About this site.
La Tuna Canyon is an independent community website — not an official project of the City of Los Angeles, not a real-estate marketing site, not a nonprofit. It exists because the canyon deserves a front door of its own.
What the site is for
Three things, in rough order of priority. First, to make it easier for someone brand-new to the canyon — a new homeowner, a new renter, a curious visitor — to understand where they've landed and how it works. Second, to collect the canyon's history in one place, with enough detail and attribution that anyone who wants to go deeper has a starting point. Third, to represent the canyon honestly to the rest of Los Angeles — as the rural, horse-friendly, hillside place it actually is, and not as a forgotten edge of Sun Valley.
Elegant local guide, practical welcome packet, civic resource — not a municipal database.
Editorial approach
A few principles we try to hold to:
Accuracy over aesthetics
If a detail is uncertain, we say so. If a source conflicts, we note both. If a page hedges — "depending on exact address," "verify at the official link" — that's deliberate. Canyon boundaries, school assignments, and civic contacts genuinely do shift, and a confident-sounding answer that's wrong is worse than a careful one.
Practical over promotional
We'd rather tell you that MyLA311 handles pothole requests than tell you La Tuna Canyon is a hidden gem. If a page reads like a real-estate brochure, we've failed it.
Heritage, handled with care
The canyon's history includes hard chapters — the Tongva dispossession, the WWII detention station, recent wildfires. We cover them seriously, name the harms, and try not to sanitize. The Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition, the Tongva descendant community, and the families affected by the 2017 fire are the authoritative voices on those topics; this site points at them rather than speaking over them.
Sources
Where factual claims on the site come from, in rough categories. Specific citations are called out on individual pages.
- Indigenous history. Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition timeline; Tongva and Fernandeño/Tataviam descendant organizations; secondary ethnohistorical sources on Wixánga and the broader San Fernando Valley village network.
- 19th-century ranching and annexation. Los Angeles Times archives; secondary sources on Charles Maclay, the Southern Pacific, and the 1915–1918 annexation cycle.
- Stonehurst. LA Conservancy documentation; city historical-cultural monument records for the Pep Rempp–Dan Montelongo rock houses.
- Hansen Dam & the 1938 flood. US Army Corps of Engineers project records; contemporary newspaper coverage of the flood.
- WWII detention station. Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition (tunacanyon.org); Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument #1039 designation records; National Archives Department of Justice records.
- Theodore Payne Foundation. Foundation's own published history (theodorepayne.org).
- 1995 Recognition. Los Angeles Times archive coverage of the petition drive and City Council recognition.
- 2017 La Tuna Fire & 2018 mudflows. CAL FIRE incident records (fire.ca.gov); LAFD press materials; Los Angeles Times and LAist contemporaneous coverage; LA County Public Works debris-flow forecasts.
- Parks & trails. Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (mrca.ca.gov).
- Civic contacts. Official City of Los Angeles directories (lacity.gov, cd7.lacity.gov, empowerla.org).
- Schools. LAUSD Resident School Identifier (rsi.lausd.net) and individual school websites.
Land acknowledgment
La Tuna Canyon sits on the unceded ancestral lands of the Tongva peoples (also known as Gabrieleño) and, at its northern edges, the Fernandeño Tataviam. The canyon's name itself comes from Wixánga — a Tongva village whose name honored the prickly pear that still grows on these hillsides. The present-day Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians and the Gabrieleno Band of Mission Indians-Kizh Nation remain the cultural stewards of this place. Covering the canyon's history responsibly means naming that these were not empty lands, and that dispossession — not settlement — is how the 19th century begins here.
How to contribute or correct
Contributions — family stories, historic photos, corrections, current-day canyon tips — are the single biggest way this site gets better. See the Share a Story page for categories we're actively collecting, or email directly:
hello@latunacanyon.com