Twenty-one Days Later: A Ventura County Perspective on the Chicano Moratorium of 1970

 Last month hundreds of people marked with moxie the 50^th anniversary of the August 29^th, 1970 Chicano Moratorium in East Los Angeles. To protest our nation’s war in Vietnam, racism, and police brutality, starting at 9 am that day nearly 30,000 ethnic Mexicans and their allies from all over the Southwest took to the streets in a 3-mile peace march through the boulevards of Atlantic and Wilshire.

                                                      (Sal Castro / Los Angeles Public Library)

Among many slogans, they chanted and held signs expressing, “¡Raza Si! ¡Guerra No!,” “Our Fight Is Not in Vietnam,  “Chicano Power,” and “Stop Chicano Genocide!”

In the spirit of the Black Lives Matter movement since George Floyd’s killing by, now, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin this May, the protests of Chicanos today concentrate on law enforcement’s abuse of power as marchers have crooned, “¡La migra, la policia, la misma porqueria!” As well as “¡Chinga tu frontera!,” and the classic “¡El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido!”

                                   50th Chicano Moratorium Education Website Facebook

All chants, then and now, denounced state violence against Black and Brown people in one form or another.

Ethnic Mexican veterans are among the valiant dating back to the Civil War. But in 1970 Chicanos protested how US casualties in Vietnam disproportionately consisted of young men from their communities in the Southwest as Dr. Ralph Guzmán documented that from 1961 to 1967 their brothers and friends made up 19.4 percent of those who died when this group consisted of 10 to 12 percent of the population.

Today, Chicanos protest the killings of Latina and Latino soldiers. Army Private First Class Vanessa Guillen stationed at Fort Hood being one and Specialist Enrique Roman-Martinez of the 82^nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg another. Roman-Martinez’s sister and mother delivered impassioned speeches at Atlantic Park in East L.A. before the commencement of the 50^th-anniversary march this past August 29^th. They criticized the Army for its less than transparent investigation and decried only having received Enrique Roman-Martinez’s partial remains.

In 1970, the Brown Berets of Los Angeles, along with UCLA student Rosalio Muñoz and others formed the National Chicano Moratorium Committee that organized demonstrations in Southern California previously and afterward. But the August 29^th march and rally at the then-named Laguna park was the granddaddy of them all.

                            Rosalio Urias Munoz Facebook photos

Once at Laguna park, families and friends celebrated the occasion’s success as they listened to heartfelt speeches, poetry, and admired children in rainbow-colored outfits dance to the music of mariachis. Home movie footage captured the pride and delight of the audience on that toasty August day.

Then tragedy struck. With the pretext of a robbery at a nearby liquor store, Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies and police stormed the peaceful assembly with batons and teargas. The law enforcement instigated riot resulted in three deaths and hundreds arrested and abused. Ruben Salazar, a former Los Angeles Times reporter turned KMEX-TV news director, considered the voice of the Chicano community, was one of the slain as he stopped at the Silver Dollar Bar far away from the melee, on Whittier Blvd, to decompress from law enforcement’s merciless assault.

After several contradictory official explanations, it was found that Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy Thomas Wilson killed Salazar with a 10-inch teargas projectile designed to pierce walls. Many in the community contended then, and believe now, that the powers that be in Los Angeles conspired to assassinate Salazar due to his refusal to temper his reportage of law enforcement misconduct.

In adjacent Ventura County, the Chicano community also viewed Salazar’s homicide as the system’s culling of its leadership. In a September 3, 1970 letter to the Ventura County Star-Free Press titled, “Siesta Is Over!” Arthur Gómez of Santa Paula addressed Governor Ronald Reagan and local elected officials when he stated, “Yes, the siesta is over! The siesta was broken by the murder of two innocent Mexican nationals in a Los Angeles hotel and the 10-inch projectile that shattered Ruben Salazar’s head… One day we shall not have our leaders murdered. One day we shall not have our children made ashamed of being part Mexican. One day we shall have justice and dignity.”

