La Placita and the Evolution of Catholic Religiosity in Los Angeles

Abstract

In 1814 a Franciscan priest, Fray Luis Gil y Taboada, laid the cornerstone for a church at the founding plaza of Los Angeles, at the site of the original “sub-mission” chapel established by the Spanish in 1784. Originally intended to serve mixed-race settlers of the Los Angeles pueblo, La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles (the Church of Our Lady of Angels), nicknamed the Plaza Church or La Placita, became the focal point of Catholic culture in Los Angeles—and of the mediation of cultural relationships between Hispano-descended Catholics and the largely Protestant Americans who migrated into Southern California after American annexation in 1846. The evolving social and cultural matrix of worship at La Placita has charted many shifts amid the creative persistence of Mexican Catholic religiosity. La Placita’s history suggests both significant variation around the West in the development of Catholic cultures and the ways in which the American West diverges dramatically from a model of American Catholic history predicated on nineteenth-century European Catholic immigration and institution building.