A Requiem for Rudy: A Ventura County Perspective

Frank P. Barajas
California State University Channel Islands
March 26, 2026

A Requiem for Rudy: A Ventura County Perspective

“Call Rudy. (123) 456-0911. Mary B.”

Circa 2003, I found this note in my campus mailbox at California State University Channel Islands (CSUCI). Mary B. was a family therapist, former Oxnard school board official, and an alumna, almost certainly in Chicano Studies, of San Fernando Valley State College (SFVSC) before it was renamed California State University at Northridge (CSUN).

The year before, Maria De La Luz, a colleague in the advising department at my campus, forwarded me and Lillian, a Chicana faculty camarada, a June 5, 2002, email from Dr. Rodolfo “Rudy” F. Acuña—with the subject heading California State University Channel Islands—originally sent to non-profit, private, and public Ventura County employees and managers in education, defense, healthcare, and law enforcement. Many people copied in the missive were Chicana/o Movement products of the 1960s and ’70s, a good number CSUN-Chicana/o Studies alumni like Mary B., for whom el movimiento never ended.

Rudy’s email expressed concern that CSUCI would not serve the needs of Latino students with Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) support and a representative contingent of tenure-track Chicana/o faculty to advocate on their behalf in the creation of the new campus. For this to happen, the startup university needed to be pressured as had been the case at CSU San Marcos. He admonished Chicana/o communities in Ventura County, especially his former students, to be vigilant as Luis Caldera, CSU Vice Chancellor for University Advancement, characterized them as complacent “Hispanics.” Ouch!

For many of his adherents, the email was like a fire bell in the night. An Educational Opportunity Program and Services coordinator at Oxnard College, expressed to me that the dispatch was a swiping to the faces of Rudy’s former students and friends to wake up and pay attention to what was happening in their community.

Rudy, with his close colleague, comrade in arms, and friend, Jorge, spoke at a downtown Oxnard venue named after him by Armando, a SFVSC-Chicana/o Studies loyalist: the Dr. Rodolfo F. Acuña Art Gallery and Cultura Center, Café on A. Topics of discussion were CSUCI, students in its service area, and the university’s political-economic significance in relation to the Chicana/o community. Groups from the cities of Ventura, Simi Valley, Santa Paula, Oxnard, Camarillo, Thousand Oaks, Port Hueneme, and other places in the county kept a close watch on CSUCI’s trajectory. Organizations included but were not limited to the: Latino Town Hall of Santa Paula, League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) of Ventura County, El Concilio del Condado de Ventura, Future Leaders of America (FLA), Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE), and the Cabrillo Economic Development Corporation (CEDC). The provenance of these orgs and the people who founded them stemmed from el movimiento and ties to the Chicana/o Studies department at CSUN, especially Rudy. After I received Mary B.’s note, I called Rudy. He was gracious. We talked over the phone several times as he helped me in my transition from teaching at a community college to a university. He knew both systems as his first tenure-track gig in academe was at Los Angeles Pierce College before his full-time appointment at SFVSC in1969, one year after ethnic Mexican high school and middle school students walked out of East LA campuses in their demand of a culturally relevant education, college opportunities, culturally competent teachers that would serve them, and to be treated with dignity—no more punishments of humiliation (wearing dunce hats in classroom corners and mouths filled with soap and paste for speaking Spanish). Rudy often expressed in his writings that it was students who presented him with the opportunity to be a university professor. Consequently, his allegiance was to them.

Since my return to Ventura County in 2001, I’ve come to befriend Rudy’s disciples. For them, he was much more than their profe; he was their mentor, advocate, defender, loco parentis. Rudy took his students to conferences and demonstrations. He taught them to be activists and championed their interests and pursuits. Like so many Chicana/o faculty, his office was a sanctuary for students to visit and just be. In the early years of el movimiento, a place to hang out with elders of your tribe was vital, as only a handful of ethnic Mexicans attended universities. From his conversations with them, Rudy acquired intel on how his university served not only Chicana and Chicanos but all students, particularly first gens.

