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

Proposition 187's Twenty Fifth Anniversary

(Image Los Angeles Times)Two years into my career as an educator at Cypress College in Orange County, California, Proposition 187 hit the political scene in 1994. Designed to discourage, if not chase out undocumented migrants from the American countries of Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras (but mostly people from Mexico as they were, and continue to be, the largest number in this band), the ballot initiative sought to deny them public services. Fueled by fear, fury, and a general status anxiety, the state’s electorate overwhelmingly voted for the measure.

At this time Cypress College students of El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (aka MEChA), organized to have the PUENTE transfer program implemented on their campus. So they, with community supporters, attended the board meetings of the North Orange County Community College District to petition its institution. It was at one of these events that I witnessed Save Our State spokesperson Barbara Coe and Art Jaques—who called himself Joe American—demand that the trustees deny an education to illegal immigrants. Frightened by the same demographic shift, racists around this time leafleted Cypress College’s library bookshelves with Ku Klux Klan/Nazi propaganda.

From this experience, I observed contradictions. Brown people with a long history in the former Mexican territories of Arizona (definitely not an Anglo cognomen), Califas (the Golden State), Colorado (Red), Nevada (Snowcapped), Nuevo Mexico (well you know), and Tejas (ditto)—all stolen by way of the United States’ war against Mexico in 1846)—were now considered outsiders, if not illegal. In addition to the names of the eventual states themselves, appellations that dotted California’s landscape such as SANTA BARBARA, SAN FRANCISCO, and its own capital SACRAMENTO highlighted the perfidy behind this nativist movement spearheaded by former SAN DIEGO mayor, Governor Pete Wilson.

Another incongruity was, and still is, family and friends of ethnic heritage distancing themselves from their expatriate roots, even when they themselves were Mexican nationals. In one case, a relative adopted the language of xenophobes to stigmatize “illegals” while married to a once undocumented migrant. Go figure. Then there were growers who employed a largely undocumented workforce to cultivate avocados, citrus, strawberries, and other crops while they donated a portion of their handsome profits made off the backs of immigrant labor to the election campaigns of red-meat anti-Mexican demagogues of the likes of not only Governor Wilson but also former Congressperson Elton Gallegly in Ventura County. But this makes perfect sense as businesses can more easily exploit with low wages and no benefits undocumented people than those with the legal protections of residency or citizenship.

Then there was the absurdity discovered by crackerjack journalist Gustavo Arellano at the Los Angeles Times that Proposition 187 was imagined by Orange County Republican campaign strategists at, of all places, a Mexican restaurant while getting plastered on margaritas.

No matter the hypocrisy, from the movements behind Proposition 187 I learned not to assume who your allies and adversaries could be. As I watched then and recently, in the case of Simi Valley residents backing and vilifying Councilperson Ruth Luevanos for her posting know your rights information for migrants on her webpage, a diversity of people can be for and against the presence of the new huddled masses on our land, as well as their advocates.

The trust embedded within the memory of Proposition 187 is that a wave of purple states will ultimately elect officials who do not politically scapegoat the most vulnerable. This was the paradox in California during the 1990s as immigrants and their sons and daughters were politically energized. So as Latino members of the California legislature recently declared on the 25th anniversary of this nefarious proposition, "Thank you, Governor Pete Wilson!"

Perhaps sooner, rather than later, a similar coven of U.S. senators and representatives throughout the nation will say, "Thank you, President Donald J. Trump!"

(Image Gustavo Arellano)
In closing, in light of the 25 years since Proposition 187 divided our state, I encourage you to learn the dubious, yet paradoxically optimistic, history of this xenophobic initiative by reading and listening to the brilliant op-ed, timeline, and podcast of Chicano avenger-journalist, and my amigo, Gustavo, at the Los Angeles Times. In addition to being an audacious columnist, he's the author of ¡Ask A Mexican!, Orange County: A Personal History, and Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. Here are links to these installments:
Prop. 187 forced a generation to . . .
Prop. 187 timeline
Podcast

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Say It Ain't So Joe: Strategies of Segregation in Ventura County

From the last Democratic debate, we learned that in the 1970s Joe Biden opposed federally mandated busing to desegregate schools because he believed it was a dilemma to be reckoned with by local government.

