Book Titles: From the Curious to Those with Moxie

 

A year ago, last week, I received author copies of Mexican Americans with Moxie: A Transgenerational History of El Movimiento Chicano in Ventura County, California, 1945-1975. A month later, newly released paperback editions of my first oeuvre on mi tierra natal arrived, Curious Unions: Mexican American Workers and Resistance in Oxnard, California, 1898-1961. Between then and now, I have given several book lectures. Most remotely and not as many I would have wished largely due to Covid-19 restrictions…I like to think. If I am invited to talk at an institution (e.g., a college, library, or museum), I now customarily request an honorarium when it is not offered, depending on my relationship with the folk at a given venue. When I am asked how much, I respond that I am happy with an amount extended to previously invited authors of a similar caliber as myself. I know that I am no MacArthur “Genius” grant winner. But I also don’t want to be lowballed because I am a Chicano academic. Simply. It’s not about the money. It’s about respect.

 

For civic groups and classroom visits, I don’t require remuneration, especially if they are nearby. Years ago, a friend who led a non-profit that encouraged Chicanx youth to go to college presented me with a small box of chocolates after my presentation. Recently, after a visit with AVID[1] students, the teacher, a 1983 classmate, gifted me a smart, yellow Oxnard High alumni t-shirt. Both gestures made me feel appreciated.

After I am introduced on showtime, I cover the scholarly provenance of both my books since Mexican Americans with Moxie is a follow-up to Curious Unions. I explain how I converted my doctoral dissertation into the latter as this is the case of the first book for many, if not most, university historians. A good number of community studies in Chicana/o history were published in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Some are titled The Mexican Outsiders (Santa Paula), Labor and Community (Orange County), Making Lemonade Out Lemons (Corona), and The Devil in Silicon Valley (San Jose). Then there was Michele Serros’ fiercely witty Chicana Falsa and Other Stories of Death and Identity in Oxnard published in 1998. Although not a work of history, when Chicana Falsa debuted, it inspired me to document my hometown’s ethnic Mexican past with similar righteousness. 

As my advisor at the Claremont Graduate University expressed her imprimatur for the project, I soon discovered a 1984 Labor History journal article by sociologist Tomás Almaguer titled “Racial Domination and Class Conflict in Capitalist Agriculture: The Oxnard Sugar Beet Workers’ Strike of 1903.”[2] In addition to its interesting, not so crypto, material analysis, a major takeaway from this social history is how a rare inter-racial union of Japanese and Mexican sugar beet workers and labor contractors—an even more exceptional partnership—successfully battled a fifty percent wage cut instituted by a rapacious cartel of white landowners. Later I learned that Carey McWilliams, a Colorado transplant and doyenne of California studies, titled a section of a chapter in his 1948 book, North From Mexico, “Los Betabeleros.” 

As I further researched and transformed my dissertation into a book manuscript, I wrestled with its eventual title. In the process, I found that other historians of my academic cohort had adopted catchphrases from McWilliams’ Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946) to headline their own books. For example, Matt García, a classmate of mine at the Claremont Graduate University, titled his first book on the ethnic Mexican community A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970 (2001). Four years later, Douglas Sackman completed Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (2005). Here are two excerpts from Southern California, respectively, that not only illustrate my point but also exhibit McWilliams’ trenchant prose: 

Throughout Southern California are many similar belts…This citrus belt complex of peoples, institutions, and relationships has no parallel in rural life in America…It is neither town nor country, neither rural nor urban. It is a world of its own.[3] 

 

Today “the orange empire” extends from Pasadena to San Bernardino through a series of evenly spaced communities, with the whole area being almost as densely populated as a city.[4] 

 

Hence, I decided that McWilliams’ nimble use of two specific words in the following account within North From Mexico would define my first book: “The growing of sugar beets is unique in that it represents ‘a curious union of family farms and million dollar corporations.’”[5] Therefore the title of my first book as the ethnic Mexican community of Oxnard developed many “curious unions,” in the form of collaborations with other ethnic and racial groups as well as civic and labor organizations making them assertive historical agents. 

Beyond the distinctive inter-racial formation of the betabelero Japanese Mexican Labor Association in 1903, ethnic Mexicans, for example, worked with whites and other communities of color in combatting police violence, the demand for equitable municipal services (e.g., streetlights, sanitation, and paved streets), youth programming, recognition, and the temporary cessation of the exploitation of braceros. Hence, the Curious Unions heading nicely alluded to a central premise of my book—that the ethnic Mexican community of Oxnard was central to the city’s cultural life as they were in no way outsiders in an “us against them” narrative. 

As I was finishing with the copy edits and gathering of permissions for Curious Unions’ eventual 2012 release, a collection of unused newspaper articles, documents, and interview material compelled me to write a follow-up book on the Chicana/o movement in Ventura County. As was the case in book one, for the second I wanted to further complicate peoples’ understanding of the Chicana/o Movement, particularly as it expressed itself outside of greater Los Angeles. After all, the ethnic Mexican communities of Fillmore, Moorpark, Oxnard, and Santa Paula had their own challenges with police brutality, protested the United States’ war in Vietnam, organized agricultural strikes, and struggled for educational justice not only like in East Los Angeles but also Delano in the San Joaquin Valley. 