About five years ago, in the year 2021, the former president of CSUN visited my campus in her mentorship of a new dean while I was chair of the History department and Chicana/o Studies. Jolene had climbed the ranks of faculty and administrators of her campus; she also served as interim chancellor of the CSU system. As we talked, I mentioned my connection to CSUN’s Chicana/o Studies department and Rudy. She then warmly recounted how she witnessed Rudy’s fierce commitment to students. When students required support, he was there for them. She reminisced how Rudy opened his family’s home to a student in distress and requiring shelter. She also spoke of his monetary generosity for students and their causes.

Rudy was tough but also a softy, especially for his students.

At Chicana/o Studies conferences, symposia, and community events, I met people over time who knew or were students of Rudy. One person’s father knew him as a fellow academic on the rise during the heat of el movimiento. Ron recalled the lively parties of gente in the San Fernando Valley. One student shared how Rudy paid particular attention to him as a highly-at-risk youth. Rudy mentored Roberto and picked him up at his home to go to conferences and events. For Roberto, now a community college professor, Chicana/o Studies and Rudy saved his life. This is why Rudy was a champion of Chicana/o Studies; this area of study not only had the power to transform people to be agents of their own destiny, but it also saved lives, just as sports and the arts positively impacted others. Chicana/o Studies made people feel proud of themselves and their community. And when this happened, they had the chance to become the doctors, lawyers, civil servants, educators, and scientists that many became. For Rudy and his students, like Diana from Santa Paula, and who is a member of SFVSC’s first class of Chicana/o Studies graduates, there were no throwaways.

Rudy’s commitment went beyond the San Fernando Valley, as many of his students commuted from Ventura County communities. These Chicana and Chicano students were of a different sort, however, as they came from cities, towns, barrios, campos, and mixed environs that were simultaneously rural and urban, rurban, if you will. Fillmore was much different from Oxnard, and Oxnard existed in stark contrast to Thousand Oaks. With the City of Ventura, perhaps, interstice. In 1970, the Chicana/o community of Oxnard sued in federal court the Oxnard Elementary School District (OESD) for the unconstitutional racial segregation of Black and Brown students. In 1971, Judge Harry Pregerson found the OESD in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and issued a summary judgement ordering the district to desegregate via cross-town busing, diversify its staff, and deliver a culturally relevant education to its students. This entailed the integration of an ethnic studies curriculum so that students saw themselves and their community in the subjects they studied. To adhere to the court order, OESD administrators, at the behest of Rachel Murguia Wong, a newly elected school board member, reached out to Rudy to provide in-service training to district employees. Although she was married with children, lived in north Oxnard, and already had a UCLA degree, Rachel enrolled at SFVSC to earn a Chicano Studies degree. It was at CSUN that she came to know Rudy and benefit from his mentorship.

As the district balked that it could not locate qualified ethnic Mexican teachers, Rachel, Rudy, and Jorge devised and implemented a program to home grow the needed educators for the OESD and other districts in Los Angeles County. It was called OPERATION CHICANO TEACHER (OCT). The program screened and trained SFVSC students to teach with pay as they earned their credentials. For working-class students this was huge. A critical mass of SFVSC Chicana and Chicano students were pipelined into the OESD. Many ultimately became school principals, district administrators, and professors of education. After their retirement, some created non-profit cultural centers in the barrios of Ventura County, the Inlakech Cultural Center, founded by Javier (aka Mr. G) an OCT product of the early 1970s, being one of them. Today, almost at every cultural celebration, UFW march, or protest you will find Inlakech’s youth Mariachi group performing with pride as they re-instilled this emotion to its audiences.

