Every Monday for more than 20 years in the mid-1800s, two groups assembled near the decaying adobe that served as the Los Angeles County Courthouse. One group came willingly; the other, by force. One came to buy; the other, to be bought.
This was the weekly churn of the Los Angeles “slave mart,” in which Indigenous inmates would be auctioned off for five days of hard labor on the ranchos and vineyards on the town’s outskirts or forced onto a chain gang and marched toward the latest public works project. Compensation, if any, came in the form of aguardiente, a stomach-turning local brandy. As soon as these once-and-future convicts consumed their “wages,” the city marshal pounced. Armed with a heavy cane and flanked by his deputies, the marshal seized any inebriated Natives he could find and hauled them to an open-air corral near the courthouse. The inmates awoke the next morning to an all-too-familiar sight: a crowd of eager bidders who would soon carry them off for another week of toil. And repeat.
Frontier Los Angeles was not known for its vigilant police force. In fact, the town had a well-earned reputation as one of the most violent settlements in the United States, with a murder rate 50 times higher than New York City’s in the mid-19th century, according to historian John Mack Faragher. Justice, more often than not, was served at the end of a vigilante’s rope, rather than through the formal workings of the feeble, overtaxed court system.
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
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But when it came to policing Indigenous people, Los Angeles made an exception. And no wonder. The weekly sale of Native convicts was L.A.’s second-largest source of municipal revenue, behind only the license fees imposed on the town’s proliferating saloons and gambling dens.
Visitors and residents alike commented on the custom, often with a shudder. “Los Angeles had its slave mart,” not unlike “New Orleans and Constantinople,” wrote the vigilante turned lawyer Horace Bell. The only difference, according to Bell, was that “the slave at Los Angeles was sold fifty-two times a year as long as he lived, which did not generally exceed one, two, or three years, under the new dispensation.”
Bell was not the only one to object. But the local demand for cheap labor trumped humanitarian scruples. “The inhabitants of Los Angeles are a moral and intelligent people, and many of them disapprove of the custom on principle,” wrote the Irish American humorist J. Ross Browne. “[They] hope it will be abolished as soon as the Indians are all killed off,” he added grimly.
20,000 PEOPLE
The exploitation of Indigenous people was, of course, nothing new under the Southern California sun. Since the arrival of the first Spanish missionaries and pobladores nearly a century earlier, California Indians—sometimes willingly, often not—had provided the labor lifeline for the region’s entire colonial enterprise. Nearby Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, for instance, fed itself off the coerced work of its Indigenous neophytes.
For those Natives who escaped the dragnet of the Spanish mission system, there remained a significant degree of autonomy—for a time, at least. The pueblo of Los Angeles abutted the rancheria of the independent Gabrielino people. From that village, known as Yaangna, came the skilled and semi-skilled laborers who would eventually transform Los Angeles into the largest settlement in Mexican California. By the early 19th century, Yaangna had become a cosmopolitan gathering place for Indigenous people across Southern California. Still at a safe remove from most colonists, Yaangna was largely spared the pestilential diseases that plagued the overcrowded missions elsewhere in the state.
The rancheria, however, could sustain only so much growth. The secularization of the missions in 1833 brought an influx of Indigenous people from Mission San Diego de Alcalá, Mission San Luis Rey, and Mission San Juan Capistrano. The bulging population flooded the market with cheap laborers and eroded the bargaining power of Native people.
Mexican authorities turned the worker surplus to their advantage. In 1836, the ayuntamiento (city council) of Los Angeles forcibly relocated the rancheria to where Commercial and Alameda Streets now meet. That same year, the ayuntamiento empowered Mexican residents to sweep the district and arrest any inebriated Natives. Once detained, they were compelled to either pay a fine or toil on public works.
The American conquest of Mexican California in 1848 accelerated what had become well-established patterns of Indigenous exploitation. If Native people hoped California’s free-soil constitution, made law in 1850, would shield them from enslavement, they were quickly disabused of that notion.
