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.”

The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan begin Friday and eight athletes have roots in Southern California, including Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

Team USA’s 232-member roster includes 21 athletes from California. The Winter Games begin Feb. 6 and end on Feb. 22.

Here's a list of who is from L.A. County:

• Spencer Akira Howe - Figure Skating - Los Angeles
• Madison Chock - Figure Skating - Redondo Beach
• Chloe Kim - Snowboarding - Torrance
• Azaria Hill - Bobsled - Santa Clarita
• Beatrice Kim - Snowboarding - Palos Verdes 

Where other SoCal athletes are from:

• Cayla Barnes - Ice Hockey - Eastvale
• Kate Delson - Snowboarding - San Diego
• Maddie Mastro - Snowboarding - Wrightwood

What about the 2026 Paralympics? The Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympics will start on March 6 and run through March 15. Not all qualifying athletes have been announced yet.

You can watch the games starting Friday on NBC and streaming on Peacock.

Local, state and federal law enforcement agencies have reported using thousands of crowd control munitions against protesters in L.A. since June 2025, when federal immigration sweeps began escalating tensions in the region.

Many people who were never accused of breaking the law nonetheless have been struck by what are known as “less-lethal” crowd control weapons, including rubber bullets, tear gas and flash bang grenades.

Legal experts and witnesses told LAist some of these instances violated California’s protest laws.

While a federal judge banned the LAPD from using 40mm projectiles at protests last month, the department still uses other crowd control weapons. According to Scott Reynhout, who researches these weapons for Physicians for Human Rights, a nonpartisan nonprofit, some of these weapons can be just as dangerous as the banned projectiles — if not more so.

LAist spoke with Reynhout to better understand what they do and how people protesting lawfully can protect themselves.

Reynhout said it's very important that people pay attention if law enforcement declares an unlawful assembly, which they are required to do before using crowd control weapons in most cases.

“ If the police have declared an illegal assembly, it would behoove you to take steps to isolate yourself from that particular situation,” Reynhout said. “If that is not possible for you, for whatever reason — say, you live in the particular area where you are — then you could consider [protecting] yourself from chemical irritants or potentially from impact projectiles.”

Some of the most dangerous crowd control weapons used in L.A.

Physicians for Human Rights’ international study, Lethal in Disguise, found weapons that fire multiple projectiles at once were “far and away the most dangerous” type of crowd control weapons.

 "82% of all the recorded injuries in the medical literature that came from impact projectiles were from ... multiple projectile impact projectiles,” Reynhout told LAist. “And 96% of all the ocular injuries from impact projectiles were from these multiple projectile impact projectiles."

He said the LAPD is the only police department in the U.S. he is aware of that uses this type of weapon. The department uses a 37mm less-lethal launcher (LLM) that shoots five rubber bullets with each shell.

According to reports required by Assembly Bill 48, the department used more than 600 of these shells — that’s over 3,000 projectiles — against anti-ICE protesters last June. They have continued to report using the 37mm launcher, most recently to disperse crowds after the Dodgers World Series win on Nov. 2, according to AB 48 reports.

The 37mm launcher is inherently risky, Reynhout said. Even though the 37mm rubber bullets are smaller than the 40mm projectiles the LAPD was banned from using at protests, they are more likely to hit sensitive areas like the face and neck.

The use of multiple projectiles causes the 37mm projectiles to scatter in a cone shape once they leave the launcher, making them much more difficult to control than a single projectile. He said LAPD’s policy of “skip firing,” which means officers are instructed to aim 5 to 10 feet in front of the person they are shooting at, also adds randomness.

A diagram showing LAPD's policy of "skip firing" the 37mm less-lethal launcher at targets.

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LAPD Use of Force Directive

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“ The real risk behind these multi-shot impact projectiles,” he said, “is that you just really don't have any control over where these bullets go in the end.”

Reynhout said people standing beside or behind the intended target could very easily get hit, which he believes was likely the case when Australian reporter Lauren Tomasi was struck in the leg by a rubber bullet in June.

[Note: LAist correspondent Adolfo Guzman-Lopez was struck in the throat by a projectile at a 2020 protest. Long Beach police later said they believed that injury was caused by a ricochet of a foam round.]

LAist reached out to LAPD for comment on their use of the 37mm launcher, but the department did not respond.

Another type of crowd control weapon found to be especially dangerous is the use of beanbag rounds, usually fired from a 12-gauge shotgun. These rounds fire small lead pellets sealed in a fabric bag.

Reynhout said the use of these rounds can be “horrific” and leave people with life-threatening injuries.

According to LAPD policy, beanbag rounds are not allowed to be used for crowd control, but other agencies have used them. The California Highway Patrol reported using beanbag rounds against anti-ICE protesters last June.

If you find yourself in a situation where projectiles are being deployed, Reynhout advises focusing on protecting your face and eyes. That’s where the most serious injuries occur.

Reynhout said ballistic eyewear that meets military standards (MIL-PRF-32432) could offer protection against some of the most severe injuries.

He said the 40mm or 37mm projectiles can be similar to getting hit by a golf ball by someone swinging just 6 feet away, and while things like bike helmets, paintball masks, hockey masks or even soft body armor might help to some degree, they aren’t designed to protect someone from that kind of impact.