When there was a labor strike in the citrus orchards and strawberry fields of Ventura County during the1970s, Rudy organized SFVSC students to join the picket lines as Chicana/o Studies was not just an academic endeavor. It was a praxis grounded in community. He was also at the Chicano Moratorium on August 29, 1970, when Los Angeles County sheriff deputies and police stormed peaceful participants—mothers and fathers, children, and the elderly—wantonly swinging batons and firing tear gas. As Rudy attempted to deescalate a situation between his students and law enforcement, he found himself assaulted by the police and forced into the SFVSC bus with his colleagues and undergraduates while the police ignited a tear gas cannister in the vehicle and barricaded its door. The police also harassed Rudy and his students on their way to a meeting by pulling them over, searching them, and detaining them for hours. This treatment by law enforcement brought to life what they had studied in the classroom about the Texas Rangers, LAPD violence, and data presented in the Armando Morales’ 1972 classic Ando Sangrando/I Am Bleeding: A Study in Mexican American-Police Conflict.

When the MEChAs of Moorpark College and Ventura College reached out to Rudy to be a speaker for Cinco de May, Mexican Independence Day, or on a topic of controversy of the day, he was there. Rudy even participated in campus sit-ins with students and got arrested with them. In his eighties, he spoke at CSU Channel Islands in 2015 when MEChA de CI invited him to speak on his latest book at the time The Making of Chicano Studies: In the Trenches of Academe (2011). A room with sixty seats was jammed pack with people standing and sitting on the floor. A librarian mentioned the fire marshal as the room was filled beyond capacity. Half of the people in attendance were former students and friends of Rudy. The audience hung on his every word, especially those who listened to the Chicano Studies legend for the first time.

In the sense of Antonio Gramsci, Rudy was an organic intellectual of los de abajo, born and raised in a much more multicultural East Los Angeles, than today, with a mix of ethnic Mexicans, Blacks, Jews, and Asian residents. His parents were immigrants from Sonora and Jalisco. Consequently, he was a Mexican, an American—a Chicano all at once. As a US Army veteran, he experienced the virulence of US racism. NO DOGS NEGROES MEXICANS. The nation’s white supremacy informed his expertise as a teacher and academic. No matter the venue, he did not freight his messages with academic speak. Students related to his lectures because they held similar stories of their own or had listened to the oral testimonials of their families. In many ways, ethnic Mexicans who lived in the communities of Sunland, Sun Valley, Oxnard, Pacoima, Moorpark, etc., experienced the racial subordination portrayed in the 1956 movie GIANT. Maria T., a SFVSC Chicana/o Studies alumna of the early 1970s, and a retired public health administrator in Ventura County, who grew up in the City of Sunland stated to me that “Racism…It was blatant, and in your face” back then. Chicana/o Studies, Rudy, and his faculty colleagues taught her and her peers to be proud of being Mexican and to fight back, que no se dejen.

He was also a role model. Cognizant of his own myth, Rudy exemplified an impudently defiant resistance to a society that loved Mexican food but hated the Mexican. He calculated when to be a Chicano Studies Malcom X professor that complemented more amenable Mexican Americans with a politics of respectability mien when they jointly engaged the racist white power structure. Rudy knew that students needed to see Chicanas and Chicanos tell “The Man” where to go so they would be empowered to do the same when they left the cloistered halls of academe. Liars, especially administrators, must be called out as liars publicly when they told mentiras. Rudy made speaking truth to power with moxie a learning objective.

At CSUCI, Rudy’s legacy lives in its Chicana/o Studies department. He and his colleague, Jorge, shared course outlines and syllabi for me to consider in the creation of Chicana/o Studies courses at my campus. He, his CSUN ChS colleagues, and students, Jose and Louie M., collectively trekked to Camarillo for a meeting to imagine a CSUCI Chicana/o Studies degree program. Their presence was both practical and a political movida. When the university decided to replace the B.A. in Chicana/o Studies on its Academic Master Plan with a milquetoast Multicultural degree, Chicana/o Studies alumni and supporters rallied and successfully demanded its reinstatement. Jose M., one of Rudy’s protégé students, collected hundreds of signatures from around the country in a petition and presented it to the CSUCI leadership at an academic senate meeting. If it were not for Rudy’s influence in Ventura County by way of his extensive network of students and fans, there would not be a Chicana/o Studies program today at CSUCI. And there would not be a: ¡Si Se Pudo! commencement, Raza College Day, the Michele Serros Learning Community, Latina/o Santa Rosa Island Retreats, and other Chicana/o related programming.

