For the most part, the demographic history of the Valley is dominated by the recent past. The Valley's population quintupled between 1945 and 1960. By the 1980s, more than one million people called the Valley home. By 2000, 1.6 million people lived there.5 More than three quarters (78.4 percent) of the Valley's population lives in twenty-seven "named" communities in the City of Los Angeles. The remainder lives in four independent cities: Burbank (106,480 people), Calabasas (20,455 people), Glendale (203,734 people), and San Fernando (24,722 people).6 One-third of the City of Los Angeles's population lives in the San Fernando Valley.
Yet, despite the relatively recent arrival of most Valley residents, the area has a long, and significant, history of settlement. As in every habitable portion of North America, the San Fernando Valley's original residents were Native Americans. For thousands of years two indigenous people, the Tongva and Chuman, inhabited the region. Like much of California, the area was, comparatively speaking, densely populated, with as many as 5,000 people settled among its various villages. Huwam, a Chumash village, rested in the low hills of Canoga Park for as many as 1500 years.7
Source: California State University Northridge San Fernando Valley History Digital Library, http://digital-library.csun.edu/Copyright.html
The arrival of Spanish settlers and missionaries in the region, starting with the establishment of the San Fernando Mission in 1797, brought about a gradual decline in this population and an effective end to the Native American culture. Diseases, killings by soldiers, rape and intermarriage all effectively wiped out the purely native population by the time of the American conquest a century and a half later.8
Many Native Americans at first resisted acculturation; one historian has asserted that mixed race children among them were "secretly strangled and buried" for several generations.9 But by1900, according to historian Lawrence Jorgensen, the Native American population in California had been reduced ninety-five percent to its estimated "pre-discovery" level.
Source: California State University Northridge San Fernando Valley History Digital Library, http://digital-library.csun.edu/Copyright.html
The Valley's period under Church domination ended in 1834 when California, now under the rule of the independent Republic of Mexico, secularized the missions. The Native American population, already drastically diminished, was once again dispossessed as land and power now transferred from the at least somewhat beneficent padres to the more profitoriented Dons.
The Valley, like much of Southern California, became the province of vast ranchos based on an economy of cattle-raising. Most of the land fell under the control of Eulogio de Celis, a Spaniard living in Los Angeles. Gradually, as the Native American population diminished, the work on the ranches, as well as in the growing nearby pueblo of Los Angeles, was done by immigrants from Mexico.10
Even after the American seizure of California in 1848, the land ownership of the Valley remained largely in the hands of Spanish-speaking Dons.11 But as "boom times" came to California, the ethnic ownership, as well as the overall demographics, began to change. Newcomers from both Mexico proper and the predominately Anglo-Saxon United States poured in to seek out gold and other minerals, but, for the most part, it was the gringos who prevailed.
Much of what took place was outside the law: the lynching of Mexicans was accompanied by the appearance of vengeance-seeking bandits, vengadores, among the increasingly displaced population of Spanish speakers throughout the period from the 1850s to the 1870s. The Dons, who had continued to prosper, began to lose control of their holdings, particularly after the severe drought of the 1860s made them incapable of paying off their often-extravagant debts.12
The new owners were, for the most part, northern Europeans - German, English, and French - who picked up the land from increasingly destitute Californios. Isaac Lankershim, a Prussian Jew who converted to Christianity, his son in law, Isaac Newton van Nuys, a Protestant preacher, "Charles Maclay" and Benjamin Porter, a San Francisco real estate investor was an important part of the core group that would soon market the Valley's farmland, and ultimately begin its sub-division into housing developments.13
With the arrival of the railroads in the 1870s and 1880s, the region became accessible to Los Angeles and the east coast. Communities such as Pacoima, Burbank, Chatsworth, and San Fernando came into existence.14 Vast wheat fields filled much of the expanse, reflecting the economic orientation of the new owners. Many larger holdings were further broken down into smaller ranches, and then into homes. Although they did much to build the tunnels for the railroads, pick the crops and do the hard jobs - along with Chinese and Indian workers - by 1900, the Latino presence in the Valley had faded into obscurity as English-speaking settlers now took all but complete control of the area.15
The Anglo demographic tide became a veritable tsunami as the Valley was transformed by two linked events - the absorption of most of the region into the City of Los Angeles and the introduction of water supplies from the newly completed Los Angeles aqueduct. Even before the annexation of the valley in 1915, Los Angeles powerbrokers - led by the Chandler family - were already assembling parcels in the region. As the water spigot was turned on, the opportunity for massive development had become a reality.16
The exclusivist tendency, characteristic of Southern California, and much of the nation of the time, now extended even to building aqueduct. In the past Latinos, Asians and other non-whites had done much of the "dirty work" in the Valley and the region in general. But the aqueduct was built largely by largely transient whites who now migrated to California in large numbers. Notes historian Kevin Starr:17
"… Mexicans, blacks, Asians or conspicuously ethnic immigrants were rarely in evidence on the line. Like so much else in Los Angeles, the aqueduct was the prerogative of white America."17
At the time of annexation, the Valley supported barely more than 3,000 people, a fraction of the 500,000 who already considered Los Angeles County home at the time.18 But backed by the city and enabled by the prospect of access to both water and power, local real estate speculators and developers, with such names as Moses H. Sherman, Eli Clark, and William Paul Whitsett scrambled to create new communities.19 "We build a city a month here," boasted developer Whitsett.20
The Valley, like much of the Los Angeles at the time, was designed to be a community of homeowners, overwhelmingly white and middle class.21 By 1920, the once heavily Latino Valley had grown to over 21,000 and within two decades had passed 112,000. It was still largely rural and a bedroom community but a more diverse economy - including some manufacturing enterprises and entertainment - was beginning to emerge.22
Source: California State University Northridge San Fernando Valley History Digital Library, http://digital-library.csun.edu/Copyright.html
As for much of Southern California, the Second World War transformed the Valley and vastly accelerated its growth. One small ethnic pocket, the 3,000 member Japanese community, suffered grievously their lands taken and their people exiled to relocation camps far in the interior. Their jobs were taken largely by housewives, high school girls and, in a development that would foreshadow future events, Mexican nationals.23
The post-war Valley took on the physical shape we know today. Vast tracks of suburb housing stretched on for miles from one end of the region to another. The now familiar pattern of shopping centers, strip development and industrial parks, much of it tied to the booming aerospace industry, now rose up where the chicken ranches, dairy farms, orchards and, formerly, cattle ranches and wheat fields had extended.
