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On the move and in the moment: community formation, identity, and opportunity in South central Los Angeles, 1945-2008
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On the move and in the moment: community formation, identity, and opportunity in South central Los Angeles, 1945-2008
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ON THE MOVE AND IN THE MOMENT:
COMMUNITY FORMATION, IDENTITY, AND OPPORTUNITY IN
SOUTH CENTRAL LOS ANGELES, 1945-2008
by
Abigail Rosas
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)
August 2011
Copyright 2011 Abigail Rosas
ii
DEDICATION
For my devoted and generous parents,
Dolores and Francisco Rosas
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The genesis of this project began with my interest in understanding how and why
my family settled in South Central Los Angeles. I was determined to uncover how my
parents and their generation of Mexican immigrant women and men transformed the
character of South Central. Born and raised in South Central has made me painfully
aware of the daily struggles that working class, working poor, and poor people of color
face and the innovative ways that despite the most oppressive of circumstances they exert
to create community. The enduring spirit and endless sacrifices of not only my parents
but countless fellow Mexican immigrant and African American South Central residents
elevated the importance of learning more about and from them, as well as my gratitude
for their unwavering confidence and trust. These women and men’s willingness to share
their personal recollections and records of their histories of migration, settlement, and
community made investigating and ultimately, finishing this dissertation a purposeful
reality. I hope that this investigation advances our understanding of the heart and
imaginaries that have kept my family and this community strong and on the move and in
the moment.
The unconditional love, support, and thoughtfulness of my mother and father,
Dolores and Francisco Rosas, have inspired and nurtured this dissertation to completion.
Everyday I strive to emulate and honor their acts of kindness, dignity, humility, sacrifice,
and work ethnic. My mother is the strongest woman I know. Our conversations,
troubleshooting, and preparation of delicious meals have been energizing and formative
iv
to my growing appreciation for her distinct brand of family and feminism. I am fortunate
and honored to have her as my mother. She is one in a million. My father’s blind
confidence and sage advice have been a constant source of inspiration. I am always in
awe of his deep seated interest in making sure he does everything within his reach to
make sure I pursue my dreams, quest for answers, travels, or simply share a much needed
soccer match and good meal with him. I hope this dissertation helps him realize how
much his devotion to my education means to me. My parents’ reading of the world and
Mexican immigration—our conversations—on the challenges facing South Central
residents are at the heart of every one of my dissertation chapters.
My sister Ana Elizabeth—Lizzie— has been an unwavering source of unending
confidence and love. She is, and continues, to be my role model and sister in the truest
sense of the word. I can always count on her generous spirit to cheer me up, challenge
me, and value the importance of my research, service, and individuality. She is the best
sister and friend a person can ask for. I am eternally grateful to learn from her civic
engagement and sisterhood. She is truly a trailblazer in our family, community, and field.
Mil gracias to my parents and sister for making it possible to dream and grow together in
support of each other and a more just society.
I have also had the honor and privilege to work with inspirational scholars,
mentors, and individuals. Dr. George J. Sanchez’s dedication, example, and vision have
proven invaluable not only for my academic career, but that of countless others in our
field. Academia is indebted to his tenacity and commitment to diversifying who is
mentoring women and men of color in our profession. Muchisimas gracias for nurturing a
v
project that aimed to capture the complexity of working people’s lived experiences across
racial difference, and believing in my undertaking of this complex history of struggle. Dr.
Robin D.G. Kelley’s sensibility towards theorizing how everyday acts and on the ground
realities of disenfranchised of people of color are valid sites of investigation, especially to
theorizing agency and community has been formative to my understanding of South
Central’s complex character. Sarah Banet-Weiser also played a seminal role in the
completion of this dissertation as she always encouraged me to continue my commitment
towards placing the struggles of women of color front and center. Thank you, Sarah.
Finally, Bill Deverell offered meaningful and timely advice on how to further develop
this investigation. In the end, I am extremely thankful for working with a generous
dissertation committee that was most forthcoming when sharing their advice, feedback,
and expertise.
My intellectual curiosity for pursuing my investigation of South Central was
nurtured as an undergraduate student at Stanford University. Dr. Albert Camarillo opened
my eyes to the rigors, rewards, and excitement that come from undertaking research that
is civically engaged and advances a more nuanced historical underestimating of our
world. I am grateful for his generosity throughout my intellectual career. At Stanford, I
also worked for Margarita Ibarra. A generous, caring, loving, and spunky woman that
made Stanford my second home. She passed away this year, but all throughout my
undergraduate and graduate career, and I am certain now in spirit, she continues to cheer
me on. Gracias, Margarita! You are missed.
vi
I feel fortunate to have pursued my graduate education at the University of
Southern California’s Department of American Studies and Ethnicity. Courses, office
hours, and workshops offered by Ruthie Gilmore, Roberto Lint-Sagarena, Jane Iwamura,
Josh Kun, Shana Redmond, Macarena Gomez Barris, and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo
made this campus seminal to my intellectual development. Our departmental
administrative staff: Sandra Hopwood, Jujuana Preston, Kitty Lai, and Sonia Rodriguez
were also invaluable to my progress. Their efforts ensured my efficient completion of
required coursework and other degree requirements.
I am most appreciative for the generous collegiality of Luis Alvarez and Danny
Widener. Their invitation to participate in the Comparative History Workshop on
Chicana/o-African American Relations at the University of California, San Diego made it
possible to learn from Dr. George Lipsitz, Gaye Theresa Johnson, Catherine Ramirez,
Jason Ferreira, and Lauren Araiza. Moreover, the timing of this workshop made it
possible to begin writing the first chapter of my dissertation. They were most
encouraging at this stage of my career in which I was developing my approach to the
complexity and resilience of interracial race relations. Adrian Burgos, Jr., Gabriela
Arredondo, Monica Perales, Anthony Macias, Stephen Pitti, Ernesto Chavez, Sonia Lee,
Adrienne Petty, and Marc Rodriguez have similarly provided comments and feedback on
works in progress at critical junctures. Josh Kun, Laura Pulido, and Brian Benhken’s
comments also made writing this dissertation that much more productive. Their editorial
comments on select parts of my investigation of South Central’s historical trajectory were
immensely helpful.
vii
I have received financial support from the Social Science Research Council,
Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral and Dissertation
Fellowship, and John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Doctoral Dissertation
Fellowship. These fellowships provided the resources to conduct extensive oral histories
as well as archival research at the University of Southern California, Stanford University,
and Southern California Library for Social Science and Research. A Smithsonian
Minority Visiting Student Fellowship at the National Museum of American History,
under the mentorship of Steve Velasquez and Faith Davis Ruffins, was invaluable as I
combed through the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park,
Maryland and Library of Congress. Their advice made gathering evidence of the national
context for the local implementation of the War on Poverty programs in Los Angeles
feasible. The Organization of American Historians’ Nathan Huggins-Benjamin Quarles
Award provided the financial support to conduct archival research at the California State
Archives, University of California, Los Angeles, and Huntington Research Library.
Thank you to all the members of the Committee on the Status of African American,
Latino/a, Asian American, and Native American (ALANA). This award as well as this
committee’s service and efforts for diversifying of the historical profession mean very
much to me. At these various archives, I have also benefitted from the assistance,
friendliness, and forthcoming attitude of knowledgeable archivists.
Mil gracias to Karina Salazar Gookin and Cynthia Gomez for always keeping me
grounded, putting things in perspective, and reading my countless emails. I am lucky we
became close and dear friends while at Stanford, and continue to look forward to many
viii
more years of adventures, memories, and travels. Elda Maria Roman—you are truly the
best! Your care, compassion, generosity, and inquisitiveness have kept our friendship
alive and thriving. Your charm, honesty, and wit make you a treasure, and one of my
dearest friends. You three ladies are driven, confident, and truly inspirational. In 2008, I
shared office space with a gentleman I now regard as my dear friend—Stevie Ruiz.
Sharing adventures at the NARA and Library of Congress and hanging out over a nice
meal made that summer fun and memorable. I am thankful our friendship blossomed
beyond that summer. Your countless encouraging, funny, and whimsical texts and chats
made finishing this dissertation a bit easier. Sharing fun times in San Diego with Stevie
and Laura Gutierrez has made all the difference. To the Disney homies, Rob Eap and
Mark Padoongpatt, thank you for all the laughs, stories, and friendship. Rob, countless
carpool adventures listening to Marvin Gaye and impromptu movies and meals—good
times—have made graduate school a memorable experience. Chrisshonna Grant Nieva,
thank you for the countless conversations we shared concerning the interracial dynamics
of L.A. and companionship when studying and writing at coffee shops throughout L.A..
I am deeply grateful to have Saski Casanova, Prisilla Lerza, Anna Chen Arroyo,
Alice Villatoro, Christel Miller, Nancy Mata, Michael Brown II, Glenn Gookin, Romulo
Salazar, and Esteban Galvan as dear, funny, and generous friends. Also, Armando Garcia,
Margaret Salazar-Porzio, Todd Honma, Porsha Cropper, Gretel Vera Rosas, Terrion
Williamson, Laura Fugikawa, Adam Bush, Michelle Commander, Celeste Menchaca,
Priscilla Leiva, Adrian Felix, Mike Amezcua, Milo Alvarez, Lori Flores, Emily Hobson,
Lisa Ramos, Hernan Ramirez, Julie Wiese, Rosina Lozano, Gilbert Estrada, Barbara
ix
Soliz, Romeo Guzman, Jih-Fei Cheng, Christian Paiz, and Genevieve Carpio as
wonderfully supportive colleagues and friends. Again, thank you for your positive energy
and encouragement.
I have been extremely honored to form part of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate
Fellowship. This fellowship has been a wonderful source of support, but more
importantly has introduced me to magnificent scholars of color nationwide. I have
benefitted from generous feedback at this fellowship program’s annual conferences by
John McKiernan Gonzalez, Joshua Guild, and Jordan Beltran Gonzalez. As I was putting
the finishing touches on my dissertation, I had the privilege to work with a new cohort of
Mellon fellows at Whittier College: Justin Martinez, Mario Obando, Jr., Nick Dante,
Natalie Smythe, Juan Pablo Bustos, Amber Orozco, Michelle Daneri, and Marina Najera.
Learning from their lived experience, research projects, and their eagerness for entering
into the academy reminded me of the important work and commitment we have ahead of
ourselves as scholars of color. Engaging with students like them is the reason I entered
and strive to be a part of this profession.
I am also and most indebted to the families in the ‘hood who have offered
supportive, encouraging, and loving words of friendship and support. Having the Manzo,
Nuno, Garza, Frias, Magallanes, Rodriguez, Ruiz, Sanchez, and Cervantez’s family in my
corner has made a difference. Finally, it has been a blessing to be inspired by the prayers,
phone calls, and generosity that my aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents in San
Martin de Hidalgo and Guadalajara, Jalisco have bestowed upon me. The love and strides
of my family have and will remain empowering forms of knowing.
x
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
List of Tables xi
List of Figures xii
Abstract xiii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 33
Urban Pioneers:
Mexican Immigrants Become “Bonafide” Residents
Chapter 2 143
Let’s Get Them Off to a Headstart!:
Head Start Programs and School Readiness
Chapter 3 262
The Wave of the Future:
Community Health Centers
Chapter 4 377
There is a Defined “Community”:
The Ideological and Social Construction of an African American Owned Bank
Conclusion 418
References 427
Bibliography 430
xi
LIST OF TABLES
Table 1: Parents Improvement Council Head Start Centers, 1965 187
Table 2: Southeast and Central Regional Population, 1970 285
Table 3: Residents in Low-Income Areas Compared to Affluent Areas 324
Table 4: Family Planning Specialist Consultation Days, 1976 344
xii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Los Angeles County Racial/Ethnic Breakdown, 1970 4
Figure 2: Los Angeles County Racial/Ethnic Breakdown, 1980 4
xiii
ABSTRACT
On the Move and in the Moment examines the relational community formation of
ethnic Mexicans and African American residents in South Central Los Angeles from the
post World War II period to 2008. I historicize the complexity of South Central Los
Angeles African American and ethnic Mexican residents’ racial attitudes, activism, and
cooperation, as their lives are constantly challenged by diminishing government services,
economic disinvestment, and immigration reform. I argue that a binary understanding of
tension and cooperation does not adequately define their interaction, but rather closer
inspection of their nuanced and complex daily and neighborly acts best captures the
generative power of their community formation. I investigate understudied community
sectors like minority owned banking institutions and War on Poverty initiatives in the
form of community and government operated health clinics and Head Start programs to
demonstrate how a strong African American historical legacy of settlement intersects
with a growing Mexican immigrant population.
Using archival research, newspapers, and oral life histories, I reveal the fragile
state of family health, business, and education among impoverished African Americans
and ethnic Mexican South Central Los Angeles residents. My approach to the
investigation of the lives of South Central Los Angeles residents does not underestimate
how changes in this region’s economy, local, national, and transnational interpretations of
immigration policy, and disinvestment in the accessibility and quality of U.S. government
services have transformed the social, cultural, institutional, and political climate and
interactions shaping these residents’ interconnected struggles for community and U.S.
xiv
government services. Their actions serve to re-conceptualize South Central Los Angeles
as a globalized city rife with generative race relations where working-class people’s
decisions are made on the move and in the moment.
1
INTRODUCTION
In the fall of October 1978, Dolores Rosas boarded a bus in San Martin de
Hidalgo, Jalisco, Mexico. With her infant child in tow, she journeyed to Los Angeles,
California. Like countless Mexican immigrants before her, she crossed the Mexican
countryside by rail until arriving in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico. Once there she did
not allow her anxiety and fears over what could happen to them as undocumented
Mexican immigrants overwhelm her. Instead, she relied on a coyote to complete their
migration into the United States. Upon arriving safely in Downtown Los Angeles, she
and her daughter reunited with her husband, Francisco Rosas. Her new home was in the
heart of Los Angeles’s African American community—South Central Los Angeles
(South Central). She was shocked to learn that predominantly African American children,
women, and men populated South Central. Her husband had failed to mention that they
were going to settle in such a community. Francisco had immigrated to South Central Los
Angeles three years prior, and was well aware of the racial demographics of this city.
Dolores recalls, “I guess you can say he did tell me. Me dijo, no te preocupres, haye de
toda gente, nombre, todo va estar bien (He told me, don’t worry, there’s all kinds of
people. Everything will be alright.)”
1
In anticipation of the reunification of his family, Francisco had secured an
apartment on 50
th
Street and Main Street, a block away from where fellow Mexican rural
hometown friends had settled. But their immediate neighbors were still largely African
American. At first Dolores believed living in South Central would be temporary, but as
1
Oral history with author, Dolores Rosas, Los Angeles, September 23, 2009.
2
the years passed South Central became more and more their world, their center, their
home. Similarly in the mid-twentieth century, African American migrants also boarded
buses in the South heading West. These migrants sought to leave behind the racial
violence of the South to thrive in the “land of milk and honey.” Like Dolores, Ruth Smith
boarded a train in Houston, Texas and made the journey West in search of better housing
and employment opportunities. She arrived in Los Angeles in the aftermath of the Watts
uprising in 1965 and temporarily settled into a community devastated by days of unrest.
As the conditions in Watts worsened in the late 1960s, she decided to purchase a home a
few blocks away from Central Avenue. Generations of African American migrants settled
in Los Angeles at the turn of the twentieth century and well into the postwar years in
pursuit of the opportunities that Los Angeles had to offer. These opportunities were
limited as housing discrimination forced African Americans to reside in South Central. In
the early twentieth century, South Central became the backdrop for a vibrant African
American community—Central Avenue was its center. Along “the avenue,” were a host
of African American owned and operated businesses like the Dunbar Hotel and Golden
State Mutual Life Insurance Company. Central Avenue became the musical center for
Jazz artists like Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and Lena Horne. Unlike other cities
throughout the United States African Americans gained meaningful employment options,
pursued political representation, and established cultural, economic, and social centers.
Nonetheless throughout the 1950s and 1960s, white flight, residential segregation, and
economic transformations shattered African Americans’ vision and reality, resulting in
the emergence of a predominantly African American yet impoverished community. The
3
bifurcation between working class and middle class African Americans and the impact
and legacy of real estate restrictive covenants ensured that a sector of the African
American community felt abandoned and disenfranchised within South Central’s
boundaries.
2
This forced segregation, thus, rendered South Central Los Angeles a space,
place, and community clearly marked as African American.
The transformations of the late 1960s—deindustrialization, joblessness,
reindustrialization in the garment and service sectors, violence, and police aggression and
surveillance—would have devastating effects for the future of South Central.
3
It is in this
changing political, social, and economic climate and landscape that thousands of
undocumented and legalized Mexican immigrants from Mexico settled throughout South
Central’s city streets. Dolores, Francisco, and fellow Mexican immigrants in the 1970s
and 1980s, were in fact part of a new wave of “pioneros (pioneers)” as they moved into
South Central when few Mexican immigrants dared to do so and as middle class African
Americans that had the ability to do so moved out. In 1970, the Latino population of
South Central was approximately 50,000 or roughly 10 percent of the area’s total
population. And by 1980 the population had doubled to 100,000 or about 20 percent of
the total South Central population.
4
2
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 (University of California Press, 2003); Mark Wild, Street Meeting: Multiethnic
Neighborhoods in Early Twentieth Century Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
3
Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
4
David Fabienke, “Beyond the Racial Divide: Perceptions of Minority Residents on Coalition Building in
South Los Angeles” Tomas Rivera Policy Brief (June 2007), 2. Figure 1 and 2 maps are from: “Los
Angeles County Racial/Ethnic Breakdown, 1970 and 1980,” Lewis Center for Regional and Policy Studies,
4
Figure 1: Los Angeles County Racial/Ethnic Breakdown, 1970
Figure 2: Los Angeles County Racial/Ethnic Breakdown, 1980
University of California, Los Angeles.
http://www.lewis.ucla.edu/publications/projectreports.cfm?listing=detailed.
5
Currently, South Central’s city streets are home to countless barbershops
paleteros, taquerias, graffiti, and the musical sounds of hip-hop, rap, banda, cumbia,
corridos, and rock. Despite the overwhelming presence of Latinos in the area, there still
remains a strong sense of its African American history. Restaurants that serve Soul and
Mexican food, business signs written in English and Spanish, and murals showcasing
African American and Chicano pride are illustrative of how this community has changed.
This multiracial landscape, however, was years in the making. For Mexican immigrants
like Dolores, who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s, South Central was clearly marked as
an African American space as they were 80 percent of the population, businesses, social,
and government services catered to their needs, African American political
representation, and in popular culture and people’s minds South Central was African
American. Tracing the impact of this demographic shift in a community like South
Central demonstrates that this wave of Latino immigrants transformed the city’s strong
historical African American character in unforeseeable ways.
Utilizing archival research and oral life histories of current African American and
ethnic Mexican South Central residents, On the Move and in the Moment, argues that
Mexican immigrants ushered in a demographic transformation that reconfigured the
interracial interactions among and between South Central’s African American and
Mexican immigrant residents. Both African Americans and Mexican immigrants
migrated to Los Angeles with similar hopes and dreams. African American migrants
journeyed to South Central to escape the racist and violent U.S. South and start anew in
Los Angeles. Racial segregation, other forms of discrimination, and limited employment
6
and housing opportunities relegated them to South Central. Hence, this city emerged as
the backdrop for African Americans to craft a Black identity and a sense of belonging
that rested on the residential, entrepreneurial, and creative ownership of this space and
community.
Similarly, Mexican immigrants came to the United States in search of an
opportunity, and faced their own set of challenges. Migrating to another country, living
with the fear of deportation due to their undocumented immigration status, and unable to
speak the language were among the barriers they confronted upon arriving in South
Central. But most importantly, and unbeknownst to many of these immigrants, these
urban pioneers were settling in a community rich in African American character and
history. It became invaluable for Mexican immigrant South Central residents to quickly
learn that like their African American neighbors, they too faced a similar dehumanizing
regime and racialization by virtue of living in South Central together.
Hence, this dissertation demonstrates that by living in the same space, Mexican
immigrant residents were negatively racialized just as African American residents before
and alongside them. Such racialization shaped the tense and collaborative moments in
which African Americans tried to maintain their claim to South Central’s Black character
and history in the midst of Mexican immigrant neighbors coming to terms with living and
settling permanently in this predominantly African American community. Historically
disentangling African American and Mexican immigrant residents’ implementation and
pursuit of services like Head Start, community health centers, and minority owned bank
reveals moments of coalition and tension. African American and Mexican immigrant
7
interactions in South Central must be viewed through a lens of charged and muted
relations and as opportunities to craft something new. These residents constantly
negotiated their relationships through evolving and changing power, political, economic,
and social structures that perpetually demonizes and prosecutes poor people of color. It is
in this social landscape that these residents’ struggles for equality, dignity, humanity, and
solidarity surged. In the end, South Central is, and has been characterized by “the
grandchildren of Southern sharecroppers who live side by side with peasant and working
class families from Mexico.”
5
As well as a space in which the pace of the community is
that as you are on the move, you are also working to settle and stay in place, where your
life is very much in the moment.
Racialization, Experience, and Community Formation of
African Americans and Ethnic Mexicans
The experiences of Latinos and African Americans are increasingly being defined
and influenced by living and working in multiracial and multiethnic contexts. Interracial
relationships between people of color are not a new phenomenon, but one that extends
back to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, what is unique about African
Americans and ethnic Mexican residents’ interactions, struggles, and settlement in South
Central is that urban communities are characterized by majority-minority demographics,
“cities of color,” where “contemporary ethnic and race relations are increasingly defined
by interactions among and between non-whites.” Chicano historian, Albert Camarillo,
urges us to consider that documenting the realities of “cities of color” entails an
awareness of conflict, misunderstanding, and tension as well as (and less obvious) the
5
Hector Tobar, “Latinos Move to South-Central Los Angeles” The Los Angeles Times, May 3, 1990, A1.
8
“resourceful ways diverse people are working together to overcome histories of
marginalization.”
6
Investigating the relationship between mutual misunderstanding and
cooperation between and amongst African American and Mexican immigrants in South
Central Los Angeles historically is a central goal of this dissertation.
The historiography of the Chicana/o experience has largely focused on
investigating the contours of Mexican immigrant lives through an exploration of identity
formation, community activism, labor exploitation, and residential segregation.
Nonetheless, Chicana/o historians have begun to take Camarillo’s call to action seriously,
and increasingly considered Latina/o lives beyond the brown/white paradigm. This
dissertation is part of this larger historiographical shift as it also seeks to understand the
racialization and racial formation of Latina/os in an interracial context and demystify the
interracial contours of the U.S. Southwest. Seminal studies on the emergence of ethnic
Mexican identity formation, and Latino identity formation writ large, have demonstrated
the complex reality in which immigrant communities forge identity. As George
Sanchez’s Becoming Mexican American illustrates Mexican immigrants of the early
twentieth century crafted racial, ethnic, class, and gendered identities in relationship to
experiences in Mexico and the United States illustrating the fluidity of culture and
identity across the borderlands as “cultural change that can take place without social
mobility.”
7
David Gutierrez’s Walls and Mirrors also advanced our understanding of the
formative role of ethnicity among individuals of Mexican descent across the U.S.
6
Albert Camarillo, “Cities of Color: The New Racial Frontier in California's Minority-Majority Cities”
Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 76, No. 1 (February 2007), pp. 1-28, 3.
7
George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles,
1900-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 13.
9
Southwest by urging us to understand the complex relationship and saliency of class,
ethnicity, nationality, and race among and between Mexican American and Mexican
immigrants and its effect on intra-racial attitudes, ethnic politics, and discourses of U.S.
citizenship in U.S. society.
Chicana/o scholars have also rigorously examined the identity formation of ethnic
Mexicans through the lens of labor exploitation. Vicki Ruiz, David Montejano, Neil
Foley, George Sanchez, David Gutierrez, Stephen Pitti, Matt Garcia, and Jose Alamillo
each document how employment conditions and terms impact the relationship between
husband, wives, and children, as well as how this relationship influences residential
opportunities and increased barriorization for impoverished ethnic Mexican
communities.
8
They have also revealed the critical importance of how individuals of
Mexican descent think about migration and generational continuities and differences, and
the influential role this relationship has on this population’s formation, construction, and
politicization of a Mexican immigrant identity. The experiences of Mexican immigrant
South Central residents are largely those of individuals who migrated to the United States
8
These scholars have provided important insights and analysis into the lives working class Mexican
laborers, in particular, how labor, community, politics, immigration, class, gender, and race are
instrumental for identity and community formation of Latinos over the course of the twentieth century. See:
David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of
Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Kurashige, Scott. The Shifting Grounds of Race:
Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton University Press,
2007); David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin: Texas
University Press, 1987); Stephen Pitti, The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and
Mexican Americans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery
Lives (University of New Mexico Press, 1987); Vicki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in
Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Matt Garcia, A World Of Its Own:
Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970 (University of North Carolina
Press, 2001); Jose Alamillo, Making Lemonade out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a
California Town, 1880-1960 (University of Illinois Press, 2006); Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans,
Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
10
in the post 1965 period. Their experience as undocumented Mexican immigrants has
largely been shaped by settling into spaces that do not neatly conform to Chicana/o
spaces, like East Los Angeles. Instead, these Mexican immigrants took residence in a
predominantly African American space with fellow first generation undocumented
Mexican immigrants pursuing legalization through the 1986 Immigration Reform and
Control Act (IRCA).
This dissertation seeks to enrich the field of Chicana/o History, as it historicizes
the complex identity and community formation of Mexican immigrants, not only
adapting to living in the United States but amongst and in relationship to African
Americans. My approach to this complex history attempts to continue the historical
discussion begun by Luis Alvarez, Albert Camarillo, Natalia Molina, and George
Sanchez, as they too prioritize investigating the racialization of individuals of Mexican
descent beyond a Latino/white framework and in spaces that transcend the workplace to
demonstrate the intensity of racialization, interracial interactions, and experiences that
occur in a racially diverse landscape.
9
Ethnic Mexicans settling in South Central had their own set of challenges,
because upon their arrival this area was overwhelmingly African American. Indeed
historians Douglas Flamming and Josh Sides characterize South Central’s history as that
of racial and ethnic succession. This space was once home to white migrants, and then
Central Avenue was multiracial. By World War II South Central was popularly known as
9
George Sanchez and Albert Camarillo forthcoming projects on Boyle Heights and Compton, respectively.
Natalia Molina, Fit to be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006); Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance
during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
11
the “heart of Black Southern California.”
10
Most recently, João H. Costa Vargas, an
anthropologist, in Catching Hell in the City of Angeles interrogated South Central’s
enduring Black character. His findings are instrumental to our thinking of the complex
reality in which Black men, women, and families construct a Black identity in the midst
of bleak economic, political, and social realities.
11
His consideration of their struggles
follows the trajectory of depicting South Central as strictly a Black neighborhood.
Despite his occasional mention of the ways that African Americans have grown resentful
of Latino settlement, such analysis, while insightful, obscures how Latinos have been part
of South Central’s social landscape for decades.
In the imaginaries of countless Southern California residents the 1992 Los
Angeles uprising proved a pivotal moment in their understanding of South Central’s
demographic change. Despite the uprising being popularly cast as a black/white dilemma
and issue, the level of Latino participation (the arrest and hospital admissions rate were
high) and presence in the community could not be ignored. By the 1990s, Latinos
accounted for 45 percent of South Central’s population. Their participation in the
uprising was due to the fact that like their African American counterparts and as residents
of South Central they faced a similar set of challenges and pressures that paved the way
to their participation in the uprising. Both the 1965 and 1992 uprisings produced
10
Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Douglas Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los
Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Darnell Hunt and Ana-
Christina Ramon, eds. Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities (New York: New York
University Press, 2010).
11
Joao H. Costa Vargas, Catching Hell in the City of Angeles: Life and Meanings of Blackness in South
Central Los Angeles (University of Minnesota, 2006).
12
countless studies about the structural inequities in the community.
12
In doing so, the
history of South Central becomes told through the lens of these large-scale uprising and
civil disturbances. These uprisings are part of my rendering of the South Central
experience; however, my narrative does not solely pivot on these upheavals. The 1992
uprising was an important event and moment in our understanding of the diversity within
South Central, yet scholars have failed to consider the presence and influence of waves of
Mexican immigrants that arrived and settled in this city well before the 1990s. It is this
challenge, of documenting Mexican immigrants settling into the community in the 1970s
and 1980s, that is at the core of this dissertation. The 1980s in South Central were adeptly
described as the “fastest turnaround in a city from Black to Latin.”
13
To gain a meaningful understanding of the ways South Central residents have
come to terms with this change, one must understand and capture the interactions
between African American and ethnic Mexican residents living side by side and pursuing
12
For more on the 1992 uprising see: Jervey Tarvalon and Cristian A. Sierra, eds. Geography of Rage:
Remembering the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 (Really Great Books, 2002); Darnell Hunt, Screening the Los
Angeles “Riots”: Race, Seeing, and Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Robert Goodwin-
Williams, ed., Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (Routledge, 1993); Edward Chang and
Jeannette Diaz-Veizades, Ethnic Peace and the American City: Building Community in Los Angeles and
Beyond (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Min Song Hyoung, Strange Future: Pessimism
and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Mark Baldassare, ed., The Los
Angeles Riots: Lessons for the Urban Future (Oxford: Westview Press, 1994). Also, another way that
South Central has been described is through an analysis of popular culture, most especially through the lens
of movies, rap, and jazz. See: Danny Widener, Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los
Angeles (Duke University Press, 2010); Clora Bryant, Buddy Collette, William Green, Steve Isoardi, Marl
Young, eds., Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999);
Steve Isoardi and Roberto Miranda, The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Bryan John McCann, Contesting the Mark of Criminality:
Resistance and Ideology in Gangsta Rap, 1988-1997 Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin,
2009; Mark Douglas Cunningham, Once Upon a Time in South Central Los Angeles: Race, Gender, and
Narrative in John Singleton’s Hood Trilogy Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 2010.
13
William Overend, “South Central L.A.: Minority Meets Minority” Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1979,
A1.
13
the establishment and utilization of social, government, and community resources and
services together. African American and ethnic Mexican South Central residents’ sense
of their day to day interactions, discrimination, and inequality as they patronized minority
owned banks, participated in Head Start programs, and utilized medical services at
community health centers are pathways into the diversity of their interracial interactions
and in turn, the consequences of structural change and decline. By focusing on the
migration and settlement of ethnic Mexicans in South Central, their surprise to find
themselves in the heart of an African American community, and their pursuit of
community with fellow Latina/o and African American neighbors, I illuminate the
complexity of interracial relations that do not conform to a narrative of
tension/cooperation, but rather a nuanced set of relations that are always changing. Ethnic
Mexican South Central residents kindly reflect on their interactions and relationships
with African American neighbors, but were severe and concerned when discussing the
larger African American population. This tension plays out in all levels of interracial
community formation. Finally, examining the politics and economic commitment of a
minority owned bank like Broadway Federal Bank, an institution that has become a staple
in the community since the post World War II period, War on Poverty programs like
Head Start and community health clinics sheds light into how financial and community
institutions shaped by African American leaders and residents respond to the changing
cultural and social terrain of its residents, and in turn, its relationship to community
formation.
14
Through such an analysis, I do not seek to assert a racial hierarchy between
African American and ethnic Mexican South Central residents. Unlike Tomas
Almaguer’s powerful analysis of interracial interactions in Racial Fault Lines, my
consideration of the racial politics of this city does not focus on how labor and
landownership shaped a racial hierarchy that placed Mexican Americans within a racial
order in which they moved up and down on this hierarchy over time.
14
Instead and in the
spirit of Laura Pulido’s Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left I seek to elaborate on her
conceptualization of differential racialization, and her argument that racial groups are
racialized differently and this produces different outcomes and experiences.
15
My
research builds on her consideration of the particular ways in which African Americans
and Latinos are racialized by the state, and how this in turn, produces different
experiences and outcomes. However, I also demonstrate that there are instances in which
Mexican immigrants by virtue of living in the same space are similarly racialized and
marginalized as African Americans. While Pulido’s notion of differential racialization is
invaluable, I add that there is a particular way in which communities that live side by
side, as neighbors, share a similarity of experience that then lends itself to understanding
how similarly they are racialized, discriminated, and in the best of situations energized to
improve their conditions and terms together.
Gaye Theresa Johnson’s “Constellations of Struggle” offers a similarly productive
approach to disentangling interracial coalition building. Johnson argues that a focus on
14
Tomas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
15
Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (University of California
Press, 2006).
15
the activism of Luisa Moreno and Charlotta Bass may at first appear odd as there is “no
archived correspondence or anecdotal record of their interactions, although they were
active on the same committee and in the same communities at the same time,” but an
investigation of these women offers an “analysis that generates new political sensibilities
and alternative identities.”
16
Through these women’s experiences, Johnson devises her
theoretical framing of a “constellation.” She argues that “the “constellation” embraces an
array of activities, histories, and identities that each woman [Luisa Moreno and Charlotta
Bass] symbolically brought with them to the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee.
Similarly, the concept suggests the mobility of many parts, as well as the ability re-form
around different nuclei.” She adds that often efforts at coalition building are met with
disappointment, as we “measure the histories of interethnic struggles by their
shortcomings rather than their successes,” where a way to counter these disappointing
strategies is to understand that the “mutual activism of these communities can change the
story that we tell ourselves about our history and our future.”
17
This is exactly what the
literature that stresses the charged moments between these two groups accomplishes—it
almost propels forward a fatalistic reading that groups can never work together. Rather,
as Johnson suggests, viewing these relations as a constellation, or a series of
constellations, offers a way to understand the mobility, flexibility, growth, and possible
sustainability of these interethnic relations.
I illustrate that African Americans and ethnic Mexicans’ relations are fraught,
16
Gaye Theresa Johnson, “Constellations of Struggle: Luisa Moreno, Charlotta Bass, and the Legacy for
Ethnic Studies” Aztlan Volume 33, Number 1 (Spring 2008), 155-172, 156.
17
Nicolas Vaca, The Presumed Alliance: The Unspoken Conflict Between Latinos and Blacks and What It
Means for America (Rayo, 2004).
16
volatile, flexible, and full of possibility. They are constantly being reoriented through
time, space, and resources, and as they collectively organize against the constant assault
and attacks waged on the working class, working poor, and poor. The interactions
amongst African Americans and ethnic Mexicans are about the promising moments of
coalition, as well as the charged moments of confronting change, discrimination, and
inequality. African American and ethnic Mexican relations and interactions in South
Central must be understood as tense and cooperative, charged and muted, and at times
uncomfortable as well as full of possibility. Looking critically at these opportunities
reveals the ways these communities struggle collectively and apart for dignity, humanity,
strength, and solidarity. The fight for community preservation is most urgent as South
Central for a long time has become a place, community, and neighborhood that people
have lost hope in, yet many residents continue to imagine and work towards creating
anew in anticipation of a desirable future. Hence, when graffiti artists Akut, Case, and
Hera spray painted two young African American girls playing and painting two pigeons
with a caption that read, “Anything can be beautiful when you look at it with love”
adjacent to Manual Arts High School in South Central, one cannot help but think that this
piece is urging us to consider that despite the violence, police aggression, poverty, and
despair, this community is beautiful and worth preserving, caring, and fighting for. It is
this spirit that energizes this consideration of how South Central emerged and continues
to be valued as home for both African Americans and Latino residents.
Johnson’s assertion of the productive enterprise of placing two unlikely activists
together expands our understanding of interracial relations, and informs how I approach
17
my discussion of the War on Poverty. By historicizing how African American residents
pursued establishing Head Start programs and community health centers in South
Central, I do not mean to erase ethnic Mexicans from this landscape or lose sight of the
interracial dynamics of this community and programming. Rather in focusing on African
American residents’ strides in this struggle to launch and implement Head Start programs
and community health centers, I seek to contextualize why African Americans were in
fact apprehensive and threatened by what this massive influx of Mexican immigrants
would mean to their accomplishments, however limited. So as Johnson places two
activists that did not leave a written record of their correspondence into conversation with
each other, I too lay out the terrain of African American activists that had little interaction
with ethnic Mexicans, as a way to think critically about what interracial relations mean
and entail. Such approach captures how activism emerges and changes against a
backdrop that is not interracial, but actually hyper-segregated. Hence, South Central
residents’ interaction and activism are reflective of lessons that can be gleaned from the
interconnection of history, struggle, and race relations.
By focusing on War on Poverty initiatives like Head Start and community health
clinics, I uncover that despite this social policy’s promise of helping the poor,
establishing and operating these centers and programs required ingenuity and
commitment by the residents it aimed to help. In early 1964, President Lyndon B.
Johnson, declared an “unconditional war on poverty.” He “not only sought to relieve the
symptoms of poverty but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.” Such a declaration is
consistent with what many scholars call the “re-discovery” of poverty in the early 1960s
18
where politicians and policy makers alike aimed to assist those who did not share in
postwar economic progress.
18
In that same year, the President signed the Economic
Opportunity Act, an extension of his Great Society programs. R. Sargent Shriver began
the Office of Economic Opportunity to oversee the implementation of the legislation and
establish community action programs that were operated by the poor. The largest OEO
programs were the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and employment
opportunities for youth with the Job Corps and Neighborhood Youth Corps and Legal
Aid. Community Action Programs and Agencies administered programs like Head Start
and community health centers, which are among the few War on Poverty programs that
remain to this day. A focus on Head Start and community health clinics is in part due to
their longevity in the community, but also because these programs have impacted the
lives of thousands of people and families, both African American and Latino alike in
South Central Los Angeles.
The scholarly interest on the War on Poverty has moved beyond studies that
discuss the legislative aspect of the program to those that show the ways it was
implemented in cities nationwide. Scholars like Bonnie Lefkowitz, Susan Youngblood
Ashmore, Robert Bauman, William Clayson, and Brian Behnken are among the few
scholars who have showcased how War on Poverty initiatives were implemented in
Alabama, California, and Texas.
19
Bauman, Clayson, and Behnken approach the War on
18
Maris Vinovskis, The Birth of Head Start: Preschool Education Policies in the Kennedy and Johnson
Administration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 146; Edward Zigler, Head Start: The Inside
Story of America’s Most Successful Educational Experiment (Basic Books, 1994).
19
Bonnie Lefkowitz, Community Health Centers: A Movement and the People Who Made it Happen (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007); Susan Youngblood Ashmore, Carry it On: The War on
19
Poverty through a comparative lens, and focus on the interactions between African
Americans and Mexican Americans. In each of their studies, they focus on the ways
conflict between both groups squandered any real progress that could have been made
using these funds collectively. They do not blame the groups entirely, although they do
point to the ways that racial prejudice often was the source of many of their misgivings,
but they also illustrate how local politicians and OEO officials’ choice in distributing
funds seemed to favor one group over the other. This “favoritism” and difficulty to
acquire funds in the first place caused friction between these aggrieved communities who
believed they deserved equal support.
Bauman’s Race and the War on Poverty offers an analysis of Los Angeles in
particular. He argues that during the Office of Economic Opportunity’s tenure, the racial
segregation of the city meant that poor communities established organizations and
programs that were geographically and racially segregated. I agree with Bauman’s
assessment of how during OEO’s tenure throughout the1960s and 1970s, the War on
Poverty and the organizations that operated the program were racially and spatially
determined. South Central delegate agencies and programs overwhelmingly were
entrusted with the needs of African Americans (and were the public face of such
programs), however, as early as the 1970s they began to also service the needs of poor
Latino families. Not only do I extend the timeline well beyond the OEO’s tenure, but also
Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964-1972 (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press,
2008); Robert Bauman, Race and the War on Poverty: From Watts to East L.A. (University of Oklahoma
Press, 2008); William Clayson, Freedom is Not Enough; The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights
Movement in Texas (University of Texas Press, 2010); Brian Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles:
Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas (University of North
Carolina Press, 2011).
20
investigate two sites—Head Start and community health centers—that are conducive to
understanding the complexity of interracial relations as early as the 1970s.
The War on Poverty lends itself to making an intervention in how we understand
working class, working poor, and poor peoples experienced the implementation of social
and government policy and services. The work of Michael Katz, Jill Quadagno, Robin
D.G. Kelley, and Alice O’Conner uncovers the public discussion about the poor shifted
from the “deserving poor” to the “undeserving poor.” The understanding of the
“undeserving poor” is loaded with racial, gender, and class dimensions.
20
Social
understandings of poverty and poverty knowledge over the latter part of the twentieth
century have focused on vilifying women and families of color. For U.S. conservatives,
the prevalence and allure of cultural arguments of deficiency and dependence took on
unprecedented importance. O’Connor is critical of the ways that poverty knowledge
entered a new phase in the 1980s and 1990s in which it became an industry in which
think tanks, foundations, and government agencies made poverty knowledge “a highly
pragmatic technical subfield in applied microeconomics.”
21
The Ronald Reagan
administration looked to conservative foundations to get its information regarding
poverty causing liberal social science think tanks and scholars to become demoralized of
the ways poverty knowledge was moving towards an over abundant interest in unwed
20
Michael Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (Pantheon,
1990); Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996); Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and
the Poor in Twentieth Century U.S. History. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Robin D.G.
Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunctional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Beacon, 1998); Robin
D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (Free Press, 1996) Robin D.G.
Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon, 2003)
21
Alice O’Conner, Poverty Knowledge, 213.
21
motherhood and dependence rather than a discussion of the ways economic restructuring
and residential segregation has limited the possibilities for poor families. O’Connor and
Kelley discuss how poverty knowledge is disseminated from the academy and
government documents to popular and everyday understandings and discourse of
America’s poor. Studies about poverty remain an important site in which we can change
our understanding of the struggles of working poor families and communities. Therefore,
like O’Connor, Katz and Kelley, I illustrate that it is urgent to find the creative spaces in
which poor people of color create possibility and opportunity, despite U.S. society’s
overbearing conservative politics of poverty that demonize them for their alleged
“unwillingness” to work rather than a true acceptance of government’s continued
investment economic, social, and political inequality.
By focusing on the urban poor, I also aim to expand our historical understanding
of urban communities undergo and understand demographic change. Thomas Sugrue’s
The Origins of the Urban Crisis is instrumental in my thinking of the state of urban
America as he argues that Detroit’s transformation from an “arsenal of democracy” in the
1940s to a postindustrial city of inequality and marginality by the 1960s set the “stage for
the fiscal, social, and economic crises that confronts urban America today.”
22
Most
recently Robert Self, urges us to think of urban spaces as much more representative of
metropolitan landscapes—a landscape that covers urban decline and suburban growth as
mutually constituting processes.
23
For Sugrue and Self, race, racial difference, and racism
22
Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996).
22
are the primary modes that spatially organize and segregate the metropolitan city and in
turn, are central to the “origins of the urban crisis.” In South Central Los Angeles the
“crisis” occurred on a different timetable than that of Detroit, in the wake of
deindustrialization and reindustrialization, as well as in relationship to increased Latino
immigration, elimination of government and social services, investment in policing and
prisons, limited economic mobility, and the bifurcation between the African American
working class and middle class. These structural changes produce an unstable foundation
for the interaction between Mexican immigrants and African Americans. Learning and
enhancing Sugrue and Self’s analysis of metropolitan and urban biracial landscapes
(black/white) to one that is more in tune with Scott Kurashige’s analysis of the ways Los
Angeles’s “world city” character creates the conditions for “overlapping processes of
exclusion and integration.”
24
By focusing on South Central’s War on Poverty and migration by Mexican
families in the latter part of the twentieth century, I illustrate the importance of focusing
on women’s gendered activism. My analysis is informed by the work of Annelise Orleck,
Rhonda Williams, Nancy A. Naples, Premilla Nadasen, Rosa Linda Fregoso, and
Kimberly Springer who have uncovered the struggles of women and community activists
who work towards securing resources for poor African American and Latino families in
the midst of changing social and government services.
25
Mary Pardo in her history of
23
Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton University Press,
2005).
24
Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of
Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)
23
Mothers of East Los Angeles also illustrates the promise that neighborhood networks that
organized along gender lines are for collective action. She offers a way towards
unearthing the power, resilience, and promise of women’s collective activist efforts.
These scholars illustrate the innovative and strategic ways women develop a
consciousness were their status of mothers and women are worthy of rights and dignity
that could influence state policy. Women’s activism happens at all levels, either through
on the ground protests, starting official organizations, or showing the importance of
informal interactions. Women of color never wavered in their political activism and
protest against the constant reconfiguration and renegotiation of welfare laws that
increasingly limited these women’s economic, social, and political opportunities.
Similarly, Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s formulation of solidarity from a similar
context of struggle is especially instructive to my investigation of the relationship
between African American and ethnic Mexican women. In Feminism without Borders,
she discusses how we can build solidarity across borders if we “define solidarity in terms
of mutuality, accountability, and the recognition of common interests as the basis for
relationships among diverse communities… rather than assume an enforced commonality
of oppression, the practice of solidarity foregrounds communities of people who have
chosen to work and fight together.” In her efforts to theorize solidarity, she urges us to
25
Annelise Orleck, Storming Ceasar’s Palace: How African American Mothers Fought Their Own War on
Poverty (Beacon Press, 2006); Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's
Struggles against Urban Inequality (Oxford University Press, 2005); Kimberly Springer, Living for the
Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Premilla
Nadasen, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (Routledge, 2004); Nancy
Naples, Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work, and the War on Poverty (Routledge,
1995); Rosa Linda Fregoso, meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) Mary S. Pardo, Mexican American Women Activist
(Temple University Press, 1998).
24
understand the complex relationality that shapes economic, social, and political lives.
Mohanty therefore asserts that “the common contexts of struggles against specific
exploitative structures and systems determines our potential political alliances... it is this
common context of struggle, both historical and contemporary, that chart and define our
course of struggle.”
26
I uncover relationships amongst women who crafted informal
networks in South Central’s city streets and as they became Head Start teachers and
parents. Their activism is reflective of how their politics were shaped by living and
working in an interethnic community like South Central Los Angeles. They theorize
citizenship, immigration, and community formation and its relationship to feminism and
feminist politics while remaining attentive to the ways the local and transnational
interactions frame their lives.
Finally, understanding Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Gloria Anzaldua’s
important theoretical move to inspire a dialogue that considers the intersectionality of
women of color’s gender, racial, class, and sexual oppression as not only a function of
interaction with white men and women, but also within the community is useful to this
investigation.
27
By placing Patricia Hill Collins and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo in
dialogue with each other one learns of the complexity of motherhood, and its importance
for African American and ethnic Mexican women’s lives. Not only is motherhood
something for which women labor, but also part of the discourse that serves to vilify
women of color. In effect discourse of “good” or “bad” mothers and sexual deviance are
26
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders (Duke University Press, 2003).
27
bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (South End Press, 2000); Angela Davis, Women,
Race, and Class (Vintage, 1983); Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute
Books, 2007).
25
aimed at controlling and othering women of color.
28
Mohanty’s theoretical innovation of
thinking of solidarity across a common context of struggle, rather than one of sheer
identity politics invigorates our investigation of the ways that African American and
ethnic Mexican women can work in collaboration with each other to envision and remake
the world with the lessons of the past in mind. I focus on the dynamic interaction between
African American and Mexican women and families to demonstrate how the threat of
government cuts is a source of coalition and unity that is rooted in a politics of
motherhood.
In the end, the demographic change and the community formation and activism it
spurred by both men and women has meant that the strong African American character
coexists alongside the settlement and arrival of recent Mexican immigrants. South
Central’s city streets showcase the intermixing of both communities. Mexican
immigration has not meant the erasure of African American history and culture, but
rather the inclusion and infusion of both groups. Gabriela Arredondo’s Mexican Chicago,
is one of the first monographs to discuss the historical presence of Mexicans in Chicago,
argues that Mexicanos that migrated and settled in Chicago from 1916 to 1939 kept a
particular brand of lo mexicano, caught in the fervor of the revolution and nationalism.
Unlike Sanchez’s assertion of the fluidity of identity, the process of becoming,
Arredondo argues for the “becoming of Mexican” as the identity formation of Mexicans
28
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila, “I’m Here, but I’m There: The Meanings of Latina
Transnational Motherhood” Gender and Society Volume 11, Number 5 (October 1997), 548-571; Pierrette
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and
Politics of Empowerment (Routledge, 2000); Gabriela Arredondo, Aida Hurtado, Norma Klahn, Olga
Najera-Ramirez, Patricia Zavella, eds., Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader (Duke University Press,
2003).
26
in Chicago.
29
In the case of Mexican immigrants that settle into South Central in the latter
part of the twentieth century, they bring a particular sense of lo mexicano, through the
visual and auditory queues like the paletero, music, and Spanish language, to a
predominantly African American space. For African Americans, according to Vargas,
blackness was about an identity forged from their lived experience in South Central—the
commonalities and point of divergence as an African American community. As Vargas
describes it, “context is a matter of consensus and conflict, solidarity and stratification,
mutual recognition and mutual recrimination.”
30
Josh Kun’s discussion of Akwid’s
musical trajectory as an expression of the consequences of living in a globalized city
places African Americans, Central Americans, and Mexican immigrants living, working,
and surviving in the same neighborhood in a musical conversation with each other. For
Kun, Akwid’s blending of hip-hop and banda reminds us that South Central has long
been a vital space for exchange and coalition between African American and Latino
communities where their music attempts illustrate the intersections and interconnections
of their Mexican roots and what’s lived on the streets of South Central.
31
In my
estimation, the community and identity formation of South Central’s African Americans
and ethnic Mexican residents is one that does not erase difference, but magnifies the
points of intersection and divergence between and amongst groups that sometimes
culminates in expressions like Akwid that bridges both lived realities.
29
Gabriela Arredondo, Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity and Nation, 1916-39 (University of Illinois Press,
2008).
30
Joao H. Costa Vargas, Catching Hell in the City of Angeles, 17.
31
Josh Kun, “What Is an MC If He Can’t Rap to Banda? Making Music in Nuevo L.A.” American
Quarterly 56:3 (September 2004), 741-758.
27
Lastly, I illustrate that the interaction between African Americans and Latinos is
varied and complex. Scholars like Luis Alvarez, Andrew Diamond, Neil Foley, Josh Kun,
Scott Kurashige, Anthony Macias, Natalia Molina, and Laura Pulido have provided an
important analysis of labor participation, public health discourse, interracial activism and
politics, legal frameworks and identity, claims to whiteness, and leisure and youth culture
as critical sites to investigate interracial and interethnic community formations.
32
All
these scholars have provided innovative ways to understand racial triangulation and
experience outside of a white/other racial binary to one that seriously considers how race,
racialization, racial difference, and racism frames and constrains, and unexpectedly also
open the door to opportunity and possibility within the most oppressive of circumstances
for communities of color in relationship to each other. These scholars remind us that the
relationships between people of color do not happen in a vacuum, but are mediated and
framed in power structures and institutions that thrive on the tension between these
groups. Luis Alvarez asserts for mid-twentieth century Mexican American youth identity
is “deeply shaped by how Chicanos relate to other racialized groups” and what binds
Mexican American and other youth of color is “a profound connection between their
efforts to reclaim dignity amidst difficult life conditions, including discrimination and
poverty.” I will expand on Alvarez’s conceptualization of identity through my
32
Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (University of California
Press, 2006); Natalia Molina, Fit to be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black
and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton University Press, 2007); Luis
Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2008); Luis Alvarez, “From Zoot Suits to Hip Hop: Towards a Relational Chicana/o
Studies,” Latino Studies 5:1 (Spring 2007), 53-75; Andrew Diamond, Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and
the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908-1969 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2009); Neil Foley, Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
28
investigation of the interactions between adults at the bank, children at the Head Start
center, and at medical centers as avenues in which African Americans and ethnic
Mexicans make sense of their similar hardships as they confront living in an
impoverished, dilapidated, and heavily policed community. Thus theorizing how the
conditions for a politics of dignity emerge from not only the struggles of one racial group
but of multiple racial groups co-existing together. It is this quest for dignity, under the
most dehumanizing of circumstances, that shapes the lives of many South Central Los
Angeles residents.
On the Move and in the Moment unravels the relations between African
Americans and ethnic Mexicans in a working class and working poor community defined
by its impoverished features like limited economic mobility, declining government and
social assistance, increased state policing, gentrification, increased immigration,
declining homeownership and public spaces. I unearth a rich and gendered history of
diverse migrations and settlement that unfolded amidst charged social, cultural, and
economic relationships between African American and Mexican immigrants. It is this
terrain in which African American and Latino residents of South Central struggle to make
sense of interactions that often leads to moments of tension but also cooperation—as they
struggle to build creative, productive, and even at times unsuccessful spaces in which
African American and Latino people actively challenge the oppressive simultaneous
interaction between race, economics, and politics.
29
Chapter Outline
This dissertation consists of four chapters. Chapter one discusses the ways that
Latino immigrants transformed South Central’s demographic landscape. From the 1970s
onwards millions of undocumented Mexicans immigrants made South Central and not
East Los Angeles barrios their home. I argue that these Mexican immigrants, urban
pioneros (pioneers), transformed South Central’s African American character and settled
into a community that was predominantly African American and rife with poverty. I also
illustrate how the interactions between and amongst African American and ethnic
Mexican residents is not solely defined by racial tension and/or cooperation, but rather a
nuanced relationship that seriously considers how neighborly and institutional interaction
frames people’s lives, relationships, and racial understandings.
In chapter two, “Let’s Get them off to a Headstart!,” I investigate the
implementation of War on Poverty initiatives in South Central and Watts. I begin by
discussing these cities’ struggles to establish War on Poverty programs, most especially
Head Start centers. Head Start’s mission of providing preschool education to children of
low-income families originates in 1965. The program began as a summer experimental
program, but after only two summers grew into a year long program that incorporated
social, nutritional, health, educational, and psychological resources. I document that Head
Start’s origins in South Central proved to be a particular challenge, because the
community lacked the infrastructure, funds, instructors, and more importantly, the trust of
community residents. In this chapter, I illustrate the important role South Central
residents, in particular mothers and teachers, played in the implementation of the
30
program’s school readiness mission, as well as the levels in which African American and
ethnic Mexican women created community—one that is not only rooted in residential
interactions but also as mothers and in support of their children’s educational future.