Up to the point when he still could, Rudy wrote and wrote. He conveyed to his readers and students the imperative that Chicanas/os write their own stories. Narratives are algorithms that empower people to achieve their liberation and self-determine their own destiny. If we did not write our own stories, others would and control us.

¡Dr. Rodolfo “Rudy” F. Acuña presente! Rest in power. B. May 18, 1932-D. March 23, 2026

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Curious Unions: Mexican American Workers and Resistance in Oxnard, California, 1898-1961

University of Nebraska Press, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indie Bound

A Preoccupying Observation

Image: Los Angeles Times

Twice, on my way home from the gym last winter, around 6:15am, I noticed a tractor in a strawberry field that surrounds Oxnard High School. The headlights cut through the dark, the tanks contained some chemical, and its extended arms sprayed a mist. The driver donned a full protective suit.

As I drove by on Gonzales Road both times, I considered how the aerosol of the fumigant would affect, immediately or deferred, high schoolers that walked to campus within the next hour.

And as I started my morning constitutional around the perimeter of my workplace, California State University Channel Islands, this past week another tractor blanketed the crops (perhaps cabbage, who knows) off Potrero Road with some substance. This time, the driver did not wear a white panoply or respirator. So I worried about this person’s well-being, the students that resided in the dorms across the street and mine as I walked away faster.

The scene of crop spraying is common on the Oxnard Plain that encompasses the communities of Ventura, Oxnard, Somis, and Camarillo. In this rurban (not completely rural or urban) corridor, the business of agribusiness is in open view. Petrochemicals are part of the air we breathe, especially for fieldworkers. They are the most vulnerable. That is a central reason why strawberry pickers are covered and masked in clothing from head to toe, even during the hottest of days.

This leads me to ask, what is being sprayed on our food? How do such chemicals affect the health and well-being of farmworkers? Can such spraying take place earlier in the morning or later in evening so that farmworkers and our children will not be as exposed? Perhaps, non-profit, private, and government agencies can effectively provide the public with answers?

Con Safos
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Not only in Berkeley or in East Los Angeles—also in Oxnard

The LA Times printed today the informative column of Hector Tobar on the Chicano Moratorium protest march of August 29, 1970. The piece highlighted Rosalio Muñoz’s organization of the protest and the exhibition commemorating this historical event at the Mexican Cultural Institute next to Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles. Check it out. Both the column and exhibit.

Tobar concludes his essay by writing, “‘One tourist who went there recently told Muñoz: ‘I thought these things only happened in Berkeley.’ No ma'am, he answered. They also happened in East Los Angeles.”

So, anti-war protest occurred in many communities, one of them in the City of Oxnard. Twenty-two days later, on September 20, close to 1,000 Chicanos and Chicanas and their supporters also protested the Vietnam War by taking it to the streets. Organized by persons such as Ricardo Carmona, Roberto Flores, and other Brown Berets, the people of Chiques listened to the anti-war speeches of Muñoz, Blase Bonpane, Roberto Aliasa, and others.

Con safos

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Sundown Towns

An oral history interviewee last week indicated that at one time the City of Oxnard was a Sundown Town. To verify this phenomenon I asked another long time Oxnardian of Mexican descent about this and he indicated that he was not aware of such an ordinance. But he did express that by the actions of the Oxnard Police Department that, "we (Mexican Americans and Mexicans) knew that we did not have any business over there (i.e. the White residential area of the city)." When I shared this with my Osher class today at California State University Channel Islands, a student indicated that Burbank was such a city. James Loewen has a book titled Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. This book is next on my reading list.

