Last updated: May 3, 2022
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Julián Chávez, the Old Spanish Trail
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Julián Chávez – Old Spanish Trail[1]
By Angela Reiniche
In 1834, Mexico decreed the secularization of the missions and made their considerable holdings available to individual citizens who promised to develop private ranchos (large land grants usually used for raising cattle and/or crops). Two years later, the government issued an edict to colonize the regions north of California’s San Pablo Bay and into the Sacramento Valley. These lands offered an attractive incentive to emigrants, some of whom were New Mexicans facing dwindling opportunities and political tensions at home.
Traders had used the pathways connecting California and New Mexico for half a decade, but secularization and the 1836 edict gave the Old Spanish Trail a new identity as an emigrant trail. On 10 March 1836, Julián Antonio Chávez, an “españole [sic]” from Abiquiú, New Mexico, petitioned the ayuntamiento (governing council) of Los Angeles for a grant of “swampy lands” nearest to the pueblo, declaring that it was “entirely vacant” and that he was “established, married, and [had] the means” to plant and harvest corn and other cereal crops.[2]
In addition to obtaining Mexican citizenship, a petitioner had to swear that the land was unoccupied and that they had the means to make it productive. Like many of the emigrants who would use the Old Spanish Trail to relocate to California, Chávez had a degree of familiarity with the landscape because he had come west, perhaps as part of a trapping party. He surveyed the land and considered its potential for offering economic prosperity. Perhaps his own resistance in New Mexico to the ardent centralism of Governor Albino Pérez, appointed in 1835, provided additional motivation for emigration.
Chávez soon found himself in Los Angeles. In 1836, the year he first petitioned for a land grant, the Los Angeles census lists Chávez as a twenty-eight-year-old labrador (laborer) married to María Dorotea Romero, a California-born resident of the Pueblo de Los Angeles. Their first child was born in late August of 1836 and a second in 1837.[3] By 1838, Julián Chávez farmed his land and had launched a political career that continued into California’s statehood, the nature of which transformed the cultural landscape of Los Angeles. His life in Los Angeles epitomizes the diverse cast of historical actors who emigrated to Alta California by way of the Old Spanish Trail during the 1830s and 1840s.[4]
Chávez’s petition for land in 1836 was only the first of many. The more land he owned, the more well-known he became, which in turn increased his local political profile. In 1838, Chávez served as the suplente alcalde (assistant mayor), his first political position; in 1844, the council granted him eighty-three acres near downtown Los Angeles. He served as regidor (councilman) in 1846 and 1847, and as juez de aguas (water master or ditch master) during the waning years of Mexican rule. During the smallpox epidemics of 1850 and 1880, the county used part of Chávez’s land to quarantine the afflicted Chinese American and Mexican American residents. This place was known then as the Chávez Canyon, later renamed Chávez Ravine. In the mid-twentieth century, after a failed attempt to create public housing for the area’s residents, part of Chávez’s former grant – in nearby Cemetery and Sulphur ravines – became home to Dodger Stadium, a project that ultimately displaced many of the area’s residents. [5]
Chávez’s political career did not end after the United States admitted California as a state. In 1852, he was elected as a member of the first Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. As part of his responsibilities, Chávez was appointed juez de campo (“field judge”) for Los Angeles. He maintained this position for several years after the outset of United States’ rule, often settling disputes that arose between cattle ranchers over stock ownership.[6]
Chàvez’s political prominence continued to bring social and economic status. Following Los Angeles’s Fourth of July celebration in 1852, a mile-long parade ended at Chávez’s vineyard where the revelers dined on barbecued meat and local California fare.[7] Twenty-four years after Chávez’s first appearance in the census records of Los Angeles, the 1860 enumeration listed him as a rancher/stockman with $1500 in real estate and $6000 in personal property. Besides the seven children that remained with Dorotea and Julián, there were five New Mexican-born laborers associated with the household and one female “Indian” servant. In the decades that followed the American Civil War, Chávez continued his political career with elections to the City Council, service on the committees for finance, water, and policing, as well as an appointment to the Los Angeles River Improvement Committee and the Plaza Improvement Committee. Chávez’s family life changed over the winter months of 1862–63, when Dorotea and several of her family members succumbed to illness.[8] Two years later, Chávez married twenty-three-year-old María Luisa Machado, the eldest daughter of a prominent ranchero family.[9] In 1873, after a quarter-century of service, Chávez retired from political life. After his second marriage, Chávez lived at La Ballona, part of the Machado family’s rancho, and according to the 1880 California mortality schedules, died from “inflammation of [the] lung” in 1879. [10]
[1] Part of a 2016–2018 collaborative project of the National Trails- National Park Service and the University of New Mexico’s Department of History, “Student Experience in National Trails Historic Research: Vignettes Project” [Colorado Plateau Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit (CPCESU), Task Agreement P16AC00957]. This project was formulated to provide trail partners and the general public with useful biographies of less-studied trail figures—particularly African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, women, and children. Thank you to the Old Spanish Trail Association for providing review of draft essays.
