The Student Fire Bell in the Night: Resistance in Ventura County to Xenophobia

On Friday, January 31, 2025, hundreds of angry Oxnard Union High School District and Oxnard School District students sounded the tocsin of resistance to the ICE raids unleashed by President Frump. They walked out in protest from the campuses of R.J. Frank Intermediate and the high schools of Channel Islands, Del Sol, Hueneme, Oxnard, Pacifica, and others. Some lined the streets and avenues adjacent to their campuses; others marched and drove to the City of Oxnard’s ombligo, la placita, where mi raza, in alliance with other working-class gente, historically organized similar rallies demanding immigrant rights as well as the end to police violence. 

Cars and pickup trucks roamed the intersection of Fifth and C Streets to affirm the students’ cause with repeated honks, blaring banda music, and the deafening revving of V8 engines. The students responded with hoots while pumping their pawky placards and Mexican colors. School administrators and teachers protectively observed the youth as did boomers like me, Gen Xers, and millennials—yes millennials you are no longer young.

 

Pacifica High student, at Oxnard’s placita, Friday, January 31, 2025 

 The righteous indignation of students continued into the night on Oxnard’s Saviers Road. As part of the protest, cars cruised this thoroughfare, as in the late 1970s, brandishing even more Mexican flags. Others lined up along the road. One galled covey burned the US flag.

This rage is largely rooted in the Magabrones jingoism against their immigrant peers, family, and barrio neighbors. Hence, burning the US flag in protest disgruntles foes and friends alike. For me, I’m cool with the burning of the US flag in protest as I know, as a Marine Corps veteran, that most of the sacrifices made by men, women, and theys in uniform were made under pretexts of defense dating back to the US attack on Mexico in 1846, to the 1899 Boxer Rebellion in China, conquering Hawaii, colonizing the Philippines, Vietnam, and Iraq, to name a few. These wars were to expand US capital abroad, not to protect our freedoms at home. 

Nonetheless, flag burning adds to the scrappiness of social movements which is fundamentally democratic.

The next day, Saturday, February 1st, another demonstration erupted. I could not witness this one as I was out of town.

After seeing social media posts by Oxnard High and Ventura College MEChA clubs Sunday morning, I drove to la placita. One started at 11 am and the other at noon. I arrived on time, but the turnout was meager at first as my people have a reputation for arriving more than “fashionably late.” But by 1:00 pm the hoi polloi grew to over 1,000. Aztec danzantes extended their imprimatur with their arrival and ceremony. The Chicana/o+ event included gringos, Blacks, as well as flag-pumping Guatemalans, Hondurans, and El Salvadorans.

I thought the protests would cease until the next weekend. But they continued in Oxnard, Santa Paula, Fillmore, and throughout Southern California as part of a Monday Day Without a Mexican boycott of public institutions and businesses. They’re still popping up. There’s even one planned in the sleepy Ventura County community of Ojai, Saturday, February 8th at Libby Park starting at 11 am. Be there or be square.

As in the 1976 movie NETWORK, my people are mad as hell and they’re not going to take Magabrone animus and Little-Hands Trump’s bullying anymore.

 

United Farm Worker veteran, at Oxnard’s placita, Sunday, February 2, 2025

Similar to the street demonstrations against racist schools throughout the Southwest and the Vietnam War, where the Mexican American casualty rate was disproportionate to their population in the Southwest, during the 1960s and ’70s, the youth of today seized the mantle of resistance to debut their generation’s power. Supported by elders of diverse ages, races, and ethnicities. To paraphrase the famous history teacher of East LA, Sal Castro, after the student walkouts of 1968, it’s a beautiful time to be a Chicana/o+—of Mexican, Guatemalan, Honduran, El Salvadoran, and other origins of Nuestra America!

Social media posts indicate that these protests are part of an inchoate social movement. The resistance will be victorious in stopping Dirty Don’s racist mass deportations. This was the result of the 2006 Gran Marchas that metastasized throughout the nation’s cities and communities that stiff-armed H.R.4437, authored by congressman James Sensenbrenner; a presumed slam-dunk piece of legislation before the infantry of Nuestra America defiantly took to the streets in mass, essentially saying “You xenophobes want a fight, you got one.”

