Antonio Miranda Rodriguez: The Filipino Who Helped Found Los Angeles
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Post 6 · Antonio Miranda Rodriguez: The Filipino Who Helped Found Los Angeles
On September 4, 1781, forty-four settlers walked nine miles down a dusty trail toward a river in Alta California and founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles — the city the world would come to know as Los Angeles. Among those chosen to make that walk was a Filipino man named Antonio Miranda Rodriguez. His name is not on the founding plaque. This is why — and why it matters.
Los Angeles is the second-largest city in the United States. Nearly four million people live within its borders. Its influence on global culture — in film, music, fashion, and technology — is almost impossible to overstate. And its origin story, as most people know it, goes something like this: in 1781, eleven families of settlers from New Spain walked to a spot on the Los Angeles River and founded a small pueblo that would eventually become one of the great cities of the world.
That story is true. It is also incomplete.
There was a twelfth family recruited for that founding journey. Its patriarch was a Filipino man, likely born in Manila, who had lived and worked his way across the Spanish colonial world before finding himself in Sonora, Mexico, and then chosen by Spanish colonial authorities to help build a new city on the edge of the known world. His name was Antonio Miranda Rodriguez. He was fifty years old. He traveled with his eleven-year-old daughter, Juana Maria. And the reason his name is missing from the official founding plaque at El Pueblo de Los Angeles — the reason most people who live in Los Angeles today have never heard of him — is a story of smallpox, of colonial reassignment, and of the particular way that history erases the people who don't fit its dominant narrative.
Bayani Collection · City Collection
Antonio Miranda Rodriguez helped lay the foundation of the most diverse city in America — and history almost forgot him. The Bayani and City Collections at UGAT honor the Filipinos whose contributions shaped this country, whether or not their names are on the plaque.
September 4, 1781: The Day Los Angeles Was Born
To understand Antonio Miranda Rodriguez, you have to understand the moment into which he was recruited.
In the 1770s, the Spanish Empire's grip on the Pacific Coast of North America was precarious. Russia was expanding southward from Alaska. British ships were probing the coastline. Spain needed civilian settlements — not just military forts and Catholic missions — to firmly establish its claim to Alta California, the territory stretching north from Baja California into what is now the state of California.
Governor Felipe de Neve was tasked with establishing the first civilian pueblo in Southern California. Finding willing settlers proved difficult. The territory was remote, the journey dangerous, and the conditions harsh. Neve eventually located twelve families willing to make the trek — recruiting them from the provinces of Sonora and Sinaloa in New Spain (present-day Mexico). They were offered land, supplies, tools, and modest wages in exchange for settling the new pueblo and farming its lands.
These forty-four people — eleven men, eleven women, and twenty-two children — were among the most racially diverse founding groups of any major American city. Only two of the adult founders were of European (Spanish) descent. The majority were of African, indigenous, or mixed ancestry. They were farmers, laborers, artisans, and soldiers' wives. They were poor. And they were, in the simplest sense, the people who built Los Angeles.
Name | Listed Racial Category (1781) | Age |
José Vanegas | Indio | 28 |
Basilio Rosas | Indio | 68 |
Alejandro Rosas | Indio | 19 |
Pablo Rodriguez | Indio | 25 |
Antonio Mesa | Negro | 38 |
Luis Quintero | Negro | 55 |
Manuel Camero | Mulato | 30 |
José Moreno | Mulato | 22 |
José Antonio Navarro | Mestizo | 42 |
Antonio Clemente Villavicencio | Español | 30 |
José Fernando de Velasco y Lara | Español | 50 |
Antonio Miranda Rodriguez | Chino (born Manila, Philippines) | 50 |
Source: 1781 census records, as compiled by William M. Mason, History Division, Los Angeles County Museum. The term "Chino" in 18th-century Spanish colonial records typically referred to people of Asian origin, particularly those connected to the Manila galleon trade.
Who Was Antonio Miranda Rodriguez?
The historical record on Antonio Miranda Rodriguez is fragmentary — as it is for most people of color who lived on the margins of empire's administrative attention in the 18th century. But what the records do tell us is striking.
