Mexican Hollywood was a waterfront neighborhood in San Pedro that thrived for at least 30 years in the first part of the 20th century. A century later, it remains as deeply embedded in the community’s identity as the steel towers of the Vincent Thomas Bridge.
“El Barrio,” as it was sometimes called, served as an immigrant gateway from the early 1920s to the early 1950s, a period that encompassed a surge in the arrival of Mexicans to the United States following a decade of civil war that began in 1910. Its residents became fiercely attached to one another, bound by a shared history, family ties, and a sense of pride in overcoming poverty and decades of disdain and discrimination from outsiders.
Even today, one-time residents remember the working-class neighborhood with an abiding affection.
“I love the memories,” says Irma Rodriguez Contreras, whose parents, Francisco and Maria Rodriguez, both cannery workers, settled in the neighborhood. It was a place where neighbors felt like family.
That sense of connection and pride in the old neighborhood culminated in the June 7 unveiling of City of Los Angeles markers on Harbor Boulevard at O’Farrell Street, highlighting “Mexican Hollywood Square.”
EARLY HISTORY
Now the site of the Los Angeles World Cruise Center, the five-acre barrio sat on lands that had been occupied for millennia. The first people arrived in the region about 13,000 years ago. When Spanish explorers came on scene by ship and by land beginning with the voyage of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo in 1542, San Pedro and surrounding areas of what is now Los Angeles were occupied by the Tongva, who established dozens of villages along streams and rivers and in sheltered areas of the coast, hunting and gathering small animals, sea mammals, fish and shellfish, and plants.
After the founding of Los Angeles in 1781 under the crown of Spain and later when Mexico controlled the region from 1820 to 1850, the land that became known as San Pedro was disputed by both the Dominguez and Sepulveda families, until the latter family prevailed in 1834. The harbor became a center for trade in hides and other goods. After the Mexican War in 1848 and admission of California in 1850 to the Union, the harbor was developed by such leaders as Phineas Banning. Mills and sailing ships laden with lumber made the port “the lumber center of the world.” San Pedro was incorporated in 1888 and remained independent until voters decided in 1909 to consolidate with Los Angeles, which wanted the port. Congress designated San Pedro Bay as the port of Los Angeles in 1897, and a decade later, the City of Los Angeles officially founded its port with the creation of the Board of Harbor Commissioners.
THE COMMUNITY’S ROOTS
Old maps discovered by the San Pedro Bay Historical Society indicate that, as late as 1908, a knoll or bluff commanded the site of what would become Mexican Hollywood. What had been Orizaba Boulevard was widened and expanded to become Harbor Boulevard. The topography changed, as did the landscape, of virtually all the lands surrounding the Port of Los Angeles.
Research indicates that the Los Angeles Harbor Department leased the land that was to become El Barrio to the Pacific Coal Company, which employed mostly Irish laborers. The company built houses for them or had employees build their own. Some homes were built over grounded boats, while many were built on stilts to escape the surges created by passing ships. A federal study conducted in the 1930s indicated that the wooden houses dated back to the early 1910s. Ancon Street ran unpaved through the middle of the neighborhood, sandwiched roughly between Berths 90-93, Front Street on the east, and Harbor Boulevard on the west. Ancon, like some other streets just blocks from Mexican Hollywood, reflected the influence of the Panama Canal. Ancon is both the name of the town at the western end of the Panama Canal and also the name of the first ship to transit the waterway on August 15, 1914.
Following Pacific Coal’s workers, another wave of residents apparently came from the Pacific Electric Railway Company, with an old trestle along the neighborhood’s eastern edge, as well as from the nearby Kerckhoff-Cuzner Mill & Lumber Co.
MEXICAN HOLLYWOOD EMERGES
In the wake of Mexico’s revolution from 1910 to 1920, when our southern neighbor was torn by violence and starvation, Mexican Hollywood emerged around 1922, when first-generation Mexicans began moving into the area.
