A guide to Los Angeles, the cinematic Californian city with Latin American roots

You wouldn’t know it from the sea of skyscrapers hemmed in by traffic-clogged freeways. Or from the flashy Hollywood studios, the multi-million-dollar celebrity homes or the Dior parading down Rodeo Drive. But a little over 200 years ago, Los Angeles was a wilderness, just sea and mountains and big sky. Back then, what’s now considered the quintessential US city wasn’t even in America, but in Mexico.

“In 1781, 44 settlers moved to this area from New Spain, further south,” explains Edgar Garcia, as we wander through El Pueblo on a sunny morning. A couple of blocks bookended by Downtown’s office buildings and grand Union Station, sandwiched between Chinatown and Little Tokyo, this small district is the oldest part of LA. It’s where the global metropolis was born. Now protected, the pretty, low-rise buildings and streets of El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument (the area’s full name) form the heart of the city’s Mexican-heritage community. “When the settlers arrived, this was the frontier of the frontier,” continues Edgar, the monument’s assistant manager. “They had to resettle several times before they built the church, around 1820.”

The church, along with several other early-19th-century buildings, is still here. It’s Sunday morning and families are pouring towards its whitewashed exterior, distinctly Spanish in its simple curves and tiled roof. Nearby, in a square containing a bandstand and fringed with thick-trunked trees, artisans sell sweets dusted in the Mexican lime-chilli seasoning Tajín. A plaque lists the names of the 44 founding pobladores, or settlers — mostly impoverished people driven to find a new life at the cutting edge of the Spanish empire.

El Pueblo de Los Angeles was just one of several settlements founded in the 18th century along the coast of California. In 1821, when Mexico declared independence from Spain, Alta California — as this region was then known — and its clutch of villages and religious missions also left the empire. The Mexican-American war (1846–1848) led to Alta California’s annexation and the area became a US free state. As a new, predominantly English-speaking LA Downtown grew up alongside it, El Pueblo fell into disrepair and disrepute.

"In a way, we’re lucky the area was forgotten,” says Edgar as we stroll past historic Pico House, once a grand hotel. “We still have our 19th-century buildings, which would have been knocked down otherwise.” He adds that, over time, nostalgia for LA’s Spanish past grew, and in the 1920s a wealthy Oakland woman, Christine Sterling, helped restore El Pueblo to a romantic, film-set-perfect version of Mexico. Mexican families were encouraged to open tourist-facing businesses here, some of which endure today.

I swing open the door to LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, in the area’s western corner, for a deeper dive. A community hub, as well as museum and cookery school, it provides an immersive look at Hispanic culture in LA and beyond. Curator Esperanza Sanchez walks me through the exhibits, charting the many difficult chapters of LA’s growth out of El Pueblo. There are many: the displacement and maltreatment of the Indigenous Tongva community; land grants that disenfranchised Mexican-descent families; and 1930s immigration raids that saw mass deportation to open up jobs for ‘real’ (ie, white) Americans. “The California constitution was originally in both Spanish and English,” Esperanza tells me as we pass colourful, large-scale paintings by artist Margaret García and a display board on Ritchie Valens, the musician behind the 1958 hit La Bamba. Clearly, the question isn’t where Latin culture has touched this city, but rather where it hasn’t.

Back outside, the square has filled. Musicians are on the bandstand and grey-haired locals salsa dance to their songs. A nearby church service has ended, releasing crowds into the street, and they drift towards El Pueblo’s main drag, Olvera Street. I join the bodies snaking along the cobblestone row, passing under a historic mural by Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, perusing stalls selling lucha libre wrestling masks and ponchos woven with the logo of the LA Dodgers baseball team. I follow a few people into Ávila Adobe house — the city’s oldest standing residence, built in 1818 — and pause in its dusty, tree-lined courtyard, a knobbly ancient grapevine scrambling up a pergola beside me. Is this really still LA? After a fleeting moment of stillness, drawn by the scent of sizzling peppers and warm tortillas, I follow the parade towards Sunday lunch. 

