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A place in the sun: Mexican Americans, race, and the suburbanization of Los Angeles, 1940-1980

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A place in the sun: Mexican Americans, race, and the suburbanization of Los Angeles, 1940-1980

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“A PLACE IN THE SUN”:
MEXICAN AMERICANS, RACE,
AND THE SUBURBANIZATION OF LOS ANGELES
1940-1980

by

Jerry Gonzalez

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(HISTORY)

August 2009

Copyright 2009 Jerry Gonzalez

DEDICATION

For my beloved grandmother,
Olivia Rivas

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation could not have been written without the support, guidance,
and friendship of so many wonderful people and institutions. My dissertation
committee deserves special recognition for nurturing this project from its inception
to its completion. I will never be able to thank George Sánchez, my esteemed
advisor, enough for admitting me into the History Department at USC. As a mentor,
George knew when to push me and when to let me float. His breadth and depth of
knowledge in Chicana/o history and beyond has been a constant source of
inspiration. I cannot say enough about the time and dedication Bill Deverell
committed to me in the years since he arrived at USC. Bill taught me how to be a
serious scholar and instilled in me the belief that nothing is merely interesting, it is
important! Leland Saito provided much encouragement throughout my graduate
school career and his work has left an imprint on my own scholarly development.
I was fortunate enough as an undergraduate at Fullerton College and
California State University, Fullerton to learn from outstanding and supportive
faculty. Gerry Padilla and Adela Lopez provided me with a foundation in Chicano
Studies at Fullerton College. Larry de Graaf, Raphe Sonenshein, and Clark Davis all
took interest in my work at Cal State Fullerton and were instrumental in my decision
to pursue a Ph.D. Clark Davis was great mentor and a generous and caring friend.
iii
Like so many other scholars who knew him, I was devastated by his passing in 2003.
Clark, this dissertation is possible because of you.
Several institutions and organizations provided generous funding that
allowed me time to research and write. The Irvine Foundation Diversity Fellowship
opened the door for me to pursue graduate school at USC and connected me with a
number of amazingly talented grad school colleagues, many of whom are named
specifically later in these acknowledgements. The USC History Department has
offered nominal though no less important financial support to attend conferences and
subsidize research expenses that helped shape this study. I am grateful to professors
Peter Mancall, Richard Fox, and Karen Haltunnen who, as Director of Graduate
Studies at various times during my program, all found my scholarly endeavors
important enough to warrant departmental funding. At the dissertation stage, I have
been lucky enough to hold a research grant from the Historical Society of Southern
California for the summer of 2006, and a Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellowship
offered through the Huntington Library for the summer of 2007. I am grateful to
have also held a Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West summer
dissertation fellowship in 2007 that put me in residence at the Huntington Library for
that summer. The John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation generously supported
the final year of dissertation research and writing.
Many archivists, librarians, and community members devoted countless
hours to helping me locate the right sources to complete this project. I am grateful
for the assistance of the wonderful staff members in the Special Collections
iv
Department at Stanford University, especially Polly Armstrong. The staff at the
National Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian Institution accommodated my
limited schedule when I conducted research there in May 2006. Thank you to the
staff at the Huntington Library, especially Juan Gomez, Catherine Wehrey, Meredith
Berbée, and Kate Hennig who all so graciously facilitated my research experience
there. Dace Taube and the rest of the staff at the Special Collections Department at
USC also made research much easier by dredging up long-forgotten boxes and
tirelessly producing copies of badly needed documents. Likewise, the staffs at the
Fairchild Aerial Photograph Archive at Whittier College, the Urban Archives Center
at California State University, Northridge, and at the Bancroft Library at the
University of California at Berkeley helped me in my research. David Deis from the
Cal State Northridge Cartography Lab stepped in at a late stage and produced the
beautiful map which graces the opening of the Introduction.
Three community institutions provided central direction to this dissertation.
Susana Lozano at the Pico Rivera Historical Museum granted me access to rare
documents and told me wonderful stories about Pico Rivera in the 1960s and 1970s.
La Historia Society in El Monte welcomed me in and granted me the privilege of
writing about aspects of their history. Ben Campos, Sergio Jimenez, Ernie and Olga
Gutierrez, Chuck and Josie Gonzalez, and Cecilia Hernandez warmly accepted me at
the museum on Tyler Avenue and shared their memories of Hicks Camp and El
Monte. I also had the special privilege of presenting a portion of my work at the
Orange County Mexican American Historical Society’s annual Barrio Symposium in
v
2008. Marty Grajeda introduced me to OCMAHS and granted me the time and space
to present.
Friends and colleagues offered considerable inspiration and support since I
began graduate school in 2002. I was fortunate to enter graduate school with an
amazing cohort of scholars who proved themselves equally esteemed as friends.
Claudia Martinez’s fierce independence and willingness to break barriers showed
early on. She handled the unique challenges thrown her way with grace and steadfast
courage that will continue to serve her and others around her well into the future.
Alexander Aviña’s soccer talent is about the only thing that can match the
intellectual contributions he made to our group. And, although he wears his hair
funny, he is a good friend and a valued colleague. Gustavo Licón always knows
when to cast aside shop talk for meaningfully useless conversation. Without the
Goose-man none of us would have retained our humanity or sanity throughout
graduate school for he regularly reminded us of the importance to have fun. It was a
special privilege to have gone through the ups and downs of graduate school and life
with Gustavo and I look forward to meeting more challenges in the future with my
good friend at my side. Likewise, my brother from another mother, Phuong Nguyen,
set the example for all of us. As a scholar, a friend, and a confidante Phuong was the
glue to our many parts. I truly could not have made it through graduate school
without Phuong’s presence and for his endless friendship and support I simply say,
thank you.
vi
I am unable to put into words all the gratitude and appreciation I have for
knowing fellow USC graduate students Micaela Smith, Gilbert Estrada, Nicholas
Hall, Barbara Soliz, Rosina Lozano, Jeff Kosiorek, and, especially Lalo Licón who
recruited me to the program and offered mentorship over the years. My friend
Rebecca Sheehan’s brilliance and genuine humanity made the office a welcome
home away from home. You’re a champion Beccs!
The Huntington Library also provided a wonderful space to meet graduate
students and faculty from other institutions. It was there that I met Sean Greene who
has become a close friend over the last several years. Sean was always good for a
procrastination break but our conversations always yielded new and exciting ideas.
The same can be said of the rest of my fellow Huntington comrades Vero Castillo,
Marlene Medrano, Suyapa Portillo, and Margie Brown-Coronel who were all
hustling to the finish line at the same time. I am especially grateful to Matt Garcia for
taking an interest in this project and offering his insights on research and life in the
profession. Our carpool rides to the Huntington in the summer of 2008 were like
mini-seminars on wheels and I am thankful to have Matt as a colleague and friend.
This dissertation benefited greatly from the close readings and insightful
comments made by members in my dissertation writing groups. When Hillary Jenks
approached me in 2004 to join a writing group focused on Los Angeles Studies I had
no idea how close of a friend she would become. Hillary has read just about every
word I have ever written for this dissertation and her sharp critiques have improved
this dissertation. Thank you, Hill. Likewise the various members who have gone
vii
through our group have provided important feedback at crucial stages. I can’t thank
Laura Barraclough, Michan Connor, Dan Hosang, Sean Greene, and Phuong Nguyen
enough for the time and dedication they invested towards the group. My other
writing posse was devoted to producing new scholarship in Chicana and Chicano
history and has impacted this work in significant ways. Lalo Licón, Julie Wiese,
Gustavo Licón, and Isa Quintana showed what dedicated scholars they are at every
monthly meeting, contributing cutting edge chapters and offering indispensable
suggestions for revision. Milo Alvarez, and Mike Chavez attended when their
schedules allowed and provided just as helpful feedback.
My time at USC was also made much more enjoyable because of the great
conversations I had with LaVerne Hughes, Brenda Johnson, Lori Rogers, and Sandra
Hopwood. As the gatekeepers to all things History Department related, LaVerne,
Brenda, Lori, and Sandra handled the barrage of requests, questions, and egos with
unshakeable grace. In my early days at USC, if I wasn’t in the History Department I
was at the American Studies & Ethnicity Center. Sonia Rodriguez and Kitty Lai have
always gone above and beyond to help when I needed it.
I learned at an early age to question knowledge and seek my own
interpretations. My family’s hand in developing my intellectual courage and
curiosity guided me in more ways than I may ever possibly know and I thank every
one of them for making this dissertation possible. To my sisters, Jackie, Candace,
and Kristen, who taught me that life is a struggle but that the joys and rewards we
share make it all worth it. To Rikki, Priscilla, and Elise, I hope this dissertation
viii
inspires you all to tell your own stories. Gary, Mike, and Paul have always
encouraged me to finish this project. And, finally, to my parents, Jerry and Maria,
who gave me a wide berth to pursue my interests before I knew what those interests
were. They never stopped believing that I could do this and I am honored to share
this dissertation with them.
I have been uncommonly blessed to have been accepted so warmly by the
Alvarado family. Rose opened her home to me and graciously tolerated all the books
and papers strewn across her living room. Art, Mary, Mark, Laura, Vivian, Curt, and
Steve have supported me from the start and always showed genuine interest in what I
was doing. I hope the completion of this dissertation provides additional inspiration
for the youth movement in the Alvarado family to pursue their own academic
dreams, especially to Bubba, Ava, Patrick, Kristen, Annie, Alyssa, Alec, Katie, and
Tam.
My most heartfelt gratitude is reserved for the one person who makes
everything possible, my loving wife Kristina Alvarado-Gonzalez. Without her
warmth, encouragement, and forceful but timely kicks in the butt, I would not have
completed this project. Kristina served as a constant source of inspiration,
encouragement, and love over these years and I am a better person for having been in
her presence. Moreover, she has been a steadfast intellectual companion from the
start, constantly challenging me to rethink and revise. And, even though she has her
own work to focus on she always takes time to hear me out and bounce back ideas.
Kristina, you are my best friend and the love of my life. Thank you.
ix
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication ii

Acknowledgments iii

List of Tables xi

List of Figures xii

Abstract xiii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: The Land of Mañana: Hicks Camp 28
and the Foundation of Mexican American
Suburbanization in Los Angeles, 1925-1958

Chapter 2: With Their Wallets in Their Hands: 64
Race, Housing, and the Struggle for Upward
Mobility, 1950-1970

Chapter 3: From the Barrio to the ‘Burbs: 103
Mexican American Political Activity, 1958-1968

Chapter 4: “Mi Casa es Mi Castillo” (“My Home 144
Is My Castle”): Mexican Americans and Suburban
Renewal, 1955-1970

Chapter 5: Mexican American Youths in Suburban 183
Los Angeles: Education and Cruising as Arenas of
Struggle, 1947-1978

Conclusion 206

Bibliography 210

x
LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. Racial Composition of Key
San Gabriel Valley Suburbs in 1960 83

Table 2. Mexican Americans in City Elected
and Appointed Positions, 1969 143

xi
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Los Angeles County 1

Figure 2. Colonias in Eastern Los Angeles County, ca. 1941 35

Figure 3. Flood Ranch Redevelopment Project, ca. 1967 144

Figure 4. Flood Ranch Aerial, 1945 153

Figure 5. Flood Ranch Aerial, 1962 155

Figure 6. Flood Ranch Streets, ca. 1966 158

xii
ABSTRACT

This dissertation contributes to a widening dialogue concerning the
intersections of race and class in post-World War II American suburbs. Working
with archival manuscripts, oral histories, and contemporary social science data I
approach my analysis of Mexican American suburbanization and identity
construction through the analytical lenses of Chicana/o history and the new suburban
history. Bringing these two ostensibly incompatible scholarly fields into
conversation challenges the accepted racial discourse on the modern metropolis that
envisions race solely through a white and black binary. Instead, my focus on ethnic
Mexicans in the post-World War II period illustrates the uneven manifestations of
racial difference in American society because pioneer ethnic Mexican suburbanites
were able to manipulate their racial identities in order to purchase suburban homes.
Racially and culturally, these middle-class Mexican Americans initially held
common cause with working-class ethnic Mexicans as they collectively sought to
achieve the suburban good life.
Working-class ethnic Mexican suburban communities had deep historical
roots in the agricultural industries that once dominated rural Los Angeles. Many of
these communities remained in place long after homeowners and local governing
bodies rearranged municipal boundaries. However, by the 1970s nearly all suburban
municipalities had laid siege to the barrios within their city limits, relying heavily on
the involvement of middle class Mexican Americans to broker suburban
xiii
redevelopment deals. Ultimately, I argue that while the legacies of pervasive racial
discrimination in suburban housing battles helped galvanize a cohesive non-white
racial identity across suburban Mexican American communities, differing class
commitments to housing issues, such as urban renewal and neighborhood
redevelopment, fueled tensions within the Mexican American community at large.
Metropolitan Los Angeles is the perfect site to explore issues related to
suburban racial and ethnic identity because the twin processes of rapid
suburbanization and ethnic Mexican residential dispersion following World War II
reflect an early expression of a much more recent trend throughout metropolitan
regions in the United States South and Midwest. Moreover, this project articulates a
vision of suburbia that simultaneously upholds the popular imagery of upward
mobility and dismantles the common mythology that frames suburbs as bastions of
the white elite.

xiv
INTRODUCTION

Figure 1. Los Angeles County. Key municipalities and their incorporation dates.

Isaías “Cy” Mesa tried his best to imagine a home out of the patch of land he
had purchased for his family in July 1948. Situated squarely within Flood Ranch, an
old colonia in present-day Santa Fe Springs on the east bank of the San Gabriel
River, Mesa’s property consisted of nothing but an empty lot next to rows of jerry-
built homes. With meager means to live on, Cy and his wife Carmen dutifully made
the best of the 16 by 16 foot tent that Cy bought from a friend for $20. For seven
months, Cy, Carmen, and their two young sons survived the cool autumn and rainy
1
winter, making a home out of that old army tent until a neighbor helped Cy build a
modest house out of scrap material early in the spring of 1949. Over the years Cy
and Carmen became involved in the community, helping other ethnic Mexican
families in similar socioeconomic situations.
1
In colonias residents enjoyed relative
autonomy as property owners in county territory. There, they could build their own
homes and make improvements as they saw fit. Like other property owners in Flood
Ranch and other metropolitan suburbs, Cy built a second house on his property in
1957.
2

The Mesas’ inauspicious beginnings belie a deeper, more complex narrative
concerning the ethnic Mexican suburban experience. Nothing on the surface of the
story suggests that the Mesas would find strength and stability in their community, or
that they would someday enjoy the comforts of a suburban home. Certainly the
Mesas’ story indicates that struggle lay ahead for them, but nothing to suggest that
struggle entailed a pitched battle with the City of Santa Fe Springs over an urban
renewal project that threatened the very home that they worked so hard to build and
maintain. Cy became an active opponent in 1962 to a proposed urban renewal plan,
even though it meant challenging the authority of fellow Mexican Americans.

1
Scott Duke Harris, “Family’s Saga Parallels That of Proud City,” Los Angeles Times, 30 November
1978, SE1.

2
Although her work is based on an earlier period in suburban development than the Mesas’ story,
Becky Nicolaides discusses the importance of homeowner-homebuilder independence in forming
working-class suburban identity in her important study of Southgate in Southeast Los Angeles
County. See, Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of
Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 26-38; also see Olivier Zunz,
The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit,
1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
2
Ultimately, Mesa’s activism positioned him to steer redevelopment along more
equitable and just lines for the residents of Flood Ranch. As a member of the
Citizen’s Advisory Committee for the Flood Ranch Redevelopment Project, Cy
Mesa ensured that the needs of working-class Mexican American homeowners and
residents were met rather than disregarded and cast aside.
3

Like many other Mexican Americans in the postwar era Cy laid claim to an
unrestricted American identity, believing that the rights and entitlements granted to
citizens belonged to he and members of his community. “Being an American
citizen,” he recalled about his decision to battle urban renewal, “I felt I had the right
to demand our God-given rights to own a piece of land—the most sacred thing we
can have this side of heaven.” Although Cy made a point to highlight his American
citizenship he also adhered to his ethnic Mexican identity. During an impassioned
protest at a public meeting for the project, Cy Mesa recounted his family’s struggles
in Flood Ranch and expressed his fear of the redevelopment project’s uncertain
impact on his family’s future. His words spoke to the anxieties of the mostly male,
Mexican American homeowners in attendance as Cy recalled that, “as I finished my
speech, we all cried. We have a saying in Spanish, Como todos los hombres, which
means, ‘We cried like men.’”
4

3
Harris, “Family’s Saga”; City of Santa Fe Springs, “Residential Rehabilitation in the Flood Ranch:
Urban Renewal Project, California R-71,” box 2, folder “Flood Ranch Redevelopment Project,”
Chester Holifield Papers, Department of Special Collections, University of Southern California.

4
Harris, “Family’s Saga.”

3
The specter of losing Flood Ranch to government bulldozers stirred the
emotions of the community and prompted collective action for neighborhood
survival. As I detail in Chapter Four of this dissertation, Flood Ranch activists
organized demonstrations, wrote letters to local elected officials, procured the aid of
the Republican Party and liberal civil rights organizations, and sued the city for
racial discrimination. After nearly seven years of struggle, Santa Fe Springs
prevailed over community challenges prompting activists like Cy and Carmen to
begin looking for new homes in surrounding cities. However, the developers offered
the Mesas a low interest rate loan to upgrade their property and they ultimately
decided to stay and rebuild the neighborhood relations of Flood Ranch. The
emphasis that the Mesas and their allies placed on preserving the neighborhood from
redevelopment underscores the significant connections barrio residents made
between identity and home. Key to this coupling was how class, ethnic, and racial
identity coalesced around the singular idea of the suburban home.
In the broadest sense, this dissertation is a study of how Mexican Americans
encountered and experienced the growth of suburban Los Angeles. For many
Mexican Americans in metropolitan Los Angeles suburbanization represented a
dialectical process. The overdevelopment of new suburban neighborhoods
obliterated many colonias on the metropolitan fringe. The devastation wrought by
the growth of suburban Los Angeles had dire consequences for many Mexican
American communities. On the other hand, suburbanization presented an opportunity
for Mexican Americans to move up social, political, and economic ladders,
4
especially in the 1960s. Suburban homeownership and its attendant benefits primed a
generation of Mexican Americans following World War II to demand entrance to the
American mainstream. Yet the competing forces that dismantled semi-rural ethnic
Mexican societies in postwar Los Angeles and simultaneously paved the way for
increased Mexican American suburban homeownership provoked intense intra-group
battles over the meanings of home and community. Though Mexican Americans
uniformly confronted racial segregation in the suburbs in the 1940s and 1950s,
divisions within the group manifested as residential development and rapid
demographic change in the 1960s laid class distinctions bare.
Although the geographies of racial difference in metropolitan Los Angeles
fundamentally circumscribed housing options for racial and ethnic minorities prior to
World War II, Mexican Americans found increased inclusion in suburbanizing
regions south and east of downtown Los Angeles in subsequent decades. Mexican
Americans became the majority in some of these suburban cities. Pico Rivera stands
as a case in point. By 1970, Mexican Americans constituted 65% of Pico Rivera’s
total population of more 54,000 residents.
5
Through a series of case studies, this
dissertation demonstrates that ethnic Mexicans were at the center of suburban
development in Los Angeles from the beginning. Prior to the mass suburbanization
of Los Angeles, semi-rural colonias (colonies) composed of working-class, first and
second-generation Mexican Americans dotted the landscape. Despite the inherently

5
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Population: 1970. Vol. 1, Characteristics of The Population:
Part 6, California – Section 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1973), 671.

5
segregated nature of these colonias ethnic Mexicans in these settlements refused to
allow structural forms of inequality in housing and labor break their spirit. Instead,
colonias emerged as sites of collective identity formation and political activism that
merged Mexican and American cultural practices. Ethnic Mexican colonias
remained in place long after they were overrun by suburban tract neighborhoods.
Historian Gilbert González asserts that colonias in Southern California
evolved into postwar suburban barrios. Importantly, these suburban barrios formed
chiefly in the absence of Mexican migrants, a quality he contends that makes the
history of colonias novel in urban studies.
6
Colonias connect the deep history of
racialization Mexicans endured to the emergence of suburbs with large Mexican
American populations marking these suburban communities as racialized spaces.
Ethnic Mexicans drew strength and support from each other through their
interactions in these shared spaces. Historian Albert Camarillo laid the foundation
for understanding metropolitan ethnic Mexican communities and provides a way to
understand the transition from colonias to barrios through his conceptualization of
neighborhood development termed barrioization. Camarillo’s phraseology refutes
the notion that barrios are historically static, fixed in place and time while the larger
processes of metropolitan development work around them. Rather, as Camarillo
demonstrates, barrioization signified a dynamic process of neighborhood
development shaped by broader external social and political conditions. This
complex interplay places barrio residents in direct conversation with the world

6
Gilbert G. González, Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern
California County, 1900-1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 15-16.
6
around them, not detached from the workings of everyday life.
7
I build my
contention that Mexican American suburbanization occurred because former
colonias resisted complete removal, and because Eastside Mexican Americans
challenged racial segregation.
The transformation of colonias into barrios—as central as that phenomenon
is to the origins of ethnic Mexican suburbanization—expresses only a single
component of postwar metropolitan development. Driven by a core belief in the
tenants of American citizenship, Mexican American veterans and professionals
challenged housing segregation and strategically manipulated their own racial
identities in order to secure suburban housing and its attendant benefits. Vested in
the notion that wartime service and sacrifice warranted inclusion, Mexican
Americans through individual and collective action strategically called upon the
privileges ascribed to whiteness even though few wholeheartedly adopted white
identities. Instead, I propose that Mexican Americans following World War II
adopted an ambivalent whiteness, one that demanded the benefits tied to white
identity but, because of the intersection between larger structural barriers and a
rejection of a full whiteness, did not produce yet another group of whitened
Americans.
8
Although Mexican Americans shifted their racial allegiances in times

7
Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in
Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848-1930 (1979; sixth printing, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1996), 53.

8
The emergence of whiteness studies has influenced a number of scholars to reconceptualize the
experiences of European immigrant groups alongside the racial discourses that marked them as non-
white or inbetween races. See, David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the
American Working-Class (London: Verso, 1999); Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and
7
that were opportune for them, they actively maintained their ties to a bi-cultural
Mexican American identity crafted by centuries of racialized discourses and
collective group identity.
Mexican racialization in the United States is a slippery topic complicated by
the epistemological convergence of historical analysis, cultural studies, and critical
race studies. While interdisciplinary approaches have enriched our understanding of
the ethnic Mexican experience in United States’ society, scholarly discourse
concerning the question of whiteness eludes consensus. What is the relationship
between Mexicans and whiteness in United States history? Such a presumably
simple question can yield (and has yielded) remarkably diverse responses. From as
early as 1848, Mexicans in the United States have continuously contended with
schizophrenic racial logics that simultaneously mark the wider community as white,
non-white, foreign, and native.
9
Moreover, scholars who study the pre-World War II
periods map the process of Mexican racialization onto a Western geography defined
by its multiracialism and diffuse hierarchical structures. Yet, studies on the postwar
era rely on the Chicano cultural nationalist language of “brown, not white” to stake

What that Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998);
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of
Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); David Roediger, Working Toward
Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the
Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness:
How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).

9
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that drew the imperialist war against Mexico to a tragic
conclusion bestowed a legal whiteness to the inhabitants who elected to stay within the ceded
territories of the former Mexican frontier. The ninth provision of the treaty granted “all the rights of
citizens” to vanquished Mexican property holders. See, Richard Griswold Del Castillo, The Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990).

8
out the historical process of Mexican racialization.
10
This study demonstrates that
Mexican racialization viewed through the context of suburbanization parallels the
nuance and dynamism of previous historical epochs. The creation of racial identities
in suburban Los Angeles became intensely political practices influenced by
aspirations of upward mobility and first-class citizenship.
Historian David Roediger argues that early twentieth century southern and
eastern European immigrants negotiated a racial “inbetweenness” throughout the
first half of the twentieth century only to graduate to “whiteness” following the
Second World War by becoming ardent defenders of the suburban ideal.
11
Few
scholars have attempted to posit how ethnic Mexicans fold into this historical
narrative, or, in other words, why ethnic Mexicans and other Latinos cannot be
regarded simply as the twentieth century’s Poles, Jews, and Italians. The legacies of
the northern Mexican frontier and their attendant cultural resonances belie the
argument that Mexicans are simply Italians in the recent period. Immigration scholar
Joel Perlmann advanced one such thesis arguing in Italians Then, Mexicans Now that
the subsequent generations of Mexican Americans following the latest immigration
boom would assimilate into American society much the same way that Italian

10
See for example, Guadalupe San Miguel, Brown, Not White: School Integration and the Chicano
Movement in Houston (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001); George Mariscal,
Brown Eyed Children of the Sun: Lessons from the Chicano Movement, 1965-1975 (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 2005).

11
David R. Roediger, Working Towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The
Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

9
Americans did by the middle of the twentieth century.
12
Yet the shifting racial
ideologies over what constitutes “white,” and all the material benefits attendant to
that racial identity, were distributed unevenly to Mexican Americans at a critical
juncture in the postwar era: during the formative years of suburbanization. So, while
they were able to move into the suburbs they were never accepted as complete
equals. In this case, inclusion did not translate into equality.
13
Regardless of the
tenure or generation of United States citizenship Mexicans possessed, their social
racialization as non-white made their suburban experiences different from whites and
African Americans.
And yet the few scholars who do study Chicano history against the backdrop
of whiteness point to shifting legal classifications of Mexicans to ground their
arguments that Mexican Americans advocated for a white identity. Historian Neil
Foley has been at the forefront of scholarship engaged in the project of recovering
Mexican American claims to whiteness. Characterized as a “Faustian pact with
whiteness” the Mexican American middle class that stressed assimilation and
Americanization presents an intellectual quandary over the larger aims of their racial

12
Joel Perlmann, Italians Then, Mexicans Now: Immigrant Origins and Second-Generation Progress,
1890-2000 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005).

13
Historian Adrian Burgos reminds us in his study of Latinos in American baseball that Latinos,
though classified as non-white, broke the color barrier in the institution but that their participation
never constituted a full acceptance of their customs, origins, or contributions. See, Adrian Burgos,
Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007).

10
politics.
14
Did they in fact reject their mestizo heritage opting instead to hang their
destinies on their Spanish origins? Or, did they strategically manipulate their
identities within a historical moment that allowed such fluidity in order to secure
civil rights and suburban housing? This dissertation demonstrates that the tensions
inherent in the above questions existed in tandem, never providing fully quantifiable
answers. Rather, while the presence of Mexican Americans in suburban Los Angeles
might seem to uphold the notion that they had achieved a modicum of whiteness,
Mexicanness stubbornly remained an essential part of the racial calculus applied to
this suburban cohort.
Historical studies of twentieth-century American suburbs have grown in
number over the last decade contributing valuable new insights into the development
of metropolitan regions. Recent studies such as Matt Garcia’s A World of Its Own,
Becky Nicolaides’s My Blue Heaven, Andrew Wiese’s Places of Their Own, and
Charlotte Brooks’s Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends have dismantled entrenched
historiographical axioms that built the definition of suburbia narrowly around racial
and class markers exclusive to privileged whites. Collectively, these studies have
recalibrated the study of American suburbs to include virtually any racialized group
in any economic class, opening the door for my dissertation. Inserting Mexican

14
See Neil Foley, “Becoming Hispanic: Mexican Americans and the Faustian Pact with Whiteness,”
Reflexiones 1997: New Directions in Mexican American Studies (Austin, Texas: Center for Mexican
American Studies, 1998): 53-70; Foley, “Partly Colored or Other White: Mexican Americans and
Their Problem with the Color Line,” in Stephanie Cole and Alison M. Parker, eds., Beyond Black and
White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest (College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 2004): 123-44; Perlmann, Italians Then, Mexicans Now.

11
Americans into the picture poses a new challenge to the field of suburban history
because it turns the attention to a group betwixt and between racialized poles.
Mexican Americans are neither white nor black. Yet Mexican American history is
ripe for uncovering the impacts of postwar suburban development on Mexican
American communities.
The term, Mexican American suburb, distorts much of what scholars know
about traditional suburbs. Seen exclusively as white middle to upper class enclaves,
suburbs in American history are seen as the natural outcomes of class ascension.
Whites who moved up the economic ladder fled inner cities leaving a devastated tax
base and a crumbling city in their wake. The places they went to excluded African
Americans and other people of color while they positioned working class whites to
grasp the mantles of power at the expense of poor people. While this trajectory may
be held up as the universal portrayal of suburban mobility, it borrows almost wholly
from metropolitan development models based on Eastern and Midwestern cities. Los
Angeles exhibits many of the elements of that story except that race does not operate
as simplistically. While blacks were excluded from most suburbs in Los Angeles
many of the suburban cities that arose after World War II gradually gave way to
increased Mexican American settlement. In the three decades following World War
II, incorporated cities witnessed a marked growth in Mexican American residency,
both homeowner and tenancy at the same time that African Americans remained
confined largely to Central Avenue and Watts. Thus, Mexican American suburbs
12
were places defined by a plurality of the group in the area and the exclusion of
blacks.
Scholars of the black experience in Los Angeles detail the rigid social and
community divisions between white and black Angelenos over the course of the
twentieth century.
15
The fact that Mexican Americans disrupted the demographic
composition of working-class suburbs in the San Gabriel Valley and Southeast Los
Angeles County raises important questions about differential racialization and the
manifestation of racial difference in suburban housing. How, after more than one
hundred years of racialization in the United States, did Mexican Americans crack the
glass ceiling in suburban housing? Moreover, how did Mexican Americans
simultaneously become the single largest population group in many eastside Los
Angeles County suburbs by 1980 at the same time that East Los Angeles evolved
into the largest ethnic Mexican barrio in the United States? And, what was the
relationship between Mexican American suburban communities and East Los
Angeles? In addressing these questions this dissertation focuses on a section of the
Los Angeles basin that geographically connects Eastside Los Angeles with suburbs
containing the largest concentration of ethnic Mexican residents.

15
See, for example, Lawrence de Graaf, “City of Black Angels: Emergence of the Los Angeles
Ghetto, 1890-1930,” Pacific Historical Review 39 (August 1970); Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The
Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995); Douglas
Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005); Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great
Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Andrew Wiese, Places of
their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004); Raphael Sonenshein, Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los
Angeles (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).

13
As an exploration of key Mexican American suburban spaces in Los Angeles,
this dissertation merges the theories of racial formation and spatial production to
interrogate the fundamental underpinnings of metropolitan development in the
postwar era. Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant advanced the concept of
racial formation that they defined as the “socio-historical process by which racial
categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.” In arguing that race is
neither a fixed objective product of natural selection, nor an illusion of American
society that will go away if we ignore it, Omi and Winant assert that we must
“understand race as an unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings [that
are] constantly being transformed by political struggle.”
16
Grassroots challenges to
the hegemonic order of whiteness constitute a rearticulation of racial meaning and
the benefits (as well as the consequences) of racial ideology.
17
So, Mexican
Americans who demanded an end to racial segregation, who cruised the boulevards
through formerly all-white neighborhoods, and challenged redevelopment all
engaged in political practices that defied the subordinating norms of postwar
American society and registered critical interventions on the meaning of suburban
space.
Such challenges to the racial “common sense” of the metropolitan order
emanated from ethnic Mexicans’ relationship with the historical Southwest. In the

16
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the
1990s (2d ed.; New York: Routledge, 1994), 54-55.

17
Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 89.

14
aftermath of President James K. Polk’s unjust and patently imperialist war against
Mexico (1846-1848), Mexicanos who remained in the ceded territories endured
relentless violence and atrocities that undermined the ninth provision of the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo entitling Mexicans to full, legal citizenship. In what one historian
has termed the “unending Mexican war,” white Americans who migrated across the
continent in droves brutalized Mexicanos in the vanquished region.
18
These legacies
of Western conquest informed practices of Mexican racialization that gave rise to
systems of hierarchy and power formed around racial difference.
19

Scholars Tomás Almaguer, Lisbeth Haas, and Stephen Pitti have each shown
how the longue durée of Western racial relations bridged the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries and marked Mexican Americans as others in their native
homelands. Through this othering racial process, Mexicans drew on the strengths
offered through racialized space to build cohesive identities and resist domination by
the new hegemonic order.
20
By extension, historian Matt Garcia’s work on the citrus
suburbs of Los Angeles builds on the notion that space represents the fulcrum of

18
William Deverell’s phrase “the unending Mexican War” powerfully describes the second half of the
19
th
century while guerrilla warfare flourished in the territories and along the newly created border.
See, William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its
Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

19
Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West;
Tomás Almaguer, Racial Faultlines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994); Laura E. Gómez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the
Mexican American Race (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

20
Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines; Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California,
1769-1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Stephen J. Pitti, The Devil in Silicon
Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2003). See also, Reginald Horsman, Manifest Destiny:

15
ethnic Mexican identity formation, yielding much different interpretations as we
expand out from studying urban barrios like the Los Angeles Eastside. Building on
the models that spaces and identities were under constant negotiation first expressed
individually by Camarillo and George Sánchez, Garcia argues that ethnic Mexican
responses to shifting spatial realities of the Southern California citrus communities
birthed a hybrid consciousness among Mexican Americans informed by its suburban
context.
21
This dissertation builds on these studies by tapping into the analyses
centered on identity formation and connecting them to the multiple spaces studied
across the field. Bridging the gap between the Eastside and surrounding suburbs
leads us towards a broader understanding of the ways that the modern metropolis
changes race, and race changes the modern metropolis.
Sociologists and geographers have done a more thorough job of illuminating
Latinos’ impact on American suburbs.
22
Altogether, from Boyle Heights in the west
to Pomona in the east, the San Gabriel Valley has been labeled the “Greater

21
Matt Garcia, A World of It Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles,
1900-1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). See also, Camarillo, Chicanos in
a Changing Society; George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and
Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and José
Alamillo, Making Lemonade Out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a California
Town, 1880-1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

22
The thrust of social scientific studies is directed at recent immigrants in recent decades however,
which leaves us with an incomplete understanding of long-term ethnic Mexican metropolitan growth.
See Victor M. Valle and Rodolfo D. Torres, Latino Metropolis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000); Thomas Macias, Mestizo in America: Generations of Mexican Ethnicity in the Suburban
Southwest (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006); Lisa Garcia Bedolla, Fluid Borders: Latino
Power, Identity, and Politics in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); David
E. Hayes-Bautista, La Nueva California: Latinos in the Golden State (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004); and Gilda Ochoa, Becoming Neighbors in a Mexican American Community:
Power, Conflict, and Solidarity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004).

16
Eastside” by ethnic studies scholars Victor Valle and Rodolfo Torres. In their words,
“the Greater Eastside is not merely an aggregation of residents of Mexican ancestry;
it is a network of neighborhoods, cultural institutions, commercial strips, and
suburban manufacturing zones linked by the day to day realities of work and play.”
23

My contention is that this network did not develop overnight. A mass migration out
of the Eastside barrios into the shiny new suburbs of the San Gabriel Valley laid the
groundwork for the expansive, present-day “Latino metropolis.”
The cohort of second-generation Mexican Americans in the 1930s and 1940s
provide the key to understanding how Los Angeles changed over time. Scholars in
Chicana/o history have written about the varied political and cultural ideologies of
the Mexican American Generation and their responses to racial inequality. Many of
the most insightful works have drawn our attention to the urban conditions this
generation encountered during and after World War II. The cultivation of civic
identity within the social world of urban barrios ensured that Mexican Americans
would adhere to a bi-cultural identity that drew from both their Mexican and
“American” roots.
24
Scholars have only recently begun to chart the linkage between
the politics of the urban Mexican American Generation and the rise of militant

23
Valle and Torres, Latino Metropolis, 24.

24
George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in Chicano Los
Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Anthony Macias, Mexican
American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935-1968 (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2008).

17
Chicanismo in the barrios.
25
However, Matt Garcia’s study of race in the citrus
suburbs of eastern L.A. County challenged Chicana/o historians to re-imagine the
social, cultural, and political worlds of ethnic Mexican communities by finally
breaking free from the urban hegemony and adopting a vision of the metropolis that
connects the interrelated urban, rural, and suburban spheres.
26
My study addresses
Garcia’s challenge by rooting Mexican American class division squarely within
suburban housing concerns.
Moreover, approaching Chicana/o history from the suburbs allows a closer
examination of the Mexican American Generation by going into their homes and
communities to unpack their varied, and at times, competing political ideologies.
Historians of the twentieth century Chicana/o experience crafted a generational
framework to explain the political animus between middle-class Mexican Americans
and working-class Chicanos in the 1960s and 1970s.
27
Mario T. Garcia and Juan
Gomez-Quiñones in their individual works identified the Mexican American
Generation as predominantly native-born, politically liberal and engaged residents of
the Southwest who came of age in the Great Depression and developed a sense of

25
Ernesto Chavez, “¡Mi Raza Primero!”: Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano
Movement in Los Angeles, 1966-1978 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and, Lorena
Oropeza, ¡Raza Si! ¡Guerra No!: Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam War
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

26
Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles,
1900-1970 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

27
Work coming out on the heels of the Chicano Movement adopted the contemporary political
rhetoric to describe the politics of the previous generation as evidence that Mexican Americans sold
out to white America. See, Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: The Chicano Struggle for Justice (San
Francisco, 1972).

18
identity during the formative years of the Second World War.
28
García’s emphasis
on the leadership of the Mexican American Generation, in particular, helped craft
paradigm that, despite an explosion of new Chicana/o historical scholarship, has
remained structurally sound. Although it is not within the goals of this work to
dismantle the generational framework, this study does contribute to a growing
literature that significantly re-frames the postwar narrative to account for the
complexities and fluidities of ethnic Mexican lives.
a

A central facet of this generation’s “American” identity, and thus their spirit
to resist further exploitation and discrimination, owed in large part to their
aspirations to exercise their “American” identity in the suburbs of Los Angeles. I
build on historian George Sánchez’s foundational study Becoming Mexican
American which showed how Mexican Americans crafted a bi-cultural identity in the
absence of social mobility.
29
These same Mexican Americans emerged from the war
fully poised to vie for the material rewards of upward mobility through suburban
homeownership. Not only did the Mexican American Generation come of age during
the Great Depression and World War II, they also came of age in the era of
suburbanization, when claims upon first-class citizenship offered palpable rewards
for achieving such status.

28
Mario T. García, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930-1960 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1989); Juan Gómez-Quiñones, Chicano Politics: Reality and Promise, 1940-
1990 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990).

