Father of the N.E. Side

The upcoming Lummis Day celebration honors the adventurous founder of Northeast L.A.
by Ross Lincoln

Perhaps it’s just election year cynicism, or terrified people reacting to uncertainty with suspicious exclusion, but in the last year the debate over the ethnic and cultural character of the country has returned with a vengeance. From the attempts to legalize undocumented workers (in the form of “guest worker” visas), to commentators who argue with a straight face that singing the “Star Spangled Banner” in any language but English is tantamount to treason, to attempts to redundantly make English the official language, the whole country seems terrified by the idea of difference, and the emerging national consensus seems to be that whatever makes American culture American is in deadly danger from throngs of multicultural zombies who survive only by eating the brains of real Americans.

However on June 4, Lummis Day: The Northeast Los Angeles Arts Festival may provide a respite from this xenophobic freak-out—at least for Angelenos who rightly see the city’s multicultural identity as one of its selling points. Named in honor of Charles Fletcher Lummis, the first city editor for the Los Angeles Times and the man who helped popularize the idea of Los Angeles as a multicultural city, the intent is to highlight the culture and history of Northeast Los Angeles—the city’s first art colony, and still one of its most diverse neighborhoods.

Lummis’ unlikely story and career are almost unbelievable: Throughout his life he was a profligate womanizing drunk, an adventurer, a libertine and supporter of the arts, a dandy known for the ubiquitous Spanish-style corduroy suits he wore until the end of his life, a workaholic who suffered his first stroke before age 30, and personal friend to Teddy Roosevelt (at least until he overstepped his boundaries). Lummis was a recent college dropout living in Cincinnati when the infant Los Angeles Times hired him as a reporter in 1884, and he decided it might be fun to get to his new job on foot. For 143 days, he defied the next 122 years of L.A. history and culture by actually walking the entire way, through states, territories, reservations and untamed frontier, breaking his arm and nearly dying in his effort. Along the way, he sent popular weekly updates to his readers in L.A. via US post.

There are probably few Californians who more obviously ought to have a festival named after them—hell, if you ignore his un-Angeleno tendency to walk, Lummis is almost literally the anthropomorphized embodiment of the city itself. Perhaps it’s odd then that such an event has taken so long to happen. However, it was the erosion of his legacy that inspired it: specifically, the proposed move of materials housed at the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in the Arroyo Seco, to the Gene Autry Museum, and the probable end of the Southwest Museum’s almost century-long affiliation with the arroyo. Lummis founded the Southwest Museum in 1907 and it was relocated at his request, from Downtown to Mt. Washington in 1914. The organizer’s original goal was to promote the Museum’s place in Northeast Los Angeles. It has since evolved into a larger marker of the local art community Lummis helped to found (and with whom he partied vigilantly), and of his legacy.

Lummis Day was in the planning stages long before the recent national conversation on immigration and America’s ethnic and cultural identity returned and devolved into parody. Even so, Los Angeles as a general rule tends to be held up as a cautionary example of a City Gone Wrong, the kind of place sensible people should avoid at all costs, and the national need to point and laugh at the left coast is never so evident as during the tiresome debate on the merits of multiculturalism and immigration. The resurgence of this issue has obviously underscored the festival, and its intended purpose is now applicable to far more than just neighborhood pride.

Festival organizer Eliot Sekuler confirms this, relating that Lummis was “a pioneer of the idea of a multi-cultural society,” and that he saw in Los Angeles a unique tradition drawing from Anglo, Hispanic and Native American traditions, among others. This may sound banal considering that such ideas are now accepted convention, but in the America at the turn of the century, the same country by the way that would eventually turn The Birth of a Nation into the first blockbuster, they were controversial to put it mildly.

Lummis’ views were initially influenced by his trek west from Cincinnati, and later as a direct result of his workaholic tendencies. The stroke he suffered occurred just a few years after taking his position at the L.A. Times; paralyzed on his left side, he moved to New Mexico to recover. He enjoyed the hospitality of one of New Mexico’s oldest Hispanic families, and during this time he began his prolific career as a freelance journalist. He covered local Catholic rituals, local Indian affairs, and in one story, he implicated local corrupt business leaders in a string of murders. Surprisingly, they weren’t pleased with this and Lummis relocated to the Pueblo Indian village of Isleta for safety.

This was, of course, during the good old days of the frontier, when men were men and Native Americans, by law, were unfit savages who could have their children taken from them by the US government for ‘education’ without appeal. Lummis began to involve himself in the fight for recognition of these families’ rights, and managed during his time to secure the release of 36 Isleta children from the clutches of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. After leaving New Mexico, he spent 10 months in Peru, finally returning to Los Angeles to become the editor of the anthology magazine Out West. As a result of his experiences among Native Americans and America’s Hispanic community, Lummis became a passionate advocate for the rights of Hispanic immigrants and Native Americans. He wrote articles and essays, took historic photographs, lobbied the president and eventually founded the Southwest Museum in order to help preserve their culture. He also began to advocate publicly the idea of Los Angeles as a city defined by many cultural influences.

To this day, Northeast Los Angeles still embodies what Lummis saw as the city’s greatest asset, and the organizers are clearly hoping that a festival in his name may just do for them what Sunset Junction did for Silver Lake. For now, the event aims to keep it real for the locals—Lummis Day begins at 10 a.m. with a poetry reading and a reception at the Lummis home (now the El Alisal Museum on Avenue 43), hosted by poet Suzanne Lummis, Charles’ granddaughter. From there, participants will commemorate Lummis’ 143 day trek from Cincinnati to Los Angeles with a short hike along the Arroyo Seco riverbed to Sycamore Grove Park. (After factoring the average distance Angelenos actually walk in a year, this short walk is nearly proportional to Lummis’.)

From noon to 4 p.m., the culture and history of the area is showcased through local cuisine, exhibits from the numerous area museums, and musical and artistic performances by local artists and Northeast L.A. royalty: Suzanne Lummis, ( author of “In Danger”); Grammy-nominated Cuban composer Juan-Carlos Formell; singer/songwriter Severin Browne (Jackson’s brother) whose grandfather, Clyde, founded the Abbey Press and the Abbey San Encino artists collective in Highland Park; and National Books Critics Circle Award-winning poet B.H. Fairchild. In addition, the event features the Tongva/Gabrielino Native American dancers, the Aztec Dancers of the Semilla School and The St. Ignatius Church Folk Dancers.

It’s not the kind of lineup likely to get out the numbers Sunset Junction is famous for, and to be honest, the lack of representation from the vibrant Highland Park indie music scene is disappointing, especially considering the immense pride bands like 8-Bit have in their neighborhood. As a result, the festival feels focused more on the area’s past than on its future. Still, that’s somewhat appropriate for this first event, and it’s a great opportunity to connect with one of the most colorful periods of Los Angeles’ history, to celebrate one of the great personalities of L.A.’s nascence, and to experience the diversity that makes L.A. great. Such a festival may not stop the self-appointed anti-zombie-Mexican brigade from their bi-partisan hate fest, but at least the rest of us might forget about them for an afternoon. LAA