The Filipino Who Helped Found Los Angeles — And Was Erased From the Plaque
The Filipino Who Helped Found Los Angeles — And Was Erased From the Plaque
Antonio Miranda Rodriguez was recruited as one of the original 12 settler families of El Pueblo de Los Angeles in 1781. A father's loyalty to a dying daughter cost him his place in history. The erased name. The recovered truth.
In the summer of 1781, a Filipino man was making his way north toward a river in Alta California. He had been recruited by Spanish colonial authorities in New Spain to help build something from nothing — a settlement that would one day grow into the second-largest city in the United States. His name was Antonio Miranda Rodriguez. He was born in Manila. He was a skilled gunsmith. And before he could complete the final walk, tragedy stopped him cold.
His daughter was dying.
That choice — to stay at his daughter's bedside in Loreto, Baja California, while the other families marched ahead — cost Rodriguez his place on the founding plaque that now hangs in downtown Los Angeles. But it could not cost him his place in history. The archival record survived. The census entry survived. The bakas — the footprint — endured. And today, 245 years after the founding of Los Angeles, that erasure is being corrected, one reckoning at a time.
In the 1781 census of the Los Angeles pueblo, Antonio Miranda Rodriguez was officially recorded by Spanish colonial authorities simply as "Miranda, chino, 50" — alongside his daughter "Juana Maria, 11." The term "chino" did not mean Chinese. Under Spain's sistema de castas, it was the standard bureaucratic classification for Filipinos who arrived via the Manila Galleon trade route through Acapulco and San Blas. For over a century, historians who lacked that knowledge either mistranslated the entry or ignored it entirely.
Bakas
bah-KAS | noun
Meaning: A footprint, trace, or mark left behind. The visible evidence that someone was here — even after they are gone.
In context: Antonio Miranda Rodriguez never completed the walk to Los Angeles. But his bakas — pressed into two colonial census rolls in 1781 and 1782 — outlasted every plaque, every monument, and every attempt to write him out of the story.
The Twelfth Family
The founding of Los Angeles on September 4, 1781 is usually told as a compact story: 44 settlers from 11 families made the nine-mile walk from the San Gabriel Mission to the Los Angeles River and established El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles. That count — 44 settlers, 11 families — is technically correct. But it is not the complete story.
There were 12 families recruited for the expedition. The twelfth was headed by Antonio Miranda Rodriguez, a 50-year-old widower and master gunsmith born in Manila around 1730. He had been identified by Spanish colonial authorities in New Spain not as manual labor but as a specialist — a man whose mechanical expertise with weapons was considered essential to a military outpost at the edge of the empire. He and his 11-year-old daughter Juana Maria were selected and documented in the expedition's first census.
They never made it to the river.
While the party was halted in Loreto, Baja California, Juana Maria contracted smallpox. Rodriguez stayed. His daughter died. The other families moved on, and on September 4, 1781, the pueblo was formally established without him. Because he was not physically present on that single day, his name was left off the monument that now marks the founding in downtown Los Angeles.
The "Chino" Misnomer and the Manila Galleon Pipeline
For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, historians who encountered the entry "Miranda, chino" in the 1781 census either translated it literally — concluding he was Chinese — or dismissed the listing entirely. It was a predictable failure. Early Anglo-American historians writing about California had no working knowledge of Spain's sistema de castas, the elaborate racial classification system that governed colonial New Spain.
Under that system, "Chino" or "Indio Chino" was not an ethnic designation for people of Chinese descent. It was an administrative catch-all for individuals who arrived in the Americas from Asia via the Manila Galleon trade route — the trans-Pacific shipping lane that connected Manila to Acapulco from 1565 to 1815. Many of those passengers were Filipino sailors, navigators, and artisans who jumped ship at Mexican ports to escape brutal maritime conditions, and who integrated into the skilled labor and military economies of northwestern New Spain.
From 1565 to 1815, Spanish galleons crossed the Pacific between Manila and Acapulco, carrying silk, spices, and porcelain westward and silver eastward. Filipino sailors, artisans, and workers traveled on these ships — many remaining in Mexico and integrating into colonial society. Antonio Miranda Rodriguez is one of the documented descendants of this trans-Pacific Filipino presence, born in Manila and living in New Spain by the late 18th century. The Manila Galleon trade is also the reason Filipino stilt villages were established in the bayous of Louisiana by the 1760s — the first permanent Asian settlements in North America.
It was not until the mid-to-late 20th century that dedicated ethnic history divisions in local museums began the work of cross-referencing baptismal records, military rosters, and burial logs. The breakthrough came from historian William M. Mason, then Curator of the History Division at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, whose archival research re-identified Rodriguez as a Manila-born Filipino. Researcher Eloisa Gomez Borah of the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) subsequently brought that documentation into the broader stream of Asian American scholarship, and Rodriguez's story eventually found its way into the SAGE Encyclopedia of Filipina/x/o American Studies.
