Wilshire Boulevard, one of the major streets through the city of Beverly Hills, California, was once a trail trod by Indigenous people. The neighborhood where multi million-dollar homes and upscale boutiques now sprawl over rolling hills, was once free range for cattle. María Rita Quintero Valdés de Villa witnessed the start of this transformation. 

She didn't choose to live her life among layers of colonialism in Los Angeles. The Afro-Latina bloomed where she was planted. With intelligence, strength and courage she owned and operated a 4500-acre ranch while navigating personal tragedy and political change.

Northwest of Pueblo de los Angeles, where Beverly Hills stands today, the Tongva people once lived in numerous villages on a fertile plains watered by streams and waterfalls from nearby canyons.

When explorer Gaspar de Portolà laid eyes on the “advantageous” site from the hill where Dodger Stadium sits today, he translated the Tongva name to Spanish. The Tongva’s paradise became Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas, or Ranch of the Gathering Waters. The land was allotted to a soldier from the expedition or a settler family.

When María Rita married Spanish soldier Vicente Fernando Villa in 1808, the ranch became their home. Little information has survived about their family life, thought they raised at least three children. Some sources say seven daughters, other eleven offspring. For sure, it must have been an event in 1821 when Mexico declared independence from Spain.

Tragically, Villa died in 1821, leaving his widow in a precarious position. But  María Rita managed to hold on to her land and is believed to have built her home at the intersection of present day Alpine Drive and Sunset Boulevard.

  The house of the Rodeo de las Aguas Ranch was located east of where today is the lavish Beverly Hills hotel. (Los Angeles Security Pacific National/Public Library Collection)

Maria Rita applied for title to the land and after ten years the governor of the Mexican-controlled California territory her the acreage constitute the core of present-day Beverly Hills.

At the time, to keep their land grant owners had make sure the property turned a profit. Maria became a successful entrepreneur, hiring mostly native cowboys to raise cattle and horses. She managed sales and a smaller produce farm. She welcomed travelers and neighboring ranchers in her adobe home, one of the earliest in the region.

Her livestock grazed free range and every year the cowboys rounded them at a rodeo

located near today's intersection of Pico and Robertson Boulevards. Today Rodeo Drive honors the ranch which she was in charge of for decades.

  Group of workers, possibly picking lima beans, circa 1903, when the ranch was owned 

by Hammel and Denker, photo courtesy California Historical Society.

Maria Rita nearly lost her ranch at the outbreak of the Mexican-American War in 1846.

"My family and I fled our home... with the political unrest and the arrival of Americans in the city," she said. "And when we returned, we realized that our house had been looted." 

She was now a resident of the United States, those like her who had been granted land under Spanish or Mexican rule now had to prove their ownership. She testified that during the violence of 1846, she'd lost her documents. She filed a claim for Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas with the Public Land Commission in 1852 

Shortly afterward, she had to take up arms to defend her ranch. As the Indigenous population dwindled due to disease, deprivation and forced labor, Tongva routinely hit up fertile ranch lands for food and livestock.  Maria Rita survived an attack against her ranch in 1852 that ended in a shootout among walnut trees located where Benedict Canyon and Chevy Chase drives intersect today.

Two years later, Maria Rita decided to retire from ranching and sold the property. At 63, she moved to a home she'd built in El Pueblo on La Plaza, current day Main Street. Some years after her death the US government acknowledged she owned the property, which she had already sold for about $1 per acre.

The plaque in commemoration of Maria Rita Valdez in Beverly Hills

"The story of Maria Rita shows the layers of colonialism in Los Angeles. She was the granddaughter of people who are the product of colonialism. Her grandparents are part of that project of colonizing Los Angeles and she takes a plot of land that is in an indigenous sacred space," says David Torres-Rouff, a professor of history at the University of California, Merced.

With the American government, came a new attitude toward race in Los Angeles County. For most of Maria Rita's life, she lived in a society not organized around skin-color. Divisions related to socioeconomic status didn't run along race or mixed-race lines.

The new administration also targeted many of the Tongva and other Indigenous peoples in the region. They arrested them on bogus charges and levied fines they couldn't pay, creating a class of convict laborers. It became a system of legalized slavery to the expand the city of Los Angeles for Anglo-American settlers, who became the new majority in the area by 1880.

A Tongvan man offers a prayer of thanks for abundant water atop the Electric Fountain 

at the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards.

By 1914, Beverly Hills had become a city, but its real boom began when Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks built Pickfair on Summit Drive. They attracted Hollywood stars and launched Beverly Hills as the celebrity neighborhood it is today.

So many famed streets like Rodeo Drive and Sunset Boulevard... couldn't one be named María Rita Avenue?

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