MEXICAN MUSICAL THEATER AND MOVIE PALACES IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES BEFORE 1950

WELCOME TO THE PLAZA

To begin to tell the story of Mexican music in Los Angeles, you have to start in the Plaza. The first site of Spanish colonial civilian settlement in 1781, it was also the city's first entertainment district. Today the Los Angeles Plaza retains its historic Roman Catholic Plaza Church, Our Lady Queen of the Angels/Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles (also known as La Placita Church), dedicated in 1822, and still an active parish serving a principally Latino congregation. The historic Pico House hotel and Merced Theater (the city's oldest surviving theater space) opened in 1870, and Masonic Hall next door was built in 1858. Los Angeles civic leaders established touristic "Mexican" Olvera Street in the late 1920s, as representative of the Spanish-heritage fantasy myth. Italian Hall, built in 1908, long a multiethnic site for cultural, social, and political activities, features David Alfaro Siqueiros's restored outdoor mural América Tropical (Tropical America) of 1932.

The Plaza area has been reconfigured and repurposed numerous times over the centuries, and has always been in a state of adaptation and change. Before the building of Union Railway Station in Los Angeles in the late 1930s, and before misguided urban redevelopment in the 1950s and the destruction of historic buildings and neighborhoods, it served as the center for the city's vibrant Mexican, Italian, and Chinese communities. Civic leaders such as Christine Sterling and Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler, instigators of the romanticized reimagining of Olvera Street, practiced what William Estrada calls "selective preservation," keeping some buildings such as those mentioned above, but almost entirely destroying the original Chinatown and gradually displacing most of the original Mexican businesses in the Plaza area.

However, at different times from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1950s, Plaza-district buildings, especially along north Main street, housed immigrant-oriented businesses, churches, restaurants and cafes, grocery stores, social clubs, billiard halls, saloons, music stores, dance halls, rooming houses, phonograph parlors, penny arcades, nickelodeons and ten-cent motion picture houses, and vaudeville theaters. The development of the Plaza area over time mirrors the transition of Los Angeles from a small Spanish and Mexican pueblo to an American frontier city, and ultimately to one of the world's major cities and metropolitan areas. As the city grew outward from the Plaza, the performing arts grew with the city, in a wide diversity of genres and styles and ethnic and racial origins and audiences. New artistic and entertainment genres were introduced, created, or adapted for local use, and older traditions were both maintained and discarded.

With the large-scale influx of immigrants during the Mexican revolution of the 1910s came the strong desire to import Mexican cultural practices to what Mexican writer, politician, and philosopher José Vasconcelos (1882–1959) and other elites called a México de Afuera, a Mexican diaspora abroad. As part of this desire to maintain strong connections to the homeland, these immigrants and exiles would establish their own popular music singing groups, orquestas típicas and mariachis, church choirs, dance and wind bands, and operatic and theater companies, creating a vitally alive and mutually supportive musical atmosphere in the Mexican community. A central aspect of this essay is how musical theater directly relates to physical location, civic identity, immigration, and ethnicity. A recurring process of cultural conflict, maintenance, and accommodation played out over time on stage in Los Angeles's Latino theatrical world. Music and theater thus served as conduits for communal self-expression, as powerful symbols of Mexican identity, and as signs of tradition and modernity.

LOS ANGELES'S MEXICAN MUSICAL STAGES AND MOVIE PALACES

Beginning around 1906 a group of Mexican-oriented theaters, offering mixed bills of live theatrical acts and motion pictures, was established along north Main street adjacent to the Plaza that would continue to be active for several decades. They catered especially to the Spanish-speaking, but also to Italian, Chinese, and Japanese residents of the greater Plaza district.

For a brief time in 1907, an attempt was made to establish a legitimate theater for live Spanish-language drama and musicals in the Italian Mutual Benevolent Association hall at 730 Buena Vista Street in Sonoratown, the predominantly Mexican district immediately north of the plaza. A Mexican company, direct from Hermosillo, Sonora, presented Ruperto Chapí's Spanish zarzuela (operetta) La Tempestad (1882), a favorite repertory piece, in February 1907. However, the enterprise failed because of lack of community support. A combination of films and vaudeville acts was more successful in the community than live musical drama at that time. In May 1907, the Los Angeles Times commented on the makeup of the typical nickel film theater audience, and that the nickelodeon had taken over from the penny arcade in popularity: "A canvas of the nickel theaters of Los Angeles last night revealed a very large percentage of foreign patronage in the plain wooden chairs. The Mexican, especially, is an enthusiastic devotee."

William Wilson Mceuen's thesis from 1914 on the Mexican community in Sonoratown and the Plaza area is invaluable for the data it contains, especially concerning theatrical spectatorship. He included a survey of the Plaza's Mexican-oriented theaters in the mid-1910s: their audiences, musical component,...