29
Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 13.

19
Following the Second World War, the geographies of power in major
metropolises took a sharp turn towards the suburbs. Such dramatic social and
political changes accompanied this demographic transition that its vast historical
complexity has spurred the growth of a significant subfield of urban history.
Suburban historians have investigated state and private mechanisms of metropolitan
growth, the architects of racial segregation, and the hopes, fears, and anxieties of
millions of Americans who made suburbs their home following World War II.
Kenneth T. Jackson’s groundbreaking synthesis Crabgrass Frontier presented a
sweeping analysis of suburban development across time and space that set the
agenda for future research. Jackson asserted that suburbs occupied a significant
position in the social, economic, and political life of the United States because they
concentrated wealth and power on the metropolitan fringe.
30

Recently, however, suburban historians shifted the paradigm by interrogating
the diverse political, social, and economic consequences brought by suburban
expansion. As a central component to this equation, the role of race in suburban
development has undergone serious reconsideration.
31
Historians Robert Self, David

30
Most studies of modern metropolis perpetuate this myth that suburbs are homogenously white and
largely exclude people of color. See, Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of
Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1962); Kenneth T.
Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985); Robert Fishman, Borgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New
York: Basic Books, 1987); John Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820-1939
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

31
Historians Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue co-edited a volume that coined the phrase ‘new
suburban history’ as an antidote to the overdeterministic conceptions of suburbs as exclusively elite
spaces. See, Kruse and Sugrue, eds., The New Suburban History (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2006).
20
Freund, and Matthew Lassiter emphasize that suburbanization had distinctly racial
outcomes. These scholars, studying the material affects of whiteness and
metropolitan development, shift our attention to the ways that white suburbanites
couched black exclusion in market imperatives that consequently rendered racial
integration a financially irrational decision. As the tenets of the black freedom
struggle drew closer to mainstream discourse, avoiding the label of racist became
more important to many white people than the actual disavowal of racism.
32
The
prolific historian George Lipsitz coined the term “possessive investment in
whiteness” to account for the material, economic, and political benefits derived from
the maintenance of white supremacy through color-blind apparatuses. In one of his
most axiomatic interventions, Lipsitz reminds us that one does not have to be racist
to benefit from systematized privilege structured around white identity.
33

New directions aside, a chief inconsistency in the new suburban
historiography is the lack of analysis from the bottom-up. Most studies privilege
structural analyses of these metropolitan processes in overdetermined ways that tell
us little about dramatic shifts in daily life and the responses of people on the ground.

32
See David M.P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban
America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Matthew D Lassiter, The Silent Majority:
Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006); Robert O.
Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2004); Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of
Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005); George Lipsitz,
The Possessive Investment in Whteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1998); Kevin M. Kruse, Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban
Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).

33
George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity
Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).

21
Scholarship centered on the urban crisis of the 1960s identifies a gross disparity in
spending and taxes between city centers and surrounding suburbs. Detroit has
become the symbol of this urban crisis as a metropolis riddled with stifling black
poverty wrought by vigilantly policed segregation and white flight.
34
Alternatively,
historians Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese have each in their own work steered
the discussion of suburban history towards the “texture of everyday life.” By placing
people back into the equation of suburban history, Nicolaides and Wiese undress the
motivations of suburbanites and illuminate the socio-historical process of becoming
suburban.
35
Wiese in his work Places of their Own challenges the prevailing logic
that African Americans encountered universal exclusion from suburban places.
Rather, Wiese argues that that narrative is more a product of scholarly neglect than
actual historical reality.
36
Thus, Wiese pushes modern American scholars towards a
broader conceptualization of suburban geographies that accepts the incipient class
and racial diversity in suburban America. Through this acceptance, some of the most
fundamental paradigms of the field are called into question.
Critical to the arc of this dissertation is that white flight is a misleading
concept when placed within a metropolitan Los Angeles context. In theory, white
flight is characterized by the out-migration of urban, white, property owners to the

34
Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis; Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black
Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (NewYork: Routledge, 1995).

35
See, Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven; and Wiese, Places of their Own.

36
Wiese, Places of their Own, 5.

22
suburbs. Although there is certainly evidence to support a white exodus from the Los
Angeles urban core, the mass in-migration of whites from other parts of United
States suggests that the dynamics of Los Angeles suburbanization differ markedly
from East Coast, Midwest, and Southern metropolitan locales.
37
Many white
newcomers to Los Angeles established themselves in new tract developments on the
periphery and were thus never urban dwellers in Los Angeles, per se. Because many
of the white newcomers to Los Angeles were not exactly fleeing from African
American and Mexican American communities in South Central, Watts, and East
Los Angeles (although they may have been fleeing people of color in their home
state), the presence of Mexican American barrios in the suburbs touched off
struggles to maintain separate neighborhoods, schools, and churches.
Whites with established roots in metropolitan Los Angeles, many of whom
engaged in the project of whitewashing the Mexican past of the region, were familiar
with the presence of colonias and barrios in suburbanizing areas. Both cohorts of
postwar suburban whites deemed barrios suburban blight, thus acknowledging an
uncomfortable truth that undermined the mythology surrounding Los Angeles as the
“nation’s white spot.”
38
Through incorporated municipalities, white homeowners and

37
Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis; Kruse, White Flight; Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of
White Flight.

38
Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe, 4; See also, Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight; Mike
Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990); Carey
McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946; Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith
Books, 1973); William Fulton, The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los
Angeles (1997; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Robert M. Fogelson, The
Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930 (1967; Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993).
23
civic leaders exercised the ability to eradicate “slums” and “blight” by taking
advantage of federal policies geared towards the creation of affordable housing by
the 1949 Federal Housing Act. Municipal incorporation became a political strategy
to not only consolidate the disbursement of local tax revenues to a confined and
ostensibly cohesive civic entity, it also empowered local governments and
community planners to displace the least desired residents, even if they were
homeowners.
Chapter Outline
Chapter One argues that former agricultural colonies for ethnic Mexican
families in the pre- and post-war eras provided the basis for Mexican American
suburbanization. Many second and third generation Mexican Americans emerged
from these worker camps to purchase property in surrounding suburban
communities. I detail the conditions of the camp and follow the migration of several
people between 1940 and 1955 from one such worker camp, Hicks Camp near El
Monte, California into the incorporated cities of El Monte, La Puente, San Gabriel,
and Pico Rivera. Chapter Two documents the Mexican American experience in
purchasing residential property in suburban cities by claiming middle-class standing,
calling upon their military service, and at times manipulating their racial identity to
establish themselves and their families in new suburban communities.
Chapter Three chronicles Mexican Americans’ growing political power in
metropolitan Los Angeles by looking at how community-initiated grassroots efforts
led to neighborhood and school improvements, political representation on city
24
councils and school boards, and an empowered sense of identity as suburbanites. The
merger of grassroots and electoral political activity in suburban Los Angeles put
Mexican American candidates in city offices and on local school boards, an
important factor in establishing suburban roots. For example, the cities of Pico
Rivera and South El Monte have both had at minimum one Mexican American on
their respective city councils since each city incorporated in 1958. Chapter Four
investigates the role of urban renewal policy on the making of Mexican American
suburbs. The colonias that once spread across rural Los Angeles prior to massive
suburban growth were rapidly drawn up into new municipal boundaries following
the incorporation boom of the 1950s. Both old cities and new suburbs sought to
consolidate their boundaries with as much productive land as possible while also
defending their territory from annexation by another incorporated municipality. The
racial history of Mexicans in the United States enabled white developers to raid
barrios with impunity and remove them to make way for tract neighborhood
developments.
And finally, the last chapter interrogates how suburban space served the
needs and desires of Mexican American youth from the 1950s through the 1960s.
Through education and leisure, young ethnic Mexicans carved out spaces in the
suburbs of Los Angeles in ways that connected barrios and suburbs and steered Los
Angeles on the path towards a Latino metropolis.

25
Note on Terminology
The term “Chicano” gained currency among youth activists in the 1960s and
1970s because it connoted a non-white racial identity, as well as a radical-left
political ideology. While the term has undergone many interpretations over the
decades the original spirit in which it was designed to identify an historically
oppressed people literally informs the way Chicano history is written, understood,
and recognized by the scholarly community. I offer this dissertation as a work of
Chicano History because at its core, the story of ethnic Mexican suburbanization is
one of struggle. Furthermore, it remains true to the original political project of
promoting social justice and self-determination through scholarship. However,
despite the significant efforts by those who created the field, I recognize that the
people we once labeled Chicano are a heterogeneous collection of men and women
with equally important modes of identification. I also take into account that identities
are not fixed, rather, people constantly reconsider their own identity and may
perhaps assume more than one. Because of this, attaching labels to any group of
people is a risky proposition that assumes much. In an effort to remain true to my
interview subjects and those individuals I encounter only in print sources, I employ a
range of identifiers that all, in some way, are attached to Mexican ethnicity.
Furthermore, I will use the term “ethnic Mexican” in the same way David G.
Gutiérrez does as a way to identify the group as a whole because it is a more
26
representative means by which to address such a diverse community; Latino is also
another preferred identifier of the people I intend to study.
39

39
David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics
of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 7.
27
28

CHAPTER ONE:
THE LAND OF MAÑ !ANA: HICKS CAMP AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF
MEXICAN AMERICAN SUBURBANIZATION IN LOS ANGELES, 1925-
1958

Lupe Prado’s family crossed the scorching California desert in 1925 when
she was an infant. The Prado family left Flagstaff, Arizona in the rear-view mirror on
their way to El Monte, California hoping that California offered permanency and
prosperity. Hicks Camp, a predominantly Mexican American neighborhood on the
outskirts of El Monte, partially fulfilled the family’s aspirations. Lupe’s migration
story is common for the post-revolutionary period. As an infant, she accompanied
her parents, grandmother, uncle, and her sister Cuca across the border at El Paso in
October of 1920. The Mexican Revolution’s lasting devastating impact on the central
Mexican state of Michoacan forced Lupe’s family to join the migrant stream north to
the United States.
Lupe’s uncles Cheno and Polo Prado ventured to El Monte ahead of the rest
of the family to scout out decent jobs and homes. Hicks Camp, in their minds, met
that dual expectation. She also recalled how everyday social life revolved around the
two restaurants, three grocery stores, the billiards hall, barbershop, bakery, and gas
station. “It was our own little village,” she recalled.
1
Lupe’s memory of the tight-knit
community, small streets, close houses, and beautifully gardened yards echoes the

1
Lupe Ruiz, “I Remember Hicks Camp,” in Cuentos de La Historia: The Journal of Barrio Literature
and History, vol. 3, no. 1, (fall 2005): 4-5.
reminiscences of hundreds of Hicks Camp residents. Yet the idyllic narratives of
Hicks Camp as a quaint, ethnic Mexican version of Mayberry mask the material
manifestations of racialized segregation and economic disparity inherent in the
metropolitan Los Angeles racial order.
Pre-World War II ethnic Mexican settlements provide a critical linkage
between Los Angeles’s rural past and its suburban future. While many hardworking
white families realized their suburban dreams prior to the postwar suburban boom,
most ethnic Mexican families remained confined to aging barrios.
2
Not until the end
of the 1950s would Mexican Americans truly make a collective push into the
exclusive world of suburban Los Angeles. Until then, their experiences in and
around colonias and barrios are fundamental features of the Mexican American
suburban story. The places they lived during this period of transition later formed the
core of suburban barrios, or the Mexican side of town in almost all of the postwar
suburban cities.
Scholars writing about agricultural and rural-based ethnic Mexican
communities have identified colonias as cornerstones of community and cultural
development.
3
Residents of these colonias soon came to understand themselves as a

2
Becky Nicolaides chronicles the experiences of white migrants and their attempts to construct a
suburban community out of a rural plot of land in Southeast Los Angeles County. She argues that
working-class whites manufactured the suburban good life in Southgate and vigorously sought to
protect it from people of color. See Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-
Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

3
Gilbert González has written the foundational text on colonia life. See González, Labor and
Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900-1950 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1994). See also, Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and
29
critical part of this broader metropolitan geography, especially during the immediate
postwar years. The characteristic of impermanency faded away as colonias took root
in the suburban landscape and emerged as suburban barrios. The mythic notion that
independent suburban developers erected shiny subdivisions atop virgin soil
contrasts with the historical reality that many working-class people scratched out a
living and maintained homes on the periphery of major cities for generations.
4

Hicks Camp’s existence from as early as 1910 to 1973 is emblematic of the
transition from rural camps into permanent suburban barrios. Moreover, community
institutions served as catalysts to challenge racism and discrimination in the
colonias. As the primary social institution in Hicks Camp, the Catholic Church was
important in the development of a cohesive community. It served as an institutional
bulwark against the exploitation of the community. Ultimately, residents of Hicks
Camp were forced to confront the consequences of suburban development as the
City of El Monte prioritized the needs of white homeowners in nearby segregated
subdivisions.
Rural Roots
Prior to 1910 a community designated as “Mexican Camp” by the U.S.
Census enumerator marked the origins of what would later be known as Hicks

Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2002).

4
See Nicolaides, “Building Independence in Suburbia,” and “Peopling the Suburb,” in My Blue
Heaven, 9-64; and Andrew Wiese, “The Outskirts of Town: The Geography of Black Suburbanization
before 1940,” and “‘Who Set You Flowin?’: The Great Migration, Race, and Work in the Suburbs,”
in Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004), 11-66.

30
Camp. Situated along Main St. were dozens of immigrant families from Mexico. The
overwhelming majority of the men marked their occupation as laborer, undoubtedly
working in the many orchards and fields in the vicinity, or on the gigantic Baldwin
family ranch.
5
In January of 1918, Lucky Baldwin’s daughter Anita sold the 22-acre
swath of land along the western bank of the Rio Hondo to one Robert Hicks for the
sum of ten dollars.
6
Several decades after Hicks purchased the property from Anita,
his son Stanley took sole ownership and control of the day to day proceedings of the
camp. His ranch on the northern end of the community employed dozens of men
from the barrio and Stanley also secured employment for some of the men at the
Arden Dairy nearby.
El Monte is one of the oldest cities in Los Angeles County, founded in the
1850s but incorporated in 1912. El Monte stood at the center of one of the most
diverse agricultural regions in the United States. San Gabriel Valley growers, most
of whom claimed membership in the ubiquitous California Fruit Growers Exchange,
raised a diverse array of crops and fruits. Walnuts, berries, wheat, and avocadoes
were some of the more prominent products of the area. Approximately 600 to 700

5
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910—Population (Washington,
D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1913), Los Angeles, Enumeration District 34, pp. 219-221.

6
Deed of sale from Anita Baldwin to Robert Hicks, 11 January 1918, Los Angeles County Archives,
Norwalk, California. The above account has been confused with the origins of Wiggins Camp by
Carey McWilliams and Ralph Leon Beals who both independently asserted that the camp grew out of
a flood in 1922 which forced people from the riverbed onto higher ground. Both the deed and the
Census data establish that the built community reaches back further than 1922 and possibly even into
the late 19
th
century.

31
acres of berry patches in the San Gabriel Valley, the majority of which gravitated
around El Monte, necessitated vast and available force of cheap labor.
7

In 1946, Carey McWilliams offered an explanation for the segregation of
ethnic Mexicans in the outlying areas of metropolitan Los Angeles. He coined the
term “colonia complex” to describe a system of labor exploitation and housing
segregation descendant from racist practices in agricultural industries. He argued that
the effects of racial discrimination manifested in segregated housing that kept
working class Mexicans as far away from their white bosses as possible in every
aspect of life.
8
The pattern remained in effect even by 1951. A study on the
consolidation of Los Angeles County Government services speaks to the ubiquity of
ethnic Mexican colonias in Los Angeles County, stating that “there are several
settlements in this area which are predominantly Mexican-American, where the
Spanish language is the most frequently heard, even in the schools. These small
settlements are restricted in size and contain the most congested housing conditions
found anywhere in metropolitan Los Angeles.”
9
The establishment of colonias
around Southern California involved a great deal of planning and cooperation
amongst private and governmental interests. Growers needed to keep their labor
pools close to the fields in order to yield production.

7
The figure of berry acreage is found in Ronald W. Lopez, “The El Monte Berry Strike of 1933,”
Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, (spring 1970): p. 103.

8
Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (1948;
New Edition, updated by Matt S. Meier, New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 197-201.

9
Edwin A. Cottrell and Helen L. Jones, Metropolitan Los Angeles: A Study in Integration: I.
Characteristics of the Metropolis (Los Angeles: Haynes Foundation, 1952), pp. 63-4.

32
The 1930 Census revealed that Mexicans in Los Angeles County totaled over
175,000. Outside of the city of Los Angeles, Mexican population numbers were over
72,000 officially, that was 7.5% of the county population excluding the city of Los
Angeles.
10
By 1940, the official estimates had risen modestly. The effects of the
repatriation drives of 1931-33 no doubt impacted the numbers of Mexicans
remaining in the county by 1940, plus the Depression itself maintained a steady
check on population spikes.
11
Although steady immigration slowed by the 1940s, the
ethnic Mexican population in Los Angeles had exploded between 1900 and 1940
with an increasing number of second-generation Mexican Americans now coming of
age. As historian George Sánchez argues, these Mexican Americans adapted to U.S.
society by producing creative synergy of Mexican and American cultures amidst
stifling poverty and uneven labor conditions.
12
This lack of economic mobility is
evinced by the disproportionate number of ethnic Mexicans who lived in substandard
homes in county territory. A 1941 report conducted by the Information Division of
the Los Angeles County Coordinating Councils funded by the Works Progress
Administration revealed that the “worst housing problems are among the Mexican
population.” The reasons, the report asserted, owed to ethnic Mexicans’ “inclination”
to settle in congested “colonies” with extreme overcrowding and poverty. The report

10
“Mexican Population of Los Angeles County and Mexican Pupils Enrolled in Los Angeles County
School Districts,” John Anson Ford Papers, Box 75, folder dd (7), The Huntington Library, San
Marino, California (hereafter, Ford Papers).

11
Ibid.

12
George Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los
Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 13.
33
continued that of the estimated 42,000 Mexicans living in county areas, roughly 50%
lived in sub-standard homes, and nearly 25% lived in “slum dwellings of the lowest
class.”
13
By ignoring the centrality of agricultural employment patterns in rural Los
Angeles the Information Division report establishes an ostensibly natural linkage
between ethnic Mexicans and poverty by implicating Mexicans in their own
degradation and exonerating the employers who devised the unequal system of
employment and residential segregation. Thus, ethnic Mexicans possessed few
housing options within the inherently racist colonia system.
The demands of local economies dictated the location of ethnic Mexican
settlements. As historian Gilbert González has shown, industries that employed
Mexican labor largely designated where their employees established community.
14

For example, employees of the Bodger Seed Company populated the environs of the
Las Flores community outside of El Monte. As a quintessential company town, Las
Flores took its name from the products of the Bodger company—“the flowers.”
Likewise, Rocktown owed its identity to the labor of its residents. Situated between
Monrovia to the north and Irwindale to the south, hundreds of black and ethnic
Mexican quarry workers and ranch hands called Rocktown home. Contrary to
popular perception, however, these places were not the exclusive property of the
companies, nor were they only made up of migrant workers.

13
“Some Notes on the Mexican Population in Los Angeles County,” Prepared by the Information
Division, Los Angeles County Coordinating Councils, WPA Project 11887, December 1941, Ford
Papers, Box 75, Folder “The Races-Mexicans,” dd(7).

14
Gilbert Gonzalez, Labor and Community, p. 2.

34

Figure 2. Colonias in Eastern Los Angeles County, ca. 1941.
35
The centers of ethnic Mexican life in rural Los Angeles County gravitated
around the dozens of colonias set amidst picking fields of both large and small
growers and new industrial zones in county territory. In the El Monte area alone nine
colonias revolved around the city, home to agricultural and industrial workforce of
the San Gabriel Valley. Hicks Camp, Medina Court, Canta Ranas, La Misíon, Las
Flores, Chino Camp, Wiggins, La Granada, and La Seccíon comprised the El Monte
“colonia complex.”
15
Beyond El Monte, nearby colonias such as Pico, Jimtown,
Simons Brickyard, Puente, Rivera, and Rocktown, just to name a few, all contributed
to a thriving landscape of ethnic Mexican settlement in Los Angeles County.
16
Each
of these communities represented a permanent home for many families who left
Mexico in the early twentieth century in search of safety and prosperity. As
outgrowths of a racialized society, most of these places struggled with persistent
forms of racism either manifested as neglect for infrastructural needs or overbearing
landlords. But, these places also served as the centers of labor and social justice
activism as residents developed cohesive bonds with neighbors and fellow workers.

15
Carey McWilliams, prominent contemporary scholar and social justice advocate, eloquently
summed up the position of ethnic Mexican spaces outside of the city of Los Angeles. Growers, along
with the vested elite of agricultural regions, structured ethnic Mexican enclaves in “out-of-the-way”
places on “the other side of the tracks.” McWilliams described Los Angeles’s peculiar agricultural
society, what he called the “colonia complex,” as an intricate system of power and hierarchy which
pitted white landowners at the top and laboring Mexicans on the bottom. Its design reinforced spatial,
linguistic, racial, cultural, and economic distance between the two worlds. See McWilliams, North
from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (1948; New Edition, updated by Matt
S. Meier, New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), pp. 197-8.

16
Please see the map of “Mexican Neighborhoods in the San Gabriel Valley Area” above to view the
location of the above named colonias.

36
At the nadir of the Great Depression, working families in Hicks Camp
entered into the public consciousness by staging on of the year’s biggest labor
struggles against their ethnic Japanese employers.
17
On June 1, 1933 a diverse group
of ethnic Mexican, Japanese, white, and Filipino pickers voted to strike against local
berry growers; within days, 1500 workers actively participated in the general work
stoppage and picket lines. The strike lasted for weeks and its actors carried their rage
with them to other picking fields and harvests up and down California. All told,
thousands of ethnic Mexican laborers throughout California shut down farm after
farm leaving millions of dollars worth of crops to spoil. Workers in Hicks Camp led
the charge.
As the primary actors in the strike’s drama, Hicks residents took the lead in
ethnic Mexican labor activism in metropolitan Los Angeles. Although the berry
pickers were a diverse collection of Mexican, Anglo, and Japanese migrants, ethnic
Mexicans took the lead on the strike and challenged Japanese grower intransigence
to reverse sinking wages and instead raise them from $.09 to $.25 per hour, as well
as improve unsafe and unsanitary work conditions.
18
Organizers from the Cannery &
Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union (C&AWIU) worked with the Mexican,

17
With rare exception, scholars reference Hicks Camp only in relation to the 1933 El Monte Berry
Strike. The role Hicks Camp played in the strike is well known but not as well understood. Matt
Garcia is the only scholar to fold Hicks Camp into any meaningful analysis beyond the actual strike.
Garcia, A World of Its Own, pp. 69-70, 74-5.

18
Japanese growers leased their farms in direct violation of Alien Land Laws which were racist land
policies enforced by the State of California that prevented “aliens” from owning or leasing
commercial property. The interethnic dimension of the strike is less important than the import of the
locus of the strike. Mark Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow: Mexican Immigrant Labor in the
United States, 1900-1940 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976), 238.
37
Japanese, and white berry pickers and aided in the calls for strike and the day to day
activities of the strike.
The strikers painted the berry growers into a corner. Berries can live on the
vine for only three days past their ripening and the growers responded quickly to the
laborers demands. The growers’ representative went to Hicks Camp to meet with the
strike committee with a counteroffer to the strikers’ original demand of $.025 per
hour, or $.65 per crate. Instead, growers offered $.15 per hour, or $.40 per crate. The
strikers quickly rejected this offer.
19
In the meantime, the berries remained
untouched on the vines. The San Gabriel Valley Citizens’ League, a collection of
growers and sympathizers, went to the principal of El Monte High School and
requested that all Japanese children be given passes for three days’ time in order to
pick the ripening berries. The small contingent of Japanese American students joined
small work crews of Russian immigrants and other European immigrants in the
fields.
20

Days passed and tempers flared as the stressful process of negotiating strike
terms dragged on. Hicks Camp took center stage in the local press for violent action
and charges of radicalism. On June 9
th
, a group of fifteen men dragged a scab worker
from a berry field and beat him. Sheriff’s deputies arrested one man for the beating, a
resident of Hicks Camp. In court, Danny Cardiel admitted to beating Pedro Zuniga.
Cardiel stated that he and the other men and two women purposefully went to the

19
Lopez, “The El Monte Berry Strike of 1933,” pg. 114.

20
“El Monte Berry Crop Threatened by Strike,” Los Angeles Time, 7 June 1933, pg. A16.
38
field to forcibly remove scab workers if they needed to.
21
Hicks residents also
detained eight scab workers in an empty building in Hicks Camp and held them there
until Lester Burdick, the widely known Sheriff’s Deputy, arrived with backup and
ordered the scabs released.
22

Although the strikers were predominantly Mexican American, the strike itself
took on cross cultural and even international strains. The Mexican and Japanese
consular offices intervened in the latter stages of the strike to make accord between
the competing factions. The consular offices of A.V. Martinez and Toshito Satow
helped to negotiate for an end to the strike with terms of $1.50 for a nine-hour day,
or $.20 per hour during unsteady work periods. This agreement was a considerable
improvement over the $.09 per hour workers received prior to the strike.
23
George P.
Clements, manager of the Agricultural Department of the Los Angeles Chamber of
Commerce, ordered a survey of Hicks Camp to retrieve information regarding
immigration status and residents’ likelihood to return to Mexico. Clements found
that over half of the residents of Hicks Camp were first or second generation
American citizens which would have precluded any repatriation efforts for that
number of people. He urged that repatriation be used to alleviate the labor tensions in
Hicks Camp for those who were not citizens, and even if they were citizens, he along
with the Sheriff, the Los Angeles County Welfare Department, and Francisco

21
“Berry Strike Gets Violent,” Los Angeles Times, 10 June 1933, pg. A6; “Striking Berry Picker
Admits Beating Worker,” Los Angeles Times, 23 June 1933, pg. 4.

22
“Berry Strike Gets Violent.”

23
“Strikers Make Pay Pact,” Los Angeles Times, 7 July 1933, pg. A1.
39
Palomares, secretary of the San Joaquin Valley Agricultural Labor Bureau, agreed to
plant an undercover agent in Hicks Camp to encourage people ot accept the Mexican
Government’s offer for repatriates of free land in agricultural colonies in the states of
Baja California and Nayarit, Mexico.
24

The leadership of the strike is often denied their right for recognition. A
migrant from Chihuahua, Mexico known as Zenaida, or Sadie as people in Hicks
came to know her, took leadership of the strike. Sadie used her ability to read and
write English to take a leadership role in the strike and rally folks behind the cause.
Sadie’s granddaughter. Kinko Hernandez, recalled that “when [Sadie] wasn’t holding
off the union buster, she was cooking rice and beans for the strikers.”
25

Hicks Camp
In a 1948 interview, Stanley Hicks likened himself as a “member of the
family” to the ethnic Mexicans living in his camp. He claimed that people considered
him more Mexican than white and that he did not know of any other white person
who knew Mexicans as well as he did. In the thirty intervening years from the time
he bought the camp from his father to when he gave the interview, Hicks became
fluent in Spanish and the ethnographer noted that Mrs. Hicks was in the middle of

24
Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation,
and California Farm Labor, 1900-1939 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp.
118-119.

25
Kinko Hernandez, “Friday Night at Abuelita’s Home in Hicks Camp,” Cuentos De La Historia: The
Journal of Barrio Literature and History, vol. 3, no. 1 (fall 2005): p. 42.

40
reading Beatrice Griffith’s American Me (1943).
26
But Hicks’ attempt to posture as
the most Mexican Anglo he knew stood in stark contrast to his primary interest in the
daily social activities and administration. He deemed the camp a “successful
sociological experiment.” The primary reason he purchased the property and
“tolerated the problems” associated with the property in his self-identification as a
“sociologist at heart…interested in this cluster of people…finding out in what small
way [he] could be of assistance.”
27

Apparently, Stanley’s understanding of assistance did not include making
major improvements to the property such as constructing sewers, curbs, gutters, and
sidewalks, nor installing adequate plumbing for running water in the homes. Though
Hicks no doubt possessed the means to make upgrades to his property, he neglected
the crucial improvements that raise the quality of life for folks in impoverished
communities, if only minimally. Father John V. Coffield, the local priest for the
ethnic Mexican communities in El Monte remarks in his memoir that when Stanley
irrigated his fields the already substandard plumbing reduced to a trickle making it

26
Griffith’s quasi-social study of Mexican American youth maturation into “Americans” fulfilled a
need for more information on Mexican Americans in the 1940s for some white liberals. Mrs. Hicks
might have genuinely been engrossed in Griffith’s popular 1948 text, or she could have conveniently
toted the book around while the ethnographers conducted their study to reinforce the image that Hicks
cared for his tenants. See Beatrice Griffith, American Me (1948; Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press,
1973).

27
“Stanley Hicks on Hicks Camp,” conversation with Faustina Solis, 20 November 1948, Folder –
“Additional Interviews-Hicks Camp,” Box 80, Ralph Leon Beals Papers, National Anthropological
Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (hereafter, Beals Papers).

41
unusable for anybody.
28
One of Stanley’s employees attested to the owner’s frugality
in regards to business and property matters stating that Stanley was a “stingy man.”
29

Residents built their own homes out of scraps of wood and timber, or
anything sturdy enough to withstand San Gabriel Valley’s cold, rainy seasons and
hot, humid summers. Railroad lumber from a nearby Southern Pacific yard offered
the most efficient home building material as refuse ties and siding girded the
majority of the homes in the community.
30
As in most worker colonias, Hicks Camp
lacked paved roads, street lamps, and waste disposal. Trash collected alongside the
houses, or in the back yards. Residents also disposed of their rubbish in the San
Gabriel River, a conveniently short walk from the property.
Working families—over one hundred thirty in total—rented 1800 square foot
lots in Hicks Camp for $4.00 per month. If Stanley Hicks happened to own the
dwelling on the lot, the rent rose to as high as $10.00 per month.
31
By 1948, rental
rates increased to $7.00 per month for three-room houses, $10.50 per month for four
to five-bedroom homes. Hicks-owned houses rented for $9.50 – a modest decrease

28
John V. Coffield, “Memoirs of Juanote,” autobiography published by La Historia Society, El
Monte, California, p. 26.

29
Bonifacio Solis biographical sketch, Box 81, Folder “Outline Draft/Notes/Household
Members/Family Studies-Hicks Camp,” Beals Papers.

30
Frank Lara interview, Personal Stories from the El Monte Communities: A Project of the
Exploratory College (Whittier: Rio Hondo College, 1978), 44.

31
“Tabulation of Facts on Conditions Existent in Hicks’ Mexican Camp,” paper to the Special
Mexican Relations Committee of Los Angeles County Grand Jury, 8 October 1942, Box 75, Folder
dd(8), Ford Papers.

42
from eight years prior.
32
By comparison, unfurnished rental homes in the immediate
El Monte area ranged from $15.00 to $30.00 per month for three-rooms; $20.00 to
$30.00 per month for four-rooms; and $25.00 to $30.00 per month for five-rooms.
33

While rentals in Hicks Camp
Families added bedrooms and car-ports to their property as needed, likewise
built from refuse material. Minor inconveniences such as bare flooring and makeshift
furniture presented fewer problems than the lack of indoor plumbing and heating.
Residents pumped water from an outdoor well for their everyday needs and cooked
food over a wood stove. Fires alone did not warm the house. Residents neatly hung
photographs of family and friends on the walls, alongside posters of favorite movies
stars clipped from popular magazines. Catholics in the community meticulously kept
their ofrendas to La Virgen and other favorite saints in the belief that their continued
reverence might promise a brighter future for their families. Residents attempted to
make a home out of Stanley Hicks’s hovels by placing plants and flowers in the entry
ways and window sills throughout the camp.
34

In a 1940 survey of Hicks Camp sponsored by the El Monte Exchange Club
and the local Spanish-American Recreational Committee, 54 family heads were
asked questions regarding their labor situations. 80% of the respondents were male

32
Letter from H.K.D. Peachy, Deputy Area Rent Coordinator for Los Angeles County to Charlotte
Hanna, Research Assistant, UCLA, 1948, Box 80, Folder “Notes – Hicks Camp,” Beals Papers.

33
Ibid.

34
“Tabulation of Facts in Hicks Camp” Ford Papers.

43
and 20% female. A full one-third listed their occupations as “farm laborer” with the
remaining respondents citing jobs as general laborers, construction jobs, foundry
work, gardening, and seed company employee, among others. The respondents listed
their wages from 15 cents to 90 cents with the majority claiming a wage of 30 cents
to 40 cents.
35
The meager wages many received barely covered the $4.00 rent each
family owed to Stanley Hicks at the end of every month. Additionally, children
numbered 242 total in the colonia, 12% or 30 total worked to help support their
families. Children made considerably less than their parents in the fields, but their
contributions nonetheless helped to put food on the table and roof over their heads.
36

Residents of the segregated community made their best attempts to survive
with the meager wages in the sugar beet, berry, and walnut fields that surrounded the
area. Those not in the employ of local growers made their earnings in the
construction industry, gardening and nursery work, or some other job that offered
little chance for advancement.
37
After the war, however, the labor structure of Los
Angeles changed in favor of light manufacture and industry and the vast acres of
agricultural production outside of the city of Los Angeles were parceled off to the
highest bidder. As the political economy of Los Angeles changed, the everyday
realities of laborers changed with them. Surveys of laborers in Hicks Camp residents
began to reflect a larger number of people working farther from home.

35
Ibid.

36
Ibid.

37
Ibid.

44
Despite the deplorable conditions that existed in many Los Angeles County
colonias, these spaces promoted the construction of complex bi-cultural and regional
identities fixed to the communities in which people lived.
38
Labor relations
contributed to creation of Mexican American identity for some residents of Hicks
Camp. Raphael Hernandez was a resident of Hicks Camp in the late 1940s and
exhibits bicultural traits of being “Mexican American.”
39
Hernandez was born in
Waco, Texas and spoke English without an accent. He also spoke fluent Spanish and
made sure that his children continued to use the language at home. Hernandez
worked at Lockheed in Burbank on the swingshift and relative to his fellow Hicks
Camp residents probably made more money. In his perspective, African Americans
had a harder time with discrimination at work than Mexicans. He also chastised
some women at his work who, though of Mexican descent, refused to speak Spanish
in conversation with him.
40
Hernandez’s experience in a relatively good job and his
ability to speak English well provided him with the tools to move upwards along the
racial and class hierarchy. His persistence with the Spanish language, and by rule,
with Mexican culture, placed Hernandez and his family in a particular segment of

38
Garcia, A World of Its Own, pp. 69-70; 74-75.

39
For a detailed analysis of what constituted Mexican American biculturality see George J. Sánchez,
Becoming Mexican American: Identity, Culture, and Ethnicity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

40
Profile of Rafael Hernandez, Box 80, Folder, “Outline Draft/Notes/Household Members/Family
Studies,” Beals Papers.

45
Mexican Americans who utilized the tools of both cultures to make lives for
themselves in the United States as an ethnoracial minority.
To make ends meet, about one-third of the Hicks Camp residents found
employment in the local fields of growers, and nearly all of the residents held low-
wage, low-skilled occupations.
41
The Bodger Seed Company and Pierson Brothers
employed local Mexican and Japanese labor from Hicks Camp and other such
communities in El Monte like Medina Court and La Misíon Vieja. Frank Lara
frequently visited friends in Hicks Camp during the 1920s and recalled the labor
challenges residents experienced after the citrus and walnut groves in the local area
disappeared in the wake of subdivision development. “Every summer, by August,
you’d go into Hicks Camp, and there wouldn’t be fifty people in it,” Lara described,
“everybody would take off, and go up north, and pick cotton, or pick grapes, and
come back.”
42
Although walnut season extended from early in August to the end of
September, the rapidly diminishing fields in El Monte, San Gabriel, and Pico forced
Hicks Camp residents to track down work in far flung areas of California. Kinko
Hernandez as a little girl recalled the migration of workers from Hicks Camp in the
summer months. She could not understand as a child why her friends had to
accompany their parents up north, but later in life she understood the privileged
position her parents created for her and her siblings. Her father held a relatively well-

41
“Tabulations of Facts on Conditions Existent in Hicks’ Mexican Camp,” Ford Papers.

42
Frank Lara interview, Personal Stories from the El Monte Communities: A Project of the
Exploratory College (Whittier: Rio Hondo College, 1978), 44.

46
paying job at the Du Pont paint factory in El Monte that provided enough financial
support to avoid the long treks up north.
43
Hernandez’s family occupied a relatively
privileged position in the working class community. Family’s with similar situations
witnessed a gradual upward mobility as they relied less on the meager wages of
picking and more on the increased industrial opportunities in the suburban sphere.
The Catholic Community
Ethnic Mexicans are historically and traditionally Catholic, if not in everyday
practice, at least in culture.
44
Hicks Camp residents exercised their religious faith to
the best extent they could in strained conditions. Ethnic Mexican residents in El
Monte were excluded from worship at Nativity Church which served white residents
of the El Monte communities. As opposed to the city of Los Angeles, outlying areas
frequently segregated church space in keeping with the social norms of rural society.
For the majority of the liturgical year, Mexicans either worshipped in chapels within
their colonias or trekked to the San Gabriel Mission; they were only allowed to
attend Mass at the community church on holy days of obligation or on important
feast days. At Nativity in the 1930s, Mexican parishioners had to wait outside of the
church to make room for white parishioners to receive their ashes on Ash
Wednesday. The daily indignity of segregated worship was reinforced by the

43
Cecilia “Kinko” Hernandez, interview by author, 24 August 2007, El Monte, Calif.

44
See Roberto R. Treviño, The Church in the Barrio: Mexican American Ethno-Catholicism in
Houston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

47
dilapidated structure and tight quarters of the Mexican auxiliary chapel of Our Lady
of Guadalupe in Medina Court.
45

In 1943, the Los Angeles Archdiocese assigned a young priest to Nativity
Catholic Church in El Monte to oversee the faith practices of ethnic Mexicans in the
surrounding colonias. Father John Coffield had only been in the vocation for 6
months, but he eagerly accepted his assistant pastor position. Fr. Coffield served
previously in a more upscale parish in central Los Angeles at Saint Brennan’s before
spending six months at Our Lady Help of Christians in Lincoln Heights. Working
with parishioners from Lincoln Heights and El Monte fueled Fr. Coffield’s
commitment to serving poor and oppressed folks and would later influence his
participation in the black freedom struggle and Cesár Chavez’s United Farm
Worker’s movement.
46
Throughout his tenure in the El Monte communities, Father
Coffield worked diligently to eradicate the problems brought on by dire poverty and
political disenfranchisement. Coffield remembered his twelve years of ministry in El
Monte as “some of the most challenging of [his] priesthood, wide open to new
possibilities.”
47
Although he had limited Spanish language training, the diocese sent
Fr. Coffield to replace the previous Spanish-speaking priest whose devotion to his
parishioners dwindled with years.