And make no mistake, the assault of Don the Con and his Magabrones on immigrants makes no distinction between the criminal, undocumented, documented, long-time or short-time resident, naturalized or US-born citizen, the Black or Brown of varying shades, from Haiti to Venezuela, as well as those born in East L.A. We are all considered a suspect class subject to arrest and deportation.

A colleague in academe and former CSU Channel Islands student of mine, at Oxnard’s placita, Sunday, February 2, 2025

By taking to the streets flapping the banners of the origins of their communities, the protestors are saying chinga tu maga—Magabrones take a long walk on a short peer. Out of the shadows, they are also saying to Trump’s Gestapo, “Bring it on.” We are going to resist you with the full support of our elders (many veteranas/os of el movimiento), lawyers, educators, service workers, and other brothers, sisters, and theys in the trades and other industries. Aqui Estamos Y No Nos Vamos—We’re Not Going Anywhere.

 

Lone sign ready and waiting for the struggle, Oxnard’s placita, Sunday, February 2, 2025

On the flag waving of Mexico’s tri-colors, Chicano-gonzo journalist, Gustavo Arellano perspicaciously penned in 2016 (and recently updated):

Waving the Mexican flag isn’t just a shout-out to their ethnic heritage; it’s a blatant reminder of the failings of this country toward comprehensive immigration reform. Because if there’s anyone to blame for the Mexican-flag flap, it’s conservatives. As I’ve been saying for over a decade, Mexicans assimilate into America, yet many Americans don’t want to believe it and want to do anything possible to stop it. Talk to those kids waving the bandera, and their culture is wholly American, from their language to fashion stylings to music, upbringing—their everything. But when you have morons calling their parents and elder relatives rapists and murderers, and call young Mexican-Americans unworthy of the U.S. and want 11 million undocumented folks deported, wrapping themselves in the Mexican flag is a righteous chinga tu madre to the white supremacy that wants them gone (and, yes, Virginia: Trump-supporting minorities can subscribe to white supremacy, too—know your decolonial imaginary!). 

 Take it from this pocho. Gustavo is spot on. 

Spanish-speaking people of Nuestra America have been under attack since, if not before, 1846 when the US, in its violent westward expansionist tradition, declared war against Mexico to steal its territories of Alta California, Nuevo Mexico, Tejas, Colorado, and Nevada. It would have conquered all of Mexico if not for its white supremacist leadership, especially Southern slaveholders like South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun (aka, the pro-slavery Fire-Eater) concerned with a replacement theory of the time, as today, opposed to the incorporation of more Brown people into the nation’s fold replacing the numerical power of whites.

In 1849, Henry David Thoreau, in Civil Disobedience, censured this war, as did Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln, along with an antagonism to the nation’s enslavement of Black people and the inexorable extermination of Native Americans. Students of Nuestra America learn these truths in the Chicana/o+ histories instructed by veterana/o college MEChistas who are now educators and advisors of MEChA clubs in high schools and colleges. From their study of settler colonial treatises of Manifest Destiny, Chicana/o+ students, and other colonized peoples of the Global South, compare themselves to Palestinians as our lands have been similarly stolen from us by terrorist Puritans and pioneers, Texas Rangers, vigilantes, and a pro-capitalist US legal system. They have studied the works of Chicana/o+ scholars who have documented these truths, largely, unaddressed in mainstream US history courses, that censor our autochthonous heritage and deceitfully label Raza, our people, as alien. As protest placards state about the US invasion of Mexico and its northern territories in 1846, “We Did Not Cross the Border. The Border Crossed Us.”

Student walkout at Oxnard High School, Friday, January 31, 2025

Chicana/o+ peoples will not be erased from the land and history. Analogous to our Palestinian camaradas, in and out of Palestine, our numbers are growing. Such data unhinges replacement theory-obsessed Magabrones.

At the Sunday demonstration, I reconnected with a former student who is now a high school counselor and co-advisor of her campus’s MEChA club. I asked her how Chicana/o Studies manifests in the protest. She responded that Chicana/o Studies teaches our students that this attack on our immigrant community is not new. We, as a people, have been to this rodeo before and have persevered through the racism initiated in 1929 at the start of the Great Depression, Operation Wetback of the 1950s (how much more racist could this epithet, coined by US leaders, be), California governor Pete Wilson’s chauvinistic promotion of Proposition 187, and the failed congressional Republican attempt to charge with felonies undocumented immigrants and their allies under H.R. 4437 in 2006. These assaults on our immigrant communities did not erase us; instead, they amplified our resolve and numbers.