Intrepidly, Chicano men and women conducted a peace march twenty-one days after law enforcement’s rampage in East Los Angeles. This time in the City of Oxnard on September 19th. Approximately, 1,000 marchers from all walks of life, different communities, and a span of generations again took to the streets.

As a former Brown Beret, Peggy Larios recalled how the participatory support of elderly ethnic Mexican men and women made her feel safe as a young teenager.

In their planning that started weeks, if not months, in advance of the August 29^th tragedy, the organizers declared the community’s goal of liberation as well as the end of Chicano genocide in Vietnam and police brutality.

Leading up to the “La Raza” (the People’s) peace march, men and women of the Brown Berets leafleted neighborhoods to promote the demonstration and, to further ensure amity at the event, disseminated a code of conduct to the public, the Oxnard Police Department, and media.

            Oxnard Press-Courier. September 20, 1970 photo by Ted Nauman

From La Virgin de Guadalupe Church, demonstrators paraded boldly through the streets of La Colonia barrio (Oxnard’s version of East LA) and the downtown district with a coffin that symbolized 8,000 ethnic Mexican servicemen killed in Vietnam. The procession ended at the city’s Community Center. There, as national chairman for the Chicano Moratorium Committee, Muñoz characterized the Vietnam War as the “systematic murder” of Chicanos.

Muñoz also linked US militarism abroad with domestic state violence when he stated that the, “Police instill more fear and harass the Chicanos more than the Viet Cong through their prejudices.”

To avoid an August 29^th-like catastrophe, the Brown Berets of Oxnard, the Ventura County chapter of the Mexican American Political Association, and MEChA representatives from local colleges and high schools met in advance with law enforcement.

La Raza Moratorium Committee’s communication with law enforcement and the press garnered the community’s goodwill for the event’s achievement. Indeed, the Oxnard Press-Courier commended the organizers in an editorial as it acknowledged the disproportionate ethnic Mexican casualty rate in the Vietnam War. It also complimented in a backhanded manner law enforcement in general, for its “diplomacy and restraint.”

Fifty years later, Chicanos are proud of being ethnic Mexicans. But with the controversial homicides of Latino soldiers and civilians such as PFCs Guillen and Roman-Martinez on the one hand and Andres Guadardo, shot in the back by a LA County sheriff’s deputy, on the other, we, Chicanas and Chicanos, still await justice.

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CSU Channel Islands Chicana/o Studies Dept. Statement

The Chicana/o Studies Department of CSUCI affirms our support for AB 1460
July 24, 2020

Statement Rejecting Chancellor Timothy White’s White Washed Requirement adopted by the California State University Board of Trustees

Systemic racism is alive and well in the Chancellor’s Office of the California State University and Board of Trustees by the passage of a so-called “Ethnic Studies-Social Justice” requirement, essentially ignoring Ethnic Studies Faculty across the CSU system. His move to preemptively undermine the passage of AB 1460, continues the legacy of white supremacy in education. A close analysis of the final vote reveals that the majority in favor of Chancellor White’s watered-down, white-washed proposal were majority white trustees. Those who voted against the measure were Latinx and Black trustees.

Since 1492 to the present, European settler colonists and their progeny have not only occupied and stolen the lands, freedom, and liberty of people of the Americas, Africa, and Asia but also nearly destroyed their histories to indoctrinate the young and old with a sanitized past to suit their racist interests. In this tradition of white supremacy, Chancellor Timothy White’s paternalistic and Orwellian double-speak substitution of his diluted Ethnic Studies-Social Justice requirement, adopted on July 22, 2020 by the CSU board of trustees, is attempting to thwart AB 1460 Ethnic Studies soon to be on the desk of Governor Gavin Newsom to be made law, is another example of how people of African, Asian, Chicanx/Latinx, and Native American ancestry are being told by European settler colonist, “We know what’s best for you little brown brothers.”