A Father First, a Founder Second
The standard historical narrative of founding moments tends to flatten human beings into symbols. Rodriguez resists that flattening. What defines him most is not his gunsmithing, not his census entry, not even his Filipino birthplace — it is the choice he made in Loreto.
He stayed.
He could have calculated, as any ambitious colonial subject might, that his future depended on completing the march. Instead, he chose his daughter. Juana Maria died anyway. He was stranded in Loreto for two years, working as a gunsmith — a practical man doing what he knew how to do while grief settled into the bones. In 1783, he finally arrived in Alta California, was recognized for his expertise, and was reassigned to the Santa Barbara Presidio as master armorer and soldado de cuera — a leather-jacketed soldier. He lived there until his death. On May 26, 1784, he was buried in the Presidio Chapel.
Antonio Miranda Rodriguez born in Manila, Philippines, during Spanish colonial rule of the archipelago.
Selected by Spanish colonial authorities in New Spain as one of 12 original poblador families to found El Pueblo de Los Ángeles. He and his daughter Juana Maria, age 11, are documented in the expedition's first census.
The expedition halts in Loreto, Baja California. Juana Maria contracts smallpox. Rodriguez stays behind to care for her. She dies. The other 11 families continue north.
The 11 remaining families found El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles without Rodriguez. He is absent from the ceremony — and, eventually, the plaque.
Rodriguez is recorded in both the first and second military censuses of the Los Angeles pueblo, confirming his institutional status as a founder.
After two years in Loreto, Rodriguez arrives in Alta California and is assigned to the Santa Barbara Presidio as master armorer and soldado de cuera.
Rodriguez dies and is buried in the Presidio Chapel at Santa Barbara. He is later honored with a memorial tile slab installed by the local Filipino American community.
What the Plaque Does Not Say
The founding plaque in downtown Los Angeles tells a version of the story. It lists the settlers who completed the walk. What it cannot convey — what no bronze monument can hold — is the complexity of who was there, where they came from, and what it cost them to be there at all.
Historians Mason and Marie E. Northrop identified Rodriguez as a vital case study in early California's actual demographics: a landscape not of Anglo-Saxon homesteaders or Spanish conquistadors, but of Black, Indigenous, Mestizo, and Asian individuals — all bound together by colonial infrastructure and their own survival instincts. California was never a white frontier. It was, from the beginning, a convergence.
Rodriguez's story is not a footnote to that convergence. He was recruited for his skill. He was counted in the census. He was deployed to protect the colony. He built guns for an empire that would later try to forget him. And when the memorial plaque was cast, his name — the name of the only Manila-born man in the founding expedition — was not on it.
"Chino, 50. Juana Maria, 11."
— The complete census entry for Antonio Miranda Rodriguez and his daughter, Los Angeles pueblo, 1781.
That is the entire footprint the official record kept of them. It is enough. It places a Filipino man at the founding of Los Angeles — not as a visitor, not as a laborer passing through, but as a recruited settler with a name, a child, a skill, and a grief that history chose to omit.
The Bakas That Remains
There are now over 56,000 Filipinos living within the city limits of Los Angeles, with the broader Southern California diaspora numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Most of them do not know Rodriguez's name. Most of the city does not know Rodriguez's name.
That is changing.
Inside El Presidio de Santa Barbara State Historic Park, the Presidio Chapel holds a memorial tile slab installed by the Filipino American community — a physical act of historical restoration. The Filipino American National Historical Society has documented his story. Scholars have written him into the academic record. And every year, as September 4 approaches and Los Angeles marks its founding, the question becomes harder to avoid: why is the Filipino man not on the plaque?
The answer is not complicated. He chose his daughter over his legacy. He was absent on one specific day. And the people who cast the monument did not look hard enough at the census rolls.
Antonio Miranda Rodriguez was born in Manila. He crossed the Pacific via the galleon trade. He made his way north through New Spain with a child beside him. He buried that child in Baja California. He kept working. He kept moving. He arrived in California three years after everyone else and spent the last year of his life maintaining the weapons of a colony that would not remember his name for two centuries.
That is a Filipino story. It is also, in every meaningful sense, a Los Angeles story.
Sources
- LA Almanac — Original LA Pueblo Settlers (1781)
- The Ted K Archive / David J. Weber — Foreigners in Their Native Land
- Ugat Clothing — Why Filipino American History Month Is Celebrated in October
- San Mateo County Historical Association — La Peninsula: Filipino Summer 2008 (PDF)
- Patnubay Online — Antonio Miranda Rodriguez, Pioneer Filipino in California
- Chinese Historical Society of Southern California — News of the Nine Notables (1994, PDF)
- Project MUSE — Manila Galleon Trade and the Filipino Diaspora in the Americas
- Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) / Eloisa Gomez Borah — Chronology of Filipinos in America (PDF)
- SAGE Publications — The SAGE Encyclopedia of Filipina/x/o American Studies
- YouTube / Kabayan Today — Antonio Miranda Rodriguez: Filipino Pioneer in Los Angeles
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