The third chapter builds on the previous chapter, by historicizing the range of
programs that emerged as part of the War on Poverty. Following the 1965 uprisings, the
need for a health center in the community could not be ignored. The campaign by
community activists, political officials, and physicians to build a hospital in and for the
community became a central concern. Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital as well as
community health centers were products of this effort. Community health centers became
an important resource for the community as they were designed to provide accessible and
expert health services to low-income families. I explore the ways community health
centers focused on comprehensive health and family planning and the goal of establishing
a “place where the poorest and most humble can be treated with respect and feel they
belong.” Unfortunately, this goal of providing desirable health facilities and services with
respect and fairness to working class and working poor residents of South Central Los
Angeles has not fully materialized, and been a source for complex interactions.
33
Finally, in chapter four, I discuss Broadway Federal Bank, a minority owned bank
in South Central that emerged to service the growing African American community in
1946. The bank is still in existence. It’s a family owned business, as three generations of
African American “race men” have owned and operated the bank throughout its history.
For the first three to four decades, its patrons were largely African American. The
33
County Hospital Construction in Watts: Group’s Objective,” The Los Angeles Sentinel, March 3, 1966.
31
African American ownership and patrons ensured that this bank had a strong African
American identity and history. By showcasing this bank’s trajectory in the post World
War II period, I investigate the cultural politics of launching and preserving a minority
owned savings institution in South Central and the formative role of African American
residents, bank leaders, and history play in understanding the process of racial transition.
I unearth the influential role of class and race with regards to how a financial institution
respond to the changing cultural and social terrain of its patrons, and in turn, its
relationship to community formation and services.
I conclude this dissertation by illustrating how the lives of African Americans and
ethnic Mexicans are shaped by racial, gender, and class oppressions as they both confront
living in a community increasingly defined by disinvestment and neglect. Within these
limited opportunities, residents find creative ways to create community and make ends
meet. Throughout the dissertation, I illustrated the points of connection and at times
disjuncture between African American and ethnic Mexican residents of South Central in
efforts to provide a model of how to think about coalition politics that does not aim to
erase racial difference, but rather illustrate how a common context of struggle and the
fight for dignity and humanity are powerful sources of unity and politics.
A note on terminology and organization
I use the full South Central Los Angeles to describe the community, despite its
name change to South Los Angeles in 2003. I use this old term because the majority of
residents have expressed that the name change did nothing to change the daily lives, as
well as the fact that they continue to use South Central when discussing their community.
32
For this dissertation, I conducted oral histories with Mexican immigrants to
capture their sense of their experiences and histories. I make a note if a person discusses
their identity in terms of Mexican American, Chicano, and/or Latino. But for the most
part, I utilize David Gutierrez framework of ethnic Mexican to discuss the expansive
documented and undocumented Mexican-origin population in the United States.
34
Finally, capturing South Central Los Angeles’ multiracial landscape in the post
World War II period means that each of the chapters spans multiple decades. In order to
illustrate how transformative and jarring this demographic shift was for African
American South Central residents, activists, and political officials, I lay out the historical
terrain of their efforts to establish and build the social institution to chronicle how the last
four decades of migration have changed these spaces. Instead of each chapter covering a
few years or a decade, each chapter is oriented along major themes of immigration,
childhood education, health, and entrepreneurial efforts, and thus expansive in its scope
in an effort to show how Latino immigrants migrated, settled, and utilized the same
services and sites as long-term African American residents.
34
David Guiterrez, Walls and Mirrors, 218.
33
CHAPTER 1
Urban Pioneers:
Mexican Immigrants Become “Bonafide” Residents
In the fall of 1975, Leticia Zarate left her home in San Martin de Hidalgo, Jalisco,
Mexico to immigrate to “el Norte.” Single and without children she decided to journey to
the United States in search of a better future for herself and immediate family. Her
mother had arrived in the United States a few years prior, and rented an apartment at the
intersection of Olympic Boulevard and Figueroa Street. She remembers this apartment
fondly before it was demolished to build the Staples Center, and now L.A. Live. Shortly
after arriving in Downtown Los Angeles, she eloped with Bernardo Nuno. Bernardo, also
from her Mexican hometown had been living in the United States since the early 1970s.
Like countless other single Mexican immigrant men from San Martin de Hidalgo, he had
taken residence in an apartment building on 49
th
Street and Main Street. As she
remembers, “la 49 era famosa en esos tiempos, y por ellos (49
th
Street was famous in
those days, and because of them).”
1
Single Mexican immigrant men immigrated and moved into a series of apartment
buildings and homes throughout 49
th
Street. As early as 1969, upon arriving in the United
States, single Mexican immigrant men from this and other Mexican rural towns made
these buildings and homes their first place of settlement. No one remembers who exactly
was the “first” to rent an apartment in the heart of this African American community;
however, these men remember the camaraderie and vacilada (playful friendship) this
1
Oral history with author, Leticia Nuno, Los Angeles, August 6, 2009.
34
cohort of early 20-year-old men shared. When asked about why they settled in South
Central, versus East Los Angeles, or la embajada (the nickname used for Glendale,
where most fellow Mexican immigrants from their hometown settled), they all explained
that they simply followed their male friends from back home. Most of the Mexican
immigrants living on 49
th
Street were men, but as the 1970s progressed most of the men
married their girlfriends back in Jalisco secured their undocumented entry and united
with their brides in the United States, and slowly transformed 49
th
Street, and the
surrounding streets, ridding it of its bachelor image. This and other nearby South Central
streets became home to these men and their families.
2
Leticia and Bernardo returned to San Martin de Hidalgo to marry and lived and
worked there for two years. However they had not abandoned their goal of returning to
Los Angeles. They made their way back in 1980, and considered moving into another
neighborhood. They lived in the City of Commerce with a relative and in Glendale with
paisanos, but Leticia did not like these cities. She felt isolated, removed, and
disconnected from her family, friends, and employment options. She urged Bernardo to
return to South Central, and rented an apartment on 47
th
Street and Main Street, just a few
blocks from where they had originally lived. Unlike their peers who lived on 49
th
Street,
Leticia recalls that 47
th
Street (just two blocks away) did not boast a large number of
Mexican immigrants. In fact, the apartment complex she lived in was the only apartment
building in the whole block that was predominantly inhabited by ethnic Mexicans.
African Americans occupied the rest of the homes. She lived comfortably in this two-
2
Ibid.
35
story apartment building for over ten years, but desired more from her settlement in the
United States. She enjoyed the stability of a steady job in Downtown Los Angeles’
garment industry where she moved up from a seamstress to pattern-maker and designer,
and her husband worked on an assembly line in the manufacturing industry. The next
logical choice was to purchase a home. As she thought of where to purchase a home she
never thought of anywhere outside of South Central Los Angeles. This was, and had
become, her neighborhood, community.
3
She was shown homes in East Los Angeles and
Huntington Park, yet none met her expectations. These were not communities she had
grown to like, she wanted to live in South Central despite its many drawbacks. Leticia
and Bernardo purchased a home close to John C. Fremont Senior High School, on a street
she said looked like any other middle-class neighborhood. The streets were lined with
palm trees and manicured lawns, but more importantly, her neighborhood did not give an
outward appearance of an impoverished community. Currently, it is a different story as
what was once a well-kept neighborhood has succumbed to decades and the cumulative
effects of poverty, neglect, disinvestment, and violence. Now, she feels, everyone is
“hustling, batallando (struggling). I mean we hustled back then, but mija it’s a different
hustle now.” Reflecting on her settlement, she states, “We were bold moving in with
Blacks. Fuimos pioneros (we were pioneers). They weren’t happy we purchased homes.
You could tell they felt as though we were taking something from them, something that
was theirs. You would hear them say Mexican, mojado (wetback), in a derogatory tone. It
3
Ibid.
36
was scary.”
4
Her anxiety and fear was not because African Americans were inherently
intimidating, as she explains, but because the 1970s and 1980s was a time of real
transition. These changes and transitions were: middle class African American flight
from the area, deindustrialization and reindustrialization, drug and crime epidemic,
intensification of police surveillance and incarceration, and increased Mexican
immigration and settlement and subsequent immigration raids at employment sites and
around the community. Leticia’s experience, like that of countless other Mexican
immigrants, was one in which she left the comforts of their Mexican hometown to settle
into a community defined by African American history and character. It was this last
dimension that would prove the hardest challenge to confront, as African Americans felt
a hard earned sense of ownership of South Central’s corridors and streets.
Scholarly interest on the racial, economic, political, and social landscape of
South Central have produced numerous studies of the community’s concerns and needs.
These reports illustrate the demographic change of the community, but more importantly
show constant oscillation by community activist, political officials, and researchers to
take seriously the migration and settlement of Mexican immigrants into South Central
well before the 1990s. In 1984, twenty years after the McCone Commission released its
findings following the Watts rebellion, researchers and policy analysts returned to the
community to investigate the status of the community. In the “McCone Revisited: A
Focus on Solutions to Continuing Problems in South Central Los Angeles,” the findings
were that “we cannot emphasize too strongly the critical nature of the problems described
4
Ibid.
37
in this report and the implications of continued inaction. We should not have to wait for a
second L.A. riot to erupt to bring these problems to serious public attention.”
5
The
problems discussed in the report were the same problems that plagued the community in
the 1960s and the “overall conclusion of those testifying was that conditions in the area
as bad, or worse, in South Central Los Angeles today than they were 19 years ago.” One
speaker testified: “A basic problem in South Central Los Angeles in 1984, as it was in
1965, is poverty: grinding, unending, and debilitating for all whom it touches.” Residents
expressed anxiety about limited job opportunities and few placement programs,
education, police relations, and feminization of poverty (one-third of all households with
children in South Central Los Angeles were headed by women).
6
Much like the 1965 report, the 1984 McCone report illustrated that everything in
South Central remained critical: health, police relations, jobs, education, social services,
and housing. The dire need for social services has defined much of South Central’s
history in the World War II period, but this report, was one of the few that early on
mentioned the burgeoning Mexican immigrant population in the community. But like
countless other investigations, it relegated their existence as secondary to those of
African Americans. The report’s authors stated, “despite the increasingly Latino
population in the original “curfew area” of the riots, our hearing will concentrate on the
Black population, as did the McCone Commission.” This focus on the “curfew area” and
5
“McCone Revisited: A Focus on Solutions to Continuing Problems in South Central Los Angeles,” Box
2066, Mayor Tom Bradley Administrative Papers, 1973-1993, Special Collections, Young Research
Library, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California.
6
Ibid. The volatile relationship to welfare funds in the community also leaves women feeling all the more
vulnerable as their ‘safety net’ was dependant on an ever changing logic of commitment (or the
increasingly lack of) social services.
38
its “revising of the McCone Report” served to justify the concentration on African
American residents (despite their acknowledgement of the expansion and growth of the
African American population beyond Watts) and omission of Latino needs. Their final
assessment, and most devastating assertion was that the “main focus of the majority of
the problems in South Central Los Angeles does not concern itself to a great extent with
people of Hispanic origin” and “those Hispanic people who are bonafide residents should
participate in all political action, all endeavors at improved police relations and all
competitive opportunities for job placement.”
7
This final assertion is the most troublesome as it suggests that Mexican
immigrants do not factor into the problems plaguing the community, when in fact most
Mexican immigrant residents would attest that like their African American counterparts,
they similarly confronted the effects of poverty. This report also indicates that Mexican
immigrants were not viewed as permanent settlers in the community, but as individuals
who had to work towards becoming “bonafide residents.” In their acknowledgment of
Mexican immigrants, political representatives of South Central, city officials, and
community activists were unable to ignore the growing presence of Mexican immigrants
in this space, yet remained hesitant to view them as affected by these issues. Mexican
immigrants, like their African American neighbors, needed and used the same social
services and government assistance program in the community. This sense that only
“bonafide residents” should participate in the political arena of the community illustrates,
7
“McCone Revisited: A Focus on Solutions to Continuing Problems in South Central Los Angeles,” Box
2066, Mayor Tom Bradley Administrative Papers, 1973-1993, Special Collections, Young Research
Library, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California.
39
on the one hand, McCone participants strived to ignore the importance of the Latino
experience, yet on the other they could not deny their ever-increasing presence.
The focus by researchers and scholars to continue to render South Central as an
African American space shaped anthropologist Joao H. Costa Vargas’s most recent study
of this city. In Catching Hell in the City of Angels, he lived in a public housing complex
in South Central for over a year in the late 1990s. His goal was to document the social
terrain of South Central’s African American residents. His discussion of Latinos centers
on tense moments between African American and Latino residents, as well as on how
Mexican immigration has transformed the visual queues of the city. Despite his
acknowledgement of Latinos, Vargas brilliantly uncovers South Central’s Black identity.
He explains that, “all Blacks in Los Angeles experience subordination and domination,
suppression and repression, but not in the same ways. Blackness emerges from different
conditions, experiences, and spatial settings… shared life and collective identity created
among residents of an apartment building in a low-income, drug ravaged neighborhood.”
8
Such assessment captures the complexity of Black identity as Blacks are confronted with
systemic oppression. His consideration of the plight of African American South Central
residents engages with Stuart Hall’s assertion of how “no one experiences identity in
isolation: race is lived through modalities of class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship.”
9
In
South Central, he argues, “blackness in this context is a matter of consensus and conflict,
solidarity and stratification, and mutual recognition and mutual recrimination.” He urges
8
Vargas, Catching Hell in the City of Angeles, 15.
9
Ibid.,16.
40
us to consider how identity and peoples lived reality are a constant negotiation that
requires people to create “political visions that point to projects of social organizations
whose premises and practices make it possible to survive genocide, achieve justice and
freedom, and decolonize ourselves in the process.”
10
In the end, he provides an astute
rendition of the lived realities and fluidity of identity for this city’s African American
residents in the latter-half of the twentieth century. He also critically thinks through the
meaning of community, as he “resists nostalgic depictions of community as cohesive
sites of unity and resistance, and instead acknowledges the fault lines, the sharp divisions
by class and gender.”
11
Moreover, Vargas’s respondents’ minimal motion to how their identity and social
reality have changed as a consequence of Latino migration and settlement. His focus and
conceptualization of African American identity, nonetheless, provides an important way
to frame the interaction between Latinos and African Americans. Rather than viewing
things as “either/or,” he urges us to consider African American and Latino relations and
interactions in South Central as tense and cooperative, charged and muted, and at times
uncomfortable as well as full of possibility. It is in this space of possibility that one
begins to see both communities’ struggle collectively and apart for dignity, humanity,
strength, and solidarity under unyielding odds. Most especially, for a community and
place in which most non-South Central residents have lost hope for.
10
Ibid., 18.
11
Ibid., 3.
41
These charged and muted relations between African American and ethnic
Mexican South Central residents are in large part a byproduct of preconceived racial
understandings of each other, but also of African American residents’ sense of ownership
over South Central. This claim to this space is due to the discriminatory and racist
practices like real estate restrictive covenants that restricted them solely to homes in this
area of the city. The achievements, tenacity, and strides of African Americans over the
course of the twentieth century have marked South Central’s corridors. In the 1970s and
1980s, and even now, there is something poignant, deep, and historical to the African
American character of South Central. It is this space’s “blackness,” rather than the overt
sense of “lo mexicano” that one feels when in East Los Angeles or Huntington Park that I
argue racializes and renders Mexican immigrants living in this space as inferior compared
to Latinos living in other cities throughout Los Angeles. Ethnic Mexicans settling in a
space that is clearly marked by a Black history, resident population, and character has
cast Mexican immigrant South Central residents as inferior and often racialized as Black.
Their willingness to live amongst and with African Americans, and purchase homes to
settle permanently in a community marked by disinvestment, violence, and poverty
propelled Mexican immigrant South Central residents to become much more protective
of their residence in South Central. It also drew unwanted negative criticism from ethnic
Mexicans living in surrounding and predominantly ethnic Mexican enclaves.
The 1970s and 1980s were pivotal decades in the economic, social, and racial
transformation of South Central. Overnight “old memories” crashed into “new realities.”
Mexican settlement undoubtedly has changed the visual and social queues of the city, and
42
has not completely erased the African American character of this space. Understanding
and reading South Central as African American is a source of negotiation and tension
amongst residents and activists, as currently African Americans are not in the majority of
the area’s population yet continue to hold the majority of political representation. This
reading of Mexican immigrants as recent arrivals, while accurate, obscures the ways in
which ethnic Mexicans have settled and lived in the city for over four decades.
Envisioning Mexican immigrants as recent arrivals continues to render them as perpetual
newcomers, and not as long-term residents with rights to claiming community. By
discussing the migration of undocumented Mexican immigrants in the 1970s and 1980s,
urban pioneers, I do not mean to diminish the important strides of African Americans, but
rather enrich how we think about how they built, constructed, and shaped South Central’s
reality. After all they worked to create opportunity in the midst of the most dehumanizing
forms of class, ethnic, gender, and racial oppression and inequality. Nonetheless, these
strides must not obscure the ways that Mexican immigrants have also helped shape South
Central’s history and future.
Ultimately, the relations between both groups are framed in response and
relationship to power structures and ever diminishing resources. These interactions do not
happen in a vacuum but rather in tandem to economics, police aggression, politics, and
poverty. The relationships between African Americans and Mexican immigrants are
fragile, muted, precarious, and volatile. The day to day interactions between these two
groups however is framed by finding dignity, accountability, resourcefulness, sacrifice,
and struggle. In doing so, we learn that becoming neighbors and residents—building
43
community—demonstrates that the history of South Central is one of ethnic and racial
intermixing, as this community was once white, then multiracial, overwhelming African
American, and now Latino. Most of the history is told through the lens of African
American migration and settlement, and only in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles
uprisings have Latinos been seen as being part of South Central’s landscape. The 1992
rebellion was a large-scale urban uprising in which South Central residents took to the
streets to protest police aggression, unemployment, limited and dwindling resources, and
racism. Overnight, despite the uprising being cast as a black/white issue, Latinos were
seen as part of the city. Latinos participated in the rebellion because, like their African
American counterparts and as residents of South Central, they were faced with a similar
set of challenges. Prior to 1992, South Central was undergoing massive demographic
change (like most of Los Angeles).
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, South Central’s racial configuration was
adeptly described as the “fastest turnaround in a city from Black to Latin.”
12
In this
chapter, I illustrate how Mexican immigrants come to terms with settlement into an
African American space, and how investigating neighborly interactions captures the
charged and muted interracial relations and for inclusion and transition mean for the
development of belonging, community, and unity. Finally, South Central is a space rife
for understanding what it means to settle in a community where people are constantly on
the move and residents must live in the moment.
12
William Overend, “South Central L.A.: Minority Meets Minority” Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1979,
A1.
44
African American Migration to Los Angeles
African Americans looked west as an opportunity to escape the racial violence
inflicted on them throughout the South. Douglas Flamming astutely argues how the first
wave of African American migrants made the trek west in search of better life chances.
They “were bound for freedom because most of them were leaving a dangerously
unequal south for a potentially equal west. Black Angelenos thus fought a double battle,
laboring to attain those rights they did not yet enjoy while seeking to protect the rights
they already had.” In his assessment, “to be bound for freedom, then, implied, more than
just a decision to leave the south for the West. It also meant that Black Angelenos were
bound and determined to keep Jim Crow out of their new home and make Los Angeles
and the West a shining example of what Americans might yet become.”
13
With this goal
in mind, the first generation of Black migrants arrived in Los Angeles in the 1880s. The
period between 1890 and 1915 is characterized as a “quieter African American migration.
Race leaders, the talented tenth… more educated, ambitious, and affluent African
Americans” characterized this wave of migration.
14
Their middle class identity was based
on “aspirations, lifestyle, and values” rather than in material wealth. They were “blue
collar, and if white collar, they knew how tangible that label can be.”
15
The level of
education and economic ability made this wave of migrants’ important to the
establishment of Black Los Angeles. Their industrialism and creativity was essential as
13
Douglas Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2005), 14.
14
Ibid, 45.
15
Ibid., 8.
45
they established important race enterprises, businesses, and employment options (like
Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company), as well as important outlets, spaces, and
venues for popular culture and recreation at the Dunbar Hotel. Their industriousness was
important for migrants that followed, as well as the creation of Black Los Angeles.
In 1913, W.E.B. Dubois’ visit to Los Angels led him to believe that Los Angeles
was a racial paradise— “California is the greatest state for the Negro.”
16
Historians
Douglas Flamming and Josh Sides both argue “opportunity was not measured in absolute
terms” for Blacks, “but rather in comparative terms.” Augustus Hawkins, an African
American migrant who would later become a representative of this region said, “when
people from Texas or Louisiana came out and wrote back South it made people in the
South believe that it was heaven… it was a land of golden opportunities—orange groves
and beautiful beaches—and life was all a matter of milk and honey.” California was
indeed viewed as the “land of milk and honey,” as it was a free state in 1850, repealed
testimony restrictions in 1863, outlawed de-jure racial segregation in California schools,
and passed anti-discrimination laws in 1893.
17
This catapulted California, in the
imagination of African American southerners as a venture worth pursuing. The sprawl of
the city made it seems as though, in the early twentieth century, African Americans were
not “rigidly confined to one geographic area, where space gave an illusion of tolerance.”
Despite the sprawl African Americans were not able to expand upon the housing market.
African Americans, who wanted to live beyond “the Avenue,” as these apartments and
16
Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 11.
17
Ibid., 13.
46
homes were amongst some of the oldest in Los Angeles confronted that while Los
Angeles welcomed them into the city, it did so only within certain boundaries. African
Americans were to remain in and around Central Avenue with other Asian and Mexican
immigrants.
In the early twentieth century, a multiracial setting defined “the Avenue,” as
whites, Asian Americans, African Americans, and Mexican Americans lived, worked,
and participated in similar activities. As Anglos left the urban core, they settled in
neighborhoods across Los Angeles’ large landscape. Communities of color however were
not offered that same mobility and relegated to segregated older housing arrangements
and communities in and around downtown.
18
The multiracial landscape of the Avenue
was overshadowed and overlooked by the ways that African Americans established
business along the corridor. Both Flamming and Mark Wild agree that the creation of
race enterprises owned and operated by African Americans rendered Central Avenue as
an African American space. It is this legacy of ownership, proprietorship, and community
that continues to render South Central as an African American community, even as the
majority of all businesses along Central Avenue now cater to a large Latino demographic.
The multiracial and multiethnic landscape that once defined downtown and Central
Avenue increasingly became more segregated during the Great Depression as over one
third of the Mexican and Mexican American population living in Los Angeles was
deported. Japanese Americans during World War II were forced into interment camps in
the wake of the Pearl Harbor attacks. Bronzeville and Central Avenue, two communities
18
Mark Wild, Street Meeting: Multiethnic Neighborhoods in Early Twentieth Century Los Angeles
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
47
defined by their multiracial character, became African American during the 1940s and
1950s.
19
By 1916, roughly 36 percent of African Americans owned their homes in Los
Angeles County. This rate of homeownership, compared to 2 percent in New York City
or 11 percent in New Orleans served to bolster the argument of how Los Angeles was the
land of opportunity as no other large city in America had such high rate of
homeownership amongst African Americans.
20
These high rates of ownership provide an
image of inclusivity, but real estate restrictive covenants ensured that upwardly mobile
African Americans did not have housing options beyond the scope of areas adjacent to
Central Avenue. Despite countless efforts to challenge these covenants, African
Americans were forced to live in South Central. The 1948 U.S. Supreme Court Shelley
vs. Kraemer decision made restrictive real estate covenants legally unenforceable, yet
private mortgage lenders “redlining” practices continued.
21
Not much had changed for
incoming migrations, as realtors continued to deter them from renting and purchasing
homes in all-white neighborhoods, hence Los Angeles housing arrangements were
divided along race and class.
19
Ibid.; Douglas Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005).
20
Tom Larson, “An Economic View of South Central Los Angeles” Cities, Volume 15, Issue 3 (June
1998),193-208, 199.
21
For further information on impact of the Great Depression on the Chicano community and Japanese
interment impact on the reconfiguration of residential neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and the impact of real
estate restrictive covenants impact for Chicano, Japanese, and African American residential opportunities
see: George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los
Angeles, 1900-1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Scott Kurashige, Shifting Grounds of Race:
Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2008); Douglas Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005).
48
The largest wave of African American migration into the community occurred in
the 1940s and 1950s. Like previous migrants, they mostly originated from Texas (24
percent) and Louisiana (18 percent). By 1950, more than 85 percent of the most recent
migrants had come from a metropolitan area, and the population grew from 1 to 8
percent. From 1940 to 1970, the African American community in Los Angeles grew
faster than any other metropolitan city in the country as it increased from 63,744 to
almost 763,000.
22
The labor shortages in defense and aerospace meant that the postwar
period offered a window of opportunity for African American men and women. African
Americans organized to be included in the union for higher wages. As their incomes
grew, they were able to buy homes in South Central. African American men working in
white-collar jobs rose from 16 percent in 1950 to 28 percent in 1970, but more impressive
were the proportion of African American women employed in white collar occupations,
which rose from 17 percent to 50 percent during the same years.
23
This gender disparity
would ultimately have detrimental effects for the livelihood of African American men in
the 1970s and 1980s. By the late 1960s South Central, Watts, and Compton was at the
heart of African American settlement in Los Angeles. Scott Kurashige points out that the
postwar period proved a pivotal period in the advancement, or limited advancement, as in
whites’ imagination “African Americans were racialized as a problem minority that had
to be contained.” This happens at the very same time in which other groups, like Japanese
22
Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits, 38; 4.
23
Ibid., 190.
49
Americans “were shed of their race and serve as a “model minority” for a moderate
integrationist agenda.”
24
Homeownership is intimately tied to employment opportunities and options. Not
everyone had the means to become homeowners in the neighborhood. The Housing
Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA) developed public housing options for
people seeking to buy homes but were unable to upon settlement into Los Angeles. For a
brief period these options were “clean, comfortable, safe, racially integrated, and for
many highly desirable as a stepping stone toward private homeownership.” The logic
behind public housing was that it was a temporary option until residents “got on their
feet.” Public housing options were racially integrated by African American, Mexican, and
white families. By the 1950s, whites left these temporary housing units and increasingly
public housing became occupied by poor African American families that stayed longer
terms. Unable to purchase a property on their own, African Americans found public
housing as their only alternative. From the program’s inception in 1947, HACLA’s public
housing tenants were 30 percent African American, but by 1959 they had increased to 65
percent. Mexican American tenants increased from 15 percent to 19 percent between
1947 and 1959.
25
African American migrant Ruth Smith journeyed west in search of better housing
and employment opportunities. Like migrants before her, she left her roots in Texas and
arrived in Los Angeles in the aftermath of the Watts riots in 1965 and temporarily settled
24
Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of
Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton University Press, 2007), 205.
25
Sides, L.A. City Limits, 114; Kurashige, Shifting Grounds of Race, 140.
50
into a community that was devastated by days of unrest. As the conditions in Watts
worsened, she along with her husband decided to purchase a home a few blocks away
from Central Avenue. In 1970, she became a proud homeowner of a modest three-
bedroom home on 53
rd
Street, “I loved this street because there was a Baptist Church at
the corner.” When she moved in she felt the community had a middle class feel or “at
least everyone was working.”
26
When she arrived, the Watts rebellion illustrated that
living in Los Angeles was a double edge sword. Like many African American migrants,
her husband found work in the rubber tire industry where he labored for many years until
the plant’s closure in 1980 and later became a janitor until his death in 1989.
27
His
employment opportunity offered a sense of comfort and security for her immediate
family, but this was not the case for countless African American families facing the
hardships of deindustrialization.
African Americans looked fondly to the city they built, but are concerned over the
changes that have taken place in the last few decades. Catherine Williams, migrant to
South Central in 1943, and homeowner in South Central since the 1950s vividly recounts
her experience living in the community. In South Central she went to her first nightclub,
were she saw Nat King Cole perform. Similarly, Beverly Blake recounts the old-
fashioned soda fountain in the community; the fountain was a source where she and her
girlfriends would chat as they ate burgers and fries. The nightclub and soda fountain are
now closed, and now new businesses have opened that catered to the growing Latino
26
Oral history with author, Ruth Smith (a pseudonym), Los Angeles, November 21, 2008.
27
Ibid.
51
community. Most African American residents, according to Los Angeles Times reporter
Charisse Jones, interviewed discuss that if they had the option, they would leave South
Central. As 55-year-old Major Cobb, and residents of South Central since the 1970s
stated, “If I had money I wouldn’t be here. If I had the money I’d be up there in Baldwin
Hills or somewhere where they have those swimming pools and everything.”
28
“For Sale”
and “Cash for your House” signs were placed across lawns in the community, reminding
residents that if they wanted they could leave and someone could take their place. It was
this sense that African Americans could easily be replaced that I argue causes many
African Americans to become fearful and weary of those moving into their community—
in this case recently arrived Mexicans and Central Americans.
Catherine Williams moved out of the neighborhood for a brief period in the mid
1960s when she became a widow, and in her estimation the community’s economic
change—prevalence of liquor stores—started to make South Central unattractive.
Williams returned to South Central, and even told Jones, “Honey, it didn't make me no
difference whatsoever because . . . this is mine. It may not look like anything to anybody
else, but my husband’s blood, sweat and tears went into this house. This is mine and I’ll
fight like hell to keep it.” African Americans may feel that in some ways South Central
did not live up to its promise. They nonetheless still deemed it a community worth
fighting for. Beverly Blake adds, “when we move, we lose.” What is at stake for Blake is
power, political power, “The more we move out, the less political clout we have. If we
don’t live together geographically, how do we empower each other?” This last statement
28
Charisse Jones, “Old Memories Confront New Realities in South L.A. Neighborhood” Los Angeles
Times, February 17, 1992, A1.
52
is interesting in light of the fact that South Central continues to be largely represented by
African American elected officials, but Blake’s assessment has to do with on the ground
political and community power. By the 1960s the beacon of hope that once defined Los
Angeles broadly, and South Central in particular, began to become extinguished as
housing segregation and changing economic sectors lead up to the Watts rebellion.
The Watts rebellion was a manifestation of African American people’s rage over
feeling that their opportunities have been limited and thwarted. The uprising showcased
the culmination of decades of struggles against police violence, labor, housing, and
public inequities. By the 1960s, a new generation of African American residents called
Los Angeles home. The children of World War II migrants “compared their opportunities
not to what African American people in other cities had, nor to the opportunities their
parents had, but rather to the opportunities enjoyed by their white peers in Los Angeles.”
Those three days of unrest did not usher in federal, state, and local support in all sectors
of the community. As I document in the other chapters of this dissertation, War on
Poverty efforts in South Central proved a challenge but this did not discourage resident
activism. In the years that followed, spatial segregation, systemic deindustrialization, and
poor schooling options made African Americans painfully aware of their second-class
status throughout the city.
29
Between 1978 and 1982, Los Angeles’ deindustrialization “generated the loss of
75,000 jobs in the auto, steel, rubber and aircraft industries. As many as 50,000 jobs
29
Sides, L.A City Limits, 172.
53
disappeared from Los Angeles’ central area.”
30
These jobs had been easily accessible to
inner city African Americans. Deindustrialization especially affected African American
blue-collar workers, because they lacked formal education and had few skills. By 1990,
about 70 percent of African American men between the ages of 25 and 34 with less than
a high school education were unemployed in South Central Los Angeles.” Not all African
American families experience hardships. There were countless families that had dual
earning incomes and had the financial ability to move into middle class neighborhoods in
Los Angeles. From the 1960s onwards, African Americans relocated to adjacent suburbs
in Los Angeles. Most moved to affluent neighborhoods like Baldwin Hills and Ladera
Heights, and more recently to farther counties like Riverside or even back to the South.
31
Strong homeowner associations that aimed to protect their new community from the same
deterioration plaguing Compton, South Central, and Watts defined these middle class
communities. The out-migration of middle class African American people ensured that
South Central, Watts, and Compton’s African American community of all ages and
generations were increasingly working class and working poor.
The 2000 census reported that one-quarter of the African American population
had moved out of the community during the 1990s. The changing demographics forced
many African Americans to question if they should stay or should go. As Charisse Jones
emphasized, “old memories cannot compete with new realities.” New realities not only
involved immigrants but the changing landscape. The “exodus” Jones points to is
30
Vargas, Catching Hell in the City of Angeles, 56
31
Sides, L.A. City Limits, 201.
54
complex, as “while some undoubtedly are leaving because of the neighborhood’s
changing demographics, most say a larger factor is the area’s long eroding quality of
life.”
32
The rise in crime rate has meant that African American and Mexican immigrants
alike “have lost a sense of freedom in their neighborhood afraid to walk to church in the
dark, to water their lawns after sunset, to move freely without worry.” Artimese Porter,
resident of South Central since the 1970s, has a theory as to why the change, “You know
why it changed? It’s all because of drugs. Other than that you could sit outside in the
summertime and talk until midnight.”
33
By the 1980s, Neighborhood Watch groups had
less of an impact on the safety of the community, as young and old residents stopped
going to meetings afraid of gang retaliation. The 1980s proved to be a tumultuous period
in South Central as residents discussed the change as not only in demographic terms, but
also economic, political, and social changes.
The decline in the African American population of South Central led the Los
Angeles Sentinel to leave their roots on Central Avenue to the Crenshaw district in late
1993. Kenneth Thomas, the newspaper’s publisher stated, “some bemoan the change, but
newspaper officials say they must keep in touch with their community. Our economic
survival is dependant on our staying in touch with the constituency we serve and that
constituency is no longer on Central Avenue.”
34
In 1993, Latinos made up more that 70
percent of the residents in the Central Avenue area from 12
th
Street to Slauson Avenue,
32
Charisse Jones, “Old Memories Confront New Realities in South L.A. Neighborhood” Los Angeles
Times, February 17, 1992, A1.
33
Ibid.
34
“Following the Readers,” Los Angeles Times, December 9, 1993, B4.
55
with stores catering to their needs. According to Thomas, demographics demanded that
they make the move. Moving to Crenshaw Boulevard made economic sense, as it was
one of the few African American areas with a thriving economic base as many black
owned clothing stores, hair salons, cleaners, nightclubs, restaurants, pharmacies, and
offices for lawyers and doctors lined the street. Crenshaw Boulevard became the new
Central Avenue. This move was the closing of the African American era along Central
Avenue, as it was one of the few African American institutions that remained.
African Americans believed that the “neighborhood feels not lived in, but lived
out.” Valerie Shaw as a resident attests that “when I drive through the commercial
districts there and elsewhere in Central Los Angeles, everything feels impermanent,
poised for flight, like a diner sitting at a restaurant eating a meal but strategically
positioned near the back door, ready to beat it at the first sight of trouble.”
35
This sense of
flight demonstrates the constant movement, the transience of the community. As Mexican
immigrants settled, African American residents came to terms and defined what it meant
to be an African American resident in South Central, but also what it meant to hold
community power without the critical mass. Josh Sides discusses the resentment of
African Americans over Mexican immigrant settlement when he documented, Leroy
Shepared attitude, “Sometimes we get mad at those doggone Mexicans” and Sylvia
McLymont lamented, “all of a sudden, it seemed like were invaded.”
36
Shannon, in Joao
H. Costa Vargas study, responds negatively to the prospect of a Latino immigrant
35
“Lost Soul: A Lament for Black Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Weekly, December 2-10, 1998, South Central
Los Angeles Documentation Collection, Southern California Library for Social Science and Research, Los
Angeles, California.
36
Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits, 204.
56
potentially renting an apartment in her housing complex, as he writes, “I noticed that
Shannon [African American resident] was visibly upset. She first started with muted
words that quickly became full shouts. “I don’t want to see no Latinos in this building, do
you hear, you motherfuckers? No Latinos? No Sir! I don’t want my kids playing with no
white kids, do you hear?”
37
While Shannon did not violently react towards her potential
Latino neighbors, her sentiments do express her anxiety and dislike of such a prospect.
Maintaining a “Black presence becomes an ever greater logistical and spiritual
challenge.” For Valerie Shaw, “There is a tremendous sense of loss in the black
community—a loss of political status, loss of neighborhoods, loss of history. What
people are dealing with is the breaking of a continuum.” In many African American
minds, the 1990s “became the symbol of all that became wrong, and in this period
“Black” has lost currency to the point were black politicians and other leaders, mindful of
cultivating broader constituent and financial bases, hesitate to characterize anything as
exclusively Black.” For many African Americans this was the biggest threat, the sense
and loss of power, as Ezola Foster said, “these people are taking food off our tables… we
are shocked to see Black leaders like Maxine Waters and Ron Dellums rallying for
illegals.”
38
For residents like Foster, this growth in political officials to become more
inclusive creates the belief that it poses a threat to their livelihood. The Los Angeles
Sentinel columnist Larry Aubry astutely deemed it a “moral dilemma” for African
37
Joao H. Costa Vargas, Catching Hell in the City of Angeles, 200.
38
Aubry Larry, Urban Perspective: Illegal Immigration and the African American; A Moral Dilemma,” Los
Angeles Sentinel, December 28, 1994, A7.
57
Americans. On the one hand they understood the struggle of what it means to be
discriminated. On the other they fear a loss of political power, “power,” that was hard to
earn.
Throughout the twentieth century migration and settlement of African Americans
to Los Angeles has been characterized by limited opportunity. In the early twentieth
century, African Americans began a vibrant cultural, social, and economic center along
the avenue. An area defined by overwhelmingly African American presence, but also
shaped by its multiracial and multiethnic residents.
39
Racism and discrimination limited
African American possibilities beyond the avenue and South Central. By mid-twentieth
century, South Central became almost exclusively Black. For the last four decades the
influx of Mexican immigration has rapidly transformed its racial, ethnic, and class
character. One must not overlooked the ways that South Central is defined by ethnic
transition, where whites, African Americans, Japanese Americans, and ethnic Mexicans
have all called South Central home throughout the twentieth century.
An understanding of South Central as an African American space is most
interesting and compelling. In similar ways, African American migrants and Mexican
immigrants left their homes in the South and Latin America to escape inequality and
poverty, in search of a better opportunity. Both groups have been discriminated upon
arrival and have been relegated to the worst paying job and housing opportunities. These
migrations are separated by time and place of origin, however both share similarities as
39
Mark Wild, Street Meeting; Danny Widener, Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los
Angeles (Duke University Press, 2010); Clora Bryant, Buddy Collette, William Green, Steve Isoardi, Marl
Young, eds., Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999);
Steve Isoardi and Roberto Miranda, The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
58
they occupied the same homes and employment niches like cooks, factory workers, and
housekeepers. Differences exist as Mexican immigrants faced INS deportation at a
moment’s notice and the economic restructuring of garment and retail industries utilized
a recently arrived Mexican immigrant workforce, while the crack epidemic and
deindustrialization negatively impacted African Americans’ life chances. Nevertheless,
both communities lived and were shaped by what living in South Central offered.
The Fastest Turnaround in a City: Lessons of Inclusion
Similar to Leticia Zarate’s migration to South Central, Maria Ruiz’s migration
also placed her in the center of South Central. Hailing from Jalisco, Mexico she settled in
South Central in 1976 shortly after marrying her husband, Magdaleno.
40
Magdaleno Ruiz,
like Bernardo Nuno, migrated to Los Angeles in 1971, and lived in the same apartment
building with other men from his hometown. He moved into this apartment complex
because his friends lived there. He did not think much about settling in “Black Los
Angeles,” after all it afforded him with the opportunity to live with a support network that
would help him find a job and secure a home for his future wife and children. Living
amongst African Americans came as a surprise, as he never imagined that the Los
Angeles everyone talked about back home was Black. This would be his first encounter
with African Americans. He described his weekly routine as going to and from work at
Douglas Furniture in Hawthorne, and on the weekends spending time with his friends. In
those initial years he remembers avoiding African Americans at all costs as they had a
40
Oral history with author, Maria Ruiz, Los Angeles, October 20, 2009. This section of South Central, in
1940, was 60 percent African American with the rest Mexican immigrant and white, but by 1960 it was
roughly 90 percent African American. Thus it is understandable that Ruiz and his fellow Mexican
compatriots would be open to settling in this area because it had a history of Mexicans living in these
streets. Sides, L.A. City Limits, 113.
59
reputation of not being welcoming, and actually confrontational. Throughout his initial
settlement, he focused on work and sending money back home. He returned to Mexico in
late 1975 and married Maria, and they moved to Los Angeles shortly thereafter. She did
not expect to live in South Central as in her imagination settling in Los Angeles meant
living with people from her hometown. Based on what her husband told her, she
imagined that the majority of her neighbors would be fellow Mexican immigrants. And,
in her block they were. But her block was squarely in the middle of Black Los Angeles.
She and her husband decided to rent an apartment close to where he had previously lived,
as they wanted to feel connected to people they knew. They never considered moving
elsewhere, as her husband had established networks that worked. A few years later they
purchased a home a block from their initial apartment on 49
th
Street, and have lived there
ever since.
41
Countless Mexican immigrants made this bold decision, and purchased a home in
South Central well before they gained legal residence in the United States in 1986. Their
residence in the United States was not secure as at any moment they could be picked up
by INS and deported. They did not think of their choices as bold, but all they had in mind
was to create a better opportunity of their family. They rarely recognized that in doing so,
they were becoming trailblazers and part of the wave of migrants who transformed the
racial character of the community.
42
In this section, I document this racial turn in which
41
Oral history with author, Maria Ruiz.
42
Oral history with author, Maria Ruiz. Oral history with author, Magdaleno Ruiz, Los Angeles, July 15,
2008. Oral history with author, Francisco Rosas, Los Angeles, September 4, 2009; Oral history with author,
Leticia Nuno, Los Angeles, August 6, 2009.
60
Leticia, Bernardo, Maria, and Magdaleno participated in, as well as the ways that
political officials, activists, and community residents responded to this influx.
I must note that in this dissertation I focus largely on the massive wave of
Mexican immigrant migration and settlement, however, it must be noted that Central
Americans also settled into the area. The civil conflicts in Central America, in particular
El Salvador and Guatemala, forced waves of refugees to seek asylum in the United
States. These refugees struggled as they crossed through Mexico, since the Mexican
government and citizens were unprepared to deal with the challenge of a large influx
fleeing from political persecution.
43
Relations between Mexicans and Central Americans
are fraught, in part because of the racism Central Americans faced while passing through
Mexico, which often led to many misunderstandings. This dynamic is another important
dimension that must be explored as we consider the changing landscape of South Central.
Central Americans’ initial settlement into South Central in the 1980s and 1990s (which
coincided with the growth of Mexican immigrant settlement) meant that their racial
identity was bound up with that of Mexican immigrants. Often, African Americans call
Salvadorans “Mexican” without much understanding for the difference. Calling Central
43
The particular migration of Central Americans is a complex and multidimensional, as the migration
experience of Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Nicaraguan people are vastly different. Their immigration
status differed from that of Mexican immigrants or Cuban refugees in that Ronald Reagan and George
Bush, Sr. considered them economic migrants rather than refugees. This led to a massive deportation of
Central Americans, and one the biggest sanctuary movements for their protection. I do not focus on Central
Americans in great length because I did not conduct enough oral life histories with Central Americans, but
anticipate doing more in the future. But for more on Central American migration to Los Angeles see: Nora
Hamilton and Norma Stoltz Chinchilla, Seeking Community In Global City: Guatemalans & Salvadorans
In Los Angeles (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); Cecilia Menjivar, Fragmented Ties:
Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in American (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Maria
Cristina Garcia, Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Gerardo Sandoval, Immigrants and the Revitalization of
Los Angeles: Development and Change in MacArthur Park (Cambria Press, 2009).
61
Americans Mexican, is an insult, and augments the already tense relationship. Both
Central Americans and Mexican immigrants would agree that their experiences vastly
differ and must be taken on their own merits. For the purposes of my dissertation, I focus
on the migration of Mexican immigrants to Los Angeles.
The 1970s and 1980s proved a pivotal turning point in the demographic change in
the community. In 1970, approximately 50,000 Mexican immigrants were living in South
Central Los Angeles neighborhoods or roughly 10 percent of the area’s total population.
44
By 1980 the population had doubled to 100,000 or about 20 percent of the total South
Central population. One indicator of racial transformation can be seen through the
enrollment of students at schools. Roughly about fifty elementary and secondary schools
in the Los Angeles Unified School District had a student population that was almost
completely African American. These schools were largely in South Central and Watts.
By 1974, 20
th
Street Elementary School was 69 percent African American and by 1978 it
was 75 percent Mexican immigrant. Hooper Avenue Elementary School was 98 percent
African American in 1974, but by 1978 it was only 26 percent.
45
This change, over the
course of four years shows the rapid rate at which Mexican immigrants were settling in
the community, but also paints a picture of the community in which they settled.
Demographics at schools, most especially elementary schools speak volumes of the
projected changes in the community.
44
“Beyond the Racial Divide: Perceptions of Minority Residents on Coalition Building in South Los
Angeles” Tomas Rivera Policy Brief (June 2007), 2.
45
“Elementary Schools,” Box 2066, Mayor Tom Bradley Administrative Papers, 1973-1993, Special
Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California.
62
Ethnic Mexican residents actively made sure that political officials were aware
and considered these changing demographics. Representative Augustus Hawkins was an
advocate of working class people and African American civil rights. Hawkins came
under fire by East Los Angeles residents during War on Poverty programming as
Chicanos felt that their needs were not being met like those of African Americans. In
early January 1970, Hawkins received a letter from South Central resident Lupe
Montano. In it she states that Hawkins has done a lot for the community, but in her
estimation, “you forget that there are also Mexican-Americans in our community.” As an
advocate for education she stressed,
“Reading over some of the literature you have sent us, we can see you have done
much for our community, but I see only one Brown face in this whole thing, that
of a child from Miramonte. Of course the needs for Black teachers are great in
South Los Angeles, but what about Chicano teachers. You are not the only person
who seems to think Chicanos are unheard of out of East Los Angeles, but we are,
we make up a great deal of this community from Compton Ave on (towards
Huntington Park). We are the majority in Florence Avenue School. I am writing
in hopes that the Florence Community does not forget the Mexican-American
population. We realize your main concern is the equality for minority groups. But
to get anywhere, we feel the only community that is really concerned with the
needs of the Chicano is East Los Angeles, but we should have to leave our
community for this. There is a new library in this community, it is located
between the Black and Brown population of this community. This library will be
used by both. I truly hope when purchasing books, the community does not forget
books concerning the struggle of all the minorities. Once again thank you for your
concern in this community, and improvement in our community!”
46
In this letter, Lupe Montano highlights how Mexican Americans are a sizable percentage
of the community on the eastern edge of South Central. Her residential community is on
the border between South Central and Huntington Park, which explains the sizable
46
“Letter from Lupe Montano, January 1970” Box 92, August F. Hawkins Papers, 1935-1990, Special
Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California.
63
Mexican American population. She is particularly invested in educational efforts in the
community. Striking about her letter is the ways that she highlights how geographically
Chicanos and Mexican Americans live outside of East Los Angeles and their needs are
not adequately being met. For city officials, politicians, and the general public, their
understanding of where ethnic Mexicans lived in Los Angeles was in the eastern part of
the city. As Montano illustrates, Chicanos were part of the South Central community
(even if the eastern edge) as early as the late 1960s and early 1970s, and their presence
and needs must be taken into consideration. African American and ethnic Mexicans use
community resources equally in the community. Hence, Montano’s letter was not meant
to suggest that Hawkins needed to leave behind his commitment to the African American
struggle, but rather that to truly meet the concerns of the community, it had to consider all
groups, not one over the other. It was this sense of transition and needs that was of grave
concern for African American residents in the community.
Hawkins responded to Montano’s letter with a response of his equal concern for
all minority groups,
“I am not only concerned about equality for minority groups, but concerned about
equality for all groups. It is very true that we sometimes forget to mention those
who constitute a large minority among the larger groups. I think your criticism is
highly justified, and I assure you that I will give great attention to including them
in my newsletter and other aspects of my activities; especially, a greater amount
of attention to Chicanos. I would appreciate any information you can send to me
which you feel maybe incorporated in some of my newsletters. I would also like
authority to be able to publicize certain parts of your letter, because I believe
others may become interested in the role of the Mexican Americans in our
community.”
47
47
“Letter from Augustus Hawkins, February 24, 1970” August F. Hawkins Papers, 1935-1990, Special
Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California.
64
His assessment of how racial groups are ignored in the midst of another racial group is
intriguing and worthy of further inspection. Despite his acknowledgement of the presence
of other groups in the community, in this case Mexican immigrants, throughout his
trajectory he discussed and understood South Central as a Black space. However, out of
all the politicians in the area, he was the only one ready to acknowledge the growing
presence of ethnic Mexicans in the area. Most especially, as he frequently received letters
from ethnic Mexican South Central residents asking for him to understand their needs in
the community, not only residents of the eastside of town. Montano’s letter and Hawkins’
response highlight very important features of ethnic Mexicans’ presence in South Central.
They demonstrate that as early as the 1970s, ethnic Mexicans were growing and sharing
space and social services with African Americans. But more importantly, these letters do
not suggest that ethnic Mexicans were asking for the erasure of issues facing African
Americans. Rather than be forgotten altogether, they stressed that they wanted to share in
social services. This latter point about sharing is key. Most letters and calls were about
what they wished for during this period of time, acknowledgement. Ethnic Mexican
South Central residents did not want a complete erasure of services for African
American, but rather inclusion. But diminishing resources always placed these two
groups at odds.
Similarly, Opal C. Jones as Project Director of Neighborhood Adult Participation
Project (NAPP) came under extreme criticism for her role in War on Poverty efforts.
NAPP was an anti-poverty organization designed to give employment and training
opportunities for residents of working poor neighborhoods. In the wake of much criticism
65
she wrote a report in which she discussed “The Mexican Americans in NAPP.” Similar to
Hawkins acknowledgment, she writes, “some areas have families of different racial
backgrounds and there are “invisible” statistics in many settings other than the traditional
Mexican-American communities. In other words, Mexican Americans live in other areas
than Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles.”
48
Her acknowledgment of the Mexican
Americans in the organization, and how they are “invisible” statistics is meaningful as
her trajectory and leadership at NAPP she received criticism for her failure to understand
and include Mexican Americans in prominent positions throughout the organization.
These critiques were not only waged on Jones, but also countless others who operated
War on Poverty efforts in South Central. What is key is that despite the growing presence
of ethnic Mexicans in South Central they were viewed as part of an “invisible”
population. It was not that they required the erasure of African American needs, as they
faced similar challenges, but that they added a few more services like bilingual forms and
staff. Thinking more broadly about the social services and meeting the needs of a larger
set of diverse experiences.
The arrival of Mexican immigrants not only affected political officials and
activists’ understanding of Mexican settlement but also residents. Their settlement was
met with trepidation and anxiety, as many African American residents were unsure about
how to interpret this migration and settlement. Gertrude Blanche, twenty-two year
resident of 56
th
Street, described her community as a “sophisticated ghetto,” a community
that while “worse than some parts of the city, was not quite as bad as others.” This
48
“Mexican Americans in NAPP,” Box 34, August F. Hawkins Papers, 1935-1990, Special Collections,
Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California.
66
reading of South Central goes against our understanding of the configuration of an urban
ghetto. Blanche was among the countless African American and ethnic Mexican migrants
and immigrants that described South Central’s appeal because of its tree-lined streets and
homes. South Central does not look like your traditional urban “ghetto” with an
overwhelming presence of public housing options, rather it is composed of single-family
dwellings with the largest percentage of homeowners for a blighted urban area. Blanche
as president of the Neighborhood Watch of her street was particularly nervous about what
she thought was threatening her community, “these Mexicans want to take over the
country. I’m not talking about the ones who were born here. They’re regular Americans.
But these illegal aliens don’t want to be told anything. They say this is their country and
they want it back.” She adds, “they taking jobs and our housing and they’re pushing the
colored people out… I even had one who told me to go back to Africa.”
49
Blanche’s
assertion about her changing community is interesting as she sees the real threats are
recent migrants, not American born Mexicans. She also conveyed that the level of
animosity between both groups as recent immigrants told her “to go back to Africa” and
that this was their country and they wanted it back. Recent immigrants also state that they
were often called “wetbacks,” and rather than imagining reclaiming the land back, they
were afraid of being discovered by Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)
officials.
Attitudes towards Mexican immigrants are varied and complex, as African
Americans and Mexican immigrants alike realized and acknowledged that they are
49
William Overend, “South Central L.A.: Minority Meets Minority” Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1979,
A1.
67
similarly racialized. Young social worker Anne Davis, expressed “what some Blacks fail
to see is the economics of the situation… this is just another case of poor people being
exploited, working in inhumane conditions.” For Davis, she doesn’t see “the Mexican
people as my enemy, when the hand comes down, it come down on all of us.” For her,
she believes that African American attitudes towards Mexican people will change, “but it
will take education from people in the community who know we’re all in the same boat.”
Attorney for the Greater Watts Justice Center, Larry Williams, further affirms this
statement as he stated that the “black leadership tends to be conservative. Personally, I’d
like to see the Blacks and Browns put in a political context. We’re really talking about
poor people. The masses will take the simplistic approach that Blacks are losing their
jobs to immigrants.” He says that while there is some truth to such an assessment, it’s just
superficially. He does not “think that’s the faulty of the Chicano. That’s the priority of
the nation, of the government that choose not to provide housing and jobs.”
50
Not all neighbors expressed apprehension toward Mexican immigrants in the
1980s. Leon Jones, an auto repair shop worker, noted that “you’ve got so many poor
African Americans and poor Mexicans and we’re just gonna all have to get along…we
African Americans can’t afford to go nowhere. If I could, I’d get out. Not because of the
Mexicans. I’d just like to get out of the area.”
51
Leon’s sentiments regarding his inability
to leave the community were based on his own limited economic opportunities, not racial
prejudice. More importantly, his feelings reflect how both African American and recent
50
Ibid.
51
Ibid.
68
Mexican immigrants were both plagued by the same circumstances: poverty. Economic
vulnerability could serve as a source of coalition-building, but also leads to much of the
tension and apprehension between these two groups as limited opportunities made cross-
racial relationships all the more fragile. Language barriers heightened misunderstanding.
As an African American resident adeptly put it, both “groups don’t quite know what to
make of it yet. I’m not prejudiced at anyone myself. I don’t think there’s a problem once
Mexicans start communicating. But over half the Mexicans can’t communicate. They
can’t talk English.” African Americans did not know what to make of these demographic
shifts. Clearly the transformation of South Central would result in changes to the racial
character of their residential streets, but also to the political, social, and economic
environment of the community.
