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Masterpiece of

      Los Angeles Literature

      Josh Kun

      IN 1923, a syndicate of African-American investors from Los Angeles and a team of mayors and local civic and business leaders in Northern Mexico decided that Baja California needed a “Negro Sanitarium.” The proposed health spa was a tourist pitch under the banner of interracial brotherhood, and it required cross-border buy-in.

In Los Angeles, Charlotta Bass, the publisher of the pioneering African-American newspaper The California Eagle, did her part to fundraise, as did Agustín Haro y Tamariz, editor of La Prensa, the city’s first Spanish-language weekly. The Louisiana jazz legend Kid Ory, summering in Los Angeles, played a benefit show in Exposition Park. And down at the border in Calexico, the poet and journalist Facundo Bernal hustled donations at a rate of 50 cents for each brick in the sanitarium’s walls; he had been living in the growing border community since leaving Los Angeles five years earlier.1 Bernal was originally from Sonora, but by 1923 he had become a key figure in Southern California-Baja California life and letters and a member of a bilingual and multicultural network of writers, artists, entrepreneurs, and politicians who took L.A.’s ties to Mexico seriously. The volume you hold in your hands, Palos de Ciego — his first and only book — was published in Los Angeles that same year. It consists of poems that originally ran in the pages of La Prensa, poems that, like Bernal himself, moved back and forth between the cultural and political worlds of Los Angeles and Northern Mexico. It was a time, before fences, walls, and the Border Patrol, when the border only existed to be crossed.

Bernal first crossed it in 1913, on his way to East Los Angeles. As an outspoken journalist in his hometown of Hermosillo, Bernal was a relentless critic of local politicians struggling for power in the thick of the Mexican Revolution. He received a number of death threats and, after one stint in jail, was promised a lifetime of imprisonment if he didn’t leave the country. He came to L.A. on the run, a journalist in exile, and his byline soon appeared in the Los Angeles Times (attached to a feature on the revolution in Sonora2) and on the pages of some of the city’s most important Spanish-language periodicals: El Heraldo de México, El Eco de Mexico, and La Prensa. Writing didn’t pay all the bills, so after a brief stint in a factory packing tomatoes, he also began working at his brother’s clothing store, Casa Bernal Hermanos, selling bespoke suits. Bernal spent four years in the city, immersing himself in its thriving and rapidly expanding community of Mexican immigrants; he followed local news and politics as closely as he followed developments back home in Sonora. Even when he left to open another branch of the family’s business in the Mexican border town of Mexicali, Los Angeles remained central to his writing.

      In 1921, Bernal began publishing a series of poems in La Prensa — a paper that declared itself to be “por la patria y por la raza” (for the Mexican nation and the Mexican race) — under the pseudonym of “Míster Blind.” The paper’s “new collaborator” and his poems “about current politics and events” were announced in a bold text box on the paper’s front page. Bernal’s weekly verse chronicles, which could be as satirical and smug as they were sincere and culturally flag-waving, appeared alongside advertisements for a Mexican pastelería on Spring Street, a funeral home on Figueroa, a Chinese herbalist on Alameda, an “American” dentist on Main Street, the Commercial National Bank on Spring, and El Progreso restaurant on Main — which offered “platillos netamente Mexicanos” (truly Mexican dishes) but was owned and run by Chinese immigrants, the Quon Chong Company.

By the time Bernal compiled his poems into a book, they had already established him as a trusted cross-border tribune and recorder, a leading authority on Mexican life both in Los Angeles and in Mexicali and Sonora. In fact, according to Mexican author and literary scholar Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, Palos de Ciego was a pioneering expression of a regional identity, of “a way of life, of a merger of beliefs and customs, of a historical stage of development and consolidation of Mexico’s northern border, which is to say, of border society — call it Sonoran, Chicano, or Baja Californian.”3 Or call it, for that matter, Angeleno.

