State Assembly

A Democrat,^[2] del Valle was a California Assembly member in 1880–81. In that position, he unsuccessfully opposed a bill that required all state offices to keep their records only in English, instead of in both Spanish and English moving forward.^{[1]: 5, 7}

While an Assembly member, del Valle received a letter from former Governor John G. Downey, dated February 22, 1879, encouraging him to "push for a Los Angeles location" for a new state normal school, which would specialize in teacher training. Del Valle introduced such a bill within two weeks, but after months of wrangling, this and other bills submitted by other assemblymen on behalf of their counties were either defeated, withdrawn or killed.^{[1]: 7–14}

In the 1881 Assembly session, del Valle was nominated for the speakership but lost by three votes. On January 4, 1881, he introduced another bill to establish a branch normal school in Los Angeles, and, after parliamentary maneuvering, a similar bill that had already passed the State Senate was adopted in the Assembly^{[1]: 15–17} and signed into law by Governor George C. Perkins. As a result, according to a history of the Los Angeles State Normal School written twenty-five years later, "Mr. Del Valle became a target for the Workingman's Delegation of San Francisco, some members of which in the heat of the debate made use of sharp personalities."^{[1]: 14–17}

This law established a branch normal school in Los Angeles; it was considered to be a branch of the original State Normal School at San Jose and was governed by the board of trustees of that institution. In 1887, the branch school became a separate institution with its own board of trustees. In 1919, the Los Angeles State Normal School joined the University of California and evolved into the University of California, Los Angeles.^[3]

State Senate

Reginaldo, his wife Helen, and their daughter Lucretia del Valle Grady.

Del Valle was elected to the California State Senate in 1882 and served until 1885.^{[1]: 20 [2]} In the latter year, the Los Angeles Times noted that del Valle:

is the parliamentarian par excellence in the upper House. Since his school days at Santa Clara College, he is generally accredited with having adopted Cushing's unabridged, so to say, as his Bible. ... He never hesitates for an instant, and is even a little arrogant in the promptness with which he decides every point and rushes the work along. No one ever thinks of appealing from his decisions.^[8]

As a senator, del Valle fought to establish the new Los Angeles institution as a school in its own right, with a separate board of trustees and separate governance from the statewide institution, which was headquartered in San Jose and dominated by Northern California members. Although he left the Senate in 1886, his proposal was eventually put into law, and del Valle was noted as the "intellectual author" of the legislation that authorized it.^{[1]: 21–25}

Water

Del Valle, circa 1910–15

Del Valle served on the city Public Services Commission for twenty-one years, beginning in 1908. He was the one who brokered peace in the "water wars" when irate ranchers dynamited the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which brought water to the city from the Owens River valley. "To him, as much as to anyone, Los Angeles owes the mighty aqueduct that was built to tap the water of the Sierra," the Los Angeles Times noted,^{[1]: 27–28} and the Los Angeles Examiner said, "The city's present water system is a monument to his energetic leadership."^[2]

Other

Telegram sent to del Valle by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Del Valle ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1884 and for lieutenant governor in 1890.^[1] He was admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1893, and he was chairman of the Democratic State Conventions in 1888 and 1894. He was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1900 in Kansas City, Missouri.^[4]

With his friend Charles Lummis, del Valle was a founding member of the Landmarks Club of Southern California, formed in 1887 to advocate for the restoration of the California missions. He also was "one of the forty founding members of the Southern California Historical Society and spearheaded the committee to restore the San Fernando Mission and the mark El Camino Real with bells."^[9]

In 1892 del Valle was a lecturer in parliamentary law in the newly opened Southern California College of Law, and later he "formed a number of law partnerships."^[1]: 28

Archival collections

• Guide to the Forster-del Valle Family Papers. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.

Other

• Del Valle family tree
• Lauren Bartlett, "UCLA Researchers Report the Founder of UCLA's Predecessor Institution Was Latino," UCLA Newsroom, March 30, 2006
• Kenneth Burt, "The Latino Democratic Trail Stretches Way Back," Hispanic News Service, June 14, 2011