[2] Angélico Chávez, Chávez: A Distinctive American Clan of New Mexico, Southwest Heritage Series (Santa Fe, N.M.: Sunstone Press, 2009); and 07 January 1808, Abiquiu, New Mexico, New Mexico Baptisms, Church of Santo Tomas de Abiquiu, Abiquiu, Provincia de Nuevo Mejico, Nueva Espana, Vol. I, 1754–1811, extracted by V.L. Olmstead, et al. (Albuquerque: New Mexico Genealogical Society, 2000), 146; and “Petition of Julián Chávez for grant of agricultural parcel, 1836,” Los Angeles City Records Center and Archives, LAARC-1_139_14, accessed via University of Southern California Digital Library, http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ p15799coll88/id/935. The term españole is spelled how it appears in the original document.
[3] Census of 1836 (Padron of Los Angeles), Alta California LA, Historical Society of Southern California (printed by University of California Press), 129; (29/66), 1836
[4] It is important to note that like many who emigrated, Chávez had traveled to Alta California with trading caravans and easily recognized its potential for New Mexican emigrants. Chávez’s first visit to Los Angeles was with Antonio Armijo’s trading caravan in 1830.
[5] County of Los Angeles Board of Supervisors, “Supervisor Julian A. Chavez,” accessed 30 January 2020, http://file.lacounty.gov/SDSInter/lac/112080_jchavez.pdf.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Julián and María Dorotea had thirteen children between 1836 and 1853. María Dorotea died in the winter of 1863, along with nine other members of her family, disease presumably a factor. Alta California Mission Book #35, 1774–1855, San Gabriel Marriages, Mission San Gabriel (Thomas Workman Temple III), 17 September 1835; and Census 1836 (Padron of Los Angeles), Alta California LA, Historical Society of Southern California (printed by University of California Press), 129; (29/66), 1836; and Year: 1850; Census Place: Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California; Roll: M432_35; Page: 16B; Image: 38 (Provo, Utah: Ancestroy.com). Other records accessed via http://www.schwaldfamily.org/getperson.php?personID=I10375&tree= RodSchwald.
[9] Alta California Mission Book #9, 1849–1884, Plaza Church Los Angeles, Marriage at Nuestra Senora Reina de Los Angeles Church (Thomas Workman Temple III), 4 November 1865. Together, Julián Chávez and María Machado had four children. For sources on his political career see the County of Los Angeles Board of Supervisors document.
[10] “California Great Registers, 1866–1910,” Family Search database (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:VTD1-3BP : 26 November 2014), Julián Antonio Chávez , 28 Jun 1879; citing Voter Registration, La Ballona, Los Angeles, California, United States, county clerk offices, California; FHL microfilm 976,928; and The Bancroft Library, University of California; Berkeley, California; U.S. Census Mortality Schedules, California, 1850–1880; Archive Collection: 97:7; Census Year: 1880; Census Place: La Ballona, Los Angeles, California; Page: 1.