 

A 1994 file photo of students from various Oxnard high schools who skipped classes and gathered in Plaza Park in Oxnard to protest Proposition 187, the polarizing ballot initiative that sought to make life miserable for unauthorized immigrants and their children. (Bruce K. Huff / Los Angeles Times) 

 Furthermore, my former student stated that Chicana/o Studies teaches us to defend and provide succor to each other—politically, legally, socially, and in terms of our mental health—as a community in solidarity with other communities also under parallel attack.

Venceremos.

 

VC MEChA, at Oxnard’s placita, Monday, February 3, 2025

Family Cars and Other Things Over Time: Mom and Me

Mom, Ramona Piñon Barajas, worked seasonally in Oxnard’s packing and canning plants—Sunkist’s Seaboard Lemon Association, Stokely Van Camp Frozen Foods, and La Chileria of Heublein, Inc. With adjacent ice works, these food factories lined along Oxnard Boulevard, Fifth Street, and railroad tracks that redoubted the predominantly ethnic Mexican barrio of La Colonia.

The parents and grandparents of many of my friends, past and present, sweated there, too, after graduating from working out in the sun into the shade, so to speak. As detailed by historian Vicki L. Ruiz, in her poetically composed narrative Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950 (1987), women and men struggled to provide via a culture that coalesced commercial forces of industry and media with their lives of community, family, and identity. For example, my ethnic Mexican parents—mom an immigrant from Chihuahua and dad first-generation US born in Rancho Sespe—met at the Seaboard packinghouse, Ramona later became a Teamster at La Chileria, and over time they became compadres several times over with like mixed-citizenship, lower-middle class coworkers.

At the kitchen table, Mom regularly recounted in Spanish Teamster matters with Dad. The words unión, pención, salario, and a union rep named Arturo (Chevarria) were often discussed. From these conversations and forced more than once as a boy to cross United Farm Worker picket lines at a small market along Wooley Road to complete mom’s mandado to purchase needed vegetables or a pound of ground beef for dinner, I learned how unions fought for workers. Later I would eavesdrop on repeated stories at my paternal grandparents’ home about how they and other union families were evicted from the Rancho Sespe citrus workers camp during the Ventura County Citrus Strike of 1941 to make room for los missouris, scab replacements of the Great Depression era Dust Bowl.

Mom worked the swing shift at canneries from about 4:30 pm-1 am. Dad commuted from Oxnard to Northridge to his job as an aerospace, electronics assembler. He left the house at 6 am. As a child, I was half awake as he prepared breakfast and lunch while listening to Spanish-language news and music on KOXR radio. As dad returned home from work around 5:30-6 pm, my Aunt Connie, my Nina, too, and Dad’s hermana, picked up my sister and me at our “I” Street home before Mom left to work for us to stay at her house on Popular Street until Dad picked us up. (Later, as adolescents, we became latchkey kids) While my Nino Ray was alive, my Nina did not work after they married as he would not allow it; her job was to take care of my two cousins and the house.

I enjoyed Nina’s inimitably tasty Mexican food, particularly her homemade flour tortillas and fried beans. Mom’s cooking was just as delicious; palatably, however, their fried beans (sometimes refried if any were ever leftover, which was not often), rice, and homemade tortillas (produced hot off the comal as fast they were eaten) were different. The ingredients (butter, lard, pepper, garlic, salt, water, etc.) used or not, and at varying amounts, made their cooking delectably unalike. No wonder I was a "husky" boy up until high school.

After my Nino Ray succumbed to a brain tumor in 1983, Nina resumed work at Seaboard.

I enjoyed my Nina’s car rides as she drove a muscular—now considered a classic—1965, Pontiac GTO. It was black with a thin blood-red pinstripe to match the car’s snazzy bucket-seat interior. I was also intrigued by how my Nino, a carpenter by trade, and Nina each had their own flare maneuvering the GTO’s Muncie three-speed stick shift transmission. My Nino Ray showed off the engine’s torque by rapidly accelerating the car to a high rpm before entering the next gear. Nina, on the other hand, drove the GTO in a cruise-like manner; the engine unstressed as she efficiently increased the car’s speed.