At its peak, about 80 houses lined its streets, sheltering about 400 residents, among the poorest in San Pedro. Ancon Street remained unpaved until the New Deal of the 1930s, which also brought a sewage system to Mexican Hollywood. Some families stayed for years in their time-worn rentals with wood-burning stoves, while others settled there with an eye toward finding better housing as soon as they could afford it. In the 1920s, monthly rents ranged from about $6 to $9; in the 1950s, about $30. Frequently, both parents worked to support their families, tending vegetable gardens, cactus plants, and fig trees for nourishment and bringing home fish. Some men hunted jackrabbits. One man baked bread for sale in his backyard.
“They called them cold-water shacks, but we called them our little casitas,” Contreras says.
“We grew up in this barrio of some 50 to 75 families who were like one big family, many related to each other,” wrote longtime San Pedro resident Alice Gonzales Morales in a 1988 recollection of the neighborhood that was published in the San Pedro News-Pilot. “People shared food and helped one another.”
The names you heard in Mexican Hollywood still abound in and around San Pedro. LaFarga. Lomeli. Olguin. Soto. Sanchez. Ozaeta. Gonzalez. Terrazas. And more.
First-generation Mexican workers found jobs—often dirty, sometimes dangerous—cleaning out boilers at Coast Welding Company or working as laborers in the fish canneries of Terminal Island, in lumberyards along the waterfront, for the old Harbor Belt Railroad or on the docks. An old wooden pier jutted into the harbor, daring young boys to dive from it, while waves lapped up to the shores of a small, sandy beach still jokingly referred to as the B.A.B.—“Best American Beach” in some circles, “Bare Ass Beach” in others. Fearless, athletic Mexican American kids swam across the channel.
Gathering places for education, culture, and faith rose up with the founding of Barton Hill Elementary in 1909, the original Holy Trinity Church, and the Barton Hill Theater on Pacific Avenue in 1924. For a while, the church used space in the movie house. Meanwhile, Toberman Settlement House created an annex to serve Mexican Hollywood, teaching skills such as cooking and sewing, and maintaining a play area for children. Teens attended myriad dances around town.
BEHIND THE NAME
Among the earliest documented uses of El Barrio’s colorful moniker calling to mind Tinseltown, came in a March 21, 1930, San Pedro News-Pilot story—about the town’s Garden Club, an advocate of the port community’s beautification. It sponsored three contests, including a “Special Garden contest for Mexican Hollywood, the dwellings east of Harbor Boulevard and north of First Street.” The eight-paragraph story went on to say that “the drive for beautifying Mexican Hollywood will begin at once.”
But where does the name come from? With so many movie houses around town showing American- and Mexican-made films, Hollywood, more than 25 miles away, may have felt like it was a dream within reach.
“According to some accounts,” as stated in the book Mexican American Baseball in the South Bay, “Mexican Hollywood got its moniker because some of the barrio’s pretty girls got jobs as movie extras when film crews came to town. Or because several singers, dancers, and musicians lived there. Or because of a local play about the neighborhood that used the name Mexican Hollywood. Meanwhile, some historians theorize that residents may have wanted to latch on to the glamor of Hollywood by adopting the name. The theories seem as plentiful as the descendants of the neighborhood.”
An anecdote from 1985 in the San Pedro News-Pilot recounts a story told by the late John Olguin, who was three years old when he moved into the area. His father, Roy, was a cook and baker but loved writing plays. John said a member of the Mexican Culture Club told him that Roy produced a play about El Barrio and, as a joke, named it Mexican Hollywood.
In her 1988 News-Pilot recollection of the neighborhood, Alice Gonzales Morales credited Mike Lomeli, Sr., an early community leader, with dubbing it “Mexican Hollywood.” Until his death in 1936, he was among the most active managers and players among San Pedro’s Mexican American baseball teams. An oil company boilermaker, he and his wife were Mexican immigrants who came to San Pedro—and Mexican Hollywood—by way of Arizona.