45
Ibid., 25-7.

46
Marjie Driscoll, “Activist Priest Pursues Dignity for Barrio’s Poor,” Los Angeles Times, 24 October
1973, p. OC_A1.

47
Coffield, “Memoirs of Juanote,” p. 24.

48
In a 1948 interview with a researcher, Father Coffield estimated that between
two-thirds to three-fourths of the people in Hicks Camp were Catholic; only about
one-tenth, he guessed, made it to mass on a regular basis because of the segregated
conditions.
48
As an advocate for the Catholic residents of Hicks Camp, Fr. Coffield
labored to build Our Lady of Guadalupe chapel into a viable church to relieve the
elderly in the community of the burdensome trek to the San Gabriel Mission some
five miles northeast from the site.
Coffield’s advocacy for his Mexican American parishioners extended beyond
standard faith services. He often took on larger projects aimed at forging tighter
community bonds and integration into the larger community, and he also took on the
role of protector from outside threat. When the so-called Zoot Suit Riots swept
across downtown Los Angeles in June of 1943, people in El Monte barrios braced
themselves for turbulent times. Rumors began to spread that Marines and other white
servicemen targeted El Monte, particularly Hicks Camp and Medina Court, for one
of their night-time assaults on Mexican American youths. Coffield recalled how the
youths of Hicks Camp armed themselves with buckets of rocks as they waited for the
military hooligans to arrive. He rushed down to the police station to warn the chief
that trouble was on the way. Two Military Policemen based at Santa Anita were
already in the department talking with the chief when Coffield arrived. Coffield
warned the police that the servicemen were on their way and that if a fight broke out

48
Ralph Leon Beals interview with John Coffield, 6 November 1948, Box 80, Folder “Additional
Interviews, Hicks Camp,” Beals Papers.

49
in Hicks Camp with all those unlighted streets a fire may erupt and torch through the
community. In thinly veiled language, Coffield made it clear that if anybody in the
colonia was harmed that it would fall squarely on the shoulders of the chief
himself.
49

Like the major Los Angeles newspapers, the El Monte Herald practically
cheered the efforts of the military thugs who sought to harm Mexican American
youths in town. The Herald reported that a score of sailors “in an orderly but
determined manner went through local theatres, and through cocktail lounges, pool
halls, and other hangouts of ‘zoot-suiters’ in Medina Court and Hicks’ Camp.” The
Herald continued with “the soldier’s…were courteous and showed no disposition to
molest anyone else or to damage property.”
50
Apparently, as long as the soldiers
focused their violent aspirations on young Mexican American males, their actions
did not require reprimand. Further rationalizations assured the reading public that the
soldiers’ activities were grounded in justice. A soldier’s wife, the paper reported,
sustained serious injuries in an alleged attack on the couple by pachucos in the
neighboring city of Monrovia, which, of course, made perfect sense to conduct raids
in El Monte.
51
Despite claims by the El Monte Herald that servicemen whisked
through El Monte with order and respect, some folks in Hicks Camp had different
stories to tell. Ernie Gutierrez was only a boy when the drunken and disorderly

49
“Memoirs of Juanote,” pp. 29-20.

50
“War Against Zoot Suiters Finds its Way to El Monte,” El Monte Herald, 11 June 1943, pg. 1.

51
Ibid.
50
soldiers came through Hicks Camp but he remembers how sailors broke out all the
windows in his father’s grocery store in their wild search to harm pachucos.
52
The
servicemen who were supposed to be fighting against the ills of racism and fascism
overseas wreaked havoc in the barrios across Los Angeles that hot week in June
1943. From East Los Angeles to the San Gabriel Valley, U.S. soldiers involved in
those racist, criminal activities forcefully accentuated the hypocrisy of American
liberty and equality in the collective consciousness of barrio residents.
One of the ways that Coffield felt he could steer youths away from danger
was by keeping them out of situations that placed them in harm’s way to begin with.
Fr. Coffield served as scoutmaster to steer boys in the community from the gangs
and drugs that plagued their everyday existence. The idea came to him from a
teenager who was refused entrance to a Baldwin Park swimming facility. He was
upset at the rampant segregation throughout the San Gabriel Valley and wanted to do
something positive for his own folks.
53
A Los Angeles Times article in 1948
lamented that Fr. Coffield’s efforts to found a community social center in Hicks
Camp had been vandalized and left in a state that required its relocation to Medina
Court.
54
While some reformers saw an opportunity to improve the conditions of
Hicks Camp by introducing community institutions, these establishments could not
fundamentally change the endemic problem of racial segregation enforced through

52
Ernie Gutierrez, interview by author, 24 August 2007, El Monte, Calif.

53
Coffield, “Memoirs of Juanote,” p. 32.

54
“Land of Mañana,” Los Angeles Times, 11 December 1948, pg. 10.
51
everyday social practice. As Carey McWilliams astutely observed in North from
Mexico (1948), “Establishing a clinic or reading room or social center in the colonia
has no doubt been helpful; but it has not changed, in the slightest degree” relations
between colonia residents and white homeowners.
55

In addition to erecting the chapel of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Coffield
organized a number of other Catholic activities and organizations, some of them
having little to do with doctrinal instruction. He organized sports leagues for boys to
compete against their peers from neighboring barrios. Ben Campos, a young resident
of Hicks Camp in the 1940s, participated in the baseball league and recalls playing
games against Canta Ranas and Medina Court, but his most vivid memories are of
the games Hicks’ boys played against all-white teams from El Monte. Campos
remembers he and his teammates received an extra charge to play and defeat white
teams because of the conditions they lived in and experienced everyday. A victory in
baseball, though short and fleeting, offered some psychological relief from the lived
experience in Hicks Camp.
56

Despite the efforts to incorporate Hicks youth into activities geared to combat
juvenile delinquency, the programs in Hicks were highly gendered in their approach.
Boys and girls were being socialized into gender specific roles marked by
masculinity, femininity, and domesticity. Young girls between the ages of 10 to 15
met together for instruction on sewing, went on picnics, and engaged in other

55
McWilliams, North from Mexico, p. 199.

56
Ben Campos, interview by author, 26 July 2007, El Monte, Calif.

52
activities that promoted housekeeping. Kinko Hernandez grew up in Hicks
participating in such programs and ultimately opted to be a housewife after marrying
at the age of 19.
57
Coffield also oversaw a group of women who visited the sick and
prepared the large community fiestas. A similar men’s group discussed the
improvements which needed to be made in Hicks Camp and addressed things that
needed to be brought before the El Monte city council.
58

Father Coffield represented an anomaly in what has otherwise been a history
of neglect on behalf of the Catholic Church in Los Angeles toward movements to
advance social justice in communities of color. Since he was assigned to Nativity in
El Monte in 1943, Fr. Coffield’s efforts to help Mexican residents of Hicks Camp
improve their homes and rise up out of poverty covered a broad spectrum of
activities.
The Rise of Suburbia
In 1948, the Los Angeles Times ran an investigative story on Hicks Camp
meant to evoke nostalgia of pre-modern Mexico by focusing on the living
“descendents” of that unspecified period in time. The article unsubtly affirmed the
prejudices of white Angelenos by articulating racial meaning through a description
of the ‘mañana complex’—a supposedly innate feature of Mexican peoples’
propensity to put things off until mañana (tomorrow). “Like a village gathered up in

57
Hernandez interview by author.

58
“Ralph Leon Beals Interview with Father John Coffield,” 6 November 1948, Box 80, Folder
“Additional Interviews, Hicks Camp,” Beals Papers.

53
its entirety deep in Old Mexico and brought to the banks of the Rio Hondo here,”
proclaimed the Times. The author notes the presence of barefoot babies, old women
tending their flowers, and, of course, “old men sleep[ing] like book ends, folded
against a shed wall in the afternoon sun.” The revelation that some Hicks Camp
“shacks” were erected in place when Lucky Baldwin owned a sizeable portion of the
San Gabriel Valley punctuates the historical linkage between Hicks Camp and its
anachronistic setting. The tenor of the article is clear; Mexican colonias were not
only a withering remnant of a bygone California past, but they were on the brink of
extinction as Los Angeles entered into its postwar metropolitan boom.
59

After the war, Stanley Hicks entertained the possibility of selling the property
to industrial interests. Given the lucrative market of real estate transfers following
the war, it made sense for Hicks to give up on his “social experiment” and finally
cash in on his property. When anthropologist Ralph Leon Beals of the University of
California, Berkeley began his ethnographic research in the community it started
amidst rumors that Stanley Hicks was preparing to sell his property and possibly
evict all of the 600 residents. Many of the residents expressed concern about their
troubles to find adequate, but affordable housing. There were some, however, who
did not allow the threats to bother them. Celia Salgado lived in Hicks Camp with her
husband and three children in a house owned by Stanley Hicks. When asked about
her family’s prospect for moving, she replied that they would most likely move into

59
“Land of Manana [sic]: Hicks’ Camp Retains Touch of Old Mexico,” Los Angeles Times, 11
December 1948, p. 10.

54
Medina Court where the lots were bigger and people owned their own plots of land.
Otherwise, she did not appear to be worried about losing her house in Hicks.
60

Alberto Salgado worked in agriculture near Lower Azusa Road, not far from their
home in Hicks Camp. One of the unique features of Medina Court versus most of the
other colonias in the area, was that ownership included the piece of property in
addition to the house itself. Hicks Camp residency blocked the opportunity for to
build equity because they could not claim true property ownership.
By the 1950s, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors began to
consider the social and economic costs of the presence of ethnic Mexican settlements
amidst the burgeoning San Gabriel Valley suburban landscape. The people and their
homes presented an unsettling problem to local officials and government agencies
invested in the development of suburban communities. Signs of turbulent times for
ethnic Mexican residents in and around El Monte began with county-government
mandated evictions in the small colonia La Misión in September, 1951. The owners,
William Eyers and his wife, operated La Misión much like Robert and Stanley
Hicks. People had the option to own the house they lived in or pay rent to the Eyers,
but the property ultimately belonged to the Eyers. With no chance to build equity
over time, ethnic Mexicans in La Misión were left especially vulnerable to economic
hardship when the eviction notices came down. Father Coffield through the El Monte
Coordinating Council organized financial assistance for one particularly hard-hit

60
Alberto Salgado Profile, Box 81, “Folder–Outline Draft/Notes/Household Members//Family
Studies,” Beals Papers.

55
family. José Avila and his wife had 15 children, two of whom were disabled and
required special attention, and were barely making ends meet with his laborer job
and additional government assistance. The Avila’s search for a new home proved
difficult with little financial backing, even with $500 in aid secured by Coffield’s
activities.
61
In situations like this, people commonly moved into a neighboring
barrio; Hicks Camp the closest barrio to La Misión.
The existence of Hicks Camp by the early 1950s disrupted the aspirations of
white suburban homeowners in El Monte. With the construction of a racially
restricted subdivision named Arden Village, the assault on Hicks Camp reached a
fever pitch. Arden Village’s white, working class families leaned on Supervisor
William A. Smith to eradicate “substandard Mexican settlements” in the area,
specifically referring to Hicks Camp. Smith summarily convened a committee to
oversee the timely removal of Hicks’ residents and the reconstruction process.
People in Hicks Camp met the news of their neighbor’s sentiment with mixed
reactions. Father Coffield representing Hicks Camp at a meeting of the Los Angeles
County Committee on Human Relations in March 1953 reported that Arden Village
homeowner actions made Hicks Camp residents “sad and resentful,” but they
harbored no bitterness.
62
Arden Village homeowners who had only 2 years prior

61
“Parents and 15 Children Looking for New Home,” El Monte Herald, 7 September 1951, pg. 1.

62
Los Angeles County Committee on Human Relations General Meeting, 11 March 1953, Box 72,
Folder cc (8), Ford Papers.

56
moved into the area, were partly responsible for and no doubt responding to the
growing resentment of ethnic Mexican communities in Los Angeles.
The problems associated with poverty, such as crime and delinquency, took
on added significance when placed in the context of metropolitan development.
County authorities recognized the problems many ethnic Mexican colonias
experienced with crime and delinquency and, to their credit, identified some of the
problem lied in limited access to recreational resources. The County failed time and
again to implement any lasting measures of improvement for Mexican American
youths thus exacerbating the problems youths faced in a racist society. In 1943, the
Citizens’ Committee for Latin American Youth proposed to the County Board of
Supervisors that special consideration be given to the establishment of adequate
summertime recreational facilities for Mexican American youths. They specifically
targeted Jimtown in West Whittier, the Pio Pico neighborhood in Pico, and Hicks
Camp as places of immediate concern. With the conclusion of the school calendar in
May, people feared that the children of these communities were going to run wild
and cause trouble. Supervisor Ford’s reply indicated that the County Recreation
Department was working with the Board of Supervisors to establish some form of
temporary recreation for youths in those communities.
63

The County government feared the social and fiscal impacts of Mexican
settlements on Los Angeles County at large. Places such as Jimtown, Medina Court,
Pico, Rivera, and Simon’s Brickyard, and no doubt, Hicks Camp were deemed

63
Stephen J. Keating to Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, 6 May 1943, Box 75, folder dd(9),
Ford Papers.
57
“communities of great public concern not only because of the humanitarian issues
involved, but because in the long run they become the source of our gravest law
enforcement problems and the occasion for large welfare expenditures from the
County Budget.”
64
Thus ethnic Mexican colonias-turned-barrios constituted the
gravest of threats to decent suburban living – crime and tax expenditures. People in
positions to sway public consciousness did very little to acknowledge the structural
factors prevalent in the creation of these barrios, instead these places were
discursively constructed as products of poor Mexicans’ inherent inabilities to live as
decent human beings. This coupling of race and class, so closely intertwined in the
geographic history of Los Angeles, signaled the limits of ethnic Mexican mobility to
millions of Southland residents.
While the discourse of colonia criminality took root in the 1920s it was in the
1950s as suburban communities encroached on previously isolated colonias that it
became the reason to dissolve these “blighted areas” throughout Los Angeles
County. March of 1953 marked a critical turning point in the eradication of “sub-
standard housing” throughout Los Angeles County. Hicks Camp took center stage as
the “worst tenement area in the Southland” because of its apparent lack of paved
roads, sidewalks, curbs and gutters, sewers, toilets, and “other modern
conveniences.”
65
Supervisor Herbert Legg initiated the push to clear Hicks Camp of

64
John Anson Ford policy proposal to Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, 29 March 1946,
Box 75, folder dd(12), Ford Papers.

65
“Plan to Rid County of Hicks Camp Prepared,” Los Angeles Times, 5 March 1953, p. 21.

58
its structures and thus people by taking the issue to Los Angeles County health,
welfare, law enforcement, and fire officials in order to work together in eliminating
the colonia. The County Counsel Harold Kennedy, and the County Health Officer,
Dr. Roy Gilbert both declared Hicks Camp as a menace to health and safety with the
potential to begin an epidemic of Typhoid in Los Angeles.
66
The fact that a new
subdivision in El Monte called Arden Village was built directly across the street
from Hicks Camp is perhaps more telling about the actions of the county government
in this matter than anything else.
A week later, the Los Angeles County Committee on Human Relations, the
civil rights wing of the County government structure, met to discuss the actions of
the County Board of Supervisors who were working to entirely remove Hicks Camp
from its present location and never resurrect it anywhere in the vicinity of El Monte.
The Committee on Human Relations sought to study the problem and implement
steps towards preserving Hicks Camp for the residents who could ill afford a forced
move. The Committee deliberated on the feasibility of the forced removal of 600
people from Hicks Camp because the owner of the property threatened to evict
everybody in retaliation for the county’s action. Father John Coffield voiced the
concerns of the people in question as the lone spokesperson for the community. He
stated that people were concerned about being thrown out of their homes without a
place to go. Additionally, Fr. Coffield revealed that local realtors claimed that there
were no local vacancies in rental property in the area which left these families in a

66
Ibid.

59
position where they would have to look for housing elsewhere. Stanley Martin, the
Director for the County Department of Sanitation added that fewer than 30 of the
161 homes were in condition to be brought up to health and safety standards of the
county and state.
67
The number of homes would soon be reduced by 37 to make way
for Rio Vista Elementary School. The 37 families impacted by the decision to place
school grounds found no support in obtaining new living arrangements in the
immediate area by either the Board of Supervisors or local realtors.
68

Supervisor Legg’s study of Hicks Camp safety unsurprisingly yielded 2136
health and safety code violations, an average of 5 per household. Additionally,
Legg’s research team found that residents balked at the opportunity to receive aid
from the County Welfare Department and the Housing Agency.
69
Perhaps the
absurdity of refusing to move from a “slum” to some amorphous, but purportedly
more “modern” place dumbfounded readers of the newspaper, but lost between the
lines of the story were the decades of life that took place in Hicks Camp, and the
reality of socioeconomic constraints poor people, let alone poor ethnic Mexicans,
faced in Los Angeles in 1953. Hicks Camp residents not only caught the blame for
living in squalor, they were charged with doing so of their own accord.

67
L.A. County Committee on Human Relations, General Committee Meeting, 11 March 1953, Box
72, Folder 5, a, cc (8), Ford Papers.

68
Ibid.

69
“2136 Code Violations Found at Hicks’ Camp: County Health Department Cites Refusal of
Denizens of Area to Move from Place,” Los Angeles Times, 22 November 1953, p. 3.

60
The result of Supervisor Legg’s crusade to eliminate Hicks Camp came to
partial fruition in 1956 when 42 homes were razed for the construction of Rio Vista
Elementary School. The transfer of title to the El Monte Unified School District and
subsequent evictions posed serious problems for many residents. The average
monthly rent for Hicks Camp plots was $16, and many struggled to reach that every
month. Though most residents did not own the property, they received anywhere
from $75 to $2000 to cover relocation expenses, depending on the condition of the
house. The uneven distribution of relocation packages benefited some, but
disproportionately impacted the poor in the community. Most people lacked the
fiscal ability to reestablish roots somewhere else. John Vera, a resident of Hicks who
lost his house, worried about poor and elderly residents who lived in Hicks their
entire lives. “A lot of them can’t work anymore,” he told the Times, “but they can
afford the $16 a month they pay for rent on their lots. What are they going do when
they have to move? Where else can they pay that small a rent for a house?”
70
While
many people relocated into other neighborhoods surrounding El Monte, or into
different houses in Hicks, some families had the financial stability to seek property
outside of El Monte. Ben Campos lived with his grandparents in one of the
condemned houses, but they purchased a new house in the growing suburb of
Rosemead to the north of El Monte.
71

70
“Houses of El Monte Hicks Camp to Make Way Soon for School Site,” Los Angeles Times, 9
December 1956, p. K12.

71
Ben Campos interview.

61
The El Monte City School District faced pressure from Arden Village
residents. Though not officially part of the city, Arden Village lay just west of the
city limits—Hicks Camp buffered the distance between El Monte and Arden
Village—the 313 home community and its residents clamored for services. The
justification to raze large tracts of Hicks Camp because of the pressures placed on
school enrollments owes largely to the spike in student enrollment by upstart
communities. In December 1954, the County committee to study the redevelopment
of Hicks Camp ordered 43 persons out of their homes for the construction of Rio
Vista. What followed was a 5-year odyssey through the legal system which ended in
Appeals Court. The Hicks’ residents who lost their homes on the leased property
argued that they did not receive proper compensation for their property. However,
the Court disagreed and considered the matter closed citing that appraisers believed
“vacant industrial land” best matched their idea of the highest use of the property.
72

Conclusion
The City of El Monte annexed the remainder of Hicks Camp in 1958 and
harbored future plans to redevelop the former colonia into a tract development
typical of other suburban neighborhoods. While residents in Hicks Camp faced
relentless pressure from county officials, local homeowners, and outside observers to
“modernize” and shed their Mexicanness, Hicks’ residents ultimately persevered.
They relied on their long, arduous experiences within the stratified labor and
residential spheres of rural, and eventually suburban, Los Angeles to forge a

72
“Appeals Court Rules Against Hicks Camp,” Los Angeles Times, 14 January 1960, p. E 1.

62
collective regional and local identity. Despite the prevalence of racial discrimination
Mexican American residents in Los Angeles colonias challenged the structural
barriers set before them in the burgeoning suburban housing market. Strengthened by
their experiences of fighting against discrimination in the colonia, many Hicks
residents resettled in surrounding suburbs. Youths who grew up in Hicks Camp who
went off to war, attended college, and became politically active spearheaded the push
into the suburbs around the San Gabriel Valley and represented the post-World War
II generation determined to establish their community’s place in American society.
As the cornerstone for future Mexican American suburban settlement,
colonias were long part of Los Angeles’s metropolitan terrain, precipitating a pattern
of residential settlement that placed ethnic Mexicans at the center of suburbanization
in Los Angeles. Subdivision developments similar to Arden Village emerged with
intensifying frequency across the region. Designed to serve the growing population
of white transplants these suburbs spurred a period of racial competition for housing
as Mexican Americans, empowered by their collective struggles in World War II and
decades of colonia and barrio living, jockeyed for position as first-class citizens in
the emergent suburbs east of Los Angeles. As a parallel phenomenon, Hicks Camp
remained in place and developed into a working-class suburban barrio. So even
while former residents of Hicks Camp were making inroads into surrounding
suburban communities, Hicks Camp underwent a process of suburbanization
common to former colonias.
63
64
CHAPTER TWO:
WITH THEIR WALLETS IN THEIR HANDS: RACE, HOUSING, AND THE
STRUGGLE FOR UPWARD MOBILITY, 1950-1970

After many years, the Mexican-Americans have made gains in the city of Monterey
Park, Montebello, Pico Rivera, Alhambra, and the City of Commerce. Not because
the members of the majority opened their hearts, but because the Mexican-
Americans opened their wallets.
—Sal Montenegro, Mexican American Realtor (1964)
1

On a cool spring day in 1951, a Mexican American World War II veteran
named Manuel Gonzales waited anxiously for a decision on his loan request for a
home in a new subdivision community in the unincorporated Whittier district of
present-day Pico Rivera. The unincorporated Los Angeles County community
experienced rapid development in the years following the war as hundreds of small-
scale farmers yielded to the will of residential developers and sold their farms for
substantial profits. Citrus orchards and walnut groves once dominated the landscape
of the Pico and Rivera communities, unfurled across thousands of square miles of
prime California real estate. But by the early 1950s, developers replaced the bucolic
image of Pico and Rivera with a stock photo of suburban sprawl that had so swiftly
come to represent metropolitan progress across the country. Like every other
suburbanizing region, the independent communities of Pico and Rivera welcomed

1
Sal Montenegro, “Effects of the Initiative and Fair Housing Law on the Mexican American
Community,” 19 March 1964, Ernesto Galarza Papers, M0224, box 5, folder 5, Department of Special
Collections, Stanford University Libraries (hereafter Galarza Papers). As a realtor in East Los
Angeles, Montenegro witnessed firsthand the mitigating effects of racist real estate practices on
Mexican Americans, but also charted Mexican American suburban progress in surrounding cities.
the rush of prospective homeowners into sparkling new tract homes found in places
such as Pico Vista Park, and exclusively white neighborhood. Also similar to other
developing suburbs, most neighborhoods in Pico and Rivera were restricted
exclusively to whites. The realty company charged with approving individual home
loans in Gonzales’s desired neighborhood resorted to a common refrain in deeming
him a poor financial risk.
In the years between 1949 and 1963 California realtors manipulated the
language of exclusion in order to circumvent the United States Supreme Court ruling
in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) that declared race restrictive property covenants
unconstitutional. In 1951, Gonzales earned $3600 a year as a social worker which
placed his income almost $400 above the median income for working, male
Angelenos.
2
In the context of suburban Los Angeles, the loan denial represented
little more than an attempt to bar ethnic Mexican homeownership in the suburbs.
Gonzales remained undeterred, believing wholeheartedly that his service in World
War II entitled his family to a stake in the American dream. Gonzales and his wife
tried to buy a house in a different tract nearby developed exclusively for veterans
with GI Bill benefits. Again, Gonzales was denied the house on the basis of race.
Left with few other options, he purchased a house in the Los Angeles barrio of

2
According to census statistics taken in 1950, the median income for working males in Los Angeles
was $3,239. U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of the Population: 1950, Vol. II, Characteristics
of the Population, Part 5, California (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1952), 368.
65
Chavez Ravine, unaware that the City of Los Angeles had initiated plans to remove
the Chavez Ravine barrios for public housing units.
3

Manuel Gonzales encountered a postwar housing market steeped in racial
discrimination and white privilege that, if not openly hostile to Mexican American
settlement, deliberately sought to limit Mexican American access to the suburbs.
While Gonzales possessed the right kind of cultural capital—veteran, head of a
nuclear family, and a car owner—the fact that he was Mexican American precluded
him and his family from settling in new suburban communities. Gonzales’s
experience, however common in the postwar era, speaks to a less well-defined
dimension of the ethnic Mexican metropolitan experience. While segregation was the
rule of the day, it did not impact Mexican American home seekers in the same way
in different places. Rather, as this chapter demonstrates, Mexican Americans proved
relatively successful in securing suburban homeownership in the postwar era in Los
Angeles.
4
This phenomenon paralleled both the consolidation of non-white ghettoes

3
“Mexicans—Research Project by UCLA Graduate School of Journalism,” Los Angeles Herald
Examiner, “California Sun Supplement,” 8 June 1951, Los Angeles Herald Examiner Subject
Clippings, Department of Special Collections, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. The
public housing units slated for Chavez Ravine never evolved past the clearance and grading stage and
instead the City of Los Angeles enticed the Brooklyn Dodgers to relocate to the West Coast by
practically donating the land to the O’Malley family. For the story of Chavez Ravine see Eric Avila,
Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004).

4
This chapter is framed conceptually by the field of the New Suburban History which reexamines
race, class, gender, and sexuality in the growth of residential suburbs. See, Kenneth T. Jackson,
Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press,
1985); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2001); Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the
Making of Greater Los Angeles (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Becky
Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-
1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the
66
such as Watts and East Los Angeles and the explosive growth of racially exclusive,
white, middle-class suburbs.
5
Residential segregation in early 1950s suburban Los
Angeles led to the expansion of Eastside barrios like Boyle Heights, Lincoln
Heights, and East Los Angeles, with sharp increases of Spanish-surname residents
that nearly doubled between 1950 and 1960.
6
Yet, despite realtors’ vigilant
maintenance of the suburban racial order exercised through clandestine exclusionary
practices, Mexican Americans strategically exploited the fissures in Los Angeles’s

Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Eric Avila, Popular
Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2004); Andrew Wiese, Places of their Own: African American Suburbanization in
the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent
Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006);
David M.P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

5
The Eastside of Los Angeles was a multiracial place prior to World War II, but the flight of Jews
and other white ethnics from the neighborhoods combined with Mexican birth rate increases and in-
migration from other parts of the Southwest transformed the neighborhoods into homogenously
Mexican settlements. See George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and
Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and
Sánchez, “What’s Good for the Jews is Good for Boyle Heights,” in Sánchez and Raul Homero Villa,
eds., Los Angeles and the Future of Urban Cultures: A Special Issue of the American Quarterly
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). For the consolidation of the black ghetto in
Los Angeles see Lawrence B. DeGraaf, “City of Black Angels: The Evolution of the Los Angeles
Ghetto, 1890-1930,” Pacific Historical Review vol. 39, no. 3 (August 1970): pp. 323-52; Josh Sides,
L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004); and Douglas Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los
Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

6
The population of Spanish surname residents in East Los Angeles alone rose from 43,473 in 1950 to
70,802 in 1960 according to the U.S. Census. Much of this growth is attributable to the outmigration
of white ethnics and Japanese Americans from neighborhoods like Boyle Heights combined with a
steady stream of immigration from Mexico. U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of the
Population: 1950, Vol. III, Census Tract Statistics, Chapter 28 (Washington, D.C.: U. Government
Printing Office, 1952); U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Censuses of Population and Housing: 1960,
Census Tracts (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962). For demographic
transitions in Boyle Heights see Sánchez, “‘What’s Good for Boyle Heights is Good for the Jews,’”
135-63.

67
racial geography and established themselves in the suburbs through both quiet acts of
resistance and group mobilization around equal rights in housing.
7

The expansion of ethnic Mexican communities beyond the confines of urban
barrios into large, federally-subsidized tract developments between 1950 and 1965
shaped a middle-class Mexican American identity that was centered around struggles
for social justice and suburban homeownership. This particular suburban push
echoes the mid-century suburbanization of white ethnics in the eastern United States
inasmuch as Mexican Americans pursued the American Dream through
homeownership. By contrast, the descendants of south, central, and eastern European
immigrants experienced far less discrimination in the United States than their
ancestors. Mexican Americans endured a racialization process that unequivocally
blocked assimilation into “whiteness” despite their relative success in settling
suburban places. Assimilationist models do not apply to Mexicans as easily as they
do to European heritage immigrant groups. Although these groups experienced the
worst forms of racialization and discrimination at certain points in their histories in
the United States, the endemic binary racial structure of white and black offered an
opportunity over time to capitalize on their European heritage and to make claims to
whiteness. Mestizaje made the racial experiences of Mexicans and other Latinos in

7
Two recent monographs have contributed greatly to our understanding of ethnic Mexican suburban
communities. Garcia, A World of Its Own (2001), and José M. Alamillo, Making Lemonade Out of
Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a California Town, 1880-1960 (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 2006) help to shift the lens on ethnic Mexican settlement and life away from East
Los Angeles but do not address questions about the connective tissues between the historic Eastside
and Mexican American suburban settlement.

68
the U.S. wholly different than European immigrants and even Asian immigrants
because of its potential flexibility in different settings.
8
In the complicated racial
milieu of postwar Los Angeles, Mexican Americans faced halting and uneven forms
of progress in their pursuits of the suburban good life but they took the lessons from
these encounters and advocated for housing equality for themselves and their
community.
Housing Discrimination
Prior to 1948, racially restrictive covenants in property deeds disallowed the
sale or rental to unwanted racialized groups. White homeowners relied on the law to
block Mexican American settlement into suburbanizing areas regardless of whether
the family sought to rent or purchase property. Most Mexican Americans remained
stuck in segregated barrios like Pico Viejo in Pico Rivera or Hicks Camp in El
Monte. As one longtime resident, Alex Castro, put it, “Yeah, Hicksville, you had to
live there because you couldn’t live no place else.”
9
El Monte’s housing market
completely shut out Mexican renters during World War II. “[Whites] wouldn’t rent
to Mexicans in those days,” Castro stated, “there were people that were very anti-

8
For studies on the racialization of Europeans from “other” to “white” see David Roediger, The
Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1990);
Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says about Race in America (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a
Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1998); and Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants
Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books,
2005). For scholarship that posits a similar path of assimilation for Latinos as European immigrants
see Joel Perlmann, Italians Then, Mexicans Now: Immigrant Origins and Second-Generation
Progress, 1890-2000 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005).

9
Alex Castro interview, Personal Stories from the El Monte Communities: A Project of the
Exploratory College (Whittier: Rio Hondo College, 1978), p. 19.

69
Mexican.”
10
The landmark 1948 United States Supreme Court decision, Shelley v.
Kraemer, declared race restrictive covenants in property deeds of sale legally
unenforceable. However, despite the Court’s attempt to dismantle the apparatuses of
inequality that were so long embraced by white Americans and subsidized by the
federal government, segregation remained a fixed feature of the suburban housing
market.
Realtors simply devised new and more insidious ways to circumvent anti-
discrimination mandates because the Shelley decision offered virtually no
enforcement power. L. Gird Levering, a real estate and insurance broker in El Monte,
exposed the glaring flaw of the Supreme Court decision in an explanation concerning
realtors’ enormous control over the housing market: “No one would sell to
[Mexicans],…not in white districts…This is true of the unincorporated territory, too.
Certainly I …wouldn’t introduce Mexicans into white territory; it wouldn’t be
ethical.”
11
Another representative from El Monte-based E.J. Shirpser Real Estate
Company echoed similar sentiments in describing a Mexican family who lived in a
white neighborhood. He complained that Mexican families failed to maintain their
homes to white standards and thus compromised the steady growth of property
values for white families. The representative declared that Mexican homeowners

10
Ibid., p. 18.

11
Interviews with Levering and woman at Shirpser by Faustina Solis, Box 80, Folder “Additional
Interviews—Hicks Camp,” Ralph Beals Papers, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, D.C. (hereafter Beals Papers).

70
belonged solely and completely in “Mexican districts.”
12
As a voice for a local real
estate company, Shirpser’s agent reveals the deep-seated hostility Los Angeles
County realty boards harbored towards ethnic Mexican suburban homeowners. Local
realtors served on the frontlines of the segregation project in El Monte by blocking
prospective homeowners from purchasing available property. The Realtor’s Code of
Ethics guided the principles by which realtors and their agents brokered the sale of
property, declared in Article 35 that: “A realtor should not be instrumental in
introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or use which will clearly be
detrimental to property values in a neighborhood.”
13
This code of ethics enabled
realtors to consciously and deliberately exclude Mexican Americans and other
racialized minorities from living in white neighborhoods, but also prevented rogue
realtors from voluntarily negotiating with prospective homeowners of color.
Brokers who failed to sustain a united front and instead sold homes to
unwanted racialized minorities faced severe penalties. In 1948, realtor Maurice
Curtis ignored the governing rules of both the Realtor’s Code of Ethics and the El
Monte Realty Board and sold a house to a Mexican American family despite its
location in an exclusively white El Monte neighborhood. The El Monte Realty Board
threatened to revoke Curtis’s license if he failed to convince the Mexican family to

12
Ibid.

13
Quoted from Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven, p. 211. Nicolaides also notes that the conclusion of
Article 35 read differently prior to the Shelley decision: “…use of property for occupancy by members
of any race or nationality or any individual whose presence will be detrimental to the neighborhood.”
Cited in Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven, 379n.60.

71
sell the property back to the company. The family shrewdly agreed to sell the house
back to the realty company but requested three times the price they paid for it
originally. They kept the home and Curtis lost his job.
14
In their professional
capacity, realtors understood that housing, particularly suburban housing,
represented the pivot upon which upward mobility and first-class citizenship turned.
To sell property to Mexicans at the expense of “American” families meant to betray
the trust placed in them as gatekeepers of the American Dream.
In order to break through the segregation barrier, ethnic Mexicans were
forced to meet an unofficial and unpronounced set of criteria that made their
presence less threatening. Women in particular transgressed these boundaries
oftentimes through intermarriage with non-Mexican men. A nurse in the El Monte
Health Department reported in 1948 that she knew of two college-educated
“Mexican girls” who both had married men of Eastern European descent and lived in
“nice homes” in El Monte.
15
In referencing the young women’s college education,
and their marriages to non-Mexicans, the nurse ostensibly redeemed the moral and
racial character of the women and allayed fears of spiraling property values and
moral corruption in the neighborhood.
After 1960, however, West Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, and
Orange County emerged as more desirable places for whites to move. Whites who

14
Memo to Executive Committee of the County Commission on Human Relations, 11 September
1948, John Anson Ford Papers, Box 72, Folder, “5, a, cc, 3, 1945-1958,” The Huntington Library, San
Marino, Calif. (hereafter Ford Papers).

15
“Health,” pg. 2-A, Beals Papers, Box 81, Folder – “Health and Housing, Hicks Camp.”

72
remained in these suburbs sought to protect their investments by excluding people of
color using financial justifications. White homeowners argued that residential
segregation protected property values in order to avoid the charge of racism.
Historian Robert Self, writing about Northern California’s East Bay, highlights the
irony of this shift in rhetoric and strategy: “This structural and ideological
rationalization of segregation encouraged whites and Anglos in the East Bay—as it
did millions of Americans during the postwar decades—to argue that their actions
were not racist, even as their individual choices and advantages represented, in sum,
a version of apartheid with deleterious long-term consequences.”
16
At a public forum
hosted by the Council on Mexican-American Affairs on Proposition 14, a California
initiative to overturn the Rumford Fair Housing Act of 1963 which outlawed racial
discrimination in public and private housing, realtor Sal Montenegro highlighted real
estate practices that exploited this shift in rhetoric. He related stories of three
different Mexican American families who attempted to purchase homes in Monterey
Park, Alhambra, and Whittier, all of whom were denied the right to purchase their
desired homes because their presence in the neighborhood would be greeted by
homeowners as a threat to property values.
The Monterey Park case offers a compelling narrative about the function of
race as a systemic barrier for Mexican Americans and the benefits that self-described

16
Self, American Babylon, p. 131. David Freund documents this shift as a result of federal
government investments in the profitability of the housing market. He also argues that vigilant
policing of racial boundaries in the period between 1920 and 1950 laid the foundation for structural
segregation which then became a function of American life, protected by a steadfast belief in the race-
neutrality of the market. See Freund, Colored Property (2007).

73
non-racists enjoyed because of structural inequality.
17
A property owner
apologetically told Montenegro that he refused to sell his residence to a Mexican
American family, not because he harbored ill feelings for them, but because he
feared neighborhood reactions to the introduction of Mexican American
homeowners. He faced relentless pressure from the next-door neighbor who
stringently opposed the idea of integrating the neighborhood. When Montenegro
walked next-door to inquire about the possibility of Mexican American neighbors,
the man told him that Mexicans “bring in their trashy cars to lower the value
of…property.” Before slamming the door in Montenegro’s face, the neighbor made it
clear that he simply did not like the idea of having Mexicans in the community and if
Montenegro did not like it, then he could go back to Mexico.
18
Race shaped one
dimension of this scenario as the neighbor called upon property value to bluntly state
his case for Mexican exclusion. He also fashioned a homeowner’s right to exclude as
an American entitlement that could be extended or retracted from perceived
foreigners. His assumption that Montenegro came from Mexico speaks to the
striking misconceptions whites held about Mexican Americans. This person’s overt
attitudes towards Mexicans notwithstanding, the pressures other homeowners faced

17
George Lipsitz speaks to the issue of pervasive white racism and its benefit to white people who do
not subscribe to racist beliefs, see Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People
Profit from Identity Politics (1998; revised and expanded, Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2006).