52
The demographic change of South Central was not publicized. Residents
experienced demographic change as a community. There are definite pockets of South
Central that have retained its African American character, while some have experienced
the greatest growth in ethnic Mexican settlement. As Ramirez, part of the Mexican
American Legal Defense Fund, “nobody is really up to date on the figures. Blacks who
are staying tend to be seniors. A lot are moving out, either farther south or west.” The
new migrants settling into the community are “almost all the new people are illegal. And
talking to some of the Blacks, I get the feeling they think they are being invaded and
don’t know what to do I think Blacks have the feeling that they are being pushed out
because housing is so tight down there. Eventually I think they will be replaced.” Ruth
52
Ibid.
69
Sanders’ put it adeptly when she said, “I guess this is how white people felt? When we
moved in… like we were takin’ over.”
53
As 20 year resident put it,
“When I came here this was almost all Blacks. Now there’s only five black
families on the block. The Mexicans, they coming in big droves. Goddang it, what
gonna become of the people here… these people like me on the street? What if I
moved? One of the them gonna get this place. If I ever move, they won’t ever be
another colored man in here. I get along with ‘em. They’re nice to me and I be
nice to them… I got six months to tend to my business and another six months to
leave there’s alone. But if you move around here, a Mexican will take your place.
You put this down. The colored can’t find a place to live in L.A. These Mexicans
done taken it over.”
54
This sense of Mexican immigrants taking over was legitimate and of grave concern to
African American residents. This sense of ethnic succession is what causes a complex
reality of racial interactions and misunderstandings. This idea that Mexican immigrants
are here to reclaim their land and take jobs and housing dominated many of the
imaginaries of African American residents. Gertrude would talk about these fears, but
also most people would accuse Mexican immigrants of taking over jobs without much
consideration for the economic transformations of the city and community. As a resident
said, “I don’t know how much the Browns are pushing the Blacks out of jobs and
housing.” She adds, “it’s not like the jobs and houses they have are that desirable. And
even with the awful conditions we have, we should make room for them. We’re so
materialistic and such a wasteful country and there are people starving.”
55
53
Oral History with Ruth Smith.
54
William Overend, “South Central L.A.: Minority Meets Minority” Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1979,
A1
55
Ibid.
70
The “flurry of moving vans, pickup trucks, and station wagons” lined streets
across the South Central area as Mexican immigrants unloaded their modest belongings.
56
Esther Sanchez’s story is one among many Mexican immigrants in the community that
moved into the area in the 1980s. Esther and her husband hired a realtor to find housing
listings, as she wanted to move out of her apartment and into a home. The realtor found a
beautiful three bedroom home on 53
rd
street, a house vacated by a middle-class African
American family leaving the area. Esther explained that the appeal of the street was that it
had a “middle class feel” as described by wide corridors beautifully lined by palm trees
and manicured lawns. As Dolores Rosas, her fellow neighbor elaborated, “In the summer
of 1994, when she was shown a property on 53
rd
Street, the street still had a Black feel to
it… not like the houses I was shown over by Hooper Avenue and Vernon Avenue (near
Historic Central Avenue).”
57
She elaborated that those streets seemed more congested,
more Latino, and on the day of her visit she saw too many Latino “gangsters that were
not to her liking.” This property had not lost its appeal. Even as countless African
Americans lived on this street, this was not any different to her experience living in South
Central. Since 1978, so she had lived in an apartment on 50
th
Street and Main Street that
had been predominantly African American. The apartment manager “La Mimi” was an
African American woman. She remembers her interactions with Mimi fondly as she
would watch her children at a moments notice, and was very attentive to the upkeep the
apartments. She was also a bit difficult and strict, as she would reprimand Dolores and
56
Hector Tobar. “Latinos Transform South L.A.” Los Angeles Times, February 16, 1992, A1.
57
Oral history with author, Dolores Rosas, Los Angeles, September 23, 2009.
71
others if they lined dried their clothing on days in which they were not allowed to or if
she was having a bad day. She was a bit fickle, yet Dolores and fellow apartment
residents, remember her with care as she did her best through hand-signals and the few
words she had learned in Spanish to communicate with her Mexican immigrant tenants.
She created a comforting environment.
58
In 1985, Dolores and her husband, Francisco, purchased a home a block away
from this apartment complex. Their choice to stay in South Central was not difficult. She
had grown accustomed to living in this two-mile radius, and again, she found herself in a
home that was flanked by African American residents. Terry, like Mimi before her, had
become her new neighbor, and as she learned early on their move into a recently vacated
African American home was met with acceptance. She recalled that despite the fact that
Francisco was not fluent in English or Terry in Spanish, they would joke and talk with
each other about the daily affairs. They had a muted friendship and relationship, one that
never ended in verbal assaults. Terry continues to live at this property, and when Dolores
and Francisco go to visit friends on this block he continues to greet them with the same
warmth he did in the mid-1980s. Dolores lived in this home for close to ten years, before
selling that home and purchasing another home on 53
rd
Street, and as she recalls she lived
some of the most tense days of her life in and around 49
th
Street. This is where she settled
upon arriving in the United States. Here she engaged and befriended her first cohort of
African American neighbors, found employment, contemplated legalization, and endured
58
Ibid.
72
the tumultuous days of the 1992 uprising. The 1980s, and this home, were important to
her overall trajectory in South Central.
59
Her neighbors had always been African Americans, and in her experience the
relationship had always been muted and positive. In 1983, Reina Maldonado, her
husband, and three children lived in a crowded apartment in Pico-Union. She grew tired
of her cramped space and decided to purchase a home further south on 53
rd
Street. She
quickly made this property her home, and in the 1980s, Maldonado was one of the first
families to settle on 53
rd
Street. “When we first came here, it was almost all black people.
Pretty soon it will be all Latino. And then we wondered who will be next to replace us.
The Asians?”
60
Like Dolores, Leticia, and Maria witnessed and were part of this influx of
migration. Maldonado discusses this change as inevitable, as ethnic succession. I would
argue that Maldonado viewed Asian immigrants as the logical next group to take over the
community because they were the majority of the business owners in the community as
well as the fastest growing immigrant group in the region. She saw Asian immigrants,
especially Koreans, as part of South Central’s business culture, yet not part of the
community, but considered Asian immigrants as potentially a part of this community’s
racial transformation.
For the first time in their lives, Latinos found themselves interacting with African
Americans. Knowledge about the African American struggle and experience was
nonexistent, as they had few popular cultural references to pull from and presence and
59
Ibid.
60
Hector Tobar, “Blacks, Latinos Coexist in a Peace Tempered by Fear” Los Angeles Times, February 19,
1992, A1.
73
roots of Blacks in Mexico and Latin America was invisible. Despite these limitations,
migrants like Josefina Hernandez believed that African Americans were predisposed to
violence and when she arrived to South Central in 1968 feared them, “When I first came
to this country, I was afraid of them. Now I see that they’re just like we are. They have a
good heart. I’ve never had a problem with them. I’ve never been robbed by a black
person. Never.”
61
She went on to share, “People look down on them just because they’re a
little darker than we are.” However, this was not the case for many Mexican immigrants.
Many have not been able to get past initial tense and violent set of encounters with
African Americans. Magdaleno Ruiz elaborates,
“It was hard, their assaults were racially motivated. We all knew that. They would
get together in a crowd; you know something was up. They would call us
Mexicans, wetbacks, in a tone, you know that was mean spirited. It was a
challenge. Uno como imigrante viene a sufrir, sufre uno mucho (As an immigrant
one comes to suffer, we suffer a lot). Living with other Mexicans doesn’t shield
you from violence. They would get you when you were alone, say at the liquor
store. Ohhh man, if I only told you how many palizas, peleas (beatings) I saw
outside the liquor, and how close I came to them too.”
62
As I talked to men about their experience, they all mentioned how the liquor or grocery
stores were places of theft, beatings, and an overall sense of helplessness. They discussed
“el sufrimiento (struggle)” they endured as they learned to reside in South Central.
Francisco Rosas agrees,
“South Central in those days was not the South Central you now know. You see a
little Mexico now, everything is accessible, easy. We changed that. Nombre
nosotros si batallamos, no sabiamos ingles, habia puro moreno, sin papeles. Pero
uno queria estar aqui, cuando vienes a los Estados Unidos y te gusta, es muy
dificil regresarte. (Now we really struggled. We didn’t know English, everyone
61
Ibid.
62
Oral history with author, Magdaleno Ruiz.
74
was Black, without papers. But we wanted to be here, when you come to the U.S.
and you like it, it’s hard to go back).”
63
Men describe their struggle as a badge of honor, but their wives were much more open to
discuss these moments as helpless, vulnerable, and tense.
Latina women in particular discussed feeling particularly alarmed, as “they are
constantly on their guard, in a state of anxiety.” In 1979, the Los Angeles Times reporter
William Overend captured this reality when he wrote that African Americans viewed
Mexican women as “easy targets for rip-offs because they usually won’t go to the police
unless their car has been stolen. One common crime these days is a lot of purse snatching
by Blacks from Latina women because it’s known they don’t keep their money in banks.”
Mexican immigrant “women are known as “walking banks.””
64
Dolores would attest that
she was often accosted on the bus on her way to work, “I would put my purse close to
me, but that was not good enough. I got my purse snatched a few times. I stop carrying
my purse on the bus, solo mi lonche. Uno paro de usar su oro, alajas, las costumbres de
antes de ponernos nuestras cositas, porque te lo robaban. (We stopped wearing our gold,
our jewelry, our old customs of putting on our possessions, because they would take that
too.)”
65
Upon arrival, Mexican immigrant women found themselves on the bus to get to
work or shopping, and expressed unease at riding the bus. This did not stop them. They
had no choice. This was the only way they had to get to work, as well as they were not
going to give up their diversion to go shopping. They simply became savvy and strategic
63
Oral History with Francisco Rosas.
64
William Overend, “South Central L.A.: Minority Meets Minority” Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1979,
A1.
65
Oral history with author, Dolores Rosas.
75
about how to hide their personal belongings, and worked on being less visible on the bus
while walking down the street. However they do discuss such fear as an unfair burden
placed on them that made commuting challenging.
Despite having lived in South Central for over four decades, many Mexican
immigrants have not been able to get over their initial feelings of anxiety, fear, and
prejudice towards African Americans. They explained, “why do I have to befriend them,
be nice to them? They have never been nice to me. No point in talking to each other.”
66
Also there is a larger sense that Mexican immigrants are able and willing to see past their
African American neighbors’ racial difference, but still continue to distrust, fear, and
avoid them. It is this attitude that not only shapes the reality of these middle aged
Mexican immigrants but also their children and grandchildren. And it is this next
generation’s prejudice and unwillingness to look beyond racial difference that is most
alarming and squanders any inroads at coalition building and perpetuates a sense of us
versus them. Ruiz’s assertion that African Americans took out their anxiety over
changing demographics and settlement on their Mexican immigrant neighbors is in line
with what Alfred Smith shared, “it is hard to see your street overrun by Mexicans. One
minute it was just us, then it was them.” Smith further shared that Mexican immigrants
would also yell expletives at them in Spanish, “they thought because they was in Spanish
we didn’t understand, but we understood… the gist was that they didn’t like us.”
67
66
Oral history with author, Juan Rodriguez, Los Angeles, September 14, 2007.
67
Oral history with author, Alfred Smith, Los Angeles, October 19, 2009.
76
For some Mexican immigrant residents, living in a state of anxiety and fear was
not a reason to decide to leave South Central at the first opportunity. Many Mexican
immigrant residents did leave South Central to live in communities with a larger
percentage of Latinos. For families like Leticia, Maria, Dolores, and Esther they decided
to purchase homes in South Central. They could have easily moved to another working
class Mexican barrio, but they chose to stay in South Central. Purchasing a home in the
community was an ultimate indicator of their commitment to this space. In effect the
threat and rendering of South Central’s African American residents was not enough nor
strong enough to leave behind this struggling neighborhood. When they settled with their
families and purchased homes in the 1980s, they were not sure how many more Mexican
immigrants would settle like them, much less that one day they would outnumber African
American residents. They reflect back on their actions and definitely call themselves
“pioneros” (pioneers). It was unclear if they would be amongst the few ethnic Mexican
families that would navigate what it means to be a minority within a highly racialized and
policed population.
Two months prior to the 1992 uprisings, the Los Angeles Times sent two
reporters, Hector Tobar (Latino) and Charisse Jones (African American) into the heart of
South Central to document the area’s demographic shift. The result, “Letters from 53
rd
Street,” an expose about how this community had changed. Not much is discussed in
terms of why they strategically chose this street out of the countless others in the
neighborhood. The logical choice could have been Central Avenue, but this
unconventional choice, I speculate, was in large part because of this part of the city still
77
boasted roughly an equal proportion of African American and Latino residents. By the
early 1990s, Central Avenue was close to 70 percent Latino. In early 1992, 53
rd
Street
was caught in the midst of true demographic transition.
68
The Los Angeles Times interest
in highlighting South Central’s “community in transition” is unsurprising as they had
written a similar story in 1979 with William Overend’s “Minority Meets Minority.” Both
series illustrates the complexity and difficulty of residents coming to terms with change
on multiple levels with writers utilizing terms like: transform, shift, new and old, coexist,
and transition to capture this community development.
Scholars, politicians, and activists describe South Central’s racial transformation
as the fastest racial transition a community had undergone. Even so, nobody was either
ready or willing to assist recently arrived Mexican immigrants settling into this
community nor prepare African Americans for this community of residents’ middle class
outmigration and changing demographics. The transition of Mexican immigrants into
South Central was indeed difficult. They were moving into a city that was not their own,
having imagined that moving to Los Angeles meant settling amongst other Mexican
immigrants not African Americans. African Americans were reacting to the feeling that
they were being left behind by middle class peers, loss of job opportunities, increased
presence of drug and gang activity, increased police aggression, and diminishing social
services. The relations between African American and Mexican immigrants are framed
68
Many of the residents I conducted oral histories with lived or moved in and around this area at around the
same time that Tobar and Jones conducted their story. Also, it is important to note, that by the 1990s
Central Avenue did not have the same African American character it had in the early and mid twentieth
century. By this point, most of the cultural and social center of African Americans had moved to Crenshaw
Boulevard, near the Leimert Park area. This area boasts a higher concentration of African Americans in Los
Angeles, closer to Ladera Heights and Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza. See: Danny Widener, Black Arts
West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (Duke University Press, 2010).
78
within a context of power, with limited power against the larger changes in the economic,
politics, and social landscape. These two communities are living and interacting in
relationship to the state, most especially through the prism of state sanction surveillance
of police, immigration agents, and social service providers. At various levels these
residents’ lives and everyday operations, they are regulated, shaped, and constructed by
the state. Both groups continue to work towards building community, solidarity, and
possibility as individuals and a collective group despite the multiple layers of oppression.
I aim to illustrate that in the last few decades the relations between these communities is
fraught, strained, and contested as a result of individual and collective race, gender, and
class notions of identity, but more importantly that these interactions are also largely
shaped by the overall U.S. racialized discourse that renders them poor, working poor, and
working class people of color unworthy of public assistance, leeches to the system, or
part of the immigrant invasion coming into the United States to drain the country of its
resources. African Americans and Mexican immigrants are subjected to racist, sexists,
and class based discrimination. It becomes evident that once they understand the
connection, both groups begin to articulate, form, and construct a new reality and
possibility.
Racialized as Black for living in South Central Los Angeles
In the last two decades, the influx of Mexican immigrants has changed the visual
landscape, however this has not eroded the African American identity and character that
people readily associate with South Central. Paleteros, personal cars and vans would
cruise streets with high-pitched horns marking the arrival of the “donas truck (donut
79
truck).”
69
Dora Escobedo explained, “you know we have arrived when we have
panaderias all over the city.”
70
Now there are more Spanish language Catholic services
than English language service. In the mid-1970s, Nativity Catholic Church did not offer
masses in Spanish or much less had a shrine for La Virgen de Guadalupe. However by
the 1990s, all these features were necessary to meet and secure the needs of devoted
ethnic Mexicans. In people’s homes, small cilantro, cucumber, tomatoes, and tall stalks
of corn lined the gardens. Chickens roaming freely in the backyard, and roosters cawing
early in the morning became commonplace. The paletero, donas truck, panaderia,
Spanish masses, and Spanish spoken in the street became a daily occurrence. Despite
these changes, outsiders, political officials, and activists continued to think of South
Central as African American.
It is South Central’s inability to shake its African American character that has
served to racialize Mexican immigrants as “Black” or less than for choosing to live in this
community. Bound up with South Central’s stereotypes are: Blacks, drugs, violence,
welfare dependence, and poverty. These negative stereotypes, part of a longer history of
discrimination and racism waged on African Americans is then attached and placed onto
recent immigrants. It is this part of getting similarly racialized as African American that
serves to alienate them even further from other Mexican immigrants. Subsequently,
Mexican immigrants felt isolated and disconnected from a larger Mexican community. In
those days, “East Los Angeles was a novelty.” Settling into South Central, with African
69
Hector Tobar, “Latinos Transform South L.A.,” Los Angeles Times, February 16, 1992, A1.
70
Oral history with author, Dora Escobedo.
80
Americans, marked many Mexican immigrants as “inferior” to other U.S. born Mexicans
and Mexican immigrants. Friends that settled in other parts of Los Angeles would
hesitate to go and visit their fellow Mexican immigrant friends in South Central. It
became a chore to convince them that coming into South Central would not endanger
their lives, in many cases their friends would not vocalize their discomfort going into
South Central but their excuses for not going would be a great indicator. Journalist
Hector Tobar writes that when Salvadoran notary, Denis Anaya informed his friend that
he moved his notary office to Central Avenue, his friend told him, “You’re crazy. How
can you live there? They’ll kill you” since he associated this street with “gang-banging”
and drive-by shootings. The level of negative associations living in South Central has
meant that many of his friends do not visit him. Despite such misperceptions,
businessmen like Anaya and residents like Maria Garcia, a plastics-factory worker,
purchased their home in the 1980s right next to or in close proximity to the Watts
Towers. She explained, “We bought the houses with the idea of staying one year and then
selling them, so we could move someplace else. But now we’re already used to Watts.”
71
Josefina Hernandez, and countless other Latinos echoed these sentiments as, “my sister’s
family lives in La Puente and they won’t come here because supposedly we live in a
Black neighborhood,” but of course “they don’t know that on this block. There are more
Latinos than Blacks.” Hernandez describes the racialization of Latinos that settled in
South Central as tightly connected to that of African Americans. In the 1990s, it was even
hard for Latinos to imagine South Central as a Latino space.
71
Hector Tobar, “Latinos Move to South-Central Los Angeles” The Los Angeles Times, May 3, 1990, A1.
81
Similarly, Esther Sanchez came to a similar realization on her way to school. In
the late 1980s, she took her seat in the RTD and broke down in tears because as she
peered out to her fellow passengers and all she saw were African American faces. She
could not hold back her tears because she realized that unlike her peers in her hometown
in Zacatecas, her family had settled in a “Black neighborhood.” The purchase of a home
in South Central was the ultimate indicator that living in South Central was not
temporary, but rather a permanent move. At that moment, anxiety over her and her family
settlement as well as feelings of being outnumbered by African Americans inspired a
sense of fear and impotence, “back then we were a bit afraid. If you looked at them
wrong, se te hechaban encima (they would fight you). Look away and to the floor. Now
(the late 2000s), if something broke out, nos podemos agarrar a fregadasos al igual (we
could get into a fight with equal numbers).”
72
After she utters those words she could not
help but laugh at the absurdity of her comment, as she herself admits never being in a
fight nor confrontational, but rather her comments stem from her and her families’
feelings of anxiety, fear, and helplessness. The increased presence of Mexican
immigrants into the community offered a level of security, but more importantly rid
South Central of its association with Blackness—a feature that for her signaled a lower
socioeconomic community. It was the multiple layers of racialization and
discrimination—living in a working poor and African American community—that
produced angst.
72
Oral history with author, Esther Sanchez, Los Angeles, August 12, 2010.
82
This rebuff by fellow Latinos towards Mexican immigrants only serves for some
families to work towards dissociating with these negative stereotypes, or bolster other
families like Leticia, Dolores, Maria, and Esther to become proud residents of the
community. Esther, while anxious about her prospect of living in South Central, often
oscillates between viewing African Americans as people “to be reckoned with” because
they are loud and boisterous, yet she considers them as united group worthy of emulation
and respect. She does dwell on the negative character traits of African Americans that
reproduce negative stereotypes. Yet she admits that they have provided assistance when
she has needed it without expecting anything in return. Esther explained, “en mi barrio
hay morenitos, pero este es mi barrio… aqui tengo mi casa… no tienen que decir nada…
nadie es major que nade… todos venimos igual, sin papeles y para buscar la vida. (this is
my ‘hood, there are African Americans, but this is my ‘hood… I have my house here…
they can’t say anything… nobody is better than anybody… we all came the same,
without papers in search of an opportunity).”
73
This last statement, that they all arrived in
the United States with similar sets of circumstances as undocumented Mexican
immigrants, is her refusal to accept that Mexican immigrants that settled in
predominantly Latino areas versus her settlement into South Central was a better choice.
Mexican immigrants like Esther, as much as they found themselves at odds or distrustful
of African Americans quickly realized that because they called the same street, area, and
neighborhood home they were similarly racialized. Becoming a resident or a “bonafide
resident,” meant beginning to feel an investment and connection to the space around
73
Ibid.
83
them. Residents do not deny that the majority of residents are poor, working poor, or
working class, that many engage in extra legal hustles to make ends meet, many are
beneficiaries of social services and public assistance, and that violence is part of daily
life, but they refuse to be relegated as less than because of their circumstances. Their
lives in South Central, similar to those of African Americans, is that they have limited
means and opportunities. This community and its chances (or lack of) are a product of
decades of disinvestment, neglect, and racism. Despite this, African American and ethnic
Mexican residents struggle to create a space worthy of a future and new possibilities.
“Bring a halt to the madness that is spreading all over our neighborhood”
To reach a point of mutual understanding takes effort, time, and work. Violence in
the community makes this all the more difficult and imperative, but also opens a space
for coalition building. Petty theft, gang violence, and the drug trade are part of the reality
of living in a working class and working poor neighborhood. The closure of teen service
centers and demise of African American political organizations like the Black Panthers
facilitated the growth and prevalence of gangs and drugs in the community. In 1972,
there were 18 gang sets, but by 1982 you had 155 with the “latter interval coinciding with
the sharpest period of decline in local manufacturing. Young teens in gangs mostly
consisted of factions of Bloods and Crips.”
74
The prevalence of gangs and drugs has
intensified South Central’s exposure to crime. Gangs have taken to the streets and
engaged in escalated warfare in pursuit of expanding their territory. But more importantly
the growth in these gangs was largely due to the “shift away from large-scale job-training
74
João H. Costa Vargas, Catching Hell in the City of Angeles, 179-180.
84
programs, the educational devastation of Proposition 13, and decline in the Black Power
movement.”
75
The homicide rates across the state of California dramatically increased in the late
1970s and peaked in 1980. Between 1979 and 1988, nearly 3000 “gang-related”
homicides took place in Los Angeles making Los Angeles amongst the highest homicide
rate areas in the state. Homicides became a leading cause of death for men of color, in
particular African American men, as they are nine times more likely than whites of being
murdered, and Latinos are four times more likely than whites.
76
Even as the crime rate
peaked in 1980 and declined, between 1982 and 2000 the California prison population
grew 500 percent with African Americans and Latinos being two-thirds of the
populations. Ruth Wilson Gilmore presents that, “since 1984, California has completed
twenty-three major new prisons at a cost of $280 to $350 millions a piece.”
77
Instead of
providing funds for schools and education, California legislators in the last three decades
have invested funds in prisons and policing. It is of little surprise that over half of male
and female youth of color do not earn a high school diploma.
78
The lack of proper schools
and employment options means that the youth subculture of gangs and drugs becomes
more palatable, and with it “justifies,” in the eyes of the state, increased police
75
Danny Widener, Black Arts West, 220.
76
E. Richard Brown, et al. “Inequalities in Health: The Sickness in the Center of our Cities” in South-
Central Los Angeles: Anatomy of an Urban Crisis Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies (June 1993),
77.
77
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalization
California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 7.
78
Richard Brown, et al. “Inequalities in Health: The Sickness in the Center of our Cities” in South-Central
Los Angeles: Anatomy of an Urban Crisis Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies (June 1993), 102.
85
aggression. As most residents would attest police presence does not guarantee peace of
mind, rather the opposite. Community residents must develop informal networks through
community outreach programs and letter writing campaigns to political representatives,
to ensure that their children, youth, and residents do not succumb to the dangers of “the
street.”
Residents and property owners in the community expressed their grievances to
Mayor Bradley about the prevalence of violence and drugs in the community. On March
4, 1993, Christina Ainer, property owner (but not a resident) of an apartment complex on
88
th
Place, wrote to the mayor asking for his help.
Dear Sir,
We desperately need your HELP! Please! We are apartment owners and operate
business in this area at 547 West 88
th
Street. Last year, I reported this same
problem and after waiting the same letter we got some temporary assistance on
the block and the robbing, drug dealing, and killing, and shooting stopped force a
short period. It was especially effective when a police patrol car stayed parked in
the driveway, thank you. But it has gotten real bad again. I sold the bldg last year,
but this year I am again the owner because the person who bought the bldg from
me was beaten and robbed and nearly killed and finally had a nervous breakdown
and had to foreclose and take the bldg back, reluctantly! We are again pleading
with these drug dealers—putting our lives on the line and still no response of
them moving from the property; they are hiding drugs somewhere on the
property. They stand on the sidewalk or in the driveway shooting dice and selling
drugs and threatening my tenants. They put a 38 pistol to heads of my tenants two
weeks ago. Feb 5, 1993, they pulled the bars off the apt #2 and went in late at
night while the tenants were home sleeping they robbed what they could in the
living room and left. The tenants were to scared to go in the living room, so they
lay in their beds still until the robber left. There was an old lady and old man
sleeping in the living room the whole time this was happening. Every night they
pistol whip, rob people, and shot hi-power rounds. They do no live in my bldg,
but they live on the street. I am afraid to confront these thugs again and don’t
want to have to shot anyone myself. I am a law abiding businessperson who have
always been a tax paying supporters in L.A. for over 23 yrs. My husband work for
the city of L.A. sanitation dept, now for over 25 yrs, we are hardworking, law
abiding productive citizens and certainly an asset to the city of L.A. Don’t we
deserve some kind of police protection?
86
Please! Please! Help Us. Your observation and advice will be appreciated—please
respond to this notice and let me know what can be done here again. Let’s Save
Lives!”
79
She closes her letter by writing the names of the people living in the property. All tenants
in the apartment building are of Mexican origin. Bradley responded shortly thereafter
reassuring her that he had sent her letter for assistance to Drug Bust Bureau and
Southwest Narcotics Bureau to begin surveillance of the property. This letter by their
apartment owner highlights the various dimensions that represent life in South Central,
the reality of drugs, theft, and violence in the city, apartment and property owners are not
from the community, and the urgency of protecting residents.
Similarly, petitions were circulated with regards to the prevalence of liquor stores
throughout the community. Community activism against liquor stores has a long history,
as residents agree that these businesses do not advance the growth, development, and
safety of the community and take up much needed space for other businesses and services
like grocery stores or libraries.
80
Motels and hotels, often use for the sex trade, are also
another source of resident collaboration. Ensuring that these businesses presence and
visibility was minimized served to bring South Central residents together.
81
On
September 17, 1992, Alpha Service Petition Members mailed a letter with a petition
signed by 40 community residents for the closure of the Hotel located at 451 East Vernon
79
“Letter to Bradley, March 4, 1993,” Box 303, Mayor Tom Bradley Administrative Papers, 1973-1993,
Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles,
California.
80
For more information on the activism around the closure of liquor stores in the area see: Regina Freer,
From Conflict to Convergence: Interracial Relations in the Liquor Store Controversy in South Central Los
Angeles, Ph.D Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1999.
81
Most recently, in 2010, you have signs all over the community in which they threatened certain streets
known for the surveillance of communities against illicit activities like the prostitution, etc.
87
Avenue. In the letter they petitioned that the L.A. Narcotics Bureau investigate the hotel.
The petition revealed that they wanted to “bring a halt to the madness that is spreading all
over our neighborhood in the areas of 43
rd
Place, 43
rd
Street, Avalon Avenue, and Vernon
Avenues. The petition calls for the closing of the hotel at 451 East Vernon Ave, which is
a hot bed for criminal activities (emphasis added by author).”
82
The hotel was close to the
telephone company headquarters where residents would go pay their monthly bills, but
when completing such residents was frequently accosted at gunpoint for their cars and
other valuables.
African American and Latinos residents signed the petition with asterisks
highlighting the people who had been assaulted. Residents’ use of the terms “madness”
and “hotbed” served to illustrate people’s disdain and frustration for the issues plaguing
the community. It also illustrates their sense of urgency and concern for their safety, but
overall community relations. In this example, residents looked beyond an ethnic Mexican
and African American racial divide and rallied together to see it as a concern of everyone.
The previous letter by property owner Aisner illustrates that she was concerned for her
residents and property irrespective of race. The drug subculture had taken hold of her
property, and was threatening the livelihood of Mexican immigrant residents. Most
striking about her letter is not only her pleas for assistance and safety, but also how race
was deployed. As you read the letter you are unaware of the racial identity of residents,
assailants, or Aisner. At the end of the letter it becomes evident that she is writing to
82
“Letter and Petition to Bradley, September 17, 1992,” Box 303, Mayor Tom Bradley Administrative
Papers, 1973-1993, Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles,
Los Angeles, California.
88
protect her Mexican residents, and one can only speculate that she herself is a white
woman from the Westside (based on the mailing address on the envelope). South Central
residents are intertwined with those in other spaces and communities in Los Angeles, as
the level of home and property ownership amongst residents is relatively low. Aisner, as
a “law abiding business person” who “reluctantly” retook ownership of the property was
uncomfortable, unwilling, and afraid to visit the property herself, thus she exercised her
privilege of not being a resident to write a letter requesting assistance. The Mexican
immigrant tenants of the apartment and the African American and Mexican immigrant
residents on the street live in this community because of their lack of options. In either
case, residents themselves and property owners expressed their concern for the safety of
people in the community. South Central emerged as a place marked by drugs, gangs, and
violence.
The sense that South Central and Watts was a dangerous space for residents was
not only part of the discourse in the United States but also in Mexico. On October 26,
1996 the Mexico City based newspaper, Reforma, published an article that documented
the dangerous community that Latinos were settling into in the United States. The article,
“Watts: Tierra de Muerte’s (Watts: Land of Death),” tone and scope were to highlight
how Mexican immigrants were not settling in the land of opportunity. Writer Rodriguez
Reyna, began the article with the story of a drive by shooting that killed a young boy
watching TV in his home. He was a victim of a stray bullet, and discussed the prevalence
of drugs, crack cocaine, and how as early as 12 or 13 years old both African American
and Latino children got involved in the drug trade. Resident Rosalio Nava described
89
living in the area, “Como es vivir en Watts? No puedes dejar un ojo cerrado. Si se te va
el gallo, man, puede ser la vida. You know, hay que estar atento (What it is like to live in
Watts? You can’t close your eyes. If you lose track of the rooster, you can lose your life.
You know, we have to be attentive).”
83
Reyna describes Watts as “un ghetto en el 1965…
hoy, tres generaciones despues, Watts sigue siendo un ghetto (Watts was a ghetto in
1965… three generations later Watts continues to be a ghetto).” The Mexican immigrant
residents and activists he interviewed all would agree that the reason they found
themselves living in Watts was that “la pobreza no perdona. Consume a sus hijos. Son
subproducto de una marginacion cronica. Esta es una tierra devastada (Poverty does not
forgive. It consumes your children. They are a byproduct of chronic marginalization. It is
a devastated region).”
84
Rodriguez Reyna rightly captures the violence, drugs, and
poverty that characterized Watts, as well as the innovative ways that residents were trying
to survive in the midst of these structural challenges. Striking throughout the piece was
Reyna’s utilization of terms like “ghetto,” “proyectos (projects),” “shooting,” “es lo que
aqui se llama “babies having babies” (niñas dando a luz a niñas),” “crack dealers,” and
“crack-zombies-los esclavos de la droga (slaves to the drug)” to describe the community
and its realities.
85
I find this use of terminology not only sensationalized and part of a
particular aesthetic to attract the reader. The writers’ choice to use ghetto rather than say
barrio, for example, render the space as an African American and also keeps the “proper”
83
Ignacio Rodriguez Reyna, “Elecciones EU 96: Watts: Tierra De Muerte” Reforma, October 26, 1996, pg
18.
84
Ibid.
85
Ibid.
90
wording to be closer to reality. But I wonder how these words and terms resonate among
a Mexican population that perhaps has never traveled to the United States, much less
Watts. One can only imagine the possible interpretations and imaginings that “crack
zombies,” “babies having babies,” and “ghetto” could and did have in Mexico. In the end,
he completes the piece by suggesting that most people “vive al dia,” because there is no
other way for poor residents with limited options. This was the reality of living in the
“land of opportunity.”
South Central residents believe that violence is found throughout Los Angeles and
not particularly unique to South Central. But the racial homogeneity makes the violence
seem less threatening. As forty five year old Marquez elaborated, “You know, there were
also gang members in Huntington Park and drug dealing? Yes, that too. In fact, it was
even worse sometimes than what he had seen here in South Los Angeles.” Mexican
immigrant residents viewed that violence as different to that found in South Central. She
explained, “the answer was obvious: on the Eastside most of the drug dealers and
gangsters were Latino. Here on 53rd Street, many of them are Black.” The difference
being the race of the assailant, regardless of this racial difference the real problems exists:
gang, drugs, and violence. Nevertheless, South Central gets the notoriety of being an
inherently violent space.
The letter writing to Mayor Bradley was also an important facet to getting
political officials involved in the daily operations of South Central. The distrust in the
police and other government authorities directly meant that most residents actually did
not call the police to report drug sales and violence. Rather drug busts were a source of
91
entertainment amongst residents, as they have grown used to the prevalence of such
actions and disillusioned by what an arrest means for the safety of the community. On
November 12, 2006, friends and neighbors of Alfred Smith were stunned by his arrest at
the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). His arrest came after they
utilized a Latino neighbor’s home for surveillance. Lorena and Esther Sanchez feared
retribution and racial misunderstanding. As a family they complied with police because
they was not sure what kind of rights they had after police officers showed them a
warrant that suggested their forced compliance. Unaware of their rights in the situation,
the Sanchez’s complied. On the day of this arrest, it was a complete neighborhood
spectacle as Alfred’s Mexican immigrant neighbors were torn about what his arrest
would mean for the community. For some, they believed his arrest would bring peace of
mind, but others believed “you arrest one (drug dealer), but another one will take his
place.” When police searched through this property they failed to find much of his
“merchandise” as he had grown strategic about where he placed it. His neighbors,
however, were well aware as Esther explained, “they looked in the wrong places. In his
house?! Who does that, police are pendejos. If they had asked any of us we would not
have said a word, because we are not chismosos y luego nos lleva la fregada (not gossips
and can face retribution). We all knew that the drugs were in the electric poles and inside
vacant cars they owned and had parked alongside the street. Alfred moved his stuff all the
time. Everyone knows where his stuff was. But no one said anything.”
86
Police managed
to find only a fraction of his stash, enough for him to bust him for failing to comply with
86
Oral history with author, Esther Sanchez, Los Angeles, August 12, 2010.
92
his parole conditions. Rather then cheering on the police’s efforts, they laughed at their
inability to truly understand how the drug trade works. Days later some of Alfred’s
associates returned to take the drugs left behind.
His ethnic Mexican neighbors did not corroborate with the police because of their
general distrust in law enforcement, but also Alfred had become much more than a drug
dealer to their fellow neighbors. They did not approve of his choices; they understood he
had no other option. He went out of his way to be supportive of his fellow Black and
Latino neighborhood families’ children, and grandchildren by working toward
minimizing the visibility and frequency of his drug trade. He had developed a reputation
for cooking some of the best BBQ ribs and chicken in the neighborhood. Esther often
asked Alfred to cook BBQ for her family functions and reunions. In effect, Latino
neighbors felt more of a sense of loyalty to him, than the police who were there to “serve
and protect.” I do not aim to suggest that all African American and ethnic Mexican South
Central residents became friends, but rather that these relationships are not as
antagonistic as most reports would suggest. When one goes at the neighborhood level,
residents are crafting their own sense of community, solidarity, and peace. This
interaction makes clear that not all Black and Mexican immigrant interactions are marked
by either cooperation or tension, but rather by complex neighborly interaction and select
engagement with the state. It is important to consider that Esther and Alfred’s interactions
were similarly marked by a shared and limited sense of opportunity and rights. Just as
Alfred confronted imprisonment, Esther and her family dealt with vulnerabilities that
discouraged her from questioning LAPD agents’ orders. She was unaware of her rights in
93
this situation. It is this vulnerability and lack of awareness that the LAPD, and the state at
large exploit when interacting and undertaking operations in neighborhoods throughout
South Central Los Angeles, discounting how their operations impact the day to day
interaction—the long-term relationships and friendships— that sustain their confrontation
of racial, ethnic, class, and gender difference in a neighborhood characterized by crime
and disinvestment and racial and ethnic diversity.
Along with the letter writing campaigns, community residents took it upon
themselves to establish informal networks to help each other navigate this ever-changing
community landscape. Ruth and Esther’s mom (Esther) quickly became cordial neighbors
and subsequent friends. Despite the larger narratives of South Central being and
becoming a site of urban decline and disinvestment, both Ruth and Esther saw their
community as something to be proud of and worth preserving. Without much thought,
both women became important to the overall operation of their block. No one in the
community challenged them as they were considered the matriarchs that held and brought
the community together. From the beginning, Esther began to befriend all her Mexican
neighbors as she felt that they too were having a difficult time settling into the region
because of the looming threat of INS officials, job exploitation and insecurity, and
unaware of school options. Esther took it upon herself, even though she is not fluent in
English, to ensure that all the children on her block were enrolled in school. She
expresses, “my neighbors want the best for their children… that’s why we make the
dangerous trip over here. I just wanted to help them and make sure they knew where the
94
closest school was, how to enroll their kids, because it’s a community effort… we help
each other equally, we have to help each other… if we don’t do it who will?”
87
Elena took her role in the education of local children very seriously. In the
morning and afternoon she would not only walk her children to the nearby junior high
and high school (and now grandchildren), but also her neighbors’ children to their
respective schools. She did this with great pleasure. Ensuring children’s safety when
crossing the street or simply ensuring they got to school on time was a great priority and
among the ways she sought to help her community. Little by little she began to grow
concerned for the African American children on her block—while she did not have the
same level of interaction with their parents as her Mexican immigrant neighbors—
whenever she saw children on the street she would ask them, if they had done their
homework, gone to school, or would participate in the upcoming school pageant. She
became known as the enforcer of education.
In a similar fashion, Ruth played this vital role in the community. She was more
attentive to the needs of the African American children on her block by ensuring that they
would go to school, played safely on the block, and most especially tried to keep kids
away from some of the hazards of living in an impoverished community like South
Central, the “prevalence of crack became an epidemic in the 1980s—it was and continues
to plague the community—you could feel it. I wanted to make sure the kids didn’t get
into any trouble.”
88
Her concern for community was an extension of her work for her
87
Oral history with author, Esther Sanchez, Los Angeles, November 19, 2008.
88
Oral history with author, Ruth Smith (a pseudonym).
95
church as she made sure that the church was always clean and well-kept for in part she
felt that the morale of the community could be uplifted if the community itself looked
beautiful.
89
Esther brokered these women’s initial interactions. Esther knew very little
English and could not readily communicate with Ruth. This experience of children being
the language brokers is not a new phenomenon, but as the years went by Esther needed
her children much less as in many ways the communication between these women
became much more intuitive and best understood though half-articulated sentences. Both
women remember this encounter very vividly and grew aware of the role that each played
in their respective racial communities. Only by collaborating would they become
powerful brokers in the community. Both women agree that having to work across racial
lines would hinder any form of cooperation, but rather saw it as an opportunity for people
in the community to work through and work against their racial prejudices. Both African
American and Mexican immigrant neighbors attest to the unique friendship that these two
women share, as if a resident needed something from Ruth and they would ask her if they
could borrow her tools and she would reply that she would think about, and would go ask
Esther if the person was a trustworthy and reliable. Only after Esther vouched for them
would Ruth lend her tools. This friendship has developed and grown for over twenty
years.
Ruth and Elena were very conscious in asserting their friendship and cooperation
as their interaction and strategizing occurred primarily on street sidewalks. Their
interactions on the street served as more than just a convenient place to talk, but rather
89
Rene P. Ciria Cruz, “To Live and Let Live” NACLA Report on the Americas (May/June 2007), 38.
96
served as a visual and physical marker for their neighbors to see the ways they worked
across racial lines for the betterment of their community. When mutual distrust and
animosity between these two racial communities was commonplace, their interaction on
the street represented a bold racial reconfiguration--an important symbolic gesture for
how people can work across racial lines--as well as a model of the power of neighborly
interaction and concern. Both women’s priority of getting to know their neighbors not in
the form of gossip but as engagement with and for the community, represents an
interaction that is not based on claiming “turf” or sense of “ownership” of the community
but one of understanding that community building can operate in absence of a movement
and in a smaller scale. Esther elaborates, “no one owns anything here… I know that when
I got here (immigrated to South Central) they (African Americans) didn’t like my family
moving in, but I think this was part of a natural progression” where Ruth was seminal to
her understanding that African Americans were apprehensive because they “had worked
really hard to get the little they have (political representation and the ability to own a
home), so to see us move in proves to be a threat to their struggle.”
90
We live in an age, in
which people do not get to know their neighbors, yet these women’s friendship,
commitment, and service to the community—both African American and ethnic
Mexican—provide us with a window into how they actually got to know each other that
can be beneficial to the overall operation of the community.
As Chandra Talpade Mohanty explains, solidarity is best sustained when the
“terms of mutuality, accountability, and the recognition of common interests is the basis
90
Oral history with author, Esther Sanchez.
97
for relationships among diverse communities.”
91
Ruth and Esther grew to understand that
their stories overlapped— both were migrants who had similar goals for a better life for
themselves and their families. Once they realized their similarities, they extended their
goals to their neighbors and the community at large. Their willingness to think critically
about the plight of the working class, most especially in a community like South Central
made their interaction possible. These women’s connection, activism, and friendship are
distinctive and worthy of examination. Both women believed that only through
community support and self-help, and through their own mothering practices and politics
could they move beyond seeing motherhood as a politics relegated solely to the domestic
sphere. Motherhood became a larger organizing principle and the concept was, in many
ways, their civil rights struggle. For these women, motherhood was not an oppressive or
pejorative term. Instead, it served as a method of exerting power, allowing them to work
with the community, as well as complicate negative representations of working class
women of color as pathological and part of the undeserving poor. They challenged these
discourses and images through their lived experience, education, and organizing. Indeed,
even in the worst of circumstances they stayed hopeful and helped give their children and
families a future. These women’s activism reveals that their collaboration was driven by
their understanding of gender, womanhood, motherhood, and family, pointing to the
importance of historically interpreting how the most disenfranchised of residents created
and nurtured unity and belonging and crafting a sense of neighborhood that made room
for two racial communities with distinct yet interconnected trajectories of migration and
91
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders (Duke University Press, 2003), 10.
98
settlement out of a gendered sense of concern for their family’s and in turn,
neighborhood’s livelihood.
Ruth and Esther labored on their block and in an informal level; however, there
are countless organizations like Community Coalition, Concern Citizens for South
Central Los Angeles, and Mothers ROC that work for the community in a more
coordinated way. At the heart of these organizations is to politicize residents. These
organizations and activists often talk about “reclaiming the streets,” against the senseless
violence over territory in the community. In the late 1980s, the Los Angeles Brotherhood
Crusade was an African American led effort to garner the help of African American men
in the community to serve as models of life outside of gang membership. The
incorporation of Black men and residents is often “a long, hard battle to convince
residents to come out of their locked houses, to believe that it’s something that can
work.”
92
The strategy is to have residents to believe and become invested in “reclaiming a
neighborhood” as African American resident Ferdia Harris states, “it’s time for us to do
something. The ground in South Central Los Angeles is just as fertile as the west side. All
you have to do is cherish it. But people are frightened. This is no way to live.”
The reality is that violence, gangs, and drugs are part of South Central Los
Angeles’ streets. Anthropologist, Joao H. Costa Vargas documents how in the “the
poorest parts, however, you will be hard-pressed to find American flags hoisted in front
of homes. Houses are often subdivided, occupied by more than one family. Their outside
appearance conceals their many hazards, including precarious electrical and sanitary
92
Ron Dungee, “Let’s Take Our Community Back,” The Los Angeles Sentinel, July 29, 1989.
99
conditions.” And at worse these houses and communities sometimes “conceal drug posts,
where drugs are sold, bought, and distributed and sounds of desperation—the gunshots,
police helicopter, sirens, resound as banal everyday occurrences.”
93
The freeway system
allows most Los Angeles residents to bypass the community entirely, and it stands out
relative to the middle to upper class homes on the Westside as the housing, streets,
schools, and business are less than stellar or nonexistent. For working class, working
poor, and poor residents of South Central the “two-bedroom and three-bedroom stucco
houses or apartment buildings in which they live is the most they can afford or aspire to.”
Despite the community’s hazards it is bustling and vibrant neighborhood that warrants
respect, care, and attention. South Central is home to countless families, were residents
daily struggle to foster the “possibility for a thriving community” against all odds.
La Migra, La Mica
Along with apprehension over trying to become neighbors with African
Americans, Latinos had to worry about Immigration Naturalization Service (INS)
detection and deportation. Gertrude viewed Mexican immigrant families moving into her
neighborhood with a great deal of suspicion. She described that her new neighbors, an
extended family comprised of brothers and sisters, lived in an apartment designed for two
adults and child. Blanche would “watch ‘em…you should have seen the way they’d
sneak around so nobody would see how many there were. They’d be quiet as a mouse,
quiet as a mouse!”
94
Recently arrived Mexican immigrant families commonly shared a
93
Joao H. Costa Vargas, Catching Hell in the City of Angeles, 100.
94
William Overend, “South Central L.A.: Minority Meets Minority: Minorities Mix in South Central
L.A.,” Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1979, D1.
100
small living space, but Blanche could not understand the logic of their living
arrangements. Moreover, many Mexican families settled for what Blanche considered an
unhealthy quality of life because of financial difficulties and because it helped them
avoid detection, detention, and deportation from the Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS).
In 1979, the California Advisory Committee for the U.S. Commission on Civil
Rights conducted a study to document how federal immigration policies treated
undocumented immigrants in Southern California. Following the passage of the
Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965 the level of undocumented immigration from
Latin America and Asia into the United States grew exponentially, despite the imposition
of quotas for Latin America and Asia and increased funding for the Border Patrol. This
report aimed to uncover how undocumented immigrants, in particular Mexican
immigrants, were being treated once in the United States. Its major findings were that
most “anti-alien” attitudes by Americans always cast Mexicans as the foreign others. In
the 1970s, countless news stories depicted Mexicans entering the country without
documentation. They utilized loaded terminology like “hordes,” “border peril,” and
“invasion” to portray immigrants as a threat. For the authors of the report, such an
attitude “paves the way for repressive police or public actions against them (immigrants)
because they are portrayed by the media as a menace.”
95
95
“A Study of Federal Immigration Policies and Practices in Southern California by California Advisory
Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, June 1980” Record Group 453: Records of the United
States Commission on Civil Rights, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park,
Maryland.
101
The study also pointed out how the vast majority of non-Mexican undocumented
immigrants apprehended by immigration officials overstayed their visas. They found that
in the mid 1970s, the level of utilization of immigrants of social services like AFDC or
health care was approximately 10 percent of all budgetary costs. In fact the growth in
these budgetary requests, most especially health costs, were not servicing the
undocumented population as some reports suggested, but budget increases were due to
supplies and salary increases.
96
The growth in undocumented immigration meant that INS
and Border Patrol extended their grasp beyond the U.S. Mexico borderlands and set up
backup stations near San Clemente and Temecula. Many undocumented immigrants
quickly realized that escaping detection from INS did not end at the U.S./Mexico border,
but that coyotes had to work hard at ensuring that undocumented migrants would also
cross the San Clemente checkpoint. Migrants felt that until they reached Los Angeles
they had made it safely into the U.S.. This sense of security was quickly dashed as
undocumented immigrants quickly discovered that routine sweeps in the community were
common. In 1977, the figure for apprehensions in Los Angeles and San Diego was
432,500 and by 1978 it rose to 571,177. In 1979, the border apprehensions accounted for
40 percent of all apprehensions, thus INS officials found themselves arresting people in
other sectors of the community. The majority of these apprehensions were Mexicans, and
the face of undocumented people became largely associated with immigrants from Latin
America.
97
The Border Patrol and INS officers adopted a philosophy of “area control”
96
Ibid.
97
Ibid.
102
where “INS officers apprehend aliens in areas away from U.S. borders by conducting
searching for an unspecified number of persons.”
98
This often meant that people were vulnerable for detection throughout all aspects
of their daily life, most especially at their work sites. Mexican immigrants living in South
Central Los Angeles felt they were not far from INS detection. Undocumented residents
would hide behind bushes if they saw a UPS truck approach. They had been told that INS
drove large brown vans, many interpreted that a UPS—roughly the same color and
build—was INS. Similarly at their worksites, Mexican immigrants would hear a fellow
co-worker yell from the front door “La migra!” and run past as a sure sign that you had to
leave everything behind and run to the nearest exit. Aside from having to deal with the
exploitation and fast pace nature of their worksites, they also had to worry about INS
officials. Leticia Zarate recalls that seeing fellow coworkers and residents run scarred and
away from INS was commonplace, and extremely unnerving and scary.
99
She also
recounts that on one fateful morning her three brothers were arrested by INS,
98
Ibid.
99
The Commission Study highlighted that beyond the U.S./Mexico border, INS conducted job site raids on
a routine basis to catch undocumented workers that manage to elude officials at the border and other
checkpoint sites like San Clemente. The International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) filed a
federal suit to prevent INS from conducting factory surveys in the Los Angeles garment industry. At the
time and to this day, this industry is dominated by undocumented migrants from Mexico and Asia. The
ILGWU alleged that INS “engaged in a pattern or practice of questioning only Hispanic employees,
pursued questioning of Hispanics who claimed U.S. citizenship and used search warrants which went
against the U.S. constitution.” Despite INS reports that raids in the workplace were under employer
consent, business employers were never fully informed and/or forced to comply. The INS attempted their
own version of compliance, by creating “Operation Cooperation” in which they attempted to avoid
assembly line shutdowns by offering assistance to employers during the hiring process. However,
employers did not like to comply as they benefitted from hiring undocumented workers as they were
guaranteed low-wage, exploitable workforce. Advocates for workers rights focused on the rights of
undocumented people, and saw INS policing as inhumane towards undocumented people and border patrol
racism. Despite the report’s astuteness of attempting to document the struggle the undocumented people,
throughout the report you fail to capture the voices of the undocumented people it discusses. See: “A Study
103
“it was roughly around ‘84 or ’85. My brothers would take the bus to work, all
along Olympic Boulevard. They would catch different lines at different
intersections. They all got caught up by the same INS truck, just on different
corners. Once they were corralled inside the van and saw each other, they nodded
and said, “hijole mano, tambien a ti?! (damn brother, they got you too?!).” They
gave false names to INS officials, and were dumped in Tijuana. Thankfully they
were together, because we didn’t hear from them for over three days. We didn’t
know what to think, all we imagine was la migra deported them. In those days,
when you didn’t hear from family members it was probably ‘cuz you got caught.
It was just funny, that on the same day, same van, same INS, just different
corners. That’s how it was.”
100
Living without a legal documentation was difficult, as Maria explained, “The uncertainty
is difficult to live with. You have to be on your feet, because any moments you could
hear a colleague yell out migra, or you would see the vans roll up. It kept you on your
toes, alert.”
101
Maria further asserts that in the early 1980s they were not sure what their
status would be in the long run, “we never imagined amnesty would come in effect.
Much less that we would be eligible. Back in those days, you saw your stay as temporary
because we were undocumented. But amnesty changed that, la mica gave us a permanent
stay, gave us some security. A new approach to living in the United States. I mean, many
of us became U.S. citizens ‘cuz we legalized with IRCA.” Leticia is currently U.S.
citizens, however, this is not the case of waves Mexican immigrants who arrived and
settled in the late 1980s and 1990s, many of these families remain living in the shadows
and without documentation.
of Federal Immigration Policies and Practices in Southern California by California Advisory Committee to
the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, June 1980” Record Group 453: Records of the United States
Commission on Civil Rights, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.
100
Oral history with author, Leticia Nuno.
101
Oral history with author, Maria Ruiz.
104
The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was a one-time legalization
program that affected nearly 3 million undocumented people throughout the United.
States. The massive legalization of undocumented immigration brought on some
important changes in the social and economic adaptation of people in the United States.
The law itself had five provisions: 1) employer sanctions for those that hired
undocumented immigrants knowingly 2) amnesty provisions for illegal immigrants who
met certain criteria 3) anti-discrimination measures to appease immigrant rights groups 4)
H-2 temporary visas 5) increase fines and punishment for undocumented immigrants and
increased funds for Border Patrol.
102
The amnesty provisions required that undocumented
migrations show proof of residency in the United States since 1992 through rent receipts,
paycheck stubs, and utility bills. Undocumented Mexican immigrant women faced the
largest challenge in presenting this type of documentation as of these documents were
often in their husbands names. Immigration officials understood the difficulty of
acquiring these documents and accepted affidavits written by neighbors, coworkers, and
employers (however, these cases went under intense scrutiny).
103
Los Angeles hosted the
largest legalization program in the country, and hired a Latino workforce to process the
paperwork. Hiring Latinos proved a deterrent for non-Latino undocumented immigrants
like immigrants from Africa to see this as legalization program for them, not a program
102
Ronald Mize and Alicia C.S. Swords, Consuming Mexican Labor: From the Bracero Program to
NAFTA (University of Toronto Press, 2011), 91.
