La Placita Olvera: A Place of Protest

Some places manage to pack in more history than others. La Placita Olvera, where our Downtown LA tour begins, is one of those places. La Placita is where the city of Los Angeles began; it’s also the place where a 1931 immigration raid marked the start of a decade of Mexican American “repatriation.” And today, it’s still a place where activists gather to shape the city’s future. 

“La Placita has been at the center of city drama for a century. This is our public square, a place for protest.”

Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá begins in La Placita Olvera in front of a plaque that honors the 44 pobladores who established a puebo in this place in 1781. They built L.A.’s first streets and adobe buildings, shaping the neighborhood where our story takes place. When Los Angeles was “founded,” California was still part of Mexico, but really the pobladores arrived in a place that had already been settled for thousands of years by the Tongva nation.

We knew, right from the beginning of our research process, that we wanted to start our story here.

When we set out to research and develop Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá we knew about the Pobladores monument and we knew about the 1931 La Placita immigration raid, but we didn’t know about the rich history that linked these two events together.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, La Placita Olvera became one of the city’s de facto public squares, closely associated with radical politics. The police carried out regular raids to disrupt rallies and groups protesting unemployment.

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Though our audio walk focuses on Mexican American Los Angeles, La Placita is a place where many immigrant histories collide — The Chinese Nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen spoke there, as did the anarchist revolutionary leader Emma Goldman.

For each of our immersive tours, one of the most difficult things to decide is what we have to leave out of the narrative. This audio tour focuses on stories that highlight Mexican Americans, but in the Learn section of our website, we expand on some of these other histories. 

As Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá reminds us, we all play a role in choosing the histories that are remembered. Social media has made us all curators of all of us, and the same principles apply to history: too often we are fed a glossy version, with the messier details left off-camera. Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá invites you to take a closer look at places like La Placita to find the threads that connect 1781 to 1931, and the many stories in between.