"Llano Del Rio"

SUBJECT:
A community in Antelope Valley, California.

Founded by lawyer, Job Harriman as a socialist cooperative colony circa 1914, Llano del Rio was intended to be "a gateway to the future." The commune of about 800 people faltered four years later, primarily due to factionalism and water disputes with nearby ranchers. After relocating to New Llano, south of Leesville, Lousiana, the colony disolved for good circa 1937, making it the longest surviving socialist community in American history.

The Llano del Rio socialist colony was founded in 1913 by prominent Los Angeles attorney and politician Jeb Harriman. The colony's population peaked at 2,000, making it the largest town in the High Desert. The ruins of the colony can be seen from Pearblossom Highway, just west of the present Llano post office.

Besides the agricultural communities the region hosted, an eclectic array of communal settlements were established in the Antelope Valley in the years before the Depression. A 1936 map shows that no fewer than ten colonies had once existed in the sweep of the Valley. The most famous of these was recently brought to new light in Mike Davis’s City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Long known to ghost town enthusiasts and published about extensively in numerous books, the Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony was a short-lived socialist colony established by former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Job Harriman. Building on the irrigation works of an earlier colony of temperance advocates, the Llano colony opened on May Day 1913, some 17 miles east of the Southern Pacific tracks where Big Rock Creek fans out on the desert floor. Internal dissension, external harassment, and an uncooperative Big Rock Creek doomed the colony, though, and in 1918 the colonists abandoned Llano del Rio. The arroyo-stone walls and columns of its larger buildings still stand alongside Pearblossom Highway at 165th Street East, littered with trash from communities that have since grown up in the surrounding desert. Despite this ignoble end, the optimism which infused the colony’s founding would prove to be an indefatigable trait of Antelope Valley settlers. [source]

Ruins of the Llano del Rio Cooperative Community, a former socialist colony near the present-day town of Llano, were once feared threatened by the proposed widening of Highway 138. Valley Press Senior Writer Rich Breault reports on efforts by Caltrans (California Department of Transportation) and the Big Pines Historical Society to protect the remnants of the community established in 1914.

To some, the concrete and river-rock pillars and concrete pad are nothing special. But to others, Caltrans included, the ruins are special and something to be preserved. Started in 1914 as a model socialist community, Llano del Rio withered by 1918. In May, Caltrans archaeologist Thad Van Buren, headed up an archaeological team that spent 10 days at Llano del Rio, mapping the site and doing small excavations within Caltrans' right-of-way.

The Llano Del Rio Colony (socialist) was flourishing at this period. One could get lodging for 25 cents a night and meals were available. The Saturday night dances at the Colony were attended by local folks and those from a great distance. During the life of the Colony they had orchards, vegetable gardens, livestock, a rabbitry and a commissary. It was a completely well supplied town of around 1000. Lack of water, funds and mismanagement caused its decline. It was abandoned in late 1917. All that remains are the well constructed foundations, fireplaces of the hotel and walls of the buildings made of stone and mortar. Traces of the stone- lined water ditch which carried water from the Big Rock Creek may be located.
Since those early days, Llano has been found to be a particularly desirable place to live, climatically and scenically. Many have come to reside there, including those of Crystalaire Estates with its 18 hole golf course and air and glider field. Llano's elevation and proximity of the Big Rock Creek Canyon, the Big Pines recreation area and the mountains of the Angeles National Forest make it attractive.

Bread & Hyacinths, the Rise and Fall of Utopian Los
Angeles by Paul Greenstein, Nigey Lennon and Lionel Rolfe
[California Classic Books, P.O. Box 29756, Los Angeles,
CA 90029]
To the victors belong the history books, but victory
tends to be a short-term trend. Fascism was the victor in
early Los Angeles, as in the rest of the United States of
America, after a small group of business people led by
Los Angeles Times owner Harrison Gray Otis managed to
seize control of the city. But Otis and his piggy friends
did not seize power without a fight. Honest working
people tried to regain their freedom by creating labor
unions, while middle-class people embraced the creed of
electoral Socialism.
Bread & Hyacinths largely follows the life of a
particular socialist, Job Harriman, who migrated to Los
Angeles, ran an almost-successful campaign to become
mayor, and helped found the utopian community at Llano
Del Rio. That community eventually was forced to move to
Louisiana through a combination of its own internal
failure and harassment by the government of California.
But for a time it recalled the days of freedom past, when
a group of people could work the land with their hands
and eat the produce of their labor without having 4/5ths
of it grabbed by various and sundry middlemen.
Though the book is hardly inspiring, as it records
a losing battle by those who love freedom, it is well-
researched and illuminated a region and a time of history
that is mostly ignored. Recommended to those with an
interest in history or human struggle.