What you may most likely be affected by: Chemical agents

Chemical agents like tear gas and pepper spray are crowd control weapons that saturate an area and affect everyone in it, Reynhout told LAist, and that includes people who may not even be part of a demonstration.

He said you should be especially aware of these weapons being used near you if you have asthma or any airway or respiratory system issues because they can provoke severe reactions in some cases.

In their report, Reynhout and other researchers found that children and older people are also at risk of severe reactions, which could be life-threatening.

There is gear on the market to mitigate those risks, including sealed safety goggles and respirators (N-, P- or R-100). If you find yourself exposed to a chemical irritant like tear gas or pepper spray, Reynhout said there is nothing shown to be more effective than flushing the area for 10 to 15 minutes with saline solution.

The saline solution should ideally be sterile and at body temperature, he told LAist, but plain water also works if that is what you have available. The important thing is that you continue to flush the area and dilute the chemicals.

For skin or clothing, Reynhout said dilution with water is still the key, but you can use some Dawn dish soap to help wash away pepper spray.

Other dangers

California law enforcement officers have also used flash bang grenades in response to protests since June. The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and California Highway Patrol together used more than 300 aerial flash bang grenades on June 8, according to AB 48 reports. Those are crowd control munitions shot out of 40mm launchers that explode mid-air and create 170 dB of sound and 5 million candelas of light.

LAist asked the LAPD about their policy on using flash bang grenades for crowd control, but the department did not respond. The LAPD has not listed any uses of flash bang grenades in their AB 48 reports dating back to April 2024.

Aside from these, there are a number of other crowd control weapons and devices that are used by law enforcement agencies in the L.A. area: grenades that explode to release small rubber balls, pepper balls, batons or — unique to the LAPD — officers on horseback using wooden practice swords called “bokken.”

Reynhout said deciding how much protection you might choose to take with you to a protest is very personal. Some bulkier items might restrict your movement, cause you to overheat or impede your ability to maintain situational awareness, so it is important to consider what risks you may face and use your best judgement.

Sometimes, he said, that best judgment might be to walk away from the situation.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass laid out her vision for Los Angeles at her first of two "State of the City" addresses Monday afternoon at Exposition Park.

The speech, which comes as her race for re-election ramps up, was framed as a celebration of the coming World Cup.

"Let's show the nation and the world we are the greatest city on earth," Bass told the crowd outside the L.A. Memorial Coliseum.

But the mayor moved quickly from announcing that there would be more than 100 free watch parties for the tournament into a retrospective of L.A.'s terrible 2025 — from the January fires to the immigration agents that descended on the city in June and haven't left.

"Raids continue every day in Los Angeles and with them have come the devastating losses of life," she said, naming Renee Good, Alex Pretti and Keith Porter Jr., who was shot by an off-duty ICE agent in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve. " This senseless death, lawlessness and violence must end and so must the presence of ICE in Los Angeles."

Bass described local leaders as the last line of defense against the actions of the federal government.

L.A.’s fire recovery

She also discussed the ongoing recovery of Pacific Palisades, where she has faced substantial criticism for the city's response to the fire and first year of rebuilding, which some residents say has been too slow.

" We've brought in new leadership to overhaul fire preparedness and emergency response," Bass said, referencing her decision to remove former fire chief Kristin Crowley. "And yes, we're fighting the next battle: holding financial institutions and the insurance industry from abandoning Los Angeles because recovery should never feel harder than the disaster itself."

Bass said 400 homes lost to the fire are currently under construction, and that she would travel to Sacramento next week with Councilmember Traci Park and Pacific Palisades residents to push for more state funding for recovery. The Palisades Fire destroyed nearly 7,000 homes and killed 12 people.

The mayor's response to the Palisades Fire is a key issue in her race for re-election. Two of Bass's challengers, former LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner and influencer Spencer Pratt, had their homes damaged or destroyed in the disaster.

Housing and homelessness

Bass then laid out her efforts around housing and homelessness, pointing to an affordability crisis that makes staying in stable housing, or buying a first home, out of reach for many Angelenos.

"The greatest test of L.A. is whether people can actually afford to live here year across Los Angeles," the mayor said in her address. "Too many neighbors are packing multiple families into one apartment are working two and three jobs just to stay housed."

Bass lauded her first executive directive ordering city officials to fast-track the construction of developments that have entirely affordable housing units, which she said had "accelerated  more than 30,000 housing units across the city." She also celebrated the city's move to significantly lower rent hikes, in the first reform to rent control in 40 years.

Bass then turned to homelessness, doubling down on her commitment to her signature "Inside Safe" program, which aims to move people off the streets and into interim housing. She said that the city had cleared nearly 120 encampments.

Bass focused on the fight to end homelessness for veterans in Los Angeles — a focus she said was interrupted by the 2025 fires. She said the city had issued 600 housing vouchers for veterans since last year.

She ended the speech where she started — talking about the city's role as host of the World Cup and 2028 Olympic Games.

" We will continue to focus on the fundamentals, the things that shape how a city feels to the people who live here and the millions who will visit," she said.

Watch the replay

This is a developing story and will be updated.