To stem the tide of violence, the Los Angeles Rangers were formed in 1853 as a volunteer militia/semi-vigilante group with only a few paid full-time lawmen. Their membership roster, with names like Andrés Pico, Phineas Banning, Agustín Olvera, John Downey, and José Sepúlveda, reads like a who's who of the city's power elite. Wealthy Anglos and Mexicans found common class interests through the Rangers. Among the general population, however, tension and misunderstanding among Anglos and Mexicans persisted. Mob lynching of Mexicans colored civic action and reaction in the early 1850s. Rumors circulated surrounding the violent exploits of real and imagined Mexican "bandits" such as Pío Linares, Joaquin Valenzuela, Salomon Pico (nephew of former governor Pío Pico), the Juan Flores-Pancho Daniel gang, and, notably, Joaquin Murrieta, the most famous and mythological "bandit" of the Gold Rush era. Horace Bell wrote that in August 1853, amid rumors that Murrieta was in the city, the entire Ranger Company, mounted and on foot, marched and rode through Sonotatown, Calle de los Negros, and surrounding areas to "search every suspicious house and place within the city limits." Thus, the spectacle of violence throughout the 1850s and 1860s, particularly in the form of public lynching, was directed against Mexicans and served to consolidate Anglo hegemony by securing the socioeconomic decline of the Mexican population. But if there was one act of violence that led to the ultimate name change from Calle de los Negros to Los Angeles Street, it was the one leveled against the emerging Chinese community.
According to the 1860 Census, only fourteen Chinese residents were listed in Los Angeles. By 1870 a recognizable Chinese community had appeared, with a population of nearly 200, about half of whom lived on Calle de los Negros, where much of the city's vice and violence of the previous decades persisted. Yet despite the general desire for law and order, Los Angeles was burdened by the dual characteristics as an open city—providing opportunity for some and lawlessness for others—while undergoing dramatic demographic change. The decline in gold production, the completion of the Central Pacific Railroad, and an extended drought that caused a sharp drop in farm production brought large numbers of unemployed white laborers into California towns from Sacramento to San Diego. Thus, within a climate of exploitative labor and corporate monopoly by railroad barons, white labor unions misdirected their dissatisfaction to the Chinese, who they believed were lowering the wages and living standards of white workers. Combined with the inflammatory anti-Chinese writings of the San Francisco press that local journalists sought to emulate, Los Angeles was rife with anti-Chinese fervor.