18
“Effects of the Initiative and Fair Housing Law on the Mexican-American Community,” Galarza
Papers, M0224, Box 57, Folder 5.
74
in the process of selling their houses contributed to the difficulties in securing
suburban residency for Mexican Americans.
The ethnic Mexican colonias in Pico and Rivera existed in seclusion from
white neighborhoods. Realtors in the Pico and Rivera communities cultivated and
maintained elaborate exclusionary measures submerged beneath the surface of public
consciousness. While advertisements and show-pieces in the Los Angeles Times
heralded the completion of Pico housing tracts aimed at WWII veterans as invoking
an “atmosphere of country living, ideally located for children…[with] all the modern
conveniences of a close-in city property,” individual homeowners colluded with
local realtors to protect the virtues of this suburban ideal against minority intrusion.
19

In the post-Shelley suburbs of Los Angeles, realtors possessed the discretion to
withhold or present homes to potential buyers based on race. House listings
circulated internally throughout realty offices with specific instructions on who (and
who should not) be shown property. A Dow Realty listing for a house in the Pico
Vista Park tract in February 1958 directed real estate agents in capital letters to
“PLEASE SHOW TO CAUCASIANS ONLY.”
20
Similar directives such as “owner
requests no Mexicans or Orientals to be shown ppty.,” “owner reserves right to

19
“Homes Completed Daily in New Whittier Tract,” Los Angeles Times, 7 May 1950, E6. The Pico
Vista Park homes in unincorporated Pico near Whittier received considerable attention from the Los
Angeles Times in short articles and write ups. See also “80% of Pico Vista Park Sold to Veterans in
Three Weeks,” Los Angeles Times, 21 May 1950, E6; “Pico Vista Park Homes to Open,” Los Angeles
Times, 23 April 1950, E3; “Dwelling Tract to Be Shown,” Los Angeles Times, 13 August 1950, E6.

20
Internal real estate listing for home in Pico Vista Park, 12 February 1958, Max Mont Papers, Box 3,
Folder 4, Urban Archives Center, Department of Special Collections, California State University,
Northridge (hereafter Mont Papers).

75
qualify any Spanish family,” and “please do not show to Mexicans,” accompanied
house listings for various realtors in Pico Rivera, Montebello, and Monterey Park.
21

Unlike segregation against African Americans which was usually overt and on the
surface, realtors and white homeowners largely masked housing discrimination
against Mexican Americans as something other than racial discrimination.
Maria Avila encountered such clandestine forms of discrimination when she
and her husband and daughter moved from Watts in 1958 to El Monte. The Avilas
first attempted to purchase a home in nearby Alhambra but were turned away
because of Maria’s dark skin:
“I remember going to Alhambra one time and we walked into this real
estate office. My husband is much lighter than I am and by looking at
him, if you were going to take him at face value, you would say he is
not Mexican. And so he would go in and they would show him this
possibility or that possibility. When I would get down from the car
then the whole story would change. Then the down payment was
higher or the criteria was another thing, but I didn’t want to live there
anyway. If they didn’t want me, I didn’t want to live there.”
22

Avila’s narrative speaks to the contingent flexibility of Mexican American
racialization as real estate agents instantaneously amended down payment fees and
finance decisions to avoid introducing ethnic Mexican homeowners into exclusive
neighborhoods.
Following the Shelley decision realtors increasingly relied on skin color as a
barometer of neighborhood fitness. Like Maria Avila, regardless of employment

21
Ibid.

22
Maria Avila interview in Personal Stories from the El Monte Communities, 2.

76
status or social standing, many families were denied ownership on the basis of their
skin pigmentation alone. Dionicio Morales, a long-time Mexican American
community activist from Moorpark, California who resettled in the San Gabriel
Valley, telephoned a Whittier realtor about an available house. The realtor asked
Dionicio if he was a dark or light-skinned Mexican, to which Dionicio replied, “what
difference does it make?” The realtor replied, “if you are light-skinned we have
several homes available, but if you are dark-skinned, don’t waste my time.”
23
This
type of incident was far from unique. Realty boards throughout the Southland
employed this tactic as a means to maintain racial exclusivity throughout the 1950s.
Decisions to segregate and deter Mexicans from suburban homeownership grew out
of realty board strategy sessions at local conferences. At a meeting of the Southeast
Realty Board, Forest Beyer recalled a discussion that took place over one such
executive directive that forbade realtors to sell to “dark-skinned Mexicans.” When an
audience member posed a hypothetical question about the protocol for dealing with
“dark-skinned Argentineans,” the president of the realty board replied “well, as far as
I am concerned, he is still a dark-skinned Mexican.”
24
Historian Rodolfo Acuña
gestures at the pervasive problem of skin color in the residential outcomes of
Mexicans in Los Angeles. He asserts that “it has been easier for lighter-skinned

23
Ibid.

24
Ibid.

77
Mexicans in L.A. to pass—to move and to live where they wanted. Euroamericans
made exceptions for them.”
25

Indeed, lighter skinned Mexicans fared much better on the housing market
than did their darker skinned counterparts because they could more easily claim a
“Spanish” identity, but it was not a hard and fast rule. A teacher at El Rancho High
School in Pico Rivera named Victor Gonzales recalled the tough times his son
encountered in elementary school near their home in West Covina. “My little boy is
dark skinned, like me,” Gonzales noted, “and I remember he was in elementary
school and he came home and said ‘Dad, you know, a girl told me why I didn’t wash
myself; your skin is dirty.’” In his West Covina school, Gonzales’s son was the only
child of Mexican origin.
26
Although asserting Spanish identity was meant to redeem
the racial character of Mexicans by conjoining them with a European rather than an
indigenous past, the term functioned merely as a means to manipulate paperwork. It
is probable that few whites believed that “Spanish” truly meant the family came from
Spain, but if the Mexican family had light skin, then whites would simply look the
other way. Scholars also argue that Mexican Americans who willingly identified as
“Spanish” eschewed their Mexican identity and instead subscribed to a white

25
Rodolfo F. Acuña, Anything but Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles (London: Verso,
1995), p. xii.

26
Victor Gonzales interview in Personal Stories from Pico Rivera: A Project of the Exploratory
College, Susan Sellman Obler, et. al., eds. (Whittier, Calif.: Rio Hondo College, 1978), 29.

78
identity.
27
But such simplistic assumptions overlook the complexities of
metropolitan Los Angeles’s racial geography, and ethnic Mexican agency. Author
D.J. Waldie, who has written on the lived culture of 1950s Lakewood, California,
ruminates on the complexity of Mexican American claims to Spanish identity:

My friend told me about his neighbors. They were Mexican. In the
1950s, that meant their parents—or even their grandparents—had
originally come from Mexico.
The husband and his wife were dark-skinned. He was a pilot who flew
tourists from Long Beach to Catalina Island, twenty-six miles away.
Before the pilot and his wife bought their house, the real estate agent
told them about the racial restrictions in their deed.
The young couple told the real estate agent they were originally from
Spain, not Mexico.
The real estate agent looked at the man and the woman, and signed
the papers that sold them their house.
28

Framed within this scenario, claiming a Spanish identity recast this young couple’s
racial status just long enough to circumvent Lakewood’s deed restrictions. It also
evinces a sophisticated knowledge regarding the fluid and situational characteristics
of race as it was applied to Mexican Americans in the postwar era.
In 1961, Ben Campos and his wife walked into the lending office of a new
subdivision development in the affluent neighborhood of Charter Oak, just east of
the San Gabriel Valley city of Covina. The agent took one look at the couple and told
them that they could not qualify for a home loan. Growing up in Hicks Camp as a
child, and spending his young adult life in Rosemead, Ben was driven by the desire

27
See also Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, 52; Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African
American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2003), p. 111.

28
D.J. Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996), p. 103.
79
to own a new home with a large yard for his children. Like Manuel Gonzales,
Campos and his wife were turned away ostensibly as a financial risk. He possessed a
college degree from California State University, Los Angeles and earned a good
living as a teacher and administrator in the El Monte Union School District. Instead
of getting angry, Ben walked directly out of the office and took his wallet to a new
neighborhood in La Puente and bought a brand new home.
29

The ethnic Mexican suburban presence gradually began to show by the mid-
1960s and it threatened to undermine the objectives of earlier exclusionary
proponents who refused to accept ethnic Mexican neighbors. The increasingly
amorphous pattern of ethnic Mexican settlement in Los Angeles coincided with a
similar diffusion within metropolitan regions across the Southwest. According to the
UCLA Mexican American Study Project, ethnic Mexican urban concentration in
California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and New Mexico between 1950 and 1960
minimally increased from 59.1% to 59.8%, respectively. At the same time, African
American populations became more thoroughly concentrated in urban centers from
74.1% in 1950 to 77.3% in 1960, and whites became less concentrated from 54.2%
in 1950 to 48.2% in 1960. According to the UCLA statistics, at least 40% of
Mexican Americans lived in suburban areas.
30
However, the static position of

29
Ben Campos, interview by author, 26 July 2007, El Monte, Calif.

30
Joan W. Moore and Frank G. Mittlebach, assisted by Ronald McDaniel, “Mexican-American Study
Project: Advance Report 4: Residential Segregation in the Urban Southwest” (Los Angeles: Division
of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, University of California, Los Angeles,
1965), p. 6.

80
Mexican Americans during this ten year span raises important questions about how
suburbanization impacted the community.
In California in particular, the percentage of ethnic Mexicans in city centers
was markedly lower than the Southwestern average, and fell between 1950 and 1960;
the percentages are nearly carbon copies of the white percentages. Ethnic Mexican
concentration in California urban centers dropped from 44.6% in 1950 to 40.3% in
1960. Similarly, white urban concentration declined from 46.9% in 1950 to 37.3% in
1960. This shift took place at the same time that the real population overall and in the
Mexican community rose significantly and also at the same time that the Eastside
barrios became homogenously Mexican in composition. Over the same time span,
black concentration in city centers remained relatively stable from 68.8% to 69.9%,
respectively.
31
California’s general population exploded from 10,586,223 in 1950 to
15,717,204 in 1960 and the Mexican American population almost doubled from
760,453 to 1,426,538.
32
The increased numbers of ethnic Mexicans can be partially
explained by the attraction of suburban developments, as the UCLA researchers
indicate, but Mexican Americans also purchased property in suburban
neighborhoods as the lives and experiences of many of the subjects in this chapter
attest.
33

31
Mexican American Study Project, p. 11.

32
Ibid., p. A-3.

33
Ibid., pp. 10, 12.

81
Although segregation and structural inequality limited access to the benefits
of suburbanization such as new homes, quality schools, and responsive public
services for postwar minority groups, Mexican Americans found greater acceptance
in suburban spaces alongside whites, despite the efforts to exclude them. While
Mexican Americans experienced segregation to a certain degree, white attitudes
towards them proved more favorable than towards African Americans. For example,
there is no evidence that Mexican American families awoke in the middle of the
night to burning crosses, arson, or lynch mobs like African Americans did across the
country.
34
Sociologist Alphonso Pinkney’s 1952 study of white attitudes about
blacks and Mexicans attests to this phenomenon. Pinkney polled 319 white adults in
an unnamed Southern California suburb about the relative desirability whites held
towards African Americans and Mexican Americans. The majority of respondents,
if given a choice, chose to interact with Mexican Americans rather than African
Americans as neighbors and social club members, and in sharing integrated services.
Faced with the scenario of either Mexican American or African American neighbors,
45% of white respondents favored Mexican Americans to 23% who favored African
Americans; 32% of respondents either declined to choose, or disapproved of both
groups equally.
35
While these numbers reflect merely a small sampling of data, the

34
For the violence and intimidation directed towards African Americans in suburban places generally,
see Wiese, Places of their Own (2004); and, Freund, Colored Property ( 2007). For an examination of
African American experiences with housing discrimination and racially motivated violent threats see
Flamming, Bound for Freedom (2005) and Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits (2003).

35
Alphonso Pinkney, “Prejudice toward Mexican and Negro Americans: A Comparison,” Phylon 24
(winter 1963), 355.

82
population statistics in multiple suburban municipalities uphold appear to uphold the
notion that Mexican Americans found greater acceptance.
Table 1. Racial Composition of Key San Gabriel Valley Suburbs, 1960
City or Unincorporated
Territory
White Negro White: Spanish-
Surname
Other*
Alhambra 54,483 89 3153 235
Altadena (U) 38,339 1484 1347 745
Arcadia 40,893 56 793 56
Baldwin Park 33,647 23 3340 281
East Los Angeles (U) 100,311 441 70,802 3518
Monrovia 24,347 2551 1094 181
Montebello 31,568 9 7019 520
Monterey Park 36,697 11 4944 1113
Pasadena 98,440 14,587 5188 3380
Pico Rivera 48,923 10 14,596 217
Pomona 65,976 880 6161 301
South San Gabriel (U) 26,009 20 3923 184
Temple City (U) 31,706 3 795 129
West Covina 50,397 7 1535 241
Whittier 33,402 103 1249 158
Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Censuses of Population and Housing: 1960, Census Tracts,
Final Report PHC(1)-82 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962), 28-9.
* “Other” in the United States Census was used as a catch-all for those not considered white or black.
This group consisted primarily of Asian American groups of Japanese, Chinese, or Filipino descent.
Native Americans made up a small percentage of the Other category as well.

Pico Rivera, for example, claimed a population of 14,596 Mexican
Americans in 1960 but only 10 African Americans. In fact, Mexican Americans
regularly held more sizeable populations than African Americans in San Gabriel
Valley areas. Only Altadena, Monrovia, and Pasadena had more African American
residents than Mexican American residents, a testament to the impact of exclusion on
the metropolitan Los Angeles black population. This material trend reflects the
deeply imbedded ideologies of race as they constrained the residential options of
83
African Americans and fluctuated for Mexican Americans. Josh Sides, a historian of
black Los Angeles, critiques the disparity between black mobility and Mexican
American mobility and argues that unlike African Americans, Mexican Americans
could claim a white identity.
36
Mexican American suburbanization, however,
involved a complex negotiation over race, class, skin color, and comportment that
had no prescribed formula for successful suburban settlement.
Some African Americans perceived ethnic Mexican flight from segregated
ghettoes as proof of Mexican whiteness. Sides argues that Mexican out-migration
from South Central and Watts to East Los Angeles and Boyle Heights constituted an
even larger concern for African Americans than the flight of Japanese Americans
and Jews.
37
Frita Shaw Johnson of Watts articulated a widespread concern and
interpretation of Mexican resettlement in suburban Los Angeles: “Mexicans get an
education, the first thing they do is move away from the area where they have lived
and move over some place else and they are no longer Mexicans. They are Spanish-
Speaking people.”
38
Many African Americans felt that Mexicans made distinctions
between those who preceded the WWII migration west and African Americans who
moved west to work in wartime industries.
39
Maria Avila who lived with her family
in Watts during her high school years in the 1940s acknowledged the distinctions

36
Sides, L.A. City Limits, 110-11.

37
Ibid., 109.

38
Cited in Sides, L.A. City Limits, 111-12.

39
Ibid., 110.

84
Mexicans drew between black migrants and black Angelenos but painted a much
different portrait: “I was raised in [Watts], and where I was raised at, we all mingled.
Those [migrant] blacks, like [prewar] blacks said at the time, were different than the
blacks who came in during the war to work in the factories. I didn’t have any bad
relationships; I associated with everybody, and my kids did too.”
40
Avila’s
description of interracial relations between black and Mexican residents of Watts
contrasts with the fact that she and her husband moved to El Monte in 1958.
Although nothing of her story suggests a claim to whiteness, from the African
American perspective the ability to exercise residential options beyond the
restrictions of the ghetto suggested otherwise.
A move from Eastside barrios to the suburbs marked a dramatic
psychological improvement for Mexican Americans seeking a middle class life,
though ethnic Mexicans’ barrio roots contoured their identities as suburbanites both
in relation to working class Mexicans and to suburban whites. The Eastside is
viewed as the traditional home of ethnic Mexicans in Los Angeles and has been
marked as a local racialized space. With roots back to the nineteenth century, the
Eastside barrios have always functioned as way stations for the millions of
inhabitants who have called those neighborhoods home. By World War II the
principal barrio of Boyle Heights was among the most racially and ethnically diverse
places in the United States. The conglomeration of Mexicans, Japanese, blacks,

40
Maria Avila interview in Personal Stories from the El Monte Communities: A Project of the
Exploratory College, Susan Sellman Obler, et. al., eds., (Whittier, Calif.: Rio Hondo College, 1978),
2.

85
Jews, Serbians, Turks, Russians, and Italians made Boyle Heights an exemplar of
multicultural harmony and progressive collective action.
41
At the conclusion of
World War II however the community began to splinter. Jews taking advantage of a
decades-long process of becoming white moved their homes and businesses to the
Westside of Los Angeles, suggesting that progress as measured in geographic
mobility slid along a continuum of east to west. This rapid out-migration of Jews and
Japanese coincided with an increase in Mexican population through a spike in
birthrates and migration from South Central.
42
For Mexicans, progress was measured
on the landscape as a west to east process. This trend continued into the 1950s as
newly developed residential tracts modeled after Lakewood cropped up around the
Southland.
Urban renewal projects in the City of Los Angeles during the 1950s propelled
some Mexican Americans into these new suburbs. The plan to build regionally
accessible freeways through Eastside Los Angeles began as early as 1930 according
to one historian; and when the last of the freeways were constructed in 1970, a
staggering 2,865 dwelling units which housed a population of 10,045 residents, or

41
In fall 2002 the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, California displayed an
exhibit on the history of multiracial community in Boyle Heights which spoke to harmonious
relationships amongst various racialized groups and a deep commitment to social justice. See also,
George J. Sánchez, “‘What’s good for Boyle Heights is Good for the Jews,’” in Sánchez and Raúl
Homero Villa, eds., Los Angeles and the Future of Urban Cultures (2005).

42
See these works in tandem as they speak to a spatial transfer that saw Jews move out of Boyle
Heights replaced by Mexicans from South Central and Compton. Sánchez, “‘What’s Good for Boyle
Heights,”; and, Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits, pp. 108-112.

86
13% of the area’s population, had been removed for freeways.
43
Where that largely
Mexican population resettled has been mostly conjecture, but evidence shows that a
significant proportion ventured east into the developing San Gabriel Valley and
Southeast area communities. As an advisory committee member of the UCLA
Mexican American Study Project and then the Los Angeles city council member
representing the Eastside, Congressman Edward Roybal recalled that the State
Highway Commission approved construction of the Golden State 5 Freeway
regardless of the community’s protest against it. In exchange for uprooting thousands
of people the city, county, and state collaborated on providing the highest possible
valuation for the destroyed homes, most of which were owned by Mexican American
families. Receiving large checks for their homes, according to Roybal, enabled
uprooted families to reestablish themselves as homeowners in Pico Rivera. Many of
the people who made this move were influenced by the proximity of Pico Rivera to
their Eastside communities and the easy access to the very freeways that displaced
them, making it easier to get to their jobs.
44
Daily travel on the freeways also folded
Mexican Americans in the growing suburban constellation of Los Angeles into a
middle class lifestyle as many became more dependent on personal modes of
transportation rather than public transit.

43
Gilbert Valadez Estrada, “How the East was Lost: Mexican Fragmentation, Displacement, and the
East Los Angeles Freeway System, 1947-1972,” M.A. thesis, California State University, Long
Beach, May 2002, pg. 127.

44
“Mexican American Study Project; Community Advisory Committee Meeting, Statler Hilton
Hotel,” 26 September 1964, pg. 6, Quevedo Papers, M0349, Box 4, Folder 6.

87
Just as urban renewal projects and freeway construction contributed to a mass
migration out of the Eastside into the surrounding communities, expansions of
existing schools in East Los Angeles pushed Mexican American families out of their
homes. In 1965 Olivia and Pablo Rivas moved with their five children to Pico Rivera
after Los Angeles Unified School District bought the deeds to all property
surrounding the Garfield High School athletic fields. Homeowners were given
eviction notices and given six months to find alternate housing. Garfield High School
expanded its running track and boys’ baseball field on the former properties of the
Rivas family and their neighbors and propelled them into the suburban fold.
45

Displacement caused by urban renewal projects brought about by city and county
officials’ disregard for the region’s Mexican population only tells part of the story.
Casting suburban movement strictly in those terms paints the Mexican community as
passive and powerless. Strategies to capitalize on the promises of postwar America
depended not only on government buyout checks, but also from a perspective
fomented in the prewar years that as Americans, ethnic Mexicans had a claim to
enjoy the material benefits of that identity.
Mexican Americans and the Suburban Ideal
The epigraph to this chapter underscores the complex social and spatial
relationships Mexican Americans found in postwar metropolitan Los Angeles. As a
realtor who served primarily minority communities Sal Montenegro measured
Mexican American progress in terms of suburban residential settlement.

45
Olivia Rivas, interview by author, 13 March 2003, Pico Rivera, Calif.
88
Montenegro’s assertion that Mexican Americans made progress and achieved
upward mobility in the suburbs east of the City of Los Angeles presents an entirely
new dimension to the historical study of urban Chicana/o communities. Although
generations of ethnic Mexicans transformed the Eastside immigrant enclaves of
Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, Belvedere, and East Los Angeles into one large and
homogenous barrio, middle class Mexican Americans negotiated a schizophrenic
racial geography characterized by both open hostility and relative acceptance of
Mexican American homeowners. This nascent Mexican American middle class,
situated in the suburbs east of downtown Los Angeles, recreated community in their
new environments modeled on decades of barrio and colonia life. This generation
not only shared similar characteristics to other educated and professional middle
class Americans, they also based their identities on unquantifiable ideas about
behavior and ambition. But, the working-class and trade union backgrounds of the
second and third generations guided their strategies to advance a group-based
suburban project; one that guaranteed Mexican Americans quality housing
experiences and opportunities for upward mobility.
46

Much of this suburbanization was possible because Mexican Americans
began to mobilize behind efforts to desegregate new cities. Dionicio Morales

46
See George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano
Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) for an explanation of working-
class traditions and union ties amongst the prewar generations, especially chapter 11. To see how
these connections spanned the periods from the Great Depression to the 1970s through the life of a
single activist see, Mario T. Garcia, Memories of Chicano History: The Life and Narrative of Bert
Corona (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

89
organized a fledgling community organization called the Council of Mexican
American Affairs in 1956 to combat segregation and facilitate Mexican American
transition into the mainstream. The CMAA introduced the problem of segregation to
19
th
District Congressman Chester “Chet” Holifield whose district encompassed all
of Pico Rivera, Montebello, Bell Gardens, Santa Fe Springs, Norwalk, La Mirada, El
Monte, and South El Monte, and parts of East Los Angeles, Bell, West Covina, La
Puente, Industry, Commerce, and Whittier. The CMAA sent one of its officers,
Arthur Rendon, to Washington, D.C. to speak directly with Holifield about
discrimination directed at Mexican American veterans in the housing market
surrounding the 19
th
District specifically and Los Angeles generally. In a letter to
Holifield, Morales drew attention to the irony of fighting for freedom and democracy
abroad but facing second-class citizenship at home. Moreover, Morales excoriated
the federal government for hypocritical lending practices that disadvantaged
Mexican American homeowners. “Many disappointed applicants have faced this
discrimination in the southland from unscrupulous subdividers who receive their
financial assistance through government-sponsored loans,” Morales proclaimed, “it
is unthinkable in our daily application of high American ideals and equal respect and
opportunity for each American citizen to observe this practice in this and other areas
of our nation.”
47

47
Morales to Holifield, 28 February 1956, Chester Holifield Papers, Box 16, Folder – “Dionicio
Morales,” Department of Special Collections, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
(hereafter Holifield Papers).

90
The CMAA challenged the flagrant disregard for the G.I. Bill of Rights
which guaranteed former servicemen benefits generative of a middle class life.
Qualified veterans expected to receive low-interest home and business loans, as well
as college tuition assistance. More than 300,000 Mexican Americans served in the
military during WWII and earned the highest proportionate share of Congressional
Medals of Honor out of all ethnoracial groups. Of the 16 Congressional Medal of
Honor award winners for World War II and the Korean War, six of them came from
California, an important point of contention for CMAA officials who sought a
resolution on discrimination against veterans in Los Angeles.
48
Despite the
prevalence of segregation, military service provided a significant bridge to postwar
suburbanization. The San Gabriel Valley and Southeastern region witnessed an
increased demographic shift in Mexican American population because of the
increasingly mobile WWII generation. Geographers James Allen and Eugene Turner
attribute this growth to veterans’ persistence to triumph over racial discrimination
and increased Americanization of second and third generation Mexican Americans.
49

48
Morin to Holifield, 21 February 1956, Holifield Papers, Box 16, Folder – “Raul Morin.”

49
James P. Allen and Eugene Turner, The Ethnic Quilt: Population Diversity in Southern California
(Northridge, Calif.: Center for Geographic Studies, California State University, Northridge, 1997), p.
108. Chicano historians debate the distinction of the WWII period as a watershed moment in Mexican
American upward mobility. George Sánchez argues that the cultural capital necessary to carry out
sustained challenges to discrimination in the postwar period was formed in the Depression-era by
second-generation Mexican American youths. David Gutiérrez argues that no such sweeping change
in consciousness occurred, rather, most ethnic Mexicans remained deeply ambivalent about their
identities as Americans. Lastly, Matt Garcia argues that both interpretations hold water because a
mounting collective consciousness in the prewar years found footing in the material benefits provided
by military service, but that Mexican American identity was more complex than claiming an
“American” identity. See, Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, chapter 12; David G. Gutiérrez,
Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995), pp. 117-9; Garcia, A World of Its Own, pp. 226-8.
91
Subtle forms of discrimination, though intended to reinforce segregation,
actually opened a window of opportunity for Mexican American activists to confront
segregation on larger scales. Developers trumpeted residential developments aimed
at GIs of Mexican descent with no down payment and low escrow and impound fees,
but such separate developments clearly resulted in the separation of white and
Mexican neighborhoods. One such development in unincorporated Rivera (the
southern part of the future city of Pico Rivera) called Rancho Burke was touted by
the Los Angeles Times as the third tract development aimed at Mexican American
veterans in the Whittier area over the previous 12 months, all of which were well
received by the community. It was also reported that both the U.S. and Mexican
governments lauded such private enterprise responses to combat discrimination,
without recognizing how it reinforced segregation as a fixed feature of American
life.
50
Mexican American leaders around Southern California decried these
segregated housing units despite the groundswell of support from the community.
Ignacio L. López, the publisher and editor of the San Gabriel Valley based Spanish-
language weekly newspaper El Espectador, issued a scathing editorial about these
tracts. In López’s estimation, the tracts actually represented a denial of access to
white neighborhoods; an affront to Mexican American acceptance which he
portended would reap bitter fruit. He admonished the community for failing to see
that it was not whites who would suffer the fallout, but ethnic Mexicans themselves

50
“Throngs Inspect New Development in South Whittier,” Los Angeles Times, 10 September 1950,
pg. E2. The article described the location as the “Whittier District” but the tract was actually in the
southern section of the future city of Pico Rivera. Pico Rivera incorporated in 1958.

92
for failing to advocate for true integration. Accepting segregation promised to
produce an “exclusive word reserved only for ourselves.”
51
Opening the door to
veterans might have been the downfall of outright segregation against Mexican
Americans however as veterans and Mexican American homeowners staged formal
protests, organized around community issues, and exerted pressure on local
governments to be more responsive to the needs of minority communities.
As a veteran, Arthur Lozano used his GI Bill benefits to purchase a home for
his wife and two children. Their old place in East Los Angeles near Evergreen
Cemetery was nice, but with a growing family, they decided to become homeowners
in the veterans’ tract in Rivera. The Lozano’s two daughters, Susana Jr. and Silvia,
found the predominantly Mexican American neighborhood rife with playmates and
enjoyed long hours in neighbors’ front yards. Susana Jr. remembers how the
neighborhood provided a positive place to grow up that also served as a site of
political engagement. The elder Susana and Arthur became heavily involved in
community politics for justice and representation, helping to found the local chapter
of the American GI Forum and walking precincts for Mexican American city council
and school board candidates.
52
WWII veteran activism not only helped open doors
for Mexican Americans, it also paved the way towards middle class standing through

51
López, El Espectador, 11 August 1950, pp. 2-3; cited in Mario T. García, Mexican Americans:
Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930-1960 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 95.

52
Susana Lozano, interview by author, 7 April 2008, Pico Rivera, Calif.

93
homeownership and a growing sense of entitlement to the benefits of U.S.
citizenship.
Veterans from the Eastside spearheaded efforts to open suburban housing to
working and middle class Mexican Americans. Armando J. Mora, a third-generation
Mexican American originally from the Eastside where he graduated from Roosevelt
High School and attended East Los Angeles College, parlayed his WWII veteran
status into a comfortable suburban home in the Southeastern Los Angeles County
city of Santa Fe Springs and a methods analyst position with Sears-Roebuck and
Company. Rather than sit quietly aside and bask in suburban comfort with his wife
and five children, Mora threw himself into the thick of community control issues.
Mora’s dedication to the “awakening of Mexican-Americans to the problems
surrounding their community” buttressed his efforts as the president of the Santa Fe
Springs Coordinating Council to procure public funding for a free medical clinic and
a local dental clinic. His participation in the Club Cultural Mexicano was
accompanied by his leadership activity in Cub Scouts, and committee work for the
Parent-Teacher Associations for both Rancho Santa Gertrudes and Los Nietos
School District.
53
While Mora’s résumé calls attention to remarkable efforts he made
in the political and social arena, his biography suggests that his allegiances to his city
and the Mexican community writ large were not unique.

53
Sears Roebuck Co. newsletter, 20 December 1972, Holifield Papers, Box 5, folder “Sears Citizen of
the Year – Armando Joe Mora.”

94
Mexican Americans like Mora sought to capitalize on their relative
acceptance through a range of social behaviors and mores which they used to place a
middle class sensibility into social and political practice. If their economic positions
did not automatically admit them to middle class standing, some segments of the
community reasoned that comportment and cultural adaptation, if not outright
assimilation, held the key to achieving the suburban good life. Class differences tied
to suburban homeownership became a wedge issue for Mexican Americans in the
1960s. Pico Rivera resident Manuel Aguilar, reflecting on his life experiences in the
suburban city known derisively as the “Mexican Beverly Hills,” cautioned against
the spread of apathy among Mexican American homeowners: “Communities where
the people become so apathetic that they don’t cut their lawns regularly. They don’t
paint their homes…the blighted areas begin to happen,” he proclaims, “sometimes it
is because of lack of money, but sometimes people just don’t worry or care very
much how their home looks.”
54
East Los Angeles, he believed, was riddled with
substandard homes because of homeowner neglect, but Aguilar fell into the same
trap as many middle class families of his generation. He failed to recognize the
impact of state neglect for the Eastside and the significant spatial disruptions caused
by urban renewal projects in that area. Nevertheless, he and his family moved to Pico
Rivera in 1965, drawn by its tranquility and distance far away from the ills of barrio
life. “It was a very peaceful community, this is what attracted us,” he said, “peaceful,

54
Manuel Aguilar oral history in Susan Sellman Obler, et. al., Personal Stories from Pico Rivera: A
Project of the Exploratory College (Whittier, Calif.: Rio Hondo College, 1978), p. 3.

95
quiet, everybody liked everybody else; everybody respected everybody else. I
figured this was the place to raise our kids.”
55
Aguilar’s nod to community life was
tied to a notion that harmonious relationships bred clean and safe social
environments for children. Calling upon the rhetoric of child-rearing brought
Aguilar, and many others like him, into conversation with suburbanites across time
and space, race and class.
Parents often made reference to schools and environments free from gangs
and drugs so prevalent in the barrios. Subdivision developers frequently marketed
their housing tracts to families with young children by playing up the recreational
opportunities and the presence of schools.
56
This strategy to tap into the desires (and
fears) of young married parents to provide a safe haven for their children was wide
spread across the country. According to historian Elaine Tyler May, the postwar
suburban home represented security during the anxious decades of the Cold War.
The power of suburban rhetoric extended beyond white families, she argues: “the
‘American way of life’ embodied in the suburban nuclear family, as a cultural ideal
if not a universal reality, motivated countless postwar Americans to strive for it, to
live by its codes, and—for black Americans—to demand it.”
57
African Americans
were not alone in that enterprise. Mexican Americans sought the suburban good life

55
Ibid., 11.

56
For example, see the description of Pico Vista quoted earlier in this chapter. “Homes Completed
Daily in New Whittier Tract,” Los Angeles Times, 7 May 1950, pg. E6.

57
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic
Books, 1999), p. xx.

96
with as much force and vigor as any ethnoracial group in the postwar era. And, with
major periodicals such as the Times delivering full support to developers in their
attempts to sell the suburbs to families by playing on emotions and fears these places
were bound to witness an increase in civil rights activity for entrance to the middle
class.
The exponential increases in children strained local school district budgets
and space which forced new school construction throughout the region. In Pico,
record enrollments for the 1951-52 school year led to the construction of two new
elementary schools. In neighboring Rivera, the school population more than doubled
from the previous academic year.
58
By the mid- to late-1950s these numbers
continued to grow. According to the 1960 U.S. Census of Population, Pico Rivera’s
youth from kindergarten to high school age numbered 14,738; almost 11,000 of
those school-age residents were enrolled in elementary school. Much of the growth
of this young population took place from 1955 to 1960.
59

Mexican American parents contributed to the growth in the child-age
population as they sought to establish families in suburban neighborhoods. Georgia
and Joe Perez moved from their home in East Los Angeles into Pico in 1951.
Initially the couple hesitated because a mortgage at the time would stretch Joe’s one
hundred dollar per week income from Standard Steel as an ironworker, which was

58
“Schools Forecast Peak Enrollment: Whittier High Utilizes All Space to Accommodate Opening
Day,” Los Angeles Times, 17 September 1951, pg. A7.

59
U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Censuses of Population and Housing: 1960 Census Tracts, Final
Report PHC(1)-82, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962), pg. 28.

97
barely enough to pay the bills and buy food. They justified the five-hundred dollar
down payment and thirteen-year loan with a monthly mortgage of seventy-one
dollars and fifty-cents because they wanted a house to raise their children in a quiet
neighborhood. Georgia did not regret the decision they made, stating simply, “I am
very happy here [in Pico Rivera] where I am. We raised three kids and here they are,
very nice.”
60
Georgia’s ostensibly whimsical comment carried a loaded cultural
assumption about the perils of barrio life compared to supposedly greener suburban
pastures.
Arsie Trujillo has a similar narrative as Georgia and Joe Perez. Arsie and her
husband moved to California from New Mexico in 1942 to find work after the
bombing of Pearl Harbor. Her husband continued work as a pipe-fitter, having
brought his skills from doing dam construction in New Mexico and Colorado.
Because his job was considered “essential” he was deferred from serving in the
military, a welcome designation for the Trujillos. They settled in the Aliso Village
Housing Projects in the Eastside, with three children until the County government
raised rents during the postwar housing crunch. Arsie’s husband had since changed
jobs to a truck driver, but as Arsie said, money was still scarce. Faced with the
possibility of paying high rent, they decided to purchase a house in 1951 which
meant paying a lower monthly mortgage. As still relative newcomers to Los
Angeles, the Trujillos knew little about the spatial makeup of the region. A real
estate agent directed them to a section of Pico which bordered Montebello and had

60
Georgia and Joe Perez oral history interviews in Personal Stories from Pico Rivera, pp. 61-74.

98
already begun to accept Mexican American families. Arsie felt it important to settle
in before school began so her children did not fall behind. Her son began school at
Fremont Elementary along with her daughter. Her oldest daughter however
continued to matriculate at Roosevelt High School in East Los Angeles because she
did not want to move to Montebello High School.
61

In 1961, newlyweds Ernie and Olga Gutierrez moved away from Hicks Camp
where Ernie’s parents operated a neighborhood grocery store. They first bought a
house in a rough and tumble El Monte neighborhood known as “Little Five Points”
because of its location near the intersection of five city streets, but less than one year
into their mortgage decided to leave. They wanted a home in a safe part of the city to
raise their children that also fit their professional standard as educators in the El
Monte Unified School District. They found a nice, modest home on a quiet street; its
location in an all-white neighborhood did not pose a problem for Ernie and Olga
initially because they believed that they had the right to purchase any house they
wanted. The owner of the house, however, refused to sell to the Gutierrezes claiming
that Ernie appeared too young to own a home. To neutralize the homeowner’s
pathetic effort to bar the purchase Ernie provided proof of his age. Backed into a
corner, the owner firmed the price of the home at $19,750 hoping to dissuade Ernie
and Olga by pricing them out of the market. Although it stretched their finances,
Ernie and Olga bought the house. It was Ernie and Olga’s first home yet the
pervasive feeling that their new neighbors did not accept them as equals mitigated

61
Arsie Trujillo oral history interview in Personal Stories from Pico Rivera, pp. 85-6.
99
their joy and excitement. The chilly reception served as a sign of things to come.
Over the years several incidents became imprinted on Ernie’s memory as both signs
of ethnic Mexican challenges in upward mobility and as signals of Los Angeles’s
shifting racial terrain.
The first incident occurred about two years after buying the house. Ernie was
cutting down some trees in his front yard when the previous owner, who happened to
be walking by, rebuked Ernie for taking out the trees. Ernie politely, yet firmly, told
the previous owner to mind his own business and that as the rightful property owner
Ernie had the liberty to remove any tree, shrub, or plant he wished. The previous
owner muttered a few words to himself and moved on. The second incident occurred
about four years later. Ernie’s children went with their grandfather (Ernie’s father)
across the street to play at the neighborhood park when police officers began
questioning the grandfather about his presence in the neighborhood. He told the
policemen that Ernie lived across the street, but the police did not believe him. Ernie
came outside when he saw what was happening and told the policemen to leave his
father alone. The policemen backed off, but not before Ernie had a chance to tell
them what he thought about their practices. Ernie knew one of the cops who had
grown up in a rival barrio. But regardless of the fact that he was also Mexican
American, he carried out the duties ascribed to him. Simply being Mexican in public
spaces in El Monte proved threatening enough to draw policemen out to the scene.
Ernie and Olga were the first Mexican Americans to move into the neighborhood and
the experiences they endured indicate that despite their ability to move into white
100
neighborhoods, they were not accepted as equals. Only when more Mexican
Americans moved into the neighborhood some five years later, did the Gutierrezes
feel like they had real neighbors.
62

Conclusion
Mexican Americans in the two-and-a-half decades following World War II
situated themselves in suburban Los Angeles County by strategically maneuvering
the region’s racial geography to meet their own needs and aspirations. Characterized
by both an upwardly mobile suburban middle class and a working class confined to
the barrios, the postwar Mexican American generation demonstrated a remarkable
diversity along class and generational lines. The suburban middle class sought to
cement their advantageous positions by embracing their identities as homeowners to
demand quality education for their youth and advocate for greater integration of
Mexican Americans from working-class backgrounds. Throughout this process,
Mexican Americans forged a suburban identity that generated a sense of entitlement
to the benefits of first-class citizenship while simultaneously upholding a Mexican
American identity to protect the community from racial discrimination.
The following chapter will examine how suburban Mexican Americans
embraced the municipal electoral system as a vehicle to advance progressive and
liberal political agendas in their new environments. Through a combination of
grassroots movements, organizational tactics, and strategic uses of ‘suburban ideal’

62
Ernie Gutierrez, interview by author, El Monte, Calif., 23 August 2007.
101
rhetoric, constituents from the barrios and the suburbs merged their collective
aspirations for upward mobility and constructed a suburban identity.