      WHERE DOES the literature of Los Angeles begin? Palos de Ciego is one of the first books of poems about the city, and yet it is nowhere to be found in accounts of L.A. literary history. Although it followed Horace Bell’s Reminiscences of a Ranger: Early Times in Southern California (1881) — thought to be first book printed in Los Angeles — and a number of other celebrated works such as Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884), Palos de Ciego appeared years before L.A. really burst onto the literary scene in 1939, with the publication of John Fante’s Ask the Dust, Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and Raymond Chandler’s Big Sleep. It also just preceded works with which it had much in common: Japanese immigrant novelist Shoson Nagahara’s Lament in the Night (1925) and The Tale of Osato (1925-26) — the latter of which was, like Palos, originally serialized in an L.A. paper, the Japanese daily Rafu Shimpo; Arna Bontemps’s 1931 novel of Black Los Angeles, God Sends Sunday; and the very first novel of Mexican-American life in Los Angeles, Las Aventuras de Don Chipote, o Cuando los pericos mamen (1928, translated in 2000 as The Adventures of Don Chipote, or, When Parrots Breast-Feed) by the Mexican journalist, playwright, and novelist Daniel Venegas.

Raised in Guadalajara, Venegas arrived in L.A. in 1924 and his novel, released by the publishing arm of El Heraldo de México, has long been considered the starting point of the city’s Chicano literature and the first book to employ early forms of “Spanglish.” Palos de Ciego checked the same boxes five years earlier. One explanation for the book’s lack of visibility is that it barely circulated in the 1920s. A warehouse flood destroyed many of the original copies. Yet even after Trujillo Muñoz excavated it for re-publication in Baja California in 1989, Palos is still mostly regarded as a milestone of poesía urbana (urban poetry) in the literature of Northern Mexico.4 Bernal’s significance extends far north of the border as well. He is one of transnational border modernism’s greatest literary interpreters.

During the period chronicled in Palos, the greater U.S.-Mexico borderland was in the midst of a modernizing boom.5 Beyond the growth of U.S. railroad and mining industries, border tourism was on the rise and the first border radio stations were broadcasting north and south of the line. A community of artists, writers, journalists, and musicians were seeking to make sense of a cross-border ecology and culture that were still less than half a century old, and Bernal was an important voice in that effort. The fact that Palos was published in Los Angeles, and that its cross-border content begins and ends in L.A., testifies to the city’s direct connection to the history of transnational border modernism. Unfortunately, that connection has been largely lost in tellings of L.A. literary history. In a recent re-evaluation of the Latinx roots of L.A. literature, Victor Valle takes literary historians and anthologists to task for turning Latinx non-fiction writers into literary ghosts: “The [L.A.] canon’s lingering reluctance to account for narratives that deliberately undermine or ignore the fixities of national borders thus ensures the invisibility of the serpentine routes through which Latina/o non-fiction writers invent their urban ‘native’ identities.”6 The same could be said for generically challenging works like Palos de Ciego, which blend non-fiction with fiction, poetry with journalism, etc. — works that define their own forms of “radical cosmopolitanism” rooted in the migrant, cross-border experiences of early 20th-century Los Angeles.

THE LOS ANGELES sections of Palos de Ciego give us a detailed, vibrant account of a city in the midst of an immigrant transformation. Between 1910 and 1930, close to a million Mexican immigrants fled the political upheavals of the Mexican Revolution and settled in the U.S., seeking freedom and work in the booming industries of the Southwest. Los Angeles, which was rapidly expanding its industrial base and fast becoming a capital of leisure and entertainment, was the most popular destination. In 1920, the Mexican population of Los Angeles reached 30,000; by 1930, it more than tripled. Among the Mexican newcomers was “an entrepreneurial class of refugees,” as Nicolás Kanellos has written, who were instrumental in shaping a circle of industries — journalism, entertainment, and commerce — that actively promoted the interests of “México de afuera” (Mexico beyond Mexico).7 The paper in which Palos de Ciego first appeared, La Prensa, was just one of a series of influential but short-lived Spanish-language newspapers that had

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