Marissa López discusses erasure of L.A.’s Mexican history on Spectrum News 1

Sean Brenner | October 11, 2024

In a recent appearance on Spectrum News 1, Marissa López spoke about the widespread erasure of Los Angeles’ Mexican history — and a mobile app she created to help keep that history alive.

López, a UCLA professor of English and of Chicana and Chicano and Central American Studies, appeared on the cable channel’s “In Focus SoCal” as part of a segment celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month.

She explained the motivation for developing the Picturing Mexican America app, which launched this year.

“Even if people know that California — and really all of the Southwest — used to be Mexico, we don’t think about it that much. We don’t often have occasion to see it around us; we’re not reminded of it in our daily lives,” Lopez said. “And I wanted to create something that would not just tell people about how California used to be part of Mexico, but to give them opportunities to think about it on their own terms, in their own time.”

López explained the selling off of Mexican-owned land grants, called ranchos, in the decades after the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848. “Mexicans used to own all of this land, so why don’t they, for the most part, anymore?” she said. “It wasn’t just the passage of time or the natural evolution of things; it was a deliberate process that was engineered at the highest levels of government.”

And she spoke about the city’s tendency to minimize Mexican stories when celebrating its history.

“Commemorating history [in Los Angeles] has been largely been a celebration of Anglo history and a really deliberate ignoring or erasing of Mexican or Mexican American history,” she said.

Watch the full interview on Spectrum News 1 (López’s segment begins at 14:38).

Read more about the Picturing Mexican America app in this 2021 UCLA Newsroom article and learn about two other projects by López in this 2024 UCLA Humanities article.