The GTO’s red interior with chrome trim also had a unique scent. Not a new car smell but of a particular pleather as its seats were not of cowhide. I believe.

  

 Cowboy Frankie P. Barajas and my Aunt/nina Connie in her 1965, Pontiac GTO. You can see bucket seats and red pinstripe, faintly, below the car door window.

 

1965, Pontiac GTO, almost identical to my Nino’s and Nina’s, sans the interior color and lack of pinstripe. Image courtesy of the internet.

 

The interior of my parents’ 1969 Chevelle whiffed of the canning season in which mom worked. For strawberries, the car smelled, well, like fresas. Broccoli like brócoli. And during the season of chiles, the Chevelle (aka the Malibu. I don’t know why) acidly wreaked of peppers. The ineradicable smell of the preserved product was intensified as Mom left her translucent plastic slickers and gloves in the car. I imagine she did not want our Levittown-styled house to stink as such as she had a preternatural olfactive sense.

1969, Chevelle/Malibu, a spitting image of the one we owned. Rims, hubcaps, and all. Image courtesy of the internet.

Similarly, the car of my grandparents always had the more agreeable fragrance of lemons as they both worked at the Seaboard packinghouse and transported stores of limones to be divvied to family and friends. Consequently, our family and friends were never of want of gratis limones and most produce due to this communist ethos at the expense of agribusiness.

At the packinghouse, Grandpa (from Michoacan, Mexico) ran and maintained the machine that fabricated lemon crates; Grandma (born in South Texas) graded lemons; the highest stamped with the Sunkist seal, many loads shipped to Japan. At times, Mom or Nina took us to the Seaboard plant to visit my grandparents during their lunch break. The women packinghouse workers sat in one area while the men played cards in another.

The Sunkist company founded the Seaboard plant in 1936, and it mysteriously burned down in March of this year; it smoldered for days; Dad said it was due to the tri-level flooring being asphalt.

 

March 2024, Oxnard Seaboard plant destruction by fire.

The last car my grandparents owned was a 1977, banana yellow Chevrolet Monte Carlo with a black interior, purchased brand new as most of their vehicles. Like the 1958 and 1964 Super Sport (i.e., top-of-the-line) Impalas they owned before, it was an army tank of a vehicle. Heavy and sound with a gas-guzzling 350, V-8 engine.

1977, Chevrolet Monte Carlo just like my grandparents’. Image courtesy of the internet.

Grandparents, Josephine Hernández Barajas and Frank Vargas Barajas.

Between canning seasons, Mom collected state unemployment, monthly, as legislators subsidized agribusiness with a stable surplus supply of local workers. This was a special time for me. When these checks arrived, my mom, sister, and I carpooled with my Tia Elida and cousins Beanie (aka, Vince) and Robert from Moorpark to shop in the City of Ventura. Mom and Tia Elida, sisters-in-law, chatted in Spanish and laughed like teenage girls at a sleepover. One year, Tia Elida, married to my dad’s brother Vincent, drove a raven 1973, Buick Riviera. Like the Monte Carlo, it was a beast of a car with a characteristic widow’s-peak-shaped rear end. As a reward for enduring their marathon shopping, which resulted in limited purchases, and girl talk, Mom and Tia Elida treated their chamacos to milkshakes, hamburgers, and fries. This made us happier than marranitos in mud.

1973, Buick Riviera. Image courtesy of the internet.

One season, Mom slipped and fell hard on the water-drenched concrete floor of La Chileria, severely injuring her back. I remember vividly her sitting at the kitchen table in tearful agony as she recounted her accident to Dad. Physically she was never the same; she took painkillers regularly afterward to function. On top of this, over time her hands and wrists swelled and knotted from rheumatoid arthritis that I attribute to the years of repetitive motion she performed canning hot and cold food products. When she suffered most from physical pain, Mom admonished me to always take care of my back. Periodically suffering bouts of sciatica, I have a minute sense of the skeletal misery mom experienced until she passed.

Mom and me. 1988 CSU Fresno, B.A. degree graduation.

After her injury, she did not return to work at La Chileria. Mom concentrated on the development of her women’s clothing, house ornaments, and anything else that could be legally sold business. Since then, our Chevelle never smelled of brócoli, chiles, and fresas again.

C/S

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