He was born around 1730, most likely in Manila, in the Philippines — then a colony of Spain and the hub of the Pacific galleon trade that connected Asia to the Americas. He was recorded in colonial census documents as a chino, the term Spanish colonial administrators used for people of Asian origin, particularly those connected to the Manila galleon route. The genealogical record compiled by Marie E. Northrop in Spanish Mexican Families of Early California confirms his birth in Manila. William Mason, longtime curator of the History Division at the Los Angeles County Museum and one of the foremost historians of early California, identified him as a descendant of a Manila Man — the Filipino sailors and workers who had been traveling the galleon route from Manila to Acapulco for centuries.
By the time he was recruited for the Los Angeles founding party, Rodriguez was a widower living in Sonora, Mexico — most likely the settlement of many Filipinos and their descendants who had come to New Spain via the galleon trade over the preceding two centuries. He had a young daughter, Juana Maria, and a skill that made him valuable on any frontier: he was a gunsmith.
He joined the group of settlers in Sinaloa as they began their journey north. He was fifty years old, with all the experience and wear that a fifty-year-old laborer in 18th-century Spanish colonial Mexico would carry. He had traveled a very long way to get to this point — from Manila, across the Pacific, through Mexico, and now north toward a new city at the edge of the Spanish world.
What We Know About Antonio Miranda Rodriguez
🗓 Born: Around 1730, most likely in Manila, Philippines
💍 Status: Widower; recruited with his daughter Juana Maria, approximately age 11
🔧 Skill: Gunsmith — a critical trade for any Spanish colonial settlement or military installation
🗺 Location before recruitment: Sonora, Mexico — a region with significant Filipino and "Manila Man" descendant communities
📜 Recorded as: "Chino" in 1781 census documents — the Spanish colonial term for people of Asian/Philippine origin
🏛 Historical sources: Marie E. Northrop's Spanish Mexican Families of Early California; William M. Mason, LA County Museum; Eric Garcetti, Our Pacific Destiny; the Los Angeles Almanac
⚰️ Died: May 26, 1784, Santa Barbara, California — buried in the Presidio Chapel
The Journey — and Why He Wasn't There on September 4th
The founding of Los Angeles was not a single dramatic moment. It was the culmination of a journey of over a thousand miles through desert and mountain terrain, with livestock, children, tools, and the weight of colonial ambition. The settler party left Sonora in early 1781 and made their way slowly northward toward Alta California.
Somewhere along the way — in Loreto, Baja California — smallpox struck.
Antonio Miranda Rodriguez and his daughter Juana Maria both fell ill. As a father with a sick eleven-year-old child, Rodriguez made the decision that any parent would make: he stayed. He remained in Loreto while the other settlers continued their journey north. He nursed Juana Maria through her illness. He waited.
On September 4, 1781, forty-four settlers — without the Rodriguez family — were escorted by four soldiers from the Mission San Gabriel to the site on the Los Angeles River. Governor de Neve presided. A ceremony was held. And El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles was officially founded.
Antonio Miranda Rodriguez was not there. Not because he had abandoned the journey, not because he had been dismissed, but because he had chosen his daughter over the historical record.
Antonio's Journey: 1781–1784
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Early 1781 — Sinaloa, New Spain: Rodriguez joins the pobladores as the 12th founding family. He and Juana Maria set out with the group toward Alta California.
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Mid-1781 — Loreto, Baja California: Juana Maria falls ill with smallpox. Rodriguez remains behind to care for her while the rest of the settlers continue north.
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September 4, 1781 — Los Angeles River: The 44 remaining settlers found El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles. The Rodriguez family is not present.
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1781–1783 — Loreto: Rodriguez remains in Loreto, working as a gunsmith while Juana Maria recovers. Accounts differ on whether she survived or died during this period.
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1783 — Santa Barbara Presidio: When Rodriguez finally arrives in Alta California, his skills as a gunsmith are needed elsewhere. He is reassigned to the newly built Santa Barbara Presidio as its armorer — the last military installation built by Spain in the Western Hemisphere.
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May 26, 1784 — Santa Barbara: Antonio Miranda Rodriguez dies and is buried in the Presidio Chapel at Santa Barbara. He was approximately 54 years old. A plaque donated by the Santa Barbara Filipino Community Association in 1986 now commemorates his life at the Presidio.