Con Safos

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The Fifth Street Twilight Zone

Last week I met with Dr. David Garcia about a joint research project on the history of the Oxnard School District and the practice of segregation. Being both educated in the city’s public schools, we shared stories growing up in Chiques and situated the school desegregation case of Soria v. Oxnard School District Board (1971) with that of Mendez v. Westminster (1946) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

I mentioned how when I was an adolescent, whether riding my Frankenstein bike or walking, I felt an unexplained unease when I ventured north of Fifth Street. Residents between C Street and Ventura Road and north of Fifth, during the 1970s, were solidly middle class and predominantly of European ethnic ancestry—Italian, German, Irish, French, etc—and Catholic. When I attended catechism classes at a craftsman style home on F Street, in what is now the city’s “historic” district, I was in awe and thought to myself, “I am in the house of rich people.” As I rode my bike home each week, I wondered how it was like to live in a spacious two story home like the ones in this neighborhood, instead of the south side one story two bedroom ticky-tacky residences in the blue collar Bartolo Square.

After meeting with David, I studied the 1974 Soria opinion of Judge Harry Pregerson of the 9th Circuit Court. In this document Pregerson cited Oxnard School Board minutes and stated:

To implement the "principle of segregation," the minutes for November 1936 to June 1939 show how Oxnard's School Board not only established and maintained segregated schools, but also established and maintained segregated classrooms within a school. Where segregated classrooms existed within a school, the Board had the additional problem of keeping children of different ethnic groups from playing together. In addressing this problem, the Board debated the feasibility of staggered playground periods and release times. Feasibility also dictated some exceptions to the Board's general principle of segregation. . . . . (Minutes for September 13, December 12, and December 21, 1938.)

Interesting. Then my eyes locked on to the computer screen as I read that in a 1937 board meeting Trustee J.H. Burfeind called for all “‘Mexican’ children living south of Fifth Street to attend the Haydock School, leaving all white and oriental children living south of Fifth Street in the Roosevelt and Wilson schools [in the north side of town]. The moving of Oriental children living south of Fifth Street to the Haydock School will be taken into consideration in case of future emergency, and no further shifting of pupils is intended.” The goal then was to carry out this crass segregation plan “with as little fuss as possible.”

Amazing. The apartheid-like feeling I internalized as a child crossing north of the Fifth Street twilight zone was not a figment of my imagination; it was de jure policy in the city of Oxnard. This is going to be a rich project. Stay tuned.


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That Smell

Great Oxnard ambrosia this morning. A hybrid fragance of a dairy, garbage dump, chicken ranch, and burning trash. Mi tierra natal. I love it. Kind of like what Duval's Colonel Kilgore character stated in Apocalyse Now, ". . .that gasoline smell. . . It smelled like. . . . victory. Someday this war is gonna end.”

Robert F. Kennedy in La Colonia Oxnard

Dear friend, life-long activist, and former Catholic nun, Lupe Anguiano recently gifted me a treasure in this photograph of Robert F. Kennedy in prayer at Cristo Rey Church in the La Colonia barrio of Oxnard three days before his 1968 assassination. Father Augustin Alvarez is in the background.

Other such historical jewels can be found in her archive at UCLA (http://www.chicano.ucla.edu/center/events/Anguiano.htm).

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Seasons Creatings: Carey McWilliams

As a fanatic of Peter Richardson’s “Stray Thoughts on California Culture” blog, I have been intrigued, but not surprised, by the promotion of Carey McWilliams’ books by Gustavo Arellano and D.J. Waldie. McWilliams influenced the careers of many writers and academics, as Peter has said—particularly those in Chicana/o Studies. Brown University historian Matt Garcia (and Claremont Graduate School classmate), for example, wrote his dissertation and first book on the Padua Players of Claremont. McWilliams first wrote on the Padua Institute that sponsored the Players within North From Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (1948). In fact, the title of Matt’s 2001 book (A World of Its Own) is taken from McWilliams’ discussion of the Southern California citrus belt within Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946). I also suspect that McWilliams’ “The Forty Blonde Babies” within North From Mexico inspired Linda Gordon to write The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (1999). In my own work, I have tentatively titled my manuscript A Curious Union in reference to McWilliams’ observation within North From Mexico regarding how unique it was for sugar refining magnates to partner with family owned farms to advance the growing of sugar beets in the West. This, in fact, was one “curious union” among many that took place in the Southern California coastal city of Oxnard which my manuscript centers. First, the city was founded by the New York Oxnard brothers who owned the American Beet Sugar Company and recruited local landowners to grow sugar beets. Second, the Oxnard Plain was a site where Japanese and Mexican betabeleros (sugar beet workers) and labor contractors curiously united in 1903 to combat a fifty percent wage cut at the hands of the Western Agricultural Contracting Company. And third, many cross-cultural alliances developed in relation to leisure, labor, and community during the first-half of the twentieth century, one involving Cesar Chavez. Hence, I find it fitting that the concept of “curious unions” be the thesis of my book. Will see.