103
Susan Gonzalez Baker, The “Amnesty” Aftermath: Current Policy Issues Stemming from the
Legalization Programs of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act” International Migration Review
Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 1997) pg 5-27, 15.
105
for “Mexicans only.”
104
By the mid-1980s, Mexicans were roughly half the total share of
undocumented Mexican immigrants, yet they accounted for over 70 percent of all
legalization applicants in the nation, with greater shares in California.
For South Central residents, they looked at this immigration program with some
speculation. After all undocumented immigrant’s daily lives were marked by fear of
being caught up in an INS raid and deported back to Mexico. Television reporter on
Univision Enrique Gratas, a trusted voice in the community, was skeptical when
discussing IRCA and the promise of amnesty and legalization. In the local newsletter, La
Gente (UCLA Chicano Newspaper) it also express some of the anxiety over the promise
of amnesty. Humberto Benitez in “Amnesty Law: A Process of False Hopes” highlights
peoples reactions are as some undocumented Mexican immigrant workers believed that
the new employer sanctions would make it more difficult to find jobs. Many
undocumented workers feared that because they received some form of federal money,
like unemployment benefits or public cash assistance, they were ineligible for
legalization. According to Benitez, “false hope is common among many immigrants,” as
people believe that because they have been in the U.S. since 1982 they would
automatically qualify but because of many provisions in the law they would be
disqualified.
105
Sergio Delatorre, head of the Villa-Zapata Workers Committee, spoke out
against amnesty as he believed the law was “extremely limited, the provisions were very
demanding, and the law was racist.” He estimated that 80 percent of all Central
104
Ibid., 17.
105
Humberto Benitez, “Amnesty Law: A Process of False Hopes” La Gente: UCLA Chicano Newspaper,
May 1987.
106
Americans are eliminated under the guidelines.” He believed that people needed to
organize in support of refugees and undocumented workers. Another critiqued waged on
the law was for the “potential breakup of families. Under the law, each person in the
family has to apply separately for the amnesty. So while one person in the family may
quality for the amnesty. Not everyone.” Similarly, critics believed that amnesty was a
way for the government to make money, as it was “the best way to get rich in three years
by selling amnesty to immigrants,” by selling the dream of the “La Mica.” Estimates
suggested that a potential $2 billion dollars could be made off undocumented immigrants
who submit documentation for legalization. Javier Rodriguez (labor and community
activist in Los Angeles) described it, “Mexican and Central American people, a historical
challenge is upon us. We can either meet it with an oppressed colonial mentality and
succumb to the regressive values of individual profit and greed or rise to the occasion as a
people with courage, strength, and values of solidarity, patriotism, sacrifice, and
compassion, and defense of the family and the oppressed.”
106
IRCA’s promise of protection for undocumented immigrants was not the sense
most immigrants felt when they learn of President Ronald Reagan’s amnesty plan.
Dolores and Francisco Rosas said they went despite their fears and reservations, “we had
to try it. We had bought a home in the neighborhood. We had two daughters. We were
thinking, we are staying here for while. Let’s try it.” They were part of the millions of
undocumented Mexican immigrants that filed their paperwork and were legalized by
1987. As she explains,
106
Javier Rodriguez, “Amnesty: Billion Dollar Business” La Gente: UCLA Chicano Newspaper
March/April 1987
107
“there’s a relief that comes with papers. We went to see our family in Mexico a
year later. I wasn’t scared of being caught up in sweeps. Back in ‘82, I almost got
caught up in a sweep in Downtown L.A. I was pregnant with my youngest
daughter. I was Christmas shopping and because I was pregnant I couldn’t make it
to the bus stop and sat down at a bench two blocks away. Right as I sat down, to
my surprise, I noticed a van pulled up the bus stop that was headed to. It wasn’t
the bus. Officers came out of the van and rounded up everyone up who could not
provide documentation. It was la migra. I could have easily been swept away, but
that day I paid off to be pregnant and tired. I got lucky.”
107
With documentation, Dolores did not have to fear deportation. There was a sense of relief
that she, along with her friends in the neighborhood, felt with legalization. For many
undocumented immigrants who legalized under IRCA, they look kindly towards Ronald
Reagan. They believe that he was bold in offering legalization when other presidents
failed to (this critiqued has been waged on President Barack Obama for not having a
commitment for a new legalization program).
Many undocumented Mexican immigrants who benefitted from Reagan’s
documentation policies fail to contextualize and see that he also ushered in other policies
that negatively affected their economic and political opportunities. To them, their
legalization was enough to defuse any criticism they could have of Reagan. With
amnesty, Reagan and his supporters believed they could curtail and contain
undocumented Mexican immigration. The policy was not a liberal attempt to provide a
pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented Mexican immigrants. Mexican
immigrants are able to forget that Reagan was a conservative president that ushered in
“Reaganomics” with a commitment to tax cuts for the rich, imposed draconian policies
towards social services, engaged in the cultural wars, had a devastating intervention in
107
Oral history with author, Dolores Rosas.
108
Central America, and escalated the war on drugs and provided increase funding for
policing in impoverished communities of color.
One important provision to qualify for legal residency was participation in an
English/Civics course. Migrants were expected to take up to 40 hours of English
preparation courses in order to begin the process of “assimilating” into U.S. culture. As
many South Central immigrants recounted, the classes were a waste of time since it was
not enough time to learn English beyond the basics and were not channeled into long-
term English learning courses. At the time, they felt able-bodied and able to easily find
work in low-wage manufacturing and garment industry that they never imagined that
their lack of preparation in the long run would have devastating effects. Unfortunately,
many immigrants did not benefit from this brief engagement with English/Civic courses
because they failed to provide a real opportunity for upward mobility. Many
undocumented Mexican immigrants in South Central, despite having lived here for over
four decades and many are U.S. citizens, continue to depend on their children for
important Spanish/English translation, or if they know English, it is at its bare minimum
to complete basic transactions and encounters in the community, but not fluent enough a
job with upward mobility. The 1970s and 1980s, Latina/o identity in South Central Los
Angeles was largely defined by its undocumented Mexican immigrant character not by a
Chicana/o identity. For immigrants that arrived prior to 1982, amnesty ushered a new
pattern of migration and settlement in Los Angeles, but did not transform their
employment options. It did move first generation migrants away from farm labor into
109
low-wage manufacturing and service work, but did not into white-collar and technology
driven sectors.
Finally, IRCA’s effect on settlement, namely creating a more permanent
immigrant community, meant that their presence and growth in California could not be
ignored. In the late 1980s and 1990s you have a series of propositions that showcased the
anti-immigrant fervor that would take hold in California and the nation. Again a
testament to the ways that IRCA was not an expression of thinking of Mexican
immigrants as a welcome addition to the U.S. politic, but rather it ushered a series of
draconian policies and politics. California voters passed Proposition 63 “California
English Language Amendment” in 1986 and began the anti-immigrant proposition
movement in California and would later embolden an English Only movement
nationwide. In 1994, Proposition 187 “Save our State” initiative aimed to prohibit
undocumented immigrants from access to public services throughout the state, it was
later deemed unconstitutional by the courts, however had a profound affect on social
services and undocumented immigrants. Bill Clinton, despite being revered by not only
Mexican immigrants but also African Americans in South Central, passed the Illegal
Immigration Reform and Immigrant responsibility Act (IlRIRA) in 1996. The Act was a
“full commitment to the criminalization of immigration and the militarization of
immigration enforcement. It increased the Border Patrol’s control and allowed federal
government to deputize local law enforcement as federal immigration officers.”
108
That
same year, Clinton passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act that
108
Ronald Mize and Alicia C.S. Swords, Consuming Mexican Labor: From the Bracero Program to
NAFTA (University of Toronto Press, 2011), 92
110
“ends welfare as we know it,” and extended restrictions to immigrants’ access to public
services as that of Proposition 187. Not only were immigrants negatively impacted, but
also a large percentage of poor women of color.
109
That same year Proposition 209 ended affirmative action in state institutions,
which has had a detrimental effect on the opportunities for communities of color to gain
meaningful employment in state and government positions as well as student enrollment
in state operated colleges and universities. Finally in 1998, Proposition 227 “English for
the Children,” ended bilingual education in California and was replaced with one-year
English immersion program. All these propositions and laws, according Ronald Mize and
Alicia C.S. Swords, were a backlash and retrenchment from the passage of IRCA and the
legalization and permanent settlement of millions of undocumented immigrants
throughout California and the U.S.
Mexican immigrants that settled in South Central in the late 1970s and 1980s
were beneficiaries of amnesty in 1986. This immigration policy, up until 1994 North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), had shaped their lives in the United States.
NAFTA was a trade agreement between the United States, Mexico, and Canada and
109
The restructuring of welfare assistance meant that families receiving cash assistance would be eased into
the workforce where after two years adults were required to find a job instead of benefiting from the
lifetime limit on benefits. Now benefits were up to five years. It was believed that welfare recipients needed
to be removed from the “welfare rolls” as politicians and public officials had crafted and image that poor
people of color people were abusing the system. Reagan described public assistance recipients, as “welfare
queens… driving Cadillacs” and committing fraud against the government to receive aid. These racist and
gendered representations of welfare recipients have had a negative effect on the public perception of people
on welfare. Many women would attest that the job “opportunities” afforded paid less than a livable wage
and were entry level without much mobility. Thus, as a consequence many women and families found
themselves negatively impacted by the implementation of PRWORA. They were left even more vulnerable
that when they were on welfare assistance. Thus this was an open assault on the life chances of
undocumented Mexican immigrants as well as working poor and poor families throughout the United
States.
111
eliminated most trade barriers or tariffs in agricultural and other products. NAFTA was
an important economic legislation between these countries. It meant that some of
Mexican immigrants’ favorite goods from Mexico were easily accessible and abundant
throughout Los Angeles, however it also meant that manufacturing and garment industry
was able to relocate to other countries in search of cheaper wages. The economic
restructuring, or better yet eradication, for many migrants that spent their laboring
lifetime in the U.S. manufacturing sector had devastating effects as their labor skills were
not needed. By this point, many are over 50 years old, no education, very limited English
knowledge or skills that could easily transfer into white-collar work. Mexican
immigrants, thus, navigated the terrain of migration and settlement by learning how to
interact with their African American neighbors and becoming legalized citizens.
Los Angeles is a Multiracial Paradise
The 1980s were a pivotal period in the changes in the community, as it was the
collusion of increased migration, fear over deportation and legalization under IRCA,
gang and drug violence, and economic restructuring that caused South Central to become
more working poor and poor. Los Angeles was also celebrated as a multiracial paradise
because of the city’s diversity. To understand this diversity, and ethnic Mexicans and
African Americans role, one must contextualize a celebration of diversity in relationship
to Tom Bradley’s mayoral term and its multiracial coalitions and multicultural politics.
Raphael Sonenshein’s Politics in Black and White and Scott Kurashige’s Shifting
Grounds of Race provide insightful analysis of the rise of Bradley in Los Angeles. At a
very young age, Bradley became involved with the Democratic Party. He started at the
112
neighborhood level by working on community-based projects with African American
leaders. He quickly realized that to be successful in politics he needed to go beyond the
African American electorate and forge alliances with Mexican Americans and Japanese
Americans in the Crenshaw Democratic Club and Leimert Park affiliate. He was most
adept at working with white leaders, especially Jewish liberals in the Democratic Club
movement.
110
Bradley understood that he lacked the “larger Black voter base and support
of the Democratic Party machinery that propelled African American politicians
representing inner-city districts.” For his success, he had to transcend “minority”
candidate status.
111
Sonenshein argues that Bradley modeled a biracial coalition politics
to rise to political power. Bradley’s earliest success in the tenth district was pivotal as it
was a “biracial meeting ground between South Central Los Angeles and the wealthier and
whiter Westside.” In 1963, Bradley was elected to the city council seat for the then
majority white tenth district. African American and white allies that assisted him while in
the tenth district ultimately became his “most enduring loyalists and comprised the inner
city of his campaign organization.”
Bradley was not content with holding a local position, as he wanted to become
mayor of the city. During the 1969 Mayor campaign, then Mayor Sam Yorty cast Bradley
as “extremist,” “communist,” and “black militant,” while Yorty positioned himself as
“Mayor for all citizens of L.A.” By 1973, Yorty became a polarizing Mayor. Bradley’s
biracial collation easily propelled him to mayor. For poor residents of South Central and
110
Raphael Sonenshein, Politics in Black and White (Princeton University Press, 1994), 10.
111
Ibid., 50; Scott Kurashige, Shifting Grounds of Race, 279.
113
Watts, Bradley was a change of pace as he was active in anti-poverty campaigns, active
in the distribution of community-development funds, and rid city hall of Yorty’s political
allies, which African American and Latino advocates viewed as hindering their political
progress in the community.
112
According to Kurashige, Bradley was a “product of a
traditional interracial notion of integrationism. Consciously inclusive of whites and
recognizing that Blacks were a minority among the minorities, he maintained the imagine
of a racial “moderate” by comparison with “Black Mayors” whose careers rose in tandem
with the ascension of the Black Power Movement.”
113
Throughout his two decade tenure
“he personally espoused a belief in the ideal of a color-blind society, the mayor’s policies
emblematized the new effort by civic leaders to celebrate ethnicity and reverse the
postwar tendency towards assimilation.” He believed that governance needed a
multiracial commitment.
In 1978, Mayor Bradley was invited to the National Conference for Better Cities
for a Better Tomorrow of Mayors. The conference aimed to tackle the urban crisis, with
an emphasis on the employment opportunities in cities. The unemployment rates in Watts
continued to loom large in a discussion of the urban crisis. In 1978, the unemployment
rates remained as high in 1965. The most alarming was the growth in the feminization of
poverty, and youth bearing the brunt of these problems “with schools not being fixed,
high drop out rate, and graduates are graduating without being able to read the morning
112
“The Killing of South Central,” L.A. Weekly, 1989 Box 25, South Central Los Angeles Documentation
Collection, Southern California Library for Social Science and Research, Los Angeles, California.
113
Ibid.
114
paper.”
114
Bradley believed in working class people ability and willingness to create a
new reality, unlike many conservative pundits and politicians. He stated, “You don’t have
to persuade the poor to believe in work, they’ve been asking for work all along. Just offer
jobs and see what happens. People want to work. What’s the first thing you ask a person
you’ve never met before? What do you do? That’s how we define each other. When a
person can’t find a job in American life, it means they may not be very important.”
115
Employment is a key element, as people’s identity and psyche is tied to their ability to
work. Being viewed as idle and without work is considered a negative attribute,
something to avoid at all costs. For South Central residents this proves particularly
difficult and almost near impossible endeavor because of the lack of skills and resources
to find meaningful employment options. Not everyone in South Central is without work.
Thousands of families are part of the workforce, yet in some of the lowest paid sectors
like the garment and service industry. South Central’s economic landscape is a
community defined by the large working poor population that is working for wages, but
is still poor. Many residents find themselves looking for alternative forms, hustles, to
make ends meet. Any resident would attest, “just ‘cuz you live in here, the ‘hood, things
ain’t cheap. We pay higher taxes, stuff just be more expense, and nothing be around
here.”
116
For Bradley, and fellow Mayors, better cities meant jobs, safe neighborhoods,
and quality schools. Bradley specifically said that South Central was not the only city to
114
“1978 Conference: Better Cities for a Better Nation,” National Urban League Papers, Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C.
115
Ibid.
116
Oral history with author, Alfred Smith.
115
worry about but, “I would say that the future looks rather bleak for the cities of
California” as they were not doing enough to find jobs for youth, women, and men. He
was not the only mayor concerned for California cities, but all Mayors in attendance
spoke for the need to help working class and poor communities of color across the United
States.
One feature that defined Bradley’s mayoral terms was his celebration of Los
Angeles’ diversity and multiculturalism. Multicultural diversity figured most prominently
as a dominant form of boosterism celebrating Los Angeles, unlike its turn of the century
predecessor that only focused on Los Angeles as the land of sunshine and opportunity.
The Bradley administration became known for its “wide-ranging alliance with
transnational capital and incorporation of previously excluded minority population in the
public sector.”
117
On October 19, 1988, Tom Bradley spoke at the “Cultural Diversity
Celebration” event in the most celebratory tone,
“I am even more proud to be mayor of a city that thrives in harmony while
learning from its diversity. I vowed to open the doors of city hall to all our
citizens. And I can say our city has been a more racially harmonious place as a
result. Entrepreneurs find new products, new markets, and new employees. I
remain fundamentally committed to the preservation of ethnic and cultural
diversity in the City of L.A.”
118
In his estimation, “diversity” made Los Angeles the largest one of the most “exciting”
and “dynamic” cities in the world, and if we do not nurture diversity it could “quickly
117
Danny Widener, Black Arts West, 224.
118
“Cultural Diversity Celebration, October 19, 1988,” Box 3686, Mayor Tom Bradley Administrative
Papers, 1973-1993, Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles,
Los Angeles, California.
116
erode the peace and harmony to which we have become so accustomed.”
119
Bradley,
despite the struggles for urban cities, most especially working class and working poor
communities believed in the “values of tolerance and brotherhood.” Throughout his
tenure as Mayor, his city council and commission’s choices ensured that the diversity of
the city was considered to be the only way to have fruitful public dialogue and consider
the needs and concerns of the people. He does not suggest that coalition building was
easy, as “prejudice and bigotry are not a thing of the past, as evidence of their presence
can be seen in the rash of incidents of racism and hatred across the nation.” The strenght
with which racism is found in the community is in large part connected to the people’s
unwillingness to let go and believe stereotypes of different ethnic groups, where these
stereotypes divide and destroy the “unity on which the peace and prosperity of our city
depends.”
120
The promise for the future was to see children speak to their parents and
neighbors in Spanish, Korean, Farsi, Russian, Tagalog, or Hebrew “to the children, the
most important thing continue to be playing together, learning together, and making
friends. Let us keep it that way.”
121
Diversity, multiculturalism, and interracial relations are often discussed in terms
of conflicting narratives of tension and coalition, yet upon closer and nuance inspection
one can get at the complexity of the reality. Bradley feared that discussing relations as
119
Ibid.
120
“Cultural Diversity Celebration, October 19, 1988,” Box 3686, Mayor Tom Bradley Administrative
Papers, 1973-1993, Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles,
Los Angeles, California.
120
Ibid.
121
Ibid.
117
tense, irrespective if they are real, would negatively impact the economy as it would
“reduce tourism, lead to middle class (regardless of race) flight out of Los Angeles, and
discourage businesses from locating in Los Angeles.”
122
He actively tried to create and
maintain a positive image of South Central’s group relations, as he wanted help the area
from “further economic depression as businesses will be hesitant to open there and
philanthropic efforts may choose politically safer places to invest.”
123
In a 1985 conference, “Human Relations Commission of the City of Los Angeles’
Office of Civic and Community Relations,” political officials and activists worried about
the negative perception that interracial tensions could have on the future of Los Angeles.
The projected future was 2000, and Human Relations Commissioner Juanita Dudley
echoed that the major fear between “new immigrants and older and poorer minorities
who feel their housing and jobs are threatened.” From the National Urban League, Henry
Talbert, identified eight dynamics that could affect Los Angeles in the year 2000: “the
fate of the black community, gentrification, growing conservatism, suspicion about social
welfare, challenges to the old line establishment, the impact of high technology on the
middle class, education of teachers, and leadership problems.” In his discussion he
focused on the plight of African Americans, but believed that “cultural exchanges need to
be broadened, and the needs of minorities must become the needs of everyone.”
124
122
“Memo: Issues Group, August 26, 1991” Box 3692, Mayor Tom Bradley Administrative Papers, 1973-
1993, Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles,
California.
123
Ibid.
118
Despite some of the apprehension expressed by his colleagues, Bradley was hopeful that
the infusion of immigrants could positively impact the city,
“Far too little has been said about how we as a community adjust to the growing
changes in the demographics of this city. We know of course, that many of the
new immigrants are coming from Mexico, Central and South America, and the
various Pacific Rim nations. Over 80 percent of our immigrants come from these
regions. If we were wise enough, if we were courageous enough, if we were
visionary enough, I am confident that we will assimilate, we will accept, we will
do what we have done as a people and as a nation since the very beginning of this
country. We are going to make the best of this new, enriching infusion of blood
and ideas and energy and talent from the various nations around the Pacific Rim
and throughout Mexico and Central and South America.”
125
In his view, accepting and welcoming immigrants involves courage, vision, and wisdom.
He discusses it in terms of assimilation, nevertheless truthful incorporation requires that
racial differences are not erased, but rather that a source of coalition must be built from
the pretext of mutual self-interest, where commonalities must be understood in terms of
histories of struggle against basic human and civil rights. Alliances are difficult, but not
impossible. It is in this multiracial political landscape that Mexican immigrants, as well
as Asian immigrants, immigrate and settle throughout Los Angeles.
Effort to build a welcoming environment involves garnering interest and much
hard work. The Commission on Human Relations in 1984 wanted to “promote and
improve human relations, civic peace, intergroup understanding, and full acceptance of
all persons in all aspects of community life in Los Angeles County.”
126
Two years prior
124
“Los Angeles 200 Human Relations Conference, 1985,” Box 3692, Mayor Tom Bradley Administrative
Papers, 1973-1993, Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles,
Los Angeles, California.
125
Ibid.
119
the commission held hearings, “State of the County,” in which residents and community
activists were offered an opportunity to voice their concerns. The issues that needed
immediate attention were: intergroup tension and conflict, education, employment and
affirmative actions, minority women and single parent heads of households, health,
police-community relations, and housing. Previous iterations of these studies, hearings,
and reports showcased employment, housing, police-community relations, and education
as the resident’s top priorities.
127
In this report, concern over these issues was not
forgotten but interracial relations took center stage. All participants at the conference
were from Los Angeles County, and of the 131 presenters and speakers: 50 were Latinos
(38.2%), 38 were White (28.9%), 28 were Black (21%), 13 were Asian Pacific speakers
126
“Today’s Conflict, Tomorrow’s Challenges: A Report on Five state of the County Hearings by the Los
Angeles County Commission of Human Relations, January 1984,” Box 64, August F. Hawkins Papers,
1935-1990, Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, Los
Angeles, California.
127
The Commission spent equal measure having a dialogue about the other issues that plagued the
community. The economic climate of the community was also of critical concern. Cuts to social programs
distressed residents as they felt they always found themselves battling local, state, and federal government
for resources. The major cause of alarm was how these cuts negatively reduced the quality of life. But more
importantly, African American residents feel that they are constantly fighting for already scarce resources.
The commission spends considerable time trying to decipher the particular plight of women of color and
single parent head of households. According to the report, women are at an unfair disadvantage as they are
most likely to live in inadequate housing, have low levels of education, are unemployed or underemployed,
and unfortunately have poor health and poor health habits. Also they encounter high rates of employment
discrimination, domestic violence, and drug abuse. In the early 1980s, 53 percent of female headed Latina
and African American families were below the poverty line, as compared to 23.5 percent of female headed
by women and “Black women occupy marginal jobs more often and experience the highest level of poverty
of all American workers; Latina women receive the most inadequate pay.” The concerns were interesting in
light of the ways that these community advocates and representatives really attempted to consider the needs
of women as a source of concern. This attention to the feminization of poverty would not only plague and
shape the experiences of women in South Central in the 1980s, but also to this day. See: “Today’s Conflict,
Tomorrow’s Challenges: A Report on Five state of the County Hearings by the Los Angeles County
Commission of Human Relations, January 1984,” Box 64, August F. Hawkins Papers, 1935-1990, Special
Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California.
120
(10%), and 2 were American Indian (1.5%).
128
The large consistency of Latinos was
indicative of how they were part of the growing demographic and becoming important
actors in the social arena.
The major grievance cited was how the changing population of Los Angeles
County “has produced a significant degree of intergroup tensions and conflict,” where
“on the one hand, this has resulted from differences in language, culture, and other
behavior in the more recent immigrant and refugee groups and their problems of
adjustment to a new society; on the other hand, this has resulted from misunderstanding,
hostility, discrimination, and violence by persons within the majority community and
within racial and ethnic minority groups with a longer history in the county.”
129
Most
speakers discussed how this demographic change inspired “majority group and
indigenous minority groups” to express their fear and engage in discriminatory acts
against newcomers. The cities that discussed high rates of tensions were Pomona,
Monterrey Park, and the Los Angeles refugee population. The biggest complaint by
African American attendees was that landlords preferred Asian refugees and Latinos to
Blacks. When South Central was discussed, it stressed interracial tension between Korean
merchants and African Americans, not amongst Mexican immigrants and African
Americans.
128
Today’s Conflict, Tomorrow’s Challenges: A Report on Five state of the County Hearings by the Los
Angeles County Commission of Human Relations, January 1984,” Box 64, August F. Hawkins Papers,
1935-1990, Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, Los
Angeles, California.
129
Ibid.
121
In the 1980s, African Americans were uneasy over the “rapid takeover of gas
stations and “mom and pop” stores in the Black community.” African American
advocates stated that there is relatively little African American ownership as is, and with
the presence of Asian-owned shops meant an increase in Asian employees and no
meaningful opportunities for African American residents. There was also concern about
the failure of some Asian owners and employees to communicate in English and the
apparent rudeness of some towards African American patrons. African American
advocates not only discussed it in terms of employment options but also about a “larger
argument of capital opportunities for Korean owners and lack of employment
opportunities and unavailability of funds for grocery stores.”
130
The Liquor and Retailers
Association then voiced their concern. They echoed many of the concerns raised by
African American advocates of the Black Agenda, and claimed that many “Koreans who
are recent immigrants and do no fully understand customs and culture, as well as the
American way of doing business. Their lack of English language proficiency was causing
communication problems and unintentional misunderstandings.” These last statements
are loaded with racialized understandings of difference, and are often not only waged
against Korean immigrants but also recently arrived Mexican immigrants. It also
illustrates that language barriers contribute to unintended sources of tension and
130
Ibid. For more on the hazards of liquor stores in the community see: Didra Brown Taylor, Knowledge,
Attitudes, and Malt Liquor: Beer Drinking Behavior among African American men in South Central Los
Angeles, California School of Professional Psychology, Dissertation, 2000; Regina Freer, From Conflict to
Convergence: Interracial Relations in the Liquor Store Controversy in South Central Los Angeles,
Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1999.
122
misunderstanding.
131
It must be noted, that almost a decade before the 1992 uprising,
residents and activists were having open and ample discussions of the escalating tensions
between these Asian merchants and African American residents.
Striking in this discussion, despite the overwhelming presence by Latinos, was
that Latino and African American relations were not given top priority in interethnic
relations. It would appear, based on this dialogue, that for African Americans their main
concern for interracial relations was the clash with Asian merchants, as they felt left
behind by investors, entrepreneurs, and employees in their own community. Most
conferences conclude with a commitment to future “dialogue” between aggrieved groups
to foster better race relations. Open dialogues is an important stepping-stone towards
building cross-racial solidarity, however what must be discussed in relationship to cross-
racial solidarity is the ways that these relations are strained because of continued
disinvestment in jobs, housing, health, education, and police-community, and social
services. The muted discussion about relations between African Americans and Mexican
immigrants, at least in the context of this meeting, was one that did not emphasize tension
but rather simple coexistence. The 1980s, in Los Angeles, must be understood through a
lens that considers Bradley’s assertion and embodiment of the importance of diversity in
131
The interaction between African American residents and Korean merchants has been a source of tension
between both groups, and has preoccupied the scholarly literature on Black/Korean relations. These
interactions cannot be ignored in the broader scope of the history of South Central, as these relations ran at
an all time high during and in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising as Korean and Asian
merchants were the targets of much of the destruction in those tumultuous days. However, for the scope of
this chapter, and overall dissertation, I do not explore African American/Korean relations, but rather
discuss it in terms of highlighting how in the 1980s interracial relations in South Central Los Angeles
highlight these tense interactions not Latino and African American relations. I do not aim to suggest that
these tensions did not exist, as testimony I document from Latinos attests to the ways they did not feel
welcomed and embraced by long-term African American residents.
123
the city, as well as hearings and meetings that aimed to discuss how increased migration
by Asian and Latin American immigrants transformed the interactions between groups.
1992 Uprising: Anger and Discontent
As the 1980s grew to a close, Korean, Mexican immigrant, and African American
relations remained strained, police aggression towards African American residents
escalated, and meaningful job opportunities were almost nonexistent. It is unsurprising
that residents of South Central took to the streets in the wake of the Rodney King verdict
to express their anger over rampant discrimination and racism. The 1992 Los Angeles
uprising left the city with millions of dollars worth of damage and thousands of arrests
and injured residents. Just prior to the rebellion, the largest Spanish language television
network KMEX/Univision conducted a questionnaire in the Latino community regarding
how they felt about African American and Latino relations in the early 1990s.
132
In May
1991, racial tensions between African American and Central Americans made national
headlines after an African American police officer shot a Salvadoran man in Washington,
D.C. This very public case of interracial violence, prompted KMEX/Univision to conduct
500 surveys with Latino (or Hispanic) respondents to uncover their sentiments towards
African Americans. Most respondents were 18-49 years old, 61 percent were not citizens,
and 73 percent were from Mexico. On overwhelming percentage of respondents, 67
percent said that Latinos had the most problems with African Americans followed by
132
No formal date is on the document, however based on the line of questioning one can speculate that the
questionnaire was conducted just prior to the 1992 uprisings. In one of the questions they reference if
respondents feared a similar disturbance like that in Washington D.C. between Black and Hispanics in the
summer of 1991. See: “KMEX/Univision Questionaire,” Box 3630, Mayor Tom Bradley Administrative
Papers, 1973-1993, Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles,
Los Angeles, California.
124
whites at 14 percent. Over 60 percent of Latinos believed that relations between Blacks
and Latinos were “mediocre” and “poor.”
133
They believed that the reasons for these
tensions were “general poverty of both communities,” “differences between language and
culture” and “competition for jobs and government resources.” These differences
warranted Latinos to believe that racial violence was possible, with 71 percent believed it
was “somewhat likely” and “very likely.” Finally the questionnaire attempted to capture
the racial prejudices of Latinos by asking if they agreed or disagreed with the following
statement: “Blacks are different from Hispanics because in general they are not hard
workers and prefer to take advantage of government welfare programs.” About 56
percent agreed, while 34 percent disagreed and 10 did not know.
This survey provides some insight into the perspective of Latinos on African
American and Latino relations in Los Angeles. It is difficult to discern if all the
respondents were from South Central or Los Angeles area broadly as there is very little
context for the study. I speculate that such a distinction might have played a role in the
ways that people answered the questions. However, of note, is the racial prejudice
Latinos hold towards African Americans, as they believe that there is a difference
between the two groups work ethic. Additionally, many Latinos claimed that problems
between Latinos and African Americans were higher than those with whites. One can
gather that this is largely due to the fact that Latinos might find themselves in similar
spaces with African Americans than with whites. Finally, as countless reports and
133
“KMEX/Univision Questionaire,” Box 3630, Mayor Tom Bradley Administrative Papers, 1973-1993,
Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles,
California.
125
hearings have described, was the ways that residents believed that an eruption was
possible. This study shows that prior to the uprising, at least from the views captured by
the Latinos that participated in this study, Latinos believed that interracial relations
needed work.
The 1992 rebellion became the most prominent and effective visual marker that
signaled demographic change. Residents still remember the terror that they experienced
during those six days of unrest, as they were afraid that they could be caught in the
crossfire by just being residents. Magdaleno Ruiz said, “you just didn’t know, most
people were looting, there was a sense of lawlessness, like no one was obeying anything,
everything was fair game.” He goes on to state, that “toda la raza anduvo alli (everyone
was involved). Your role was to shut up and not say anything.”
134
Unfortunately, it took
the presence of the National Guard and military with snipers in hand on roof tops of local
buildings to usher a “sense of calm.” This “calm” was achieved through the physical
exertion of state authority and violence. For African American and Mexican immigrant
residents alike, they never imagined they could feel as though they were part of a
warzone. The police, military, and national guards’ outward demonstration of authority,
an extension of how they had approached the community for decades, signaled that they
were there to restore “order” at any cost. Between thirty to forty percent of business
damaged in the unrest were Latino owned.
135
Over half of the people arrested during the
134
Oral history with author, Magdaleno Ruiz.
135
Maria Newman, “After the Riots: Riots Put Focus on Hispanic Growth and Problems in South Central,”
New York Times, May 11, 1992, B6.
126
uprising were Latino, one third of those killed were Latino.
136
These rates in conjunction
to the pictures and television coverage of the rebellion captured how thousands of Latinos
were not only participants in the event, but also residents of African American South
Central Los Angeles.
For Angelenos living outside the bounds of South Central, and the nation as a
whole, this racial transformation was news— a reminder of how isolated South Central’s
residents were from the rest of the city. For community residents, this was not news as
they had been living with this reality for over a decade. For Gloria Molina, then the only
Los Angeles County only Latino Supervisor, this demographic shift came as a surprise,
“All of us have an awful lot of work to do to learn about the changing demographics of
South Central Los Angeles.” Political representation in South Central was, and is, still
largely African American. The vast majority of the Latinos living in South Central were
recent arrivals, undocumented, and unable to vote. Molina believed that there were “few
social service agencies that cater to Spanish speakers, and even in churches where the
congregations are becoming more Hispanic, parishioners barely speak to newcomers
because of the language barrier.”
The early 1990s offered an opportunity for the “lessons of inclusion,” as the
strains on the community are “more related to the frustrations of people living in poverty
than to racial or ethnic hatred.”
137
The uprisings were a representation of people
expressing their frustration over poverty as just a year after the uprising, the poverty rate
136
Manuel Pastor, Jr. “Economic Inequality, Latino Poverty, and the Civil Unrest in Los Angeles”
Economic Development Quarterly Vol. 9, No. 3 (August 1995), 235-250, 238.
137
“In the Neighborhood Watts: Demographics and Culture, but Poverty Persists,” Los Angeles Times,
February 22, 1993, A4.
127
in Watts was at 44 percent with a per capita income of $8,159, compared to Los Angeles
county 15 percent and per capita $16,149. The owner occupied housing units were 39
percent, while for Los Angeles County 49 percent.
138
Getting meaningful employment for
residents has always been an issue. The uprising was one of the most costly urban unrests
in American history that illustrated the gulf between the wealthy and poor. The infusion
of War on Poverty grants in the late 1960s and through the 1970s meant that youth were
provided with job training opportunities. Director of the Watts Health Foundation,
Donzella Lee said that, “When you don’t have any place for kids to work and you don’t
have any place for kids to play you have a problem. Gangs provide jobs, and a
recreational outlet. And not only don’t we have jobs for adolescents, but we don’t have
jobs for their parents. (This) leaves the community very vulnerable—vulnerable to
developing an underground community (including) drugs and other criminal activity.”
This vulnerability is very real and palpable. Arturo Ybarra, President of Watts-Century
Latino Organization, and resident of South Central since the 1980s, echoed many of
Lee’s fears, “We don’t have enough programs for our youth and children or programs
that will help us with single mothers so that our people can break this vicious cycle of
dependency (on welfare). (That would happen) with training programs, with more jobs so
people can have a decent income to support their families African Americans and Latinos
suffer from the same social and economic neglect, and what is available is not enough for
everyone, so this creates some kind of resentment in some groups.”
139
He adds, that the
138
Ibid.
139
Ibid.
128
resentment between groups would not exist, if both groups were taken care of. Getting
both groups to work on common ground is an important key to the development of a
coalition politics that can be long lasting.
In response to the rebellion, Mayor Bradley formed Rebuild Los Angeles. It was a
five-year rebuilding project that aimed to infuse the community with investors and
business owners. Rebuild L.A. was organized in eleven task forces with political and
economic officials as well as community experts. The task force focused on: finance,
construction business development, education and training, racial harmony, insurance,
media and communications, philanthropy, urban planning, volunteerism, and health and
youth. Rebuild L.A. came under much criticism for its failure to make inroads in the
development of economic capital for the community, although it did make some inroads
in securing some investment like large grocery stores. Part of the problem with Rebuild
L.A. was its top-down approach, but others state that the economic recession negatively
affected the organizations’ opportunity to gather financial capital to establish an
infrastructure.
One important facet of the Rebuild L.A. project was establishing the Rebuild
L.A.’s: Racial Harmony and Discourse Task Force with the help of the Los Angeles City
Commission on Human Relations. On February 8, 1993, the taskforce convened to have
an open dialogue to discuss differences and find common ground. As co-chair of the
event Ki Suh Pak urged that participants “must respect others perspectives as equally
important as our own.” He warned against “being too nice,” noting that it is also
important to be honest and listen to each others points of view without rancor or
129
emotions. He believed they “had to come to grips with what racial harmony is all about.
Common language about the city’s problems and solutions.”
140
Antonia Hernandez,
fellow co-chair echoed Pak’s concern and said that having open, respectful, and sensitive
conversation “is the tough work.” Part of the goals of the meeting was to allow the
community to express their grievances, so that they understood what was going on in the
community and avoid being viewed as “do-gooders” doing for the folks. The four areas
of concern were: racial tensions in the schools; community/merchant conflict; Martin
Luther King, Jr. Hospital conflict; and food distribution controversies. The latter issue
was bound by the occurrence of the uprising as in the wake of the disturbances, food
distribution agencies were not well managed and some groups were limiting the
distribution to some groups.
At this meeting residents were given an outlet to express their anxieties over how
the disturbances had transformed their daily lives. Residents stated, “economic racism is
the root of the problem” and we are “living in a war zone and civilians are getting hurt.”
But more important, or enlightening, was the ways that a resident expressed, “we’re all
immigrants, some more recent than others,” meaning that South Central Los Angeles
residents share the experience of having to adapt and settle in the community. As part of
the meeting, both residents and officials allotted time to look at “communities that have
successfully integrated immigrants. What happens in a community that works?” After
much debate about approaches to integration, the answer was youth, as “the way to guide
140
“Rebuild Los Angeles Racial Harmony and Discourse Taskforce Meeting Minutes, January 4, 1993,”
Box 1179, Mayor Tom Bradley Administrative Papers, 1973-1993, Special Collections, Young Research
Library, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California.
130
youth will be the way the community goes in the future. The youth need safe,
constructive things to do and places to go to learn about other cultures in non-conflict
situations.”
141
Astutely, as residents complained about some of the racial and ethnic
problems of the community, they always returned and said that at the root of all problems
were economic and political inequalities. Residents are well aware that their problems
they face, while at first glance appear to be racially motivated, are linked to larger
structural forces rather than unexplored racial prejudice.
Political officials considered that the tensions between African American and
Latinos in Los Angeles are among the worst nationwide. Tension is found at all levels:
streets, prison, schools, college campuses, and politics. Skeptics doubted that truce and
solidarity could be achieved between these groups and much rather believed that tension
will define the relationship between them. There is some truth to the difficulty of
coalition building as the level of interracial gang violence is high, yet it is not impossible.
Through the 1990s, and even today, “racial brawls” in middle schools and high schools
occur. From 1991 to 1994, in sheriff facilities alone about 100 race riots were recorded.
142
However, despite these flare ups, African American and Mexican gang members and
residents actively rally to create a truce between these two groups in schools, prisons, and
on the streets. It is not as hopeless as outsiders of the community attempt to suggest. For
example, the Watts Gang Truce’s unofficial slogan was “Crips plus Bloods plus
141
Ibid.
142
Roberto Rodriguez, “An Unnecessary Conflict: Black/Latino Relations” Black Issues in Higher
Education, Volume 11: Issue 16, October 1994
131
Mexicans—Unite!.”
143
The slogan was displayed throughout Los Angeles city walls
before and after the uprisings. The uprisings pointing out, how important it was to build
institutions, relations in which people worked cross racially. Similarly the Multicultural
Collaborative was established in which twelve community organizations in Los Angeles
banded together to mediate inter-racial disputes. Against all obstacles, activists and
residents continue their mission of striving towards collaboration.
The mutual education of these groups is an essential feature in the struggle for
interracial cooperation, as both groups must see how both face racial and ethnic
discrimination. This lack of understanding for the struggles of ethnic Mexicans often
leads African Americans to believe that Mexican immigrants come to the U.S. and just
take advantage of many of the important gains made by African Americans, “Many
Blacks believe that gains for Latinos are at the expense of Black— that for Latinos to
want more, it means Blacks will have less.”
144
Conversely, Latinos feel that their claims
of discrimination and “minority” status are not taken seriously, as these are viewed as
reserved for African Americans. For cross racial collaboration, residents, activists, and
political officials alike, must leave behind their propensity to divide along racial lines and
instead open themselves up to working across racial difference.
The 1992 uprising proved a pivotal moment in the lives of South Central
residents’ as it was a reaction to the cumulative effects of neglect and racism. Mainstream
pundits and journalists viewed the riots as an example of “racial hostility and individual
143
Ibid.
144
Ibid.
132
lawlessness,” while scholars like Cornel West viewed it as “neither a race riot nor a class
rebellion, but a multiracial, trans-class and largely male display of justified social rage...it
signified the sense of powerlessness in American society.”
145
Many criticized the poor for
burning down their very own community. But for many residents how can you call it “our
community” if the majority of the business, property owners, and investors are not from
the community. Yes, it is their community because they reside within its boundaries, but
for the majority of residents they do not have a material, economic, and political claim to
the space. The scope of the uprising did not extend beyond South Central and its adjacent
areas because as described earlier law enforcement and the military quickly cut off access
to other parts of the city and ensured that wealthy and middle class white areas remained
protected. For many residents their worldview and experience was, and is, South Central
Los Angeles. Thus it is understandable that the immediate taking out of frustration would
occur within the community—as it was a constant reminder of a failed promise.
The scholarly interest in South Central Los Angeles grew exponentially in the
wake of the uprising and produced a myriad of studies on the ways that uprising was a
pivotal moment in the community. Many scholars argued for the structural underpinning
for the riots. Another segment of scholars viewed the uprisings as having similarities with
the 1965 Watts rebellion, however with a much more diverse racial landscape. Unlike the
black/white framework that defined 1965, in 1992 South Central residents had become
more Latino and store owners were Asian immigrant, largely Korean. The participants
were more multiracial as well as the boundaries of the destruction went beyond South
145
Jane Twomey, “Searching for a Legacy: The Los Angeles Times, Collective Memory, and the 10
th
Anniversary of the 1992 L.A. “Riots”” Race, Gender & Class, Volume 11, Issue 1 (January 2004), 63-80.
133
Central and Watts. Another sector of the scholarship on the uprisings focused on the
Rodney King trial and verdict, through an analysis of the white police officers’ acquittal
as another example of white racial privilege and supremacy, as well as an extension of
police violence, racial profiling, and the police and increased incarceration of men of
color in working class communities. Scholars have also documented media coverage of
the days of unrest.
146
I agree that the 1992, and the 1965 rebellion, are key moments and
indicators of the struggles of community residents, yet I argue that only focusing on these
transformative moments obscures many of the changes in that were occurring throughout
the community that produced the conditions for such a large-scale expression of
discontent.
The discourse in South Central throughout the 1990s centered on the ways
Rebuild L.A. failed to restore the city in the aftermath of the uprisings. Rather increased
police aggression, surveillance, and incarceration became institutionalized and supported.
Despite the federal and state failures at providing real material, economic, and political
opportunities, residents rose from the ashes as they had countless times before, “Que mas
nos queda pero siguir luchando (what other option do we have but to keep struggling)”
said resident Francisco Rosas. Like residents who rallied around the cause for Head Start
programs and a hospital and community health centers in the wake of the 1965 uprising
146
For more see: Jervey Tarvalon and Cristian A. Sierra, eds. Geography of Rage: Remembering the Los
Angeles Riots of 1992 (Really Great Books, 2002); Darnell Hunt, Screening the Los Angeles “Riots”:
Race, Seeing, and Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Robert Goodwin-Williams, ed., Reading
Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (Routledge, 1993); Edward Chang and Jeannette Diaz-Veizades,
Ethnic Peace and the American City: Building Community in Los Angeles and Beyond (New York: New
York University Press, 1999); Min Song Hyoung, Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles
Riots (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Mark Baldassare, ed., The Los Angeles Riots: Lessons for
the Urban Future (Oxford: Westview Press, 1994).
134
as a way to “come out of the ashes of Watts,” residents again had to create community
with decreased services and through a different racial landscape. For many, every April
29
th
is like any other day, but in 1992, it was a day people took to the streets out of anger
and frustration. Close to two decades later, South Central residents may not think about
the rebellion, however, vacant lots and minimal investments are remnants of those days
of unrest and struggle.
Youth: The Key to the Future
South Central is now predominantly Latino, yet still has reminders of being an
African American space and community. South Central is becoming like East Los
Angeles, or any other Latino space, but rather something of its own. The fusion of
Latinidad and African American history and struggle are shaping not only the city streets
but also racial understandings of residents. This fusion is difficult for people that do not
live in the community to understand. Popular culture and youth’s engagement with it are
important spaces in which to investigate cross racial collaboration. Scholars like Josh
Kun, Anthony Macias, and Luis Alvarez have all provided examples of how youth
culture and popular culture through music, clothing, and politics have been instrumental
in theorizing how multiracial spaces offer cross-racial collaboration. Josh Kun’s “What is
an MC if he can’t Rap to Banda?” discusses the musical trajectory of Akwid as an
expression of the effects and consequences of living in a globalized period like the
present that places African American, Central American, Mexican immigrant, and
Mexican Americans living, working, and surviving in the same neighborhood. Akwid is
understood as representative of a new reality of many Mexican immigrant and Mexican
135
American youth in South Central Los Angeles as they “listen to the rough narco-corridos
of Chalino Sanchez at home, but on the street, they belonged to the South Central L.A.
hip hop scene.”
147
For Kun, Akwid’s regionalization of hip-hop and banda reminds us that
South Central has long been a vital space for exchange and coalition between Black and
Latino communities where their music attempts to make sense between the intersections
and interconnections of their Mexican roots and what’s lived on the streets South Central.
Building on Alvarez and Kun’s assertion of the ways that Chicano youth’s identity is
“deeply shaped by how Chicanos relate to other racialized groups” and what binds
Chicanos and other youth of color is “a profound connection between their efforts to
reclaim dignity amidst difficult life conditions, including discrimination and poverty.”
148
It is in this racial and ethnic space that residents craft their sense of identity and
community, something that is not distinctly ethnic Mexican nor African American, but
the overlapping of these two experiences.
Children and youth are viewed as key to the future of race relations in South
Central. Like clockwork, every few years there are news stories that document racially
motivated fights between youth and children. Despite these tense instances, activists,
scholars, and resident believe in youth as ushering cross-racial collaboration. For
example, Jermaine Baskerville and Uri Rebollar illustrate how realities of cross-racial
collaboration occur everyday in South Central. These two boys have known each other
since third grade, and throughout the years have become best friends, where their
147
Josh Kun, “What Is an MC If He Can’t Rap to Banda? Making Music in Nuevo L.A.” American
Quarterly 56:3 (September 2004), 741-758, 748.
148
Luis Alvarez, “From Zoot Suits to Hip Hop: Towards a Relational Chicana/o Studies,” Latino Studies
5:1 (Spring 2007), pp. 53-75, 55.
136
“friendship exemplifies the bicultural social acceptance and assimilation from one culture
to the other.”
149
Uri, a Mexican American, states that the major difference is “in the types
of foods and music,” as Jermaine states that they enjoy similar recreational activities like
sports. “There’s not really a difference between Blacks and Latinos but their culture and
the color skin, but we’re all human,” says Uri. Peter Gomez, fellow friend, believes that
sports are helping youth of different racial groups to communicate and socialize better.
These boys are high school juniors at Wallis Annenberg High School. Wallis is a
charter high school whose mission since 1994 was “for the school to create harmony
between Blacks and Latinos, and demonstrate that the two groups will be stronger when
they work together than apart.” Jonathan Williams (African American) and Kevin Sved
(white) started the school and understood that part of what would make their school
different and successful was their diversity program and curriculum. This curriculum
would make sure that books about different cultures and racial communities were
available and widely used. They also made sure to celebrate different cultures through
common groups of dance, music, and holidays. Jonathan shared that his commitment to
cross-racial solidarity was in large part due, “to something that I grew up with. I learned
from my parents. I learned what’s right or wrong. It’s just learning as you grow up, being
mature and stop acting like a kid.” Jonathan models what he hopes his students will do, to
not shy away friendships just because they are of a different racial and ethnic
background.
149
Christine Sabathia, “Color Never Mattered to these Two Friends,” The Los Angeles Sentinel, March 30,
2006, A1.
137
Harmonious race relations do not mean the erasure of difference, but rather the
embracing of different people’s culture. In South Central, youth are listening the similar
music, “speaking the same street lingo,” and interracial dating. Andres Rivas, fourteen-
year-old High School student, said he dated an African American girl last summer after
they met at the Swimming Pool in one of the local parks. For Rivas it seemed normal, or
not out of character for him as, “I hang around most with Black friends. Some of the
Hispanics called me a traitor. It doesn’t really bother me because I know it’s not true. I’m
proud to be Hispanic.” This argument is often waged on many Latinos who are willing to
engage, befriend, and embrace African Americans and vice versa.
Children also become a key toward bringing adults together. Ava Chavez,
resident of South Central since the 1970s, explained that she befriended her African
American neighbor because of her children and involvement in school activities. Chavez,
“My kids grew up with her children. Whenever she would cook she would send a plate
over. I had never heard of a chitlin, and learned to eat those chitlins and greens with her.
Whenever I prepare a Mexican dish I share it with her. I have learned to cook her dishes
and she has learned to cook mine.”
150
Food became a way to share with each other their
culture, but more importantly show how despite their differences they could get along
and learn from each other. She reflects that after years of friendship they call each other
“play sisters.” Only through continued interaction and education, can we “learn about
each other’s culture . . . to know where we come from and not forget our roots and share
with each other.” This, in turn, crafts a new reality.
150
“In the Neighborhood Watts: Demographics and Culture, but Poverty Persists,” Los Angeles Times,
February 22, 1993, A4.
138
Similarly, ice cream vendor Adan Hernandez’s interaction with African American
children has caused him to reflect on his racial prejudice and misunderstanding. When he
started his route as an ice cream vendor in South Central he quickly realized that selling
popsicles would not be easy, as a he did not understand half the clientele. It was not the
lack of customers that was the problem; it was that they could not tend to the African
American kids that lined up before his van. Inside his van he struggled to understand the
orders as African American kids shouted “fudgsicle” or “cornnuts.” But he failed to
understand, and the African American teenager walked away from his truck annoyed.
Hernandez reflects that the child’s annoyance was because, “That fool acted like I was
talking to him in Chinese.” Hernandez did not always have these blunders with his
African American patrons, as one of his loyal customers an African American boy, gave
him two quarters with a polite please. Hernandez smiled and knew the kid wanted a red
Popsicle. For the child’s warmth, he handed him free pieces of bubble gum, with
Hernandez saying “Es buen muchacho.” This last encounter, speaks to the difficulty of
servicing the African American patrons. Also that constant interaction serves to challenge
the narrative of interracial tension to illustrate a much more nuance interpretation of race
relations as well as the ways these interactions happened at all levels in multiple
situations. Only by inspecting closely the neighborly interaction is one able to the
promise, possibility, sacrifice, and struggle that is to build community. Building
community has, and continues to be a struggle, that both groups share in wake of
dehumanizing power structures and state forces.
139
Conclusion
Interest in South Central’s racial dynamics will continue to spur reports and
studies. After four decades of Mexican immigrant settlement, studies will continue to
investigate and attempt to uncover how a community defined by its African American
character incorporate Mexican immigrants. The tensions that exist between the two
groups are due to poverty and inequalities in access to resources and livable wages.
Tensions emerge out of frustration and misunderstanding. South Central, despite its
demographic shift, continues to be racialized as African American. There is a
particularity to the ways that South Central maintains its African American character
despite the ways Latinos have infused it with it with their own. South Central has truly
become a space in which multiple migrations collide everyday. It is this collusion that
produces charged, complex, and fragile relations between Latinos and African
Americans.
Coalition building between these two groups remains of critical importance and
something to continue to work towards. In a recent study on interracial dynamics in
South Central, David Fabienke found that one of the greatest challenges and hurdles to
get beyond the racial divide was to move away the perceive threat over employment and
economic competition. African Americans express feelings of Mexican immigrants
taking over their jobs, while Mexican immigrants feel that African Americans feel this
way yet that there is very little competition. Neither group perceives themselves as being
“prejudiced towards the other, but both groups perceived the other to be prejudiced
towards them.” Surprisingly, both groups approached collaboration differently as many
140
African American viewed that they must first address the unique struggles of each group
before they start working collaboratively, while ethnic Mexicans were more attuned to
working together on common goals as to avoid alienation.
151
African Americans
apprehension over cross racial collaboration was because they believed that ethnic
Mexicans would rather work with other Latinos due to shared language and ethnic and
national affinities. This racial solidarity is viewed as positive feature by African
Americans, as illustrates loyalty; however such an approach leads many African
Americans to believe that ethnic Mexicans feel superior to them and this belief, whether
real or imagined, is the greatest gulf between both groups. As an African American
participant of the study states, “I wish our race thought like theirs. There could be like 80
of them in a three bedroom and they’ll have brand new cars. They help each other get
established. We [African Americans] can’t create that kind of stability.”
152
African American participants perceived themselves as a community to be more
likely to welcome members of other ethnic or racial groups into their environments. One
participant said, “We [African Americans] are more accepting of other peoples’ cultures.
We nurture them and bring them into our families. They [Latinos] don’t accept us into
theirs.” This sense of cohesion and commitment to the whole family success is attributed
to why ethnic Mexicans are able to adapt to the U.S.. African American respondents
admired, but at the same time resented this characteristic. However, most Latinos would
argue that African Americans exhibit a high level of racial solidarity and commitment.
151
David Fabienke, “Beyond the Racial Divide: Perceptions of Minority Residents on Coalition Building in
South Los Angeles” Tomas Rivera Policy Brief (June 2007), 1.
152
Ibid., 5.
141
Many of the oral histories I conducted with Mexican immigrant residents, expressed that
encountering African Americans as a group, “they were a community to be reckon with.”
Often citing that if they found themselves in a car accident with an African American
resident any other African Americans around would run to their aid and rally to support
the person even if they were at fault. Or that as group, you never knew if they were
fighting, laughing, or just talking as their conversation all had a similar tone of being loud
and boisterous. In many effects, both groups believed that the level of racial solidarity
amongst groups was particularly strong, and at times threatening. Such a reading fails to
consider that from the outside intergroup dynamics look cohesive and unified, while the
reality is that intergroup relations are not as cohesive as imagined.