Thus, I took advantage of the thrill in my completion of book one. I studied, yet again, the edition I had of Rodolfo Acuna’s Occupied America—the encyclopedic Before the Mayflower and Custer Died for Your Sins book of historians of Chicana/o history—to refamiliarize myself with the touchstone events and unaddressed questions of el movimiento. I also examined Acuna’s 2011 book The Making of Chicana/o Studies: In the Trenches which detailed how a significant number of San Fernando Valley State College (now named California State University, Northridge) students and faculty came from or ended up living in Ventura County. One alum of Valley State was Diana Borrego Martinez who I came to know through her father, Robert Borrego, who was civically engaged primarily, but not solely, in Santa Paula for decades. Each year, Robert and Diana visited a class I co-taught with a colleague in English on the youth movements of the 1960s and ’70s. 

As a result, I met with Diana at a Ventura coffeehouse in July of 2012. As we chitchatted before I pressed the record button of my mp3 device, I referenced a passage in The Making of Chicana/o Studies that detailed how United Mexican American Students (UMAS) at Valley State “consisted of about thirty students, and a dozen or so were hard core.” In the next sentence, Diana’s name was listed as one of those students. I asked her about her college experiences and what made her and her peers hard core activists. Diana looked down at the table to reflect upon the question. After a moment, she raised her head with a grin and replied, “You know, we had moxie.” 

Moxie. That word. It captivated me since I first heard college basketball play-by-play announcer Dick Vitale belllow it to describe frosh UCLA ballers in the 1990s: “They got moxie BABEEE!”

COURAGE, DETERMINATION. AGGRESSIVE ENERGY. INITIATIVE. That was the radical style of Chicanas and Chicanos. 

Consequently, as I considered the critical feedback of peer reviewers that recommended my second book manuscript for publication again with the University of Nebraska Press, I spent time thinking about its prospective title. Then, being that ethnic Mexican youth and young adults of the 1960s and ’70s were carrying on a tradition of resistance of leaders in their community of the Mexican American Generation, I realized that they, too, were Mexican Americans but with a moxie all their own. In other words, where many, but certainly not all, of the Mexican American Generation advocated on behalf of their community from an aspirational politics of middle-class respectability, comportment, and acceptance (sartorially imagine suits), the Chicana/o Generation carried themselves with a counter-culture savoir-faire. At the same time, however, this bearing, flare, mien, anger, if you will, was an adaptation of what their parents and elders role modeled but in a more measured manner, predominantly. It was part of a historical dialectic. So much so that a good number of ethnic Mexicans, consisting of US-born and naturalized citizens as well as long-term and recent immigrant Mexican nationals, embraced the Chicana/Chicano epithet. This was particularly true as working-class families with mixed citizenship and residency status demanded to be treated with dignity in terms of just wages and conditions in the fields, orchards, plants, and nurseries of Ventura County.

That is our history.

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[1] Advancement Via Individual Determination  

[2] The article was incorporated into Alamaquer’s germinal 1994 book Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy. 

[3]Southern California, 207. 

[4]Southern California, 216. 

[5]North From Mexico, 166. 

El Calor de Otro Sol Or: Giant-A La SoCal, Part 1

Based on Edna Ferber’s 1952 novel, the film GIANT depicted mid-twentieth century life and society in Texas four years later. Although much of the Lone Star state’s cultural landscape applied to the rest of the nation. This entailed the quotidian oppression of ethnic Mexicans and Blacks, a bespoke racial regionalism, and thorny socio-economic transformation draped in a normalized veil of White Supremacy. A diner slugfest between freshly woke cattle baron Jordan “Bick” Benedict, played by Rock Hudson, and the bigoted proprietor who would not serve Bick’s ethnic Mexican daughter-in-law Juana, played by Elsa Cardenas, and his mixed-race grandchildren functioned as the tale’s climax. Racial capitalism won the pleito, btw. But the significance of the scene was not in the win or loss but in the fight itself.

The movie’s central take was the South’s racial capitalism as Anglos monopolized land, cattle, oil, and racialized labor. For example, in Bick’s Texas ethnic Mexican ranch hands of Reata obsequiously attended to the crows of Whites like Luz Benedict, Bick’s sister who enjoyed cattle rustling over making love. And in Virginia—the home state of Leslie Benedict, Bick’s wife played by Elizabeth Taylor—well-mannered Black servants answered the commands of plantation bosses from a more genteel tradition. The opportunity for upward mobility in this caste system existed only for working-class whites of ambiguous lineage. The hardscrabble alcoholic, Jett Rink, played by James Dean, mythically symbolized this trope. Nonetheless, in both the film and novel, no hint of resistance exists to the house of White supremacy on the part of Brown and Black agents. Vexingly, in the film only Whites could demand social justice—and only when racism demeaned new Brown family members, wearily accepted, such as Juana and her children.