The same year that California’s constitution outlawed slavery, the state legislature opened a yawning loophole through which to drive generations of captive Natives. With little sense of irony, legislators named the law an Act for the Government and Protection of Indians. The statute licensed a wide array of coercive labor practices, including child servitude, debt bondage, and convict leasing.
At least 20,000 California Indians were held in various modes of bondage between 1850 and 1863. They could be found from one end of the state to the other.
Many of them were minors. For their domestic needs, Angelenos most often exploited the wardship provision of the 1850 law, which enabled them to claim Indigenous children as domestic servants. A California householder simply had to bring a Native child before the court, state that the parents were unfit, and claim legal guardianship. The “adopted” child could then be forced to cook, clean, and perform other chores without compensation until they reached adulthood—or, as was often the case, an early grave.
These Indigenous minors, however, were ill-suited to the heavier tasks upon which ranches and vineyards depended. For those needs, landowners turned to the ready supply of Native convicts, available for purchase every Monday for as little as $1 to $4 a week.
Angelenos, disturbed by the sight of a weekly human auction in the center of their city, could tell themselves that the regime served the interests of public order. The convicts were typically rounded up from Calle de los Negros, the vice district of early Los Angeles. Of course, the illicit enterprises of the alley continued to thrive, with or without Indigenous patrons.
Finally, around 1870, Los Angeles closed its Native slave mart. Its demise wasn’t prompted by a reawakened antislavery spirit or a rediscovered moral center, however. Rather, the slave mart consumed itself.
The relentless pattern of incarceration and forced labor wasn’t a “vicious circle,” according to historian George Harwood Phillips, so much as a “downward spiral from which few escaped or survived.”
The numbers are telling—and tragic. In 1850, the Native population of Los Angeles County stood at 3,693. The figure dropped to 2,014 a decade later. By 1870, the population had plummeted to a mere 219. At that point, there was no longer enough human fodder to sustain the slave mart.
REMEMBER THIS
The Indigenous past of Los Angeles has been erased twice over. First, the original inhabitants were erased bodily through decades of warfare, disease, and enslavement. Then they were erased symbolically through urban development and historical amnesia.
Those who wish to visit the spot where the slave mart once stood will find iconic emblems of Los Angeles—City Hall and the federal courthouse—but no mention of Indigenous convicts. There is no sign or memorial to acknowledge the coerced workers who kept the city afloat financially through much of its early history.
Perhaps that should come as no surprise. Los Angeles, the so-called City of the Future, makes little space for reflection on a painful past. The city literally paved over the ashes of the Native rancheria that provided the labor that first built L.A. As the scholar Norman Klein reminds us, no ethnic community was allowed to keep its original Downtown location.
Yet slowly and sometimes painfully, the past is resurfacing in Los Angeles. That reckoning has been led, in large part, by the Mayor’s Office Civic Memory Working Group, which consists of 40 local leaders, scholars, artists, architects, curators, designers, historians, and Indigenous elders. They’ve produced an extensive report, a website, and a splendidly illustrated volume of essays, interviews, and discussions related to the submerged history of L.A.
Although the site of the slave mart still lacks signage, there are templates for what can yet be done. Another dark chapter in the city’s past—the 1871 Chinese Massacre—is finally getting the memorialization it deserves. In 2021, a steering committee launched a campaign to build a tribute to the 18 victims of one of the largest mass lynchings in American history (see “Knowing and Grieving Two Massacres”).
Perhaps one day, then, visitors who stare up at the soaring pinnacle of City Hall will also look down to the history under their feet. For decades, that ground served as the site of a slave mart, an enterprise that filled the city’s coffers as it drove the Indigenous population toward the brink of collapse.
That, however, is only part of the story. Despite the best efforts of Southern California’s colonists, the region’s Native population ultimately rebounded. Today, Los Angeles County boasts the largest concentration of people in the United States who identify solely as Indigenous. The L.A. slave mart is merely a chapter in a much longer history of survival.•
Kevin Waite is an associate professor of history at Durham University and the author of West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire. His next book is a biography of Biddy Mason funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