The timing of his reassignment is the key to understanding why his name is missing from the Los Angeles founding plaque. He arrived in Alta California after the pueblo was already established, and was sent immediately to Santa Barbara rather than to Los Angeles. He never settled in the city he had been recruited to help found.
But he had been chosen. He had made the journey. He had been part of the founding party. He was — by the reckoning of every historian who has examined the record — the twelfth poblador of Los Angeles.
The Most Diverse Founding of Any Major American City
The story of Antonio Miranda Rodriguez gains additional power when placed in the context of who the other founders of Los Angeles were.
Of the forty-four original settlers, only two were of European (Spanish) descent. The rest were Black, Indigenous, or of mixed ancestry. More than half — twenty-six of the forty-four — had African ancestry. The founding plaque at El Pueblo did not acknowledge this racial reality until 1981, when a new plaque was installed on the city's bicentennial, thanks to the efforts of Miriam Matthews, Los Angeles's first Black librarian, who had spent years campaigning for an accurate depiction of who actually founded the city.
Los Angeles was not founded by white European settlers. It was founded by a multiracial group of people — African, indigenous, mixed, and at least one Filipino — who were recruited from the margins of the Spanish colonial world because no one else would make the difficult journey to the edge of empire.
That is the true origin story of what became the most ethnically diverse major city in the United States. It was diverse from the very beginning — not as a result of later immigration, but in its founding DNA.
"Our city's links with Asia are deep and old — as old as the city itself. In 1781, a Spanish subject of Filipino heritage, Antonio Miranda Rodriguez, joined 43 other pobladores to trek to the area that became El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora, la Reina de los Angeles."
— Eric Garcetti, former Mayor of Los Angeles, Our Pacific Destiny
The City Was Always Ours
Filipino presence in Los Angeles didn't begin in the 20th century. It began in 1781, when Antonio Miranda Rodriguez was chosen to help build this city from the ground up. The City Collection and Bayani Collection honor that lineage.
The Historical Debate: What We Know, What We Don't
Telling Antonio Miranda Rodriguez's story, the Filipino Who Helped Found Los Angeles with honesty means acknowledging what the historical record is — and what it isn't.
🔍 The Honest Historical Picture
What is well-documented: Antonio Miranda Rodriguez was recruited as the twelfth founding family of Los Angeles. He is listed in colonial census records. He was recorded as "chino" — the colonial term for Asian/Philippine origin. He was a gunsmith. He was delayed by smallpox in Baja California. He was later reassigned to Santa Barbara. He died there and is buried in the Presidio Chapel.
What is strongly supported but not definitively proven: That he was specifically Filipino (born in Manila, Philippines), as opposed to Chinese or of other Asian origin. The colonial term "chino" was used loosely. However, multiple respected historians — including William Mason of the LA County Museum — have concluded he was likely of Filipino/Manila Man descent, based on his name, the genealogical record, and the patterns of Filipino migration through New Spain.
What is genuinely uncertain: Whether Juana Maria survived the smallpox. Whether Rodriguez ever actually arrived in Los Angeles before being sent to Santa Barbara. Whether he considered himself Filipino in any meaningful cultural sense, having likely spent decades in New Spain before the founding.
Why it still matters even with these uncertainties: The preponderance of historical evidence supports Filipino heritage. Multiple mainstream and academic sources — the Los Angeles Almanac, the LA County Museum, Eric Garcetti's historical writing — affirm this. And even setting ancestry aside: a man of Asian heritage, recruited as part of the founding group of Los Angeles, is a fact of LA history that deserves to be widely known.
The historical debate around Rodriguez is not a reason to dismiss his story. It is a reason to tell it carefully and honestly — which is what this post attempts to do. He was there. He was chosen. He was Filipino, or of Filipino descent. And he has been left out of the story for over two centuries.
Santa Barbara: Where Antonio Rodriguez Ended Up — and Where He Rests
The Santa Barbara Presidio — the last military installation built by Spain anywhere in the Western Hemisphere — was established in 1782. Its construction required skilled tradespeople, and Antonio Miranda Rodriguez's expertise as a gunsmith made him exactly the kind of person the new presidio needed. He was reassigned there, worked as its armorer, and eventually became its ironsmith.