Chancellor White’s alternative proposal diverts students away from genuine Ethnic Studies courses by allowing them to take pseudo, undefined social justice classes in their place to graduate. This is like telling students that “All Lives Matter” instead of Black Lives Matter.” Ethnic Studies is rooted in the critical examination of racism, white supremacy, anti-racism, racial equity, unlike Social Justice that has its origins in theology, philosophy and criminal justice (a contradictory place to examine the Black Live Matter movement) and calls for the abstract ideal of “equality.” Whereas Social Justice advocates for equality by treating everyone the same and giving everyone the same opportunities, Ethnic Studies strives for equity, which refers to just and proportional representation (by race, class, gender, and other intersectionalities, etc.) in those same opportunities. Another problem with Chancellor White’s notion of “Social Justice” is that it advances colorblindness in a society replete with institutional racism. In fact, the editors of Seeing Race Again: Counterblindness across the Disciplines argue that social justice discourse has been ineffective in pushing back against colorblindness.

We are concerned about what kinds of courses will count towards fulfilling a "social justice" requirement at CSUCI. We already have a watered down Multicultural Perspectives (MP) requirement that can be fulfilled by such courses as “The Beach” and “What is Art?” and “Musical Theatre.” Like the MP requirement, the Social Justice requirement continues the cosmetic and ineffectual approach to a deep understanding of the histories of the four historically racialized groups (African Americans, Native Americans, Chicanas/os- Latinas/os and Asian American). Additionally, by what metric will that social justice pedagogy be measured if we extract a critical examination of race from out of that equation? How will we know what is being passed as "social justice"? That requirement is incredibly vague and will lead to a non-critical, non-racial general education. For example, will classes that examine Plato and Aristotle count as "social justice" courses?

They would technically be examining these issues but would be devoid of any contemporary applications. We demand a curriculum that addresses the current rise of white supremacy along with anti-Black, anti- Latina/o, anti-Asian, and anti-Indigenous sentiment in our country; we demand a curriculum that provides our students with the tools to critique and dismantle these dynamics and ensure that we keep something close to a democracy in the future of this country.

Furthermore, Chancellor White is hiding behind the veneer of local autonomy, allowing campuses and their GE committees to determine the Ethnic Studies requirement, without having to defer to Ethnic Studies faculty experts, who are predominantly people from underrepresented communities, in this academic field. Where is the disciplinary deference? Would we ever pass the GWAR requirement without input  from English Faculty? No. Would we also allow the quantitative reasoning requirement without input from Mathematics? I don't think so.

Chancellor White’s requirement is an example of a racist policy. A “racist policy” according to Ibram Kendi is as “any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups.” A racist policy uses euphemisms and vague and dishonest language (eg. social justice) around naming specific groups that leads to generic strategies, usually coming from a Whiteness perspective. AB-1460 is an anti-racist policy because it avoids vagueness and names four historically racialized groups (African Americans, Native Americans, Chicanas/os-Latinas/os and Asian Americans) and identifies the CSU policy (Generation Education) as institutional racism as the reason for inequality in the outcomes experienced by historically racialized groups.

Therefore, once again, the white supremacist power structure of the California State University, that Chancellor White leads, refuses historically underrepresented faculty the freedom to self-determine, design, and teach their own Ethnic Studies requirement to a majority people of color student body.

Chancellor Timothy White’s Whitewashed Requirement is Racist; AB-1460 is Anti-Racist.
Stop the white supremacy of Chancellor White and support self-determination and Anti-Racism by demanding that Gov. Gavin Newsom sign AB 1460!

Chicana/o Studies Department at CSU Channel Islands

(916) 445-2841

https://govapps.gov.ca.gov/gov40mail/

Hey PAL!: Community Discussion on Racism and Policing

One reason why I write has to do with the influence such reflections have had on me as a student curious about the lives of people long finished. For example, in my study of archival material, I have been moved by the letters of persons composed decades before my existence, who, in one moment of time, by some vocation, expressed the frustrations and aspirations of not only themselves but also the communities from which they came. In such texts, there also lives a courage. There is little danger to express audacious, ephemeral views in the spoken amongst friendly company. But to cast durable perspectives in the written with the intention to sway the thinking of both ideological friends and adversaries requires moxie.

Furthermore, I germinate into the electronic ether perspectives and observations with the, perhaps vain, hope that after I have long stopped breathing that a similar person, another historian, maybe, into the future will read a meditation or two of mine to get a sense what my community struggled against.