Job Harriman was a socialist politition who unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Los Angeles and Vice-President of the United States. He organized a utopian experiment in Antelope Valley, California in 1914 founded on the general principles of "equal ownership, equal wage and equal social opportunities." Llano del Rio, as it was called, was forced to move 3 years later (due to a lack of sufficient water resources) to an isolated area in western Louisiana.

Llano is pronounced "YAH-no" and means "plain." So in Spanish, "Llano Del Rio" translates to "Plain of the River."

If all that information still wasn't enough for you, here's an obscene amount more: Llano Del Rio info

LYRICS:
llano-llano / llano-llano / llano-llano / going out to llano / llano del rio / try to find utopia / in the stucco grids and tumbleweeds / you gotta love that pearblossom / it'll kill you just like possum / have you been to the rock foundations? / where it's mostly known just for the speed / going out to llano / going to look for aldous huxley / there between the power lines / and the purple flowers of mescaline / if you really want to / you can practice esperanto / but in the land of pronto / the wind it tastes like gasoline / llano-llano / llano-llano / going out to llano / llano del rio / going out to llano / llano del rio

REFERENCES:
Aldous Huxley
(1894-1963)
Aldous Huxley was a mid 20th Century author who wrote two fictional books questioning "ideal" societies. First he wrote Brave New World (1932), in which a totalitarian state controls the people via conditioning and drugs; and later, Island (1962), where he sketches a true utopia that is destined to perish as soon as it comes into contact with the greed and exploitation which characterize the modern world. While Island is a work of fiction, it is the vehicle Huxley used to communicate his ideas about how people in a good society would interact with each other and their environment.
In 1942, Huxley moved to the defunct Llano Del Rio colony in California, and while living there wrote about Llano's legacy. He likened Job Harriman's dream to that of Ozymandias, "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
In May 1953, Huxley tried mescaline (see below) for the first time under the supervision of Dr. Humphrey Osmond. During the experience, he commented "This is how one ought to see, how things really are." The next year, his essay titled The Doors of Perception was published describing this experience.

mescaline
The alkaloid responsible for the profound psychoactive properties of peyote cactus. The primary natural sources of mescaline are peyote (Lophophora williamsii or Lophophora diffusa); San Pedro cactus (Trichocereus pachanoi); and Peruvian Torch (Trichocereus peruvianus) cactii. It was isolated in 1896 and synthesized in 1919, but it was not until 1927 that its effects on the human mind were described. Though one of the weakest by volume, it is a strong hallucinogen whose effects, when taken in a dose of around 400 mg, are equivalent to those of LSD. Duration of effectiveness: 10 - 12 hours. This was the hallucinogen on which Huxley based his "Doors of Perception", the primal hallucinogen, the standard for all hallucinogens.

esperanto
Esperanto is a constructed language, developed about 100 years ago as a second language for all peoples. Politically neutral, it belongs to no nation or political movement. It is reputedly quick to learn; possibly 4 to 10 times faster than national languages, being grammatically simplified and regular, and consistent in its alphabet and pronunciation. It was based on widely known European roots from Latin and German sources. The vision for Esperanto is to be used as an auxiliary language, supplementing each person's national language so that, for example, people from Norway can talk to people from Japan without having to revert to broken English.
The language Esperanto was devised in 1887 in Poland, by Dr. L. L. Zamenhof, a Jewish oculist and amateur linguist. He published the first book on the language ("Lingvo Internacia") under the pseudonym "Doktoro Esperanto"; the word means "one who hopes." Before long, the word "Esperanto" became known as the name of the language. In the 100 years since that first pamphlet, Esperanto has spread to become a language spoken by more than a million people in dozens of countries. Each year, the world Esperanto convention, or Universala Kongreso, draws thousands of participants from around the world.
While it has yet to become the international second language as its proponents had hoped, it is far from dead, and in fact is still experiencing slow but steady growth as it begins its second century. Considering that Esperanto has spread almost entirely by word of mouth, and that it has been systematically suppressed by major governments and ignored by academicians (though the Llano del Rio colony's small liberal arts college did offer it as a language course), the current estimated Esperanto population of two million is a sign of genuine strength. Of the dozens of similar language projects, only Esperanto has survived its creator and continued to grow.

LIVE: yes

ACOUSTIC: yes