How Did We Get Here? Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Naive Nativists

Frank P. Barajas
November 6, 2025
Center for Community Engagement: Professor Georgina Guzman; Pilar Pacheco, Interim Director of Strategic Engagement and Mission Based Initiatives; and Jennifer Raymond, Community Partner


How Did We Get Here? Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Naive Nativists


Opening Story: Living The Dream--Once Upon a Time circa 1988 a MA student

When I reflect upon the question of immigration, and such policies of restriction and deportation, I think of my community of Oxnard, my friends, my family, and CSU Channel Islands students, immigrants, and the sons, daughters, theys, and mixed-family progeny of immigrants: grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren.

I am the proud son of an immigrant mother and immigrant and migrant grandparents from the states of Chihuahua and Michoacan in Mexico, and South Texas. Before my cultural deracination by California’s school system, Spanish was my childhood first language. But with every elementary grade, English by-and-by became my dominant verbal way to communicate. My parents addressed me in Spanish, and, over time, I responded, more and more, in English. I remember speaking with my grandparents in Spanish. But as I got older, the conversations with my maternal Abuelita, Doña Rita, particularly, became progressively brief to the point of my only deferential greetings, short pleasantries, and warm farewells. As a young adult, when I did attempt to converse at length with my Abuelita, who always referred to me as mi rey (that always boosted my self-esteem), she often looked at me with a countenance of bewilderment that I interpreted as “What in the world is he trying to say.”

By the way, only a few years ago, I learned, disappointedly, from a rival prima that my Abuelita referred to all my cousins, the US-born and immigrant alike, some documented and others undocumented, I suspect, as mi rey and mi reina. So much for my being the one and only king. No matter, her endearing reverence instilled in me an internalized sense of worth.

Then there were my neighborhood friends and classmates, many immigrants, all of the working class, some I would learn later, whose parents and grandparents were immigrants from Armenia, China, Japan, the Philippines, Iran, the former Soviet Union, and Taiwan. This was particularly the case in college. At CSU Fresno, several of my favorite professors were immigrant refugees from Nazi Germany, China/Taiwan, Hungary, and fascist Spain. As educators, they shared unique, fascinating, perspectives and personal stories from those of my US-born professors.

Professor John W. Bohnstedt and his dislike of communists.

This is all to say that I harbor a profound affinity for immigrants and immigrant cultures. Consequently, our current white-supremacist, terrorist policies toward immigrants, all immigrants, not just the undocumented, are a personal attack on my family and community of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, now, more than ever, considered a suspect class during this time of mass incarceration and deportation.

But as a historian, I understand US immigration history as being grounded in a White-supremacist racial capitalism as posited by Cedric Robinson, author of the authoritative book on race, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, published in 1983. Interestingly, a racial capitalism in which Western Europeans, racialized colonized Europeans such as the Irish and Eastern European Slavic peoples, with the decline of feudalism, as they oppressively seized and occupied their lands. A settler colonial system adopted by the US in which, in the view of Mahmood Mamdani (the father of New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani), in Neither Settler nor Native (2020), “states have often treated settlers as citizens, and natives as aliens.” We see this in the Israeli occupation of Palestine and here in the US, as Indigenous people, such as the Chumash, are often mistaken for Mexican immigrants.

As fearfully anticipated by historically minded people, the current Trump administration has now expanded the discussion from the mass deportation of the undocumented to the revocation of the legal residency and naturalization of documented immigrants. Just last week, Vice President J.D. Vance reiterated the Trump administration’s position to vastly curtail the entrance of immigrants as a whole “to build a sense of common identity.” This racist dog whistle, more a dog howl, of the ethnic cleansing of non-white immigrants is historical. Historian Ronald Takaki, in his important book Strangers From a Different Shore (1989), documented such racist promulgations of our nation’s founders: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and others. In 1923, the US Supreme Court noted such American values when it opined in US. v. Bhagat Singh Thind, “The children of English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, and other European parentage, quickly merge into the mass of our population and lose the distinctive hallmarks of their European origin.” But not non-White immigrants.

For example, with the US’ insatiable demand for immigrant labor, both voluntary, that consisted, largely, of Europe’s unwanted poor, and those who entered the British North American colonies and the new nation without consent or contract, (i.e., enslaved Black people,), the federal government quickly codified racial capitalism in the National Origins Act of 1790 that circumscribed naturalized citizenship, less than one year after the US Constitution ratification in 1789, to white men who met a residency requirement of just two years. Indigenous, enslaved Blacks, and white women could not become citizens with the constitutional protections and privileges that came with US citizenship. This made immigrants of color, especially, political targets as they could never enjoy the scepter of the franchise in elections defend themselves from racist demagogues. This permitted amoral politicians such as President Trump to boorishly scapegoat immigrants with impunity.