Hence, the below.

On Saturday June 13, 2020, I attended an Oxnard community forum titled, “The Talk…Expression Dialogue and Change.” Subsequently, I watched the Tuesday July 1, 2020 television broadcast of the Oxnard City Council Special Meeting named, “Virtual Panel Discussion on Racism and Policing.” Both events responded largely, but not exclusively, to the merciless Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd on May 25th.

On both occasions, I hung on the words of African American residents of Ventura County—attorneys, a retired Oxnard Police commander, managers, and educators—as they reprised their experiences with racist law enforcement officers in and out of Oxnard. Several detailed questionable, if not outright bogus, police stops while driving— such pretenses included the driver “fit the description” sham. Their true trespass for being pulled over by police, however, was most likely driving while Black.

In being questioned by the police if they were either on probation or parole (not if they were), they all detailed being treated, first and foremost, as criminals not citizens who warranted equal justice under the law. Why not? Because they are Black people.

After listening to their testimony of being interrogated by the police, I sensed that they were all one step of way from arrest to be body-cavity searched in jail. That’s how cruel and humiliating they described their detainment.

I also heeded a particularly new insight as participants in both events referenced their experiences with the Police Activities League (PAL) of Oxnard. At “The Talk,” Kingsley Garrick, who worked with PAL for some fifteen years believing he was doing the right thing helping kids, described a culture less than positive for youth mandated to complete community service at his site. In fact, he stated, “We [the police and staff at the PAL program] would perceive them as bad kids.” Then Mayte Alonzo spoke as President of the Youth Directors Council of PAL. Despite her service with PAL, she stated that she always feared the police and continues to do so. This dread was recently reinforced as she was terrorized by the police at a Washington, D.C. demonstration.

This testimony struck me as I wrongly presumed that the two, as having worked closely with law enforcement, were going to present deferential perspectives on the police. After all, a goal of PAL is to improve police relations with the community. Instead, to my wonder, they, and other participants on both occasions, described an entrenched culture of racism in law enforcement. As a result, both discussions left me pessimistic that the present system of unwarranted deadly police force and the mass incarceration of people of color will be dismantled significantly any time soon. Especially by pusillanimous elected officials terrified of being politically targeted by police unions for imagining a updated financial model for public safety.

One other point that struck me was Oxnard Police Chief Scott Whitney’s July 1st public defense of the use of the carotid restraint (i.e., chokehold) in situations to defend the lives of officers and the community. As a former Division 1 NCAA wrestler, I can say without reservation, there are means to effectively control a person without the use of a chokehold to render a person unconscious, period. I especially oppose the use of the carotid chokehold when there is more than one officer at a scene.

In closing, Oxnard Police Department officers cut short the lives of Meagan Hockaday (d. 3/28/15), Alfonso Limon (d. 10/13/12), Michael Mahoney (d. 8/14/12), Robert Ramirez (d. 6/23/12), and Juan Zavala (d. 6/28/2014). Consequently, any City of Oxnard official, elected and appointed, who condemns the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police must also memorialize their deaths. Especially Robert Ramirez who, like Floyd and Eric Garner in New York, could not breathe as the medical examiner of Ventura County determined his death a police homicide from prone restraint asphyxia—choking.

Only then can we, as a community, have an authentic conversation on police violence elsewhere.

CODA
People against police violence established a local Black Lives Matter Ventura County Chapter. For more information visit: https://www.facebook.com/groups/blmventuracounty/permalink/991049838001191/

References:
“The Talk…Expression Dialogue and Change”
https://www.facebook.com/vijay.nunn/videos/10217081551019494/

City Council Special Meeting: Virtual Panel Discussion on Racism and Policing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvXc3Ww2Z80&fbclid=IwAR2AwzzRR9tyVlDhWASZUhkdMkJITRoxU-VM3EuGfpRqCCjsyzJ1Mzq_vu0

The Vexation of History In An Age Of Police Violence

Oxnard Police Department officers cut short the lives of Meagan Hockaday (d. 3/28/15), Alfonso Limon (d. 10/13/12), Michael Mahoney (d. 8/14/12), Robert Ramirez (d. 6/23/12), and Juan Zavala (d. 6/28/2014).