To further ground my obra within the existing body of scholarly literature on the region, I have been studying Kevin Starr’s magisterial Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s. Today I read on the importance of the Automobile Club of Southern California in relation to its publication of Touring Topics beginning in 1909 and renamed in 1934 Westways. Starr states that Touring Topics was “a serious, well-edited journal of travel, history, cultural commentary, and informed promotionalism. Touring Topics was the Overland Monthly, the Atlantic Monthly even of Southern California. . . .” And low and behold, as a 24 year member of the Automobile Club I found in my mail this very day the Special Centennial Edition of Westways. Within in it, Kevin Starr writes a tribute to Carey McWilliams as McWilliams authored a monthly column for the Automobile Clup magazine titled “Tides West” from 1934 to 1939. In this piece, Starr credits McWilliams as “the finest nonfiction writer California has ever produced, and the leading interpreter of the state up to the mid-20th century.” I am left wondering, however, who Starr recognizes as the leading interpreter of the region since the 1950s, especially with McWilliams varied credentials as a journalist, historian, civil rights activist, and cultural critic. None come readily to mind, as Peter Richardson has pondered.

In closing, there is no one book of Carey McWilliams that I would suggest for you to purchase. They are all great, so just pick one depending on your current interest and need. But I am confident in saying that you will mostly likely find three books within arms reach of many scholars of Chicana/o history and they are: Kate L. Turabian’s A Manual for Writers, depending on her or his baptismal year into Chicana/o Studies an edition of Rudy Acuña’s Occupied America, and McWilliams’ North from Mexico.

Happy holidays,
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The Alinsky Connection

It has been some time since my last post. But here is an essay that was printed today in the Ventura County Star. A dear friend in Texas also emailed me stating that the San Benito News also published this essay. Peter Richardson provided feedback on earlier drafts of this piece. Thanks Queta and Peter.

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Ventura County Star November 2, 2008

The Alinsky, Chavez, Obama connection
Sunday, November 2, 2008

If recent polling holds true, a former community organizer from Chicago will be America's next president. Barack Obama's success thus far has been largely attributed to his efficient grass-roots voter-registration campaign and pensive eloquence. Meanwhile, detractors like Fox News and author Jerome Corsi have sought to discredit Obama by linking him to Saul Alinsky.

Before John McCain, Corsi, on Fox's "Hannity and Colmes," accused the Obama campaign of seeking to redistribute wealth and creating a "cult of personality" similar to that of Cesar Chavez "borrowed directly from the organization of the farm workers going back four decades."

According to Corsi, Obama must be feared for his promotion of economic justice and empowering the near powerless — two core principles of Alinsky.

Cesar Chavez I know, but who is Saul Alinsky? I asked the same question 10 years ago after attending a Teatro Campesino production in Orange County. The theater company was inspired by Chavez and Dolores Huerta in the 1960s, and after the show, UFW activists led a series of call-and-response cheers: "Que viva Cesar Chavez! Que viva! Que viva Dolores Huerta! Que viva!"

Paeans to other Chicano icons followed. Then came a less-familiar blast: "Que viva Saul Alinsky!" The crowd roared its answer, but I was stumped. Alinsky wasn't a surname I had heard during my Chicano upbringing. Saul, yes. But not Alinsky! As a history professor at Cypress College, I was too embarrassed to ask anyone in the crowd that day.

