LA's First Black Mayor Owned the Entire San Fernando Valley

Juan Francisco Reyes was mayor of Los Angeles in 1793 and the first owner of the San Fernando Valley.

In 1973, Tom Bradley was elected mayor of Los Angeles and was celebrated, correctly, as the first Black man to lead the city. What almost nobody said out loud at the time — and what still doesn't make it into most retellings of LA history — is that Bradley wasn't actually the first.

That distinction belongs to Juan Francisco Reyes, a mulatto settler who arrived in the fledgling pueblo shortly after its founding in 1781. In 1793, Reyes was elected alcalde — mayor — of Los Angeles, a position he held for two years. He wasn't a minor figure propped up for symbolism. Reyes was, by every measure of his era, a wealthy and powerful man: the Spanish Crown's first land-grantee in the area, and the original owner of a stretch of land he called Rancho Encino, which comprised what is now the entire San Fernando Valley.

Think about that for a second. Before it was freeways, strip malls, and a punchline in every LA comedy, the San Fernando Valley belonged, outright, to a Black man.

Reyes ran cattle on that land for over a decade. But in 1797, the Catholic Church wanted the site for a new mission, and Reyes — during his final year as mayor — ceded the property. Two years later, Mission San Fernando was completed on the ground he'd once ranched. He didn't walk away empty-handed; he received a new grant of land further south, which he also named Rancho Encino, and he went on to acquire additional land near Lompoc. But the Valley itself, the one whose place names still ripple through Los Angeles today, passed out of his hands and into the mission system, and eventually into the patchwork of ranchos that Pío Pico himself would later lease and re-grant.

Reyes's story sat mostly buried for close to two centuries. It resurfaced, ironically, during Bradley's mayoral term, when historians researching Los Angeles's early government realized the "first Black mayor" title was already spoken for — by a man who'd held the job in 1793, under a colonial government most Angelenos assume was entirely Spanish and white.

It wasn't. The 44 original settlers who founded Los Angeles in 1781 were overwhelmingly mestizo, mulatto, and Black — records from the era describe a founding population built largely of mixed African, Indigenous, and Spanish ancestry. That population didn't disappear once the pueblo grew into a city. It shaped the earliest city council, the earliest mayors, and the earliest land grants — Reyes among them, alongside men like Manuel Camero, elected to the first city council as a mulatto settler, and Tiburcio Tapia, grandson of a Black man, who went on to serve three terms as mayor decades later.

This is the throughline connecting all three weeks of this series. Rodeo Drive, Pico Boulevard, and the San Fernando Valley aren't three unconnected trivia questions. They're three pieces of the same founding story — a Los Angeles that was Black and mixed-race at its roots, whose descendants owned the land, ran the government, and left their names on the map long before the city became what it is now. The trivia framing is the erasure. The land records were always telling the truth.