The most interesting finding of the report was the ways that African Americans
felt they had to go out of their way to embrace Mexican culture and community. When
most Mexican immigrants, residents and activist alike, believe that they had to work
particularly hard at getting African Americans to work with them. They [Latinos] don’t
accept us into theirs.” Another believed that African Americans who were able to speak
some Spanish “felt that their language ability facilitated their acceptance into Latino
social circles, but most participants resented having to learn another person’s culture and
language just to be treated as an equal.” As one participant pointed out, “It’s an issue of
respect. I’m accepted [by Latinos] because I speak Spanish or because I eat Mexican
food. But if I don’t, it’s a problem. Why do I have to meet you [Latinos] half way? Why
can’t we meet each other in the middle?.”
153
The findings of this report are indicate the
153
Ibid.
142
ways that demographic change in the community, now overwhelmingly Latino, has
meant that African Americans feel they must make concessions in order to community
build. Yet, when Mexican immigrants settled from the 1970s in the city, Mexican
immigrants felt they had to make the effort in collaborating with African Americans. The
sheer numbers of the community has meant a real or perceived realigning of how to build
community and coalitions.
In the end, the migration and settlement of Mexican immigrants into African
American South Central has been met with some trepidation and negotiation. Both
groups encounter, confront, and challenge extreme forms and levels of dehumanization
and disinvestment. Both groups understanding their struggle as a shared struggle takes
work. Community activists and residents both strive to create space(s) in which they can
create collation and future in the mist of insurmountable odds. Most people have lost
hope the in the promise of South Central, even a majority of residents, however, this after
all is their home and must carve out a space that makes sense to them. African American
and Latino residents stories at first appear to be running different courses, yet their
migration, settlement, and commitment to the longevity and progress of the community—
South Central Los Angeles—unites residents them in unforeseeable ways. It is residents’
commitment and activism on this city street that one learns how residents in South
Central Los Angeles work across racial, gender, class, and ethnic lines to cope with this
region’s continuous economic restructuring, immigration, and dehumanizing government
services and policies. The severity of their concerns bolstered the importance of
establishing an inclusive multiracial and multiethnic notion of solidarity.
143
CHAPTER 2
Let’s Get Them Off to a Headstart!:
Head Start Programs and School Readiness
On July 6, 1965, was the first day of Head Start classes throughout Los Angeles,
California. Jack Jones, Los Angeles Times on staff South Central Los Angeles
correspondent, wrote a cover story about Pasadena Oaks College Head Start’s promise.
Head Start was a school readiness program aimed to put disadvantage children on an
equal footing. Head Start was a $16.5 million year round educational program aimed to
“equip [children] emotionally, culturally, and even physically for their futures in
kindergarten and first year.” Head Start aimed to “enable children from low-income
families to overcome the effects of stimulus deprivations.”
1
Head Start’s school readiness
mission was to teach children how to color, play collaboratively, and learn the alphabet
and numbers—the basic skills of how to behave in a classroom. Pasadena’s Head Start
students were majority white, with substantial numbers of African American and
Mexican American children. This Head Start center worked in conjunction with already
established Pacific Oaks Community College campus and nursery.
2
Jones featured four-year-old Blanca Castillo in the story. He discussed Blanca’s
initial days at Head Start as marked by her apprehension with mingling with other kids in
the playground. For three weeks she silently participated in the Head Start activities and
playtime. Many of the teachers attributed her apprehension to the fact that she did not
speak English. However, Jones writes, that the universal language of laughter with her
1
Jack Jones, “Head Start Off to a Good Start,” Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1965, A1.
2
Ibid.
144
fellow playmates opened a space for her, and her “fellow Spanish-language friends,” to
come out of their shell and engage in classroom and playground activities. Teachers at
the Pasadena Head Start discussed the level of language development going on in the
center, as activities centered on play and trust to help non-English speakers like Blanca
engage in class.
3
In many instances, Mexican American children were not as behind as
was expected, as they where able to describe objects (ie. if they looked a picture a cow,
children would yell “vaca” the Spanish term for the animal). Unlike other children who
were not able to describe the animal, Mexican American children were fully aware of its
name and purpose. However, in the “wrong” language, a “deficiency” that Head Start
aimed to correct.
4
It was instructing Mexican American children to learn English, and
lose some of their apprehension towards engaging with children that did not speak
Spanish that Head Start boasted its greatest and immediate success.
Blanca’s story posits a complex narrative of Head Start’s origins in Los Angeles.
Jones selection of the Pasadena Pacific Oaks Head Start was strategic as it showcased the
public vision of Head Start’s educational promise through the lens of one of the most
successfully established centers in Los Angeles. In doing so, obscuring the political
battles waged in South Central Los Angeles between Mayor Sam Yorty, Congressman
Augustus Hawkins, and community residents to acquire funds to establish Head Start
centers. Fifteen miles separate South Central and Pasadena, but such geographic division
makes a world of difference in our understanding of the social, political, and economic
3
Ibid.
4
William Estes, “Head Start Provides Step up in Learning,” Los Angeles Times, July 8, 1965, SF1.
145
opportunities in these two communities. On the one hand, Pasadena in the 1960s was a
majority white neighborhood with small number of African American and Mexican
American families. On the other, South Central was overwhelming African American
and working poor and working class. The Head Start center at the Pasadena Pacific Oaks
Head Start was established in conjunction the Pacific College Children’s School—a
school that had been existence since 1945 and worked with college students taking child
development courses at the adjacent Pacific Oaks Community College. The feat of
having a fully operational Head Start center in Pasadena, and this being Los Angeles
Head Start’s public imagine, promise, and success rendered the trials and tribulations of
establishing Head Start centers throughout South Central invisible. Jones discussion of
Pasadena strategically served to gain support for the program and offers an interesting
entryway towards understanding Head Starts’ history in Los Angeles. His showcasing of
Blanca’s story, “her success,” goes against the grain as War on Poverty initiatives and
programs in Los Angeles as they have largely been discussed in terms of servicing the
needs of impoverished African American families. By illustrating, Blanca’s
transformation it documents how Los Angeles multiracial landscape opened a space to
showcase the ways that War on Poverty initiatives not only serviced the needs of African
Americans, but also Mexican immigrants.
Head Start’s origins in South Central proved extremely difficult, and almost
impossible. Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty refused to distribute funds to support the
establishment of Head Start centers throughout South Central. Yorty, wanted to maintain
control of War on Poverty funds and operations and minimize community involvement
146
and control, nonetheless, South Central’s Congressman Augustus Hawkins outspoken
disapproval of Yorty efforts brought Yorty’s stubbornness national attention. Office of
Economic Opportunity’s Director, Sargent R. Shriver, wrote to Yorty that failure to allow
community control of War on Poverty funds through community delegate agencies
would mean that all funds would be revoked.
After this bitter political battle, Jack Jones returned to profile Head Start’s
promise by showcasing the programs’ move from a summer program to a year-round
school readiness program. This time he spotlight African American children in South
Central Los Angeles. On September 22, 1966, four-year-old Sammy Burks began his first
day at Head Start at Sacred Heart Catholic Church. Like others in the class, Sammy, put
his paintbrush to paper and smiled at his finished purple-and-red work of art. Sacred
Heart Catholic Church was one among many religious institutions that housed Head Start
programs in Los Angeles. Sammy’s teacher, Mrs. Maryanne Levine (also African
American), expressed that this move from summer to year round Head Start classes were
“going to make quite a difference. Someone like Sammy will be able to learn to play and
go on to other things rather than being cut off after two months as in the summer
programs.” Mrs. Levine, as new Head Start teacher, said that along with the need to be
exposed to basic skills, children need “more than that, they need the feeling of success…
to get over the feeling of failure.”
5
OEO officials believed that by extending the program
to year round they would enhance the program. In Mrs. Levine’s class, “veteran” head
start children, children who had been enrolled in the program over the summer but not
5
Jack Jones, “On a Year-Round Basis: 6,780 Children Begin Head Start Classes,” Los Angeles Times,
September 22, 1966, A8.
147
old enough to enter kindergarten, were making her job easier because they “had taken
over the class.” Mrs. Levine was counting on the “veterans” to help with other children
“who have never seen crayons or paste before or who shrank shyly from the
overwhelming sight of strange adults and play equipment.”
Jack Jones reporting of this Head Start center showcased the ways extending the
program beyond the summer to year round as a promising aspect of the school readiness
mission. Students like Blanca and Sammy needed to be socialized into the rigors of
becoming good and ready students, and needed to remedy their “language deficiencies”
as they were viewed as lacking the “vocabulary” and language skills needed to succeed in
their future educational endeavors. Despite the promise with which Jones reported
Sammy’s and his peers’ potential progress, Head Start’s origins and implementation in
South Central was not as easy as that of Pasadena. Pasadena offered a public and easy
“sell” for Head Start’s purpose and promise, however the same could not be said of South
Central despite the showcasing of Sammy’s success. In this article, and others Jones
writes in the next few years, he documents South Central’s struggle to implement the
program due to lack of classroom space, poor class attendance, and political struggles in
the distribution of funds—largely because of the lack of infrastructure.
Government officials believed that “children from economically deprived areas
traditionally represent the bulk of behavioral and teaching problems in the school system”
and the “first five years of life were the most critical in the development of personality.”
6
The effects of poverty were evident in these children’s first day of class at Head Start.
6
“Head Start” Box 1, Los Angeles Area Federation of Settlement and Neighborhood Centers, Inc., Special
Collections, University of Southern California.
148
Teachers reported that many children “hadn’t seen common kinds of food, such as
pineapples and bananas.” Poor children had “never used cut-out scissors, looked at a
picture book, or scribbled a crayon, been told a fairy story, painted, and played with a
tricycle and toy kitchens.”
7
Many children had never seen a doctor before, others did not
know how to serve themselves food, and never held a telephone. Office of Economy
Opportunity (OEO) and Community Action Programs (CAP) officials entrusted the fate
of children like Sammy to delegate agencies like the Los Angeles Chapter of the Urban
League, Los Angeles Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Los Angeles Area
Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood Centers, Parent Improvement Council, and
African American Churches to expose impoverished children to essential life tools.
8
Head
Start was viewed as a viable and promising program to combat the effects of “stimulus
deprivations.” Sammy and “veteran” students’ progress illustrated the promise that Head
Start offered impoverished children.
The War on Poverty meant to do “something specific for the children of the
poor,” were gender, racial, and class discourse about poverty demonized mothers and
fathers for “lacking the motivation to get out of poverty,” thus the “cruel legacy of
poverty is passed from parents to children.” Children are thus the innocent victims.
9
Despite these racists and reductionist understandings of poverty, I argue that Head Start
7
“The Office of Economic Opportunity During the Administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson,
Administration History,” Box 107, Entry 14, RG 381, Community Action Program, National Archives
Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.
8
Wesley Brazier, “Your Urban League” Los Angeles Sentinel, September 16, 1965, A6.
9
“The Office of Economic Opportunity during the Administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson,
Administration History,” Box 107, Entry 14, RG 381, Community Action Program, National Archives
Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.
149
through its school readiness mission, offered children like Sammy an opportunity at a
childhood through the experience of using crayons, paints, and tricycles. These sites
offered a safe place to play, an appeal not only for four-year-old children, but older
siblings. Children’s participation in Head Start provided children with a head start in
kindergarten. They were going to be socialized into the rigors of interacting with other
children, teachers, and community members. Many believed that children’s lack of
knowledge for how to use toys and crayons represented how poverty robbed poor
children of their childhood. Often, the inner-city is described as failing to provide a space
for children to enjoy a childhood. The lack of access to toys and school supplies, poverty,
and violence are features used to describe how children’s childhood is cheated. Head
Start offered children, who are often described as not being children, an opportunity to be
kids through play, exploration, and education.
Investigating War on Poverty initiatives broadly, and Head Start in particular,
offers insight into the challenges that residents of South Central Los Angeles and Watts
confronted at a time of real transition. Uncovering the inner contours of the Head Start
program illustrates the complex matrix of federal, state, and local political negotiations as
well as the ways that local actors and organizations crafted their own sense of citizenship.
I agree with scholars that critique the War on Poverty because it failed to eradicate
poverty as the OEO failed to truly tackle and remedy the structural nature of poverty by
offering real job training and employment and educational opportunities—opportunities
that would truly alter the life chances of residents living in poverty. Unlike many of the
programs spearheaded by the OEO, Head Start continues to operate. The logic of
150
continuing this program is not only that children are positively affected (children who
participate in Head Start are more likely to attend college), but also community
participation is integral to its success. Head Start officials, both nationally and locally,
heralded that the true success of Head Start was measured by the ways the program
enriched “the parents lives and strengthen family ties when its activities become a project
for the involvement of the whole family.”
10
The level of family and community
involvement is essential to its success, and more importantly, the reasoning behind its
longevity.
In the wake of the Watts uprising and economic transformation the city, Head
Start offers a window into understanding how for South Central Los Angeles and Watts
families this program meant “a real possibility to change as they government was
committed to eradicate poverty.”
11
I present how the government intervened in the lives
of African American and Mexican American children and families throughout Los
Angeles through a government sponsored program aimed to offer a “childhood” and
“opportunity” to poor children. This program’s goal was to provide impoverished
children with an opportunity at a future. Community participation in the program ensured
that impoverished women and families imagined a new possibility as they often became
central to the success of each classroom but they were also closely supervised by the state
and these local agencies. Like their children, they were placed in seminars and classes
that informed them how to better feed their children, mend their clothing, family
10
“Head Start is For Parents Too- Education and Involvement Guide,” Los Angeles Sentinel, January 29,
1970, C1.
11
Susan Youngblood Ashmore, Carry it On: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in
Alabama, 1964-1972 (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 9.
151
planning, and English language courses. Head Start, thus not only regulated the lives of
children, but also families. This program was as much an educational tool for children as
it was for mothers. Through these state controlled parenting classes, whose origins are
from a premise of the lack of parenting abilities by women in color, African American
and Mexican American women imagined possibilities and spaces of empowerment.
These women and mothers felt that only through their personal educational development
and empowerment could they best help their children tackle their intellectual growth.
Within state and local control efforts, women of color found resourceful ways to craft a
new reality for themselves and children.
The scholarly literature on Head Start has largely focused on the national political
battles for funding, contemporary studies that focus on the success rate of the program, or
differences between white and African American children that participated in the
program. The larger literature on War on Poverty initiatives periphery discuss the
importance of Head Start, and largely focus on other programs funded through this
program (ie Job Corp, Neighborhood Adult Participation Project, etc). Very few scholars
have focused on Head Start, despite its longevity, and much less on how it has shaped the
lives of many inner-city children in Los Angeles. The diverse landscape of Los Angeles,
offers a unique window in which to uncover and interrogate how a program like Head
Start managed to transform the lives of children of color but also their families and
community residents.
Los Angeles’ multiracial landscape offers an opportunity to uncover the
collaboration between African American and Mexican Americans. In the early to mid-
152
twentieth century, real estate restrictive covenants ensured that South Central Los
Angeles was largely African American community. As such, the initial years of Head
Start programs were racially segregated. Robert Bauman in Race and War on Poverty in
Los Angeles astutely chronicles the ways that,
“antipoverty organizations [in Los Angeles] were all created by culturally
nationalistic groups intent on improving the lives of poor people in their own
communities. These agencies contained a clear, unmistakable geographical
component. Even the names of the organizations: Watts Labor Community Action
Committee and The East Los Angeles Community Union, define the geographical
boundaries of their work. The War on Poverty in Los Angeles was fought in
racially and ethnically distinct neighborhoods rather than in interracial movement
of the poor.”
12
Bauman rightly argues that during the OEO’s tenure, War on Poverty programs and
agencies were deeply divided along racial and geographic lines. This was largely due to
the geographic realities of Los Angeles as well as the political obstacles placed on the
distribution of funds. However, if one extends the timeline beyond the OEO’s tenure and
understands the War on Poverty as a “long War on Poverty,” one is able to capture the
multiracial landscape for Head Start centers in South Central Los Angeles and Watts.
13
For Head Start operators in South Central, while they mainly serviced the needs of
African American families, they had to remain attuned to the ways that Mexican
immigrant migration and settlement into the area was changing the daily operations of the
12
Robert Bauman, Race and the War on Poverty: From Watts to East L.A. (University of Oklahoma Press,
2008), 7.
13
Robert Bauman utilizes Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s argument of a “long civil rights movement,” to suggest
that there is a “long war on poverty.” Scholars have suggested the ways that the war on poverty has either
failed or ended with the end to the Office of Economic Opportunity in the 1970s, however, like Bauman I
agree that that the war on poverty extends beyond the 1970s and continues to be fought to this day. See:
Robert Bauman, Race and the War on Poverty, 9; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights
Movement and the Political Uses of the Past” Journal of American History 91:4 (2005).
153
program since the 1970s. Similarly, one must look beyond the sensational accounts of
racial tension to find the instances and points in which organizations like the Urban
League, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Parents Improvement Council, and church groups
serviced equally children of different racial backgrounds.
14
This in turn opens the
possibility to uncover more cross-racial and ethnic collaboration within the community.
In this chapter, I present how the government intervened in the lives of African
American and Mexican American children and families throughout South Central Los
Angeles through a school readiness program aimed to offer an “opportunity” to poor
children and families. For Head Start advocates nationally, Head Start’s readiness
mission meant getting children to learn their colors, alphabet, and numbers, but as I will
show in South Central Head Start readiness meant much more. It meant getting the actual
spaces (classroom) ready to teach children these basic skills, training and hiring potential
teachers from the community, creating curriculum that considered the diversity of
students experience, and transforming Head Start mothers as integral actors in carrying
out the public mission of Head Start. Readiness thus meant a multitude of things and
required vision, execution, and commitment by residents, families, and community
activists. Mexican immigrant and African American women through Head Start worked
together to create spaces of empowerment and visionary responses to education. In the
end, Head Start provides an opportunity to uncover how a program develops amongst
insurmountable odds for poor children’s opportunity at a childhood and future, women
14
The westside of Los Angeles boasted a racial and class diversity with African American, Mexican
American, and White children attending the same head start centers.
154
and families’ empowerment, and increasingly diverse landscape of servicing the needs of
the poor.
War on Poverty and Childhood Education
On January 8, 1964, Lyndon Baines Johnson declared an “unconditional war on
poverty,” promising “not only to relieve the symptoms of poverty but to cure it and,
above all, to prevent it.” Johnson’s declaration was spurred by what some academics
called a “re-discovery” of poverty in the early 1960s where politicians and policy makers
alike aimed to assist those who had not shared in the postwar economic progress.
15
Johnson’s commitment to eradicate poverty came at the heels of taking office after the
tragic assassination of John F. Kennedy. Johnson, a day after Kennedy’s assassination,
met with Walter Heller, chair of the council of economic advisers “to discuss the
Kennedy administration’s unfinished business, including the proposed program to fight
poverty, which was being called “Widening Participation in Prosperity.” Johnson
believed in a program designed to combat poverty as he stated “that’s my kind of
program… move full speed ahead.” He believed that they needed to “use the Kennedy
program as a springboard to take on the Congress, summon the states to new heights, and
create a Johnson program.” The Kennedy administration did not emphasize early
childhood education programs as a key aspect of fighting poverty, but it did mention
preschools as a possible way to help young children from impoverished homes and
communities.
16
For President Johnson, the “discovery” of poverty along with changing
15
Maris Vinovskis, The Birth of Head Start: Preschool Education Policies in the Kennedy and Johnson
Administration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 146; Edward Zigler, Head Start: The Inside
Story of America’s Most Successful Educational Experiment (Basic Books, 1994).
155
perspectives on early childhood education created the conditions to develop Head Start.
His goal was to win the fight against poverty within a decade to prove that he deserved to
occupy the White House.
17
The War on Poverty was an extension of Congress’ Great Society initiatives.
These initiatives included Medicare, Medicaid, federal subsidies for education, new
urban renewal initiatives, expansion of Social Security, and the creation of federal arts
and humanities endowments. Robert Self in American Babylon adeptly describes how the
“great society foundation was an optimistic theory of American society: opportunity
existed for those who, with the government assistance in education and welfare, were
willing to look for it.” The knowledge produced on poverty, and the logic behind the War
on Poverty, according to Self, “accelerated a profound shift that had been underway in
antipoverty research and policy since the 1930s: from a focus on structural reform of the
economy to a focus on managing and shaping the supposed “pathological” behavior of
individuals.”
18
Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, a bill that focused on
community action and education programs. Prior to its passage, early childhood
education was mentioned briefly during deliberations. Neither Sargent Shriver nor
congressional Democrats stressed preschools as a key component to eradicate poverty. In
Maris Vinoskis’ The Birth of Head Start, in a radical departure from previous research
16
Ibid.
17
Susan Youngblood Ashmore, Carry it On, 21.
18
Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton University Press,
2005), 199.
156
that suggested the centrality of Democrats, Johnson, and Shriver, instead argues that the
key figures in developing Head Start were House Republicans who pressured for early
childhood education as part of the discussion. They invited Urie Bronfenbrenner, social
psychologist and early childhood education expert (would soon become co-founder of the
Head Start Program), to testify at the House hearings on Economic Opportunity Act.
Bronfenbrenner criticized the administrations proposal for targeting assistance to those
aged 16 to 22 while ignoring early childhood education. Bronfenbrenner role, and
Republic support, meant that Republicans critiqued the Democrats for their failure to
initially embrace and acknowledge the need for preschool education.
19
In August 1964,
the democrats passed the Equal Opportunity Act that incorporated financial assistance for
early childhood education. The OEO was created to oversee and administer the state and
local application of funds under the Economic Opportunity. The OEO programs included
the largest Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), and employment opportunities for
youth with the Job Corps and Neighborhood Youth Corps, Legal Aid, and Community
Action Programs and Agencies that administered programs like Head Start.
Vinoskis’s fails to provide a broader picture of why Republicans supported early
childhood education, but one could surmise that part of their support was the belief that
the OEO’s commitment to education had two advantages within the Great Society
context: “it did not threaten middleclass assumptions about success, and it presumed the
existence of almost unlimited opportunity for those willing and able to seize it.”
20
Head
19
Maris Vinovskis, The Birth of Head Start, 67.
20
Robert Self, American Babylon, 201.
157
Start’s longevity is in part indebted to the bipartisan support for childhood education.
Vinoskis’s discusses that an argument amongst Republicans and Democrats was whether
Head Start was an education program or a comprehensive child development program.
This difference would prove important as it caused tensions in the development of the
program and question who should administer it. Head Start origins lie in the OEO but by
1969, under President Richard Nixon, Head Start is transferred to the Department of
Health, Education, and Welfare and becomes part of HEW’s Office of Children
Development.
Democrats and Republicans argued over the level of parent involvement in the
program. Advocates of the program believed that parent involvement was an important
avenue for the politicization and mobilization of the poor. As director of the OEO,
Sargent Shriver, expressed that efforts to dismantle Head Start would deepen unless a
larger parental constitutive was created. He stressed that Head Start programs needed to
provide comprehensive health, social, and educational services. The initial iteration of the
program was an educational summer session in which four to five year old children
attend Head Start classes the summer before they enter kindergarten. The first two-
summer session cycles were “experimental.”
In 1966, despite reports that questioned the advantages of Head Start the
administration moved from funding the summer program to a full-year program.
21
Children like Sammy Burks, thus were part of the first cohort of children to participate in
Los Angeles’ year-long Head Start programs. In his analysis, Vinovskis’s grew
21
Ibid., 151.
158
concerned that the short-term political maneuverings left a devastating legacy for Head
Start, as Lyndon B. Johnson’s firmness to create a large-scale, visible, and low-cost
program over running a pilot program that would adequately research how to best service
the needs of low-income children and families was a deterrent in making the program
effective. Lyndon B. Johnson failed to fully consider the importance of running a pilot
study prior to its growth. Many Head Start officials argue that having a program is much
more important that potentially not having one at all. The relative low-cost operation of
the program for a large segment of the population meant that many educational and
policy analyst pushed forward in the implementation of a large scale Head Start program.
Edward Zigler, leading psychologist on child education and eventual member of the
National Planning and Steering Committee of Project Head Start, recalled,
“few of us on the Planning Committee really believed that an eight week summer
program could produce many lasting benefits in children’s lives; we certainly
didn’t think that a couple of meals a day and some vaccinations could ‘cure’
poverty. But the estimated $18 million price tag for the entire summer Head Start
program was about the same as the cost of two fighter bombers at a the time. If the
nation could spend so much money on a war that was benefitting no one, why
couldn’t it spend a fraction of that amount on poor children in Head Start? The
program certainly wouldn’t do any harm; it might even do some good.”
22
Despite the initial apprehension for the promise of the transformative effects of Head
Start, the program became one of the most popular Great Society programs. In part,
Zigler’s assessment and cost analysis of the small price tag associated with the program
has secured Head Start’s longevity.
The first half of the 20th century, educational debates over the costs and benefits
of nursery schools was contentious, however, by mid-twentieth century the promise of
22
Ibid., 77-78.
159
what kindergarten education offer became an acceptable component of education and
was incorporated into public school system.
23
Unlike nursery schools and centers that
focused on taking care of children, Head Start and preschool education programs had
structured curriculum. Scholars like J. McVicker Hunt and Benjamin S. Bloom argued
that children’s intelligence was not fixed at birth and could significantly be altered by
improving their environment. According to Hunt, “overcoming the cultural deprivations
of economically disadvantaged children, is achieved by developing effective preschool
programs.”
24
Bronfenbrenner added that recent scholarship indicated the importance of
healthy early childhood, “we now have research evidence indicating that the environment
of poverty has its most debilitating effect on the very young children in the first few years
of life… growing up in poverty often means growing up in a situation in which
stimulation is at minimum. What is more the effect is cumulative, the longer he remains
in school, the further he goes.”
25
Overall, Bronfenbrenner’s beliefs were negative and
prejudiced views of poor children, yet his views bolstered his advocacy for the ways
early childhood education was key to offering poor children an opportunity. Head Start
found itself in the middle of debates between the biological versus environmental impact
for children’s ability to learn.
26
As time progressed, Head Start advocates’ believed
strongly that environment proved the most important detriment for a child’s success,
“human development occurred very rapidly in the first few years of life and that
23
Maris Vinovskis, The Birth of Head Start, 9.
24
Ibid., 10.
25
Ibid., 46.
26
Ibid., 145.
160
improving the disadvantaged child’s early environment was imperative if one wanted not
only to relieve the symptoms of poverty but to cure it; and above all, to prevent it.”
27
It
was this logic that served as the backbone for government’s commitment to Head Start.
The debates surrounding early childhood education and its potential, spurred the
development and success of Sesame Street. In many ways, Sesame Street is indebted to
Head Start. Sesame Street premiered on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1969. Mr.
Rogers Neighborhood, its predecessor, utilized a traditional view of preschool education
of teaching social skills, not cognitive ones. Sesame Street drew its childhood learning
and cognition premise from Head Start.
28
The show had the ability to reach more children
of diverse socio-economic backgrounds, and its production was relatively inexpensive.
Producers of the show hoped that it could affect the socioeconomic disparity between
black and white children. Sesame Street shared Head Start goals but it operated at a
fraction of the cost, and more importantly, it was easily exportable and reusable product
throughout the globe.
29
The promise of Head Start’s approach towards preschool
education prompted the origins of Sesame Street, coincidently two preschool programs
that exist to this day.
27
Heather Hendershot and Lynn Spigel, Saturday Morning Sensors: Television Regulations Before the V-
Chip (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 140.
28
Ibid., 139.
29
Ibid., 142.
161
Implementation of Head Start in South Central Los Angeles
Head Start funding was dispersed to delegate agencies under the umbrella of
Community Action Programs. Getting psychologists and educators to speak on Head
Start’s potential was one hurdle; the other was how to equally distribute funds. A memo
between Community Action Program officials stated that they had to make the tough
choice between funding “only those communities which had an adequate quality of
resources (staff and facilities) and funding communities who displayed intense
motivation even though they might be deficient in quality resources.” This readiness
mission would prove Head Start’s greatest challenge. Head Start decided to offer
programs in communities where resources were deficient. During its first summer in
1965 Head Start operated in more than 2/3 of the poorest counties across the nation.
30
Priority funding for impoverished communities urged African American South Central
Los Angeles and Watts residents’ to form their own delegate agencies to receive federal
government anti-poverty funds. In the initial year of its inception, Head Start received 38
percent of all Community Action Program funding.
31
In Los Angeles, a political battle of how to distribute funds into communities
most in need was waged between Mayor Samuel Yorty, representatives of color, and
residents. Mayor Yorty, elected as a populist, was the first mayor to hire a female deputy
and a racially integrated staff. This is did not assuage African American residents distrust
of Yorty as they still faced high levels of unemployment and housing discrimination.
30
“Memo: When did Head Start become part of HEW?” Box 2, Entry 70, Community Action Program,
National Archives Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.
31
Maris Vinovskis, The Birth of Head Start, 67.
162
African American distrust in Yorty was only heightened, as tensions between Mayor
Yorty and African American Congressman Augustus Hawkins increased when Yorty
thwarted efforts to distribute War on Poverty funds to the South Central Los Angeles and
Watts region. Part of the battle was raged over the level of community control these
programs would have, as Yorty believed that monitored and minimal community control
was necessary for the successful implementation of the program. He established the
Youth Opportunity Board of Greater Los Angeles (YOB) to maintain control and monitor
War on Poverty funds. The YOB support base was the City of Los Angeles, County of
Los Angeles, California Department of Employment, Los Angeles Unified School
District, and the Los Angeles Junior College District. One member from each
organization was a member of the YOB, including representatives from the Boys Club,
Welfare Planning Council, The Urban League, The Catholic Welfare Bureau, and
Council for Mexican American Affairs. Despite the mission of the YOB to “create a self-
help and mutual-help organizations such as child-care cooperatives,” it “remained in the
exclusive control of the state and local government agencies,” control that Yorty wanted
to maintain and could be threatened with a strong community representation.
32
At core of OEO’s mission is community participation; this was encouraged for
the successful management of the programs. Dissatisfied with the lack of community
input in the YOB, a group of middle-class professionals in Watts formed their own
private organization—Economic Opportunity Federation (EOF). Opal Jones, an African
American social worker and member of the Welfare Planning Council and the Los
32
Bauman, Race and the War on Poverty, 20.
163
Angeles Area Federation of Settlement and Neighborhood Centers (LAAFSNC),
supported the EOF. The EOF mission and belief was that the War on Poverty initiatives
needed to work with the neighborhood and establish “family-centered resources,
volunteer training, and job programs.” Supporters of the organization were Congressmen
Augustus Hawkins, Edward Roybal, James Roosevelt, and George E. Brown.
33
Congressman Hawkins was an outspoken advocate for community participation and
control, mainly by African Americans in Watts and South Central Los Angeles and
Mexican Americans on the northeast side of his district. He believed that these funds
were severely needed and must be distributed to effectively tackle and assist the
impoverished communities of Los Angeles. Hawkins said, “why shouldn’t Compton,
Willowbrook, Watts area, Enterprise or the Avalon community have some say about their
own conditions?” He contested that the involvement of the poor should be at every stage
of activity meaning the administrative and operational, as it was not enough to “merely
put community leaders on an advisory committee, or a few minorities on the staff or to
consider a few proposals from independent groups.” That is not involvement of the poor.
Hawkins goes on, “they are involved only if they are also included at the policy level
where the actual decisions are made and in the actual over-all planning of programs.”
34
Seminal to his argument was that “folks needed to be from the poverty areas.” Only
through community involvement and outreach could strides be made in eradicating
poverty. The poverty areas in Los Angeles, were well defined and the “two largest groups
33
Ibid., 21-22.
34
“Poverty United Needed,” Los Angeles Sentinel, June 10, 1965, A6.
164
in the poverty areas are Negroes and Mexican Americans… here lies the crux of the
problem… the sooner they get broad representation the sooner they can get started.”
35
Congressman Hawkins urged local groups like EOF to end the war with Mayor
Yorty in order to receive the benefits of anti-poverty programs. Mayor Yorty believed the
formation of the EOF was a “personal and political affront” and his opposition to the
organization was “as much selfish as principled.” Efforts to merge the YOB and EOF
came to head when Yorty wrote to President Johnson about the conflict in Los Angeles
and War on Poverty funds. In January 1965, the federal government replied stating that
the EOF and YOB needed to merge and include more low-income representatives on the
board. This would mean that the board would be twenty-two members, of which ten
public agency, six private agency, and six community representatives. Yorty was left
with little option to accept the merger and Hawkins believed it was necessary to receive
federal money to community projects. The merger produced Economic and Youth
Opportunities Agency of Greater Los Angeles (EYOA).
36
Despite what appeared like a political truce, Yorty continued to seek political
power and control over the program as Hawkins and Roybal continued to fight for and
oversee that the representation of the poor was at the heart of the War on Poverty
agencies and organizations. Hawkins, Roybal, and Roosevelt often asked OEO to bypass
the EYOA to fund local projects directly, as Hawkins stated the situation had “reached a
crisis state in Los Angeles County, a crisis caused by the failure of public agencies.”
37
35
Ibid.
36
Bauman, Race and the War on Poverty, 22-23.
165
The tension between community participation and political power was not only between
political officials but also between the working class and poor members of Watts and
growing power of middle class African American ministers in Watts. The ministers
supported many of Yorty propositions for the distribution of War on Poverty funds.
Hawkins urgency to get War on Poverty funds and programs enacted in Watts and South
Central Los Angeles were merited. He believed that inaction would open a space for the
growing discontent in the community, and that something needed to get done to appease
the growing anxiety and concern that was brewing in the community.
At the time of the Watts rebellion in 1965, Watts’ population was
overwhelmingly African American, two thirds of families were on welfare, three fourths
of adult males were unemployed, and 40 percent of Watts’ residents (higher percentage
than in any other area of the city) families lived below the poverty level. Between 1959
and 1965, the purchasing power of South Central families fell four hundred dollars, with
housing options overwhelmingly characterized as “dilapidated” and “deteriorated.”
38
The
incident with the Frye’s was the tipping point, as Watts’ residents were responding to
police aggression as well as the culmination of decades of struggles against police
violence, labor, housing, and public inequities for African Americans in Los Angeles.
Over the course of those five days of unrest, one thousand people were injured, thirty-
four dead, more than eleven thousand arrested, and $35 million in property damage and
destruction. The bulk of the destruction took place on Watts’ commercial corridor with
37
Augustus Hawkins, “Crisis in the War on Poverty,” Los Angeles Sentinel, June 10, 1965, D3.
38
Bauman, Race and War on Poverty, 34-36.
166
over thirty-five thousand residents of South Central Los Angeles taking part.
39
The Watts
rebellion also illustrated the growing gulf between middle class and working class
African Americans residents in Los Angeles, as the postwar employment gains facilitated
middle class Black families to move farther west to affluent neighborhoods like Baldwin
Hills and Ladera Heights and forge strong homeowner associations that looked to protect
their new communities from the same deterioration plaguing South Central and Watts.
The out-migration of middle class African American people ensured that South Central
Los Angeles and Watts African American community were increasingly working class
and working poor.
Scholars and political officials alike both agree that the underlying causes of the
Watts rebellion was the failure of city hall to expedite the funding of War on Poverty
programs in the area. Mayor Yorty also failed to take seriously accusations of police
misconduct from African American and Mexican Americans residents. Hawkins was the
most vocal about the impact that the delay on War on Poverty funds in Watts it was as
“part of the basic cause in the recent Los Angeles disorders.” In the McCone
Commission, Hawkins testified that “had politics not been played with anti-poverty
funds, more youths would have been in meaningful activities this past summer, more
indigenous leaders would have been in neighborhood programs, and more job-creating
activities would have been in operation the early part of this year.” Sargent Shriver
agreed with Hawkins and residents assertion that the lack of poverty agencies in the area
contributed to the revolt. For Shriver the anti-poverty programs were “not an anti-riot
39
Bauman, Race and War on Poverty, 31; Paul Bullock, Watts: The Aftermath An Inside View of the Ghetto
(New York: Grove, 1969), 30-36.
167
program, but the more chances you give people to get out of poverty, the less chance
there is of revolt.”
40
The McCone commission recommended that the OEO needed to
increase its funds for employment and job-training programs and preschool education,
which included more Youth Opportunity Centers, Legal Aid Services, and the full
implementation of Head Start.
41
The multilayered mission of exposing children to the possibilities around them is
an important feature Head Start. These children might not have played with crayons,
paste, and scissors, but an event like the Watts uprising opened their minds to understand
discontent, inequality, and distrust. Children in Watts and South Central faced the reality
of their disadvantage younger in life. In the wake of the rebellion, Head Start officials
were proactive in offering children a chance to “meet with the policemen and other
figures of authority, in situations which would bring respect and not fear.”
42
In some
instances, the Los Angeles Police Department was invited to Head Start classes to
provide children with free cokes but also expose them to police without confrontation.
43
The goal of exposing children to government officials and local officers was to create an
ambiance of trust. Most especially in the aftermath of the uprising, such interactions were
viewed as an opportunity to build greater family confidence, dignity, and nurture self-
identity between community residents and government officials. The mission of creating
40
Jack Jones, “L.A. Gets More Poverty Funds than any other City- Shriver,” Los Angeles Times, June 15,
1966, A3.
41
Bauman, Race and War on Poverty, 37.
42
Ibid.
43
“Newton Cops Gives Cokes to Head Start,” Los Angeles Sentinel, November 5, 1970, B5.
168
the conditions for children in impoverished communities to have positive life
opportunities is at the heart of Head Start. Unlike the other programs being serviced by
War on Poverty funds, Hawkins and others felt that this program showed exceptional
promise because it aimed to intervene in the lives of children through education, an
endeavor worthy of support as it would help the community as a whole.
Racial Tensions in the War on Poverty
Mayor Yorty giving up complete control of War on Poverty funds and the Watts
uprising were but a few roadblocks in distributing War on Poverty funds. The other was
establishing multiracial coalitions. Coalition politics between African American and
Mexican Americans have a long history in Los Angeles. In the interwar period,
organizations like the Southeast Interracial Council, Council for Civic Unity, and County
Committee for Interracial Progress illustrated the potential and promise of interracial
coalition; however such organizations crumbled in the mist of anticommunism. Distrust
and tension mounted. Tensions reached all time high amongst Mexican Americans and
African Americans when Edward Roybal was elected to Congress. Gilbert Lindsay, an
African American, replaced Roybal’s city council member seat. In Mexican American
advocates eyes, an African American political official replaced the only Mexican
American councilmember seat. The tension between these groups was proven when in
1965 (a few months prior to the Watts uprising) the County Human Relations
Commission reported a high degree of tension between African Americans and Mexican
Americans in the city. The study found that only 16 percent of Mexican Americans
169
surveyed supported any type of Black-Chicano coalition.
44
The lack of coalition efforts
between African Americans and Mexican Americans meant that when War on Poverty
funds became available in Los Angeles it would cause racial strife.
The 1960s were a pivotal moment in the politicization of youth of color.
Organizations like League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the GI Forum,
and Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), leading traditional integrationist
Mexican American leadership organizations, were at odds with the younger people that
formed the separatist, economic nationalist Brown Berets and La Raza Unida (inspired by
Black Nationalism). LULAC, GI Forum, and MAPA were coming to terms with the
changing politicization of the community, one that did not center on integration and
representation, but on self-determination. For African Americans, the Watts uprising was
a reflection of their dissatisfaction with the city’s leadership to take into perspective the
needs of working poor people. The uprising was a reflection of peoples’ disillusionment
with the inclusive promise of postwar liberalism, and some African Americans gravitated
towards the philosophy of African American nationalism like the Black Panthers.
45
It was in this political arena that War on Poverty funds were distributed in the
city. The McCone Commission recommended that the African American problems in Los
Angeles “apply with equal force to the Mexican Americans… whose circumstances are
similarly disadvantageous and demand equally urgent treatment.” Despite this, both
African American and Mexican Americans hesitated in crafting alliances to each with
44
Robert Bauman, “The Black Power and Chicano Movements in the Poverty Wars in Los Angeles”
Journal of Urban History 33:277 2007, 277-297, 282.
45
Ibid., 283.
170
regards to War on Poverty funds. Chicano youth were weary of aligning with African
American civil rights organizations to create interracial War on Poverty organizations.
According to Rudy Acuña, the War on Poverty encouraged competition between African
Americans and Mexican Americans, “each wanting control of their portion of the
windfall funds that suddenly came to the communities.”
46
The War on Poverty programs
were important sources for community organizing and the “training grounds” for many
students to become participants in local community politics. As Mexican American youth
became part of the War on Poverty programs, they felt they were “low on the war on
poverty agenda.”
47
Congressman Edward Roybal was the most vocal about securing War on Poverty
funds for East Los Angeles residents. In October 1965, Roybal told OEO that his
constituents felt they were not getting “a square deal” from OEO and that the
administration had a policy of “Negroes first.” He went on to state that perhaps the
Mexican Americans should “riot to get attention.” Roybal told OEO officials that racial
conflicts could develop and escalate between African Americans and Mexican Americans
“unless something is done to indicate that the Mexican American group is getting a good
deal.” OEO Director Sargent Shriver, agreed, “We should be doing much more with
Mexican-Americans.”
48
Roybal, along with LULAC, MAPA, GI Forum, and Brown
Berets, were all working to organize against the unfair distribution of War on Poverty
46
Rudy Acuña, A Chronicle of Chicanos East of the Los Angeles River, 1945-1975 (Chicano Studies
Resource Center, 1984), 124, 132.
47
Carlos Munoz, Youth, Identity Power: The Chicano Movement (Verso, 2007), 83.
48
Bauman, “The Black Power and Chicano Movements in the Poverty Wars in Los Angeles,” 295.
171
funds. Roybal pointed out that out of the 13 Neighborhood Adult Participating Projects in
the county only two served Mexican American neighborhoods. The purpose of NAPP
was to link anti-poverty programs to the grassroots level, so that people in poor
communities could have a voice in the operation of the War on Poverty. Phillip Montez,
as board member of Neighborhood Centers, which administered the NAPP posts,
“Mexican American are the largest minority in the county and the community has not
been adequately served.”
49
Genuine fears abound amongst residents, as “We don’t want a
Watts.” Rudy Ramos, the GI Forum lead attorney, complained to the White House that
the predominantly Mexican American community of East Los Angeles had lower
incomes than the Watts area, yet it had received little War on Poverty funding. In
September, MAPA, LULAC, GI Forum, and CSO wired Sargent Shriver urging him to
investigate the distribution of programs in Los Angeles, as they wanted the OEO “to
instill in the Mexican-American community the belief that the Office of Economic
Opportunity is really interested in their plight and will correct those inequities” and
“bring a halt to the rising bitter feelings of the Mexican-American in the streets that
antipoverty funds and job opportunities are going principally to Negroes.”
50
The OEO was in large part to blame for the unequal distribution in funds. They
are responsible in breaking down the city into manageable poverty units. OEO focus on
remedying African American poverty, served to obscure how they envisioned helping
Mexican Americans. In other places outside of Los Angeles, the OEO serviced the needs
49
“Neglect of Mexican American Group in Poverty War Charged” Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1966, A3;
“Economic Hardships Faced by ELA Neighborhoods,” Eastside Sun, August 26, 1965; “Equal
Opportunities Demanded by Rep. Roybal in House,” Eastside Sun, September 23, 1965.
50
Bauman, “The Black Power and Chicano Movements in the Poverty Wars in Los Angeles,” 292.
172
of Mexican Americans, but when confronted with a multiracial landscape like Los
Angeles they were not prepared with how to divide the city to offer assistance equally to
both groups. The OEO did attempt to create opportunities for Mexican Americans
however, on a much smaller scale to African Americans.
In the fall of 1966, tensions between African Americans and Mexican Americans
over the War on Poverty reached new heights when Opal Jones (founder’s of EOF and
director of the Economic and Youth Opportunities Agency’s Neighborhood Adult
Participation Project (NAPP)) fired Gabriel Yanez. Yanez was the Mexican American
director of a NAPP field office in East Los Angeles. Jones defended her choice to fire
Yanez, as he was discouraging his aides and residents to become involved in NAPP.
Jones believed that Yanez was contributing to the split between Mexican Americans and
African Americans, both within NAPP and in Los Angeles at large. Mexican Americans
organized and picketed NAPP offices and criticized both NAPP and EYOA for showing
favoritism toward African Americans. Jones eventually offered to divide NAPP programs
equally between the two groups. This statement angered many African American NAPP
members that believed that the programs should stay in the community. The pressure
mounted to rehire Yanez, and despite his reinstatement the political damage had been
done. Irene Tovar, NAPP director of an outpost in Pacoima (one of two Mexican
American directors), resigned in protest over Yanez’s firing and believed “what’s good
for Watts and the civil rights movement is not necessarily good for the Mexican-
American community.”
51
51
Ibid., 293.
173
The NAPP controversy further politicized the Mexican American community’s
activism for community control. In East Los Angeles, like in South Central Los Angeles,
the War on Poverty led movements for self-determination, cultural identity, and
empowerment. The vast majority of organizing around War on Poverty efforts in East
Los Angeles centered on economic, housing, and educational efforts, with youth playing
a pivotal role in those efforts. It is in this political landscape of sparring between Mexican
American and African American activist and residents that War on Poverty programming
like Head Start was established. Despite these tensions, activists understood the
importance of working across racial difference for the future of the next generation.
The initial years of the War on Poverty and OEO presence in Los Angeles were
marked by the majority of Mexican American residents living in East Los Angeles and
African American residents in South Central Los Angeles. Mexican Americans were not
against African Americans creating programs that aimed to alleviate the problems in their
communities but that funds should be equally distributed. What bolstered these racial
divisions was OEO officials inability to fully understand how Mexican Americans fit into
their black/white paradigm and reading of poverty. In OEO officials’ minds, the
impoverished were predominantly African Americans. In Los Angeles, this was not the
case. African American activists leadership role in War on Poverty programming was in
large part due to the OEO’s receptiveness, and expectation, that African Americans were
the majority of recipients and programming. Beyond the OEO’s tenure, and for the last
three decades, the rigid racial divisions quickly diminishing amongst these two groups.
The division between white residents and people of color remained intact throughout Los
174
Angeles, but as Mexican Americans settled in communities outside of East Los Angeles
and into South Central. Community organizations that once serviced the needs of African
Americans had to create a more inclusive notion of community. Most of the scholarly
literature on War on Poverty, most especially as it relates to the Mexican American
community, has largely focused on the politicization and self-determination for youth of
color and the economic and educational struggle for equity. Very little has been
documented in terms of the organizing it produced for early child education and health
equity.
Los Angeles Head Start Off to a Good Start?
Establishing Head Start centers in Los Angeles differed from other communities
in the U.S., posing its own set of challenges to the school readiness mission. Poverty in
Los Angeles County was not contained to one geographic community or housing project
or one racial group. The communities with the greatest need for War on Poverty
programming were in Watts, South Central Los Angeles, and East Los Angeles,
communities boasting large working class and working poor African American and
Mexican American communities respectably. An issue facing Head Start centers in Los
Angeles was establishing centers that used similar approaches and curriculum, but were
also adaptable to the community that were being serviced. In Los Angeles’ eastside,
thousands of children did not speak English when they entered public school or Head
Start, a handicap educators felt harmed children socially and psychologically. In South
Central Los Angeles, children were living in houses where families had limited literacy
and few language skills. The geographic sprawl and racial and ethnic diversity of Los
175
Angeles dictated that a flexible curriculum was needed, but at the heart of these different
curricula was to formulate “appropriate inter-personal experiences” where “positive
feelings must be constantly engendered and reinforced.”
52
The summer of 1965, Head Start classes across Los Angeles began. The most
successful programs with trained teachers and teacher aides, full enrollment, ample
parent participation, and fully equipped facilities were not in areas that solely serviced
impoverished children of color like Watts, South Central, or East Los Angeles. Rather,
Head Start centers in Pasadena, Harbor Area, West Los Angeles, and San Fernando
Valley, areas that serviced diverse socio-economic, racial, and ethnic communities, were
easily “oked” for funding and experienced waitlists. To operate a Head Start center and
qualify for the program, the total income for a family of four could not exceed $4,000. In
accordance, with OEO regulations 90 percent of the participants in the Head Start
program must meet this criterion. The remaining 10 percent allowed Head Start centers
like those in Pasadena and the Westside to establish centers with sizable white
populations.
53
As previously mentioned, children at the Pasadena Pacific Oaks College Head
Start, one of best organized Head Start programs and agencies in Los Angeles, began
serving and reporting progress at a much higher rate than other centers in Los Angeles.
Pasadena’s Head Start students were African American, Mexican American, and white
52
“Head Start Report,” Box 1, Los Angeles Area Federation of Settlement and Neighborhood Centers, Inc.,
Special Collections, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
53
Ibid.
176
children of the area.
54
The Los Angeles Times cover-story on Pasadena Oaks College
Head Start’s promise featured four year old Blanca Castillo. It may appear surprising that
the initial reports of success emerge from sites that serviced the needs Mexican American
children. As War on Poverty initiatives and programs have been largely imagined to
service the needs of impoverished African American children. Due to Los Angeles
diversity, as well as California’s complex relationship to bilingual education, it is not
surprising that Head Start would be seen as premier educational force to ease Mexican
American and Mexican immigrant children into English instruction.
The battle over community representation in the EYOA proved an obstacle in
establishing delegate agencies through community organizations. Efforts to open and
operate a Head Start center with federal and state funds, forced community organizations
to apply to the EYOA to receive delegate agency status. Once deemed a delegate agency,
the EYOA approves the fiscal budget for the Head Start center, as well as provide
supplemental services in the form research development, training, program development
and management.
As EYOA quarrels subsided, there were ten delegate agencies administering 270
Head Start centers throughout Los Angeles and 131 centers in South Central Los
Angeles. In these locations, the agencies central to the operation of Head Start centers
were The Urban League, Los Angeles Alumnae Chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta
Sorority, Parents Improvement Council, Protestant Community Services, Los Angeles
County of Schools, and Los Angeles Area Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood
54
Jack Jones, “Head Start Off to a Good Start,” Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1965, A1.
177
Centers. In East Los Angeles, the Council of Mexican American Affairs and Latin
American Civil Association largely serviced the Mexican American community in this
area. Every year, these agencies needed to apply for federal and state funds to keep their
centers operating. In the fall of 1965, federal grants were approved for several anti-
poverty projects in Los Angeles in the amount of $8.2 million. By early 1966, following
the suggestions of the McCone Commission and Hawkins lobbying the OEO office
announced that $4 million federal monies were approved to solely carry out the most
comprehensive Head Start program in Los Angeles. The level of financial support,
number of delegate agencies, and Head Start centers placed Los Angeles as the city with
the largest Head Start program in the country.
55
This ranking invigorated delegate
agencies to ensure that their communities would be amply supported and funded.
By August 1965, Head Start centers had been serving children for a little over a
month. Watts’ children feared that their new Head Start centers might be casualties of the
uprising. The Head Start centers in the Watts area feared the worst. Their centers were
not staples in the community as they had only been in operation for a month prior to the
uprising. During those tumultuous days parents were asked to pick up their children from
elementary schools and Head Start centers, as the threat of fire was eminent.
56
The
parents and children of the Urban League and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Head Start
closed their centers during the riots. However, children and aides at the Parents
55
“Press Release: Govenor Brown, January 28, 1966” Box 187, Alexander Pope Papers, Special
Collections, The Huntington Research Library; “Largest Head Start Program Announced by Governor
Brown” Los Angeles Sentinel, February 3, 1966, A2.
56
“Letter: September 7, 1965” Box 94, Collection 1642, August F. Hawkins Papers, 1935-1990, Special
Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles; “Head Start Classes Halted,”
Los Angeles Times, August 14, 1965, 15.
178
Improvement Council’s Head Start continued to hold classes during those hectic days.
While teachers stayed away (majority not from the community), teacher aides from the
community understood the importance of maintaining some form of stability in the
student’s lives. Children were surprised that “they didn’t burn down their school.”
57
The
importance of community involvement in Head Start proved critical to its survival as
during the riots not a “single Head Start site was damaged, even though in some case,
adjacent buildings were destroyed.”
58
Children and families in Watts were exposed and
faced with a different set of challenges than their peers throughout Los Angeles. It is this
disparity that Head Start programs attempted to combat not only in Los Angeles, but also
across the nation.
Despite these financial shortcomings delegate agencies were committed to
operating and servicing the needs of impoverished children in South Central Los Angeles
and Watts. The Delta Sigma Theta sorority’s commitment to servicing the needs of
impoverished children was an extension of their Delta Sorority’s Five Point Plan. The
plan stated a commitment to “educational development, economic development,
community and international involvement, housing and urban development and mental
health.” The announcement by then President of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Delta
Sorority, Mrs. Harriet Williams, in mid-June in 1965 was that they had been granted
$63,000 to organize and administer a center for 300 children within the boundaries of
Main Street, Compton Avenue, Jefferson Boulevard, and Slauson Avenue. They rented a
57
Jack Jones, “Head Start Off to a Good Start,” Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1965, A1.
58
“Head Start: Spring and Summer, 1968,” Box 1, Los Angeles Area Federation of Settlement and
Neighborhood Centers, Inc., Special Collections, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
179
space from the Victory Baptist Church on McKinley Avenue, just a few blocks away
from historic Central Avenue.
59
They mailed flyers and actively recruited children from
the neighborhood and did not discriminate based on race or religion, they were simply
committed in helping students that were living below the poverty line. This commitment
to servicing children irrespective of race was true then and now, as by 1980 they serviced
the needs of 800 children yearly in 17 sites across South Central Los Angeles and
Watts.
60
As a delegate agency, the Delta’s serviced the needs of African Americans
children and increasingly children of different racial and ethnic groups.
Similarly, the Urban League was just as eager as the Deltas, if not more eager, to
establish its own series of Head Start centers in Los Angeles. In its first summer of
operation, the Urban League serviced 665 youngsters in 21 centers, with a staff of 36
teachers, 36 teacher aides, 36 Neighborhood Youth Corps, and 42 community volunteers.