Photographer: Fontana, Mark; California State University Northridge San Fernando Valley History Digital Library, http://digital-library.csun.edu/Copyright.html
By the late 1940s, the Valley had become the fastest growing urban area in the nation, with over 400,000 people. Even as Los Angeles became more diverse - with its growing Latino barrio on the eastside and growing African- American communities on the south side - the Valley remained largely white. By 1950, Anglos accounted for at least ninety percent of the total population. The population tilted towards married families: there were much fewer elderly and more children than the rest of the county and the country.24
These demographics epitomized the Valley described by Valley native and writer Kevin Roderick as "America's suburb". The Valley was not so much a part of Los Angeles as the epitome of everything that we associate with the great demographic dispersion of the post-war era:25
"The Valley became the swimming pool and the sports car capital of the country, and grew the biggest shopping center in Los Angeles"
By the early 1950s, the northeast of the San Fernando Valley, notes UCLA's Allan Scott, boasted one of the most important concentrations of aerospace and high-technology industries in the region. Development pressures began to whittle away at the last vestiges of the Valley's bucolic past.26 As the population doubled in that decade, the pattern of life changed, although the outwardly suburban form remained. Most of the growth came not from Los Angeles, but directly from the rest of the country. It was no longer bucolic; densities had grown from 350 people a square mile in 1930 to over 3,900 in 1962. One observer returning home noticed the change: "It's all rush, rush, rush."27
As the need for service, industrial and other workers increased, there also came an abrupt end to the Valley's ethnic isolation, and its separation from Los Angeles' changing demography. Although only a few pockets of the region for generations had been heavily minority - such as San Fernando City and Pacoima - there began in the 1970s the extension of largely immigrant communities into places like Canoga Park, Panorama City and Van Nuys.
California State University Northridge San Fernando Valley History Digital Library, http://digital-library.csun.edu/Copyright.html
At the same time, the imposition of school busing in the late 1970s brought the problems of inner city Los Angeles into the Valley. Many observers trace the beginnings of today's secession movement to parental objections to busing. The dispute over busing and the increasingly poor performance of Los Angeles public schools, in addition to rising crime rates, also led to an exodus of middle class families, many of them to the outlying suburbs to the north. Much of the high tech infrastructure also migrated northwards, towards the Ventura County line.28
Clearly the homogeneous, isolated Valley of the post-war era was now passing, much as the world of the Dons and rancheros had before. The Economist magazine might still refer to the Valley as "its own world, the quintessential suburban enclave", but in reality it has been changing dramatically into something quite different. Rapid population growth, which had characterized the area for much of the last century, began to slow to a crawl in the late 1960s and 1980s. Some communities, such as Burbank, actually lost population in the 1970s and, increasingly, the once young-oriented Valley had become increasingly elderly.29
By the 1980s, the Valley increasingly resembled not so much "America's suburb" but a community in economic and demographic decline. It might not have been on its way to becoming what one Marxist writer gleefully described as "crabgrass slum", but it was beginning to resemble other "older suburbs." There, author Mike Davis Suggests, in the east and Midwest, whose time appeared to have passed as affluent populations migrated to the tech-rich, more pristine and well-planned outer suburbs, they could re-create "a museum society of suburban nostalgia."30
Clearly the Valley's epoch as "America's suburb" was coming to an end, both in reality and in the eyes of its residents. The challenge from its periphery, particularly the rapidly growing 101 Corridor stretching into Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties as well as north into Santa Clarita, was drawing off middle class people, not necessarily for racist or nostalgic reasons, as radicals like Davis suggest, but for such basic things as better education for their children, excellent parks and other amenities. Indeed, a 1999 Los Angeles Times poll found considerably less satisfaction among Valley residents than those living in more peripheral areas such as Ventura and Orange Counties.31
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Karin Lane (MPP '05) is director of the Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission Program of AMPATH, which runs 23 HIV/AIDS clinics in Kenya.
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