Consequently, any City of Oxnard official who empathetically condemns the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police must also memorialize their deaths. Especially Robert Ramirez who, like Floyd and Eric Garner in New York, could not breathe as the medical examiner of Ventura County determined his death a police homicide from prone restraint asphyxia—choking.

Only then can we, as a community, have an authentic conversation on police violence elsewhere.

Meanwhile, we ought to recognize the ways in which the legacies of historical systems of white supremacy continue today in the disproportionate mass incarceration of people of color due to racist and sexist institutions of education, the administration of justice, health care, housing, and employment. This fact is easily proven by noticing who dominates such leadership posts as well as enjoys such privileged life chances.

Academics such as Rodolfo F. Acuña, Michele Alexander, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Ronald Takaki, and others have long written on the historical echoes and rhymes of slavery, the genocide of Native American peoples, and the wars of conquest over the territories of Mexico. In fact, as Henry David Thoreau argued in Civil Disobedience published in 1849, these are the original sins of our nation which recent trespasses have demonstrated that we, as a nation, have yet to atone.

Instead a societal amnesia, if not a denial, persist.

As we denounce the ruthless killing of not only George Floyd but also Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, the people of Ventura County must also reckon with its past before any reconciliation can be pursued.

For instance, in July of 1971 residents of Oxnard’s La Colonia neighborhood revolted against the Oxnard Police Department. For two consecutive Sunday nights, Chicano youth confronted the police with epithets, rocks, bottles, and sniper fire. In the process, buildings were set ablaze. It got so bad that law enforcement back up was called in from neighboring cities.

The next year, Chicano youth of Santa Paula similarly resisted police abuse in and out of the downtown district for at least three consecutive Sunday nights. Young men and women also cursed the police, exchanged gunfire, and shattered the windows of schools and businesses. To quell the insurrection and maintain the peace, Santa Paula Police Chief Ray Tull, for at least a month’s time, depended on reinforcements from the California Highway Patrol, Sheriff’s Department as well as the police departments of Oxnard, Ojai, Port Hueneme, and Ventura.

In both instances, Oxnard and Santa Paula city officials proclaimed ignorance to the root causes of the rebellions. Instead, they deflected responsibility and blamed the actions on outsiders. The righteous indignation of Chicano youth and their elders, however, would not be silenced.

The newspapers of the Oxnard Press-Courier and the Santa Paula Daily Chronicle reported on the courageous demonstrations of Chicano youth in front of police department buildings, their statements, and face-to-face conversations with the city councils and police chiefs. Their indictments encompassed incessant police harassment in the form of gruff contacts, provocations, and brutality. They also pointed to racism in schools as well as restricted recreation and job opportunities.

Although positive change resulted from the protest movements and dialogues of the 1960s and ’70s, a continuity of oppression continues in stark racial disparities in COVID-19 infections and deaths, access to health care, academic achievement, and the prison industrial complex.

In Oxnard, this past Saturday’s protest of George Floyd’s killing drew hundreds of people from all walks of life. Speakers linked racist policing tactics afar to this city. Resident Stephanie Turner, for example, decried the Oxnard police for the regular racial profiling of her Black sons. And an African American father spoke to how his wife feared for his life whenever he drove the community's streets.

As an educator and lifelong resident of Ventura County, I have heeded the testimonies of young people stopped and detained by police on bogus traffic infractions. One account detailed how a police officer yelled “stop resisting” as he beat a compliant detainee.

I, myself, as a fifty-year-old man, experienced a police contact that opened with the cavalier lie of an officer. Before this episode ended, I found myself surrounded by four cops.

In driving through Ventura County, I’ve witnessed detained motorist, usually adult men of color, sitting on the curb of streets, with their heads downcast in humiliation, as a coven of police with terminator-style sunglasses jocularly pastime.

Quotidian experiences such as these is the tinder that fuels a visceral antipathy toward law enforcement.

