This project is made possible, in part, by a grant from the California Council for the Humanities in partnership with the Skirball Foundation, through the jointly supported California Documentary Project, a program of the California Stories Initiative.
Chasing Light Pictures, LLC is currently in development for Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles, a groundbreaking 4-part documentary video history series that tackles a long-overdue, in-depth and sometimes painful examination of the early history of Los Angeles’ Anglo American and Mexican ethnic interactions, and illuminates how this many layered and troubled relationship built one of the world’s great cities.
Photographic & Postcards Images Acknowledgements: • The Huntington Library, San Marino, California • La Plaza History Society & Archive, Los Angeles, California • Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley • California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento • Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, Los Angeles • Collection of William Deverell, Pasadena, California • Archivo Práxedis, Los Angeles, California. All rights reserved by the copyright holders. No reproduction without permission.
© 2009 Chasing Light Pictures, LLC | All Rights Reserved
Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles, documents the remarkable energy and drive of Los Angeles’ Anglo city leaders in their quest to build a modern metropolis. It is a story acknowledging their ingenuity in devising a progressive civic vision for the city to pursue, while crafting a romantic myth about Los Angeles in order to promote and sell it to the rest of the nation. It is also the story of Los Angeles’ ethnic Mexican people - of their forbearance, endurance and persistence in the face of demeaning racial stereotypes and barriers to sharing in the same opportunities afforded to Los Angeles’ Anglos. It is the tale of their monumental labor on behalf of that Anglo American vision for Los Angeles. Also woven into the story are Los Angeles’ other ethnic minorities, and instances of their tribulations and significant contributions to the building of the city.