Most of their initial classes began in housing projects or local churches with nursery
courses like dancing, games, music and art. Head Start’ programming, they felt, would be
the most rewarding way of “serving youngsters so culturally deprived that they cannot
point out a dog or a football on a picture test.”
61
They firmly believed that only through
“involved sincere, dedicated community people in preparing disadvantaged youngsters to
be successful in school” provided a “rare opportunity for concerned people to make a
59
Let’s Get Them off to a Headstart!,” Los Angeles Sentinel, June 24, 1965, A8.
60
“Delta Sigma Theta Group Hits 51 Year Mark,” Los Angeles Sentinel, May 22, 1980, C1.
61
Wesley Brazier, “Your Urban League,” Los Angeles Sentinel, September 16, 1965, A6.
180
direct, meaningful contribution to youngsters who will face a better life through
education.”
62
The Delta Sorority and Urban League’s success of garnering support must be
viewed as an achievement in the mist of inconceivable odds. They opened centers
throughout South Central, however the location of Head Start centers raised many
concerns. Head Start delegate agencies in South Central did not have the infrastructure to
begin instruction in the summer of 1965, nor years that followed. Readiness for South
Central Head Start delegate agencies meant finding open, available spaces to set up
classrooms for the initial cohort of children enrolled in the program. This feat required
ingenuity and creativity. In the initial years of the program, Head Start often operated in
church classrooms or makeshift warehouses. In an oral history with Compton born and
raised resident, Phillipa Johnson warmly remembers her first summer working with Head
Start. She was a teacher’s aide in 1965. She worked at the 120th Street and Main Street
center. She described the classroom as a big warehouse, with limited windows, lighting,
and ventilation—not a building or space readily associated with child education. Two
“classrooms” were created using a cardboard partition to divide this big warehouse space.
Teachers creatively built bookcases from empty milk cartons and tables from wood lying
around the neighborhood. The toys children played with were found objects throughout
the neighborhood like rubber tires.
63
Despite these shortcomings, Johnson recalls this
summer with a particular fondness—as a transformative moment in her life journey— as
62
“Head Start Program Seeks Adult Volunteer Assistants,” Los Angeles Sentinel, July 7, 1966, A8.
63
Oral history with Phillipa Johnson, conducted by author, November 14, 2009.
181
she explains how she felt she was helping build a program from the ground up. The
physical, creative, and emotional stress that came from building a program from the
“ground up” was worth it, as she saw her young students positively respond to the
program.
In response to these shortcomings, the following year’s proposal for Head Starts
throughout South Central featured the need for safe play equipment like jungle jims,
treehouses, balls, bean bags, jump ropes as well as musical instruments and dolls that
were both balanced between Black and white looking dolls. Alongside equipment they
asked for funding to go on field trips that included going to the local bakery,
supermarket, shopping center, department store, police and fire department, parks,
museum, zoo, beach, library, and at least an opportunity to go to Disneyland.
64
Head Start
teachers and coordinators believed that exposure to such toys, instruments, and field trips
were essential to the creative development of the children. The only way to successfully
carry out the mission of Head Start meant “broadening children’s horizons and increase
their understanding of the world in which they live.” By exposing children to
professionals and taking children on field trips to local museums provided children “the
chance to succeed, develop a climate of confidence, increase the ability to get along with
others in his family, plan activities which allow groups from varying social, ethnic, and
economic levels to join together with those of limited income in the solving of
community problems.”
65
64
“Head Start,” Box 86, Box Record Group F3751, State Office of Economic Opportunity Records,
California State Archives, Sacramento, CA; “Photo Standalone 3,” Los Angeles Sentinel, September 22,
1966, A4.
182
Along with concerns with proper teaching equipment, delegate agencies fought to
acquire proper buildings and classrooms for instruction. The battle for proper buildings
extended beyond the first year of the program. On April 25, 1966, J.C. Morning,
Superintendent of Buildings in the City of Los Angeles ordered that operators of Head
Start centers that failed to file requests for inspection with the Department of Building
and Safety to immediately close. This mandatory closure affected at least 117 Head Start
centers in South Central Los Angeles.
66
The hesitancy by Head Start centers in South
Central Los Angeles to file these requests was because operators knew that their
classrooms were not up to building codes. In response to the eminent threat of closures,
representatives from the Urban League, Protestant Community Services, Council on
Mexican American Affairs, Los Angeles Area Federation of Settlements and
Neighborhood Centers, and Council of Churches issued statements trying to assure the
community that Head Start would be in operation for their children. Executive Director
of the Los Angeles County of Churches, Dr. Harry McKnight, stated “that it is
impossible for Head Start sites, located largely in church edifices in depressed areas, to
meet the excessively stringent regulations of the Building Code. These regulations, they
declare, would prohibit the maximum use of existing facilities situated in the areas where
the need for Head Start is the greatest” thus, “the L.A. anti-poverty program most
unanimously declared successful is on the verge of extinction!”
67
65
“Head Start,” Box 86, Box Record Group F3751, State Office of Economic Opportunity Records,
California State Archives, Sacramento, CA.
66
“Head Start Delegate Agencies,” Box 1, Los Angeles Area Federation of Settlement and Neighborhood
Centers, Inc., Special Collections, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
183
Head Start centers in the initial years of the program were largely dependant on
the resources in the community. They had to share facilities with many other groups,
making the control for equipment and supplies difficult to maintain. Similarly, “setting
up and use of permanent outdoor facilities (swings, slides, climbing, and crawling
equipment) impractical,” important features for early childhood development.
68
Church
officials stated that due to Building Department proceedings and announcements “the
public has come to believe that thousands of impoverished preschoolers are being taught
in buildings that are unsafe. This is untrue!.” Church officials declared their building did
“comply with floor level status, safety doors, kitchen tools is good, and ratio between
adults and children is good.” McKnight believed that the Building Department had very
stringed building and safety codes, and that impose such codes on “structures in poor
neighborhoods that cannot meet these requirements” was unfair and in need of
reconsideration. He further asserted that Church ownership of older buildings was only
possible because that is all that poor residents could afford, “that is the very reason they
are owned by poor people.”
69
The debate over whether to allow Head Start classes to operate in older buildings
throughout South Central received local and national attention. In response to the critique
waged against unsuitable classrooms, Frederick Dumas, Operation Head Start director for
EYOA said that it requested from the federal government to pay for 71 portable units. If
67
Ibid.
68
“Ernestine Letter,” Box 2, Los Angeles Area Federation of Settlement and Neighborhood Centers, Inc.,
Special Collections, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
69
“Head Start Delegate Agencies,” Box 1, Economic and Youth Opportunity Agency of Greater Los
Angeles, Special Collections, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
184
their request went unanswered Head Start officials and parents planned on making the
trip to Washington D.C. to ensure that their demands and requests were taken seriously.
Getting portable classrooms into South Central proved difficult. The debate became as to
who would pay for the portable classrooms. Local officials believed that the federal
government needed to pay for repairs and portable classrooms while the federal
government responded that the city needed to pay the bill, since according to Shriver,
“these are community programs.”
70
But as described earlier, Mayor Yorty unwillingness
to fully support programs in South Central Los Angeles ensured that the funding for
repairs in already established Head Start centers or portable buildings was not easily nor
quickly achieved. The community’s outrage and activism over the city’s strict building
code policy made it that the city granted Head Start centers a six month extension to get
their buildings up to code. Despite the portable classroom crisis and building code
violations parents continued to enroll their children in Head Start, as they firmly believe
that an exposing their children at an opportunity to an early education, albeit in an old
building, was much more important to keeping children at home. Head Start centers in
mixed income neighborhoods did not face a similar challenge in the establishment of the
program as in South Central Los Angeles. Parents also did not have to make the choice of
dropping off their children for instruction in classrooms that were potentially hazardous.
These conditions were found in working class, working poor, and poor communities like
South Central Los Angeles, and posed an added hurtle to the school readiness goal.
70
Jack Jones, “Precedent Feared: Portable Classrooms Pleas Stall Head Start” Los Angeles Times,
September 14, 1966, A1; Jack Jones “New Exemption Pushed for Head Start Sites,” Los Angeles Times,
September 15, 1966, A12.
185
Readiness, thus, not only meant getting children ready for kindergarten, but also
acquiring the physical classrooms for instructions.
Jordan Downs Public Housing Head Start
Along with makeshift classrooms and tools, Head Start centers needed to
convince South Central Los Angeles residents to enroll their children in the program.
Again, a challenge delegate agencies did not account for in their implementation and
planning of the program. Communities of color’s general distrust for government
programs and assistance was commonplace, thus, organizations like the Urban League,
Alumnae Chapter of the Delta Sorority, Parents Improvement Council along with
residential community activists had to “sell” the promise of what this program could
bring to their children and families. These delegate agencies drafted flyers, mailers, and
advertisements in the African American run newspaper— Los Angeles Sentinel—in
hopes of getting South Central residents interested and inquire about the Head Start.
Headlines that stated “Let’s get them off to a Head Start!” were followed by statements
that discussed how “admission to the program was not based on race, religion, national
origin or color… it was designed for families with incomes of less than $4,000 annually,
with the goal of program to Help both the child and his family to gain greater confidence,
self-respect, and dignity.” Newspaper articles featured in the Los Angeles Sentinel and
Los Angeles Times not only served to bolster financial support for the program, but also
to convince residents of the programs’ promise and rid it of the social stigma attached to
federally and government supported programs.
186
Residents in South Central rallied for the need to establish a Head Start in many
of the housing projects throughout the community. Ernestine Geneva Fitzhugh, director
of the Parents Improvement Council, worked closely with a core group of African
American residents of Watts and South Central to launch a Head Start center in Jordan
Downs Housing Project. The Parents Improvement Council was located in the heart of
Watts, and serviced the needs of Watts, South Central Los Angeles, Bell, and Huntington
Park residents. Communities, in and of themselves, would undergo a tremendous racial
and ethnic change in the wake of the Watts uprising. Community residents like Ernestine
Fitzhugh, utilized the newspaper articles as a starting point to populate the Head Start
center at Jordan Downs. She supplemented such advertising by actively canvassing the
community through door-to-door efforts to locate children most in need of Head Start
and promote the program.
71
Fitzhugh wrote to Congressman Hawkins to tell him her
recruitment concerns and express that the children that joined Head Start the initial
summer were “brave little children.” A feat Ernestine was proud of because at the
beginning of the summer the Head Start center she operated was only at half enrollment
(roughly 10 children), but by the end of the summer more and more parents enrolled their
children in the program.
72
As the summer wore on, parents who initially claimed they did
not have any 4-year-old children when teachers went knocking on their doors, suddenly
appeared to register their children. Word of mouth of families participating in the
71
“Head Start Report,” Box 2, Los Angeles Area Federation of Settlement and Neighborhood Centers, Inc.,
Special Collections, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
72
“Letter,” Box 94, Collection 1642, Augusts F. Hawkins Papers, 1935-1990, Special Collections, Young
Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles; Jack Jones, “Head Star off to a Good Start,” Los
Angeles Times, July 23, 1965, A1.
187
program made community residents reconsider. Many initially believed that Head Start
was a free baby-sitting service, but “they saw the process their children were making in
the program, thus, they took a second look.” As resident, Mrs. Ethel Taylor expressed, “it
has been inspiring, adventurous and educational for my little girl, Sabrina Taylor.”
73
By September 1965, the Parents Improvement Council was serving 2,000 children
through their Head Starts. In Watts and South Central Los Angeles, they housed five
centers:
Table 1: Parents Improvement Council Head Start Centers, 1965
Center Negroes Spanish
American
Caucasian Oriental Total
117th Street
Center
35 8 2 0 45
Palm Lane Center 60 0 0 0 60
120 Avalon 109 11 0 0 120
West Adams 26 30 4 0 60
Jordan Downs 110 20 0 5 135
Total 340 69 6 5
The Parent Improvement Council overwhelmingly serviced an African American
population, however, as illustrated in the chart above they also were attentive to the needs
of Mexican American, white, and Asian children.
74
In the West Adams location they
serviced more Mexican American children and families than any other Head Start center.
This was largely due to the location of the Head Start, as attendance and participation
was based on residential location. The West Adams location was further northeast from
73
“Parents Improvement Council Letter to Hawkins” and “Head Start Reports” Box 94, Collection 1642,
August F. Hawkins Papers, 1935-1990, Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of
California, Los Angeles.
74
Ibid.
188
the center of South Central Los Angeles. West Adams emerges as a white affluent suburb
in the early twentieth century, but as Los Angeles expanded further west white flight
transformed West Adams. From the 1920s onwards, middle class and affluent African
Americans moved into the West Adams community. This community became known as
the center of affluent African Americans. The Parents Improvement Council in West
Adams serviced a slight majority of Mexican Americans to illustrate that while the West
Adams region was majority African American community, the residents needing Head
Start services the most were Mexican Americans. This might be due to economic
standards set on Head Start centers, that the majority of the children being serviced had to
be part of impoverished backgrounds, thus, foreclosing the possibility for a larger
participation by middle class African Americans in the area. As well as, the West Adams
location was adjacent to the area in South Central Los Angeles that was closest to
downtown Los Angeles, a region of South Central that boasted a sizable Mexican
population of 17 percent in 1965.
75
The Parent Improvement Council’s Jordan Downs Head Start serviced African
American, Mexican American, and Asian American children and families. In the 1940s,
public housing was characterized by its diverse racial character. Public housing provided
working class families desirable housing options as they were initially built with
beautiful personal gardens and front lawns. These well-built and racially integrated
housing units offered children a safe spaced to “encounter one another” in an “often
convivial atmosphere.” From their inception, public housing was clean, comfortable,
75
“McCone Commission Population Reports,” Box 184, Alexander Pope Papers, Huntington Library, San
Marino, CA.
189
safe, and racially integrated. These were temporary housing options for people to pursue
private homeownership. According to historian Josh Sides, by the late 1940s and early
1950s, as veterans, whites, and Asians moved out, “more poor black families moved in
and stayed for longer terms” because they were “unable to afford private housing” due to
the limited economic opportunities. Many African American families found public
housing to be their only alternative. In 1947, African Americans represented less than 30
percent of public housing tenants, but by 1959 they accounted for 65 percent. The
proportion of Mexican Americans also rose, though not as dramatically as African
Americans, from 15 to 19 percent.
76
Jordan Downs in Watts was built between 1953 and
1955, a period in which public housing became synonymous with working class African
American housing options. In this period, Jordan Downs also became seen as “self-
contained ghetto in which the worst effects of segregation life—including racial isolation,
overcrowding, crime, and frustration were highly concentrated.”
77
By the time Head Start
opened in Jordan Downs, this public housing complex was considered “solidly Black” as
white, Mexican, and Asian veterans had moved out.
78
The Improvement Council’s
serviced a majority African American population, however, as indicated in that roster it
also tailored their instruction to Mexican Americans and Asian Americans. The Parent’s
Improvement Council’s student roster, like the Delta Sorority or Urban League, had to
consider how to service a diverse classroom from the onset. The multiracial landscape of
76
Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 118.
77
Ibid., 120.
78
Ibid., 117.
190
these classrooms also urges us to consider how these spaces offer a window in which to
investigate how government services and intervention in impoverished communities are
not as racially segregated as historian Robert Bauman suggests. Head Start centers offer a
window in which to illustrate that in the years leading up to the massive influx of
Mexican immigrants across Los Angeles, social services like Head Start had to be savvy
about how to train its teachers, organizers, and administration how to work with a diverse
community.
The diversity in Los Angeles, while offering an opportunity for cross-racial
collaboration, also offers a space for racial tensions and misunderstandings. Alexander
Yeh, an Asian American Los Angeles resident, moved his way up within the Parents
Improvement Council Head Start organization. His career in Los Angeles began as a
payroll clerk for the United States Navy. His experience maintaining the financial records
for the Navy proved vital to the Parents Improvement Council. He developed the dual
role of being the Head Start teacher and accountant for their Head Start centers. He was
credited as having a true commitment to the children of Head Start. By the summer of
1967, Alexander became the Parents’ Improvement Council Project Director, replacing
Ernestine Geneva Fitzhugh. In that summer, he was very active in organizing a benefit
show at the Memorial Sports Area in South Central Los Angeles where all the proceeds
would go to furnishing the Improvement Council’s Head Start centers with furniture,
school supplies, and toys for the children. He was extremely persistent in seeking out
191
talent from across the southland to ensure that community residents would attend the
program.
79
In the fall of 1968, he embarked on a journey to create a Head Start relationship
that would link Asia to the west through the Trans-Pacific Program. Yeh believed that the
Head Start Program could be successful operation in other parts of the world. He wrote a
proposal for a Goodwill Education Program for Nationalist China. His visit to China in
early September would be the first step in establishing this program. His focal sites of
comparison between pre-school education programs were the U.S., Taiwan, and Hong
Kong. Congressman Augustus Hawkins took a keen interest in this Goodwill Education
program. He eagerly received Yeh after his trip and presented Yeh with a bronze plaque
in recognition for outstanding community service and leadership.
80
Yeh and
Congressman Hawkins prepared the necessary budget to what appeared a feasible
American and Asian early childhood education program and development project that
was inexpensive and worthwhile. Yeh’s efforts made him both locally and nationally
recognized as an asset to the Parents Improvement Council. The Council received
recognition from the OEO in Washington D.C., Congress, and Los Angeles City Council
for their tremendous community service and involvement.
81
Community residents revered Yeh’s efforts, with Head Start parents amongst his
strongest supporters. In the summer of 1969, there was outrage over Yeh’s decision to
79
“Parent Improvement Council Memo” Box 94, Collection 1642, Augustus F. Hawkins Papers, 1935-
1995, Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
80
Ibid.
81
Ibid.
192
close a class in South Central Los Angeles to open one in Chinatown. Yeh defended his
choice to close down one of the two classes operating at the Head Start on 114th Street
and Wilmington Avenue because “one class was being held in the morning and
afternoon, and the afternoon attendance was low and the children were not responding, as
the enrolment was as low as 9 out of 15 possible children. After meeting with the
advisory committee from both the center and area we requested consolidation of the two
classes … so one class could open in Chinatown.”
82
Teachers, staff, and parents across
South Central Los Angeles defended Yeh as they pointed out that he had been “selfless
and has dedicated himself to a cause he believed in.” One South Central resident and
mother added, “Mr. Yeh has worked for several months without pay in order to make this
program go and these few people who want to attach should be ashamed of themselves
because this man has made a definite contribution to the community.” Augustus Hawkins
also expressed his support for Yeh’s efforts throughout Head Start in Los Angeles. One
observer of the critique against Yeh said, “it seems a shame that three teachers and three
parents could raise this hell.” An enraged parent added, “It is truly unfortunate that these
six people could create so many problems for the project by making these complaints. It
would seem they would use the methods prescribed by the book. I mean they should
being complaints before the appropriate committee instead of airing their dirty linen in
public and making us look like idiots.”
83
82
Jim Cleaver, “Poverty Program Defended” Los Angeles Sentinel, June 12, 1969, pg., A1.
83
Ibid.
193
Despite the public support and understanding for Yeh’s decision, an investigation
was launched into Yeh’s commitment to the community and Head Start. The group of
dissenters felt their viewpoint had not been fully explored. They took their grievances to
EYOA Director Manuel Aragon. This effort was spearheaded by Mrs. Nancy Crouch,
Mrs. Eva Jackson, and Mrs. Corrine Robertson, and supported by twenty mothers. They
formed the Community Action Council (CAC). As a council they went to the EYOA to
inform Aragon that Yeh had “taken a dictatorial attitude with the teachers.” They cited
instances where people claimed to have been fired because of the inability to get along
with the Yeh and his wife. A male teacher reported that he had been invited to Mrs.
Yeh’s home only to find that Mrs. Yeh expected the teacher to clean her house, and in
other instances teachers reported that they had to do favors for the Yeh’s to keep their
jobs. After hearing the complaints, Aragon stated he would assign a special investigator
to look at the inequities of the program.
84
The accusations against Yeh were that “he
performed illegal, illegitimate, high-handed bullying.” The CAC charged the Parents
Improvement Council with being in violation of provisions and guidelines of the
Economic Opportunity Act and denied the community decision-making privileges. Yeh
and the Parents Improvement Council were also accused of not handling the distribution
of funds openly as it worked with personal donations as well as federal money for the
Head Start program. The CAC did have some legitimacy in their accusations, as the
differentiation between these two sources of funding and transparency of how they were
being used were not easily discernable or transparent. CAC did not have an intention of
84
Jim Cleaver, “Group Seeks Head Start Inquiry,” Los Angeles Sentinel, July 3, 1969, A1.
194
closing down the Parent Improvement Council Head Starts, but believed that their
investigation would allow for a fair and transparent operation of Head Start.
85
The major
defense for Yeh rested that he and his wife, “wrote the plan for the school in accordance
with the formats for Head Starts all over the country” as well as that their critics were
from the West Side and not from the Watts community.
86
The EYOA ruled that “no
contract should be executed with Parent Improvement Council until there is a full
accurate disclosure of fund-raising monies, and that it can satisfactorily be established
there has no misappropriation of funds and the delegate agencies in the area administer
the existing Head Start sites pending the final resolution of the problems.”
87
In the end,
the EYOA was committed to ensuring that the parents and community resident’s needs
were met. Aragon said, “the program will continue and all the sites will continue to
operate. The real problem we have a real functional board of directors who will really
take care of business… I am hoping for a significant change.”
88
The CAC’s attack on Yeh and the Parent Improvement Council appear to be
racially motivated. Yeh as director of the Parent Improvement Council had been working
within the community without problems for over four years. It was until the decided to
open a Head Start program in Chinatown, well within the Parent Improvement Council’s
boundaries, did allegations of racial favoritism and racism emerged. The Parent
85
Jim Cleaver, “Fuming Councils Confront EYOA,” Los Angeles Sentinel, July 24, 1969, A1.
86
Jim Cleaver, “Community Leader Says: Project Critics are ‘Liars’” Los Angeles Sentinel, July 21, 1969,
A1; “Parent Improvement Council Memo” Box 94, Collection 1642, Augustus F. Hawkins Papers, 1935-
1995, Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
87
“EYOA Takes Over Eastside Head Start,” Los Angeles Sentinel, September 4, 1969, A11.
88
Ibid.
195
Improvement Council was open and progressive in allowing a non-African American
director of its program at time in which most directors for delegate agencies in South
Central Los Angeles and Watts were African American, especially an Asian American
leader within a predominantly African American and ethnic Mexican service area.
Shortly after the allegations, Yeh left his post as director of the Parent Improvement
Council. His story and involvement with Head Start in South Central Los Angeles and
Watts offers an opportunity to uncover and investigate Los Angeles diverse landscape
and the ways it offers a window beyond the Black/white paradigm to uncover moments
of collaboration and tension between a diverse group of people. Head Start provides a
window in which to understand the local, national, and transnational connections that
early childhood education creates and sustains.
Head Start Mothers and Families: Learning and Teaching
As discussed throughout this chapter, Head Start readiness mission not only
involved the children it aimed to help but also parents, neighbors, and community
residents. The longevity of the program rests on the high level of community
participation and support. Community support is actively sought, earned, and nurtured.
Local, state, and national representatives of the community are instrumental in the
planning of Head Start where community strategizing is important feature of the
program. Communities of color’s general distrust for government assistance programs
were commonplace, thus, delegate agencies connection to the community proved
especially important as they worked towards ensuring that parents believed in the
promise and benefits of the program. Delegate agency employees like Ernestine
196
Fitzhugh, actively canvassed the “poverty areas door-to-door to locate children most in
need of Head Start, promote the program, and screen prospective assistant teachers and
neighborhood aide applicants.”
89
Along with statistics stating the promise of Head Start
graduates, the most important by-product was the level of community participation and
commitment.
Community participation took on different forms. Community residents and
agencies ensured that not only children were served, but also employment opportunities
arose for community residents. At age 21, Carol Chevis’ life was transformed through her
participation in another War on Poverty program—Neighborhood Job Corps Program.
Carol was a high school dropout who had been working as a domestic for many years.
She never imagined that she could do anything else, as “life seemed good for a while,
because I was making almost $100 dollars a week as a domestic. I really didn’t know any
other way of life—but I felt like I was kind of wasting my time.” One day on the way to
work on the bus, she sparked a conversation with a woman who told her to find a job
with a future. The Neighborhood Job Corps would offer training and employment. She
was worried of leaving behind a job that offered a solid income. Enrolling in the program
“meant a cut in pay, but I was really excited about being placed as a teacher’s aide with
Head Start. I love kids and use to think about being a teacher.” Her commitment to
children and her dream of becoming a teacher impulse her to return to Manual Arts High
School to earn her high school diploma and attend Los Angeles City College to earn her
89
“Head Start Report,” Box 2, Los Angeles Area Federation of Settlement and Neighborhood Centers, Inc.,
Special Collections, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
197
degree in child psychology.
90
Carol’s story is one among many African American women
who benefited from War on Poverty initiatives and programs. Head Start often functioned
in tandem and connected to other War on Poverty programs. Programs like the
Neighborhood Corps and Job Corps all based on the empowerment of the community,
were short-lived.
Pacific Oaks Community Center (the location were Los Angeles Times reporter
Jack Jones boasted Head Start’s first summer success) was an educational center that
trained many of the Head Start teachers and teachers aides like Carol. The goal of the
school is to provide an educational environment in which children, teachers, parents, and
community residents learn in relationship to other people. Three major purposes define
Pacific Oaks Community Center. First, “the education of upper-division and graduate
students for leadership in various professional workings with young children and their
parents; second, to contribute in insights about young children, family life, human
relationship and education of young children, and third is to provide special community
services.”
91
Its third commitment meant that Pacific Oaks instituted a community
involvement component with a Leadership Development Program designed to get the
parents and the community more involved in Head Start by encouraging active
participation by going to Head Start Centers across Los Angeles. At the core of Pacific
Oaks training and philosophy was a belief that each person involved in Head Start had
the “ability to create success by seeing his “vision-idea” to take shape, that person will
90
“Determined LA Mother Learns To Achieve Goal,” Los Angeles Sentinel, September 14, 1967, A8.
91
“Pacific Oaks College Report,” Box 86, Box Record Group F3751, State Office of Economic
Opportunity Records, California State Archives, Sacramento, CA.
198
have the confidence in himself to continue to grow and change.”
92
Pacific Oaks
Community Center, thus, became a key training center for Head Start teachers, teacher
aides, and parents of Head Start students.
Most Head Start teachers and aides begin as Head Start parents. Lupe Osuna, an
immigrant from Mexico, became a teacher at the Watts Towers Head Start operated by
the Training and Research Foundation. She is a mother to five children. She began to
volunteer when her youngest child was enrolled at local Head Start in South Gate. She
volunteered daily and even helped the staff cleanup at the end of the school year in June
by washing the walls and packing the equipment for storage. The following year when
her child was not enrolled in the program she still returned to Head Start as a volunteer. It
was at that point that the teachers urged her to apply for the aide’s job as they said,
“‘You’re here every day. You know what to do.’”
93
Osuna was not easily convinced that
this route was available and open to her. Her first obstacle was to convince her husband
that enrolling in school was a worthwhile cause. As she recalls, when she started school
and working her “husband didn’t talk to me for a month after I started working.” Her
92
Ibid.
93
Kay Mills, Something Better for My Children: How Head Start Has Changed the Lives of Millions of
Children (Plume, 1999), 239. Kay Mills, a journalist, is the only investigation on Head Start centers in
South Central Los Angeles. The focus in her book is on documenting how Head Start operated in
communities across the U.S., with a particular ethnographic focus on one Head Start class in Watts in 1991.
It is a key text in my chapter as it illustrates how Head Start helped children in Watts as well as how
teachers, administrators, and children were living through and making sense of how changing
demographics impact the day to day encounters in the classroom and community. The interviews I have
conducted with teachers, administrators, and families of Head Start always discuss this transition in
hindsight, yet, Mills provides an on the ground account of how this demographic change was being lived
and played out at the pivotal moment in the early 1990s. Despite her richness of detail, the majority of the
book focuses on other parts of the U.S. like Montana, Alabama, and Texas as well as glosses over the
history of Head Start and Los Angeles. In this chapter, I provide a more comprehensive account of Head
Start’s origins in the community to argue for the importance of this program in the community as fertile
ground to uncover the effects of demographic change. Kay Mills, Something Better for My Children, 20.
199
mother-in-law was her biggest advocate as she would tell Osuna “don’t let it worry you.
Keep on working. One day he’ll leave you and you’ll have a job.” Osuna felt that her
mother-in-law was right. Her husband eventually gave in and began to talk to her since he
realized that she was not going to stop working, but sadly Osuna and her husband decided
to divorce shortly thereafter. She is thankful for her mother-in-laws advice. There was
hardship in becoming a teacher for Head Start; she had to go to school at night. She
recalls, “It would be hard in the winter when I had to get the bus in the rain to go to East
Los Angeles College.” Sometimes she would take two buses, and would have classes
from 7 pm to 10 pm after working all day, get home at 11pm, do what she needed to do to
prepare for the next day’s work and her children’s school day. Her older daughter was of
great assistance as she helped with her siblings while Osuna was getting her education
and setting an example for all her children.
94
Her example served to inspire many of the
women, in particular Mexican immigrant women, to follow in her footsteps. She was
very vocal about letting women know that there options out there. She knew that some of
her peers’ husbands were not keen on her encouraging other women away from home to
study, but many of the men and husbands ended up budging because Head Start involved
their children. Osuna serves as a role model not only for her children and those in Head
Start but also the women who volunteered at the center. Her presence and story served to
reaffirm them that if they desired to go to school, gaining employment at a place like
Head Start was possible. It was hard work, but possible.
94
Ibid., 77-78.
200
Josephine Garner followed a similar trajectory to Osuna. Garner, an African
American resident of Watts, came to Los Angeles by train from Birmingham, Alabama in
1962. Like countless other Head Start teachers, she started volunteering for the program
in 1979, when her son was enrolled at Head Start Center near the Imperial Courts. As a
divorced mother, she had to make employment choices that would provide financial
assistance and stability for her family. She had worked for fifteen years at an embossing
machine plant in Orange County and went back to school to take child development
classes and began as teacher assistant in 1982 at Head Start.
95
She recalls those years as
very trying, “Oh yes, I’d get tired. I’d sit in the car between classes and I’d nod off… but
I knew I wasn’t doing myself any good just staying home. I needed to take these fingers
and do whatever I can with them.” She always had an affinity towards child education.
Her affiliation with Head Start did not come as a surprise. She began as a teacher and
quickly ascended to Head Start coordinator. Throughout her trajectory at Head Start she
always feared, “I wouldn’t measure up… I’m not good enough.”
96
This anxiety over
teaching effectiveness was not only felt by Garner but many Head Start teachers and
aides. They were anxious over whether they are doing a service to these children.
Not all women were able to finish the necessary steps to become a Head Start
teacher or aide. Esther Sanchez followed a similar path to Osuna and Garner, where the
volunteer requirement urged her to start working at the Head Start in 1977. She enrolled
her son, Antonio, at the Center Court Head Start near her home. The students were
95
Ibid., 10
96
Ibid., 25.
201
majority Mexican immigrant, and the teacher was white. Esther’s lack of English
proficiency did not prove a deterrent to her participation in the classroom as she learned
essential English phrases and the teacher utilized the few Spanish words she knew. She
continued to volunteer for the program after son graduated at the end of 1977 school year,
and in her second year at the center the teacher was replaced by African American Watts
resident Ms. Davies. Esther recalls her interaction with Ms. Davis fondly as she was her
biggest advocate and supporter for attending night classes to get her GED and teaching
credential, “Ms. Davies was super nice, supportive. She wanted the best for the moms.
Queria que nos superaramos (She wanted us to better ourselves). I liked working with
her. Oh Ms. Davies.”
97
Esther attempted the coursework but her husband’s hectic work
schedule prevented her from pursuing the courses any further as she was not content with
leaving her three children unsupervised while she went to school. She does not regret her
choice of not pursuing her degree further and recalls those years in Head Start as an
important experience to make her feel active, community and politically engaged, as well
as integral part of her becoming a South Central Los Angeles resident.
Government officials, most especially at the national level, critiqued inner-city
Head Start centers for failing to provide credentialed and trained teachers. There was a
celebration of hiring within the community and on another the demonization of such
practice. Sargent Shriver and local Head Start centers praised the job opportunities
created for local citizens. Maris Vinovskis political history of the program’s origins
argues that critics of Head Start claimed that children were at a greater disadvantage
97
Oral History with Esther Sanchez, November 20, 2008.
202
when taught by “inadequately prepared teachers” as “the use of poorly qualified teachers
became commonplace for many summer and year-round Head Start projects.” He further
asserts that although most experts and policy makers initially saw Head Start as a way to
compensate for or overcome the educational limitations of poor children, many of these
“youngsters soon were to enter Head Start projects taught by semiliterate parents or
neighbors rather than professional trained teachers.”
98
Head Start centers throughout
South Central Los Angeles, however, did not report an anxiety over having “unqualified”
teachers instruct young children.
In Head Start centers in South Central, the ability to provide employment
opportunities for the community as teachers, social workers, and administrators was
equally as important as childhood education. As part of Head Start requirement, parents
were expected to volunteer a few hours a week. These hours translated into helping with
classroom duties and managing children. Through volunteering, parents felt welcomed,
and began to even drop by on days they were not expected. They would be responsible to
go on errands, pick up children for school, and read stories to classes. Parent participation
did not end there. Special instruction classes were designed for parents. For example,
Head Start officials offered sewing classes, a course that parents embraced as they were
“thrilled at being able to make and repair clothing for their children for the very first time
in their lives.” Health education was administered through school nurses, films, lectures,
and literature to teach the importance of health to each family member.
98
Maris Vinovskis, The Birth of Head Start, 151.
203
Many Mexican immigrant women used these classes as an opportunity to learn
English. Many of these parents only spoke Spanish, and this became a problem during a
parent/teacher Head Start meetings. Many Mexican immigrant women were shy during
meetings as they knew very little English, and what little they knew they were very
insecure in using it. To ease Mexican immigrant women into the program and get their
active participation in the program, Head Start hired Spanish-speaking specialists to
translate at the meetings and provide materials in Spanish. Head Start officials believed
that only through active engagement by Mexican immigrant families could they better
understand the needs of the community and by the 1980s Head Start budgets and program
proposals had Spanish translation and English Second Language (ESL) classes as integral
financial features of program.
99
Despite the inclusion of translators and Spanish language materials, Head Start
mothers believed that they should learn English for the livelihood of their families in the
United States. As evidence through a Mexican immigrant mother’s plea, in broken
English, “that all of them must try to learn the language their children need when they go
to school.”
100
This urgent call to learn the language initiated the impetus to formally begin
English classes for parents who volunteer. Classes that proved beneficial to many women
and their families. Their efforts towards beginning these courses, and participation in
Head Start, allowed women to see their work and Head Start not only as something for
their children, but something for their benefit. Mexican and African American women
99
Oral History Phillipa Johnson.
100
Jack Jones, “Producing Vital By-Product,” Los Angeles Times, November 6, 1966, A1.
204
found creative ways to translate the imposed nutritional, health, family planning, and
sewing courses into something of their own. These women had to become active in
suggesting and implementing programming that they felt were needed for their entire
families. For instance, both African American and Mexican mothers discussed how their
older children were also struggling in class, and as a collective group began to hold
remedial afternoon sessions for older Head Start siblings using Head Start resources.
101
Instead of viewing these as forced features of the program, they proved to be
opportunities for women to come together and discuss their personal, family, and
communal needs. These opportunities were a source of community building and upward
mobility.
These programs offered an opportunity to attain jobs within Head Start and/or
War on Poverty programs. The first step to move from Head Start volunteer to Head Start
teacher was to attend and graduate from teacher classes offered through the Head Start
delegate agencies or at the nearby community college (in many cases this was Compton
Community College). Garner and her colleagues created their own brand of teaching that
involved incorporating the needs of the community based from their lived experience.
Like Garner and Osuna, many of Head Start’s teachers were volunteer parents as such
they had a unique perspective of incorporating the needs of the child and family. They
knew first-hand what children and mothers did after class and in their homes. They
coupled this first-hand knowledge with the lessons learned in their child development
classes, and what first became an ESL or General Educational Development (GED)
101
Ibid.; Oral History Phillipa Johnson; Oral History Maria Garcia.
205
course quickly become earning an Associates Degree, and ultimately a Bachelors of Arts
degree.
Head Start coordinators firmly believed in women’s empowerment. Psychologists
and social workers have been especially attuned to how Head Start transformed the lives
of working class women participating in the program. Lynda Ames’s Women Reformed,
Women Empowered and Barbara Peters’s The Head Start Mother document how Head
Start reshaped the lives of women in the program. Ames’ argues that conservatives
supported the program because they believed that the program “continued their belief and
emphasis on the mother as the “child’s first teacher” and was consistent with their
emphasis on “family values and women’s proper and preeminent role as mothers.”
102
Also
conservatives believed that women could and must be “reformed,” and supported this
program because it would do just that. Government programs, especially with regards to
social services, have a long history of having embedded within their logic and discourse a
punitive and reformist twist. As I document and others have as well as, women of color
are not passive victims but have found creative ways to utilize what could be
constraining, pejorative, and discriminatory notions of mothering and motherhood to
something that is empowering and positive. Both Ames and Peters argue that the
transformation by Head Start mothers is gradual, but in the end they are changes in their
perspective and approach towards their children and community. Peters, a psychologist,
argues that the Head Start mother’s growth during the program must be understood
through a symbolic interactionist model where the “self is a process in which its meaning
102
Lynda Ames, Women Reformed, Women Empowered: Poor Mothers and the Endangered Promise of
Head Start (Temple University Press, 1996), 34.
206
is created and allows us to view self-change in the context of social interaction.”
103
Head
Start mothers’ growth reveals that they strengthen and improve their psychological,
social, and economic conditions through their participation in health and substance abuse
counseling, housing assistance, and education advancement. Ames and Peters focus on
women in D.C. and the South, documents how Head Start mothers’ lives changed as a
result of their participation in the program.
Like the women described by Ames and Peters, Head Start mothers at the Charles
Drew Head Start Center in Watts and Compton also experience considerable growth. The
goal of courses in early child development was to get women involved as much more
than just volunteers in the classroom but also begin to imagine the possibility to going to
school and earn their GED, A.A., and possibly B.A. in child education. The yearlong
course ended with a graduation ceremony where women received diplomas of completion
and wore cap and gown like an official commencement. The graduates’ families were
invited to the ceremony and reception. These ceremonies were communal celebrations
were families and community residents celebrated these women’s accomplishments.
Phillipa Johnson has recorded these celebrations by scrap-booking pictures of these
events over the last twenty-five years. The pictures illustrate the happiness, joy, and pride
felt by the women and their families as they accomplished this feat. They also show the
demographic change of the program. Initially, you see the boastful faces of handful of
African American Head Start mothers, many of which continue to work at Head Start as
coordinators and social workers. But by the 1990s, the majority of graduates are Mexican
103
Barbara Peters, The Head Start Mother: Low- Income Mothers’ Empowerment Through Participation
(Routledge, 1998), 5.
207
immigrant women and like their African American predecessors they too have joined the
ranks of Head Start teachers, teacher aides, and social workers. They credit their
development and success to being able to participate in Head Start and become active
participants in Parent Policy Councils that encouraged the belief that they could
accomplish their dreams.
Parent’s participation in Parent Policy Councils was an important step in Head
Start families’ activism. Head Start parents serve as the Parent Policy councils’ elected
officers. The President of the Council must be a Head Start parent and must be voted in
by fellow Head Start parents. These council meetings are monthly and have become
important step for leadership development. These meetings are an important site in which
Head Start parents wage complaints, concerns, or praises of the program. Parents are
encouraged to take an active part in the development of the program through constructive
criticism and suggestions for Head Start administrators, delegate agencies, and teachers.
Parents, both African American and Mexican immigrant, have proven to be vocal about
what they felt mattered most. Complaints ranged from the availability of books for every
child, ensuring that the bathrooms were promptly fixed, or to larger grievances like
teacher misconduct or favoritism. In some instances, Mexican immigrant women were
the most vocal in their efforts. In cases where they were not able to articulate their
concerns in English, they did them to Spanish speaking social worker or translator.
Mexican immigrant mothers did not let their lack of proficiency in English or
undocumented status deter their commitment to organizing collectively and making sure
that their and their children’s needs were met. Contrary to some popular beliefs that
208
ethnic Mexicans, most especially recent immigrants and residents into a community, are
not be vocal about their needs, ethnic Mexican mothers in Head Start understood that
they were setting an important example for their children. The fierceness in which
Mexican immigrant women organized caused some initial tension within the Parent
Policy Council and African American women, with clear instances of racial divisions.
African American women felt that their children’s needs were shortchanged by the
increased activism by Mexican immigrant women. Yet, such racial divisions were shortly
and promptly quashed as both groups understood that their concerns were not that
different. They both wanted what was best for their children and the fight for classroom
maintenances, sufficient books and toys for the classroom, or offering more educational
opportunities for all women was a benefit to all.
104
They grew to understand that their
activism was not rooted solely in a racial political struggle, but one rooted in their
identity and politics as working class women of color, mothers, caretakers, and concern
citizens for their families well-being and in turn community. Women grew to see and
understand their work in Head Start as much more than just taking their children to
school and volunteering, but a real opportunity to shape Head Start’s daily procedures.
Their activism within the Parent Policy Council was a rife opportunity to develop
leadership skills.
African American and Mexican immigrant women’s activism within the Parent
Policy Council extended beyond their local council and Head Start. In the summer of
104
Oral history with Phillipa Johnson; Oral history with Maria Garcia, conducted by author, January 2,
2010; See: “Future T.A.’s for Head Start in Training at Phillips Temple” Los Angeles Sentinel, February
24, 1966, A3; Jack Jones, “Community Participation: Many Head Start Classes Producing Vital By-
Product” Los Angeles Times, November 6, 1966, E1.
209
1968, despite Head Start celebration as an asset for early childhood education; it faced
severe budget cuts and incorporation into the Los Angeles Unified School District. Head
Start Delegate agencies in South Central Los Angeles grew concerned over these looming
changes and as such mobilized its strongest constituency, Head Start parents. During
Parent Policy Council meetings, Head Start parents were encouraged to write letters to
Congressman Augustus Hawkins about their disapproval of such a move. The response
by African American and Mexican immigrant women was overwhelming, yet in many
ways their perspective differed.
African American women were much more direct about their concerns. Brathei
Titicomb wrote, “Dear Congressman Hawkins: Please vote for Head Start programs to
remain in their own neighborhoods.” Dorothy Turner wrote, “this is in regards to the
Head Start program being taken over by the Board of Education. As a community
member I know that this school are already overcrowded and have many problems as a
result adding Head Start could only be harmful to our community kids it should be much
better to leave Head Start to the community.”
105
Both Titicomb and Turner expressed how
they wanted Head Start to remain community controlled, as the School Board would not
provide adequate attention to the program. Such a move would eliminate one important
tenet of Head Start—community activism and control. Letters by African American
residents also expressed a concern over the leadership of the program if the school board
were to take over. Head Start’s appeal and success was tied to how the leadership was
105
“Letter by Brathei Titicomb” and “Letter by Dorothy Turner,” Box 94, Collection 1642, Augustus F.
Hawkins Papers, 1935-1995, Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los
Angeles.
210
reflective of the residential community, something that would drastically change with the
school board take over. African Americans expressed genuine concern over the future of
the program and firmly believed that writing letters to express their dissatisfaction with
the future of the program was necessary. The letter writing campaign in this instance, and
over the course of Head Start presence in South Central, was a key feature of the program
and has always been nurtured. Head Starts in South Central have continually faced
budget cuts and threats to delegate agencies closures. During Nixon’s administration, a
period in which the budget for Head Start declined slightly, participants of Head Start
wrote to Hawkins again to show their support for the program. And as usual, Hawkins
made public statements of his commitment to the program and childcare legislation. Most
especially, that Head Start remain operated by community organizations and delegate
agencies. Residents and local Head Start administrators knew they had an ally in
Hawkins and that their political engagement through letter writing campaigns and phone
calls were being taken seriously.
Mexican immigrant families voiced concerns over the school board take over
differently. Most letters written by Mexican immigrant parents were written in Spanish.
On July 22, 1968, in a letter to Congressman Hawkins, Josefina Velarde wrote,
“Honorable Sir: Cordially we request that you support the continued maintenance of the
excellent Head Start program that benefits our children greatly, as they are the future of
tomorrow.”
106
Similarly, Augustina Jurado stated, “On behalf of the Mexican and Spanish
speaking people, I thank you, so much if this great Head Start… continue in our
106
“Letter by Josefina Velarde” Box 94, Collection 1642, Augustus F. Hawkins Papers, 1935-1995, Special
Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
211
community. For the development of our children in this wonderful country in which they
will be the future citizens.”
107
The majority of letters written by Mexican immigrant
families present how Head Start was helping children and families transition into U.S.
culture. In some instances these letters appear to be written by the same person as the
handwriting and their message was the same, yet signed by different members of the
community. The letters reference how they were speaking for the “Mexican” community,
unlike their African American counterparts that used a much more inclusive language
like “community” without a racial attachment. Letters by Mexican families were much
more racially motivated. They hardly ever reference the presence of African Americans
in the community or in Head Start, and spoke to the educational value of the program
assisting Mexican immigrant children adapt into the U.S.. The discourse around
citizenship and nation was overwhelming amongst these letters. They spoke to the ways
that this program offered their children, and in turn their families, an opportunity at a
future in the United States. The utilization of words like “future” and “citizenship,” I
posit serve to frame how Mexican immigrant women and families conceptualize their
own citizenship and rights. This discourse follows in line with an assimilationist narrative
of immigrant families where education services as the tool in which the second
generation becomes part of U.S. body politic. The use of future aimed to justify why
Head Start in particular, and education more broadly, must continue to receive economic
support. Mexican immigrant women’s letter writing campaign illustrates how irrespective
107
“Letter by Augustina Jurado” Box 94, Collection 1642, Augustus F. Hawkins Papers, 1935-1995,
Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
212
of immigration status, they felt they had the rights to fight for their children and
community needs.
Nurturing a sense of rights and activism irrespective of ones citizenship has
always been apart of Head Start’s politics. This letter writing campaign illustrates African
American and Mexican immigrant women and families’ activism. In total, over 300
signatures on petitions were collected and one hundred individual letters written to
Hawkins by African American and Mexican families urging him not to allow the Head
Start move to the LAUSD. In the end, the school board did not take over Head Start and
it remained under the purview of the delegate agencies throughout South Central Los
Angeles, a victory that these Head Start mothers felt was in part due to their activism.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag and Nancy A. Naples’s Grassroots
Warriors provide a theoretical model to understand Head Start mothers’ activism and
politicization. They discuss women of color’s activism in Los Angeles and New York
respectively. Gilmore’s discussion of the origins and politics of a group of mothers that
formed in Los Angeles in response to the growing crisis of incarceration of youth of
color, Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (Mothers ROC), argues that through
“cooperative self-help, the mothers transformed their care giving or reproductive labor
into activism, which then expanded into the greater project to reclaim all children,
regardless of race, age, residence, or alleged crime.”
108
Similarly,
Naples suggests that a
woman of color’s activism is often tied to the long-term commitment to community that
originates in their residential community. Activist mothering, according to Naples, “not
108
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalization
California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 183.
213
only involves nurturing work for those outside one’s kinship group, but also encompasses
a broad definition of actual mothering practices… mothering that is paid and unpaid that
is infused with political activism and includes self-conscious struggles against racism,
sexism, and poverty.”
109
Naples does not aim to provide an essentialist or reductionist
reading of mothering practices, but rather builds on the seminar work of Patricia Hill
Collins theorization of “other mothers” where “a substantial portion of African American
women’s status in African American communities stems not only from their roles as
mothers in their own families but from their contributions as community other mothers to
black community development.” The activism by African American women, according to
Hill Collins, extends beyond kinship networks and forms part of the extended kinship
network in the African American community to pave the way for the political activism of
community mothers.
110
Naples argues that mothering practices are “not natural
expressions of a black women’s social or cultural identity,” but rather an analysis of
women’s community work demonstrates how they develop a “dynamic relationship to
109
Nancy Naples, Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work, and the War on Poverty
(Routledge, 1995), 15.
110
It is important to note that Patricia Hill Collins discusses African American family structures as defined
by shared mothering practices (“bloodmothers,” “othermothers,” and “community mothers”). The
communal strategy of raising children challenges the conceptualization of parenting and family as an
independent and private endeavor. Hill Collins demonstrates that childrearing emerges as a public and
communal affair is a legacy of slavery as well as necessity. From slavery to the present, Black families are
organized through communal mothering practices. Similarly, Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman?
posits the ways that motherhood, rather than marriage, was the most important right of passage for Black
women. During slavery, marriage between enslaved Black men and women were not valid legal
institutions, thus, marriage did not hold the same cultural, political, and economic meaning for Black
women as for white women. Motherhood anchored women to a location, ability to form relationships to
Black men, and provided a unique opportunity for solidarity to emerge between older and younger Black
women. In subtle ways, White argues that the valorization of motherhood versus marriage was a way in
which Black women challenged white men and women’s gendered notions of womanhood, femininity, and
virtue. A politics anchored in motherhood becomes an important element in the Black women’s experience
and identity.
214
particular historic conditions and transmitted through self-conscious socialization
practices and political struggles.”
111
Naples and Hill Collins discuss an activist mothering politics that originates in the
African American community. The multicultural landscape of South Central and Head
Start made it so that both African American and Mexican immigrant women crafted their
own brand of activism rooted in their connections as mothers. The neighborhood, both
the streets of South Central and Head Start classrooms, serves as the catalyst to mobilize
women of color into a long-term commitment to community work. The War on Poverty
initiatives offered women of color an opportunity at forming their own definition of
motherhood and mothering activism. The political work by Head Start mothers extended
beyond the classroom and Parent Policy Councils to their personal relationships and
community as they daily challenged the false separation of reproductive work in family
with the labor in the labor force. As Gilmore documents in the struggles of Mothers
ROC, for Head Start mothers, motherhood became a larger organizing principle and the
concept was, in many ways, their civil rights struggle. For these women, and like the
women of Mothers ROC, motherhood was not an oppressive or pejorative term. Instead,
it served as a method of exerting power, allowing them to work with the community as
well as complicate negative representations of working class women of color as
pathological and part of the undeserving poor. They challenged these images and
discourses through in their daily lives, education, and organizing. Indeed, even in the
worst of circumstances they stayed hopeful and helped give their children and families a
111
Nancy Naples, Grassroots Warriors, 191.
215
future. Women exhibited multiple and varied pathways to community activism as well as
a diverse sense and meaning behind motherhood and mothering practices.
Mothers’ participation in the program has always been seminal, however, fathers’
support has always been equally as important. In a concerted effort to attract the
participation by fathers in the program, Head Start centers throughout South Central
hosted “Father’s Night.” The night included a one-on-one teacher-father conference and
discussion followed by dinner, movies, and coffee. Head Start teachers believed, “it is not
often that a male or father figure takes interest of these children.” Father’s Night aims to
correct this disjuncture by providing men, fathers an “opportunity to be with our pre-
school children and see their exciting world of learning.”
112
In efforts to get more “fathers
and male friends of Head Start” involved they organized a softball league among the
schools. The creation of a softball league was short-lived, but the commitment of
incorporating fathers and male figures in Head Start remains.
113
The goal of incorporating
fathers into the Head Start program is to assure children that they have two parents,
irrespective of their parent’s marital/relationship status, and that both parents have a
responsibility to them. In a society, maleness is defined in terms of financial position and
authoritarian characteristic. For Head Start administrators they insist that men’s support
in a child life is more than just financial support. Rarely are men viewed as nurturer and
caregivers. Head Start strives to craft an image for men that is based on active caring,
concern, and support of young children; features and actions that should not solely
112
“Head Start to Entertain Dad,” Los Angeles Sentinel, June 1, 1967, C1.
113
Ibid; Oral History Phillipa Johnson. Through the multiple Head Start delegate agencies I visited
throughout Los Angeles there was always a mention of how father’s participation was critical to the daily
practices at Head Start and overall education of their children.
216
relegated to women. Head Start administrators aimed to incorporate both parents into the
education of their children, as parenting is much more than pocketbook but a legitimate
role in the childrearing process.
114
Head Start coordinators did not want men off the hook.
Just like the women in the program, they also offered education classes for fathers and
men to learn and become invested in asking questions at the school and doctor office.
These events have proven to be great opportunities for men to create their own support
networks. Like Head Start mothers, men found a group in which to voice their frustration
of home, work, or the street hustle. Head Start centers are proud of the level of
participation by men in the program. They do so by displaying images of men doing arts
and crafts with their children, attending Parent Policy Council meetings, and parent-
teacher meetings. Unlike the women in the program, it was harder to keep consistent and
active engagement amongst fathers.
Head Start administrator’s commitment to parent and community involvement in
the program followed in line with the provisions under the Economic Opportunity Act—
community involvement. One question that has always been at the center of Head Start
proposals was what is meant by meaningful participation at the policy making level.
Head Start, like other War on Poverty programs, had to maintain the 1960s promise over
“maximum feasible participation of the poor.” Over the course of Head Start’s history the
level of activism and participating by parents and women in the program varied. As
documented, many Head Start mothers in South Central attained employment
opportunities with Head Start as teachers, teacher aides, social workers, and part of
114
Kay Mills, Something Better for My Children, 195.
217
administration in delegate agencies. The level of mobility within the ranks within the
program has become increasingly difficult. The vast majority of Head Start teachers
today have a state credential to teach or an Associates degree. By 2007, the federal
government mandated that all Head Start teachers must have a Bachelors degree. Head
Start teachers are some of the least paid educators. In 2001-2002, a Head Start teacher
with a state credential was making $19,000, A.A. degree $21,049, and B.A. degree
$25,090. In 2001-2002, on average, Head Start teachers earn an annual salary of $21,287,
and Head Start assistant teachers earn an average of $14,162, while Kindergarten teachers
earn $43,152. The requirement to have more teachers with higher educational degrees has
transformed the pool of eligible teachers throughout Head Start. The ease with which a
Head Start mother and community resident transferred the skills learned in the delegate
agencies courses and A.A. degree at the local community college to a meaningful job
opportunity as a Head Start teacher has been severely reduced with this new mandate.