102
103

CHAPTER THREE:
FROM THE BARRIOS TO THE ‘BURBS: MEXICAN AMERICAN
POLITICAL ACTIVITY, 1958-1968

Mexican American Generation politics in postwar metropolitan Los Angeles
focused on protecting the opportunities for suburban homeownership won in the late
1950s and early 1960s. The entrance into the middle class heaped tremendous
rewards on those Mexican Americans who attained upward social mobility.
Privileges such as safer neighborhoods, better public schools, and increased property
values girded the Mexican American Generation’s orientation to advance racialized
politics for their own benefit and for that of the ethnic Mexican community at large.
1

This political activism took form in community organizations, municipal elections,
and fair housing advocacy. Mexican American efforts to mobilize politically around
identity and community issues in the late 1950s and early 1960s emerged at a time in
Postwar America when distinct suburban ideologies began to take root. Federal
distribution of wealth and resources to American suburbs following World War II

1
The Mexican American Generation has sparked vigorous debate amongst Chicana/o historians
because of its widespread tendency to work within mainstream political institutions to advocate for
anti-discrimination and first-class citizenship. Chicano cultural nationalists in the late 1960s rejected
“Mexican American” identity and mainstream politics, instead espousing a militant political ethos
framed around a non-white identity. For the rupture between the Mexican American Generation and
Chicano cultural nationalism, see Carlos Muñoz, Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement
(London: Verso, 1989); Ernesto Chávez, “¡Mi Raza Primero!”: Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency
in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966-1978 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002); Lorena Oropeza, ¡Raza Sí! ¡Guerra No!: Chicano Protest and Patriotism During the Viet Nam
War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

subsidized the emergence of an enormously influential white middle class.
2
People
of color seldom benefited in kind from such public assistance, but Mexican
Americans experienced some success in cracking suburban barriers while
maintaining a strong political consciousness tightly aligned with their dual identity as
suburban homeowners and as a racialized minority.
This chapter also charts a course towards the rise of the Chicano Movement
by looking at how early 1960s organizations, rhetoric, and political activism
combined to create a widespread disillusionment with the pragmatic politics of New
Deal coalitions. Studies on the politicization of barrio youth in Los Angeles
characterize the so-called Mexican American Generation as the antithesis of barrio
political activists. Classified as vendidos (sell outs) and tio tacos (Mexican Uncle
Toms) by militant Chicanos in the 1970s, members of the so-called Mexican
American Generation present an important challenge to Chicana/o historians. The
politics this generation advanced was radical for its time and laid a necessary
foundation for more militant action undertaken by later generations.
The Mexican American Political Association
Critiques launched at MAPA by contemporaries and by historians, however,
point to the ineffectiveness of MAPA to produce elected leaders at state and national
levels. Critics argue that poor leadership and lack of precinct work in major cities

2
For the federal subsidization of the white middle class following World War II, see Kenneth T.
Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar
Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); and, David M.P. Freund, Colored
Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007).
104
compromised MAPA’s large-scale potential.
3
However, critiques fail to recognize
that MAPA’s greatest potential lied in building local political networks in suburbs
and barrios. Progressives in MAPA understood this, and built a political ideology
centered on community concerns. “Community issues and electoral politics were two
sides of the same coin,” Bert Corona, a founding MAPA member and longtime labor
organizer, explained, “[w]hile elections came around every two years or so,
community issues went on all year round.”
4
The failures of MAPA to effect political
change on big political stages owed more to a strategy that placed the cart before the
horse. MAPA held more potential for bringing meaningful change and political
power for ethnic Mexican communities in suburban and rural areas than in large
cities like Los Angeles because they could align with sympathetic white liberals and
exercise positional power to advocate for community concerns.
In January 1958, the California Democratic Council [CDC] announced its
slate of candidates to challenge the Republican controlled state assembly and
governor’s office.
5
Hank Lopez, a Mexican American attorney from East Los
Angeles, garnered the party endorsement for Secretary of State over the highly
favored John Anson Ford, a retired Los Angeles County Supervisor. Along with

3
For critiques of MAPA in secondary literature see, Juan Gómez Quiñones, Chicano Politics: Reality
&Promise, 1940-1990 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), pp. 68-9; Ernesto
Chávez, “¡Mi Raza Primero!” 33-41.

4
García, Memories of Chicano History, 204-5.

5
The Democratic “sweep” of 1958 wrested control of California state government from the
Republican Party, which had been at the helm since the early twentieth century. Other CDC-endorsed
candidates included Edmund “Pat” G. Brown for Governor, Clair Engle for United States Senator,
Bert Betts for State Treasurer, and Stanley Mosk for Superior Court Judge.

105
Edward Roybal’s candidacy for Los Angeles County Supervisor, Lopez’s
nomination held tremendous promise for the integration of Mexican Americans into
the political mainstream.
6
Lopez’s challenge came in facing a renowned political
veteran in John Anson Ford whose distinguished tenure on the Los Angeles County
Board of Supervisors from 1934 to 1958 earned him great respect and admiration in
the California Democratic Party. Ford supporters in the CDC underestimated Hank
Lopez’s ability to mobilize delegates around a platform which prioritized minority
representation in state government, however, and Lopez easily won the nomination,
leaving Ford and his supporters stunned. Lopez’s triumph at the 1958 CDC offered
Mexican Americans a realistic opportunity to elect a representative voice for the
community. Yet, the prospect of a Mexican American Secretary of State did not sit
well with entrenched Democrats. Thus, ethnic Mexicans encountered a political
environment in the late 1950s that was overwhelmingly controlled by whites
unwilling to relinquish critical government posts.
Ford supporters aired their frustrations in the weeks following the CDC
convention. Aldrich Blake wrote in a letter to Ford, “it saddens me to read this
morning that you had been beaten by a Mexican attorney. I have no doubt he is a
capable person, but it just seemed to me that probably you were sacrificed on the
altar of political expediency.” Blake continued, “After your life-long espousal of the
rights of minorities, I thought this rather an ungrateful thing. It made me more

6
See Juan Gómez Quiñones, Chicano Politics: Reality &Promise, 1940-1990 (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1990), 67.

106
devoutful [sic] thankful than ever that in this country we still have white
supremacy.”
7
Blake’s assumption that Lopez’s nomination represented little more
than a political maneuver by the party to appease minority voters is underscored by
his belief that “white supremacy” will prevail. K. Wallace Longshore, a delegate
from the 24
th
Congressional District of California assured Ford that if the feasibility
of Lopez’s victory had been circulated among the delegates prior to the vote,
Longshore and his cronies “would certainly have been busier than bees” to ensure a
Ford nomination.
8
Ford himself vented his frustration over the outcome in a candid
response letter to a friend:
To have supported Hank Lopez to emphasize the party stand for
civil rights is a bit of sophistry. Not only is my record on this
point officially and publicly 100% in accord with all the party
stands for, but – and this should be a major consideration to one
who wants to be a practical idealist – my stand on civil rights is
known far and wide – much more widely than Hank’s position
could possibly be known. In a sense I have officially personified
this very issue.
9

By rhetorically holding himself up as the embodiment of civil rights causes,
Ford avoided reconciling his personal hypocrisy with his “practical idealism.”
Another Ford supporter offered consolation in baldly stating, “The name of your

7
Letter from Aldrich Blake to John Anson Ford, 13 January 1958, John Anson Ford Papers, Box 48,
Folder 11, e, dd(6), The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. [Herefter, Ford Papers].

8
Letter from K. Wallace Longshore, 22 January 1958, Ford Papers, Box 48, Folder 11, e, dd(6).

9
Letter from John Anson Ford to Joseph Johnson, 21 January 1958, Ford Papers, Box 48, Folder 11,
e, dd(6).

107
opponent will of itself defeat him. So have no regrets.”
10
The notion that Lopez
prevailed because of his “frank bid for recognition of minorities” exposed the limits
of Democratic Party liberalism in the 1950s and revealed the barriers to Mexican
American entrance to the political mainstream following World War II.
11

Democrats won the day in November 1958 as they nearly swept the statewide
election—Lopez was the lone exception on the victorious Democratic ticket. The
Democratic Party failed to adequately fund Lopez’s campaign in the statewide
general election, nor offer public support. According to his colleague Bert Corona,
Lopez’s campaign was hamstrung by such a severe lack of institutional support
which forced Lopez to travel up and down California with little money, in his
“broken-down old car.”
12
CDC leaders Edmund “Pat” Brown, the Democratic
candidate for governor, and Jess Unruh openly refused to campaign for Lopez,
believing a Mexican American politician stood zero-chance of winning a statewide
office. Pat Brown and other party leaders refused to appear with Lopez on the same
stage at public campaign stops.
13
Unsurprisingly, given the party’s reluctance to
fully support his campaign, Lopez lost a close race to the Republican incumbent

10
Letter from James D. Meredith to John Anson Ford, 14 January 1958, Ford Papers, Box 48, Folder
11, e, dd(6).

11
“Democratic Machine in High Gear,” Los Angeles Times, 14 January 1958, p. B4.

12
Mario T. Garcia, Memories of Chicano History: The Life and Narrative of Bert Corona (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), p. 196.

13
Ibid.; Kenneth Burt, The Search for a Civic Voice: California Latino Politics (Claremont, Calif.:
Regina Books, 2007), 163-4.

108
Frank Jordan. Lopez’s defeat marked the only Democratic loss on the state ticket that
year, a fact not lost on Mexican American political organizers across Califor

nia.

Years later, Ford reiterated that he would have garnered more votes than
Lopez. In a letter to Eduardo Quevedo, Ford wrote: “[t]he mistake in endorsing Hank
Lopez, was not in your desire to get official recognition; rather, you who supported
Hank did not realize how strong and how widely known the Republican opponent
[Frank Jordan] was,” he continued, “I certainly had demonstrated my friendship and
support of the Mexican people. I would have gotten many more votes than Hank, tho
[sic] I cannot say positively that I would have won.”
14
Ford’s commitment to this
line of thinking helps explain how limited the white liberal notion of Mexican
American political activism and maturity actually was at the outset of the 1960s. The
Democratic Party’s abandonment of Lopez’s campaign, and the controversy swirling
around Roybal’s defeat, provided enough impetus to create a political organization
aimed at Mexican American representation. Veteran labor and political organizers,
politicians, and business owners channeled post-election bitterness and resentment
into the development of the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA).
15

14
“Ford to the Friends of Sr. Edwardo [sic] Quevedo,” 5 March 1964, Box 9, Folder 20, Eduardo
Quevedo Papers, M0349, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford,
California [hereafter, Quevedo Papers].

15
For a detailed narrative of the genesis of MAPA as an organization see Kaye Lynn Briegel, “The
History of Political Organizations Among Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles since the Second
World War,” (M.A. Thesis, University of Southern California, 1967), 45-53; Kenneth Burt, MAPA:
The History of MAPA and Chicano Politics in California (Sacramento, Calif.: Mexican American
Political Association, 1982); and Burt, The Search for a Civic Voice, 159-84.

109
MAPA filled a critical institutional and political void for a community
seeking an outlet for their needs and interests.
16
MAPA organizers envisioned it as a
bi-partisan bulwark against voter exploitation and manipulation of ethnic Mexican
leadership by the Democratic and Republican parties.
17
MAPA’s primary objectives
were to increase Mexican American elected and appointed officials and to aid
sympathetic non-Mexican candidates. MAPA organizers also envisioned it as a
grassroots organization to represent Mexican Americans in community issues as well
as to take an active role in voter education.
18

Almost immediately, MAPA launched local Mexican Americans into
national focus. The John F. Kennedy presidential campaign kicked off in early 1960
with the Massachusetts state senator squaring off against Whittier native Richard M.
Nixon. The Nixon campaign stubbornly refused to appeal to Mexican American
voters during the general election campaign so Democrats seized the opportunity.
19

Mexican Americans in Texas and California became major players for the first time
in presidential politics by providing organizational structure to Viva Kennedy clubs.
In Texas, the American G.I. Forum contributed leadership and grassroots support to
the Viva Kennedy movement providing the national campaign with a solid

16
García, Memories of Chicano History, 195.

17
Ibid.

18
Briegel, 51; and Leo Grebler, Joan W. Moore, and Ralph C. Guzman, The Mexican American
People: The Nation’s Second Largest Minority (New York: The Free Press, 1970), 544.

19
Ignacio M. García, Viva Kennedy: Mexican Americans in Search of Camelot (College Station, TX:
Texas A&M Press, 2000), 47-8.

110
Southwestern base.
20
California Mexican Americans however provided direction for
the national campaign. Hank Lopez secured a leadership role overseeing the
direction of Viva Kennedy clubs throughout 13 states and Edward Roybal became
the California state director. Kenneth Burt has highlighted the local efforts of MAPA
chapters in providing an organizational base for Viva Kennedy in California.
Although the campaign funds were channeled through the CSO, MAPA organized
the bulk of voter registration drives and community education efforts.
21
Lopez
described the early formation of Viva Kennedy clubs throughout California as
simply a matter of short-term name change from MAPA to Viva Kennedy. Lopez’s
connections throughout California made it easy to call on the services of local
MAPA chapters for the Kennedy campaign.
22
These local efforts through MAPA-
coordinated activities validated the organization amongst Mexican American
community members and Democratic Party leaders.
23

While MAPA served as an umbrella organization for Mexican American
political activism, the true story of MAPA’s effectiveness took place on local levels,
orchestrated by local people who organized under the banner of MAPA to effect
local change. Even during periods of great ideological discord, MAPA’s local
influence continued to thrive as people used the organization as a vehicle to

20
See García’s second chapter titled, “Organizing the Viva Kennedy Clubs,” in Viva Kennedy, 33-59.

21
Kenneth Burt, MAPA: The History of MAPA and Chicano Politics in California (Sacramento:
Mexican American Political Association, 1982), 5-6.

22
Ibid., 6.

23
Ibid.
111
challenge abuses of power by municipal governments and to gain representation on
small city councils.
24
The proliferation of MAPA across the state emanated from an
organizational goal to establish viable chapters in state assembly districts inhabited
by large populations of Mexican Americans.
25
Likewise, people in the community
organized MAPA chapters to meet the political needs of their local neighborhoods.
Strategies employed by local-level organizations eluded the logic of some
contemporary activists and critics. In January 1964, Carta Editorial—a periodical
that reported on Mexican American activities, communities, policy issues, and
news—commented on the hidden success of MAPA:
Strange as it may appear at first glance, the greatest [political]
development reported was from the smaller communities and
suburban areas. These included in particular the Alameda County
chapter, with those in Irwindale [San Gabriel Valley] and the San
Fernando Valley next in line. Actually, this is probably to be
expected, since the greater cohesion of the smaller Mexican-American
communities probably makes group identification and therefore,
organization, an easier task.
26

MAPA members initiated action on behalf of the group as they responded to
perceived discrimination in housing and in the workplace. In the small San Gabriel
Valley city of Irwindale, which housed a relatively large ethnic Mexican barrio,
MAPA members employed by Permanente Cement Company requested an
investigation into discrimination against Mexican American employees. Workers

24
Ibid., 18-9.

25
Kaye Lynn Briegel, “The History of Political Organizations among Mexican-Americans in Los
Angeles since the Second World War,” (M.A. Thesis, University of Southern California, 1967), 51.

26
“Report on MAPA,” Carta Editoria: For the Informed – Interested in Mexican-American Affairs,
20 January 1964, vol. II, no. 18, Ernesto Galarza Papers, M0224, Box 54, Folder 8, Department of
Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries (hereafter, Galarza Papers).
112
charged that the trucking company paid Mexican American workers less than other
employees despite their union membership and that the company offered more work
hours to white drivers than Mexican American drivers. Permanente Cement had
federal and state contracts for construction projects, a point that subjected them to
Fair Employment Practices Commission guidelines in hiring and employment.
27

Neighborhood residents also organized through MAPA to battle housing
issues. In 1964, Pico Rivera city council member Orlyn Culp anticipated a
substantial profit from a proposed upgrade to property he owned in the Pico Viejo
neighborhood on the northwest corner of Pico Rivera. Culp owned a dairy farm and
several other properties in an area that the city re-zoned in 1962 for the
“redevelopment of blighted areas” and construction of multiple-family dwellings.
28

Culp’s neighbor, Maria Aguirre, became the lead claimant on a lawsuit filed against
the city on behalf of the residents of the Pico Viejo barrio. Although Aguirre
described herself at the time as mostly apolitical, “just a good housewife, cleaning,
and my family…my own little world, a good housewife, that was it, nothing else,”
she was thrust into a political battle that would change the course of her life.
29
At the
behest of Pico Viejo community members Aguirre took the lead role and helped

27
Eduardo Quevedo to Permanente Cement Company, 16 December 1963, Quevedo Papers, M0349,
Box 3, Folder 5, Stanford.

28
“Pico Rivera: A Progressive City with Rich Historical Heritage and a Background of Dramatic
Changes Faces a Prosperous Future,” Whittier Daily News, 10 October 1962, p. 10 B; Maria Aguirre,
interview, Personal Stories from the Pío Pico Neighborhood: A Project of the Exploratory College
(Whittier, Calif.: Rio Hondo College, 1978), p. 26-7.

29
Aguirre interview, p. 27.

113
organize a MAPA chapter in order to fight the city. Through MAPA, the residents
were able to bring suit and stand a chance to win in court.
30

To raise funds for legal fees, Aguirre and allies arranged dances in the local
United Auto Workers union hall on Rosemead Boulevard. At these dances, MAPA
members sold food donated by local restaurants, individuals, and companies to add
to their legal fund.
31
The effort reached beyond the tiny neighborhood of Pico Viejo,
as the dances suggest. Aguirre’s assertion that even the people from the “southside”
(middle class suburban homeowners) helped in the effort shows that ethnic Mexicans
across the city recognized the pervasive threat Pico Viejo redevelopment posed to
Mexican American suburban homeownership writ large. The plaintiffs in Aguirre,
Lujan v. Pico Rivera (1965) emerged victorious as the judge struck down the
planned expansion of condos and apartments on Aguirre’s land.
MAPA also provided a vehicle for changing local political machinery by
institutionalizing the Mexican American vote and throwing support behind
candidates with ostensibly community inspired perspectives. In a 1965 local election
for the El Rancho Unified School District in Pico Rivera, MAPA supported
candidates Henry Alonzo and Tony Sanchez unseated white incumbents. The local
newspaper reported an unusually high number of votes emerging from Pico Viejo

30
Aguirre interview, 28.

31
Aguirre interview, 30.

114
neighborhood where Aguirre lived and actively organized the community.
32
In a
political battle detailed in further depth in the following chapter, the public schools
in Pico Rivera failed to meet the needs of ethnic Mexican children, a failing that
sparked parental activism around educational justice and equity for their children.
Despite the strategic uses of MAPA at local municipal levels, dangers existed
in MAPA’s diffuse nature. Carta Editorial carried a story about the March 1964
MAPA endorsing convention where a battle broke out amongst the membership over
the endorsement of Los Angeles District Attorney. A flood of new members from
Pomona and Compton balanced the support for Abel Younger where the support
previously appeared to lean towards Vince Dalsimer. As Carta observed, these new
members “seemed ill-at-ease in the convention, and for many it was obviously their
first time at a political meeting.”
33
Carta further pointed out that it was the largest
endorsing convention to date for the Southern California region and clearly
articulated the mounting political prowess of the Mexican American electorate. The
newsletter cautioned MAPA however to be mindful of growth, stating that new
members must be instructed on the workings of the organization so that they can
become individual thinkers within the group and “now that they are in MAPA they

32
“Elect MAPA-Backed Candidates: Incumbent Monson is Returned as Trustee,” Pico Rivera Times
Post, 22 April 1965, in box 9, folder 10, Manuel Ruiz Papers, M0295, Department of Special
Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

33
“Organization For Whom, For What, and On Whose Terms,” Carta Editorial, 1 April 1964, vol. 1,
no. 22, Galarza Papers, Box 54, Folder 8.
115
need to be welcomed and helped to learn about the organization, its history, and its
objectives.”
34

The organization’s impact became widely known through several far-
reaching campaigns for State Assembly and Los Angeles Board of Education
elections. MAPA wasted little time following incorporation in pursuing the election
of Mexican Americans in important political positions. In 1962, Phil Soto, small
businessman and councilmember of La Puente, and John “King” Moreno, teacher
and Mayor of Santa Fe Springs, each won state assembly seats in newly created
districts without an incumbent.
35
MAPA activities outside of the city provided a
blueprint for city politics beyond coalition politics. Julian Nava’s election to the Los
Angeles Board of Education in 1967 brought politically active ethnic Mexicans from
surrounding suburban cities into direct contact with big city politics.
Local MAPA chapters steered Nava’s campaign as leaders like Bert Corona
crafted campaign strategies, organized voter registration drives, and walked precincts
with rank-and-file members.
36
Symbolically, Nava’s victory proved that Mexican
Americans possessed the ability to unify for specific causes and effect electoral
change. Additionally, if they could do so in the city of Los Angeles, they could
certainly do so in suburban areas with highly valuable state assembly districts where

34
Ibid.

35
Burt, “Latino Los Angeles,” 185.

36
Corona came down from the Bay Area to help lead the Nava campaign as did others. Garcia,
Memories of Chicano History.

116
many of the organizers in the Nava campaign lived.
37
The Nava campaign also
showcases the highly metropolitan nature of the effort to gain a big city position.
Success depended on the vested involvement of politically active people from
outside the city limits. Ignacio Lopez, the southern regional director of MAPA at the
time and the longtime editor of El Espectador, overflowing with optimism following
the Nava campaign said, “If we work it right we have a good chance to get some of
our people elected to the assembly next year.”
38
Such hopes fell short of realization
however, as Mexican Americans continued to encounter problems with
gerrymandering and backroom deals on the state level.
By 1968, MAPA began to espouse a more pronounced grassroots ideology.
Bert Corona’s guidance of MAPA between 1966 and 1968 helped shift the
organization towards a barrio-suburban collaboration. His labor organizing
background in the Community Services Organization grounded his policies and
MAPA’s agenda towards social justice and barrio improvement.
39
The June 1968
MAPA convention was important for a number of reasons. For one, it occurred in a
presidential election year which pitted Robert F. Kennedy, a wildly popular
candidate in Mexican American communities across the Southwest, against Richard
M. Nixon, a Whittier native and staunch conservative. Secondly, the conference took

37
Frank Terrazas who was a city council member for Pico Rivera at the time helped organize
campaign efforts for the city of Los Angeles position. He then began to position himself as a would-
be candidate for state assembly.

38
“Nava Poll Victory Jolts L.A. Politics,” People’s World, 10 June 1967, news clipping, Quevedo
Papers, Box 9, Folder 3.

39
See Garcia, Memories of Chicano History for a thorough biography of Bert Corona.

117
place in Pico Rivera, a city that by 1968 represented a symbol of Mexican American
upward mobility. In a letter to MAPA members and conference participants, Corona
illustrated the expanded base of MAPA. “We are taking great pains to guarantee the
fullest participation of grass-roots and rank-and-file members in the deliberations of
this convention,” he added, “we are working to ensure the participation of college
and ‘barrio’ youth, senior citizens, our women, our ‘barrio’ poor, and our Paisanos in
Organized Labor.”
40
While Corona’s letter certainly pays heed to the rumblings of
discontent in Southland barrios earlier that spring, the 1968 MAPA convention also
placed Pico Rivera squarely in the mix of emerging suburban barrio politics.
The Promise of Municipal Politics
With state and national political positions seemingly out of reach, political
organizers and community groups sought to establish themselves in the
independently incorporated cities surrounding Los Angeles. This new Mexican
American suburban constituency fused grassroots movements with municipal
elections to solidify their middle class standing. Suburban San Gabriel Valley and
Southeastern Los Angeles County regions became battlegrounds for housing and
education rights as affluent Mexican Americans migrated into planned subdivisions
from Eastside barrios. They held fast to a memory of political disenfranchisement in
Los Angeles and seized opportunities, even if still limited, to represent their
community interests on suburban city councils.

40
Corona to Friends and MAPA Members, 29 April 1968, Chester Holifield Papers, box 70, folder
“Mexican-Americans; File 1; Legislative Info.,” Department of Special Collections, University of
Southern California.
118
Edward Roybal’s presence on the Los Angeles political landscape
transcended city boundaries as his example inspired Mexican Americans to assume
political power. On the strength of coalition politics organized through the
Community Service Organization Edward R. Roybal in 1949 became the first elected
Mexican American city councilmember in Los Angeles since the nineteenth
century.
41
Roybal’s strong leadership and outspoken character on social justice
issues gave the Mexican American community a voice in city politics in the critical
postwar decades. His decision to pursue a Congressional post in 1962 created a c
in Mexican American political empowerment in Los Angeles city politics.
risis

42
Roybal’s seat on the city council was hotly contested between African
American and Mexican American voters. Gilbert Lindsay entered the runoff with
Richard Tafoya, an aide to unpopular Mayor Sam Yorty and the only Mexican
American candidate with a realistic shot at gaining the seat. The election swung
Lindsay’s way largely because Boyle Heights and the Latino Eastside looked much
different than it had when Roybal was first elected. In an interview with political
scholar Kenneth C. Burt, Richard Tafoya attributed his defeat to displacement of
Mexican American voters by freeway construction and urban renewal programs and
the subsequent move to the suburbs of both Mexican Americans and Jews: “Mexican
Americans went into Pico Rivera, Whittier, and Montebello. The Jewish population

41
Edward Roybal’s election is well documented. See Kenneth C. Burt, “The Power of a Mobilized
Citizenry and Coalition Politics: The 1949 Election of Edward R. Roybal to the Los Angeles City
Council,” Southern California Quarterly, vol. 85, no. 4 (winter 2003).

42
Gomez-Quiñones, Chicano Politics, 73.

119
which was very liberal and which could have voted for a Mexican, moved out. Who
moved in? Mexicans from Mexico, primarily, who didn’t vote.”
43
This recognition
that the suburbanization of Mexican Americans took a toll on city politicians
obscures the significance for Mexican American politics posed by massive
suburbanization as homeowners in those places engaged in the political system.
In January 1958, residents from the two independent communities of Pico
and Rivera in unincorporated eastern Los Angeles County went to the polls to decide
on city incorporation. The proposed city covered an 8.5 square mile swath of land
between the Rio Hondo and San Gabriel River and promised home, community, and
security to its nearly 52,000 residents. Cityhood passed by a narrow margin, 4190 to
3529.
44
John Todd took a post as City Attorney for Pico Rivera after it incorporated
in January of 1958. As Lakewood’s former City Attorney and member of the
Lakewood Chamber of Commerce, Todd fulfilled Pico Rivera’s need for personnel
experienced specifically in suburban politics. The connection to Lakewood became
tighter with the hiring of Mary Simmons to City Clerk Pro Tem for Pico Rivera; she
served as Deputy City Clerk for the city of Lakewood prior to accepting the position
in Pico Rivera. The duo’s experience in crafting the Lakewood Plan undoubtedly led
to Pico Rivera City Council’s decision to hire them for the same purposes of

43
Tafoya interview by Burt, Montebello, 31 May 1997, cited in Kenneth C. Burt, “Latino Los
Angeles: The Promise of Politics,” in Martin Schiesl and Mark M. Dodge, eds., City of Promise: Race
and Historical Change in Los Angeles (Claremont, Calif.: Regina Books, 2006), 189.

44
“Pico Rivera Cityhood Plan Wins; Election Draws 52% of 16,973 Eligible Voters,” Los Angeles
Times, 8 January 1958, p. C7.

120
contracting services through the county government such as fire, police, animal
control, etc.
45
Although the election drew approximately 52% of eligible voters, Pico
Rivera’s incorporation provided a place that enabled Mexican Americans to exercise
a hybrid political identity as both suburban homeowners and members of a racial
minority.
Louis R. Diaz, a former UCLA student, became the first in a long line of
Mexican American city council members in Pico Rivera. In the early 1950s Diaz
directed the Variety Boys Club in his native Boyle Heights which offered after-
school activities, field trips, and athletics to neighborhood youths.
46
Diaz gained
recognition from Mexican American political heavyweights early because of his
close association with Edward Roybal. Diaz accompanied Roybal to important
public events and on one occasion stood by in support as Roybal raised a motion in
the Los Angeles City Council to investigate former Los Angeles Police Department
Chief William H. Parker. Chief Parker during a civil rights hearing said Mexicans,
despite their historical roots in California, “…aren’t far removed from the wild tribes
of Mexico.”
47
Diaz parlayed his popularity with Democratic heavyweights into a

45
“Pico Rivera to be City Tomorrow,” Los Angeles Times, 27 January 1958, p. C6; “Pico Rivera
Sheds Its Swaddling Clothes with Municipal Election,” Los Angeles Times, 20 April 1958, p. SG2.

46
“Eastside Boys to get Free Ocean Park Outing,” Los Angeles Times, 29 March 1954, p. 24. The
tradition of YMCA inspired youth programs aimed at Latino boys originated with the fallout from the
Sleepy Lagoon incident and Zoot Suit Riots in 1943. County and state agencies invested heavily in
combating juvenile delinquency in Mexican communities and encouraged community leaders to take
active roles in curbing delinquency.

47
“Parker Asked to Explain his Attitudes Towards Latins: Accused of Prejudice by Roybal,” Los
Angeles Times, 29 January 1960, p. B1.

121
leadership role with the aforementioned Viva Kennedy Clubs in 1960. Serving as a
Southern California Coordinator, Diaz occupied a position on the Executive Board
and organized important campaign activities for John F. Kennedy in Mexican
American communities in the region.
48

As a member of the city council, Diaz became a prominent person in the
Mexican American community in Pico Rivera. He was also highly sought out for
Democratic Party events and appearances on behalf of the California Latino
community. Perhaps Diaz’s most important accomplishment was breaking down the
barrier for Mexican American representation on the city council. In 1962 when Diaz
decided to quit the council and lead a Peace Corps contingent through Latin
America, Frank Terrazas took his seat on the council. Frank Terrazas was born in El
Paso, Texas in 1913 just days after his mother crossed the Río Grande fleeing from
Pancho Villa. Terraza’s father was the chief engineer of the water department in
Ciudád Juárez, Mexico and had recently shut down the water and electricity so
Villa’s forces could not establish camp.
49
From El Paso, the Terrazas family moved
to Boyle Heights on the city of Los Angeles’s eastside in 1921. Terrazas graduated
from Garfield High School and worked as a salesman around the eastern Los
Angeles county region. He recalls venturing over to Pico where the ethnic Mexican
citrus workers lived (it was still unincorporated then) and taking part in the parties.
“It was a saint’s day of somebody, or somebody got baptized,” he said, “some reason

48
Viva Kennedy Clubs of California, Eduardo Quevedo Papers, M0349, box 2, folder 7, Special
Collections Department, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California.

49
Frank Terrazas interview, Personal Stories from Pico Rivera, p. 82-3.
122
or another there was always a party down there among all the orange pickers.”
50

Terrazas’s interest in politics began at an early age when he actively campaigned in
1928 for Democratic candidate Alfred E. Smith a prominent Catholic politician from
New York who ran against Republican candidate Herbert Hoover.
51

Terrazas moved to the Pico Rivera area in 1950 and never left. His job at
Lockheed afforded him the opportunity to live in newly developed suburbs in the
1950s. Terrazas began his public career in 1962 as a city council member of Pico
Rivera. Holding the distinction as the second Mexican American on the city council
since the city’s founding in 1958 was an honor and an obligation. As a life-long
Democrat and suburban homeowner Terrazas’s political viewpoints reflected a firm
belief that the purpose of government is to serve the people, regardless of race.
52

Elected on the strength of the middle class Mexican American vote in Pico Rivera,
Terrazas was meant to broker ethnic Mexican needs with city policy.
A September, 1962 race riot at Pioneer High School in neighboring Whittier,
California drew the city of Pico Rivera into a political firestorm. Hundreds of
students from Pico Rivera crossed the bridge that spanned the San Gabriel River to
attend school. Pioneer High School’s student body profile reflected the working and
lower middle-class neighborhoods that surrounded the school with a majority of
white students and a sizeable minority of Latino students. Young peoples’ awareness

50
Ibid., 75.

51
Ibid., 77.

52
Ibid.
123
of each other made the gradual demographic change surrounding Pioneer particularly
recognizable. Tensions abounded as traditional racial animus intersected with
adolescent energy and machismo. One hundred and twenty five students convened at
the footbridge that divided Whittier and Pico Rivera. Students responded slowly to
campus police orders to disperse so fifty-two Los Angeles County Sheriff Deputies
from the Norwalk substation descended on the scene and proceeded to arrest thirty-
seven teenagers and two mothers of the teens, mostly all ethnic Mexican. Deputies
charged students and mothers with inciting a riot and refusal to disperse. The on-
looking crowd of white students involved in the melee taunted and jeered the
Mexican students as the sheriff deputies led them away.
53

In the aftermath of this incident, charges of racism and police brutality put
city officials and law enforcement on the defensive and brought out the underlying
racial divisions existent in the small suburban city. Both the Council of Mexican
American Affairs (CMAA) and the Pico Rivera chapter of the American GI Forum
held community meetings that spoke out against police brutality and racism.
Representatives from the CMAA and the GI Forum met with Frank Terrazas and
decided that an organized protest should be submitted to the city council. Frank
Macias, the GI Forum representative, charged that “…the situation was not only
aggravated by the action of the police, but was probably ignited and started by
them.”
54
According to historian Edward J. Escobar, police brutality in Los Angeles

53
Salazar, “Case History of a Rumble.”

54
Ibid.
124
Mexican communities prior to World War II unequivocally marked Mexican
Americans as racialized ‘others’ in U.S. society and as a result facilitated the
construction of a cohesive political identity.
55
In 1960s suburban Los Angeles,
excessive police force revealed community divisions over questions about race,
class, and citizenship. Elected Mexican Americans risked their credibility in the
barrio as sellouts, or in the white community as biased, based on their public
response to such incidents. Claims of impartiality rung hollow in the politically
charged atmosphere of 1960s Los Angeles and the collective identity that began to
emerge in the barrios evolved out of stark class divisions in the community.
Mexican American elected officials exacerbated class tensions and group
unity by siding with the police. Louis Diaz publicly defended the deputies’ actions
and concluded that race did not appear to be a significant factor in the arrests of the
teens and their mothers.
56
Diaz at the time was no longer on the council, but as a
person of distinction in the community, his failure to come out strongly against the
actions of the sheriff’s deputies angered people in the community. Likewise,
Terrazas agreed with Diaz that race was not a motivating factor in the arrests.
57

Whereas the failures of both Diaz and Terrazas to boldly support the Mexican
American community in their charges against the sheriff’s department could be

55
See Edward J. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans
and the Los Angeles Police Department (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

56
Ibid.

57
“Pico Rivera ‘Incident’ Praised and Censured,” Los Angeles Times, 8 January 1963, p. 22.

125
construed as weak, it might also be viewed as one of the unique challenges Mexican
American elected officials faced in the suburbs. Mexican American councilpersons
and mayors occupied a middle space in municipal governments as their loyalties
were divided between their ethnic Mexican constituents and their non-Mexican
voters.
Conservatism
Mexican American conservatives receive scant scholarly attention because
there were very few of them, but also because Chicana/o historians still have not
figured out what to make of their racial politics. While they clung to conservative
fiscal and social values, many also saw themselves as defenders of the ethnic
Mexican community from discrimination.
58
Suburban homeownership provided the
critical link between white and Mexican conservatives. Collaboratively, they created
a new cast of enemies to the suburban state: unwed mothers, illegal immigrants, and
drug abusers. In a letter to Congressman Holifield in August 1970 (one day prior to
the Chicano Moratorium march in East Los Angeles) a collection of conservative
women sent a letter to Holifield chastising the welfare state. Culling up victim
rhetoric these people from the cities of Montebello, Pico Rivera, Whittier, Norwalk,
and Santa Fe Springs clamored for a change to existing welfare guidelines. In the

58
Suburban historians do a better job of documenting the rise of conservatism in white suburbs. See
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2001); Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working
Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Robert O.
Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2004); Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern
Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Matthew Lassiter, The Silent
Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
126
letter they framed the impact as a “burden on the taxpayer and the homeowner”
rather than a state program designed to temporarily assist people with financial
difficulty. In Reaganesque terms, they acknowledged that some people legitimately
required government assistance such as the “blind, physically handicapped, or the
aged,” but proceeded to detail why “unwed mothers, divorcees, dope addicts…and
aliens” did not deserve welfare relief. A deep, misplaced sense of victimization lay at
the core of their indignation:
As a taxpayer and property owner it really hurts to know I must
continue working to be able to afford the taxes on my house which
will be exorbitant after the proposed increase. It also hurts to leave my
child with a babysitter because I want a better future for her and yet
knowing there are unwed and divorced mothers being paid to stay
home with their children and instead are out partying and possibly
adding a new illegitimate child to our welfare rolls.
59

This group also declared that “aliens of any country should not be allowed in
our country if they have no means of support.” According to these women
even undocumented persons were benefiting from welfare and laughing all
the way to the bank adding, “have you ever seen the new cars these people
drive?”
60
By beating the victim drum, the authors of the letter declared that
welfare recipients should not have the opportunity to raise children at home,
take leisure time to enjoy themselves, or have sex ever again, or at least until
they secured a professional job.

59
Betty Lounsberry, et. al. to Holifield, 28 August 1970, Chester Holifield Papers, Box 22, Folder
“Welfare Programs, 1970,” Department of Special Collections, University of Southern California.