Since the mid-19th century onward, the preferred immigrant was of Old Stock origins: Northern and Western European, English or Germanic speaking, and Protestant. Or vernacularly, WASPs: White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants. President Donald Trump echoed this preference in January of 2018 and in mid-October of this year in relation to white English-speaking refugees, particularly from South Africa. Notions of Race Suicide, The Great Replacement Theory, favoring WASP immigration, currently, as in the past, is based in a demographic shift that has been occurring steadily since the Immigration and Nationality (Hart-Celler Act) of 1965 that repealed racist national origins quotas that favored northern and western European immigration, dramatically lowered the proportion of immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and virtually excluded completely the entrance of Asians. Consequently, when nativists such as Vance and Charlie Kirk point to a traditional “white America,” they are referencing, knowingly and naively, a settler-colonial US history of extermination against Indigenous-Native peoples, and the almost complete exclusion of people from all of Asia: China, India, Korea, and the Philippines.

Furthermore, when the question arises of refugees from Chile, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador, and other parts of the developing world, or in the words of Trump, “shit-hole countries,” both craven Democratic and Republican politicians ignore the factor of causation. Or, address the vital question, “Why do immigrant refugees (economic, political, and war) come to the US in the first place?” What is so direly powerful happening in the homeland of refugees to leave their countries with almost nothing materially to travel dangerous journeys to the US? Politicians who commit billions upon billions of dollars to immigration enforcement conveniently omit how presidential administration after presidential administration, both Democrat and Republican, green-lighted the Central Intelligence Agency’s overthrow of governments, democratic and revolutionary, with mirror ideal of our Declaration of Independence, to maintain and install ruthless, bloody dictatorship that advance US corporate interests in oil, rare earth resources for our smart phones and computers, and agricultural products such as sugar, coffee, and bananas. CIA-sponsored dictatorial coups then caused refugee streams to the US. As a Union Del Barrio leader commented to me recently, colonized people ultimately migrate to the center of empires. I first learned of this pattern of CIA-advised upheavals when I read as a graduate student the works of historian William Appleman Williams and Walter LeFeber’s classic Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Latin America (1983). These authors turned on the light bulb, exposing the deception of US foreign policy’s mission to expand democracy globally when in fact the goal is to expand US corporate interests from sea to shining sea. As a Marine Corps veteran, I am reminded of US Marine Corps Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler declaration at an American Legion conference in 1931:

I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service, and during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen 16 Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Indeed, immigration, past and present, is closely tied to an interventionist, capitalist US foreign policy. This is particularly true with the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994, which devastated and displaced two million Mexican small farmers who became economic refugees to the US. Then there are the US-sponsored wars of the same era in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The blatant plan to overthrow the Venezuelan presidency of Nicolas Maduro with the not-so-covert operations of the CIA and severe economic sanctions is the latest case in point. But this did not start with the Trump administration; the presidencies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden considered, if not actively pursued, regime-change in Venezuela in one manner or another. Materially, consider that Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in Latin America. And US oil companies can’t wait to get their hands on this prize.

Immigration policy, particularly of the early twentieth century, is also closely aligned to the eugenics movement of that time that sought to racially engineer the make-up and character of a White America. But the goal to make whites racially great demographically commenced soon after the US instigated war against Mexico in 1846, which conquered over half of Mexico's northern territories with the Spanish-Mexican labels such as Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, Nuevo Mexico, y Tejas. And let us not forget the cities and towns named Camarillo, Calabasas, Hueneme, Saticoy, Malibu, Ojai, Santa Paula, and Simi. The names of these communities and by-and-by states are a reminder that we, ethnic Mexicans and the Chumash in the US, did not cross the border; the border crossed us. Carey McWilliams, the doyenne of California studies, pointed this out in his 1948 germinal book, which served as the foundational text of Chicana/o Studies up to 1972, North From Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States.

One last point on the US attack on Mexico. US expansionists, such as President James K. Polk, contemplated the conquest of all of Mexico, but racists of the ilk of Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina feared for the nation’s racial and demographic supremacy with the inclusion into the union of a largely Mexican indigenous-mestizo population.

US policies of exclusion launched, by-and-by, after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 that ended the US attack on Mexico, with California’s Foreign Miners Tax of 1850 that sought to discourage and expel immigrant miners from China and Latin America, even Mexicans who were not foreign to California, during the Gold Rush. After the completion of the western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, the US Paige Act of 1875 prohibited the immigration of Chinese women. Complemented with anti-miscegenation laws, this law precluded the natural population growth of Chinese Americans. Seven years later, the US passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which excluded Chinese immigrant laborers even though this group made up less than one percent of the total US population. Chinese immigrants became the indispensable enemy, to use the title of Alexander Saxton's groundbreaking book on immigration, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California, published in 1975. Despite the real and proportionally slight number of Chinese immigrants in the country, craven state and national political candidates of the Democratic and Republican parties bent over backwards and forward to anti-Chinese each other in calling for ever more draconian laws of Chinese exclusion permanently extended in 1902.

