buffer against Russian and British aggressors. Neve’s request was granted and agents for the Spanish crown began searching for “men of the field” who were “without vices or defects” to recruit as settlers.

A statue of Felipe de Neve at La Plaza

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Los Angeles Public Library

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Agents focused their recruiting efforts on what are now the Mexican states of Sonora and Sinaloa. According to America’s Black Heritage, one-third of the people living in Sinaloa were of African descent. Intermarriage was common in Spanish Mexico, leading to an elaborate caste system which classified people according to their racial heritage.

In the Sinaloan town of El Rosario, where most of the future settlers lived, two-thirds of the residents were of Spanish and African descent and classified as “mulattos.”

Enslaved Black people were essential to the success of colonizers all over the western world. “The only reason people were settling on Indigenous land is because of the slave trade,” Anderson says.

“And it doesn't matter if it's Uruguay or Mexico or the U.S., it's all the same. There were so many Africans that were brought to the New World. So, for us to think that Mexicans aren't of African descent or Chileans aren't of African descent? It's crazy.”

Compared to enslaved people in the United States, people in bondage in Mexico were often able to purchase their rightful freedom.

“In Mexico, slaves were permitted to marry, and no master could sell and separate wives and husbands or children, and it was relatively easy for a slave to obtain his freedom,” William A. Mason and James Anderson write in America’s Black Heritage. “There was a place in society for the freed slave in Mexico. He was not an outcast.”

By the 1780s, roughly 90 percent of those classified as “mulattos” in Sinaloa were free. Many had probably been free for generations. Spanish agents scoured the area, promising land, rations, salaries, and livestock to potential settlers. Those who signed up included the eleven families who eventually became known as the founders of Los Angeles.

Settlers of Black descent

According to the anthology Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California, of the eleven original families of Los Angeles, seven involved couples of different racial backgrounds, while two couples were of African Spanish descent.

Some of these couples were Luis and Maria Quintero, Manuel and Maria Tomasa Camero, Jose and Maria Guadalupe Moreno, Antonio and Maria Ana Mesa, and Basillo and Maria Manuela Rosas.

The pioneers left home and made the arduous journey to the Mission San Gabriel, around twenty-five miles away from the new pueblo of Los Angeles. Despite popular belief that they all arrived together at the new townsite on September 6, 1781, records in The Founding Documents of Los Angeles: A Bilingual Edition make clear they arrived in L.A. in waves, and each family received both a plot of land for a home and a field to till.

“The first homes, earth covered willow-and-tule huts, were soon replaced by adobe dwellings with flat roofs, which were later waterproofed with a coat of brea from the tar pits a few miles west on the Indian trail toward the ocean,” Poole and Ball write. “The pioneers constructed a dam and irrigation canals, including the zanja madre, or mother ditch, to bring water to the pueblo, and set about tilling and planting the fields.”

Life on the frontier was hard, and there were tensions between the settlers. In 1782, three families were “expelled” from Los Angeles. Antonio Mesa, who was said to be disillusioned with pioneer life, returned with his family to Sonora. Luis and Maria Quintero also left, but they didn’t go far. They settled in Santa Barbara, near three of their married daughters. Quintero became Santa Barbara’s first tailor, and his grandson Josef Rafael Gonzalez, served as alcalde (mayor) of Santa Barbara in 1829.

According to the LA Almanac, the Camero and Moreno families stayed in Los Angeles, where both Manuel and Jose served as city councilmen. They were joined by other settlers of Black descent, including Fernando Reyes, who was the first elected mayor of Los Angeles in 1793.

Pobladores' descendants

By 1790, census records indicate 18% of colonists throughout Alta California were of African descent. This number was probably incorrect, since many Afro Latinos had already begun changing their names and racial classification.

Maria Guadalupe Perez, the wife of Jose Moreno and the last of the Pobladores, lived to see California become an American state in 1850. She died in 1860. Her granddaughter, Catalina, became the life partner of Mexican soldier Don Andres Pico (who also had African ancestry), the brother of the last Mexican governor Pio Pico.

Maria Rita Valdez, the granddaughter of Luis Quintero, was a brilliant businesswoman who ran her family’s prosperous 4,500-acre rancho known as El Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas. She sold it to Henry Hancock and Benjamin D. Wilson in 1854. The area is now known as Beverly Hills.

John Gómez, Adelina Mutaw de Lugo, Minnie Lugo de Gómez, Mary Abelar de Lugo, Isabel Lugo de Wilson, Suzanne Lugo de Barker in May 1937. The Lugo women are direct descendants of Luís Quintero, one of the original pobladores.