Head Start teachers are increasingly not from the community, as many South Central
residents cannot afford or attend a four-year university.
In South Central, the residue of women’s activism within Head Start has various
incarnations. Parents learn better health habits for their families, create consistent medical
and dental practices, and further their educational horizons. They also encouraged women
to form, establish, and apply for funds through various delegate agencies to form Head
Start centers in their housing projects or community. Delegate agencies directors would
encourage efforts by these women to build leadership skills and allow women to become
more self-sustaining. But more importantly, women’s participation in Head Start
218
politicized them in unforeseen ways. Women began to take an active role in critiquing
and working to change the deteriorating conditions in their communities. They worked
collaboratively across racial difference. As Head Start mother, Maria Garcia states,
“early childhood education changed my child’s shyness with other kids, but also
helped me get over my shyness and work with other women. Before I felt isolated
and alone, I spent most of my time at home cleaning, cooking, and caring for
others…. but going to Head Start I’ve made new friends, and learned a lot of
things from just talking to other women… even Black women. I really can’t talk
to them, but there’s a shared sense that we care about our kids. My kids teacher,
she’s Black, and she shows no difference amongst the kids. I like her… I use to
think that Black women were the worst, but she’s changed my mind.”
115
Garcia, a recent Mexican immigrant to South Central, child’s participation in Head Start
not only transformed her child’s shyness but also herself. It has provide her a new racial
outlook, one that while seems minor at this stage, can be the beginning to transformative
perspective of the African American community. Garcia perspective of how Head Start
changed her attitude towards African American women is not unique. One would suspect
that Mexican immigrant women would prefer to have Latino teachers teach their
children; however, this is not always the case. Mexican immigrant women understand
that the most important characteristic is that teachers are committed and treat their
children fairly. In one instance, in which one Mexican immigrant woman rallied against a
longtime African American teacher due to her supposed favoritism of some of the
children, the Mexican immigrant women in the program worked to ensure that this
African American teacher was not fired. For them, the racial background of the teacher
was not an issue, as they knew that if this teacher was potentially fired a Latina teacher
could have replaced her. What mattered most was that their children were instructed and
115
Oral history with Maria Garcia.
219
cared for within Head Start. For these Mexican immigrant women, their children’s
instruction was not dependant on the teacher’s race. Mexican immigrant women’s
engagement and interaction with African American teachers, parents, social workers, and
officials and vice versa allowed African American and Mexican immigrant women to
rethink and think critically about their racial understandings as they both worked for the
improvement of their children.
Finally, Garcia as a new Head Start mother states that in the few months that she’s
been part of the program she has become involved in the Parent Policy Council and doing
much more than volunteer a few hours a week. Maria is but one Head Start mother whose
perspective and politics have changed through their participation in the program. Head
Start continues its commitment to fostering collective and political action by African
American and Latino families. Hector Tobar, a Los Angeles Times reporter, documents
that for Latino families organizing a series of demands for the school board to offer their
children a better education continues to be a struggle. Most recently, Gerardo Jasso
(metal polisher), a Mexican immigrant from the state of Durango, is concerned for his
children and other children’s education as he notices that his kids struggle to remember
their timetables, a feat he was able to learn by third grade. Gerardo does not understand
how it would be possible for his children to not know the basics if they attend school in
one of the richest countries in world, unlike his upbringing in an impoverished rural town
in Mexico. What he learned in his elementary school education far surpasses what his
children are learning today. Similarly, Fidel (a cook), also an immigrant from Mexico
described how when he went to school he would carry backpacks and books, yet his
220
children and many others do not carry books or have homework. Both Fidel and Gerardo
are worried for their children’s livelihood, but have never conceived of protesting or
demanding that their children receive a better education. Tobar’s tone in the article is to
urge Fidel, Gerardo, and other parents that they must “start complaining soon… because
we won’t have great schools again in L.A. until working, immigrant parents start to
demand them. I know they’re busy, I know they work hard. But their kids make up a big
chunk of the student body. And if more of them don’t speak out, all of us L.A. parents
will suffer.”
116
The activism that Tobar urges has been part of Head Start’s philosophy from the
beginning. Head Start over its forty plus year trajectory has encouraged and organized
that parents take an active role in ensuring that he needs of their children and families are
met. Unlike parents like Fidel and Gerardo who had not thought about demanding better
opportunities for their children, the women of Head Start had a long history of cultivating
this politics. Parents activism within the program is a major transformation, as in some
cases it transformed women’s lives not only in their hours at Head Start classroom, but
also in their home life and community. Women have become more political engaged
throughout the community as they work towards childhood education, community
beautification, and street safety.
116
Hector Tobar, “A Lesson About Speaking Up,” Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2010.
221
“There are Children Here”
Children at a very young age are exposed to the dangers associated with living in
an impoverished community. These dangers include dodging bullets, hiding under the
bed and blankets at the sound of shots, or caught in the middle of police raids and arrests.
Something triggers when a seven year old witnesses their first SWAT raid and asks her
mother “why did those men in masks with armor breakdown that persons door?.” At least
for a brief moment, they wonder if such acts are common. As five-year-old girl, Jayanna,
remembers on a fall evening in 2008 when she was awakened by police yelling at her
home for everyone to come out one-by-one. She and her brother came out the house with
their hands up and guns pointed at them followed by her aunt and mother. Still a child,
she did as she was told as her mother reassured that if she just walked out quietly
everything would be fine.
117
It is baffling, yet unsurprising, that police officers justify
such treatment of children without thinking of the mental consequences of pointing a gun
at a child, but is reflective of how these state and power institutions fail to see children in
the inner-city, as in fact, children. Luckily Jayanna still enjoys playing in the
neighborhood and appears unfazed by what happened, or atleast outwardly unbothered,
yet there are many children who are unable to move past being startled at night by a
looming helicopter light, SWAT shouting at her home with guns drawn, and having to
exit their home with their hands in the air. This is the reality that families and children
living in South Central Los Angeles continually face. Because of the real possibility for
such occurrences, even while in the comforts of their home, Head Start becomes an
117
I personally witness this event, and followed up with a casual conversation with Jayanna’s mother.
Informal conversation conducted by author with Jayanna’s mother, November 13, 2008.
222
important physical, mental, and social space for children and their families to craft a
space for community and home.
For Head Start officials and advocates, the ability to offer children a safe, clean,
and educational environment in which to develop their cognitive and social skills is
essential and at the core of the school readiness mission. By participating in Head Start,
children learn the alphabet and numbers, how to overcome shyness, fear of being away
from parents, cooperation and sharing, and the basic routines of school. The year-long
participation ensured that children were instilled with the love for learning and reading. It
is this goal that Head Start officials boast as the greatest success to the program, Head
Start’s ability to shield children from the hazards of growing up and living in an
impoverished neighborhood. A 1965 study, conducted by the Southern California
Permanent Medical Group, documents how impressionable and knowledgeable young
children are to their surroundings. The study aimed to investigate how children perceive
and react to “intense disorganization or threat in the physical and social environment.”
Most studies up to that point had focused on the emotional effects of children in the
aftermath of natural disaster, but very little on social upheavals like the Watts uprising.
The psychiatrist conducting this study decided to interview Head Start children right after
the curfew was lifted to get the immediate reaction of children aged four to five years old
who resided in or close the riot area. They interviewed 107 African American, 23
Mexican American, and 52 white children (the white children were a control group and
not a part of the Watts neighborhood, but nursery schools away from the area) in five to
223
ten minute semi-structured interviews.
118
The interview questions centered on how they
felt those days, if they were aware of what was going on, what they saw, their perception
of what people were reacting to, and what should happen to those that rioted. The results
illustrated that irrespective of race, all children were aware of what was going on. Of
course, African American children responded with much more detail, fear, anxiety, and
understanding regarding the events that transpired. The white children were quick to
demonize and blame the African American community for the riot, as they stated that it
was their need to be equals with whites that caused the riot. Conversely, African
American children stated that in those stressful days they were “scared they would start
[their] house on fire.” One child stated,
“they burned my house up. Daddy took us all out. People took things out of
stores… my dog got loose; he’s way off. I was scared at night. We slept in old
Mr. Jones’ house… I saw big men break in places. They burned Steve’s house.
They burned my things, burned my TV, burned my toys.”
Another stated,
“I saw people putting benches on the street from the playground so the cars can’t
go through. I saw people taking food from stores and I heard guns. I was afraid.
They were shooting guns at night so I couldn’t sleep and I was afraid they would
stick the guns at night so I couldn’t sleep. So I slept with my mother. A store
close to my house was burning. They were lighting matches and breaking
windows and I thought the whole world was burning.”
119
118
Ralph Dunlap, Astrid Beigel, and Virginia Armon, “Young Children and Watts Revolt: Reactions of
Negro, Mexican American and White Pre-school Children to the August 1965 Los Angeles Race Riots” by
Southern California Permanent Medical Group, Box 187, Alexander Pope Papers, Special Collections, The
Huntington Research Library.
119
Ibid.
224
African American children expressed a great deal of fear of imminent threat. White
children discussed the riot from afar, but African American responses were much more
vivid, detailed, and anxiety ridden.
The responses by Mexican American children in the Watts riot expressed the
tense relations between African American and Mexican immigrants in the area. The
researchers asked Mexican American children if they knew who the riot participants
were. Two thirds of the children expressed “hostility or some negatively stereotypic
attitude toward the rioters and Negroes in general” as they stated,
Interviewer: Who did the fighting?
Mexican American child: Black people.
Interviewer: Why did they do that
Mexican American child: Because they were colored.
Interviewer: Why were they mad?
Mexican American child: Because they like to burn everything.
Another Mexican American child was asked,
Interviewer: Who was fighting?
Mexican American child: Negroes.
Interviewer: Why did they do that?
Mexican American child: Negroes fight. Just fight because they are Negroes.
Negroes just fight.
According to the researchers these sentiments are dangerous as they express a “uniformly
hostile-fearful attitude towards Negroes, amounting to a sub-cultural stereotype that
Negroes are by nature bad and violent. There are important, and unhappy, implications
when a stereotype like this appears so clearly by the age of four or five,” and suggests
that future cooperation and understanding is dim between these two groups.
120
These
sentiments illustrate both the dangers of living in poverty as African American children
120
Ibid.
225
express genuine fear and concern, while Mexican American children expressed overtly
racist sentiments about African Americans. Mexican American children’s racial
understandings are a reflection of their parents— this being the most troubling— because
work must be done to educate parents against these racist notions.
One must believe that with increased interaction at a very young age can be the
source at which inter-group relations can, and must be, improved. Ultimately, what this
study proved was despite adults’ belief that children are “ignorant” and “unfazed” by
crises; children as early as preschool age are aware and affected by social and physical
crisis. They are also painfully aware of how race operates in social life, as African
American children expressed how they understand and articulate the ways that rejection
feels because of racial status. A program like Head Start offers an environment in which
children can engage with children of different racial backgrounds as well as a safe
environment that attempts to help them begin to navigate their social and economic
surroundings.
The creation of safe interracial spaces for children is important as limited
economic opportunities, poor quality schools, and very few afterschool programs have
made it close to impossible for children and youth to avoid gangs, drugs, and violence.
The growth in the gang subculture in South Central, most famously by the Bloods and
Crips, and the economic investment by state and city officials into police, policing, and
prisons has ensured that youth of color in South Central and Watts options are not only
constrained but also under constant surveillance. During the 1980s, the feud between the
Bloods and Crips over territory, drugs, and gang membership escalated. This meant that
226
the threat of gunfire, violence, and death was a reality for residents and children living in
South Central and Watts.
The potential violence unleashed by rival gangs, became a reality on a winter
morning in 1990. The Watts Towers Head Start advised the children in the program to
leave out of the fear of the nearby shooting at the Imperial Courts Housing Project.
Earlier that morning a young man was shot and killed and another wounded in the
projects.
121
The presence of these gangs in the community prompted education and mental
health professionals to pay increased attention to the needs of South Central Los Angeles
children and adolescents. Lester Ford, a nine year old that lived in the Jordan Downs
housing project, stated “They shoot somebody every day” and “I go in and get under the
bed and come out after the shooting stops.” Like Lester, children throughout the
community began expressing their anxiety over the violence in their community and
school. As early as 1987, school guidance counselor, Melba Coleman at the 102nd Street
Elementary School noticed that children were regressing to bed-wetting and good
students were becoming withdrawn, unable to concentrate, and hostile due to their social
situations. Melba began a crusade to gain the assistance of Los Angeles Unified School
District mental health workers and social workers to begin to evaluate how to best help
children. In 1989, an investigation and report led the school to establish a grief class for
students. By 1990 this elementary school was on the frontlines in the battle against how
to treat children living in South Central as “experts and mental health professionals are
just beginning to learn what happens to children like Lester as they grow into adulthood:
121
Kay Mills, Something Better for My Children, 154.
227
Even if these children of violence survive the drugs, the gangs and the shootings, they
might not survive the psychological effects of the constant barrage.” Children as young as
six years old are recruited as drug-runners, and for psychologists some of the most
disturbing elements are hearing “babies’ first words and gestures are the names and hand
signs of their parents’ gangs… the very color of one’s T-shirt can determine whether you
live or die, and the most important lesson of childhood is that survival depends on hitting
the ground when the inevitable shooting starts.”
122
Gang prevention programming began targeting younger children. They
increasingly noticed that between 10-12 years of age children were making the critical
decision of whether to join a gang or enter into the illicit drug trade.
123
Violence in the
neighborhood was a concern not only to adults but youth living in the neighborhood, as
they too wanted the violence to stop. Youth of color expressed a concern over “too much
gang violence, cut down on drugs, purse snatchers and stealing, and establish an
organization or program dealing with crime prevention.”
124
They wanted to establish
better relationships with law enforcement, in order to feel like police was protecting them
and not harassed or constantly imaged or thought of committing a crime. This antagonist
relationship has meant that children and youth sing and taunt, “Fuck the police.” Such
122
Lois Timnick, “Children of Violence: What Happens to Kids Who Learn as Babies to Dodge Bullets and
Step Over Corpses on the Way to School?” Los Angeles Times, September 3, 1989, A6.
123
“Report by the City of Los Angeles Community Development Department, Human Services, and
Neighborhood Development Division” Box 3821, Collection 293, Tom Bradley Administration Papers,
1973-1993, Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
124
“Youth Summit Report,” Box 2432, Collection 293, Tom Bradley Administration Papers, 1973-1993,
Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.
228
sentiments were echoed throughout the community in the aftermath of the Rodney King
case.
125
Despite, the level of violent crime decreasing in the 1980s, South Central
residents felt the opposite as they felt an escalating violence between these warring
gangs. In the first seven months of 1989, there had been 237 homicides, 413 rapes, 5,864
robberies and 9,068 aggravated assaults, and 35 of the homicide victims were under 18
years old. Dr. Gary Ordog at King/Drew Medical Center found that 34 children under 10
years old were treated there for gunshot wounds between 1980 and 1987, a statistic never
seen before.
126
Equally important was the rate at which children and adolescents were
exposed to drugs and alcohol. In 1986, a Los Angeles report on adolescent drug use
reported that by seventh grade at least 58 percent of 12 year olds had tried alcohol and 16
percent had gotten drunk, and by age 16, 20 percent of children were drinking beer
weekly. By age 12, 11 percent of children had a drug and by 16 years of age the
percentage had shot up to 52 percent, with 13 percent using marijuana at least once a
week.
127
These statistics have not changed dramatically as in 2000, 41 percent of Los
Angeles teens ages 14-17 had consumed an alcoholic drink in the last 30 days, and 24
percent of teens had binge drunk within that same period.
128
These rates are alarming
because they show how at a young age children and adolescents are exposed to alcohol
125
Stephen Braun, “Tensions Mount on L.A. Streets,” Los Angeles Times, December 15, 1991, A1.
126
Lois Timnick, “Children of Violence: What Happens to Kids Who Learn as Babies to Dodge Bullets and
Step Over Corpses on the Way to School?” Los Angeles Times, September 3, 1989, A6.
127
“Alcohol and Drug Use amongst Teens,” Box 3692, Collection 293, Tom Bradley Administration
Papers, 1973-1993, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.
128
Ibid.
229
and drugs. Researchers believed that early-prevention programs are important, such as
camp programs, after school programs, or early education programs that give children an
opportunity to see the world outside their everyday existence and television. Parents,
especially mothers, need exposure to alternatives through programs that give them a
break from the draining responsibility of caring for several children around the clock on
limited resources or without male support.
129
Head Start was this type of program.
Children and parents found the support they needed to get away from the hazards of the
community, even if the Head Start centers were in the crossfire of danger.
The scholarly literature on children growing up in the inner-city focuses on the
ways that children form a subculture. According to Elijah Anderson, children, especially
male children, at a very young age are caught in the “dilemma of the decent child” to
either exhibit hypermasculine behaviors like the “thug or gangsta” or the good kid that
parents and teachers encourage. Unfortunately, Anderson finds that too many children
succumb to the pressures of “code of the street” that values machismo, violence,
impudence while denigrating compassion and responsibility. Gangs provide jobs, and
they also provide a recreational outlet in the absence of organized activities. The
pressures of the street are often so strong that even parents, adults, teacher’s
encouragement or alternatives are not enough. Children still at a very young age are
forced to learn how to survive and navigate their surroundings.
130
The work by Daniel
Moynihan and Charles Murray, for example, focus on how children grow up in
129
Lois Timnick, “Children of Violence: What Happens to Kids Who Learn as Babies to Dodge Bullets and
Step Over Corpses on the Way to School?” Los Angeles Times, September 3, 1989, A6.
130
Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (W. W.
Norton & Company, 2000); Eugene Perkins, Home is a Dirty Street (Third World Press, 1975).
230
pathological family structure and are more likely to fall prey to their negative
surroundings. In their estimation, it is this cycle that poses the greatest threat for children
to get out of poverty. Such a rendition of inner-city children and families, fails to fully
discuss how the lack of employment or educational opportunities in the community and
increased investment in the police state leaves children and adolescents of color with
limited opportunities and many engage in informal and underground economies. Scholars
like Monihayan and Murray, blame individuals and families as the source of the problem,
without fully acknowledging how decades of structural racism has hindered working
class and working poor families opportunities.
The literature on inner-city children has also largely focused on youth of color
going through middle school and high school. Sociologists and psychologists’ studies
have provided working class youth of color with an outlet in which to voice and write out
their frustrations, memories, and pleasures of growing up in their communities. Through
personal vignettes youth write about the pain, anger, love, and personal dreams.
131
One
seminal location for the study of inner-city children has been Chicago’s housing projects.
Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here provides a portrait of inner-city child
poverty through the stories of Pharaoh (9) and Lafeyette (11) growing up in the Henry
Horner Homes— one of Chicago’s most notorious housing projects. The book traces the
lives of these two African American brothers and other children in the summer of 1987.
Unfortunately, much of what these children experience in the late 80s has relevance
131
For more see: Philip Kay, Andrea Estepa, and Al Desetta, eds., Things Get Hectic: Teens Write About
the Violence that Surrounds Them (New York: Touchstone, 1998); Alice McIntyre, Inner City Kids:
Adolescent Confront Life and Violence in an Urban Community (New York: New York University Press,
2000).
231
today—at much more accelerated rate. Both Pharaoh and Lafeyette, were privy to a
friends murder, family members taken to prison, and drug abuse. This reality left their
mother, LaJoe, to conclude in an interview with Kotlowitz’ “but you know, there are no
children here. They’ve seen too much to be children.”
132
Despite their mother’s
proclamation and their exposure to danger, Pharaoh and Lafeyette, like many other
children, clung to a semblance of a childhood as they played and enjoyed childhood
games with others. The difficulty of growing up in an impoverished community means
that it forces children to navigate the terrain of what it means to be a child and adult at a
rapid pace.
Miles Corwin’s And Still We Rise documents the struggles of twelve talented
South Central Los Angeles inner-city Crenshaw High School students who thrive despite
the overwhelming odds. Corwin shows us another side of inner-city life; one that we
seldom investigate. In the mist of Proposition 209, these Latino and African American
students fought against incredible odds to be able to graduate high school and attend
college. What is most compelling in Corwin’s narrative is that even the most gifted of
students cannot possibly succeed without help. This assistance comes from their families,
extended family networks, community residents, committed teachers, and extensive use
of afterschool programs and services. Corwin reminds us that in the inner-city,
opportunity and success, are achieved through a community effort—much like Head
Start’s model for education and community.
132
Alex Kotlowitz, There are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America
(New York: Anchor, 1992), 1.
232
These aforementioned scholars each document the struggles of adolescent youth,
yet without much attention to how younger children are also impacted by risks of living
in the inner-city. The hesitancy of study younger children is the belief that “their
identities and lives are bound up with those on their parents and families… defining
categories of difference among children is complicated because adults and children see
differences within racial, sexual, cultural, economic, regional, and situational contexts
differently.” For many scholars the very notion of investigating childhood, what
childhood is contested and open for debate. As it is believed that the “discourse about
childhood is a proxy for society’s hopes and fears about the future and yearnings for the
past.”
133
The burden of a promising future is placed on this generation of children.
Scholars suggest that childhood is “eroding” and “disappearing” because children are
increasingly hurried and exposed to adult pressures and media and for some children,
especially upper-class children they are treated as precious commodities that must move
quickly move beyond the stage of free play to more structured daily activities. More
needs to be done on how “less play and more work” affects children of different racial
and class backgrounds as much of the scholarship on poor and children of color focus on
crime, violence, and gangs. Children who participate in Head Start, are placed in this
delicate balance between children forming their own identity and in relationship to their
parents as well as proving the benefits of education curriculum that emphasize play and
learning.
133
Barbara Beatty, “The Complex Historiography of Childhood: Categorizing Different, Dependant, and
Ideal Children” History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 40: No. 2 (Summer 2000), 201-219, 201.
233
Despite the potential limitations of asking adults about their experience in Head
Start, they look to their Head Start experience with fondness and nostalgia. Uncovering
children’s childhood experience through the lens of Head Start serves as an important
vehicle in which to understand how children express their first experience in a structured
environment like the classroom that encouraged free play and expression. Pharaoh and
Lafayette’s mother made a firm statement when she said, “there are no children here,”
and for the most part I agree with it as children are exposed to the many potential dangers
while living an inner-city early in life. However, this does not completely deprive
children at the ability of being children. Head Start teachers, parents, and community
residents agree that despite the negative aspects of living in an inner-city, children must
be viewed and treated as children. Children like Jayanna, and most especially her jovial
demeanor, shows that notwithstanding what she was privy to on that fateful evening her
family, friends, and neighbors find creative ways to make her feel that in the mist of all
this chaos and devastation she still has a free space to play and be a child.
Similarly, Head Start offers children an opportunity at a childhood experience that
is not solely encompassed by their home and neighborhood surroundings that at times is
fractured, fragile, and erratic. In doings so, provides some semblance of normalcy,
structure, and connection. As a letter by Head Start student, Scotty (via his mom as she
states that it came from “directly from his little heart”),
“Thank you for my tractor. Thank you for that lovely trip. Thank you for all the
lovely stuff you gave me, the cars and puzzles and the food. Thank you for the
lovely peanut butter, cheese and crackers. Tomorrow is the last day of school and
234
I’m sorry to say good-bye to you. Thank you for the lovely books and the stories I
love you very much.”
134
Another letter by Christopher,
“Thank you very much for having me at Head Start. I am sorry the program is
over but I am very happy that I’ve had the chance to be in all the enjoyable and
fun things that we have done. My mother says I’ve learned things that will help
me in kindergarten. Believe it or not, I really have become more independent, I
can write my name and think I play with other children a little bit more
cooperatively than I did before. I am going to miss you all more than you know.
There are so many other children that need you, just as I have needed you. Thank
you for my friends being wonderful.”
135
These letters, via their mothers, are a testament to the ways that Head Start was impacting
the lives of children. Children were exposed to new things like crayons, bicycles, dolls,
things that have been part of our everyday life for people living in the inner-city.
Currently, children are learning in a completely different reality. They find themselves in
a hyper individualized, stimulated, and commercialized culture, yet Head Start still aims
to offer children an outlet to learn, play, and interact with children at a stage in
development to create and nurture a fondness and eagerness for learning, most especially
with children of different backgrounds. Instead of sheltering children of the dangers of
the community and its racially diverse landscape, Head Start teachers became a source
for children to see as source of friendship, solace, understanding, and community.
Cornel West offers a compelling perspective of how the suburbanization not only
cemented the white privilege we see today, but also parenting was impacted by such rigid
segregation and wealth. West argues that the creation of suburban white spaces and
134
“Design of the Head Start Evaluation,” Box 1, Los Angeles Area Federation of Settlement and
Neighborhood Centers, Inc., Special Collections, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
135
Ibid.
235
consumer driven society has meant that that in today’s society not enough credit or
validation is given to parenting, where caring, nurturing, and cherishing are not viewed as
essential for a child’s upbringing. He suggests that “never before has one generation of
American children been less healthy, less cared for, or less prepared for life than their
parents were at the same age.”
136
He goes on to argue that “parents pay much more time
outside of the home getting validation from outside peers rather than what is going on in
the home.”
137
The need for better parenting or parent/child relations was also of grave
concern for youth of color in South Central Los Angeles. In the summer of 1981, during
the South Central Los Angeles Youth Summit, youth disclosed that they were concerned
over the level of child abuse in the community, the growth in “spoiled youth,” and
feelings of abandonment by adults. They ultimately asked for better parent/child
communication. This Youth Summit was an opportunity for youth of color in South
Central and throughout the Greater Los Angeles area to have an arena to voice their
concerns and needs. In attendance were government officials, city workers, community
organizations, and residents. Along with their demands for better parent/youth relations
they also called for setting up a cleaner community commission that would ensure that
the city worked harder at cleaning up alleys, more garbage pickup, clean shopping
centers, and clean up the empty lots. They also wanted more recreational spaces like
136
Sharna Olfman, Childhood Lost: How American Culture is Failing our Children (Praeger, 2005), 59.
137
Ibid., 66.
236
parks, more discos for young people, more movie houses and drive-ins, and recreation
that was connected with school work.
138
West makes valid points about how the level of parenting and involvement in a
child’s life makes a difference in their overall success of a child. The value placed on
being “good” and “involved” parents are eroding. Policy makers have a long history of
critiquing families of color parenting and family structure as the source of the problem.
Such arguments place blame on individual actors without much consideration of how
structural inequality has contributed to a complex understanding of family. Also it
neglects to account for how structural impediments make it difficult for working class
and working poor families to spend ample time with their children as many of these
families work two or more jobs to make ends meet. In this globalized economy where
work schedules are not confined to a business office hours but rather 24-hour production
schedule creates the conditions for difficult parenting structures.
The prison industrial complex, one that ensures that the majority of men of color
spend the bulk of their time behind bars, makes for a difficult and complex relationship to
parenting as well. These difficult work schedules and policing of Black and ethnic
Mexican men and women, means that communities of color in Los Angeles must find
creative ways to parent that often extends beyond the biological mother and/or father.
Parenting becomes a communal effort that not only involves extended family like
grandmothers, aunts, and uncles but also neighbors and community organizations. This
follows a longer trajectory of parenting in communities of color. In the case of South
138
“Youth Summit Report,” Box 3692, Collection 293, Tom Bradley Administration Papers, 1993-1973,
Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.
237
Central Los Angeles, and in particular in Head Start centers, African American and
Latina women are seeking each others advice, companionship, and assistance to make
sense and navigate raising children in such an accelerated consumer, technology, and
violent culture and environment. Parenting involves a whole host of actors from Head
Start, community services, and afterschool programs. Like the High School students that
Corwin tracks, children also need collective guidance if there is to be any hope.
Psychologists and sociologists are equally concerned for the ways that today’s
consumer culture has transformed parenting practices. Psychologists agree that in the
past, parents “insisted that their children go outside to play, yet increasingly, parents rely
on “electronic babysitters” to keep kids inside.” Children then consume forty hours of
media each week, surpassing the time given to every activity but sleep.
139
Part of this
move towards using television and technology as surrogate parents has meant that Barbie
is passé by preschool. If children play with a doll, it is not Barbie but with “edgy,
streetwise Brat dolls” or leave dolls all together and play with electronic games. The
concept of play, and how children play, has changed dramatically over the course of U.S.
history. Play is defined as “spontaneous, joyous activity of children.”
140
In the pre-modern
period, toys were not the source of entertainment but play with other children. Modern
society, according to Howard Chudacoff, has placed a very high value on formal toys
than anything else that children collect and play—found objects are labeled as junk.
141
The growth of the Mickey Mouse Club, Disneyland, and Barbie exemplified some of the
139
Sharna Olfman, Childhood Lost: How American Culture is Failing our Children (Praeger, 2005), 203.
140
Howard Chudacoff, Children at Play: An American History (New York University, 2008), 1.
141
Ibid., 6.
238
“major themes of adult domestication of children’s play since the mid-twentieth century:
commercialization and the co-optation of time and activity.”
142
Toys, play, and childhood
became overwhelmed and tied into keeping children indoors and away from the “hazards
of the street.” In turn, making television the surrogate babysitter, “critics charged created
Saturday morning and after-school “ghettos” where kids’ culture was shaped by violent
cartoons, fantastic adventures, and ads for frivolous toys and sugary junk food.”
143
Chudacoff and Sharna Olfman both agree that play, most especially with other children,
“inspires imagination and invention, helping children attain positive emotions and control
negative ones.”
144
The lack of children playing outside is not only linked to children’s increased
dependence on electronics but also due to the lack of open, safe spaces in which children
can engage in free play. Mark Wild’s investigation into early twentieth century interracial
community formation is especially adept at laying Los Angeles residents relationship to
public spaces. In Los Angeles, Anglo reformers were concerned with the environment in
which children could play. The growth in youth gangs ensured that the political and
social imperative for creating safe spaces for children gained momentum. Playgrounds,
for Anglo reformers, were a way to get kids away from gangs. The “Playground
Movement” goal was to build playgrounds for children to have healthy alternatives.
White ethnics in Los Angeles had easy access to these play areas, yet for many children,
especially children of color access to playgrounds were not as convenient. Not all
142
Ibid., 157.
143
Ibid., 166.
144
Olfman, Childhood Lost, 203-204.
239
playgrounds were “open” to all racial groups, but those that were did not mean that “all
groups used them equally or that harmonious ethno-racial relations prevailed.”
145
For
example, an observer of the “Watts playground asserted that white children rejected
African American playmates and associated with Mexican children only if they were
“fine looking” and well dressed.”
146
Despite reports that suggested that children and
families were self-segregating by race, playground officials still wanted to paint a picture
that children played together irrespective of race. Wild, argues that the integrated
environment of the playgrounds stood in contrast to the ethno-racial restrictions placed on
other Los Angeles recreational facilities, as a vast majority of these spaces that were not
open to families of color. Despite the reformers efforts, divisions occurred in large part
because of the location of playgrounds, as they were not placed in convenient places for
working class kids and kids of color.
By the 1970s, the politics surrounding playgrounds in Los Angeles had changed
dramatically. Parents and park officials worried with the safety in parks (ie. protecting
children from hazardous tools and materials). In 1981, a study by the U.S. Consumer
Product Safety Commission reported that American children were not using playgrounds
in the intended manner, as they were not using the jungle-jims and play equipment as
they were intended. For many parents, this raised an alarm as to the safety of these toys
for their children and transformed the frequency of parents taking their children to parks
145
Mark Wild, Street Meeting: Multiethnic Neighborhoods in Early Twentieth Century Los Angeles
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 102.
146
Ibid.
240
and playgrounds.
147
For children living in urban city centers, safety not only involved
using play equipment properly, but also protecting children of other dangers. The
violence by warring gangs also impacted parks and playgrounds. Gangs, both African
American and Mexican, had taken over these spaces and for families and their children
this posed a problem as they felt their children were not safe. This only made matters
worse, as there was already a shortage in public recreational spaces in the inner-city.
In late 1999, the city of Los Angeles made a concerted effort to build more parks
in the neighborhood but under a different rubric. Urban planners believed “small urban
parks serve people better,” and began a project to build “pocket” (a half-acre or smaller)
or “mini-parks” (between a half-acre and an acre). Residents and activists in the inner-
city applauded this effort. Jose Cruz, resident of South Central Los Angeles, explained
how his three sons had to “routinely play soccer in an empty, litter-strewn lot across the
street from his South-Central home” and noted that the nearest park was more than a mile
away, thus, “we would all like a park because there are no parks around.” Politicians
stressed that these newly built parks must be taken care of and were the responsibility of
community residents.
148
For families in the inner-city, this placed a burden to ensure that
these spaces did not become overrun by gangs and safe spaces for kids to play; a
responsibility that could not always be guaranteed. Despite these limitations parents like
Jose Cruz were eager to have these mini-parks built in their neighborhood. Child
psychologists agree, these spaces afford children an opportunity to engage in spontaneous
147
Howard Chudacoff, Children at Play, 203.
148
Hugo Martin, “City Seeks to Put Mini-Parks in Urban Pockets,” Los Angeles Times, February 8,
1999. A1.
241
play with other children by taking them away from an overdependence on electronic
games and television.
Shifts in children’s play alternatives and choices have proven detrimental in
child’s development. At such an early stage of development, “children foreclose on the
stage of initiative” and in many ways “prematurely push them into the stage of industry…
we may indeed succeed in getting some children to read, write, and complete math
equations precociously. But we may also be creating a cohort of children who lack
spontaneity, creativity, and a love of learning.”
149
Psychologists cite Europe as an
example in which child play is still an integral part of early child education and
development. In the U.S. (in large part due to No Child Left Behind Act) the commitment
to teaching for the end of the year test has created a gulf between what educators believe
to be optimal child development and what they are told do in the class. By following
“prescribed curricula and sideline play in preparation for standardized testing” has placed
children at a loss both in the home and classroom.
150
Historian Steven Mintz argues that by the 1970s parents began to emphasize a
“prepared” childhood, one that would equip young people for success in postmodern
society. According to Mintz, middle class parents have become less and less patient with
the ‘wastefulness of play’ and upwardly mobile parents want their children to be better
than average in all things, “so they try to provide them with professionally run activities
that would enrich their minds, tone their bodies, inculcate physical skills, and enhance
149
Sharna Olfman, Childhood Lost, 205.
150
Ibid.
242
their self-esteem. You have parents enrolling them in all sorts of programs, sports, etc.”
151
This also translates into preschool education opportunities. What emerge are two polar
opposites. On one end you have, for example, the “crème de la crème” of preschool
education centers and schools in New York City paying up to $15,000 dollars a year in
tuition or bartering favors in the corporate world to get their children in these programs.
While at the other end of spectrum, state and federally funded preschool centers that do
not have the same financial support as private preschool centers. These disparities have
not gone unnoticed. A national survey recently found that 87 percent of the populace
supports public funding to guarantee every 3 to 4 year old access to a top-notch
preschool.
152
Even economists have translated their findings into a language of benefits
outweighing the costs; where their work has confirmed that early education is a wise
investment.
153
The support does not translate into actual on the ground financial assistance
for equal and quality educational opportunities for children across the board. Head Start
unfortunately has not received the financial support that is up to par with what Anglo
middle and upper class children preschool centers.
Despite these financial limitations, Head Start is the safest and most convenient
place for children to play and learn throughout South Central and Watts. Along with the
educational emphasis of learning, Head Start teachers ensure that children have a space in
which to be children and play. In the early years of the program, children were thankful
151
Ibid., 165.
152
David Kirp, The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2007), 3.
153
Ibid., 10.
243
and entertained by and with the limited amount of toys and play equipment offered at
Head Start centers. In many ways crayons, pencils, toy phones, tricycles were a novelty,
something that they did not have access to previously. However, in the last few years,
Phillipa Johnson discusses that children’s access to technology and television has war-off
the novelty that classroom basics use to have. These tools remain the primary mode in
which children are educated and entertained in class, but they have left teachers at a loss
as by the time some children arrive to Head Start they are already exposed to the quick
transitions and rapid burst of knowledge that comes from programming like Sesame
Street, Baby Einstein, and cartoons. Children, in turn, expect the same level of rapidness
associated with their classroom interactions. Teachers and educators often feel
overwhelmed at having to keep up, thus, not only has the lack of free play potentially
thwarted children’s imaginative development but also placed teachers at a disadvantaged.
Head Start attempted to save children from “death or harm in the concrete
jungle.” Despite the bleakness in which the inner-city is often discussed and understood
families, activists, educators, organizations, and scholars believe that there are hopeful
possibilities for residents in these communities, most especially children. Gwendolyn
Brooks, African American poet, in the mid-twentieth century believed that “the subject of
childhood represents a means through which she can interrogate and unmask dominant
notions of domesticity and child-rearing as part of her own radical and social and poetic
agenda.” Children and childhood in her assessment represent a “hopeful possibility” and
the transformative potential of “imagination or a radical innocence.” Brooks argues that
childhood is a social construction, and “like the romantic idyllic landscape of white,
244
middle class children, poor children of color also had a possibility at a radical new
world…their childhood was also socially constructed into a childhood that was subsumed
under the prevailing cold war family values ideology.”
154
It was this ideology, of an
idyllic, nuclear family that children of all racial and class backgrounds have a right to.
Brooks warns us that this ideal paradise is often times not a reality for children of color,
and that they too have the right to construct their own sense of what childhood means
outside the bounds of what middle-class white America may perceive as an ideal.
Childhood, hence, is an ever-changing concept.
For mothers in South Central Los Angeles, and participants in Head Start, they
realize that their children will not be privy to what middle class children are provided,
nevertheless within the boundaries of their neighborhood they hope to carve out a space
in which their children can play, interact, and learn. A recent Nielsen study found that
children between the ages of 6 to 11 spent more than 28 hours a week using computers,
cell phones, televisions and other electronic devices. From 1979 to 1999, children on the
whole lost 12 hours of free time a week, including eight hours of unstructured play and
outdoor activities.
155
Childhood is being redefined for children across the board, but in the
case of working class children of color, and children of South Central in particular, they
must increasingly foster their sense of childhood in the mist of an increased technology
and within an impoverished community. In South Central, Head Start officials believed
that at this juncture children’s lives, four to five years old, they needed to carve a space in
154
Richard Flynn, “The Kindergarten Of New Consciousness: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Social
Construction of Childhood” African American Review, 34:3 (Autumn, 2000), 483-499, 485-487.
155
Elkind, David, “Play Time is Over,” New York Times, March 26, 2010.
245
which children could play, develop their imagination, and socialize with other children
within the context that reflected their lived reality.
Teaching in a Diverse Classroom
An investigation into Head Start offers a way to understand how children and
families confront demographic change, and the ways that an increased multiracial
landscape impacts the school readiness goal. Mark Wild, in his investigation of early
twentieth century multiethnic central Los Angeles, discusses how children, unlike adults,
were open to forge interethnic friendships and relationships. Children build bonds in
schools, playgrounds, and public spaces; opportunities that were unavailable and in many
cases undesired by parents.
156
According to Wild, children created “inter-ethnoracial”
friendships without much regard for the social implications” and “as they grew older they
encountered more resistance to such relationships from both within and outside their
ethnic community and became more aware of the distributions of power that traced racial,
ethnic, gender, and class boundaries. Many children rapidly internalized a respect for
ethnic boundaries and hierarchies and imposed them in their own social circles, while
other bucked and transcended the social boundaries that confined many adults.”
157
In the
playground and during free time at school, Wild documents how children were much
more accommodating to friendships across racial difference. Wild finds that these cross
racial friendships did not go unchallenged or unchanged. As Angelino children grew
older, the interaction with more Anglo children, teachers, family, and neighbors
156
Mark Wild, Street of Meeting, 95.
157
Ibid.
246
“undercut the promise of egalitarian, integrated social relations, imposing on students a
multitude of often contradictory lessons about the meaning and significance of racial and
ethnic categories. These mixed messages often confused students.”
158
For Wild, the
pivotal transition from adolescence to adulthood “suggests that while integration may
have been necessary to achieve inter-ethnoracial cooperation” it was not sufficient to do
so as “persistent stratification and division, whether instituted by school officials, parents,
and peers, often eroded children’s willingness to cross ethnoracial boundaries.”
159
Wild
aptly discusses it in terms of “the promise and problem of interracial spaces.”
Head Start’s throughout South Central primarily serviced the needs of families
and children of color—a feature that did not define Wild’s study of central city interracial
childhood friendships. The need to guide youth and children through their multiracial
and multicultural futures requires that “safe, constructive things to do and places to go are
developed to learn about other cultures in non-conflict situations.”
160
Head Start centers
throughout South Central Los Angeles were majority African American, and increasingly
Mexican immigrant in origin. In the 1970s and 1980s, teachers and students were
predominantly African American, but by early 1990s a normal Head Start classroom had
a majority ethnic Mexican student body. It is this racial transformation that forced Head
Start directors and officials to make an effort to hire Latinos. The hands-on approach of
recruiting internally from the community like Head Start mothers had many benefits. As
158
Ibid., 114.
159
Ibid., 120.
160
“Racial Harmony and Discourse Task Force,” Box 1179, Collection 293, Tom Bradley Administrative
Papers, 1973-1993, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.
247
the demographics in the community changed, administrators like Garner and Johnson
looked to their community as a resource. In addition, they had to become advocates of
teaching and celebrating different cultures. From 1977 to 1981, during the Jimmy Carter
presidency, Head Start’s received special and increased funding for bilingual and
bicultural Head Start Migrant programs throughout the U.S..
161
Head Start centers were
mandated by federal law to ensure that they hired “persons who speak the primary
language of the children and are knowledgeable about their heritage… at least one
teacher or aide interacting regularly with the children must speak their language.”
162
Under this new funding rubric and mandate, Head Start administrators were able to
expand on their mission of investigating and learning about different cultures. For
example, for Garner her childhood experience instructed her commitment to a
multicultural curriculum as she wanted all children to learn about,
“different customs, so that if they [children] go to another school and meet other
children they won’t be surprised like I was. We do this so kids can understand
other cultures. When I was little, I didn’t know Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t get
Christmas presents and I gave a little boy a present. His father was insulted that I
even offered it.”
163
This memory ensured that early into Garner’s teaching philosophy she incorporated
lessons that celebrated difference—and of upmost concern was to teach children about
Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.
161
“Head Start Report,” Box 2, Los Angeles Area Federation of Settlement and Neighborhood Centers,
Inc., Special Collections, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
162
Janet Currie and Duncan Thomas, “Does Head Start Help Hispanic Children?” National Bureau of
Economic Research Published Report, October 1996, 5.
163
Kay Mills, Something Better for My Children, 80.
248
Hiring Latina teachers was an asset to the overall longevity of the program, and
more importantly, a reflection of how the community had changed. Head Start officials
embraced Latina teachers entering the classroom as it made their job teaching Latino
History easier. Garner spoke very little Spanish, but with assistance from teachers like
Osuna, and by extension mothers like Esther Sanchez, she was able to best address the
needs of Mexican children and families and more importantly encourage African
American children to embrace learning Spanish. By learning the days of the week, colors,
and songs in Spanish, she hoped it would encourage further curiosity for Mexican
culture. Garner remembers a particular incident with fondness. On a summer day, she
encouraged the Mexican and African American Head Start parents and students to hold
hands in a circle around the table as she led grace and then sang as she always did with
the children: “Thank you for my luh-unch, gracias por las comidas.” The fact that she
uttered these words in both languages and the families around the table were both African
American and ethnic Mexican led her to conclude, “people breaking bread together
makes my day.”
164
The need for bilingual Head Start centers was largely due to the ways that the
initial wave of Mexican immigrants into South Central were first generation immigrants
that hardly spoke English. Mexican immigrant children spoke Spanish and very little to
no English. Teaching was done entirely in English, but teachers like Osuna helped some
of the children in Spanish and spoke to the parents in Spanish as a way to help the
transition into learning in English. Mexican immigrant children and families found it
164
Ibid., 86.
249
initially difficult to interact with children and families that were not Spanish speaking
Mexican immigrants. Garner and Head Start teachers agree that “Mexican children go
through a six-to-eight month silent period. They’re assimilating what’s around them.
Ninety nine percent of them are speaking beautiful English by June.”
165
A national study
by the National Bureau of Economic Research in 1996 reported that participation by
Latino children in Head Start has a positive impact the English language acquisition of
Latino children. This study focused on Latino children and families across the nation. It
found that Latino children of Mexican origin reap the largest gains from programs like
Head Start. This is especially true of children in California, as they showed remarkable
progress after attending Head Start.
166
Bilingual early childhood education is beneficial
for ethnic Mexican children because preschool is their “first exposure to English and
preschool experiences are likely to enhance cultural assimilation and socialization.”
167
The level of bilingual teachers and interactions in the classroom also created a
space for African American children to learn Spanish. African American students, like
Raven, would gladly share what they learned. She would recite the colors in Spanish,
“azul, rojo, verde” and then she then in English. Garner would celebrate such
achievements when she said, “All right, girlfriend… You [Raven] came in here speaking
English and you’ll [Raven] leave speaking Spanish.”
168
Despite the emphasis on English
acquisition in the classroom, Head Start teachers took advantage of the bilingual
165
Ibid., 157; Jack Jones, “Head Start Off to a Good Start,” Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1965, A1
166
Janet Currie and Duncan Thomas, “Does Head Start Help Hispanic Children?,” 5, 25.
167
Ibid. 4.
168
Kay Mills, Something Better for My Children, 80.
250
classroom to ensure that African American children also learned Spanish words and
songs.
Racially integrated Head Start centers like the Pasadena Pacific Oaks College
Head Start (described earlier) provide teachers a transformative experience as well.
Teachers learned to leave behind their “preconceived ideas about poverty children” and
start “thinking of them only as children.” More involvement between teachers and
children of different racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds forced everyone to notice the
“warmth and honest trust that children had for [their teachers] they seemed to move into a
new stream of enthusiasm.”
169
Head Start was an avenue of intercultural exchange and
growth. Head Start, in conjunction with Sesame Street’s programming, allowed children,
teachers, and parents the promise of a multiracial landscape. Sesame Street’s backdrop
was an integrated neighborhood of whites, ethnic Mexicans, African Americans, and
Asian Americans. Sesame Street also taught children how to count in Spanish, and in this
way, highlighted and celebrated cultural differences and diversity. The show’s
researchers believed that by celebrating diversity they would be able to eradicate racism.
The show utilized “conscious devices—an inner-city neighborhood, and integrated cast,
an equal role for all children in solving problems” with a “hidden curriculum that sought
to bolster the black and minority child’s self-respect and to portray the multi-ethnic,
multi-cultural world in which both majority and minority children are growing up.” The
decision to locate Sesame Street in an inner-city neighborhood crowded with garbage
cans and brownstones (even though Los Angeles housing landscape was vastly different
169
Head Start Folder, Box 90, Collection 1642, August F. Hawkins Papers, 1935-1990, Special Collections,
Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
251
that than portrayed in Sesame Street) was crucial to the program’s commitment to
promoting racial understanding and tolerance. In many ways, for middle class and white
children that participated in Head Start and watched Sesame Street, the inner-city became
a site of adventure rather than a site of racism, poverty, and violence. Sesame Street
helped suburban kids not to fear the inner-city, an angle parents celebrated as “exposed”
their children to another world without having to visit.
170
In today’s world, placing a
children’s program in an inner-city and diverse soundstage may not seem radical,
however, it was radical compared to all other children’s programming whose settings
were white middle class homes and life.
Sesame Street’s educational premise was that cognition could be the great
universalizer between children of different racial and socio-economic backgrounds.
Viewing preschool cognition and education as an equalizer of inequality blinds
researchers of other real structural inequalities that preschool television never
challenged.
171
Sesame Street and Head Start organizers belief in the promise of how an
integrated television series and school environment can eradicate all racism is a difficult
proposition, most especially at the hands of white children and families. In the Pasadena
Pacific Oaks College Head Start not everyone celebrated in the promise of integration.
One small middle class white child at the center expressed her acknowledgment of a little
Mexican American girl when she stated “that little brown girl over there took my
tricycle.”
172
This young girl did acknowledge the presence of a Mexican American
170
Heather Hendershot and Lynn Spigel, Saturday Morning Sensors, 152.
171
Ibid., 143.
252
classmate, but not as a positive experience. She failed to provide a name for the young
girl as well as saw her as someone taking something that belonged to her. This type of
interaction could lead to moments of mistrust and anxiety, not the promise of interracial
unity and understanding. Sesame Street’s multiracial landscape is not enough to change
this young girl’s racial mistrust. This can only be achieved through continued interaction.
Head Start’s classrooms, most especially, the active efforts by teachers like Garner and
Osuna can offer an opportunity for children and families of different racial backgrounds
to interact which can diminish levels of mistrust and misunderstanding.
The cultural diversity, and teacher’s awareness of such, is key as Head Start in
Los Angeles reassessed its curriculum. The racial transition in the community and in
Head Start, while not always easily embraced, required that centers had to find creative
ways to make African American history relevant and important to Latino families and
children, and vice versa. Along with the language barriers that made the relationships
between African American and Latinos most difficult, children had to make sense of their
parents own racial prejudice and attitudes. Parents pass some of the racial tensions and
prejudice onto their kids. Children formative years in the home have often shielded them
from interacting and playing with children of different racial backgrounds. Head Start
officials declare that Latino children are most weary and apprehensive about mingling
with African American children.
173
Mexican American children initial days in the
program are meant with some skepticism. The first few days at a Head Start center one
172
Jack Jones, “Head Start Off to a Good Start,” Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1965, A1.
173
Kay Mills, Something Better for my Children, 120.; Oral History Phillipa Johnson.
253
hears the cries of children for their mom, siblings, and family. Their apprehension over
being in a new environment and context translates into seeking out people that look like
them, which often means that ethnic Mexican children gravitated toward ethnic Mexican
teachers and children. Such divisions create barriers in making friends of different racial
backgrounds. Ethnic Mexican children (especially in the late 1970s and early 1980s) felt
isolated and lonely upon first arrival to Head Start as they were in the minority. Currently
in South Central and Watts, where Head Start service majority Latino children, African
American children feel isolated and begin to question and internalize “why won’t they
play with me.”
174
The initial days at Head Start are largely marked by segregation, often along race,
yet over the course of the school year children are much more willing and able to break
down racial walls. Teachers are particularly important in this endeavor, as they are
conduits of authority and knowledge for these children. While parents might not be open
in discussing cross racial alliances at the dinner table, their day to day encounters with
their teachers and students makes for an early intervention about how racial difference
should not be tension or conflict. Some of the cross-racial friendships that form in Head
Start centers might not be long-lasting; however, I argue they do offer an opportunity in a
child’s cognitive, social, and emotional development to not associate racial difference as
negative, but rather an opportunity to understand the richness in diversity.
The racial background of the teachers in South Central Los Angeles, largely
African American and Latina, has been an integral source in forming a collaborative and
174
Oral History, Phillipa Johnson.
254
friendly environment in which children can learn how African Americans and ethnic
Mexicans must coexist peacefully. Working across racial difference was and is not an
easy task for all Head Start teachers and administrators. They, too, had to learn how to let
go of their on preconceive racial stereotypes and understandings and open themselves up
to the inclusion and increased hiring of Latina teachers and assistance. This transition,
while met with some trepidation, was not as difficult in that the mission of the program
was to help impoverished families of South Central, a mission that parents and Head Start
teachers firmly believed in. Head Start has serviced the needs of ethnic Mexican children
across Southern California since it began, therefore, transferring a diverse curriculum
already utilized in the eastern part of Los Angeles made for an easier transition into the
cross racial collaboration between African American and Latino Head Start advocates
and instructors. By 1995 nationally, Head Start’s students were 36 percent African
American, 32 percent white, 25 percent Latino, 4 percent American Indian, and 3 percent
Asian. In Los Angeles and Head Start centers in Watts, about 55 percent of children
attending Head Start were Mexican or Central American and 40 percent were African
American.
175
It was this multiracial landscape and multitude of Head Start centers and
delegate agencies that created the conditions for easier transition into servicing the needs
of Mexican children and families.
By the 1990s, celebrations for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s Birthday and Cinco de
Mayo became commonplace throughout Head Start’s in South Central and Watts. A
teacher at a Head Start center stated, “we ended up with a number of kids wanting to be
175
Ibid., 18.
255
Dr. King when we have the children portray various Black history figures in February… I
remember one Mexican child being King one year.” Even after the event the Mexican
child “walked around feeling so proud”
176
Teachers had to find creative ways in which to
instruct children that figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. not only advocated for African
American equality and rights, but all disfranchised poor people. On Cinco de Mayo
teachers set up a party to celebrate the 1862 Mexican victory over the French in the
Mexican state of Puebla. They celebrated Cinco de Mayo with piñatas and other
reenactments that actively involved all the children and parents. Over the years, teachers
like Garner gathered curriculum and books that helped them make sense and teach
African American and Mexican history and culture for young children.
177
This was made
easier and possible with the increased presence of Latino teachers and parents involved in
the program.
This approach of teaching difference and diversity through an exploration of food,
folkways, holidays, and language is part of a larger trajectory of multicultural curriculum
in education. Educators believed that this was an effective tool to celebrate diversity.
Critics of multicultural education fear multiculturalism because its represents the social
and political fragmentation of national identity, a loss of what is American (ie. white and
protestant). Also educators who are critics of this method suggest that such teaching
models reify difference, as well as increases the “normalization of multicultural discourse
and its resultant failure to reinvent or confront established categories of knowledge or
176
Ibid., 155.
177
Ibid.
256
relations of power,” as multicultural curricula simply adds ethnic content to culture.
Culture in this way becomes a stand in for race.
178
And at worst, multicultural curriculum
breaks down culture through a process of categorization, which in turn instructs children
to learn through categories and places them at a disadvantage. Advocates of this
curriculum believed that discussing and introducing children to some features that
characterize different cultures is positive. These multicultural educational resources must
be “sophisticated and reflective understanding of culture and the most important change
that needs to made is proper contextualization: that is, culture cannot and should not be
artificially inserted, bits and pieces, into everything and anything in the guise of
multiculturalizing it.” What is required is a “holistic and comparative perspective that
allows students to draw their own conclusions and abstractions from evidence” to move
way from prejudiced, negative, simple, and categorical views and understanding of
culture.