A significant solution to ending police misconduct is for elected officials to stop fearing law enforcement unions who will brand them as soft on crime for publicly raising legitimate concerns. For example, when I criticized the City of Oxnard’s adoption of its constitutionally flawed civil gang injunction, council members confided with me their reservations with this tool.

But these elected officials dared not doing so in council chambers to avoid being targeted in their reelection campaigns by the Oxnard Peace Officers Association as anti-police or, worse, pro-gang.

But if more elected officials took stances that condemned misconduct on the part of law enforcement no matter the political fallout, such as in the case of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, city by city people of color will live their lives with a diminished fear for just being. Then a reconciliation can begin.

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History News Network

Frank P. Barajas is a professor and chair of history at California State University Channel Islands. His forthcoming book is titled, Mexican Americans with Moxie: A Tran-Generational History of El Movimiento Chicano in Ventura County California, 1945-1975. University of Nebraska Press.

A Book Review: The Injustice Never Leaves You

786 The Journal of American History December 2019

The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas. By Monica Muñoz Martinez. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. 387 pp. $35.00.)

Using a transgenerational lens, Monica Muñoz Martinez cogently narrates a supplementary corrective to the history of the Texas Rangers from the bottom up. Since the early twentieth century, families who suffered the cold-blooded violence of this agency petitioned authorities in the United States and Mexico for legal justice. More recently, the progeny of these victims contested the way the state of Texas whitewashed its inglorious past. (Image of Texas Rangers over the bodies of killed Mexicans. Univ. of Texas Brisco Center for American History)

Martinez’s central thesis demonstrates “the long legacies of violence” in Texas (p. 8). In the process, the author informs readers that only within the last forty years have historians exposed the Texas Rangers and the outfit’s white supremacist enablers, in and out of public institutions, for what it was, a legalized terrorist organization. The hagiography of the historian Walter Prescott Webb in The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense (1935), however, continues to dominate the public’s imagination via the popularity of the radio program turned television series The Lone Ranger during the 1930s and 1950s as well as with the recycled fiction in the action drama show Walker, Texas Ranger (1993–2001).

Martinez also persuasively contends that the Texas Rangers criminalized ethnic Mexicans through the organization’s use of the bandit trope to justify its extrajudicial killings. This label would be refashioned with the “illegal alien” slur after the passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 and creation of the Border Patrol. In fact, former Rangers often joined this new agency and in doing so defined its propensity for merciless violence against Mexican immigrants.

But as Martinez states, “this book also highlights the long efforts to reckon with loss and shows that mourning can be a practice of resistance, passed from generation to generation, continuing even a century later” (p. 9). Adroitly, the author supports this claim in the discussion of vernacular-history making practiced by the descendants of Antonio Rodriguez, who was lynched (actually, burned alive), the shooting in the back of Jesus Bazán and Antonio Longoria, and the massacre of fifteen ethnic Mexican men and boys at Porvenir, Texas. In the pursuit of justice, family members from the 1920s onward pressed transnational investigations. By the creation of alternative accounts in the Spanish-language press, an oral tradition, and the more recent use of the Internet, the offspring of both witnesses and victims embarked upon vernacular-history making that compelled Texas state museums and commissions to mark the names of the victims and survivors of Ranger terrorism. In the process, vernacular historians persuaded officials, appointed and elected, to revise Texas’s official history.

Masterfully researched and argued, Martinez demonstrates how history matters. With the zeal of vernacular historians in the lead and the open-mindedness of scholars, policy makers, librarians, and museum directors, the portrayal of a truer and more inclusive narrative of the past is possible. The Injustice Never Leaves You is recommended for educators at all levels and venues of learning.

Frank P. Barajas
California State University Channel Islands Camarillo, California
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jaz598

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Remembrances, Race, and Role Models: The Renaming of a Middle School

After students of the Richard B. Haydock Academy of Arts and Sciences studied the City of Oxnard’s history, on May 15th of last year two middle schoolers petitioned the Oxnard School District board of trustees to rename their campus. Why? Because Haydock, as an early twentieth century superintendent of the district and a long-time councilmember, espoused racist views toward people of color. Furthermore, as a public official he advanced policies of racial exclusion in housing, public facilities, and schools.