Where to eat

Every community has its political meeting place — somewhere for handshakes over good food, see-and-be-seen socialising and backroom deals. I’m told by Edgar that in El Pueblo, this place is El Paseo Inn. Founded in the 1930s, it’s occupied its current Olvera Street location since 1953 and has been run by Don Carmacho’s family since the 1980s. The great and the good of LA’s Hispanic community have dined under its adobe-style wood ceilings — as have a number of other high-profile guests. “George H W Bush sat at that table right there,” Don tells me, pointing across the private dining room. “It was around 5pm one evening in the 1990s and my dad called me up at home, saying I had to get down to the restaurant quick because the president’s in town and fancies some chips and salsa.” 

We grab our own table in the main dining area, festooned in lights and wooden wagon wheels. By the front door, a chef is making tortillas by hand, and on tables all around multi-gen families and groups of friends scoop up bowlfuls of guacamole. “People have a tradition to visit every Sunday,” Don tells me. “They go to church with their families, then they come here. Family is so important to our culture and we want to honour that — which means providing the meal they’ve come to expect.” Don is a dealer in nostalgia as much as nourishment, supplying the familiar dishes generations of locals have grown up with.

As my carne asada tacos arrive, I ask Don how he squares such tradition with the need to make changes, and he shrugs. “We try to make things a bit healthier sometimes, or we might use Mexican crema [similar to sour cream] rather than more cheese. We’re not the food you find in Mexico, nor are we Tex Mex. There’s menudo beef tripe stew on the menu, but also fajitas.” The aim is to find a happy place where the likes of Don’s parents and tourists who rarely eat Mexican can all find something they like. 

Olvera Street may be the epicentre of Mexican food in LA, but venture further afield and you’ll find Latin culinary influences everywhere. On Hollywood Boulevard, hot-dog vendors top their grills with jalapeños. In new Downtown hotel Conrad Los Angeles, the star breakfast is tortilla with egg white and caviar. In upmarket West Hollywood, restaurant Gracias Madre cooks vegan Mexican classics with cashew cheese and soy chorizo. 

South of Hollywood Boulevard, chef Wes Avila serves his own high-end interpretation of coastal Tulum cuisine in his restaurant, Ka’teen. With outdoor seating and tropical greenery, it has a laid-back Yucatán atmosphere but is just a stone’s throw from the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

“Mexican food is getting trendier,” he says, explaining how after making his name in taco trucks, a bricks-and-mortar restaurant felt like the natural next step. “Tacos, for example, have been elevated as chefs use better meat cuts and more seasonal produce.” Wes points out that pricing is a battle, as diners unfairly expect Hispanic food — Mexican, in particular — to be cheap. “People complain if you charge $6 for a taco. But it’s perception. If you disassemble that taco and put those ingredients on a plate,” Wes says, “suddenly you could charge triple the price.” Diners are, however, happy to shell out for seafood, which is why he says dishes like ceviche have become popular in higher-end Mexican restaurants.

I’d happily pay top dollar for Wes’s kampachi crudo with mustard seed vinaigrette, but my favourite is his esquites (grilled corn), flavoured with coconut and parmesan. With its globe-trotting flavours, Ka’teen is the other side of the spectrum to Don’s more traditional dishes.

“I wouldn’t call this cuisine Mexican really,” Wes tells me after I’ve finished eating. “The best description that someone has coined is ‘Alta Californian’ or ‘north of the border’ cuisine. There’s a Mexican lens on it but, this being the LA melting pot, there are influences from Japan and Lebanon, France and the Philippines, too.”

My mind returns to El Pueblo’s bandstand square. On the plaque listing the 44 founding settlers from 1781, the names weren’t just Spanish, nor were their backgrounds — nearly half were Indigenous and Black. Edgar had explained that the neighbourhood has always been a place of different peoples and cultures, from Mexican to Chinese, many coming to seek a better life. So yes, on the surface, El Pueblo — a charming time warp in an endless sea of steel and glass — doesn’t seem much like the rest of Los Angeles. But on reflection, it could just be the most American place I’ve ever been.