60
Ibid.

127
That this group was composed mostly of women is important in and
of itself, but that it was a group combined of mostly Mexican American
women with white women makes it even more important. The social and
political mixing these women did at various events no doubt brought them
into contact with one another as they shared ideas and political strategies.
Historian Lisa McGirr demonstrates how pivotal women were to the
grassroots organizing campaigns of Orange County for politically
neoconservative causes.
61
Here in the suburbs east of East Los Angeles these
collectives took on cross racial features more prominently than they did in
Orange County. Also, women tended to bind together on these issues in
greater proportion than men.
In South El Monte Joe Vargas championed conservative causes and
embodied the base of what historian Rudy Acun !a called the “Hispanic Generation.”
Unlike Louis Diaz and Frank Terrazas in Pico Rivera who both subscribed to liberal
causes in defense of the community at large, Vargas adopted a set of beliefs that
shunned ethnic politics proper and instead promoted an ideal of individual hard work
and accomplishment as means to end racial discrimination.
62
His family was
relatively wealthy and he himself owned a large walnut ranch in the area of South El
Monte before the city incorporated in 1958. Vargas took public office at the outset of
South El Monte’s cityhood and remained in power well into the 1970s. His public

61
McGirr, Suburban Warriors.

62
Joseph Vargas, interview, Personal Stories from the El Monte Communities: A Project of the
Exploratory College (Whittier, Calif.: Rio Hondo College, 1978), 110-13.
128
office and political stances along various issues are at times contradictory and do not
follow neatly with white conservatives. As the only Mexican American public
official of a burgeoning San Gabriel Valley suburb, his voice and representation for
ethnic Mexican community affairs grew more important as the years passed. Vargas
adopted civil rights rhetoric and spoke out on the problems that beset ethnic Mexican
communities in South El Monte. Looking at the ways Vargas approached community
problems challenges us to reconsider how we look at ethnic politics in relation to
conservatism, and how we understand suburban-based conservatism in general.
Fair Housing, Proposition 14, and the Origins of Chicano Politics
In 1962, Los Angeles City Councilman Edward Roybal led an effort to
enforce fair housing practices in residential rentals and sales within city boundaries.
Roybal’s multiracial 9
th
District embodied the outcomes of housing segregation
throughout the metropolitan region as the postwar housing shortage and prevalent
discrimination swelled the minority population of the district. Speaking about the
bill, Roybal ensured MAPA’s full support because, as he stated, “Mexican-
Americans have a stake in fair housing here, too.”
63
Roybal’s personal experience
with housing discrimination made him particularly aware of the obstacles racialized
minorities faced in their attempts to secure decent housing. A 1949 Los Angeles
Sentinel article reported that Roybal’s Mexican ancestry barred him from the right to

63
“Council Facing Fair Housing Bill,” Los Angeles Sentinel, 12 April 1962, pg. A1.

129
purchase a home in a new suburban neighborhood.
64
Likewise, Dionicio Morales, a
board member for the Council of Mexican-American Affairs, reported that he had
received twenty-nine reports of discrimination aimed at Mexican American
homebuyers.
65
Community activists responded to such discrimination by launching
collective efforts to desegregate Los Angeles area housing. The Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE) oversaw a multiracial effort dubbed “Operation Windowshop” that
identified racist real estate agents and landlords. The campaign deployed decoy
African American, Mexican American, and Asian American homeseekers on June 23
and 24, 1962 to suspected exclusionary areas with instruction to expose property
owners who denied fair housing to racialized people.
66
CORE, and fair housers alike,
linked property rights to basic human rights, and sought to increase pressure on local,
state, and federal government to enforce non-discriminatory laws.
Decades-long efforts to reverse discrimination in housing seemed to payoff in
1963 when the California State Legislature passed into law a fair housing bill
sponsored by State Assemblyman Byron Rumford. The Rumford Fair Housing Act
enforced non-discrimination in California’s private housing market. Seen primarily
as a way to advance African American suburban homeownership, Mexican
American organizations quickly embraced the protective measures of the legislation

64
“The Right to A Decent Home,” Los Angeles Sentinel, 15 September 1949, pg. A7. The article also
claims that despite Roybal’s exclusion, Mexican Americans still did experience the worst forms of
housing discrimination that were reserved for African Americans and Asian Americans.

65
“Fair Housing,” Los Angeles Sentinel, 28 June 1962, A6.

66
“CORE Plans New Fight for Integrated Housing,” Los Angeles Sentinel, 7 June 1962, pg. A5.

130
as well as the opportunities it represented.
67
A groundswell of opposition emerged
almost immediately after the Act passed. Set in motion by the California Real Estate
Association (CREA), an initiative to repeal the Rumford Act materialized into
Proposition 14. The CREA and the California Apartment Owners’ Association
organized under the banner of the Committee for Home Protection (CHP) to carry
out the campaign against Rumford. The public discourse on Proposition 14 shifted
around homeowners’ rights and the efforts of an oppressive state to force racial
minorities into white neighborhoods.
68
The flaw in the discourse, however, was that
by definition it set up binary poles of those who were included and those were
excluded: white and black. Mexican American conservatives like Joseph Vargas
vigorously campaigned for the passage of Proposition 14 despite the majority of
Mexican American organizations and leaders who came out against it.
Rumford Act supporters organized quickly in response to rumblings of a
ballot measure to strike down fair housing legislation. In January 1964, the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Congress Of
Racial Equality (CORE) protested outside of regional CREA meetings that were
discussing the Rumford Act in Pomona, Monterey Park, Van Nuys, Westwood, and

67
Becky Nicolaides and Robert Self concentrate on the Rumford Act’s impact on black and white
social consciousness. Mexican Americans demonstrated a critical awareness of the issue as well but is
yet to be fully explored.

68
See Self, American Babylon, 260-65; Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven, 308-315; and, Daniel Wei
Hosang,”Racial Propositions: ‘Genteel Apartheid’ in Postwar California,” (Ph.D. diss., University of
Southern California, 2007).
131
Pasadena.
69
Meanwhile, Mexican American activists began to drum up opposition to
the pending ballot measure.
MAPA and The Council of Mexican American Affairs opposed Proposition
14 in recognition that it would block generations of potential Mexican American
homeowners from suburban residence. Focused on the disjuncture between
American freedom and individual segregationist mentalities, these organizations
joined with nearly every minority civil rights organization, the Democratic Party, and
progressive whites to block its passage.
70
In a 1964 MAPA Southern Region
Newsletter, attorney Frank Muñoz who lived in La Puente railed against misguided,
or deceitful, community leaders who failed to recognize Proposition 14’s harmful
impact on residential equality. “Recent events indicate that many Mexican
Americans do not understand the threat that passage on Prop. 14 would pose to vital
interests of our Community,” he argued, “no one can deny that for years Mexican-
Americans in California have for years suffered from the effects of prejudice and
discrimination.” Muñoz continued to explain how protective legislation such as the
Fair Employment Practices Commission, the Unruh Civil Rights Act, and the
Rumford Act stood to be stricken from the record if the California electorate voted
Proposition 14 into state law. Muñoz also refuted the idea that both the Rumford Act
and Proposition 14 solely spoke to the state of racial affairs between white and black
homeowners. Rather, the issue of fair housing was a ubiquitous concern for all

69
“Pickets March to ‘Save Fair Housing,’” Los Angeles Sentinel, 16 January 1964, A3.

70
A MAPA mailer with the organization’s slate of preferred candidates and initiatives for the 1964
general election, “MAPA Slate/Vote No En La 14,” Quevedo Papers, Box 9, Folder 20.
132
racialized groups in California, especially Mexican Americans. “For a Mexican-
American organization, supposedly interested in the welfare of the Community, to
come out in favor of Prop. 14,” Muñoz proclaimed, “is nothing short of betrayal.
MAPA is unequivocally opposed to Proposition 14.”
71
The idea that Proposition 14
directly threatened Mexican American homeowners and potential homeowners was
echoed by a number of activists and community leaders. Salvador Montenegro who
founded a committee of East Los Angeles realtors and real estate agents who
opposed the measure argued that the ballot measure would “hit most sharply at
Mexican Americans and other minority races and religions.”
72

As unbelievable as it sounded to many community activists, the Mexican
Chamber of Commerce voted in August 1964 to support Proposition 14 despite
granting approval on the votes of only 60 of its nearly 300 members. Carta Editorial
blasted the chamber calling its actions “stupid” and uninformed. “Composed mainly
of immigrant shopkeepers, without a vote,” Carta charged, “the Mexican Chamber
of Commerce of Los Angeles took it upon itself to recommend to the Mexican-
Americans that they support the discrimination initiative.” Carta then highlighted
that the action did not even originate from a Mexican American member, but from a
“Cuban doctor.” The editorial closed with a call for membership to overturn their

71
MAPA Southern Region Newsletter, 1964, box 9, folder 2, Manuel Ruiz Papers, M0295, Stanford
University Libraries, Stanford, California.

72
“Anti-Prop. 14 Group Formed in East L.A.,” Los Angeles Times, 21 September 1964, p. 5.

133
support of discrimination and for the resignation of the chamber president.
73
Almost
over night, the Mexican Chamber of Commerce held an emergency meeting at the
Alexandria Hotel in downtown Los Angeles to reconsider their position. The group
overrode their previous vote to endorse Proposition 14 and instead changed their
stance to neutral. The move was hardly an inspired opposition to the initiative, but
Manuel Sanz, spokesperson for the chamber, declared that endorsing the initiative
ran counter to the chamber’s by-laws adding that “it was immoral for us to endorse
something like that, especially since Mexican Americans have been discriminated
against for so many years.”
74
Sanz felt that the endorsement meeting was hijacked by
right-wing ideologues charging that “one Cuban refugee, and several other people,
obviously misled voters to endorse it” in his absence and over his previous
objections.
75
Actions like this revealed a widespread lack of understanding among
Mexican Americans about the effects of Proposition 14 and prompted an effort in the
community to combat state-sanctioned discrimination.
Two months prior to the election, UCLA Ph.D. students in history and
Political Science Jesús Chavarría and Richard Maullin conducted a survey in
Mexican American neighborhoods in Boyle Heights and Monterey Park. The
researchers concluded that Mexican Americans lacked a fundamental knowledge

73
“What Can We Say,” Carta Editorial: For the Informed – Interested in Mexican-American Affairs,
20 August 1964, Vol. II, No. 6, pp. 3-4, Ernesto Galarza Papers, M0224, Box 54, Folder 8,
Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

74
“Mexicans Qualify ‘No Stand’ on Proposition 14: Minority Nixes ‘14’ Stand,” Los Angeles
Sentinel, 20 August 1964, A1.

75
Ibid.
134
about the effects of Proposition 14 on their lives. Nearly 76% of working class
respondents and 53% of middle class respondents had no knowledge of the
proposition and thus failed to understand how its passage could potentially limit their
future residential options. In Monterey Park, an area which became home to many
upwardly mobile Mexican Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, 52% did not know
whether the Rumford Fair Housing Act helped them or not, 24% believed it did help,
and 24% felt it made no impact on their living conditions. The most valid
conclusions the student researchers made were that a general feeling of
discrimination still existed in the Mexican American community and that Spanish-
language media factored heavily into voter education.
76
Leaders in the Mexican
American campaign against Proposition 14 attempted to reverse the lack of voter
understanding by connecting cultural events to the ‘no on 14’ camp. The Mexican
American committee of Californians Against Proposition 14, the American G.I.
Forum, Community Service Organization, League of United Latin American
Citizens, and MAPA co-sponsored a float to ride in the annual Mexican
Independence parade as it traveled through the Chicano Eastside. With the slogan
“Vote No On Proposition 14” emblazoned on each side, organizers sought to
“dramatically illustrate [the Mexican American] people’s united stand against the

76
“Voter Education Indicated by Survey,” Carta Editorial, 8 September 1964, vol. II, no. 7, Galarza
Papers, Box 54, Folder 8. See also, Ruben Salazar, “Housing Issue Ignored by Mexican Americans:
Large Percentage in Survey Have Little Knowledge of Discrimination Controversy,” Los Angeles
Times, 30 August 1964, J7.

135
housing discrimination that Proposition 14 seeks to unleash on [the] community.”
77

The public displays of opposition to Proposition 14 also took flyer form as CAP-14
began to distribute leaflets directed at Mexican American voters. Reminding them
that “It is your fight too,” the poster issued an implicit reminder that Mexican
Americans were prone to racism just like African Americans and Asian Americans.
78

Although ongoing public lectures and debates failed to reach the majority of
the Mexican American electorate the political activity surrounding Proposition 14
evinces the commitment many Mexican Americans made to defeat the initiative.
Speaking at a public debate hosted by the Council of Mexican-American Affairs at
the International Institute in Boyle Heights on 19 March 1964, East Los Angeles
realtor Sal Montenegro delivered a powerful statement against the initiative by
pointing out the ways that suburban home ownership engendered and enabled
housing discrimination.
79
“The bigots have not disappeared,” he insisted, “they have
just moved further out.”
80
Montenegro relayed several stories of discrimination in
middle-class suburban housing against ethnic Mexicans. In 1963, the owners of a

77
“Mexican-Americans Plan ‘No on 14’ Float,” Los Angeles Sentinel, 3 September 1964, D1.

78
“It’s Your Fight , Too!” flyer, box 5, folder 7, Max Mont Papers, Urban Archives Center, California
State University, Northridge.

79
The debate was moderated by Daniel Luevano, Assistant Secretary of the Army. Sal Montenegro
and Milton Gordon, chairman of the California Real Estate Commission argued in favor of Rumford
and against Prop. 14. South El Monte Vice-Mayor Joseph Vargas and Jack Hagler, member of the
California Real Estate Association, argued for Prop. 14 and against Rumford. For the announcement
of the debate see, “U.S.-Mexican Council Slates Rumford Study,” Los Angeles Times, 16 March
1964, A2.

80
Sal Montenegro, “Effect of the Initiative and Fair Housing Law on the Mexican-American
Community,” 19 March 1964, Galarza Papers, Box 57, Folder 5.

136
home in West San Gabriel refused to sell to Manuel Hidalgo, a Mexican American
attorney, because he was “undesirable.” Likewise, in Alhambra in 1964, a local
realtor threatened to remove real estate agent Anthony Sandoval’s listings if he
allowed the Mexican American clients he represented to purchase a home in an
exclusive neighborhood.
81
Montenegro directly challenged the conservative Mexican
American proponent of Proposition 14, Joseph Vargas, to defend his position as a
Mexican American in support of discriminatory legislation. He posed a scenario
wherein his son as an adult could not purchase a home in San Marino and questioned
why. In his fictive response, Montenegro tells his son that he tried to stop
Proposition 14 and similar discriminatory measures but lost the struggle. He then
turned to Vargas and asked, “what will your answer be should your son approach
you with the same question?”
82
Montenegro concluded with a missive that addressed
the multilayered consequences Proposition 14 held for Mexican Americans:
If you are content to remain a second-class American, then I say vote
for the initiative and if you are content to have your children
discriminated against – then vote for the initiative, and if you wish to
discriminate and to injure your fellow American – then vote for the
initiative, and if you want to continue to divide our wonderful country
by racial bitterness and bigotry, I say, by all means, vote for the
initiative.
83

The fallout from Proposition 14 amongst people of color revealed not only
the complexity of the racial issues at stake, but also laid bare the Democratic Party’s

81
Ibid.

82
Ibid.

83
Ibid.
137
inability to respond in any meaningful ways to the large Mexican American
constituency, particularly in metropolitan Los Angeles. The racial and ethnic politics
within the “No on Prop. 14” campaign itself raised important questions for an
increasingly progressive-minded Mexican American populace and the Democratic
Party’s impotence and clueless behavior made them disillusioned with the political
process.
One example of Democratic leadership blunders lied in the strategy to defeat
the proposition to begin with. Pundits at the time painted the proposition as a black
and white issue which left very little negotiation room for ethnic Mexicans and Asian
Americans. Carta editors called the party on this error by pointing out that the
proponents of Proposition 14 made effective use of the Spanish-language media in
Los Angeles. The miscalculation on the Democratic Party’s and the opponents of the
proposition came in their neglect of Spanish-language media to spread the word
against the latent racism inherent in the proposition. It was either a case of them
taking Mexican votes for granted again, or lacking the analytical ability to piece
together the complicated fabric of postwar racial relations. The Committee Against
Proposition 14 (CAP 14) decided that the potential funds allocated to combat the
initiative through the Spanish language media would be better spent in other places
rather than on Spanish radio. It was only in the final weeks leading up to the
November election when Mexican American community activists such as Eduardo
Quevedo who was president of Channel 34, began to take their own campaigns
138
against 14 to the Spanish radio stations.
84
These hastily prepared last ditch efforts
failed to convince enough voters to deny the initiative however and point to the lack
of communication between CAP-14 organizers and Mexican American activists.
Proposition 14 passed by a stunning margin statewide, 4,526,460 “yes” votes to
2,395,747 “no” votes.
85
In the rapidly expanding Mexican American cities of
Montebello, Monterey Park, Norwalk, and Pico Rivera the initiative won by better
than a two-to-one margin respectively.
86
It is unlikely that more Mexican American
opposition to Proposition 14 would have produced a different outcome, but
antagonisms between New Deal Coalition members and Mexican American leaders
contributed to the unraveling of the moderate left in the mid-1960s.
Opponents of Proposition 14 immediately questioned the constitutionality of
its provisions. Both the California State Supreme Court in 1966 and the United
States Supreme Court in 1967 declared that Proposition 14 contradicted the equal
protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,

84
“Spanish Radio and Proposition 14,” Carta Editorial, 29 October 1964 (vol. 2, no. 10), p. 1,
Eduardo Quevedo Papers, M0349, Box 9, Folder 20, Department of Special Collections, Stanford
University Libraries, Stanford, California.

85
California Secretary of State, California Statement of the Vote: General Election, November 3,
1964, 1964, 25. Ironically, this occurred in the same election where Lyndon Baines Johnson ran as an
incumbent for the Democratic Party with a civil rights agenda. LBJ’s history with Mexican Americans
extended back to his early professional career as a school teacher in south Texas working primarily
with young Mexican students. See Julie L. Pycior, LBJ & Mexican Americans: The Paradox of Power
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997).

86
Statement of the Vote, 69; Between 1960 and 1970, the percentage of Latino residents more than
doubled in each city except one: Montebello 22% to 47%; Monterey Park, 13% to 33%; Norwalk,
15% to 27%; Pico Rivera, 30% to 61%. United States Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of
Population and Housing: 1960 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962); U.S.
Bureau of the Census, Census of Population and Housing: 1970 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1972).
139
but, as Daniel Hosang argues, the racial discourses surrounding the campaign left an
indelible mark on the social and political culture of California. Supporters of
Proposition 14 shielded themselves from charges of racism by deploying a language
of racial innocence. Instead of racism, proponents held that Proposition 14 was
driven by a populist sentiment to protect homeowners’ rights and property.
87
As
many Mexican American homeowners negotiated a dual identity of suburban
homeowner and minority member, the language of property rights and equality
profoundly resonated. For ethnic Mexican opponents to Proposition 14, however, the
fallout from the campaign contributed to a growing resentment and militancy in the
barrios by ethnic Mexicans who felt shunned by mainstream politics. Despite Sal
Montenegro’s appointment by Governor Pat Brown to participate on the bi-partisan
commission to amend the Rumford Act, Mexican Americans understood that their
political positioning in California was tenuous at best.
88

Conclusion
Mexican Americans who engaged the suburban political arena sought to
make lasting change for the community by dismantling a political culture dominated
by white liberals whose racist views shaped public policy. By constructing alliances
with working class members of the barrios, middle-class Mexican Americans
wielded enough political power to effect change at the local municipal level in the

87
Daniel Wei Hosang, “Racial Propositions: ‘Genteel Apartheid’ in Postwar California,” (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Southern California, 2007).

88
“Sal Montenegro: Realtor on Rumford Act Study,” ca. 1966, newsclipping, Quevedo Papers, Box 8,
Folder 6.
140
San Gabriel Valley and Southeastern communities. Through these networks of
electoral and grassroots political action, Mexican Americans in suburban Los
Angeles built an effective system in the late 1950s early 1960s to meet the needs of
growing communities. By the end of the 1960s, however, the movement to secure
political power in individual municipalities was on life support, stricken by an
inability to establish wide representation at every level of government.
In the five county Metropolitan Los Angeles region, Mexican Americans
wielded minimal power in elected or appointed office. Of the 223 appointed
positions, not a single Mexican American official was represented and only 7 of the
387 elected positions belonged to Mexican Americans, 5 in Los Angeles.
89
At the
municipal level, Mexican Americans fared just as bad on the surface. In Los Angeles
County cities with at least one Mexican American representative in elected or
appointed office (see Table 2) 36 of the possible 360 positions, or 10%, were held by
Mexican Americans, most if not all of whom were men. It is also critical to note that
16 of the 21 cities cited in the appendix are in the San Gabriel Valley and Southeast
Los Angeles County communities, the major thrusts of Mexican American suburban
settlement following WWII. This woeful situation for Mexican Americans in
municipal politics underscored the importance of grassroots organizing. Chicanos in
Los Angeles looking at this situation read it as a failure in pragmatic politics.
Perhaps more accurately, it indicated a failure on the part of postwar Mexican
Americans to completely deliver on the promises of the suburban project.

89
Hector C. Burgos, “Statistical Data on Mexican-Americans,” c. 1969, Ernesto Galarza Papers, Box
59, Folder 5, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University.
141
Chicanos understood that electoral politics offered little in the way of true
progress because it limited the reach of the community to a single, or an esoteric
group of individuals who were deciding on issues vital to the communities in which
they served. Likewise, liberal Mexican Americans cast suspicious gazes at “radicals”
who represented a new social order which many in the suburbs were not quite ready
to deal with. George Medina, co-owner of Cox, Medina & Associates professional
insurance services company, wrote Congressman Chester Holifield “it is my desire
to more effectively serve a broader base of the Mexican-American community in an
attempt to alleviate radicalism, and replace it with rationalism.”
90
A congressional
constituent from Pico Rivera addressed the questions that arose from the youth
movement: “The young people today are forcing a ‘show of hands’ among our stable
and solid institutions - government, schools, and churches – The ‘older’ generation
to which many of us belong are trying to find out answers why, why!”
91
Despite the
disavowal of Chicano activism by some Mexican Americans, the Chicano Movement
profoundly reshaped the discourse of calls for Mexican American rights and
equality.

90
Medina to Holifield, 23 November 1970, Holifield Papers, Box 23, Folder, “Cabinet Committee on
Opportunity for the Spanish-Speaking, 1971.”

91
E.G. Romero to Holifield, 15 May 1970, Holifield Papers, Box 22, Folder, “Miscellaneous
Correspondence, 1970.”
142
Table 2. Mexican Americans in City Elected and Appointed Positions, 1969

City in L.A.
County
Population Total
Positions
Mexican
Americans
Positions
Azusa 27,000 15 1 Councilman
Cerritos 8,000 8 1 Mayor
Commerce 10,600 11 3 Councilmen (2),
City Treasurer
Culver City 37,067 21 1 City Treasurer
El Monte 65,000 13 1 Councilman
Gardena 44,559 16 1 Director of
Finance
Glendora 30,300 15 1 Building
Inspector
Hawthorne 41,500 18 1 Street
Superintendent
Hermosa Beach 18,253 18 3 Councilmen (2),
Recreation
Director
Irwindale 1,870 8 7 Mayor,
Councilmen (4),
City Clerk,
Police Chief
La Puente 30,550 10 2 Councilmen (2)
La Verne 10,071 20 3 Councilman,
Street Foreman,
Water
Department
Foreman
Lawndale 26,000 13 1 Superintendent
of Parks
Los Angeles 2,917,000 30 1 City Controller
Monrovia 29,029 21 2 Director of
Parks,
Recreation
Director
Monterey Park 50,581 23 1 Water
Department
Superintendent
Norwalk 94,101 12 1 Councilman
Pico Rivera 51,000 14 1 Mayor Pro Tem
Pomona 85,100 30 1 Councilman
Santa Fe
Springs
15,400 15 1 Councilman
South El Monte 12,200 12 1 Councilman
Vernon 208 17 1 Councilman
Source: Adapted from, Hector C. Burgos, “Statistical Data on Mexican-Americans,” c. 1969, Ernesto
Galarza Papers, M0224, Box 59, Folder 5, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University
Libraries, Stanford, California.
143
CHAPTER FOUR:
“MI CASA ES MI CASTILLO” (“MY HOME IS MY CASTLE”): MEXICAN
AMERICANS AND SUBURBAN RENEWAL, 1955-1970

Figure 3. Flood Ranch Redevelopment Project, ca. 1967.
The above image of a bulldozer leveling a home in the barrio of Flood Ranch
represents an important aspect of the post-World War II Mexican American
metropolitan experience. In cities with traditionally large ethnic Mexican populations
such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Antonio, powerful municipal interests
solicited federal and state support to remove poor people from their homes and erect
housing tracts, industrial parks, and strip malls in their stead. Prevailing
interpretations in urban studies hold that federal urban renewal programs in every
144
major American city displaced working-class and communities of color who
depended on the inexpensive downtown core to maintain their homes and social
networks.
1
Although, urban renewal, by definition, limits analysis of the program to
downtowns and civic centers, this image captures an important moment in the
making of suburban Los Angeles. The transformative process of colonias-turned-
barrios depended on invasive suburban development around and through these once
isolated communities. The presence of “slums” in new suburbs constituted an
enormous contradiction of the pervasive suburban ideal throughout postwar Los
Angeles. White elites were so successful in their collective enterprise to erase and
“whitewash” the history of Mexican Los Angeles that the spaces inhabited by ethnic
Mexicans seemingly melted into the peripheral ‘virgin soil’ coveted by developers.
2

To the surprise and chagrin of first-time suburban homeowners, many of whom were

1
This dissertation does not challenge that interpretation, rather it contributes to the dialogue by
bringing suburban redevelopment into the conversation. For works that highlight the impact of
downtown slum clearance on working-class and communities of color see, Herbert Gans, The Urban
Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: Free Press, 1962), 281-335;
John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and
Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 48-9; Robert O.
Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2003), 139-44; Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and
Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 145-84; David R.
Diaz, Barrio Urbanism: Chicanos, Planning, and American Cities (New York: Routledge, 2005),
161-88; Leland T. Saito, The Politics of Exclusion: The Failure of Race-Neutral Policies in Urban
America (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 32-67.

2
White elites sought to whitewash, or obscure, the Mexican past from Los Angeles in order to build a
more perfect “city of the future.” If the legacies of that racialized past bled into the future, influential
members of the Los Angeles elite like John McGroarty and the Fiesta Planning Committee
repackaged it as remnants of the supposedly quaint and idyllic Spanish past. This discursive rendering
of Mexicans as Spanish paved the way for dangerous material consequences for the community. For
the construction of the Spanish Fantasy Past see William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe and Phoebe S.
Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006).
145
Mexican American, these old colonias presented an unsettling reminder of the
decaying urban core that they either left behind, or sought to avoid. Indeed, the
presence of “blight” in ostensibly new suburbs constituted an unstable contradiction
that required intervention.
The racial lines of suburban development were not as clearly drawn as in
central cities because the process of building and creating suburbs was not solely a
black and white phenomenon. Mexican Americans participated in, and shaped the
contours of, suburbs in Los Angeles San Gabriel Valley and Southeastern areas
through support of neighborhood redevelopment. While working-class Mexican
American barrios resisted complete removal, upwardly mobile Mexican Americans
worked diligently to dismantle these same suburban barrios. Modernization
constituted the centerpiece of Mexican American policy decisions concerning
housing. In the visions of many of these suburban homeowners, barrios represented a
haunting past; one that they left behind in the traditional Eastside barrios of Los
Angeles. Historian Douglas Monroy has argued that the colonias and barrios of Los
Angeles constituted an expression of México de afuera (Mexico outside, or outer
Mexico). In his study of prewar Los Angeles, Monroy asserts that the forced and
organic creation of colonias and barrios within the borders of the United States was
an impulse of transplanted Mexicans’ desires to recreate their homeland.
3
Mexican
American slum clearance advocates pursued urban renewal as an opportunity to

3
Douglas Monroy, Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

146
eliminate the last vestiges of México de afuera and fold fellow ethnic Mexicans more
thoroughly into the postwar suburban order.
Urban renewal is a peculiar phrase to describe a program executed in the
suburbs of Los Angeles. Historical scholarship on urban renewal is fraught with
inconsistencies and mischaracterizations, even by scholars who investigate the
impact of urban change on communities of color.
4
The conglomeration of policies
and programs enshrined by “urban renewal” enabled the suburbanization of Los
Angeles by financing the displacement of ethnic Mexican colonia and barrio
residents. Los Angeles’s unique metropolitan geography deceived casual observers
into believing that suburbs filled a spatial void, yet the historical reality reveals that
developers and local redevelopment agencies waged war on ethnic Mexican colonias
and barrios to clear way for new and ever-expanding tract developments. This
chapter remaps the scope of urban renewal programs in Los Angeles by introducing
the use of the federal program in the suburbs and by showing that suburban renewal
projects involved Mexican Americans in central roles.
Slum clearance made urban renewal possible because it sanctioned local
governing bodies to displace people from their homes in the name of the “public
good.” Scholarship on federal programs aimed at redevelopment, renewal, and
revitalization is skewed toward Midwestern and Northeastern cities like Chicago,
Detroit, Boston, and New York, and also focuses racial analyses on the consequences

4
Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

147
of urban renewal on the displacement of poor, and primarily African American
residents.
5
Studies that focus on the Latina/o experience with redevelopment
similarly lack broad vision as they overemphasize the role of the state in displacing
large numbers of barrio residents and simplistically cast it as a manifestation of white
discrimination.
6
Indeed, one of the largest flaws of urban renewal legislation was
that implementation powers rested with local officials whose interests in
redevelopment targeted the most acute threat. In suburban Los Angeles, the most
pressing issue was bi-focal: the rising number of Mexican American suburbanites
and the decaying suburban barrios. Put together, these dynamics produced a
situation that reshuffled the axes of local power to middle-class Mexican Americans
at the same time that it reinforced the boundaries of racial distinction that fully
informed planning strategies that removed working-class Mexic

an American
commu
d

nities.
Flood Ranch in the present-day city of Santa Fe Springs represents a
significant case study of the impact of federal urban renewal on suburban ethnic
Mexican communities. Flood Ranch faced a local redevelopment agency that favore

5
Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian Americans (New York:
Free Press, 1962); June Manning Thomas, Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in
Postwar Detroit (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997); David Schuyler, A City Transformed:
Redevelopment, Race, and Suburbanization in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1940-1980 (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); Thomas Sugure, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and
Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Derek S. Hyra, The
New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2008).

6
Rodolfo Acun !!a, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (5
th
ed.; New York: Pearson-Longman,
2004), 294-7; Arlene Dávila, Barrio Dreams: Puerto Ricans, Latinos, and the Neoliberal City
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); David R. Diaz, Barrio Urbanism: Chicanos,
Planning, and American Cities (New York: Routledge, 2005).

148
the removal of working-class ethnic Mexicans from their homes to make way for a
middle-income neighborhood tract. Unlike the Hicks Camp incident addressed in
Chapter One of this dissertation, however, Santa Fe Springs pursued urban renewal
with a mixed-race city

council and redevelopment board that included middle-class
Mexica
ful

e
n Americans.
Historian Andrew Wiese’s conceptualization of suburban renewal is a use
point of departure for understanding the uses of state power to shape the private
residential landscape of metropolitan Los Angeles. Wiese argues that suburban
renewal enabled municipal officials to restructure the suburban geography by
removing African Americans to build middle-income housing. The results of
suburban renewal shunted African American migration into previously affordable
suburbs and curtailed their abilities to move up the economic ladder.
7
I build from
this conception of suburban renewal by interrogating the racial underpinnings of
slum clearance as it applied to Mexican Americans in the postwar period. Like many
other suburban civic leaders in Los Angeles, Santa Fe Springs city council members
attempted to annex chunks of productive land in order to generate tax revenue for th
city while lowering property taxes for homeowners. Municipal officials used urban

7
Historian Andrew Wiese coined the term suburban renewal to frame the impact of federal
redevelopment policy on suburban African American communities in the South. Central to Wiese’s
understanding of suburban renewal is the fact that urban renewal policy enabled private developers
nd municipal officials to displace undesirable homeowners legally and at low cost by capitalizing on
n
a
available federal funds. Andrew Wiese, Places of their Own: African American Suburbanization i
the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 104-109.

149
renewal as a device to redirect slum clearance funds into civic center development.
8

In this all-important game of suburban city building, Mexican Americans confronted
the legacies of racialization head on. Their homes and their communities stood in the
way of

by
ny in the barrios
on through those lenses, the story is more nuanced.
Flood R
estations

massive suburban growth.
Suburban renewal presents an unsettling challenge to Chicana/o Studies
scholars. Displacement associated with the actions of urban renewal programs
ensured that the legacies of Mexican racialization continued after World War II. Yet,
Mexican American planning and participation in suburban redevelopment programs
unseats the rested notion that ethnic Mexicans were always and only victimized
displacement strategies. On the surface, their central leadership in such efforts
constitutes a grand betrayal of ethnic and racial unity. And while ma
read the situati
anch
In the pre-war years, Flood Ranch like Hicks Camp belonged to a wider
network of colonias. These rural and semi-rural worker colonies were manif
of racialized agricultural labor found throughout the Southwest. They were
composed primarily of ethnic Mexican residents who labored in the agricultural
fields of Southern California, or toiled in low-paying industrial jobs. In Santa Fe
Springs, Flood Ranch residents either worked in nearby walnut groves or in the

8
Logan and Molotch argue that civic officials welcomed urban renewal funds for slum clearance
because federal government subsidization enabled city leaders to eliminate communities that did not
generate high amounts of tax revenue and also to buttress the economic interests of corporate tenants
and individual property owners because urban renewal dollars could be re-allocated from slum
clearance to projects that generated revenue for the city. See Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes, pp.
166-9.
150
area’s booming oil fields. Despite their place in the labor structure of L.A., 70% of
Flood Ranch residents owned their own homes. As homeowners, Flood Ranch
residents presented serious challenges to suburban developers. They were more than
willing to fight for their homes. Just as importantly, and probably more problematic
for suburban builders, the overwhelming majority of Flood Ranch residents w
least 2
nd
generation Mexican American. This meant that they could also make use of
the legal and electoral systems in defense of their nei

ere at
ghborhoods. The social
dynami as

g
t
he
te

cs of Flood Ranch only became more entrenched following World War II
the suburb of Santa Fe Springs developed around it.
During and after the war, the Los Angeles County population grew by 2
million every decade, from 2.8 million in 1940, to 4.2 million in 1950, to 6.1 million
in 1960.
9
Such dramatic population increases placed stress on existing housing and
school systems and sparked a massive residential construction boom that encroached
on and displaced agricultural and rural lands. Colonia residents quickly saw their
communities move from the rural periphery into the middle of a dizzying, sprawlin
metropolis. Local municipalities capitalized on the Federal Housing Act of 1949 tha
granted civic governing bodies the authority to seize private property through the
auspices of eminent domain and deliver it to private developers in the name of ‘t
public good.’ The housing act created the Urban Renewal Administration to delega

9
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940. Population, Vol. 1. Number
of Inhabitants (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942); U.S. Bureau of the Census,
U.S. Census of Population: 1950. Vol. II, Characteristics of the Population, Part 5, California
Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1952); U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of
Population: 1960. Characteristics of the Population, Part 6, California (Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1962).
151
municipal requests for federal subsidies targeting redevelopment zones. As this
chapter makes clear, federal investment in private suburban development was
limited to lending and military related industry. The Urban Renewal Administrat
under the Housing and
not
ion
Urban Development program oversaw governmental
vestments in the redevelopment projects aimed at boosting property values in
uburbanizing areas.

in
s

152
Flood Ranch Redevelopment Project

Figure 4. Flood Ranch Aerial, 1945. Flood Ranch, outlined in bold, is surrounded by agricultural
elds and
bottom r

iles
fi various industrial zones. The San Gabriel River runs along its western edge and in the
ight corner, oil derricks dot the landscape. Fairchild Aerial Photograph Collection, 1945.
In 1957, the small suburban community of Santa Fe Springs located 12 m
southeast of downtown Los Angeles incorporated as a contract city with 15,000
residents. Despite its overwhelmingly industrial character, Santa Fe Springs quickly
153
earned recognition as an “All-American City” by the National Municipal Leag
citizen participation in municipal affairs.
ue for

er
olor to
ics that
e
desperation in urban America as people of color spectacularly vented their frustration

10
It was one of thirty-four suburban
municipalities to incorporate in Los Angeles County between 1954 and 1965. The
perfect storm of population booms, housing shortages, and shifting metropolitan
boundaries carved out a space for suburban communities to capitalize on the fears
and ambitions of Angelenos in postwar Los Angeles through incorporation. The
incorporation boom precipitated a catastrophic decline in the City of Los Angeles
caused by lost tax revenues and crumbling infrastructure. Communities of color,
particularly African American and ethnic Mexican, felt the strain more acutely than
anyone else because the ghettoes and barrios that entrapped them sunk even furth
below the poverty line and drifted further from the minds of civic reformers and
philanthropists. State and federal governments likewise abandoned people of c
the predilections of realtors and employers resulting in the drastically uneven
distribution of resources and wealth that became central to grassroots mobilization in
the 1960s for civil rights, housing justice, and economic equity. These dynam
tugged at the ends of the postwar city cultivated an American “urban crisis”
characterized by spiraling poverty and metastasizing deficit. Urban rebellions in th
mid-1960s in Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York underscored the

10
City of Santa Fe Springs Historical Society, The History of Santa Fe Springs (Santa Fe Springs:
Santa Fe Springs Historical Committee, 1979), 13.

154
with endemic racism and government disinvestment on city streets during the long
hot summers of 1965-1968.
11

Figure 5. Flood Ranch Aerial, 1962. Flood Ranch is attached to a sprawling suburban zone. The
shape of the neighborhood is unchanged aside from the 605 San Gabriel River Freeway represented
by the gray line. Fairchild Aerial Photograph Collection, 1962.

11
See, Gerald Horne, Fire this Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville, N.C.:
University Press of Virginia, 1995); Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis.