The students discovered this from their study of David G. Garcia’s Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality (2018).

Garcia, a UCLA professor and product of Oxnard’s public schools, documented how city and Ventura County officials purposefully set policies that injured the life chances of people of color by the provision of inferior housing and educational opportunities. While denying services enjoyed by Oxnard’s white residents, in 1917 councilmember Haydock blamed victims of municipal neglect when he stated, “We have laws to prevent the abuse of animals . . . but the people are allowed to abuse themselves. The ignorant are allowed to breed under conditions that become a threat and a menace to the welfare of the community.” Who were “the people” and “The ignorant,” according to Haydock? Ethnic Mexicans.

Four years later, at an Oxnard Rotary Club assembly, Haydock publicly bemoaned the presence of African Americans in the United States. For him and others of his class of this era, such as Superintendent of Ventura County Schools Blanche T. Reynolds, the restriction of people of color was the solution.

(Image Richard B. Haydock, Calisphere)

This history matters as it informs us of persistent social and economic inequities long after racist strategies—in the form restrictive real estate covenants, residential redlining, gerrymandered school attendance boundaries engineered around segregated neighborhoods, and employment practices—were deemed illegal. This knowledge also complicates an appreciation of our nation’s ethos of equal opportunity contrasted by official actions that prohibited the realization of this value for people of color and women. For example, our history informs us that we are a nation endeared with democratic tenets simultaneously as elected leaders decreed oppressive acts of land dispossession, genocide, and slavery.

But should nefarious practices and views advanced by figures such as Haydock be completely stricken from public memory? Absolutely not. Just as I don’t favor the textual removal of racially restrictive covenants in residential deeds (although I support their inert state), the new name of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, whatever it will be, should have a recognizable footnote so people can learn not only about the totality of Oxnard’s history but also its relationship with larger national currents. The Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education, 1954 comes to mind as it declared unconstitutional the separate but equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896.

Let’s not forget Mendez v. Westminster of 1946 that preceded Brown. For this case, future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall assisted in the writing of an amicus curiae brief for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

By the study of this history, students can appreciate struggles for social justice by people from all backgrounds as well as the challenges that lay ahead.

And yes, past sins are inalterable. But we can motivate students to be agents of change for the better. Especially as we hear racist slurs of the past echoed by President Donald J. Trump.

So, I propose that the school be renamed the Rachel Murguia Wong Academy of Arts and Sciences. Raised in an era when ethnic Mexican students were not only segregated but also corporally and psychologically assaulted for speaking California’s first European language (Spanish), Murguia Wong committed her life to young people. As a Ventura County resident, she served on numerous civic and educational advisory committees. And after her work as an OSD community-school liaison in La Colonia’s Juanita (now Cesar Chavez) Elementary, Murguia Wong won an elected seat on the district’s board of trustees in 1971.

As a trustee, Murguia Wong championed Title 1 compensatory programs, teacher diversity, as well as the district’s full compliance with the summary judgement of Judge Harry Pregerson in Soria v. Oxnard School District Board of Trustees of 1971. Based on the agreed-upon facts in this case, Pregerson ordered busing as a means to dismantle the decades-long de facto (unofficial) segregation of its schools.

After a resistant board majority appealed the decision, the Ninth Circuit ordered a trial in 1973. This time school board minutes of the 1930s surfaced that documented the district’s implementation of de jure (official) segregation in violation of the plaintiffs’ rights of equal protections guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

At the behest of white parents, districts records of 1937 and 1938 revealed that Superintendent Haydock, in collusion with the trustees, schemed byzantine strategies to segregate ethnic Mexican students. In a time when social Darwinist ideas of Anglo-Saxon superiority was popular, miscegenation was the primary fear of the nation’s white establishment.

Hence, Murguia Wong, unlike Haydock, was on the right side of history. The renaming of the Academy in her honor would provide opportunities for all the children to learn Oxnard’s nuanced history.


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LatinoLA History News Network