Downey is a city located in Southeast Los Angeles County, California, United States, 13 mi (21 km) southeast of Downtown Los Angeles. It is considered allowance of the Gateway Cities. The city is the birthplace of the Apollo tell program. It is as a consequence the house of the oldest operating McDonald’s restaurant in the world. As of the 2020 census, the city had a sum population of 114,355.

Mission San Gabriel Arcángel was initially founded upon September 8, 1771, near settlements of the Tongva people. It was located in the Whittier Narrows upon a bluff overlooking the Rio Hondo, near the intersection of today’s San Gabriel Blvd and Lincoln Avenue. After five years, flooding irritated the relocation of the mission to its gift site in San Gabriel.

In 1784, Governor Pedro Fages decided to former soldier Manuel Nieto (1734–1804) the largest of the home concessions made in what was later Alta California, a province of New Spain. Its 300,000 acres (120,000 ha; 1,200 km) stretched from the Santa Ana River on the east to the Old San Gabriel River (now the Rio Hondo and Los Angeles River) on the west, and from the mission highway (approximately Whittier Boulevard) on the north to the ocean on the south. Its acreage was slightly abbreviated later at the insistence of Mission San Gabriel upon whose lands it infringed. The Spanish concessions, of which 25 were made in California, were unlike the sophisticated Mexican estate grants in that title was not transferred but were similar to grazing permits like the title remaining with the Spanish crown.

The Rancho Los Nietos passed to Manuel Nieto’s four children upon his death and remained intact until 1833 following his heirs petitioned Mexican Governor José Figueroa to partition the property. The northwestern portion of the original rancho, comprising the Downey-Norwalk area, was contracted as Rancho Santa Gertrudes to Josefa Cota, the widow of Manuel’s son, Antonio Nieto. At approximately 21,000 acres (8,500 ha; 85 km), Santa Gertrudes was itself a sizable rancho and contained the outdated Nietos homestead, which was a middle of social vivaciousness east of the pueblo of Los Angeles. After the Mexican–American War concluded in 1848, many of the Californio ranchos were obtained by well-to-do Anglo-Americans who were immigrating west under the United States manifest destiny doctrine, and marrying into conventional Californio Spanish families. This migration was Definite from that prompted by the California Gold Rush farther north.