Later, I learned that Alinsky founded the Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation, which sent battle-tested organizers to train and develop local leaders on issues related to voting, discrimination and police brutality. In his classic treatise, "Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals," Alinsky showed how working-class blacks and white ethnics could work together to end employer discrimination and municipal neglect.

For example, to influence elites holding power to make concessions, "Rules for Radicals" proposed the tactic of threatening to have community activists purchase 100 seats for a symphony performance in Rochester, N.Y. Beforehand, the attendees would enjoy bowls of baked beans with subsequent "obvious consequences" as they sat in their concert seats.

To persuade an upscale department store to change its discriminatory hiring practices, Alinsky suggested that protesters order all items in sight, have them shipped C.O.D., and then refuse delivery later. These two tactics signaled that long-standing privileges would be threatened if a community withheld basic rights from its most disadvantaged residents.

One of Alinsky's disciples, Fred Ross, founded Community Service Organization chapters throughout California after World War II. In Los Angeles, the CSO worked with Chicano activists to promote English and citizenship classes, voter-registration drives, and get-out-the vote campaigns. To aid Edward R. Roybal's election to the Los Angeles City Council in 1949, the CSO registered 12,000 new voters. Roybal became the first Mexican-American to sit on the City Council since the 1880s, and he later represented Los Angeles in Congress for 30 years.

One of Ross' protégés was Cesar Chavez. Like his mentor, Chavez traveled the state developing CSO chapters and leaders. After asking community members to invite neighbors, co-workers and family to a house meeting, Chavez listened to their problems and organized them to demand redresses to their grievances. His success led Alinsky and Ralph Helstein, president of the United Packinghouse Workers of America, to summon Ross and Chavez to San Francisco in 1958 to discuss the creation of a CSO chapter in Ventura County. Helstein believed that a CSO there could buttress the UPWA's efforts to combat the citrus industry's exploitation of bracero guest workers.

Impact on Ventura County
So, with a hefty budget worth about $144,000 now, Chavez listened to community complaints in house meetings, tapped into the energies of activists and assisted Mexican residents with their everyday problems. From a long series of house and community meetings, the Ventura County CSO increased enrollments in English language classes, guided longtime Mexican residents through the naturalization process and registered citizens for the 1958 election. On Election Day, CSO organizers worked tirelessly to get out the vote. In the Oxnard barrio community of La Colonia, turnout was an impressive 82 percent. The CSO had convinced residents that showing up to the polls could bring about social change.

Months later, Chavez would use the apparatus of the 1958 election to organize Ventura County domestic farm workers to combat the Goliath-like might of the agricultural industry. Indeed, short-lived successes in this struggle inspired Chavez to leave the CSO a few years later to start his own national farmer workers union in Delano. It was here that Chavez used the strategy of organizing one true believer, one household, one community at a time to bring about hope for the future.

So, in the midst of an economic recession in 1958, disciples of Alinsky used his rules of radicalism to empower men, women and children to believe in themselves.

And today Obama's ground game of true believers is getting out the vote in highly contested states such as Florida, Missouri and Ohio. Similar to the diligent work of Chicago's Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council and California's CSO, the Obama campaign has inspired a new generation of citizens to participate actively in our democracy and this is good, no matter what Fox News and Corsi would want you to believe. Que viva Saul Alinsky!

— Frank P. Barajas is an associate professor of history at California State University Channel Islands. Barajas is writing a book on labor and community in Ventura County titled, "A Curious Union: Activism and Community to the Rise of Cesar Chavez."

©2008 Ventura County Star

Salud Carbajal is No Santa Barbara Fantasy

Oxnard’s adopted native son, Salud Carbajal, will have an easy time in his reelection to the prodigiously affluent 1st District seat of the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors. The Santa Barbara Independent attributed Carbajal’s talent to politically fund raise over $395,000 by the January filling period coupled with an affable disposition as central reasons in staving off a challenge to his seat.

BTW: Salud is an Oxnard High School alum of the class of 1983 and my compadre. His determination to attend the University of California at Santa Barbara out of high school inspired many of his classmates (me included) to enroll in college preparatory courses in the ultimate pursuit of baccalaureate degrees. This is particularly significant when one considers that over 50% of our peers dropped out of school, some as early as the ninth grade.

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Op.Ed. Ventura County Star

I received a holiday card this year with a special surprise from Sylvia Mendez. It was a U.S. Postal Service stamp commemorating the precedent-setting Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County et al. (1946). As a graduate student in the early 1990s, I had the privilege of interviewing Sylvia and her mother, Felicitas, in their Fullerton home. Felicitas and her husband, Gonzalo, were the lead plaintiffs in a suit challenging their children's segregation in "Mexican schools."

The case demonstrated that systematic discrimination in the United States was not limited to African-Americans in the South but also targeted blacks, Asian Americans and Chicanos throughout the Southwest.

The Mendez decision held that separate-but-equal practices violated the constitutional rights of Chicano schoolchildren. Thurgood Marshall, lawyer for the NAACP and future U.S. Supreme Court justice, filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Mendez plaintiffs. The following year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the decision, but school boards throughout the state resisted desegregation remedies for decades.

In 1954, when Marshall successfully challenged the separate-but-equal doctrine as it applied to African-American children in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education, he cited the Mendez ruling.

Studying the Mendez case led me to wonder about historically high dropout rates among Chicanos. Over the years, I've asked Chicano parents, grandparents and great-grandparents throughout Ventura County about their schooling. The elders I spoke with described Mexican schools in Ventura, Santa Paula and Fillmore that were both separate from, and unequal to, those attended by white children.

And where budgets precluded the creation of Mexican schools, districts established segregated spaces within the schools. At the Woodrow Wilson School in Oxnard, for example, officials physically separated students of African, Asian and Mexican ancestry from their white peers, both in the classrooms and the playground. One person I interviewed said that Chicano children often relieved themselves behind trees because the nearest restroom was on the side of the playground designated for white students.

The same senior citizens also recalled the corporal punishment meted out to children who spoke Spanish at school. One Fullerton College counselor lamented the tight-lipped confusion he and his classmates endured. Unable to answer his teachers in English, and prohibited from speaking Spanish, he mostly remained silent while attending a Mexican school in Orange County. Chicano students who survived elementary and middle school were often tracked away from college preparatory courses and toward vocational and home economic classes.

Alienated and marginalized, 50 percent of Chicano youths dropped out — some contend they were pushed out — and then had to overcome educational handicaps to compete in the job market.

Southern California school districts weren't always quick to implement school desegregation. Before the Mendez and Brown decisions, Oxnard built neighborhood elementary schools (Juanita and Ramona) yards away from each other to prevent Chicano children of La Colonia from venturing outside their barrio for their education. In 1974, almost three decades after Mendez, U.S. District Court Judge Harry Pregerson used, in Debbie and Doreen Soria et al., Plaintiffs, v. Oxnard School District Board of Trustees, school board minutes from 1934 to show the "explicit intent to racially segregate its elementary school students." He ordered the Oxnard School District to implement a desegregation plan.

Desegregation was usually slow when it came at all, and recent studies show that American communities — and schools — are resegregating rapidly. The Mendez case reminds us that the problems of social equity now facing our children may be complex, but they're not wholly unprecedented. Income based on the education that persons received in previous generations now plays a large role in determining what neighborhoods their progeny live and where they send or do not send their children to school. This is the new face of segregation. If there is one thing that history reminds us it is that the struggle for social justice continues. Thank you for the stamp, Sylvia Mendez.

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Ventura County Star

An Invading Army: A Civil Gang Injunction in A Southern California Chicana/o Community

During my six years of probationary status as an assistant professor at California State University Channel Islands, I learned that self promotion is an important attribute in advancing one’s career in academe. With this in mind, I announce that my latest peer-reviewed journal publication in Latino Studies is now out. The essay explores the dramatic institution of a civil gang injunction in the city of Oxnard. To obtain a free copy visit:

http://www.palgrave-journals.com/lst/journal/v5/n4/index.html

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