He died on May 26, 1784, and was buried in the Presidio Chapel at Santa Barbara. He was approximately fifty-four years old.
He is, by every historical account, the first documented Filipino to have lived in California. Not just in Los Angeles, not just in Santa Barbara — but in all of what is now the state of California.
In 1986 — more than two centuries after his death — the Santa Barbara Filipino Community Association donated a plaque to the Presidio Chapel commemorating Antonio Miranda Rodriguez and his connection to the Filipino community of California. His name is inscribed in a tile slab inside the chapel alongside the other early residents of the Presidio.
It is a small recognition. But it is real. His name is there, in stone, in the city where he spent his last years. And the Santa Barbara Filipino community — which has existed and thrived for generations — has roots that trace back, in a direct historical line, to the man who arrived in 1783 carrying a gunsmith's tools and the memory of a journey that had taken him from Manila across an ocean and a continent to the edge of the known world.
"Certainly, he was Santa Barbara's first Filipino resident, and perhaps the first permanent Filipino resident of California."
— William M. Mason, curator, History Division, Los Angeles County Museum
Why This Story Belongs in Every Filipino American Home
Los Angeles is home to the largest Filipino American community in the continental United States. Hundreds of thousands of Filipino Americans live, work, and raise families in the Los Angeles metro area. Many of them have been here for generations. And almost none of them know that the city their community has claimed as home had, at its very founding, a Filipino man among its builders.
That is not a minor footnote. That is a foundational fact — one that changes the story of who Los Angeles has always been. Filipino presence in this city is not a 20th-century phenomenon. It does not begin with the post-1965 immigration wave, or the farmworker movements, or the nurses who came in the 1970s and 1980s. It begins in 1781, before the United States existed, before California was American, when a fifty-year-old Filipino widower and his daughter traveled a thousand miles through the desert because they had been chosen to build something new.
The Saysay Project — a Filipino American art exhibit held at El Pueblo de Los Angeles — took its name from this history. Saysay is a Filipino word meaning "significance" or "meaning." The exhibit explored Filipino presence in Los Angeles from the 12th Poblador to the present, making explicit the through-line from Antonio Miranda Rodriguez to the Filipino Americans who fill the city today.
For the Filipino American community in LA and beyond, Antonio Miranda Rodriguez is not just a historical figure. He is an ancestor. He is evidence. He is proof — documented, cited, buried in the soil of California — that this community was always here. That it did not arrive. That it was not imported. That it was, in the most literal sense, present at the creation.
His name should be on the plaque. Until it is, we carry it ourselves.
Carry His Name Forward
Antonio Miranda Rodriguez walked a thousand miles to help build a city. His name was left off the plaque. UGAT exists to make sure stories like his are worn, shared, and never forgotten. Every purchase supports Filipino heritage design rooted in this history.
His Name Was Antonio Miranda Rodriguez
He was born in Manila around 1730. He crossed the Pacific on the galleon trade. He lived in New Spain for years, decades, long enough to become a father and then a widower. He was chosen — out of the entire population of Sonora and Sinaloa — to help build a new city. He traveled a thousand miles. He stopped to care for his sick daughter. He arrived too late, and was sent somewhere else. He died in 1784, in Santa Barbara, California, and was buried in a chapel that still stands.
He was the twelfth poblador of Los Angeles. He was the first documented Filipino in California. He was a gunsmith, a father, a traveler, a man who made a journey most people never could and arrived somewhere he never expected.
And for more than two hundred years, his name was missing from the founding story of the city he helped build.
Now you know his name. Say it. Share it. The next time someone asks when Filipinos first came to Los Angeles, the answer is: before Los Angeles was Los Angeles. Before California was California. Before there was a United States of America.
A Filipino man named Antonio was there first.
💬 Join the Conversation
Are you a Filipino American from the Los Angeles area? Did you know this history? Share your thoughts, your family's connection to LA, and what it means to you to know that Antonio Miranda Rodriguez was among the city's founders. Every person who knows this story makes it harder to erase.
📖 Part of the FAHM Series: "Mga Bayani ng Kasaysayan"
This post is part of our Filipino American History Month series exploring the figures and moments that shaped the Filipino American story.
Know Your Roots
Get Filipino heritage stories, new collection drops, and cultural deep-dives from UGAT — not just in October.
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