155
In the meantime, urbanites cast their gazes toward the suburbs that were
ostensibly devoid of strife and struggle. This dissertation shows that ethnic Mexicans
have always played a vital role in the processes and struggles of suburbanization
through the cultural life of colonias, the activism of integration, and the power of
cultural expression. Virtually every postwar suburban municipality in Los Angeles
was forced to deal with the remnants of ethnic Mexican colonias and barrios in their
midst. Reconciling the motivations of suburban city builders with the aspirations of
Mexican Americans involved miniature versions of the problems accompanying the
urban crisis, though the stakes were no less important. Suburban civic leaders
responded by eradicating ethnic Mexican communities. In El Monte, San Gabriel,
Pico Rivera, Whittier, and Montebello city council members and local
redevelopment agencies collaborated with Mexican American members of the
community to devise redevelopment plans of older sections of town. By 1967 more
than 100 cities in California had redeveloped aged districts with the assistance of
urban renewal grants, all done in the name of progress.
12

Santa Fe Springs followed the lead of other incorporated suburban cities in
seeking to “modernize” the Mexican American neighborhoods within their
boundaries. In 1962, Santa Fe Springs appealed for funding from the Urban Renewal
Administration to begin redevelopment feasibility studies in Flood Ranch.
Homeowners in Santa Fe Springs sought to recast the mixed agricultural and

12
Dial Torgerson, “Urban Renewal Stirs both Fear, Favor in Southland,” Los Angeles Times, 16 April
1967, p. F1.

156
industrial character of the city in order to attract middle income families. For their
part, Flood Ranch residents challenged the city’s actions through grassroots efforts to
halt progress on the project. Flood Ranch residents also took the City of Santa Fe
Springs to court twice to secure an injunction against the project. The court
eventually sided with Santa Fe Springs and suburban renewal began in 1967.
Ultimately, the city proved victorious, but Flood Ranch residents achieved a voice in
the later planning phases of the project and scored some partial victories in the
process. Suburban civic leaders could never comprehend the attachments ethnic
Mexicans made with their modest homes. Urban renewal did not signal to barrio
residents a genuine effort to provide assistance in home upgrades, rather it embodied
a threat to their livelihood and future security. Homeowner Louisa Flores who
moved into Flood Ranch in 1940 put it best when she said “This is my home. I do
not wish to leave. I wish to stay. I want to die here.”
13

13
Flores quoted in Torgerson, “Urban Renewal Stirs both Fear, Favor in Southland,” p. F1.

157
Dissenting Voices

Figure 6. Flood Ranch Streets, ca. 1966.
The aging homes, overgrown yards, and muddied, unpaved roads of the 65-
acre Flood Ranch barrio presented the fledgling city of Santa Fe Springs with a
tremendous financial opportunity at the outset of the 1960s. Proceedings towards
redevelopment began with city council meetings to decide the nature of the plans.
Residents like Cy Mesa opposed urban renewal in their neighborhood and instead
requested street paving, sewers, sidewalks, and street lamps. Initial assessments
conducted by the city planning director Dick Weaver concluded that the varied
quality of homes in Flood Ranch complicated the city’s course of action. Weaver
determined that the mixture of substandard homes and “good” homes negated the
city’s ability to “sweep the area clean,” even with federal funds. “It is not a slum
158
area,” Weaver declared, “and we are trying to determine what would be the best
program.”
14
However, for the city to secure urban renewal funds, the planning
department was required to define the area as blighted and one of the first steps
involved re-zoning existing neighborhoods. In 1960, the Santa Fe Springs City
Council re-zoned residential properties in Flood Ranch from R-2 to R-1—a switch
that limited the number of residential structures on a single property lot from two
buildings to one.
15
Zone changes accomplished two things: first, it established the
power of the city council over the newly acquired Flood Ranch area, and secondly, it
froze structural improvements that would have raised the neighborhood’s overall
property value. This last point is especially important because maintaining a low
overall cost made the redevelopment project more likely to secure federal funding.
Equally important to reclassifying Flood Ranch as a slum than the aesthetic quality
of the buildings, however, was the demographic makeup of the neighborhood.
The predominantly working-class, Mexican American barrio of more than
1200 homeowners and tenants provided enough justification to declare Flood Ranch
a “slum” in the minds of developers and civic leaders. After only four years as an
incorporated city, Santa Fe Springs officials argued that the deplorable physical
condition of Flood Ranch necessitated a complete and thorough slum clearance
effort. Civic leaders argued that Flood Ranch threatened the fiscal health of the city

14
“Improvement District or Urban Renewal Project Decision Slated,” Los Angeles Times, 21 February
1960, p. SC2 [emphasis added].

15
“Zone Relief Denied in Santa Fe Springs,” Los Angeles Times, 14 October 1960, p. A7.

159
and posed personal danger to local homeowners. Citing studies conducted by the
City Planning Commission and the Los Angeles County Health Department, Santa
Fe Springs officials highlighted that although Flood Ranch housed a mere 8% of the
suburban city’s entire population, the neighborhood accounted for 48% of structure
fires and 45% of city-wide arrests.
16
While neglecting the deep legacy of hyper-
policed barrios in California, these statistics reinforced prevalent racist attitudes
against working-class ethnic Mexicans while also tapping the nerve centers of white
suburban homeowners by raising the specter of higher taxes and crime.
17
Affixing
the slum label onto Flood Ranch proved both easy and necessary in order for
municipal leaders to acquire assistance from the Urban Renewal Administration for
slum clearance. A 1949 adjustment to federal housing laws empowered local
redevelopment agencies to employ eminent domain as a tool to acquire and
redevelop properties that were officially deemed slums and/or blighted.
18
Although
eminent domain was a tool meant to help old cities recoup tax revenue lost from the
mass migration of taxpayers to the suburbs, it became a tool for new suburbs in Los
Angeles to eliminate ethnic Mexican “slums” in places where housing developments
were built, or in the planning stages.

16
City of Santa Fe Springs, Progress Report, 1961-1963 (Santa Fe Springs, n.d.), p. 15.

17
For studies on policing barrios and ghettoes see, Edward J. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making
of A Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900-1945
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

18
David R. Diaz, Barrio Urbanism: Chicanos, Planning, and American Cities (New York: Routledge,
2005), p. 163.

160
Flood Ranch residents, however, did not see their neighborhood as a slum,
nor did they feel it necessary to tear down the neighborhood and construct new
homes. They understood that improvements were necessary, but their repeated
requests to the city for improved infrastructure continually fell on deaf ears. After the
city annexed Flood Ranch in 1958, residents anticipated infrastructural
improvements to their neighborhood that never materialized. Homeowners in
particular, longed to bring Flood Ranch up to the standards of neighboring suburbs
by requesting paved streets, underground sewers, street lamps, and a public park;
none of which were built. Instead of finding assistance from the city, Flood Ranch
property owners faced a redevelopment agency bent on creating a new-look Flood
Ranch, replete with middle-income tract homes and Newport Beach-style
townhouses.
19

Flood Ranch was no stranger to geographic upheaval. Barrio residents
adopted the name Flood Ranch in the 1940s because the neighborhood was prone to
San Gabriel River floods during intermittent periods of intense rain. Ironically, the
threat of flooding protected barrio homeowners and tenants from residential
displacement for decades. That is, until the Los Angeles County Flood Control
District and the United States Army Corp of Engineers encased all significant Los
Angeles-area rivers in concrete in 1954. This engineering conquest of the river swept

19
The ironic humor found in the council’s attempt to bring Newport Beach, to this day a
predominantly white, upper-income enclave in south Orange County, to Flood Ranch amused
homeowners and renters who contended that ‘Flood Ranch is no Newport Beach.’ See,“Latin Group
Battles Urban Renewal Plan,” Los Angeles Times, 28 March 1967, A8.

161
aside the modicum of protection Flood Ranch once enjoyed; their properties now
secured against natural disaster, lay prone to developer interests. Massive flood
control projects enabled the suburbanization of Southern California by making large
tracts of land available for development.
20

The engineering triumph over the unpredictable Los Angeles landscape
brought unprecedented growth to the formerly flood-prone regions of Southeast Los
Angeles County. The City of Lakewood is an exemplar of the kinds of community
building projects made possible by making dynamic geographies predictable.
However, suburban developments like Lakewood situated at long distances from
highways and freeways required access to metropolitan hubs. In 1954 the California
Highway Commission approved a 23-mile stretch of freeway that ran north from
Lakewood to a connector with the 60 Freeway in El Monte.
21
Not only did this
freeway weave Lakewood integrally into the expanding metropolitan sphere, it also
introduced the possibility of further Lakewood-style developments along the San
Gabriel River corridor. The freeway, which snaked alongside the concrete
monstrosity once known as the San Gabriel River, buried working-class barrios
under 100 million tons of ‘progress and prosperity.’ When the first leg of the freeway
was completed in 1964, it dissected the predominantly Mexican American
neighborhoods of Jimtown, Rivera, and Flood Ranch. Freeway construction,

20
Victor M. Valle and Rodolfo D. Torres, Latino Metropolis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000), 153.

21
See “San Gabriel River Freeway Route Proposed,” Los Angeles Times, 19 November 1954, A2.

162
consequently, reduced Flood Ranch from 85 acres to 65 acres prior to the city’s push
for renewal.
Urban historians have argued that the discursive construction of “slums” and
“blight” by city planners and developers neglected the history of racial segregation
and systemic inequality built into urban and suburban environments. Such a
monumental denial enabled suburban builders to carry out their plans at removal and
redevelopment free of charges of racism.
22
In Santa Fe Springs, the city could also
rely on the shelter of having Mexican Americans centrally part of the project. The
Flood Ranch Redevelopment Project Director, Massey Herrera, although a self-
identified Mexican American himself, denied that the project in Santa Fe Springs
held racial implications, rather he claimed that the redevelopment agency, “merely
aim[ed] to provide better housing and commercial facilities for approximately 300
families living in the Flood Ranch area.”
23

Grassroots activism surrounding Flood Ranch redevelopment reveals a
complex set of political ideologies at work. Historian Matthew Lassiter argues in his
study of the ascendance of suburban politics to the national stage, that housing
concerns flatten seemingly distinctive boundaries between left, right, and center.
24
In
Flood Ranch, within the span of 4 years, grassroots activists defied simplistic

22
Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2004), 139-144.

23
Ruben Salazar, “Mexican Americans Protest Santa Fe Springs Project,” Los Angeles Times, 7
September 1964, p. A1.

24
Matthew Lassier, The Silent Majority.

163
categorization in their political identities. While community activists and
organizations began to espouse militant language in defense of their homes, they also
flirted with the Republican Party and grassroots conservatism in ways that connected
them with white suburbanites in Orange County and the Deep South.
25

The Santa Fe Springs Redevelopment Agency applied to the Urban Renewal
Administration for $168,000 in detailed surveys and preliminary planning work for
the project.
26
On 9 October 1964 Santa Fe Springs approved the renewal program
that called for the displacement of over 150 ethnic Mexican families from their
homes.
27
As basis of justification, the redevelopment agency identified 131
“deteriorating” homes, 86 “substandard” homes, 102 houses in need of major repair,
70 slated for demolition, and 96 in need of minor repairs of $2000 or less. These
studies only found 59 houses that met county standards and 8 in perfect condition.
28

Citing that Flood Ranch constituted less than ten percent of the entire city population
yet produced 48% of structure fires, and 45% of citywide arrests, municipal officials
publicized a resounding suburban calculus that made displacement of Flood Ranch
residents palatable to local homeowners. Suburban homeowners always responded to
threats to their property values and tax dollars by flexing their collective political

25
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors; Matt Lassiter, The Silent Majority; Kevin Kruse, White Flight;

26
“Renewal Asked for Flood Ranch Area,” Los Angeles Times, 28 July 1962, B2.

27
“Renewal Plan Wins OK at Santa Fe Springs,” Los Angeles Times, 9 October 1964, 26.

28
Salazar, “Mexican-Americans Protest.”

164
muscles and removing the perceived problem.
29
As an urban renewal project, the
federal government shouldered three-fourths of the cost. To acquire the 65-acre
property from the property owners amounted to $1,942,934 of which the city of
Santa Fe Springs was responsible for only $700,000. These costs included purchase
of the land at its value and temporary relocation costs for residents. The city
promised Flood Ranch residents several benefits if they agreed to “temporary”
relocation, such as: cash for their equity and payment of closing costs, assistance in
finding new homes, opportunity to obtain low interest rate loans because they lived
in the redevelopment zone, and receive “fair-market value” for their property.
30
With
potential state and federal monies burning through the pockets of city officials, Santa
Fe Springs was set to boost the overall value of property in the industrial city by
acquiring this desirable land.
Despite the flowery promises made by the redevelopment agency, Flood
Ranch residents remained skeptical. They quickly mobilized opposition to the plan.
As denizens of a large, rapidly expanding metropolis they understood that working-
class communities of color disproportionately bore the consequences of renewal. The
Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency acquired a notorious reputation in
the barrios of metropolitan L.A. for their role in displacing Mexican American
homeowners from Chavez Ravine. Activists gave a new definition to the L.A.
Community Redevelopment Agency acronym, CRA, by instead renaming it the

29
“City of Santa Fe Springs: Progress Report, 1961-1963,” pg. 15.

30
Salazar, “Mexican-Americans Protest.”

165
“Chicano Removal Association.”
31
The clearance of Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles
stands as an iconographic case-in-point of the consequences urban renewal programs
wrought on ethnic Mexican residential communities. The widely publicized removal
of Mexican American homeowners from Chavez Ravine in 1959 was meant
originally to clear the way for public housing. After the project was red-baited out of
existence, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ owner Walter O’Malley purchased the land at cut-
rate to relocate his baseball team to a new stadium built in Chavez Ravine.
32

Suburbs like Santa Fe Springs seemed unlikely places for Chavez Ravine
style displacement, but in former colonias across metropolitan L.A. new suburban
cities exercised their broad powers to determine the “public good” through the use of
eminent domain.
33
Small municipalities mimicked the language of urban centers in
drawing distinctions between ‘respectable’ and ‘slum’ housing. They understood that
urban renewal dollars translated into a massive economic windfall. Cities that were
awarded urban renewal contracts in the 1960s capitalized on federal investment
because the Department of Housing and Urban Development funneled money
directly into city chests. Because federal urban renewal monies did not have to filter
through the County, small cities like Santa Fe Springs benefited in greater proportion

31
Raúl Homero Villa, Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 145.

32
Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles.

33
Hicks Camp, Jimtown, Rivera, Pico Viejo, Los Nietos, and Rocktown are among the few large
barrios that faced redevelopment pressure from their respective cities.
166
to larger cities like Los Angeles or Long Beach. In essence, the federal government
provided economic incentive to eliminate suburban barrios.
Middle-class Mexican Americans were at the center of the movement to
redevelop Flood Ranch. Ernest Flores began his career in Santa Fe Springs on the
Planning Department in 1962 and worked his way up to Planning Commissioner by
the beginning of 1964. In January 1964, Councilman Joe Ramirez suddenly resigned
from the city office and the remaining members appointed Flores to Ramirez’s post.
Since settling in Santa Fe Springs with his wife Lupe and their four children in 1956,
Flores had been active in several community organizations and advocacy groups.
Most notably, he served as the president of the Santa Fe Springs chapter of the
American G.I. Forum following his service in the Army Intelligence Department
during World War II. Flores used the GI Bill to earn a degree in civil engineering
from the University of New Mexico. Employed as a civil engineer for a firm based in
nearby Pico Rivera, Flores likely enthusiastically supported city incorporation in
1957 as his record of civic participation suggests a deep interest and commitment to
the affairs of Santa Fe Springs. Since incorporation, Flores became an active member
in the Sister City Committee and the street naming subcommittee—a coupling that
yielded the naming of a street in Flood Ranch to Navojoa after the city’s adoption of
Navojoa, Sonora in Mexico as a Sister City.
34
If Mexico embodied pre-modernity in

34
“Santa Fe Springs Will Seat New Councilman,” Los Angeles Times, 19 January 1964, p. R4;
President Harry Truman created the Sister City Program as a means to foster citizen diplomacy during
the height of the Cold War. Santa Fe Springs was not unique in its efforts as a suburban municipality
to adopt a larger and more populous city from Mexico as its “sister” city. The neighboring city of
Downey adopted Guadalajara in Mexico as its sister city and regularly engaged in friendly soccer
167
the minds of middle class Mexican Americans, then naming a street in Flood Ranch
after the Mexican sister city made an important statement about their regard for the
barrio and its residents. It also signaled to Santa Fe Springs developers to take the
necessary steps towards progress in the barrio. Flores’s short tenure as Planning
Commissioner ensured that he and other Mexican American civic leaders would
continue to pursue Flood Ranch redevelopment.
Not all middle class Mexican Americans adopted hostile postures towards
suburban barrios, however. Despite the prevalence of Mexican American council
members engaged in redevelopment efforts, other Mexican American activists
advocated for justice in the barrios. Dionicio Morales had a long record of defending
Mexican American rights throughout his career. As head of the Mexican American
Opportunity Foundation based initially in Pico Rivera, Morales was an active
participant in local social justice struggles. In May 1964, he led a contingent of more
than 100 protestors down the main thoroughfares of Santa Fe Springs to city hall to
demand an end to the redevelopment project.
35

Opposition to the project was at its highest in 1964. Manuel Magaña, a
Protestant minister and Flood Ranch home owner who spearheaded the grassroots
movement to halt the project, told the Los Angeles Times, “I think the date the Flood
Ranch area was annexed to Santa Fe Springs and the date this urban renewal project

matches and exchanges of gifts until the city of San Diego out-muscled Downey for the rights to
Guadalajara. See, “Proposed Sister City Already ‘Adopted,’” Los Angeles Times, 15 February 1962,
p. B9.

35
“Flood Ranch Project Draws Residents’ Ire,” Los Angeles Times, 30 May 1964, p. A3.

168
was first brought up, are suspiciously close.”
36
Magaña accurately read the city’s
intentions for Flood Ranch. Santa Fe Springs stood to benefit dramatically from
federal investment in the project and Flood Ranch provided an ostensibly easy target.
However, Flood Ranch residents like so many other barrio residents throughout the
Southwest, challenged the perceived injustice of suburban renewal.
At a public hearing, John Alvarado, a resident of Flood Ranch, voiced
concern over the city’s trampling of his civil rights in the name of progress. Alvarado
then asked the central question on the minds of most residents: “As a Mexican, I
have been studied my whole life. And it always comes out the same. Somebody has a
plan to help me. But I have no voice in it. I’m the person they’re trying to help. Why
don’t they ask me how?”
37

At that same hearing, Magaña invoked indigenous identity in a way that
anticipated the cultural-nationalist language of the Chicano Movement in stating: “I
don’t believe we are so retarded in our progress that we need Great White Father to
come build us a teepee.”
38
By confronting municipal power structures through
grassroots activism, small metropolitan communities under siege, like Flood Ranch,
made important contributions to the development of Chicano consciousness. The

36
Magaña quoted in Ruben Salazar, “Mexican-Americans Protest Santa Fe Springs Project: Say
Urban Renewal Plan Aims at Ousting Them from All America City,” Los Angeles Times, 7 September
1964, A1.

37
Alvarado quoted in Salazar, “Mexican-Americans Protest.”

38
Ibid.

169
emergence of chicanismo in barrios on the suburban fringe instilled a sense of
shared fate with urban barrios as activists recognized the similarity of experiences.
In their charges against Santa Fe Springs, Chicano activists drew distinct
parallels to the events that took place in Chávez Ravine. Protest marches on Santa Fe
Springs city hall made clear reference to the tragedy in Chavez Ravine. Picket signs
hollered “Move Out Mexicans—We Need Your Land,” and “Chavez Ravine All
Over Again.” In a marked departure from community activism surrounding Mexican
American removal from Chavez Ravine, activists in Santa Fe Springs assumed a
self-consciously militant posture evinced by signs that read: “I Will Fight For My
Land,” “Arms Are Used in Defense of Freedom,” and “When You Bring Your
Bulldozers, Don’t Forget Your Guns.”
39
In December 1964, one-hundred seventy-
three Flood Ranch homeowners sued the city of Santa Fe Springs for violating the 6-
month old Civil Rights Act. The homeowners charged that the city and local
redevelopment agency purposely targeted Flood Ranch because of its historically
large Mexican American population. The presiding Superior Court judge summarily
issued an injunction against the project under the provisions of the Civil Rights Act,
the first such use of the act in the United States.
40

City Councilman Ernest Flores dismissed Magaña’s charges of
discrimination calling them, “the same, old tired charges of racial discrimination…I

39
Salazar, “Mexican-Americans Protest.”

40
“Court Order Halts Urban Developing: Rights Act Used in Santa Fe Project,” Los Angeles Times,
18 December 1964, A1; “Judge Halts Urban Renewal Project,” Los Angeles Sentinel, 24 December
1964, p. A3.

170
am, myself, a Mexican-American and I would have been one of the first to raise my
voice if I had seen any hint of an intent to discriminate against Mexican-
Americans.”
41
Flores’s tenure on the Santa Fe Springs Planning Commission
influenced his perspective on the Flood Ranch Redevelopment Project. In his
capacity to oversee “orderly and attractive growth” for the city, Flores pushed
diligently for the project’s completion as a member of the council.
42
The story was
not as simple as white racial discrimination directed at an impoverished group of
ethnic Mexicans. Middle class Mexican Americans, Like Flores, participated in the
redevelopment project at Flood Ranch from the beginning. As I chronicle in Chapter
Two of this dissertation, many Mexican Americans after World War II were able to
move from Eastside barrios into San Gabriel Valley and Southeast Los Angeles
suburban cities.
World War II veteran and California State Assemblyman John Moreno,
helped devise the Flood Ranch Redevelopment Project while serving as Mayor of
Santa Fe Springs in 1959. After a drunk driving conviction unceremoniously ushered
Moreno out of public service in 1964, other middle-class Mexican American city
officials assisted in redevelopment planning. City councilman Joe Ramirez furthered
the city’s attempts to remove working-class and poor Mexican residents from Flood
Ranch as did Executive Director of the Santa Fe Springs Redevelopment Agency

41
“Discrimination is Denied in Springs,” Whittier Daily News, 29 March 1967, p. B1.

42
“City of Santa Fe Springs: Progress Report, 1961-1963,” ca. 1963, pg. 10.

171
Massey Herrera.
43
Middle class Mexican American involvement in redevelopment
efforts obviously created conflict with working class Mexican Americans because of
the former group’s alliance with white municipal officials. Tensions over housing in
the early 1960s would seem to partially indicate that Chicano vitriol directed at
vendidos (sell-outs) and tio tacos (Mexican Uncle Toms) during the Movement of
the late 1960s and early 1970s originated, at least in part, from middle-class Mexican
American efforts to displace working class people.
44

Local Republican Party leaders saw opportunity in the suburban renewal
controversy. Here was a chance to make inroads into the local Mexican American
community, especially before the 1964 presidential and state elections. Party leaders
hoped to build a lasting relationship with the Mexican American community through
their support of Flood Ranch opposition. In October 1964, Latin Americans for
Goldwater hosted a free barbeque for Flood Ranch residents. The theme of the
barbeque, “Mi Casa Es Mi Castillo” (“My Home is My Castle”), invoked the sanctity
of the home while also echoing suburban-ideal rhetoric common in white working-

43
“Renewal Chief Quits in Santa Fe Springs,” Los Angeles Times, 28 February 1964, 26; For the
genesis of Santa Fe Springs political machinery see Swain, The Historical Volume and Reference
Works; and for a glimpse on Mexican American politics on the suburban fringe see Kenneth C. Burt,
The Search for a Civic Voice: California Latino Politics (Claremont, Calif.: Regina Books, 2007),
207-9.

44
This chapter contributes to a more complex understanding of the development of the radical
Chicano Movement that is currently undergoing historiographical reconsideration as not simply a
youthful reaction to the Mexican American Generation, but rather a collective ethos formulated
around material conditions such as the war in Viet Nam, injustices perpetrated against Latino
immigrants, and the failure of state and national electoral systems to represent the needs of ethnic
Mexican communities. See Lorena Oropeza, ¡Raza Si! ¡Guerra No!: Chicano Protest and Patriotism
during the Viet Nam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Laura Pulido, Black,
Brown, Yellow & Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2006); and Ernesto Chavez, ¡Mi Raza Primero!: Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano
Movement in Los Angeles, 1966-1978 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
172
and middle-class suburbs across the country. Manuel Magaña was one of the nearly
3,500 attendees at the event and proved eager to hear what Republicans could offer
residents in defense of their castillos. He noted the absence of Democratic Party
leadership at the open-invitation event but proved more than willing to entertain
Republican courtship. William Sousa, the field director for Latin-Americans for
Goldwater, denounced the renewal plan and charged that “Democrats are interested
in power not people.” Sousa also explained why Mexican Americans fit naturally
into the Republican ideological camp in saying “This minority group is interested
more in personal dignity and self-reliance than in government handouts. Maybe
some of the area’s homes are in bad shape, but most of these people are trying to
improve their lot through individual resources—not by directives from
Washington.”
45

Carta Editorial, a politically progressive mailer devoted to Mexican
American concerns, cautioned the Democratic Party not to neglect Mexican
American issues on the heels of this event. Highlighting that Goldwater stood little
chance to win the presidential election, the editors warned that “the theme of the
speeches at the barbeque will outlast the elections—that the Democrats have for too
long taken the community for granted.”
46
One of the barbeque attendees, Everett

45
Ruben Salazar, “Goldwater Forces Woo Problem-Beset Latins: Barbeque Held for Mexican-
Americans in Throes of Urban Renewal Controversy,” Los Angeles Times, 26 October 1964, p. A8.

46
“Watch it, Democrats…” Carta Editorial: For the Informed – Interested in Mexican American
Affairs, 29 October 1965, Vol. II, No. 10, pp. 3-4, Eduardo Quevedo Papers, M0349, Box 9, Folder
20, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

173
Hunt, was in the midst of a bitter election campaign against incumbent Democratic
Congressman Chester Holifield. Hunt made himself visible to Mexican American
voters in speeches at the barbeque and at community hearings. Santa Fe Springs
Mayor A.J. Emmens removed Hunt from a public hearing for continually
interrupting the proceedings with repeated challenges over school and public space
plans for the redeveloped area.
47
Indeed, renewal issues made strange bedfellows.
Members of both the civil rights organization Congress of Racial Equality, and the
ultra-conservative John Birch Society, sat side-by-side at city council meetings in
support of Flood Ranch residents.
48

As homeowners, Flood Ranch residents challenged displacement. Dissident
leaders marshaled the prevailing political language of suburban America that linked
taxpayers and homeowners to popular conceptions of “the people”—an increasingly
politicized term that signified white, middle-class suburbanites.
49
With arguments
recognizable in every postwar suburban municipality, the president of the
oppositional Flood Ranch Improvement Association Manuel Magaña decried the
actions of the local government to draw on Federal funds for the project. “We feel it
is tragic that taxpayers’ money is being used to further and promote grandiose
schemes by some politicians, in this case local politicians. Urban Renewal gives

47
“Renewal Plan Wins Ok.”

48
Salazar, “Mexican-Americans Protest.”

49
Matthew Lassiter argues that taxpayer, homeowner, and schoolparent constituted the “Silent
Majority.” See Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005).

174
power to the few to control, dominate, and intimidate the taxpayer citizens whose
money is used for such nefarious practices.”
50
Magaña’s blatant characterization of
Flood Ranch residents as “taxpayer citizens” dispelled generalized racial stereotypes
associated with ethnic Mexicans as public charges and perpetually foreign. Within
this logic Flood Ranch residents should have possessed a legitimate claim to
autonomy as well as the license to define the meaning of home. However, Mexican
American homeowners in Flood Ranch understood too well the implicit racial
meaning behind the redevelopment effort because they were not the right kind of
homeowners, nor did they own the right kind of homes.
Ironically, the passage of Proposition 14 in 1964 which won by a
representative 2:1 margin in Santa Fe Springs, stalled progress on the redevelopment
project because of ensuing legal challenges.
51
HUD shelved more than $200 million
in federal redevelopment projects throughout the state until the California Supreme
Court decided upon the legality of Proposition 14. The anti-fair housing initiative for
constitutional amendment sought to overturn California’s Rumford Act which
criminalized racial discrimination in residential sales and rentals.
52
California

50
Rev. Manuel Magaña to Chester Holifield, 10 September 1966, [emphasis added], Box 2, Folder
“Flood Ranch Redevelopment Project,” Chester Holifield Papers, Department of Special Collections,
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Calif.

51
Frank M. Jordan, Supplement to Statement of the Vote: State of California General Election,
November 3, 1964 (Sacramento, Calif.:

52
I discuss in greater detail the Mexican American community’s interactions with Proposition 14 in
Chapter Three of this dissertation. For other scholarly examinations of roposition 14 and the repeal of
the Rumford Act see Thomas W. Casstevens, Politics, Housing, and Race Relations: California’s
Rumford Act and Proposition 14 (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, University of
175
Governor Pat Brown pleaded with HUD to release the funds. He argued that urban
communities of color desperately needed the funds for community improvement.
Originating from a belief that urban renewal was “a good thing,” many Democrats
like Brown failed to understand that ethnic Mexicans, many of whom owned homes
in redevelopment target areas, became displaced by such projects.
53

Despite the tide of opposition that faced the redevelopment agency, Massey
Herrera and Ernest Flores spearheaded a campaign in the local press to discredit the
grassroots opposition. In November 1966, the local paper, the Whittier Daily News
profiled the Flood Ranch Redevelopment Project in a series of articles that were, in
Flores’s words, meant to “honestly reflect” the redevelopment undertaking.
54
The
article series provided Herrera and Flores with a sounding board to signal the
beginning of clearance and construction by recasting community sentiment from
opposition to cooperation. Herrera proclaimed: “We’ve been thrilled recently by the
greater number of phone calls we’ve gotten from project area residents wanting to
know when the money will be available and when they can file their applications.
The people are finally getting behind this thing.”
55
The series writer, completely

California, 1967); and Daniel Wei Hosang, “Racial Propositions: ‘Genteel Apartheid’ in Postwar
California” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 2007).

53
“Brown Appeals to U.S. To Free Urban Funds: Renewal Work Stalled by Federal Freeze Pending
Decision on Validity of Prop. 14,” Los Angeles Times, 18 February 1966, 30; “U.S. Won’t Free Urban
Funds, Brown Says: Weaver Tells Governor His Agency Still Feels Prop. 14 Blocks Any
Negotiations,” Los Angeles Times, 4 March 1966, 4; Salazar, “Mexican-Americans Protest.”
54
Flores to Holifield, 10 January 1967, Box 2, Folder “Flood Ranch – Santa Fe Springs,” Holifield
Papers.

55
Dick Singer, “Federal Loan Grant Holds Up Flood Ranch Renewal Program,” Whittier Daily News,
24 November 1966, p. 15.
176
omitted dissenting voices, however, in articles proclaiming the end of opposition in
Flood Ranch. Noting the quietude of Flood Ranch, he wrote: “There are no more
pickets, no more speeches, and no more mass marches. Just quiet resignation to the
fact that the urban renewal plan for the area is, after all, a fact.”
56
Although Singer
wrote the obituary for Flood Ranch a bit premature, in March 1967, United States
District Judge Francis Whelan concurred with the Redevelopment Agency that
racism did not factor into the decision to redevelop Flood Ranch.
57
With over 1500
Mexican Americans threatened with displacement, the judge’s decision seemingly
took into account the presence of Mexican Americans in the planning process even
though that did not dislodge the glaringly racialized overtones that pervaded the
project’s entire life cycle. A mere ten years after Santa Fe Springs incorporated as a
city, it realized its objective to “renew” itself.
Victory in the legal arena did not completely wipe away the challenges for
the Santa Fe Springs Redevelopment Agency. Although the project was granted
clearance, the city and redevelopment agency still had to contend with the
uncertainty of federal budgets. In 1967, the Federal National Mortgage Association
(Fannie Mae) suddenly adopted a policy of denying funds for homes and
neighborhoods situated too close to freeways, blighted areas, and, ironically, within

56
Dick Singer, “Flood Ranch Renewal Program Merely a Fact Now—Not a Battle,” Whittier Daily
News, 25 November 1966, p. 13.

57
“Santa Fe Springs Row: Flood Ranch Group Protests on Renewal,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
28 March 1967, Box 2, Folder “Flood Ranch - Santa Fe Springs,” Holifield Papers.

177
designated redevelopment zones.
58
Massey Herrera’s experience with Fannie Mae
posed a potential deal breaker for Flood Ranch residents who were still weary about
the true motivations of the redevelopment agency. The uneasy peace delivered by the
judge and municipal officials hung in the balance as Fannie Mae seemed poised to
deny the loan request for five property owners under Section 220 Special Assistance
funding. According to Herrera, the property owners agreed to support Flood Ranch
redevelopment on the promise of low-interest rate loans for home improvements.
Fannie Mae’s imminent denial prompted the Federal Housing Authority to offer a
specialized “across the counter” loan offer for 8-10% more than the homeowners
originally agreed to. The FHA loan would ultimately cost each homeowner more
than $1500 out-of-pocket on top of what they lost in equity from their demolished
homes. More than anything else, Herrera feared the cascading affects that even a
minimal loss of confidence posed to the overall success of the project. In a letter to
Chet Holifield pleading for his intervention, Herrera expressed his and the city
council’s fear that “if the opponents of [the] program succeed in learning of the
freeze, they would not hesitate to use this opportunity in not only attacking the
prestige of the Council-agency but belittle the benefits of all federal programs.”
59

Holifield who had proved an able ally to the project throughout the planning stages,
pressured friends in the Department of Housing and Urban Development to help

58
Massey Herrera to Chester Holifield, 18 December 1967, box 2, folder “Flood Ranch – Santa Fe
Springs,” Holifield Papers.

59
Herrera to Holifield, 18 December 1967, Box 2, Folder “Flood Ranch – Santa Fe Springs,”
Holifield Papers.

178
Santa Fe Springs maneuver around the Fannie Mae debacle. Ultimately, HUD
secured the Section 220 assistance without the homeowners ever learning about the
close call.
60

Flood Ranch residents however, shifted their focus from stopping
redevelopment to controlling redevelopment to meet the needs of the community.
Mandated by legislation built into President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty
program, citizen advisory councils wove barrio property owners into the planning
process.
61
Former redevelopment opponents organized the citizen’s advisory council
and ensured that the demands property owners had been making for ten years found
their way into policy. In 1965, a small group of residents led by Mary Gingras and
Candelaria Corral established a neighborhood service center in a rented house along
Pioneer Boulevard. The center provided social services and educational
programming for low-income residents of Santa Fe Springs, and especially Flood
Ranch. The clientele outgrew the physical building and with the proposed clearance
of Pioneer Boulevard in 1967, community activists saw a golden opportunity to
make the renewal program meet their needs. Together with the Club Cultural
Mexicano, Gingras and Corral spearheaded an effort to secure funding for a
permanent building to house the neighborhood center. HUD granted over $140,000

60
Ibid.

61
Diaz, Barrio Urbanism, p. 173.

179
towards the construction of the Santa Fe Springs Neighborhood Center and allowed
for the expansion of services provided by the staff.
62

Similarly, the citizen’s advisory committee advocated for the development of
multi-family dwellings in the form of apartments and condominiums to
accommodate the individuals and families that could neither afford displacement, nor
afford to stay. The Mexican American middle class that from the start constituted a
beachhead against Flood Ranch activists, now proved to be important allies in
brokering redevelopment deals for their working-class counterparts. In addition to
the infrastructural improvements made to the neighborhood, Flood Ranch residents
successfully advocated for the Neighborhood Center, a public park, and affordable
housing for the neighborhood. More importantly, the majority of Flood Ranch
property owners returned to the neighborhood upon completion of the project in
1972.
Conclusion
Incidents like Flood Ranch’s struggle with Urban Renewal and slum
clearance are evidence that Mexican Americans actively and enthusiastically
participated in the making of suburban Los Angeles. By using the broad powers of
the state such as the legal system, the electoral system, and federal government
funding packages, both working-class and middle-class Mexican Americans

62
“Santa Fe Springs, Calif., Receives All-American Cities Award for the Second Time,”
Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 92
nd
Congress, Second Session, Vol. 118, No.
39 (March 1972); Archie Beasor to Holifield, 26 January 1968, Box 2, Folder “Santa Fe Springs,”
Holifield Papers; “Suit to Block Urban Renewal Plan Fails,” Los Angeles Times, 8 December 1967,
pg. 3.