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Los Angeles Public Library/Shades of LA collection

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But, by the time Maria Guadalupe Perez died, these women’s heritage was being consciously blotted out by the new xenophobic, racist American elites of Los Angeles. “Once the U.S. took over California and then getting into the 20th century, white historians started whitewashing California's history,” Anderson notes.

According to historian William M. Mason, the uproar began in 1884, when historian Hubert Howe Bancroft published the 1781 census of the Pobladores, which included their caste, in his book History of California. The backlash was immediate, with fellow Californian J.M. Guinn deriding the Pobladores’ contributions, claiming they “were mongrels in race…poor in purse, poor in blood, poor in all the sterner qualities of character that our own hearty pioneers possessed.”

Los Angeles boosters, eager to lure more white Americans to Southern California, increased their campaign to erase L.A.’s multi-ethnic beginnings, and paint the Pobladores as European Spaniards. This meant that many of the founders’ thousands of descendants were unaware of their Black heritage.

This campaign continued well into the twentieth century. “The racial background of the founders was in the textbooks in the 1940s,” Anderson says. “By the 1950s, when the district put out new textbooks, they erased that information.”

Reclaiming the city's Black heritage

There were some L.A. historians who insisted on reclaiming the city’s Black heritage. In the 1950s, Glen Price, a curator for the Plaza Park Project, commissioned a plaque which pointedly included the race of each of the original 44 settlers. “The plaque soon vanished without a trace,” Cecilia Rasmussen reported in the Los Angeles Times. “Rumor had it that several Recreation and Parks commissioners had been displeased by its public display of the role blacks played in the city’s founding.”

California historian William A. Mason also advocated for reclaiming the founders’ heritage. “In view of our great debt to the pobladores,” he wrote in 1975, “we should celebrate them for what they really were — a racially mixed group with a decidedly Black cast.”

Charlotta A. Bass, publisher and editor of the California Eagle newspaper in the 1950's

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Los Angeles Public Library/Shades of LA photo collection

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But it was two Black women who would make sure the Black Pobladores were recognized and honored. “I would say that there are probably two heroes in my book who are associated with these campaigns,” Anderson says. “One is Charlotta Bass.”

Bass, the legendary publisher of The California Eagle, used her paper to tell the truth about the settlers’ heritage. “Of the eleven founding families, 56% would be classified as colored today!” she wrote in 1941, per Victoria Bernal of PBS SoCal. “These are no idle statistics, since the names, lot numbers and race of the founders are preserved in the archives of the State of California and City of Los Angeles."

“In 1948,” Bernal writes, “she opined about the city's 167th anniversary, ‘When celebrating anniversaries, the City of Angels has always avoided any mention of the fact that among the first settlers (the first 44 persons) there were some important Black angels…’”

As Anderson notes, the other hero in the story was the pioneering Miriam Matthews, who was the first certified Black librarian in California. Known as the “dean of Los Angeles Black history,” Matthews worked tirelessly to chronicle Black history in Los Angeles, including reclaiming the origins of the city’s founders. "It is a sad commentary when the names of these black families — Antonio Mesa, Manuel Camero, Luis Quintero, Jose Moreno — were omitted from many history books,” she wrote in The Los Angeles Sentinel.

When Matthews was appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley to the bicentennial committee to put together L.A.’s 200th anniversary celebration, she was determined to have a new plaque honoring the Pobladores placed near where the city began. “And that was my top priority: a proper founders monument to be erected in the plaza, in the State Historic Park” she later said in an interview.

On September 4, 1981, a plaque recreating the 1791 census, complete with the racial backgrounds of each settler, was unveiled on the southern side of the Los Angeles Plaza. There it stands to this day. “A result,” Anderson says, “of a a generations long battle to expose the historical truth.”

It’s that time of year when black bears are beefing up, often on trash, in Southern California’s foothill communities.

From fall to early winter, bears quadruple their food intake in preparation for the cooler months — bears here don’t really hibernate given our mild weather and plethora of resources, but they do slow down during the winter (as we all should). And right now, mother bears are looking to find a safe place to den and have their cubs.

Bears aren’t just roaming the roads of mountain towns either. They’re in suburban neighborhood streets along the 210 Freeway corridor — including Altadena, Sierra Madre and Monrovia — and even in Encino and Tarzana.

A black bear walks along an Arcadia street earlier this month.

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Courtesy Wild Neighbor

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This time of year is when humans and bears might come into conflict more frequently, says a former biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“You're going to see those bears just eating ravenously, foraging all day for food, and then also they're going to start looking for these potential denning sites under our crawl spaces, unfortunately,” said Jessica West, a human-wildlife conflict specialist who over the last five years worked for the state on bear coexistence efforts from Santa Barbara to San Diego.

Nearly 60,000 black bears are estimated to live in California. Here in Southern California, the estimate is around 2,000, according to the latest count by the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife.

State resources to help communities coexist with bears have been cut. That includes West, who was the sole wildlife conflict biologist serving Southern California counties. Gov. Gavin Newsom just signed a bill into law that aims to bring some of those resources back, but in the meantime, the need remains.

“More than ever, people and bears are sharing space,” West said.  "The fact is that they're here and they're not going anywhere, and we're here as humans and we're not going anywhere.”

Neither did West’s passion for wildlife coexistence when she was laid off. That’s why she just launched her own business to help fill the resource gap: Wild Neighbor.

Jessica West, a bear biologist, installs an "unwelcome" mat at a home. The electrified mat helps keeps curious bears away.

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Courtesy Wild Neighbor

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An "unwelcome" mat with bear prints outside of a home in Ojai.

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Courtesy Wild Neighbor

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She offers detailed property assessments and recommendations for $150. She focuses primarily on prevention, such as strategically placing electric wiring and “unwelcome” mats to secure crawl spaces, trash and other vulnerable areas, which can cost $350 to around $900 depending on the home. She also rents such equipment if residents prefer. West works with manufacturers of electric bear-resistant tools that have been vetted for fire safety and bear conflict.

“We really want to avoid potentially orphaning those cubs,” she said.

It’s best to avoid allowing a bear to get into your crawl space or trash in the first place, West said. When bears become too accustomed to humans and eating human food, the risk of injury to people and pets rises. And the bears themselves are more likely to be euthanized.

In 2023, California hit a tragic milestone: It was the state’s first documented killing of a human by a black bear, in Northern California. In Southern California, foothill communities such as Sierra Madre have seen several bear-related injuries in recent years (more on that in our 2024 podcast on this topic). Several bears, including a well-known one in La Cañada Flintridge, have also been euthanized in recent years.

In the vast majority of cases, this is preventable, West said, if residents take a little responsibility for securing their own properties. That can also save thousands of dollars in damage caused by a bear.

Since West is no longer with the state, she can’t trap bears that have risen to the point of becoming a problem — for example, those that learn how to regularly get into homes or cars, or have lost their fear of humans. She does encourage her clients to share sightings and any concerning conflicts with the Department of Fish and Wildlife, but she doesn’t share anything herself without clients’ permission. (Learn how to report bear sightings or human-bear conflict here.)

West said that in lieu of state resources, companies like hers may become more common.

“What [clients] can expect is someone who is going to listen to them, and someone who is passionate about their job and really wants to help them,” West said. “Because at the end of the day, I'm a bear biologist by training. I love bears, but my whole goal in all of this is to help people. Because if we help people, we're also helping bears.”

City inspectors have declared several buildings on the Peninsula unsafe to enter after Hurricane Rachel’s high surf and tides chewed away at the shoreline, tearing apart a section of a wooden wall that is the neighborhood’s last line of defense against the ocean.

Officials issued a notice Thursday night that a large section of the bulkhead, left exposed after waves from Hurricane Marie ripped away its surrounding sand, was badly damaged over the past day and left a gap that allowed water to reach homes and side streets.

Residents stood in shin-deep flooding on Friday, with vehicle access closed at 62nd Place. Waves continued to chew at homes’ foundations along the shoreline and tear planks from the boardwalk. At least one home in the 6500 block of Seaside Walk appeared close to collapse.

Laath Martin, a city spokesperson, said inspectors are still assessing the extent of the bulkhead and boardwalk damage.

Crews rushed to make emergency repairs, pump water off the streets and fill in the exposed section with roughly 1,000 sandbags. The city is bracing for rain this weekend, and more high tides and surf are expected.

Inspectors surveyed homes threatened by water damage and red-tagged two buildings containing three units in the 6400 and 6500 blocks of Seaside Walk. The red tag means they’re too dangerous to enter.

Craig Nakano, a spokesperson for the city’s Community Development Department, said Friday that nobody has been displaced by the tagging. One property was under construction, he said, while the other was confirmed by the owner to be vacant.

A young man talks with an employee helping pump water out of the street as high surf from Hurricane Rachel crashes into the Peninsula in Long Beach on Friday, October 9, 2026.

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Thomas R. Cordova

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The Long Beach Post

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A third building received a yellow tag, which means its owner may go in briefly to collect belongings but may not stay. Nakano confirmed that the owner had already found somewhere else to stay.

Two buildings were already yellow-tagged after damage from Hurricane Marie weeks ago. The latest damage brings the total to five damaged Peninsula structures, two red-tagged and three yellow-tagged. The tags are preliminary, and a red tag can be downgraded to yellow once repairs are made and inspectors sign off. Inspectors will keep checking homes twice a day.

The latest bout of strong waves — whipped up by Hurricane Rachel — came just weeks after other hurricane-charged swells battered the Long Beach coast and the Peninsula.

The city is planning a multimillion-dollar dredging project to rebuild the stretch of Peninsula beach that’s been eroded. Long-term fixes are expected to be even more expensive.

In the meantime, storms keep rolling in.

The forecast for this weekend

Bryan Lewis, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said high surf and tide are expected to rise precipitously each day through Sunday, with tides reaching 7.5 feet high on Saturday and nearly 8 feet high on Sunday morning around 10 a.m. Waves are currently ranging from 4 to 7 feet high, but are expected to rise to up to 8 feet by Sunday, he said.

Conditions on Sunday evening and Monday morning, he said, will mirror Saturday, and likely will not relent in strength until Wednesday morning.

The NWS expects to announce a flood warning later Friday. They currently have an advisory running through Tuesday. Warnings are usually triggered when coastal buoys the Service monitors — in this case ones in the San Pedro Channel and city harbor — are routinely hit with high enough surf, Lewis explained.

This storm could also bring rain and wind. The city expects up to a half-inch of precipitation this weekend and gusts strong enough to knock down trees and power lines.

“Protecting our residents is our top priority as high surf and erosion impact our Peninsula community,” Mayor Rex Richardson said in a statement. He praised emergency crews and urged residents to “be prepared and follow City guidance.”

Lewis said rain showers could start in the area as early as Friday night and Saturday morning, with a second storm system hitting the area on Monday. Showers are expected to total between a half inch and three quarters of an inch of rain.

“This will bring additional rain, so that’s kind of separate from what tropical storm Rachel could be responsible for,” Lewis said.

Metrolink, Southern California’s regional commuter rail service, is planning for major service cuts — slashing 29% of weekday trains and 40% of weekend trains. Those cuts could go into effect as soon as next month.

The Metrolink Board of Directors on Friday voted to move forward with a $420 million budget proposal for this fiscal year, which includes the service cuts. The proposal now goes to member agencies for review and approval.

A majority of Metrolink’s budget is funded by Orange, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties’ transportation agencies. For more than a year, Metrolink officials have been building a budget that member agencies, like the Orange County Transportation Authority and L.A. Metro, would approve as it struggles to close its funding gaps.

How did we get here? 

The service announcement comes the same week as the agency rolled out fare increases.

Metrolink officials blame low ridership numbers for the budget troubles and increasing operational costs for the potential change in service.

The agency expects an 18% dip in ticket revenue in the next fiscal year. On top of that, both OCTA and L.A. Metro proposed cutting their subsidies to the rail service by millions of dollars.

Tom Schamber, Metrolink's chief financial officer, said the service cuts were necessary to balance the budget.

“These cuts were targeted at low-performing trains and trains that overlap with the Pacific Surfliner service,” Schamber said. “The schedule will look more like a commuter rail service focused on weekdays during peak periods.”

How could my routes change?

In Orange County, the number of weekend trains will be cut in half and weekday trains by nearly 40%. Weekday service to Oceanside is included in those cuts.

San Bernardino and Antelope Valley lines will also see major service cuts to weekday and weekend trains. Weekday trains for the Ventura County line were cut by 36%.

You can see the proposed service schedule here.

What do some riders think? 

During public comment on Friday, many riders expressed concern that Metrolink was entering a transit death spiral — a slippery cycle where fewer services and higher fares lead to fewer riders and deeper financial trouble.

Cooper Crane, a UC Riverside graduate student and historian of Southern California’s public transportation network, said the cuts make the service impractical.

“It is going to bring Metrolink into a death spiral, which could be compared to the historic collapse of services such as the Pacific Electric here in Southern California,” Crane said. “We don't want to experience something like the collapse of the Pacific Electric again, but the budget cuts that have been made by Orange County and the lack of government commitment to the support for the service is pretty much exactly what that will lead to.”

Mason Buck of Irvine said he mainly uses the Metrolink services recreationally.

“You can understand my concern when I look, and I see weekend service getting absolutely gutted in Orange County. … Issues like this are extremely frustrating to me because it feels like such a self-inflicted wound,” Buck said. “I just want an alternative to driving.”

The changes will not just stunt ridership growth but exacerbate ridership loss, Adriana Rizzo, a founding member of Californians for Electric Rail, said.

“This is going to be a net negative for Metrolink. I'm very concerned that we're going to be back here in six months, looking at even more severe cuts,” Rizzo said. “Metrolink is essential for the economy. It's essential to keep our region moving, and we cannot just let it die.”

What’s next?

County transportation agencies need to consider and adopt the budget before it goes back to the Metrolink board for final approval on Oct. 23.