To be fair to Joe, most people—black, brown, and white—at the time liked their neighborhood schools.

White-collar professionals purchased homes significantly based on the public school that came with them—historically better resourced than those in black and brown communities systematically concentrated in the nation’s inner cities.

Less affluent minority parents, too, simply desired equally funded neighborhood schools with effective teachers friendly to the needs of their children. And for many others, a culturally relevant curriculum that instilled an amour propre in students from diverse backgrounds was a plus.

Largely absent from today’s public conversation on mandated busing is the racism that created segregated neighborhoods in the first place and translated to poorly funded schools for minority children. As Eric Avila in Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (2004) and Richard Rothstein in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (2017) detail, in the 1930s, Federal Housing Authority policy, via the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation, created a redlining system that encouraged real estate interests (lenders, developers, and agents) to concentrate people of color away from white homeowners.

This was the history behind the desegregation case of Soria v. Oxnard School District Board of Trustees (1971) in Ventura County, California.

As David G. García details in Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality (2018), since the 1930s, the Oxnard School District accommodated white homeowners who did not want their children socializing with Mexican children, primarily, as they were the largest non-white demographic.

As limited funding and facilities made complete segregation impossible, OSD administrators, upon the direction of trustees, gerrymandered attendance boundaries and schedules to separate students as much as possible.

To maintain this system, during the next two decades the OSD constructed two segregated Mexican schools in the 1940s less than one block away from each other. When these sites overcrowded, the district imported portables classrooms and constructed new campuses nearby.

Ten years after Brown v. Board of Education 1954, the Community Service Organization, an ethnic Mexican civil rights group, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People of Ventura County protested the segregationist practices of the OSD trustees.

The district contended that de facto school segregation was an outcome of residential patterns outside its purview.

As the City of Oxnard grew, the CSO and NAACP persistently petitioned the OSD to remedy racial imbalances in the schools. The board rejected all of the numerous desegregation plans proposed by Althea Simmons, field secretary of the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP andits own advisory committee.

Fed up with the intransigence of OSD trustees, black and ethnic Mexican parents filed the Soria case in 1970 in federal court. In May 1971, Judge Harry Pregerson’s summary judgement found that both de facto and “de jure overtones” of segregation consisted of, but were not limited to, the creation of new schools, individual intra-district transfers via busing, and the use of portables to keep black and brown students concentrated in segregated schools.


These were constitutional violations of equal protection under the 14th Amendment. As a result, Judge Pregerson mandated a paired-schools busing plan as a remedy.

That September buses transported children of the barrio to their paired schools in the city’s more middle-class neighborhoods and vice versa. Like Kamala Harris in Berkeley at this time, as a first grader I, too, was bused from an ethnically integrated neighborhood of black, brown, and Asian American families in south Oxnard to Brittell Elementary in the predominantly white, northern part of the city.

In November of 1973, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated Judge Pregerson’s summary judgment and remanded the case for a trial. Subsequently, board minutes of the 1930s surfaced that evidenced the de jure segregation of Mexican children to appease white parents. Former OSD superintendents, including Los Angeles County Superintendent of Schools Dr. Richard Clowes, also testified that up to and throughout the 1960s, trustees maintained segregation.

Based on prior and fresh findings, Judge Pregerson ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and busing continued. The need to bus students faded through the 1980s as the City of Oxnard increasingly browned. Its cause: a middle-class flight of diverse races and ethnicities to the neighboring communities of Camarillo and Ventura.

But as the demographics of these communities shifted over time, flight renewed. People moved further eastward, if able, to Newbury Park and Thousand Oaks.

Hence, a more insidious segregation exists today as people of all colors and creeds troll education and real estate websites for school rankings. The systemic outcome: the segregation of largely black and brown students, again.

If a school’s status dips and the number of brown students rises, some parents, if they can, will take one of the following steps: move to whiter more affluent neighborhoods or commute their children to higher performing and less racially diverse schools.

Without the segregationist mentors who Joe Biden proudly worked with as U.S. Senator in the 1970s, this is the new face of de facto school segregation.
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