180
exercised a suburban civic identity that was intimately linked to protection of the
home and neighborhood. In contesting slum clearance, the “citizen taxpayers,” in
Magaña’s words, challenged their second-class treatment at the hands of municipal
officials regardless of the leadership roles fellow Mexican Americans exercised.
The racial stakes of the Flood Ranch Redevelopment Project relied on a
complex class strategy to redefine the social space of everyday life. Middle class
Mexican Americans involved at the highest levels of the redevelopment project held
a different vision of suburban legitimacy than their working class counterparts. The
middle class approached the redevelopment of Flood Ranch as a rescue effort to
deliver the promises of suburbia to their working class counterparts. The proverbial
barrio, however, has a long history mediating complex social relationships that defy
such simplistic categorizations. Barrios were at once a manifestation of a segregated
metropolitan order and simultaneously a refuge for ethnic Mexicans from pervasive
discrimination. The diverse racial and ethnic identities mediated by barrio life
complicate the grand narratives of ethnic and immigrant generational assimilation.
This dynamic social process also undermines narratives which cast ethnic Mexicans
as a homogenous, undifferentiated bloc.
The incident at Flood Ranch also puts the diverse identities of the Mexican
American Generation on full display. The middle class that moved out of Eastside
barrios, although major proponents of redevelopment, held tightly to the Democratic
Party. Flood Ranch residents exhibited a much more pronounced ideological
promiscuity that permitted them to challenge suburban renewal from multiple angles.
181
Faced with the inevitability of the redevelopment project, in 1967 these grassroots
activists formalized their demands into policy decisions that ultimately won support
from the middle class Mexican Americans who once opposed them.
Flood Ranch’s struggle with the city of Santa Fe Springs is representative of
suburban-growth dynamics in postwar metropolitan Los Angeles and demonstrates
that urban renewal has remained a constant and critical feature of postwar suburban
community building. Yet, the striking difference between suburban renewal projects
like Flood Ranch and urban renewal projects like Chavez Ravine rested on the
targets of redevelopment. While working class Mexican American communities
were victimized by renewal proponents throughout metropolitan Los Angeles,
suburban city builders sought to funnel funds into the development of private
property; Urban Renewal programs sought to channel funds into public projects. And
lastly, large Urban Renewal projects in the city of L.A. were executed primarily by
an all-white city council and redevelopment agency. In the suburbs, Mexican
Americans held tightly to the levers of power available to them; sometimes at the
expense of their own aims to broaden the suburban good life for their gente.
182
183
CHAPTER FIVE:
MEXICAN AMERICAN YOUTHS IN SUBURBAN LOS ANGELES:
EDUCATION AND CRUISING AS ARENAS OF STRUGGLE, 1947-1978

Word was out on the street. An impending rumble between two groups of
teenage boys—one white, one Mexican—stirred the excitement and imagination of
hundreds of Pioneer High School students in Pico Rivera early in the fall of 1962.
On that Monday afternoon, antsy teens milled about following the final school bell
and anxiously awaited the inevitable clash. But, an anonymous telephone call to
Principal Jack Jines on the previous Friday alerted the local sheriff’s department
which had ample time to prepare a plan to stop the fight. Shortly after school let out,
several deputies from the Norwalk sheriff’s substation attempted to disperse the
crowd of an estimated 125 students and send them home.
The deputies dispatched to the scene paid little attention to the mob of white
students but proceeded to shout at the Mexican American youths to leave the scene.
When the students pointed out to deputies that the white students started the fight,
deputies began to club Mexican American youth at will. A mother of one of the
students stepped in to stop the beatings and arrests, slapping a deputy in the face for
arresting her son, another deputy put in a distress signal that promptly delivered 57
deputies to the scene to help quell the looming riot. The deputies placed 37 students
and the mother who slapped the officer – mostly all ethnic Mexican – into custody
and charged them with inciting a riot and refusal to disperse.
1

The on-looking crowd of Anglo students involved in the fight taunted the
ethnic Mexican students as the sheriff deputies led them away. The racially charged
atmosphere was made worse when a white city official from Pico Rivera made a
denigrating statement about the character of Mexican Americans. In the aftermath of
this incident, charges of racism and police brutality put city officials and law
enforcement on the defensive exacerbating the already deep racial divisions existent
in the small suburban city. The Council of Mexican American Affairs and the Pico
Rivera chapter of the American G.I. Forum – a nationally recognized Mexican
American civil rights organization – held community meetings that spoke out against
police brutality and racism. But ethnic Mexicans did not all have similar sentiments
regarding the event. Louis R. Diaz, a long time community activist and member of
the first city council, publicly defended the deputies’ actions and concluded that race
did not appear to be a significant factor.
2
This was not supposed to happen. When
Pico Rivera incorporated to city status in 1958 the 61
st
city of Los Angeles County
billed itself as a “place in the sun,” a city of “homes, churches, schools, and

1
Ruben Salazar, “Case History of a ‘Rumble’---Who’s To Blame?” Los Angeles Times, 21 October
1962, pg. K3.

2
Ibid.

184
industry”; in coded terms, a safe haven for honest, hard working, and “typical”
American families.
3

Education and recreation frame the ethnic Mexican youth experience in
suburban Los Angeles. Mexican American parents rallied around educational issues
that they felt would offer the best opportunities to their children’s advancement in
society. Through school desegregation battles, advocacy against poor educational
practices, and finally through community led campaigns to promote college
enrollment suburban Mexican Americans were as involved in school battles as their
counterparts in East Los Angeles, and as black and white activists in the South and
North.
4
Likewise, Chicana and Chicano youth sought to make suburban space
accessible to them for their recreational endeavors. In their use of public space,
suburban Chicana/o youth bridged the cultural gap between the city and suburb.
Particularly, the increasing popularity of cruising in the 1960s transcended the spatial
confines of East Los Angeles and extended through the suburban municipalities of
Montebello, Pico Rivera, and Whittier.

3
“Place in the Sun: City of Pico Rivera, First Annual Report, 1959; City of Homes, Churches,
Schools, and Industry,” Pico Rivera Museum, Pico Rivera.; William Deverell’s discussion of
“typicality” as method to sell the landscape, and thus the neighborhoods, of Los Angeles is especially
important here. As the first annual report makes clear, the city of Pico Rivera was exceptional only in
that it protected its territory from annexation by Whittier, its neighbor to the east, and Montebello, its
neighbor to the west. Aside from that, the writers of the report emphasized that theirs represented a
typical suburban city outside of the reach of Los Angeles rule. See William Deverell, Whitewashed
Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004), 173-6.

4
Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority; Kevin Kruse, White Flight.

185
Battles Around Childhood Education in El Monte
Los Angeles during the 1940s and 1950s, although already enduring a
suburban revolution, remained marked by the legacies of segregation that marked
social and political relations prior to World War II. Segregation in the City of El
Monte structured the facets of everyday life, especially in the colonias orbiting
around the city center. Denied entrance to white elementary schools, ethnic Mexican
children from Hicks Camp were directed into the Lexington School. Lexington was
established in 1908 to serve the children of El Monte, but in 1923 the El Monte
Unified School District built an explicitly white only school and re-categorized
Lexington as a Mexican school. Designed unabashedly as a segregated institution,
Lexington resembled the typical Mexican school found in almost every other colonia
and Mexican barrio throughout the Southwest.
5
Regardless of the patently unequal
institutionalization of childhood education expressed through the creation of separate
schools, the Los Angeles County Counsel legitimized the practice of discrimination
against ethnic Mexicans by deploying a convoluted racial logic that relied on the
designation of “Mexican” as a category that linked foreignness, unassimilability, and
inferior and used it for a basis for exclusion. Mexican schools, in the eyes of the
state, did not present any legal quandaries so long as they were “equal in every

5
Mexican schools stretched across the entire Southwestern United States from Texas to California.
The most common characteristic they all shared was their segregation and inferior facilities. For a
short explanation of Mexican Schools in Los Angeles County see Douglas Monroy, Rebirth: Mexican
Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999, pp. 201-3.

186
respect” to schools designated for white students.
6
The problem, however, was that
there was nothing equal between the facilities and the social and psychological
distance between whites and Mexicans was constantly reinforced by the idea that
both groups needed separate educational facilities. The County counsel continued:
We assume that the segregation of Mexicans is not based upon any
racial prejudice but is based upon the fact that the Mexicans, owing to
their differences in language and other racial differences, present
different problems in teaching which from an administrative
standpoint can best be solved by segregating the pupils and applying
to each the most advanced and appropriate methods of teaching.
7

The County Counsel’s judgment registered a local expression of a wider racial
project that denied equality to ethnic Mexicans in education while shifting the public
discourse from explicit racial exclusion to the contradictory logics of dealing with
foreign, or somehow culturally disadvantaged youth. Schools in California, Arizona,
New Mexico, and Texas all had designated “Mexican schools” that built and
maintained boundaries between white and Mexican children.
8

White schools, represented in El Monte by Columbia Elementary School,
served growing numbers of white suburbanites. Grades one through five were
restricted to white students only. From fifth grade to eighth grade, ethnic Mexican
and Japanese American students were admitted only if they satisfactorily completed

6
Letter from Los Angeles County Counsel J.H. O’Connor to J. Dwight Cate of the Ranchito School
District in Pico, May 1941, box 75, folder “The Races-Mexican, 1933-1958,” Ford Papers.

7
Ibid.

8
See Guadalupe San Miguel, Brown, Not White: School Integration and the Chicano Movement in
Houston (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2001); Carlos Blanton, The Strange Career of Bi-
Lingual Education in Texas, 1836-1981 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004).

187
grades one through five at Lexington. District officials redrew boundary lines to
maximize the reach of Columbia’s enrollment but maintained that, “those children
coming from non-English speaking families and who are now in attendance in the
Lexington School…these children will be required to attend the Lexington School
regardless of the area in which they live.”
9
The school district deployed the term
“non-English speaking” as a way to bar entry for ethnic Mexican and Japanese
American children regardless of their aptitude to speak English.
In June of 1946, a community-led group from Hicks Camp and surrounding
barrios directly challenged El Monte Union’s policy of segregation. With the
assistance of Rev. Fr. John V. Coffield, the community’s Catholic Pastor, and
Dwight Ramage, a minister for a local and predominantly Mexican American
Presbyterian congregation, a contingent of parents and community members
pressured the local school board into accepting integration as a uniform policy across
its K-12 campuses.
10
A 1947 report prepared by the Los Angeles County
Superintendent of Schools gleefully reported that El Monte Union’s attempts to
desegregate were “highly successful” as the district reassigned Mexican children to
schools closest to their homes and eliminated altogether the “Mexican School.”
11

9
Minutes of the Board of Trustees of the El Monte School District, 10 May 1938, in Olga L.
Gutierrez, “Analyzing Segregation in El Monte: The Lexington School,” MA Thesis, California State
University, Los Angeles, Appendix D.

10
Olga Gutierrez, “Analyzing Segregation in El Monte.”; Ben Campos, interview by author.

11
“Status of Segregation in School Districts Served by the Office of County Superintendent of
Schools,” 7 November 1947, Manuel Ruiz Papers, M0295, Box 16, Folder 4, “Racial Discrimination
and School Segregation,” Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford,
California (hereafter Ruiz Papers).
188
Attempts like El Monte’s to desegregate schools and transition into neighborhood
school systems appeared on the surface to comply with the judicial decision; and
legally they did. However, residential housing remained severely segregated and
resulted in de facto segregated schools. Although the California Supreme Court ruled
against school segregation in the Mendez v. Westminster case in 1947 segregation
remained a fixed feature of compulsory education with effects that lingered for
decades.
12

Childhood Education in Pico Rivera
In June of 1967, the El Rancho Unified School District in Pico Rivera
attempted to convert the Pío Pico School from a graded to non-graded format. The
school board reasoned that Mexican American children, most of whom spoke
Spanish, stood to benefit academically from an educational structure that eliminated
age-determinant grade levels (i.e. first-grade, second-grade, and so on) and instead
emphasized scholastic achievement at an individualized pace. In the non-graded
structure, first through third grades are collapsed into one continuous progress plan
identified as “primary education.” Proponents of the non-graded system contended
that educational atmospheres improved by reducing pupils’ tensions and anxieties,

12
See Vicki Ruiz, “South by Southwest: Mexican Americans and Segregated Schooling,” OAH
Magazine of History (winter 2001), online resource accessed 4 March 2008,
http://www.oah.org/pubs/magazine/deseg/ruiz.html.

189
individualizing the educational process, and made teachers more aware of individual
student strengths and weaknesses.
13

Parents in the Pío Pico School neighborhood balked at the idea of non-graded
education for their children. They saw the idea as a way for the largely white staff tp
continue to alienate their children. Community members knew full well the failures
of the neighborhood school to prepare children to compete academically at the
primary level. In a June 1967 petition to the El Rancho Unified School Board,
parents pointed out that three generations of “non-readers, children with low self-
status, [and] potential drop-outs that later [become] actual drop-outs,” cycled through
the dysfunctional school; the school’s inadequacies rendered students “unprepared
with non-marketable skills and [unsatisfactory] college preparatory work.”
14

Whether the school remained graded or transitioned into a non-graded curriculum,
made little difference to the parents; racist and ill-trained faculty bore responsibility
for the school’s failures. Parents demanded a complete personnel overhaul from the
principal down to teachers, calling for the transfer and replacement of all staff with
“preconceived attitudes.” Only staff with non-graded school experience, the parents

13
The differences between graded and non-graded school systems were hotly contested by
educational administrators and policy researchers alike. My understanding of late 1960s versions of
non-graded primary education systems is aided by Wilmajean Williams, “Academic Achievement in a
Graded School and in a Non-Graded School,” Elementary School Journal, vol. 67, no. 3 (December
1966), pp. 135-9.

14
“Petition presented to El Rancho Unified School Board, June 18, 1967,” Ruiz Papers, M0295, Box
9, Folder 10.

190
reasoned, possessed the ability to successfully oversee their students’ passage from
primary education to middle school.
15

A concurrent problem exacerbated the tensions between the Pío Pico
residents and the school board. Maria Aguilar Burke, a Mexican American woman
married to a white man and the school’s Community Relations Specialist and trusted
liaison on the parents’ behalf, resigned from the school board in protest over the
board’s dismissive attitude toward the parents and students of Pío Pico School.
However, at the behest of the parents, she sought reinstatement but the board denied
her request. The rejection sparked outrage and charges of discrimination from the
community.
16
Burke’s absence from the board signaled a loss of decision-making
power for the community and efforts to bring her back began. Maria Aguilar Burke
was well known amongst the parents for her ability to bridge the cultural gap
between the schools and household. As a Mexican American community member,
Burke placed special importance on the achievement of children in Head Start. She
received glowing reports from her superiors, including this one from the El Rancho
Unified School District Director of Curriculum, Jim Stafford to the Assistant
Superintendent, John E. Moore:
Maria Burke performed a valuable service as Parent Consultant. On a
regular basis she met with the mothers of Head Start children and
discussed child growth and development, use of leisure time, and
educational and cultural opportunities. I sat in on several of these
discussions and I could tell quite readily that these sessions were

15
Ibid.

16
“El Rancho Board Meet Picketed,” Whittier Daily News, 25 July 1967, pg. 1.

191
informative and valuable for the mothers. The culmination meeting
wherein Maria obtained noted speakers was particularly well-
conceived and executed.
17

Both the district and the parents who relied on her expertise could ill-afford
Maria Aguilar Burke’s resignation.
Community members banded together to negotiate a reconciliation between
Burke and the board members, but after repeated failed attempts to meet with the
school board, parents organized the Ad Hoc Committee of Mexican Americans for
Better Schools. Both the Los Angeles County Superintendent of Education and the
County Counsel blocked the meetings citing a confidentiality agreement which
forbade public discussions of faculty and administrators.
18
The ad hoc committee
then sought out and secured assistance and support from the Mexican American
Political Association and the American G.I. Forum. Backed by MAPA and the G.I.
Forum, the ad hoc committee’s list of demands grew to include a reinstatement of
Burke to her position as community relations specialist with a pay increase. Since the
board refused to meet with the ad hoc committee in person, community members
staged a protest outside of the board meeting carrying signs that read “De Facto
Segragated [sic] schools in California? Yes, in Pico Rivera,” and “It’s un-American
to segregate, it’s happening in Pico Rivera.”
19

17
Stafford to Moore, 30 August 1965, Holifield Papers, Box 2, Folder – “El Rancho Unified School
District—Pico Rivera.”

18
Letter from Matilde Lujan to Dr. Max Rafferty, 30 July 1967, Box 9, Folder 10, Ruiz Papers.

19
“El Rancho Board Meet Picketed.”

192
Challenging the authority of the school board took a concerted organizational
effort by leaders in both MAPA and the GI Forum, but the collective action of
parents and concerned citizens’ points to a growing suburban consciousness nurtured
by increasing population numbers and upward mobility relative to their brothers and
sisters in East Los Angeles. Identifying the actions of the school board as
segregationist carried ideological and political weight in a suburb that was struggling
with how to accept and incorporate its growing Mexican American population.
Matilde C. Lujan, a representative for the ad hoc committee commented in a local
newspaper about community-led protest stating that their frustration “is based on the
unmet needs unique and specific to this ‘de facto segregated school’ composed of an
almost total Spanish surname student body.”
20
The power of the protest stretched
beyond the racial discourses of de facto segregation, however. With the central roles
of Aguilar Burke and Lujan ethnic Mexican women found themselves in politically
powerful role, struggling against the male-dominated school system.
Despite the historically large numbers of women in Kindergarten through
high school teaching profession, men acted as the primary decision makers in Los
Angeles area schools. The parents’ protest in Pico Rivera on the surface embodied an
attack on racial discrimination, but the subtext was a power struggle promulgated by
patriarchal hegemony. Burke’s resignation, and the board’s subsequent refusal to
allow her to rescind the action, grew out of the board’s refusal to take her seriously

20
Newspaper clipping, “Petition Given Trustees Asks Principal, Teachers Transfers at Pio Pico, Pico
Rivera News/Santa Fe Springs News, 7 July 1967, pg. A7, in Ruiz Papers, M0295, box 9, folder 10.

193
as an accomplished educator and administrator. Aguilar Burke interpreted the
board’s decision to block her from returning to her administrative post, a position in
which she exercised tremendous skill according to one school board member in a
previous evaluation of the district, and limiting her status to that of teacher, as an act
of gender discrimination. Her replacement, Larry Sandoval, indicated further that the
board knew very little about the daily interactions and parental needs which
community liaisons were forced to meet. Aguilar Burke enlisted the assistance of the
National Organization for Women to bring suit against the school board for illegally
naming Sandoval as successor, and for gender discrimination.
21
Mexican American
women like Maria Aguilar Burke thrived politically in suburban Los Angeles mainly
in grassroots efforts and school issues. As a political force, Mexican American
women spearheaded grassroots efforts focused on community concerns Men
dominated the electoral arena, but women carried out the significant movements to
initiate change in the neighborhoods and schools.
22

Susana Lozano also carried on a tradition of Mexican American women’s
activism as she campaigned for council members, school board members, and state
and federal candidates by walking precincts and organizing community discussions

21
“Burke to Sue El Rancho Board: Woman Cites Illegal Acts by Trustees,” Whittier Daily News, 26
July 1967, pg. 1.

22
See Mary S. Pardo, Mexican American Women Activists: Identity and Resistance in Two Los
Angeles Communities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Lisa García Bedolla, Fluid
Borders: Latino Power, Identity, and Politics in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005); and, Gilda Ochoa, Becoming Neighbors in a Mexican American Community: Power,
Conflict, and Solidarity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). For discussions on how white
women in the suburbs engaged in political activity see, Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven (2002); and,
McGirr, Suburban Warriors (2001).

194
on issues germane to the ethnic Mexican community. Lozano’s daughter, Susana Jr.,
became politically active as well when she reached Rio Hondo College in the early
1960s, organizing around civil rights issues. Susana Jr. recalls becoming politicized
as a college student at Rio Hondo College by the Civil Rights Movement. She sought
to connect her love of music with her political aspirations by joining a folk music
band called Up With People. The band was made up of similarly politicized Mexican
Americans from Montebello, Norwalk, and Pico Rivera who saw the band as a
means to express their discontent with American society.
23
While Lozano and her
band members were part of a growing body of Mexican American youths angry with
the conditions of barrio residents and speaking out, these suburban youths engaged
the system through a type of group left out of traditional Chicana/o narratives of
youth political agency.
Cruising
A vibrant Chicana/o car culture, drawn from a wider regional affection of
automobility, breathed life into an alternate form of youth expression in the
deindustrializing sections of suburban Los Angeles. Cruising did not overtly
announce political resistance, though it challenged the modes of convention by
urbanizing suburban youth culture. The principal areas under study in this
dissertation were connected geographically to the Eastside by a series of highways
and boulevards. Chief among them was Whittier Boulevard. The eleven-mile stretch
of Whittier Boulevard that extends from East Los Angeles through the incorporated

23
Susana Lozano, interview by author, 7 April 2008, Pico Rivera, Calif.

195
suburbs of Montebello, Pico Rivera, and Whittier in Los Angeles County cuts
straight through the heart of a large and complex Mexican American community.
Designated as State Route 72 by the California Department of Transportation,
multiple generations of Chicana and Chicano cruisers know it simply as “The
Boulevard.” After decades of struggle against housing discrimination Mexican
Americans acquired a semblance of the “suburban dream” that follows along this
very corridor. The racial transformation that took place through these suburbs was
accompanied by an emergent Chicana/o youth culture in the 1960s reminiscent of
earlier phases of Mexican American youth culture.
24
Youths have always assumed
an irreverent posture towards the modes of convention, especially Chicana and
Chicano youth in Los Angeles. This defiance translated into a collective disregard
for the arbitrary boundary lines between “urban” and “suburban” exercised th
cruising.

rough

Historian Anthony Macías’s notion of 1960s Chicano music as a complex
racialized expression of resistance maps onto the enterprise of cruising and its
reliance on the interstitial spaces of metropolitan Los Angeles.
25
Whittier Boulevard

24
See Mauricio Mazón, The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1984); Anthony Macías, Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance,
and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935-1968 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Luis Alvarez,
The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2008).

25
Anthony Macías, Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los
Angeles, 1935-1968 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); See also, George Lipsitz, “Cruising
Around the Historical Bloc: Postmodernism and Popular Music in East Los Angeles,” Cultural
Critique, No. 5, Modernity and Modernism, Postmodernity and Postmodernism, (winter 1986-1987):
pp. 157-77. Lipsitz’s body of scholarship includes an impressive list of publications that place popular
music at the center of resistance across the “long fetch of history.” See, Lipsitz, Time Passages:
196
was both a literal and figurative interstitial space in the suburbs fanning out from the
Eastside, into what social scientists Victor Valle and Rodolfo Torres have called the
Greater Eastside.
26
Because Chicana and Chicano youth have historically
encountered discrimination in their recreational endeavors at places like the beach or
Disneyland, Whittier Boulevard on weekend nights became their own version of
Disneyland where the slow train of lowriders that cruised stealthily along the main
drag mimicked the slow boat ride of theme park’s famed “Small World” attraction.
Taking Disneyland as a point of departure, suburban cultural history is fraught with
inconsistencies and mischaracterizations of the Chicana/o role in claiming suburban
space and informing it with their own meaning. Historian Eric Avila’s work on Los
Angeles provides a case-in-point. Rather than explore the deep connections of ethnic
Mexicans to the suburbs in which he analyzes, Avila casts them within a binary
framework of black and white in ways that continue to distort the historical realities
of Mexican Americans’ complex relationship with suburban Los Angeles.
27

From the mid-1960s to the 1980s, suburban Chicana and Chicano youth
transformed cruising from an “urban” form of recreation into a wider metropolitan

Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2002); Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

26
Valle and Torres argue for an expanded analysis of Latino space in major urban centers that re-
maps our understandings of the Latina/a metropolitan experience. Using Los Angeles as a case study,
the authors call attention to the interconnected political economies and cultural spaces shared by
Eastside barrio residents and Latina/os in surrounding suburbs in the 1990s. See, Victor Valle and
Rodolfo Torres, Latino Metropolis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

27
See, Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
197
cultural phenomenon that drew heightened police harassment and suburban
homeowner anxieties over crime and property values. The field of urban history is
moving towards a broader analytic framework that investigates the complex
relationships between large cities and suburbs. This chapter addresses how Mexican
American youth in the “city” and the “suburbs” created a dynamic relationship built
upon racial identity, Southern California’s car culture, and music.
In late 1965, a popular East Los Angeles band named Thee Midniters’
launched the anthem of weekend cruising on a B-side. The song, aptly titled
“Whittier Boulevard,” deftly captures the vibrance of youth culture in Southern
California while also drawing from the sounds of the Boulevard itself deploying the
faint hum of crowds and car horns in the background. The only lyrics of the mostly
instrumental song, “Let’s take a trip down Whittier Boulevard,” are followed by a
cry of “Arriba! Arriba!” as pulsating drums and guitar riffs takeover.
Thee Midniters are identified by several scholars as the bridge between the
Mexican American Generation and the Chicano Generation.
28
Thee Midniters’ place
in the rise of Chicano identity, particularly in the emergence of cruising, cannot be
ignored. In discussing the genesis of the song “Whittier Boulevard,” band member,
Romeo Prado, explained: “We practiced on Whittier Boulevard, we cruised Whittier
Boulevard, and [band manager] Eddie Torres lived on Whittier Boulevard. So we

28
Dave Reyes and Tom Waldman, Land of a Thousand Dances: Chicano Rock’n’Roll from Southern
California (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998); Anthony Macías, Mexican
American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935-1968 (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2008), p. 193.

198
thought, ‘Why not write a song about Whittier Boulevard?’”
29
However, Thee
Midniters did not create the tune “Whittier Boulevard” in a vacuum; other songs
expressed the joys of living a young life in Southern California. Hits from the 1960s
such as “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas and the Papas and “Surfin’ USA,” by
the Beach Boys helped to create a youth-inspired, leisurely image of Southern
California life.
30
While this wider musical context put “Whittier Boulevard” squarely
within a genre that celebrated youth, Thee Midniters’ music also reflected the
racialized boundaries of metropolitan Los Angeles. The aforementioned songs
embrace an idealized version of California free from racial tension, but Thee
Midniters’ homage to Chicana/o youth culture is also a complex articulation of
racialized space. Few mid-1960s rock fans would have recognized the racial
meaning of taking a trip down Whittier Boulevard, unless they experienced the
Greater Eastside cruising scene.
In the latter half of the 1960s, as the popularity of cruising matured, the Los
Angeles County Sheriff’s Department ramped up their patrol and surveillance of the
Boulevard in East Los Angeles. One year after the famed 1968 East LA Blowouts
where Chicana and Chicano youths staged mass walk outs from their Eastside high
schools in protest of educational tracking, racist teachers and administrators, and a
lack of Mexican American history courses, Whittier Boulevard, again, became a site
of struggle. In July 1969, young Chicanas and Chicanos held a protest rally against

29
Reyes and Waldman, p. 92.

30
Reyes and Waldman, p. 92.
199
the Sheriff’s Department decision to strictly enforce curfew laws and increase the
number of citations issued to cruisers. The peaceful protest quickly devolved into
chaos as sheriff deputies indiscriminately clubbed protestors and made mass arrests.
According to La Raza Magazine the rioting lasted three days and was the fourth such
scene involving police brutality within the previous 12 months.
31
Such repressive
measures along the drag in East Los Angeles pushed cruisers further down the
Boulevard into the suburbs of Montebello, Pico Rivera, and Whittier which had
experienced significant increases in Mexican American homeowners and tenants in
the 1960s. According to the United States Bureau of the Census, in 1970 Mexican
Americans comprised 47% of the population in Montebello, 61% in Pico Rivera, and
13% in Whittier.
32

Despite the lengths cruisers took to avoid police confrontations like those in
East Los Angeles, they met with similar forms of intimidation in the suburban
settings as well. Using “gang violence” as an excuse to harass young Chicanas and
Chicanos, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in Pico Rivera regularly
stopped cars with non-gang members and dismantled their cars in search of drugs,
weapons, or any other type of paraphernalia that could elicit a citation or arrest.
33
To
justify their actions, law enforcement officials trotted out shocking crime statistics

31
“Sheriffs [sic] Riot on Whittier Blvd.,” La Raza, vol. 1, no. 2, (ca. 1969), pp. 7-8.

32
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Population and Housing: 1970. Census Tracts. Final Report
PHC(1)-117. Los Angeles-Long Beach, Calif., SMSA Part 1 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1972), 670.

33
Police harassment was a regular complaint of cruisers, many of whom pointed out that it was the
gang members who caused all the trouble on the Boulevard. See, for example, Keith Takahashi,
“Youths Organize Group to Protect Cruisers’ Rights,” Los Angeles Times, 5 August 1976, p. SE1.

200
and tied cruising directly to gang activity. However, communities that experienced
crippling disinvestment of private and government resources in the 1970s
experienced similar bouts with violent crime. In the uncertain economic times of
1970s Los Angeles, the Greater Eastside endured some of the most staggering losses
of revenue beginning with the Richard Nixon Administration’s dismantling of local
safety nets through his decimation of War on Poverty funds and also through the
closure of large employers like the Ford Motor Company’s assembly plant in Pico
Rivera in 1976. In this environment, cruising offered a free recreational alternative
for youths already impacted by a flailing economy.
Gangs did pose a problem, however, as far as fellow cruisers were concerned.
Many cruisers lamented the violent conflicts between rival gangs as the blame for
police crackdowns on cruising. Like the character Raymond says in Boulevard
Nights, “It all changed when the cholos came around,” many young Chicanas and
Chicanos expressed a similar sense of loss brought by increased violence and
attendant police surveillance. A.L., a 22-year old biker who frequented Whittier
Boulevard, told a reporter in 1979, “We’re just bikers, man…People think we’re out
to make trouble, but we’re not. It’s the cholos that cause the problems. It’s the truth.
Who cares about the cholos, anyway?”
34
In his succinct description of the problem,
A.L. problematizes the underpinnings of police and community complaints regarding
cruising. While official responses tended to portray cruising itself as the problem,

34
Joy Horowitz, “Whittier Cruising: A Tradition Gone Sour,” Los Angeles Times, 8 August 1979, p.
E1.
201
within the cruising circuit, young Chicanas and Chicanos distinguished amongst
themselves who the troublemakers were.
In their own defense, cruisers challenged the brutal tactics of police
harassment and defied law enforcement attempts to barricade sections of Whittier
Boulevard. In August 1976, a mixed-race group of white and Chicana/o youths in the
City of Whittier formed a “Whittier Blvd. Rights Committee” to air their grievances
to the city council. At a planning meeting in a local park that drew over 100 people,
the leaders of the Whittier Blvd. Rights Committee denounced police harassment and
demanded a clear set of guidelines outlining the grounds for arrest and citation.
Additionally, the Whittier Blvd. Rights Committee developed an agenda for
combating the attempts by the police department to limit their use of the public
thoroughfare: they invited members of the American Civil Liberties Union to
observe the conduct of police officers on weekend nights, requested public hearings
to discuss cruising and individual rights, invited city council members and police
officials to discuss short- and long-term solutions for more amicable relations
between cruisers and police, and initiated meetings with car clubs to discuss ways to
achieve the autonomy afforded them by occupying public space.
35

Despite the best efforts of some youth to challenge the repressive tactics of
the police in the late 1970s, local authorities pushed forward with a plan meant to

35
Takahashi, “Youths Organize Group to Protect Cruisers’ Rights,” Los Angeles Times, 5 August
1976, pg. SE1. The City of Whittier responded by forming a social services panel to discuss the
“cruising problem.” See, Takahashi, “Social Services Panel to Work on Cruising Problem,” Los
Angeles Times, 12 August 1976, p. SE1.

202
frustrate cruisers. The Los Angeles County Sheriff order barricades put in place to
stop the flow of traffic to the Boulevard. Attempts were even made to block off side
streets that led into Whittier Boulevard. These measures offered temporary relief
from cruising, but it was not long before cruisers moved further down the Boulevard,
or even onto parallel streets such as Beverly or Olympic. Ronnie Delgadillo, a 14-
year old said with amusement, “They can’t stop the cruisers, no way can they stop
them.”
36
Another young person agreed, in a quote to a Los Angeles Times reporter he
gestured at the boundless agency cruisers enjoyed in saying: “The cruisers will just
go somewhere else.”
37
That somewhere else was further down the Boulevard.
In the suburban areas of Montebello, Pico Rivera, and Whittier homeowners
complained that side-street parking presented the largest threat to neighborhood
safety. When the City of Montebello blocked off all side streets along Whittier
Boulevard, homeowners hailed the decision as “the best thing they’ve ever done.”
38

Homeowners in Pico Rivera disagreed. Pico Rivera City Manager John Donlevy
argued: “Moving the cruisers down the road a bit might correct Montebello’s
problems, but it sure doesn’t help us.”
39

36
Marcida Dodson, “Barriers Make Boulevard Night an Empty One,” Los Angeles Times, 2
September 1979, p. A3.

37
Ibid.

38
Blake Gumprecht, “Cruiser Win Boulevard, but Montebello Find Peace,” Los Angeles Times, 20
July 1980, pg. SE1_B1.

39
Rebecca Trounson, “City to Proceed with Barricade,” Los Angeles Times, 12 February 1981, p.
SE1.
203
For young Chicana and Chicano cruisers, the distinctions between suburban
and urban mattered less than the autonomous expression they enjoyed on the
Boulevard. Yet, the cultural power of cruising down la calle (the street) and “hitting
switches” from East LA to Whittier punctuated the material phenomenon of ethnic
Mexican suburbanization. Centrifugal demographic transitions in the cities of
Montebello, Pico Rivera, and Whittier created more than profound changes in the
political and economic arenas of these suburban municipalities. It also gave rise to a
flourishing, racialized youth culture tied to the use of suburban public space. The
wide boulevards that barreled through ethnic Mexican neighborhoods, coupled with
pervasive pop-cultural expressions of Chicano cruising, transformed the Boulevard
experience into a wider metropolitan phenomenon that included urban and suburban
spheres. Danny De La Paz, the young star of Boulevard Nights, was born and raised
in Whittier in a self-admittedly middle-class neighborhood. Yet, his iconic portrayal
of Chuco underscores the complexity of metropolitan Chicano culture as ‘urban’ and
‘suburban’ overlapped. Viewing the ways that Chicana and Chicano youth in
metropolitan Los Angeles used space as a form of cultural expression complicates
the seemingly stark contrast between cities and suburbs.
Conclusion
Both education and cruising became arenas of struggle for Mexican
American youths seeking to make a space for themselves in suburban Los Angeles.
Suburban areas across the country were famously marketed as a youth-centered
spaces for reasons not least of which owed to neighborhood schools and wide-open
204
spaces. As Mexican Americans encountered the public school systems in El Monte
and Pico Rivera, they spun their aspirations of upward mobility into action.
Education offered the opportunity to move up the social and economic ladder and
parent and student activism for fairness and equality in the schools evinced a broad-
based commitment to secure that promise for future generations.
Cruising likewise reflected a youth movement not centered wholly on
political activism. While East Los Angeles spawned Chicano cruiser culture, the
boulevards that connected the urban barrio to its adjacent suburbs filtered both cars
and culture into suburban spaces. For many suburbanites, including Mexican
American homeowners, this transfer of youth culture from the “city” threatened to
undermine the tranquility that they sought in places like Montebello, Pico Rivera,
and Whittier. Yet the youths at the forefront of cruising merely seized onto a mode
of recreation emblematic of neighborhoods in economic and demographic transition.
The closing of the Ford Motor Plant in 1976 that put thousands of local area
residents out of work and the abrupt shrinkage of government programs in these
areas left youths with few other alternatives for recreation. Cruising transformed The
Boulevard into a public space that connected suburban youth to a wider Chicana and
Chicano youth culture.
205
206
CONCLUSION
Colonias such as Hicks Camp became overrun by suburban growth in the
decades following the Second World War. These communities provided a critical
linkage between the rural past of ethnic Mexicans in Los Angeles and their suburban
future. With established communities already in place, Mexican Americans from the
Eastside moved into new suburbs by challenging racial discrimination and forging a
uniquely racialized suburban identity. This cohort, emboldened by their suburban
status, sought to cement their positions through electoral and grassroots political
activity. By establishing community organizations, representing the community on
municipal councils, and advocating for fair housing Mexican Americans sought to
broaden the levels of opportunity for other Mexican Americans to acquire suburban
homeownership.
Politics surrounding youth activities played an important role in applying
meaning to these Mexican American suburban spaces because parents and students
challenged discrimination in schools and advocated for quality education
commensurate with suburban residency. Likewise, Chicano youth embraced the
automobile as a way to express their culture on the wide streets and boulevards of
suburbia sending a resounding message that the racial composition had changed.
Middle-class Mexican Americans contributed to this sea-change in more
ways than buying into neighborhoods. In the beginning of the 1960s they provided
key leadership in efforts to dismantle working-class barrios. These projects inspired
community protest to slum clearance which led to a sort of peace that incorporated
community input and middle class directions. From the 1940s to the 1970s, Mexican
Americans exercised a profound ability to suburbanize the community east of Los
Angeles that paralleled the consolidation of urban barrios on the Eastside.
Postwar suburbanization expanded the separation between white and black
Angelenos crippling the opportunities for African Americans to collectively pursue
upward mobility. Mexicans Americans on the Eastside experienced similar economic
disadvantages that contributed to the barrioization of Boyle Heights, Lincoln
Heights, and East Los Angeles. However, the fluidity and historical contingency of
racial categories provided crucial openings for Mexican Americans to acquire
suburban housing. The outcomes of Mexican Americans’ use of racial identity
politics provoke careful reexamination of reflexive interpretations that paint them
simply as sell-outs. Instead, they exercised a strategic manipulation of racial
categories to clear a path for upward mobility for themselves and their community.
The grassroots work of the Mexican American Political Association, while not
entirely successful in placing Mexican American political figures in statewide office,
became a vehicle to oppose discrimination at the local level in suburban barrios.
Lastly, even in their collusion with redevelopers, middle-class Mexican Americans
held tight to their racial identities if only as a means to refract charges by Flood
Ranch residents that the redevelopment project represented a racist plan aimed at
their wholesale removal. Using redevelopment as a strategy to boost working-class
ethnic Mexicans into suburban homes was misguided and imperfect, but the incident
provides a window onto important struggles around identity within the ethnic
207
Mexican community by exhibiting the different uses of racial language to mobilize
community support.
Barrioization applied to the suburban context moves away from earlier
interpretations of ethnic Mexican community formation that mark barrios
universally as nodes of concentrated poverty. Instead, this dissertation contributes a
vision of ethnic Mexican community development that is diverse and decentered. As
colonias transitioned into suburban barrios they served as community anchors that
drew other Mexican Americans into the social and political world of metropolitan
Los Angeles. New subdivision housing was often marked implicitly by
segregationist codes that directed (or contained) the growth of the Mexican
American population to a specific section of town. Sometimes, as in the case with
the Rancho Burke development in modern-day Pico Rivera, developers built housing
tracts that specifically targeted Mexican American veterans. Yet, by the end of the
1960s, the Mexican side of town in almost all of these postwar suburbs had become
so prevalent that the town itself took on a predominantly ethnic Mexican character.
Everything from housing, to employment, to schools, to street recreation reflected
the demographic changes in the eastern Los Angeles County suburbs by the
beginning of the 1970s.
Moreover, the significant transformation of these communities has escaped
the purview of scholars currently investigating questions about the role of postwar
suburbs in altering the American way of life. The persistence of the black/white
paradigm that originated in urban studies and transferred smoothly into suburban
208
studies obstructs serious analysis into the integral challenges that histories of other
people of color present to the national narrative. As a consequence, the black/white
dichotomy removes groups like Latinos and Asian Americans from the spaces that
construct the national framework like the suburbs, rendering the story incomplete at
best. Ethnic Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Chicana/os, and Latinos did, in fact,
become suburban at the same time that the nation became suburban. It is time to
recalibrate the lenses of Chicana/o and suburban history to capture this historical
reality.
209
210
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Asset Metadata

Creator Gonzalez, Jerry (author)

Core Title A place in the sun: Mexican Americans, race, and the suburbanization of Los Angeles, 1940-1980

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program History

Publication Date 08/05/2009

Defense Date 05/28/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Chicano history,Los Angeles history,Mexican Americans,OAI-PMH Harvest,Race

Place Name Los Angeles (city or populated place)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Sanchez, George J. (committee chair), Deverell, William F. (committee member), Saito, Leland T. (committee member)

Creator Email jbgonzal@usc.edu,jerry.gonzalez3@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2485

Unique identifier UC1138396

Identifier etd-Gonzalez-3042 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-187708 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2485 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Gonzalez-3042.pdf

Dmrecord 187708

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Gonzalez, Jerry

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu