Bracero Project at CSUCI

Last Monday, I attended the Bracero Project Town Hall meeting at Santa Paula High School in Ventura County. The event organized by CSU Channel Islands’ Centers for Community Engagement and Multicultural Engagement in conjunction with the university’s History and Chicana/o Studies programs reached out to the community to gather the contact information of people who worked under the US Bracero (Guest Worker) Program from 1942-1964. The event also sought the contact information of family members of Braceros and those who serviced them in housing, board, transportation and in other ways. The next step will be the conduct oral history interviews by CSUCI students.

Some times an image can sum up an experience quite well. See the following link for more information: http://americanhistory.si.edu/onthemove/themes/story_51_5.html

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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Chicana/o Food?

If your are ever in Los Angeles or Orange County two restaurants to place on your itinerary to eat are El Tepeyac [a.k..a., Manny’s] in East Los Angeles and Super Mex in the city of Cypress. For a filling breakfast, the huevos rancheros plate at El Tepeyac (http://losangeles.citysearch.com/profile/59599 ) is outstanding and gets you powered for the day. For a hearty dinner, the #32 carne asada meal at Super Mex (http://www.supermex.com/ ) is heavenly. Your favorite company will make your dinning all the more pleasurable.

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Tall Dark & Chicano

There are people of Mexican origins who speak of Chicanas and Chicanos as though they have gone the way of dinosaurs—no longer around, if not extinct. For others, the image of Chicanas and Chicanos is frozen in the time of 1960s street protestors with raised fists. But as Chicanas and Chicanos still take to the streets when necessary, they have also infiltrated board rooms (political and, some, corporate I imagine), the faculty and administrations of academe, and other institutions. As I write, I am reminded of the ending of Luis Valdez’s Los Vendidos (The Sellouts) play in which Mexican characters representing stereotypes map out the infiltration of Chicanos throughout the nation, even Rumford, Maine.

The label of Chicana/Chicano is well alive. Last night I enjoyed George Lopez’s Tall Dark & Chicano show. Lopez stood before yet another sold out show at the 7,000 seat Nokia Theatre L.A. Live. It was very funny as well as affirming of the syncretic culture that is Chicana/o. Similar to previous tours, Lopez’s comedic stories contrasted his late baby boom upbringing in the San Fernando Valley with that of today’s adolescents. Toward the end of the show, Lopez repeatedly implored audience members in their mid-twenties and thirties to savor their youth. His admonition reminded me of George Bernard Shaw’s adage, “Youth is wasted on the young.” (I thought it was Mark Twain but a quick Google tells me otherwise).

Unlike his 2005 show at the Universal Gibson Amphitheatre, Lopez was also more political in that he took jabs at the outgoing W and the Terminator. He also condemned the creation of a wall along the US-Mexico border. He compared the creation of a nativist inspired wall like putting on a condom after having sex since some 45 million Latinos already live in the US. He also characterized the social-political present as “our time.” Lopez meant that a cultural-demographic shift was presently taking place. As I listened, I thought of a host of issues that our society needs to address in this regard, mainly having to do with education.

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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

Beijing Olympic Freestyle Champion: Henry Cejudo

Twenty-one year old Henry Cejudo won the gold medal in the 55-kilogram (121 lbs) weight class today against Japan's Tomohiro Matsunaga.

Congratulations, Henry!