Similar to the Chinese population in the US in the latter half of the 19th century, today, undocumented immigrants make up less than three percent, or eleven to fourteen million people, of a total US population of 340 million. So, undocumented immigrants are the “indispensable enemy” of the twenty-first century. Without the undocumented to dogpile with social culpabilities, the political dictatorship of the Democratic and Republican parties could no longer effectively deflect the public’s attention from the failings of our capitalist system.

New immigration and a series of laws of restrictions based on a logic of eugenics culminated in the Reed-Johnson Act of 1924, which again, favored northern and western European immigration, severely restricted immigration from southern and Eastern Europe, and essentially excluded people from Asia. At the behest of the agricultural commercial lobby, Congress exempted people of the Western Hemisphere, Canada, and Mexico to access a fluid supply of farm workers essential to the economy.

The Reed-Johnson Act also reified a geographically nebulous US-Mexico border and with this the idea of the illegal immigrant from Mexico and Latin America. As detailed in the prize-winning book by Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (2018), named by The Guardian one of the Five Best Books on White Supremacy, the establishment of the Border Patrol that same year enlisted racist agents, many who former Texas Rangers, an organization infamous for its settler colonial terrorism against ethnic Mexicans. Before Reed-Johnson, the US negotiated with the Meiji government of Japan a ban on immigration from this Asian nation. As opposed to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the US did not unilaterally exclude Japanese immigrants as Japan was an imperial power, itself, that had defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Hence, Japan could not be disrespected with impunity as was Manchu China. So, President Theodore Roosevelt, an ardent promoter of Anglo-Saxonism, US imperialism, and the idea of Race Suicide, negotiated the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement to nearly ban Japanese immigration. Japanese men already in the US were able to replicate themselves demographically, unlike the Chinese, by a family reunification system of fictive Picture Brides.

White growers of California particularly loathed Japanese immigrants as they challenged their supremacy as capitalist agricultural producers. To eliminate the competition of Japanese farmers, a white grower dictatorship lobbied the California legislature to establish the Alien Land Laws of 1913 and 1920 that prohibited land ownership by Japanese. Apparently, the Jeffersonian myth of the yeoman farmer did not apply to non-whites. Although the acts did not explicitly name the Japanese, the legislation targeted them as “Aliens ineligible for citizenship,” unentitled to owning land and holding long-term leases. Language pulled directly from the National Origins Act of 1790. Consequently, Theft, terrorism, legal extortion, and Alien Land Laws are major reasons why California agriculture, and that of the Southwest and nation, is dominated by a dictatorship of a white commercial grower class.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, massive deportation and repatriation campaigns occurred in many parts of the United States. Historians Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez estimate that on million ethnic Mexicans were forced to leave the US, sixty percent US citizens. Then during World War II, the US reinvited Mexican workers to work in the orchards, fields, and railroads of the country under the Bracero Program under the pretense of a labor shortage, disputed by historian Gilbert G. Gonzalez, from 1942 to 1964, when the exploitive, inhuman project became an embarrassment. But soon after its deauthorization in it was repackaged as an H-2A Visa program. In between, the US government instituted another deportation campaign in 1953 labeled Operation Wetback. The takeaway, the US loves Mexican workers and Mexican food, but not the people of Mexico.

Racist acts of exclusion and restriction lived on into my lifetime up to the Immigration and Nationality (Hart-Celler) Act of 1965. As one reform of the civil rights movement, the act eliminated the national origins quota system and exclusions. Consequently, immigration increased from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This law is the basis for the national demographic shift we have seen happening over the last fifty years. Currently, the US consists of some 59% White non-Hispanic, Hispanic (the majority ethnic Mexican) 19%, 12% Black, Asian 7%, Indigenous 3%. By 2045, the US Census Bureau estimates that the white population will be a minority. Based on a sense of demographic, social, and political supremacy lost, tethered to the decline of the material well-being of the middle class leading to a general status anxiety, first coined by the eminent historian Richard Hofstadter in the 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Age of Reform, the Trump Administrations has politically capitalized on angst to make white supreme again.

**Comments on Resistance. Comments on Civic Engagement

But I refuse to be silent. Speaking up by way of these messages and attending protests is my way to live with myself as I think of Reverend Martin Niemöller’s trenchant poem, First They Came:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.

C/S
fpb

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

fpb