Who ruled Los Angeles?

Los Angeles spreads across a wide coastal basin in southern California, hemmed in by mountains and the Pacific and watered only by a small, unreliable river. It began as a Spanish farming village and for most of the nineteenth century was a modest cattle town, far less important than San Francisco. What made it one of the great cities of the world was a series of deliberate bets: railways, oil, imported water, cinema and aircraft. Its story is one of explosive growth, repeated reinvention and deep social tensions.

For thousands of years the basin was home to the Tongva people, who lived in dozens of villages and traded along the coast and with the Channel Islands. Their village of Yaanga stood near the river where downtown Los Angeles is today. The Spanish expedition of Gaspar de Portolá passed through in August 1769, and in 1771 Franciscan friars founded Mission San Gabriel nearby, where many Tongva were drawn into mission labour and suffered devastating losses from disease.

On 4 September 1781 a group of 44 settlers recruited in north-western New Spain, men, women and children of Indigenous, African and Spanish ancestry, founded the Pueblo de la Reina de los Ángeles on the river under orders from the governor of California. The village depended on Tongva labour and grew slowly. After Mexico won independence in 1821 the town became the centre of a ranching economy, as huge land grants, the ranchos, divided the surrounding country and supplied hides and tallow to visiting ships.

During the Mexican–American War, American forces occupied Los Angeles, and Californio leaders surrendered under the Treaty of Cahuenga in January 1847. California passed to the United States in 1848, and Los Angeles was incorporated as an American city in 1850. The next decades were lawless and violent: in 1871 a mob killed about 18 Chinese residents in one of the worst racial massacres in the American West.

The railway connection to San Francisco in 1876, and a direct transcontinental line in the 1880s, set off a land boom that drew settlers from the Midwest. Oil was struck within the city in the early 1890s, the port at San Pedro was developed, and in 1913 an aqueduct began bringing water more than 300 kilometres from the Owens Valley, allowing the city to annex the San Fernando Valley and grow to an enormous area. Film-makers arrived in Hollywood in the 1910s, and by the 1920s the movie industry had made the city world-famous. Los Angeles hosted the Olympic Games in 1932 and again in 1984.

The Second World War turned the region into a centre of aircraft and shipbuilding, drawing hundreds of thousands of workers, including many African Americans from the South. The same years saw the forced removal of the city's Japanese American residents and the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, in which servicemen attacked young Mexican Americans. After the war freeways and suburbs spread across the basin. Racial tensions erupted in the Watts uprising of 1965 and again in the riots of 1992 after the acquittal of police officers who had beaten Rodney King, and the Northridge earthquake of 1994 caused heavy damage.

Today the city has nearly 4 million people and its metropolitan area more than 12 million, with large Latino and Asian American communities, and it is the second-largest city in the United States, a centre of entertainment, trade through its twin ports and aerospace.