TIME FOR PLAY
Just as the lure of Hollywood’s magic captured the eye of El Barrio’s people, so too did baseball, which—like the movies—dazzled audiences from coast to coast. By 1930, Mexican baseball teams flourished throughout San Pedro, from the little neighborhood of La Rambla hugging nearby hillsides to Mexican Hollywood. Young Mexican men—and women—“organized teams that played at Bob Myers Field at the southeast corner of Ancon and O’Farrell streets in Mexican Hollywood,” according to Mexican American Baseball in the South Bay. Myers Field, an apparent reference to Bob and Bernice Myers, who ran a local grocery at Harbor Boulevard and O’Farrell Street, was developed by 1931 and improved and enclosed in 1933.
Among the teams were the Hollywood Mexicans, which took to the Mexican Hollywood field in 1931, but team members soon voted to rechristen themselves as the San Pedro Internationals, competing under that name until 1934. Among its managers was longtime baseball aficionado, Mike Lomeli, Sr., who lived on Ancon Street. Other Mexican teams also used the field, including the San Pedro International Girls, the Hermosa Athletic Club, the Sonora Club, and the San Pedro Sharks.
Mexican teams from throughout the South Bay and Los Angeles County played there, as did teams representing U.S. Navy ships. Mexican Hollywood teams played against a number of squads fielded along other racial and ethnic lines, including Italians, Croatians, Filipinos, Chinese, and African Americans.
MASSIVE CHANGE
For at least two centuries, the port has served as a center of trade and travel. The advent of World War II saw jolting changes unseen before. The young men of Mexican Hollywood went off to serve their country in Europe and in the Pacific. On the waterfront, vast amounts of manpower and capital focused on turning out and repairing ships in local shipyards, while in the decades following, every bit of land around the water’s edges presented an economic opportunity, in particular with the arrival of containerized cargo in the late 1950s and the evolution of the Port of Los Angeles as the busiest container port in the country. The neighborhood gave way to the redevelopment of its lands by the Port of Los Angeles in 1952. The site became home to the Catalina Terminal and then the cruise center. Families had to leave Mexican Hollywood.
“We cried because we met so many beautiful families,” Contreras says. “We were not sure we were going to see them again because they scattered throughout San Pedro. Others moved out of town.”
The Mexican Hollywood Culture Society, a local nonprofit incorporated in 2021, has been researching the origins and evolution of the Mexican Hollywood neighborhood.
Through the work of a board that includes Magdeline Fierro-de Alba, also known as Maggie de Alba, the founding president, and with help from Mona Dallas Reddick of the San Pedro Bay Historical Society, they have sought to preserve and to tell the story of Mexican Hollywood with the goal of obtaining historical designation for the area from the City of Los Angeles. Their mission is to celebrate and honor Mexican American heritage and contributions to the industries and communities of the Los Angeles Harbor area in San Pedro and the surrounding communities. The Mexican Hollywood Culture Society comprises dedicated community ambassadors who seek to educate, honor, and celebrate Mexican American culture.
With the markers now in place, the organization’s longer-term goals include the establishment of a cultural center, exhibits, installation of a half-dozen banners celebrating Mexican American culture in the Port of Los Angeles promenade near Harbor Boulevard and O’Farrell, and designation of the area as Mexican Hollywood Plaza.
Other society members include: Rick Gonzalez, vice president; Paul “Dickie” Chavez, treasurer; Yomaria Gettler, secretary; Vince LaFarga, historian; Richard Gettler, technology adviser; Steve Linares, special events; Rudy Alba, advisor; Robert Maynez, advisory council; and Isela Lopez, volunteer bookkeeper. Bobby Fabro is the official photographer.
As a result of the society’s efforts, the City of Los Angeles prepared four signs for unveiling on June 7, 2025, declaring the area at Harbor Boulevard and O’Farrell Street as “Mexican Hollywood Square.” A half dozen colorful banners were set to be hung in the area, reflecting the old neighborhood’s dual Mexican and American identities.
“One day,” says Fierro-de Alba, “we hope to produce a Mexican Hollywood documentary.” spt
Ron Gonzales, a native of San Pedro, is a co-author of Mexican American Baseball in the South Bay.
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