The inhumanity of White supremacy in housing, healthcare, public facilities, and work (i.e., structural racism) conveyed in GIANT is also wrenchingly detailed in Isabel Wilkerson’s magisterial Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010). Through the harrowing migrant family stories of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney who relocated from Chickasaw County, Mississippi eventually to Chicago, Dr. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster from Monroe, Louisiana to Los Angeles, and George Watson Starling from Eustis, Florida to Harlem, Wilkerson narrates an in-your-face-racism that humiliated, subordinated, and disciplined southern refugees in multifaceted ways. Any Black person who contravened racist mores risked White public rituals of lynching that entailed gang rapes and beatings, torture (e.g., victims chained to cars and dragged through streets by the genitals), bodily mutilations, people burned alive, and hangings in town squares while White families entertained themselves in their Sunday’s best. Such acts of collective terrorism were not limited to the South as they took also place in the Midwest, North, and West against families who attempted to reside in uncrowded working-class neighborhoods such as the Chicago suburb of Cicero.

The dialectic of migration detailed by Wilkerson rhymed similarly with those of ethnic Mexicans from different parts of the US and Mexico. For example, the terrorist violence of outfits such as the Texas Rangers and Ku Klux Klan also compelled the migration of Black and Brown refugees to el calor de otro sols. Indeed, Wilkerson stated, “The people of the Great Migration had farther to climb because they started off at the lowest rung wherever they went. They incited greater fear and resentment in part because there was no ocean between them and the North…Thus, blacks confronted hostilities more severe than most any other group (except perhaps Mexicans, who could also cross over by land)….” Then there was the economic opportunity in the shipyards, auto plants, and meatpacking factories of places like Oakland, Detroit, and Chicago that recruited Black and Brown migrants before the Second World War. And once at a terminal point of their chain migration from one city and town to another over time, the transplanted set up socially supportive and protective migrant clubs and mutualistas, as did Whites from places such as Iowa, and held culturally restorative reunions.

I often reflect upon the Great Migration stories, Brown and Black, of my community while coming of age in Ventura County. Growing up I eavesdropped and listened to the accounts of my paternal and maternal great-grandparents and grandparents. On my mom’s side, my Abuelita guided her four young daughters from Chihuahua, Mexico as a single mother. My dad’s father migrated earlier in the century from Michoacan; from McAllen, Texas his mother’s family traveled back and forth from Chihuahua, Kansas, and Texas before settling in Rancho Sespe. I also often ponder the migrant, working-class narratives of families that lived in my Bartolo Square neighborhood of south Oxnard composed of a fairly balanced mix of ethnic Mexicans, Filipinos, Japanese, Blacks, and Whites. I periodically chuckle to myself when I remember my Black schoolmate, Steve, who lived down the street when he boasted one day on the playground that his family originated from Paris. “Wow,” I incredulously said to myself, “Steve’s family is from France?” After a brief pause, Steve clarified his assertion with a smile, “We’re from Paris, Texas!” Other Black families in my Bartolo Square neighborhood in south Oxnard, like Curtis’s, came from Mississippi and other states of the South. We got all got along—for the most part. Then there was the story of my paternal grandmother, Josephine, who shared with me how a Black farmer in McAllen, Texas had taught my great-grandfather, Santos Hernandez, how to read. Wow. Heavy.

From these accounts, I feel a certain connection to Texas and its people.

After my return to Ventura County in 2001 to begin my teaching career at California State University Channel Islands, I interviewed my first-grade teacher, Ms. Lillie Watkins, after some thirty years since being her student, for my first book Curious Unions: Mexican American Workers and Resistance in Oxnard, California, 1998-1961. In this conversation, I learned that she was originally from Indiana. Upon facing graduation from Ball State University in the late 1950s, Ms. Watkin’s sister was recruited to work at the Oxnard Elementary School District. Following her sister’s lead, Ms. Watkins accepted a position to teach first grade in the OESD. When Ms. Watkins and her husband arrived in Ventura County they searched for an apartment. And like many Black and Brown migrants in search of the warmth of different suns, they experienced how units open during a phone conversation suddenly became rented once they arrived to view them. Discouraged and angry, Ms. Watkins decided to return to the Midwest with her husband but was convinced to stay when supportive White colleagues helped find them a home. But not all co-workers were so kind as she discussed how one White teacher uttered the n-word under her breath in 1965 as she walked past her in the hallway. Oxnard not being the South, Ms. Watkins challenged this racist educator who denied saying anything.

As I presently read Wilkerson’s book, I wish I would have asked Ms. Watkins if her parents’ family migrated to Indiana from the South. I also would have asked what stories her parents shared with her and her siblings as they grew. Nonetheless, I am privileged to have had Ms. Watkins as one of my early teachers. As a Black educator, she not only taught me, patiently, how to read but also complicated my understanding of race in Ventura. Along with other Black teachers named Bloodworth, Calhoun, Datcher, Thrasher, Wilson, and White—as well as classmates with similar last names—I learned to value all people as people while recognizing, not denying, their race and cultural heritage. This is not to say that racial tensions did not manifest in Ventura County. But they were nowhere near the White-heat violence documented in places such as New York, Chicago, and many parts of the South…as far as I know at this moment.

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