179
Teachers at Head Start attempted, as best they could to balance their curriculum in
light of these critiques and suggestions for multicultural education. They presented and
discussed Mexican immigrant and African American experiences through the lens of
history, always attempting to contextualize what they were studying. In part, this strategy
proves particularly difficult when teaching four to five year olds, yet Head Start teachers
believed in the political act in which they were engaging. Head Start teachers understood
that part of the lessons were not only for the children, but also parents. The lesson plans
178
Diane Hoffman, “Culture and Self in Multicultural Education: Reflection on Discourse, Text, Practice”
American Education Research Journal Vol 33, No. 3 (Autumn, 1996) pg. 545-569, 547.
179
Ibid. 555.
257
had to operate on two levels. They understand that by discussing these things, while for
educators might seem superficial categories of culture and difference, it is a way and
strategy for these two groups to begin to understand and envision a way to coexist that is
not tense or based on conflict. For this reason, Head Start teachers embrace of a more
multicultural curriculum in the late 1980s and early 1990s signaled that they were
growing comfortable, accommodating, and understanding of how the needs of the
community were changing.
In the end, children like Sammy, Blanca, Shardae, Kathy, Raven, and Michael
each represent how their lives have been transformed from quiet, shy, and anxious
children on their first days of Head Start to active, inquisitive, and friendly children.
Many of these children’s anxiety and apprehension in the program originated from
children having grown up in the an environment in which they fought constantly at a
young age, but slowly realized that Head Start was a “neighborhood where the children
soon stopped fighting” and worked together. The concept of Head Start as a
neighborhood frames how Head Start teachers and families understand the role of this
program in the community. It conjures up an image of space and place, where for
children and families of Head Start are not just about building social bonds but also
creating a space, place in which children can grow and be loved and care for. Head Start
teachers hoped that “little ones would think of themselves as “me”…someone who is
loving and loveable, someone who is to be respected and treated with dignity… someone
258
who one day will have the ability, the wisdom, the courage and the convictions to make
the world a better place in which to live.”
180
“We Were the Only Game in Town”
In the late 1960s, Kendren Head Start Center began as one of the smallest Head
Start delegate agencies in Los Angeles County. By 2005 it was one of the largest
agencies with over twenty-eight Head Start centers under its umbrella. It is now the
biggest and longest running Head Start program, and it is found in the heart of South
Central Los Angeles. To date, this Head Start continues to be viewed as an “oasis of
hope.” Its longevity and positive appraisals in and by the community are connected to its
mission and belief that by “affect[ing] positive change in the behavior and family
structure” one can “bring about hope in the future in our community… and include the
entire family unit in education and training not just the preschool age child.” Kendren
Head Start’s, like all the others discussed through this chapter, are oasis’s of hope that
were built and achieved through the collective effort of community residents, activist, and
government sponsorship. Phillipa Johnson reflects with fondness when Head Start was
the largest and only early childhood provider in the area. As she put it, “we were the only
game in town.” In 1995, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Early Head Start
grants. These grants offered financial assistance to establish and expand early childhood
education services for pregnant women and children from birth to age three (an age group
that had previously not been covered through previous federal legislation). The
180
What is Head Start?, Los Angeles Sentinel, January 18, 1968, A2.
259
government’s financial commitment to early child development and education created
conditions for a proliferation and growth of these types of programs.
In South Central, and across Los Angeles, the growth in early childhood
education centers is readily apparent. In addition to this government funding, voters in
California voted and approved Proposition 10 in 1998, a 50 cent per cigarette pack and
tobacco tax that went towards the financial assistance for Head Start, First 5 Los Angeles,
and St. Johns Well Child and Family Center. These organizations cater to working class
families’ health, education, and social needs as early as pregnancy. A cohort of women
and families that Head Start did not have the funding to service. The growth in these
organizations (private, public, and government funded) was due in large part to the
countless studies that boast the promise and positive effects of early childhood education.
The growth in early education centers reshaped how Head Start centers approach
recruiting children and families into the program. Johnson, discusses how it use to be
enough to say Head Start was a free program nestled within the community, however,
this marker of “free” is no longer enough to get children enrolled as all the
aforementioned programs are also free. Head Start must boast its quality, success, and
longevity in the community to get residents in the community to join. Its longevity and
success is by far Head Start’s largest asset when administrations recruit private donations.
The competition by these different centers has dramatically changed the game for Head
Start delegate agencies. They have been forced to enter into a more business type model
were early childhood education became increasingly framed through a business model of
profits, where studies, reports, and statistics must evidence Head Start’s success.
260
Scholars, educators, economist agree that Head Start is an important asset for
child development. Children’s growth through their participation in the program
illustrates how the combination between learning and playing must be fostered. Maria’s
young daughter, Paola, meekly replies when asked her if she likes Head Start and what
she does there, “uh huh (as she nods her head)… I like school… I play a lot.” Maria
elaborates, “she was very shy, she would run away from adults. Head Start has helped her
open up and trust others. She loves to count, sing. She also has other little girls to play
with… she loves her friends and teachers.”
181
Establishing a Head Start center throughout
South Central was particularly difficult, challenging, and a true labor of love for
residents. Residents and political activists almost always found themselves at odds with
political officials, and this served to bolster their commitment to the program. Against all
odds— like not having a physical infrastructure in place for classrooms, training a cohort
of teachers, and convincing residents of the promise and possibility for the program—
South Central Head Start’s remain as a staple in the community.
An investigation into Head Start centers in South Central reveals that it is not only
a transformative experience for children, but also parents involved in the program. Many
Head Start mothers became teachers, staff, and social workers affiliated with the
program. The diversity of the community also shaped the daily interactions and politics
of Head Start centers and curriculum. The multiracial landscape in which Head Start
operated from the 1980s onward was one in which African American residents found
creative ways to include the growing Mexican immigrant community settling the area. It
181
Oral history with Maria Garcia.
261
was met with some trepidation, however, the interaction and experiences between
African American and Mexican immigrant children, families, and teachers shows that the
relationships between these two communities is not always defined by tension but a
willingness to overcome racial divisions and form genuine friendships and relationships.
The challenge of establishing centers and dealing with demographic shift also impacted
the development of community health centers, the subject of the next chapter.
262
CHAPTER 3
The Wave of the Future:
Community Health Centers
In the fall of 2008, the waiting room at the Los Angeles County-University
Southern California Medical Center (LAC-USC Medical Center) was inundated with
pain-ridden patients. They waited patiently most if not an entire day to see a doctor. Their
appointments simply secured them a space in this medical center’s waitlist queue.
Patients who inquired how much longer their wait would be were curtly instructed to wait
for their name to be called by this medical center’s staff. The anticipation and waiting
culminated in a quick fifteen-minute doctor visit in which at best patients were rushed out
with a pharmaceutical prescription to minimize their pain in hand. While waiting for his
appointment, middle-aged patient Jose Lugo expressed,
“I never imagined I would be a limosnero (beggar), waiting hours to see my
doctor, and being told I am ok when I feel pain. I use to see the long lines of
people waiting to be treated… and I used to laugh, eso era como hecharme la sal
(it was like wishing my own bad luck). I never knew that I would one day be one
of those people.”
He elaborated that the best he could do was take comfort in being among the fortunate
few eligible to receive medical care at this free to low-cost medical center. Unemployed,
without savings, or assets of his own such medical care was his only option.
1
He could
only afford to wait as long as an entire day for medical care, and over time and like many
fellow patients in similar situations, he developed a waiting routine.
Lugo and fellow patients had become used to preparing and bringing a plastic
grocery bag packed with a combination of water, fruit, sandwiches, and/or chips. They
1
Jose Lugo, informal conversation with author, Los Angeles, October 10, 2008.
263
knew that seeking medical care would be a full day’s ordeal.
2
Along with food and
snacks, Lugo’s plastic bag also contained records of his previous medical exams,
appointment book, and other forms of documentation that confirmed his low-income
status. Carrying these documents was important as each L.A. clinic and medical center
used a different set of procedures, guidelines, and paperwork to determine the patient’s
identity and eligibility to receive medical care, confirm their scheduled appointment, and
record their results and future appointments. The assumption that patients should know
what to carry or provide during their scheduled appointments at these clinics and medical
exams is one of the greatest sources for misunderstanding between patients and
healthcare practitioners. Often patients bare the brunt of these misunderstandings as they
are shamed publicly if they are unprepared during their medical appointments. The
dehumanizing attitudes and procedures used to care for the impoverished and uninsured
patients of Los Angeles reveal the unfair burdens of seeking medical care when these
patients are often at their most vulnerable state, ill and financially desperate. It is a reality
that working poor and working class communities of color confront each time they seek
affordable medical care in Los Angeles County.
2
The number of uninsured people in Los Angeles, needing medical services is astronomical. In April of
2010, a weeklong medical clinic was staged at the Los Angele Sports Arena offering medical, dental, and
vision services to Los Angeles at no cost—all you had to do was wait in line for days to get an arm band
that would allow you to see volunteer medical practitioner. The summer before, a similar medical clinic
convention was held, again servicing thousands of patients, but that is only a fraction of those that actually
need help. For more see: Molly Hennessy-Fiske, “Free Medical Clinic to Return to Los Angeles area in
April” Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2010; Bob Pool and Kimi Yoshino, “Hundreds Spend Night at the
Forum to get Free Medical Care,” Los Angeles Times, August 12, 2009.
264
Beyond preparing to wait patiently and provide necessary forms of
documentation, patients also had to overlook being mistreated when waiting for their
medical care. Often the pronouncement of their names intensified their mistreatment and
vulnerability at the hands of LAC-USC Medical Center’s staff and other personnel. This
medical center’s staff of nurses may call out “Maria Medina” when they are requesting
that “Maria Medrano” enter the doctor-patient rooms, or “Willie Nelson” becomes
“Wilhelm Olson.” The blundering of names, while the mistake of nurses and/or other
members of this medical center’s staff, is used to reprimand patients. They are
consistently blamed for the consequences of the staff’s carelessness. But how is Willie
supposed to know that his name was really Wilhelm or Maria that her last name was no
longer Medina but Medrano? There is no way of knowing as the waiting room was
replete with fellow African American and Latino patients. When Maria and Willie
approached medical center staff regarding their appointments, nurses instead of realizing
their mistakes, admonished them and deemed it a reflection of patient’s incompetence.
They refused to admit or hold themselves accountable for such confusion. Maria,
frustrated by such a blunder, after all, it resulted in her having to wait approximately an
additional two hours for her appointment did not remain silent. She took it upon herself to
confront the African American nurse handling her case of her mistake. The nurse replied,
“I am African American, I don’t know any Spanish.” Maria simply responded, “for the
future it is ME-DI-NA.”
This exchange captures the fraught and charged relationship between medical
practitioners and patients, one that illuminates the intricacies of providing and seeking
265
medical care. Racial understanding and misunderstanding can easily occur. I assume that
the responses of LAC-USC Medical Center’s nurses is a reflection of their struggling to
come to terms with the changing demographics of their patients, and the burdens of an
increased reduction of already scarce financial and human resources when treating a
population in desperate medical and financial conditions. The challenges of growing
demographic diversity, poverty, and poor health have transformed the conditions that
drive medical care in medical centers like, LAC-USC Medical Center and government
supported community clinics and hospitals throughout South Central Los Angeles.
The experiences of Willie, Maria, and Jose are among the countless experiences
of working class and working poor residents and institutions struggling to obtain and
provide medical care. Joao Vargas in Catching Hell in the City of Angels discusses how
African American residents of South Central experience similar forms of mistreatment
like those of Maria and Jose. In his investigation, he documents the struggle of Shannon
with “hostile” social services like welfare offices and public hospitals. On one occasion,
she was upset by the poor quality of her medical care and length of time she had to wait
to receive treatment at the “second-class, inefficient hospital [Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hospital].” She felt unjustly treated as she explained, “I bet white folks don’t put up with
this kind of shit.”
3
Shannon, Maria, Willie, and Jose each had to endure the bureaucratic
procedures set up at these public social institutions. Only underprivileged African
Americans and Latinos had to accept these unfair and dehumanizing institutional rules
and behaviors. Vargas asserts, “There was no other way for these poor residents… it is
3
Joao H. Costa Vargas, Catching Hell in the City of Angeles: Life and Meanings of Blackness in South
Central Los Angeles (University of Minnesota, 2006), 73.
266
either compliance or further suffering… everybody had to use the only available medical
services for poor people, and were expected to silently submit to what they, the
institutions, considered appropriate.”
4
This chapter lays out the terrain that has led to the
charged relationship Maria experienced as well as Jose’s assessment of his relationship to
medical services. The lack of one-size fits all approach to medical care means that
patients have to constantly familiarize themselves with each respective clinic and
hospital’s procedures. The public discourse surrounding working poor people of color
and public services is that they readily and easily seek services; they are “leeches” to the
system. When indeed, the reality of their situation is much more complex. In a
community in which few residents have private insurance policies or feel comfortable
seeking medical care, community clinics, hospitals, and other medical centers require
patience, ingenuity, and humility that does not conform neatly to the conventional
narrative of ready primed hoarders of services.
As Jose pointed out, waiting all day in the waiting room with similarly uninsured
people makes him feel like a limosnero. Providing equitable and respectable health care
is a charged undertaking whose origins lie in the aftermath of the Watts uprising.
Community residents, doctors, and political officials collectively organized to establish a
hospital and clinics in the community. Dr. J. Alfred Cannon was a frontrunner in this
mission. Cannon, associate director of social psychiatry at the University of California,
Los Angeles, advocated that the biggest health priority was a hospital. Cannon along with
members of People in Community Action (PICA) (a coalition of 75 organizations in Los
4
Ibid.
267
Angeles), organized the effort to begin construction of a county hospital in the Watts
area. The organization was an interracial coalition of African American, white, and
Mexican American residents and health care advocates who wanted to “shake the power
structure,” as well as “get more adequate representation of the poor on the poverty
board.” PICA organizers were firm believers in the power of community residents to
create their own vision of what the hospital should look like and what services it should
prioritize and offer. They urged for the employment of African American architects to
draw up plans for the hospital. Cannon hoped the hospital would be named after Charles
Drew, a blood bank pioneer. He believed that naming the hospital after such a prominent
African American would inspire minority youngsters to become doctors, nurses, and
specialists in other health fields.
5
In his estimation, it was not enough to have a hospital,
“it could to be an adequate physical facility and yet provide the worst of medical care…
there are too many hospitals where the attitudes of those staffing it are so poor, that the
public would rather stay home ill than suffer from the poor medical practice.” For
Cannon, PICA activists, and community residents what was of equal importance to the
physical building of the hospital was to establish a “place where the poorest and most
humble can be treated with respect and feel they belong,” as well as establish a “hospital
where Negroes and other minority doctors of excellence have positions of responsibility.”
The hospital and health care centers would be a way in which to “rise out of the ashes of
Watts.”
6
Unfortunately, the commitment to providing health facilities and services with
5
“County Hospital Construction in Watts: Group’s Objective,” The Los Angeles Sentinel, March 3, 1966.
6
Ibid.
268
respect and humility to working class and working poor residents of South Central Los
Angeles is a goal that remains to be fully achieved.
The struggle for a hospital is but one facet, one important facet, of community
health care throughout South Central Los Angeles’ landscape. Attention to the hospital’s
origins provides an important springboard towards discussing the health issues plaguing
the community of South Central and Watts. However, it does not provide a complete
account of this endeavor. War on Poverty funds that financed programs like Head Start
(as discussed in the previous chapter) provided important financial support for many of
the community health centers in the area. Similar to the struggle experienced by Head
Start centers to receive quick financial support, residents, activists, and medical
professionals who advocated for the healthcare needs of the community faced the similar
challenge of a slow response and support. The McCone Commission’s publication of the
urgent need for health care centers in the area provided the boost needed for these activist
efforts. I demonstrate that along with the goal, mission, and promise of establishing
respectably operated health care centers, medical officials and practitioners needed to
work against and remove the stigma placed against them by the community. Community
residents were extremely weary of becoming patrons of clinics operated by the
government and state because of the long history of unethical and discriminatory
practices towards people of color by medical officials. Thus, implementing the goal of
preventive health through regular health visits and practices had its challenges.
In this chapter, I illustrate the dynamic relationship between residents, medical
advocates, and elected officials in the struggle for a hospital and government supported
269
community clinics that provided comprehensive health and family planning to advance a
holistic understanding of the discourse, needs, and concerns surrounding the health needs
of South Central residents, as well as the divergent and interconnected racial, ethnic,
class, gender, and sexual discourses surrounding African American and ethnic Mexicans.
The historiography on Los Angeles War on Poverty efforts and its relationship to people
of color’s activism has failed to showcase the struggle and activism for health equity. It
has largely focused on the struggle for employment, educational, and community
empowerment. I also demonstrate that alongside those struggles, South Central residents
and their health allies were equally invested in combating poverty through the
establishment of health centers in the community, despite local political officials
unwillingness to support such endeavors. The OEO’s lack of understanding of poverty
beyond a black/white framework to one that considers a multiracial landscape served to
dampen the possible coalitions between African American and ethnic Mexicans activists
and political officials. Disagreements over community control and employee
representation framed the political arena between these two groups leadership, however,
for African American and Mexican immigrant patrons of community clinics and hospitals
and residents they received similar second-class medical service. Unfortunately, the lack
of financial resources and private medical insurance coverage has meant that for poor and
uninsured residents of South Central and Watts, they had to utilize these limited health
services. But as most residents would attest, they would rather utilize these inadequate
health services than not have anything at all. The county operated hospitals and
government funded community clinics, are thus the only and most important resource for
270
these resident’s health. Upon each medical visit, they hope that the government’s
commitment to equitable and dignified healthcare would become a reality.
In the end, the political battles waged over equal racial, class, and gender
representation in War on Poverty programs, OEO, and health organizations did not
diminish the shared racialization and dehumanization experienced by African American
and Mexican immigrants. Their muted interactions and relations in waiting rooms across
health centers over the last four decades is reflective of the ways that their experience are
born out of a similar treatment and struggle, where they both continue to seek dignified
and equitable health services.
“A Model Medical Facility for Los Angeles’ Poorest Black Community”
The dearth in healthcare providers in the Los Angeles area has plagued the
community for decades. Leonard Deadwyler’s tragedy “sealed the deal” in people’s
minds with regards to the urgent need of medical services for the community. In May of
1966, Leonard, a twenty five year old Watts resident, was caught speeding and running
red lights throughout Watts as he hoped to get his pregnant wife to the nearest county
hospital. But the hospital was twenty miles away. As he was speeding through Watts’ city
streets, he was pulled over by police officers. He believed they were there to help.
Instead, Los Angeles police officer Jerold Bova pointed his gun at Leonard and shot him
point blank. As he slumped over and died on his wife’s lap he stated, “but my wife is
having a baby.”
7
City officials feared that this incident would have violent consequences
as people would take to the streets and another Watts uprising would ensue. This did not
7
Jennifer Bihm, “King/Drew Medical Center and the 1965 Watts Revolt,” The Los Angeles Sentinel,
August 11, 2005; “California: The Deadwyler Verdict,” Time Magazine, June 10, 1966.
271
come to pass, as residents of Watts accepted his death as another example of state
sanctioned violence by police against African American residents. This tragedy, many
believed, could have been avoided if there had been a hospital conveniently located in the
community.
The Deadwyler incident made community residents and activists painfully aware
of how the lack of health care providers in the area was not only affecting the physical
health of residents, but also, could lead to death. To many, Leonard was not at fault
because he was trying to get his wife to the hospital for her delivery, but rather the state
and federal government were to blame because they were unable or unwilling to satisfy
and understand the needs of the community. Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital opened its
doors on March 27, 1972, as the seventh hospital operated by Los Angeles County.
8
Nevertheless, the struggle for a hospital began much earlier. The first attempt to build a
hospital in the South Central area was in 1950. Wells Ford, a black physician, was the
first to organize around the need for a hospital; however, unsuccessful. Similarly, Prize
Fighter Joe Louis made a similar attempt years later, but was unable to secure financial
resources. In 1963, Dr. Sol White also worked to bring a hospital to South Central, but
like everyone before him the inability to secure financial support for the project made it
difficult for a hospital to ever materialize.
9
8
The hospital has also been known under the following names: Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical
Center, Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital, and Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital. It is currently open
as an urgent care and outpatient clinic under the name: Martin Luther King, Jr. Multi-Service Ambulatory
Care Center; Randall Foster, “King/Drew Community Health Alert,” Los Angeles Times, January 16, 1997.
9
Malaika Brown, “Sweat and Pride Help Keep ML King Hospital Alive,” Los Angeles Times, January 13,
1994.
272
The most alarming findings from the 1965 McCone Commission were that only
106 doctors were available to service the community of 252,000. Also an alarmingly
small number of hospital beds, 454 beds, were available in the whole area. The McCone
Commission’s findings have largely been criticized for blaming the people of Watts for
their own plight, yet the Commission managed to offer several important
recommendations. It stressed emphatically, “The need to create a new, comprehensively
equipped hospital as the other major public hospitals, County General and Harbor
General, are distant and difficult to reach particularly given the degree to which the Watts
area is underserved by public transportation.”
10
The McCone Commission, Watts
uprising, Deadwyler incident, and availability of War on Poverty funds through the
Office of Economic Opportunity spurred the activism to secure financial, political, and
social resources for the hospital.
11
Like previous experiences, bringing a hospital to the community proved a
challenge for activists, residents, and city planning officials knew all too well that
“nothing comes easy down here.” The struggle for equitable employment and housing
options were not sidelined by their deep seated interest in public health, but activists
believed that the “deepest problems of the impoverished persons in the center of the
Negro area—disease.”
12
Dr. Hubert Hemsley of Compton believed that the African
10
Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramon, “Killing “Killer King”: The Los Angeles Times and a
“Troubled” Hospital in the ‘Hood” in Ana-Christina Ramon and Darnell Hunt, eds., Black Los Angeles:
American Dreams and Racial Realities (New York University Press, 2010), 286.
11
“Violence in the City: An End or a Beginning?” Box 94, Collection 1642, August F. Hawkins Papers,
1935-1990, Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
273
American community was in the “throes of the problem of our century—the urban health
crisis” and “charity hospital complex dispensing second class medical care to poor
minority people would be a blaspheme to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. and
Charles R Drew, both of whom died because of their second class status in America.”
13
He believed, along with countless other medical practitioners and residents, “the focal
point of training should be community medicine with stress on the total community,
rather than isolated observation training in clinics.” Following such an approach would
mean that American medicine would no longer be “mismatched with the lifestyles of the
ghetto poor.”
14
Ensuring the community that Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital was
operated by and for African Americans would prove a challenge. In the fall of 1966, local
resident Mrs. Charles Zanders wrote to Congressman Augustus Hawkins in support of a
hospital and community clinics,
“I have been a tax payer in Watts for years and am strongly opposed to USC using
poverty money to build and operate a clinic in our area for tutorial purposes. I do
not feel that a private school should compete with our own doctors. Furthermore,
Watts needs a hospital not a ghetto type clinic. County facilities have expanded
enough in the Watts area to take care of the clinic type patients. If there is a need
for a clinic, let our community run it with the help of other medical schools
including USC, if they wish to help.”
15
In her letter she describes the need for a hospital in the community with equitable health
care options, “not a ghetto type clinic.” In Mrs. Zanders’ view, limiting the role of USC
12
Jack Jones, “Political Fighting Slows Up Health Programs: Politics Impedes Health Programs in Watts
Area” Los Angeles Times, July 19, 1967, A1.
13
Charles Baireuther, “A Doctors Opinion: MLK Hospital will Fail Without Community Stress,” The Los
Angeles Times, April 23, 1970.
14
Ibid.
15
“Letter By Mrs. Charles Zanders,” Box 73, Augustus F. Hawkins Papers, 1935-1990, Special
Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
274
in implementing the medical school would guarantee this. These concerns were not only
those of Mrs. Zanders, but countless organizers and activists in the community, as they
wanted to feel that this effort was by and for them.
Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramon’s insightful study on the newspaper
coverage of Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital documents how over the course of the
hospital’s history it went from being envisioned as a “model medical facility for Los
Angeles’ poorest black community” to one of African American failure. In their
investigation, they document the dramatic rise and fall of King/Drew hospital, as not
solely a story of a hospital trying to fulfill its promise, but rather a “broader context of
Black Los Angeles, and ultimately race in America” where King/Drew is “emblematic of
both the promises and the pitfalls facing Blacks who seek to control their own institutions
in a society structured to undermine Black control.”
16
Racial framing and racial
understanding served to frame the development, growth, and eventual demise of the
hospital.
17
The hospital was named after civil rights leader and visionary Martin Luther
King, Jr. and its attached medical school was the Charles R. Drew Postgraduate Medical
School named after the African American pioneering physician and medical researcher.
Like the University of California, Los Angeles and University of Southern California
16
In 1966, California voters, unsurprisingly, rejected a bond issue that would fund the hospital, despite the
Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors vote to support the 21 million facility. Voter rejection meant that
County Board of Supervisor, and African American community resident and activist ally, Kenneth Hahn
had to personally convince Governor Ronald Reagan that the hospital was of critical importance to the
community. He successfully appealed to Reagan and was able to secure state funds for the medical center.
Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramon, “Killing “Killer King,”” 284.
17
Ibid., 286.
275
hospitals, Martin Luther King, Jr. General Hospital was a teaching hospital. The Charles
R. Drew Medical Society established the first African American medical school west of
the Mississippi when it opened the Charles R. Drew Postgraduate Medical School. The
medical school would train interns and doctors at the hospital. The promise and value of a
“teaching hospital” was that it was a cost-effective manner for providing care to indigent
patients, who otherwise could not afford to pay for private care. This patient demographic
was a significant portion of King/Drew patients.
18
Opening the hospital and medical
school was one challenge that was met; however convincing community residents to seek
services at the hospital was another challenge (this same challenge characterized Head
Start centers). The hospital’s first years of operation coincided with revelations of the
U.S. government’s role in the Tuskegee Experiment, a 40 year old government study that
withheld medicine from African American syphilis patients. Community activists needed
to find a way to dispel people’s apprehension towards seeking services from a
government and county sponsored hospital. The hospital sponsored health bazaars and
festivals where they provided free hypertension, blood pressure, and sickle cell anemia
tests. Through these outreach efforts they attempted to present themselves as concerned
medical providers that were attuned to the particular health needs of the community, as
well as provide a face to the hospital. Hospital officials believed that this approach would
allow residents to see the hospital as an entity that could be trusted.
Organizing around Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital was one facet of the struggle
to bring health providers to the community. Community health centers are another vital
18
Ibid., 289.
276
and important part in meeting the health needs in the community. In Community Health
Centers, Bonnie Lefkowitz’s documents the emergence and growth of community health
centers across the nation as a courageous political struggle by working class communities
of color. Community health centers became part of the national landscape in 1965
through the availability of War on Poverty funds. OEO’s origins did not place health as
an essential feature needed to fight poverty— employment and education training were
prioritized. The health problems of Head Start children alerted OEO officials to the need
to form health programs for children and their families. The experimental health clinics
established in Head Start centers, served as “feelers” for approaches to providing health
services. Local staffers of OEO programs utilized the small-scale clinics in Head Start as
models to establish their own health institutions.
19
Like, Head Start’s origins, Mississippi was the first U.S. state in which the
Community Health Center model was implemented.
20
In January of 1965, officials at the
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) headquarters met over how much
money to give to implement health care in the Mississippi delta. HEW official and
Bostonian doctor H. Jack Geiger requested $30,000 for a feasibility study, but Sandy
Kravitz (social worker with a doctorate in public policy and part of a team to create
national community action programs) instead offered $300,000 to move beyond a
feasibility study and start a health care center right away. Both Kravitz and Geiger
believed that health care centers located in the community was of critical of importance,
19
Bonnie Lefkowitz, Community Health Centers: A Movement and the People Who Made it Happen
(Rutgers University Press, 2007), 6.
20
Ibid., 7.
277
as poor people in cities had shouldered the burden of inadequate care for far too long.
They cited that up until then access to medical centers required riding “three or four
different bus lines to a charity hospital, only to wait for hours on hard benches for
impersonal and episodic services,” and that this was unacceptable.
21
The model that
Geiger and Count Gibson (Tufts Medical School Chair of Preventive and Community
Medicine Department) were suggesting “featured personal health care from teams of
physicians and other health professionals, often assigned to follow specific families,
convenient locations and a focus on the communities they served; outreach, child care,
and transportation.”
In the summer of 1965, six months from the day from that initial meeting, OEO
approved a grant to Tufts University and Grieger to carry out a health center in the South.
Shortly thereafter, the first community health center, The Delta Health Center, sponsored
by OEO opened in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Greiger’s vision, this center, and the on
the ground activist efforts of Mississippian residents was the model followed nationwide.
By 1965, the OEO had become actively involved in promoting similar health centers and
supporting similar projects in eight cities across the United States, including Denver,
Chicago, and the “problem riddled Watts neighborhood of L.A.”
22
As a supporter of
health programs for the poor, Ted Kennedy arduously worked to convince his fellow
senators of the need of such programs. By April 1967, $51 million dollars was earmarked
for health centers in the OEO act. Despite Kravitz’s departure from the OEO in 1966, the
21
Ibid., 8.
22
Ibid., 9.
278
OEO cemented its commitment to funding health center programs, and moved from
establishing experimental programs to federally supported and funded long-term projects.
The funding provided by OEO was general and without structure. No preference
was given to type of sponsorship, how community action programs and community
development agencies served as grantees, and in many cases medical schools and
teaching hospitals received the majority of grants during the first four years of the
program. The OEO believed that funding these clinics through these large institutions
offered political protection, professional credibility, and experience in administration of
federal funds. Under President Richard Nixon, HEW took over OEO’s programming.
HEW began its own version of the health center model that required a “highly flexible
demonstration authority.” This management style represented a reversal of previous
policy and practice. Public health officials working at HEW had a very traditional
approach to health care. They were uncomfortable with the provision of comprehensive
care and “favored “categorical” or diseases specific education and screening programs
run by state and local health departments.”
23
Under HEW, clinics were more medical than
comprehensive in their approach, but in other respects they resembled the OEO model.
The experimental nature of community health centers meant that the number of
centers rapidly increased. Nixon with his “new federalism” policy reduced the number of
programs funded by Kennedy and Johnson. By 1971, 150 health centers serviced cities
across the United States. In 1972, HEW issued regulations stating that federal support
was not needed, since the health centers could collect reimbursements from Medicare,
23
Ibid., 110.
279
Medicaid, and private insurance. The plan to have these centers funded through Medicare
was flawed, as Medicare does not cover everyone. Ted Kennedy introduced a bill that
would guarantee that the federal and state governments were responsible in providing
funds to community health programs. It also mandated that all centers have a consumer
majority governing board. This meant that an even stronger commitment to citizen
participation than had existed went into effect under OEO. By 1974 there were 158
grantees nationwide, and in 1980 there were 872 centers. Growth meant that more people
were helped; yet most of these centers were small. There was more that needed to be
done. In the end, Lefkowitz summarizes her point best when describing Dan Hawkins’
assessment of community health centers, “We grew low and slow, under the radar… until
we were big enough to make our presence known.” In the 1960s community health meant
a series of experimental programs, but in the present these experimental programs have
real consequences to the operations of services rendered. Debates surround the
differences between public health and community health, with the former being more
top/down in approach while the latter being driven by residents, either way health
resources that cater to the community remain of the utmost importance.
24
Lefkowitz’s study focuses on Mississippi, Massachusetts, South Carolina, New
York, and Texas. She makes an intervention in our understanding of how community
health centers— over 1,000 clinics across the country currently— emerge from a
community organizing model rooted in the civil rights movement for social equity. This
activism understood that poor health in low-income communities is connected to
24
Valery Riddle, “Reducing Social Inequalities in Health: Public Health, Community Health, or Health
Promotion” Promotion and Education Volume 14, No. 2 (2007), 63-70.
280
malnutrition, poor housing and employment options, and inadequate access to health
facilities. What community health centers did best was connecting healthcare funding
with economic development and job creation for the community. Lefkowitz documents
the struggles and successes of five centers, with a focus on Mississippi community health
center because of its historical importance and growth. Centers in the Mississippi delta
were found in one of the poorest counties in the United States, with remarkable results as
it actually helped the residents it aimed to service and was a catalyst for upward mobility
for some of its residents. At the Delta Health Center, five physicians, seven PhDs, and
over a dozen registered nurses came from and worked for the community. This
community health center followed a similar model to the one I discussed for Head Start,
where maximum feasible participation was at its core. Nonetheless, the discourse of
community control is easier said than done. South Central Los Angeles’ residents’
struggle for community control of community health clinics was challenging, because it
rested on their opposition to medical teaching institutions like USC and UCLA and
conservative government officials and what role they would play in health care centers in
the community. The level of community control was of their utmost concern, and has
been a source of tension in discussing OEO programs and centers.
Like the clinics in the Mississippi Delta, community health centers in South
Central Los Angeles were found in stand-alone buildings as well as non-traditional
spaces like elementary schools or barbershops. These non-traditional spaces were not
only a function of lack of space for these clinics, but also a reflection of how clinics were
successful when spaced in easily accessible sites for the community. This was true in
281
1965, as the present. In the spring of 1996, 10-month-old Angel Chavez came down with
an ear infection. His mother, 35–year-old Maria Sancen knew that her son needed
medical attention. Her choices were to go to the county’s Hubert H. Humphrey Health
Center a few miles away from her home or the elementary school across the street from
her home at the Pueblo Del Rio housing project. The decision to take her son to the
elementary school was easy and almost second nature. Since Angel’s birth, Maria and
son became patients of the government sponsored well-child clinic at Holmes Avenue
Elementary School. The clinic was a small room with an attendant nurse. Flyers of health
education and readiness and artwork directed at children graced its walls. Maria’s choice
to take Angel, and her other two children to this clinic was a reflection of the good
treatment she readily associated with this site. She explained, “I like to come here
because they treat me good.” The nurses at the clinic made sure to tend to Angel’s ear
infection but also gave him his vaccinations for polio, diphtheria, and hepatitis. Being
treating well made a world of difference for Maria and countless other South Central Los
Angeles residents. The majority of their encounters with social services involve
dehumanizing treatment. Hence, “good” treatment for residents at these government
community health clinics means friendly staff and doctors, clean consulting rooms, and
convenience. Residents, due to their limited means, have to accept and acquiesce that
these basic features is all they will receive in the form of dignified health care.
The clinic’s location at Holmes Avenue Elementary School was part of an effort
by health officials in Los Angeles County to get health care to communities most in need.
Schools, churches, and more recently barbershops, have become “new testing grounds for
282
distributing health care at the community level. Federal grants, private foundations,
support from the county Department of Health Services, and large amounts of volunteer
help make these programs familiar local institutions to treat the sick before they become
candidates for hospital emergency rooms.”
25
South Central Los Angeles residents like
Maria must make the choice (out of a lack of options) to go to this small-scale clinic, the
county clinic, or hospital. Her choice in this small clinic was “I won’t go to the county
[clinic or hospital] unless it is an extreme emergency.”
26
Maria considered the county
clinic or hospital a last resort because of the distance and long wait. The treatment that
community residents receive at these hospitals and government funded community clinics
is less than ideal, but when they find a community clinic in which they are treated with
dignity and respect they instantly gravitate towards that center and give it their patronage.
Clinics like Holmes Avenue Elementary School have their origins in health
funding through the OEO. The OEO prioritized seven areas for health programs:
Comprehensive Health/Neighborhood Health; Family Planning; Emergency Food and
Medical Services; Environmental Health; Narcotics Addiction; Alcohol Control; and
Other Community Health Services.
27
OEO provided the most funds for comprehensive
health and family planning clinics, as such these two programs are the ones I discuss in
greater length in this chapter.
28
The OEO believed that health taskforce and personnel
25
Douglas P. Shuit, “Health Care’s Special Delivery; Clinics at schools and churches?” Los Angeles Times,
April 24, 1996, A1.
26
Ibid.
27
“OEO Health Task Force,” Box 2, Entry 70, Record Group 381, Community Action Program, National
Archives Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.
283
would “make this project [health] really noteworthy is that federal funds have armed an
angry, underserved minority community of a major urban area with the tools to
effectively negotiate with a series of insensitive providers and governmental
bureaucracies with the skill and the methods to document inequities and in-house
articulate spokesman to argue for responsible redress.”
29
It is this mismatched narrative
that served to frame the OEO’s role in funding community projects, as on the one hand it
wants to provide the resources and support for community residents to assert their rights
and needs, yet on the other describes the very people it aims to help as “angry.” It is the
OEO and political officials’ benevolent understanding of their role in helping the
“underserved” that is a source of tension between community residents, doctors, and
government officials.
28
Due to space limitations in this chapter, I do not discuss the prevalence of alcohol and drug rehabilitation
centers. Along with the rise in comprehensive health centers and family planning clinics, the other major
component of federal and state funds were for alcohol and drug rehabilitation centers. In a 1991 National
Household Survey of Drug Abuse (NHSDA) in six metropolitan areas in the United States, Los Angeles
ranked number one in illicit drug use; 8.5 percent of Los Angeles’ general population admitted to being
users, with an estimated 5 percent of Los Angeles County residents are problem-level drug users, while an
additional 7 percent are alcoholics or alcohol abusers. The Office of Alcohol Programs estimates that in
1990 over 600,000 persons over the age of 14 in the county suffered from alcohol-related problems,
including alcoholism and alcohol abuse. These statistics suggest that alcohol abuse begins at an early age.
The level of drug addicts is harder to estimate, yet 1980s South Central Los Angeles streets is known for
the high rates of cocaine, particularly "crack" cocaine, use. Estimates place drug use at 8.8 percent, while
the rest of the metropolitan statistical area had a rate of 7.9 percent. These alarming numbers, signal the
need for centers focused on rehabilitation. Yet the support for these centers, along with other social services
in the later half of the twentieth century is varied. See: E. Richard Brown, et al. “Inequalities in Health: The
Sickness in the Center of Our Cities,” in South Central Los Angeles: Anatomy of a Crisis, Lewis Center for
Regional Policy Studies, Working Paper No. 6 June 1993, 71.
29
“OEO Health Task Force,” Box 2, Entry 70, Record Group 381, Community Action Program, National
Archives Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.
284
Community Health Centers: “The Wave of the Future”
The racial diversity and geographic sprawl of the city were amongst the OEO’s
challenges. The economic and geographic barrier presents the major challenges for
disadvantaged groups to access health care services in Los Angeles. Public Law 93-
641—Appropriateness of Recommended Geographic Regions for Health Planning and
Resources Development—required that each health service provider have a population of
not less than 500,000 nor more that 3 million for each emergency health care provider
and neighborhood clinic.
30
The sprawl of Los Angeles County meant that executing this
law would prove difficult, as a comprehensive and expensive transportation system was
not in place. OEO officials knew that the most indigent of residents were the
handicapped, mothers with small children, and economically disadvantaged. Plans for the
location of these clinics and services required that these concerns were taken into account
along with the accessibility of existing full service teaching hospitals; health service
needs of the population; community interest; natural and man-made geographic barriers;
and municipal boundaries.
31
Assistant OEO Deputy Director Saleem A Farag wrote a
letter to Executive Director Frank F. Aguilera in which he stated, “Los Angeles County
by virtue of the fact that it is both a standard metropolitan area, automatically is exempt
from the maximum population limit of three million imposed by public law, and will
become by far the most populous health service are in the United States.” Farag believed
that the health needs of the residents of Los Angeles County were best served by
30
“Letter to Saleem A Farag, Assistant Deputy Director, March 10, 1975,” Entry 70, Record Group 381,
Community Action Program, National Archives Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.
31
“OEO Health Task Force,” Box 2, Entry 70, Record Group 381, Community Action Program, National
Archives Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.
285
breaking down the county into designated areas, with South Central Los Angeles and
Watts residents occupying the Southeast and Central regions. By 1970 the population in
these areas, according to health officials was:
Table 2: Southeast and Central Regional Population, 1970
Whites Black Spanish Other
Southeast 313,748
(41 percent)
303,482
(40 percent)
129,966
(17 percent)
17,761
(2 percent)
Central 446,660
(36 percent)
288,208
(23 percent)
408,955
(33 percent)
95,591
(8 percent)
The large percentage of whites in the Southeast and Central regions is attributed to how
these geographic areas cover South Gate and Downtown L.A. It is difficult to discern the
percentage of Mexican immigrants, “Spanish,” who actually reside in South Central and
Watts at this point as the Central region also accounted for parts of East Los Angeles.
These statistics provide a starting point in which to investigate the racial breakdown of
the community, and in turn, the health services offered for the community. These racial
demographics also had linguistic repercussions for how resources were disseminated.
In 1967, the OEO’s supported the Watts Health Foundation (WHF). The non-
profit organization aimed to provide low cost and high quality health care to residents of
South Central Los Angeles. Clyde Oden served as the first president and chief execute
officer for the WHF. The foundation has proven a critical resource for the funding and
implementation of community health centers in the community over the last four decades.
Its interracial personnel—African American, Mexican American, and white—made it a
unique enterprise that served the Watts and Huntington Park communities. The Watts
286
Health Foundation’s motto was to “render personalize service in a setting of dignity.”
32
One U.S. Senator described the WHF as “an American success story” as it focused on
serving the most difficult population: “the poor, minority groups, new immigrants, the
homeless, chemically addicted, elderly, chronically ill, and teenage mothers.” The types
of programs offered by the foundation were community health centers in Compton,
Watts, and Huntington Park; a chemical dependency center, the House of Uhuru
(freedom), provided residential and outpatient treatment of people alcohol and substance
abuse problems; preventive health services center for persons receiving services in
nutrition (WIC), AIDS education, sickle cell anemia and hypertension testing; and finally
a Teenage Health Clinic at two of Los Angeles High Schools to offer health education,
reproductive health options, and prevention programs.
33
The foundation’s main comprehensive health clinic was the South Central
Multipurpose Health Services Center (SCMHSC). On the clinic’s opening day,
September 16, 1967, Sargent Shriver (Director of OEO) attended the dedication services.
In his speech he stated,
“Change is coming. The same change that has come to Watts. Not because of
programs but because of people. Not because of committees, but because of
commitment. For too long, the poor have looked around and asked: “Where is this
life we are guaranteed?” They haven’t seen it. Instead of being guaranteed life,
the poor get a guarantee of death. Not a quick, violent murder. But a slow, quiet
32
“Watts Health Foundation Fact Sheet- July 23, 1987” Box 3653, Folder 7: Watts Health Foundation,
Mayor Tom Bradley Administrative Papers, 1973-1993, Special Collections, Young Research Library,
University of California, Los Angeles. In the mid-to-late 1980s, the Watts Health Foundation went under
extreme economic hardship as it was on the verge of filing for bankruptcy, as the renewal of a Medicare
and other contracts were not secure. The WHF continues to serve the poor, minorities, and elderly, and new
immigrants.
33
“Office Memorandum” Box 3653, Folder 8, Mayor Tom Bradley Administrative Papers, 1973-1993,
Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
287
death that whittles away life. This why the OEO is in the business of delivering
health services—because health is basic to everything. Health is one of the surest
guarantees of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This health center in
Watts is your answer. You want a commitment to life. A life where good health is
not a lucky privilege for a few. But a basic right for all.”
34
Shriver’s speech was moving and indicative of the ways that health equity was in fact a
social justice issue that needed immediate attention, support, and action. Health is viewed
as a basic service for everybody and without it the poor are vulnerable to slow death.
With such ardent support by OEO Director, the clinic opened to service the needs of poor
residents of Watts.
The promise of government sponsored community clinic South Central
Multipurpose Health Services Center preceded the celebration of the opening of the
Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital. A year after the clinic’s opening, more than 12,000
patients registered at the clinic, and it became one of the first antipoverty clinics
sponsored with a 2.4 million grant from the OEO. The large enrollment signaled how
medical services on the community level were sorely lacking. The clinic was viewed as a
“radical experiment in health care of the poor… champions hail the center as a shining
example of what interracial cooperation can do to help underprivileged people.”
35
The
area immediately surrounding the clinic in Watts was composed of 58,000 residents, of
which 35,000 were on welfare. The initial surge of 12,000 patients meant that less than
one fourth of the resident population was being serviced. Most especially in a severely
34
“Speech by Sargent Shriver at the Dedication ceremonies, South Central Multi-Purpose Health Services
Center” Sept 16, 1967,” Box 64, Mayor Tom Bradley Administrative Papers, 1973-1993, Special
Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
35
Harry Nelson, “New Watts Clinic Fights to Survive Many Problems,” Los Angeles Times, July 8, 1968,
A1; “Blood Pressure Confab,” Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1983, B1
288
depressed area with the highest rate of maternal deaths, premature births, infant mortality,
tuberculosis, high blood pressure, heart disease, sickle cell anemia, and lung cancer.
36
The
tuberculosis death rate was four per 100,000 persons compared to 2.8 for the county;
venereal disease was three to four times the countywide figures. SCMHSC wanted to
combat these health issues head on. But, like many social providers that relied on renewal
grants, they were afraid that OEO’s commitment to the clinic would be removed at any
moment, despite the clinic being heralded as being the “wave of the future.”
Resident of Watts and patron of the clinic, Dolores Morado expressed that she
liked the center very much because of its close proximity to her home, as she no longer
had to make the long commute to the County-USC Medical Center in East Los Angeles
when she needed emergency treatment for her children. Morano’s regard for the
convenience of the clinic represents how community clinics relieve the stresses placed on
federally funded hospitals. Throughout these clinics’ history in Los Angeles are countless
reports of residents, like Paula Tate, who state, “It made it more convenient for them to
come here… I liked the whole idea of them coming to the community.” Convenience
proves important when selecting a clinic. Feelings of comfort, good treatment,
cleanliness, and supportive assistance played an equal role. Residents express that they do
not want to walk into depressing centers. If they walk in feeling ill, the sight of a
depressing building and old machinery makes them feel worse. For residents the
36
Cancer is the second leading cause of death in Los Angeles County. Cancer mortality rates are much
higher in African American males and females than other racial groups as it is 20 percent higher in Los
Angeles than in the entire U.S.. The high cancer rates are due to the poor health practices and lack of
prevention and early detection. See: E. Richard Brown, et al. “Inequalities in Health: The Sickness in the
Center of Our Cities,” in South Central Los Angeles: Anatomy of a Crisis, Lewis Center for Regional
Policy Studies, Working Paper No. 6, June 1993, 79-81.
289
aesthetics of the building plays an important role in terms of their going to feel cared for.
As neighborhood clinic supporter, Illinois Senator Percy, explained, “Until the time we
can take care of the poor here, we have no business trying to Americanize the whole
world.”
37
This statement signals the ways that community residents and political officials
believed that the United States must focus on fixing domestic issues primarily, before it
concerns itself with international affairs.
The South Central Multipurpose Health Center was the only major government
funded community clinic serving the area. By 1982, the Watts Health Foundation
provided services to 8.28 percent of the entire service area, and the following two years
the percentage of services had increased to 11.3 percent of the service area. The WHF
and SCMHSC serviced the needs of Mexican immigrants and African American patrons
and residents, and slightly less than 90 percent of the population still needing care. The
level of participation and sustained growth in the center meant that the community was
receptive to its services. Positive appraisals of how the clinic was friendly, caring, and
knowledgeable made it by the mid-1980s a staple in the community, and a nationally
recognized health enterprise. It was hailed as a “shining example of what interracial
cooperation can do to help underprivileged people.” The clinic and foundation’s 700
employees served over 120,000 people each year with an operating budget of over $70
million dollars. The increased diversity of the community also meant that public health
officials had to expand their concerns over illnesses plaguing the African American
community like infant mortality, drug related deaths, cancer, cirrhosis of the liver,
37
John Kendall, “Health Center in Watts Visited by Senator Percy,” Los Angeles Times, July 7, 1969
290
venereal disease, and hypertension, as well as the particular concerns of Mexican
immigrants residents like diabetes and tuberculosis.
38
These diseases are heavily gendered
in that men are more likely to show signs of these diseases. However, Dr. James Arthur
Mays pointed out that women were also increasingly being diagnosed with high blood
pressure, heart disease, lung cancer, and hypertension. He attributed this finding to
women taking on predominantly male habits like increased alcohol use and cigarette
smoking.
39
Along with increasing residents’ patronage of the clinic, SCMHSC made a
genuine attempt at hiring community residents into the clinic. Harriet Goslin, a 23-year-
old dental hygienist, for the clinic’s dentistry program (the program operated with the
help of USC dental school) not only worked at the dental clinic but helped people find
decent jobs and a better life.
40
She operated seminars and workshops. Four of her
“graduates” gained well-paying positions at the clinic. As she recalls, she spent a year
transforming “irresponsible teenagers” into proud, well-grounded young ladies who were
38
“Watts Health Foundation, Inc Response: Watts 20 Yrs Later… 20 Years Ahead,” Box 64 Mayor Tom
Bradley Administrative Papers, 1973-1993, Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of
California, Los Angeles. Watts Health Foundation has had a challenging time keeping its federal funding.
In 1987, where this documentation of the Foundation’s efforts in the community originates, the foundation
filed for bankruptcy as a last effort to reorganize the organization and start anew. It emerged in 2001, only
to be filing for bankruptcy again in 2005. By 2006 the foundation had terminated giving health services
through its clinics. See: “Watts Health Foundation, Inc Response: Watts 20 Yrs Later… 20 Years Ahead,”
Box 64 Mayor Tom Bradley Administrative Papers, 1973-1993, Special Collections, Young Research
Library, University of California, Los Angeles; Lisa Girion and Debora Vrana, “Watts Health Foundation
Falls Ill for third time in 3 Decades” Los Angeles Times, June 3, 2005; “Public Notice: Regarding Watts
Health Foundation, Inc. request for exemption from restructuring requirements of the Knox-Keene Act,
Section 1399.71” online source: www.hmohelp.ca.gov/aboutthedmhc/gen/WattsPublicNotice.pdf
39
“Community Profile: James Mays- Physician, Community Activist,” The Los Angele Sentinel, September
6, 1990.
40
C.O. Dummett, “The South Central Multipurpose Health Services Center for Watts: Dentistry’s
Contributions,” Journal of the National Medical Association May 1967 59: 3: 206-208, 207; Jack Jones,
“Watts Girl Finally Find Good Jobs After Training,” Los Angeles Times, May 6, 1968, B6.
291
certain they could work for any dentist. She was committed to their success as she drove
them to interviews and would rehearse with them. Her mentorship extended beyond the
workshops, as “all the girls call me regularly… they are so excited about their work.
They’re learning more everyday and for the first time in their lives they’re getting good
paycheck. They all such different girls now.”
41
The foundation and by extension the clinic’s goal of training people from the
community had its limitations. Despite Goslin’s success, by the 1980s the clinic’s 36 out
of its 252 staff were from the community and have been trained at the clinic. These
positions centered on the day-to-day operations of the clinic as clerks and medical
assistants, not as doctors or nurses. One sector of the community residents stood apart in
the clinic was the neighborhood health agents. These 14 neighborhood health agents were
seminal to the distribution of information to new and old patients as well as connected the
needs of the clinic to the community. The small fraction of the community residents
working as personnel is reflective of the difficulty of satisfying the goal and mission of
community participation and representation. The resources in the community are not only
lacking in terms of health, but also educational and employment equity. Poor educational
opportunities at the High School level, guaranteed that every few people from the
community attended college, and much less medical school. From 1969 to 1974, the
number of African American and Mexican Americans trained as doctors each year on a
national level hovered between 100 to 300 students.
42
The possibility for community
41
Jack Jones, “Watts Girl Finally Find Good Jobs After Training,” Los Angeles Times, May 6, 1968, B6.
292
residents to be of and from the community was minimal, and thus many of the health
practitioners working at these clinics were not from the community, which for
community advocates that wanted higher rates of admission for Mexican American and
African Americans into medical school the largest argument they made was that without
knowledge and recognition of the needs of the community it would prove difficult for
them to fully understand their needs.
The small number of employees that are of the community means that the vast
majority of employees unfamiliar with the realities of South Central and Watts, and
arrived with preconceived and often erroneous perceptions of its residents and health
needs. Not all doctors expressed enthusiasm over working with indigent populations. A
doctor at County-USC Medical Center told three medical students on their tour of
“charity wards,” “we don’t want to make it too nice for the patient here… we don’t want
to make it so pleasant that they’ll like it better here than at a private hospital.” Such
statements went against the promise and goals of community health. Medical officials
working at HEW realized that hospitals do a good job treating disease, yet a lousy job
when it comes to treating people. HEW began a program to get medical students involved
and working with the community as they believed that “a lot of health professionals are
surprised that medical students should suddenly be organizing for change. Medical
schools and hospitals have been conservative places filled with conservative people.”
43
Training new medical students invested in serving the poor, even though such efforts are
42
“East LA Health Task Force” Health Task Force Folder, State Office of Economic Opportunity,
California State Archives, Sacramento, California; “Chicano Health- A Statistical Nightmare” NCHO
Newsletter: Salud y Revolucion Social, Volume3, Number Five, January 1974.
43
“Students Health Project Fights Medical Traditional and Poverty,” Los Angeles Times, July 22, 1968,
B1.
293
not as lucrative as working in a private hospital or clinic was of equal importance to
getting people from the community to plan and operate health centers in poverty areas.
44
The combination of conservative medical professionals, reduced compensation for
working in the community, discrimination and lack of meaningful opportunities for
medical school admissions, and the minimal educational tools in the form of racial,
ethnic, and cultural awareness classes meant that medical students and professionals were
not equipped with the knowledge of how to service working poor and working class
communities of color—a community that already has reservations about seeking medical
assistance.
The struggle for community participation in operating health centers in the area
extends beyond ensuring that African Americans and Mexican immigrants were hired,
but that they were found in key decision-making positions. Neighborhood and
community health centers are defined by efforts by medical staff and center
administrators to solicit community input and participation via mandatory local councils
and advisory boards.
45
Despite the promise of community control attached to South
Central Multipurpose Health Services Center, the clinic’s governing body, Community
Health Council, did “include not one young Black or Brown male leader in the
community who could be an asset in defining community health needs and health
problems; who not only spoke the language of the community, but could act as a positive
44
“Community Profile: James Mays- Physician, Community Activist,” The Los Angeles Sentinel,
September 6, 1990.
45
Alondra Nelson, Black power, Biomedicine, and the Politics of Knowledge. Diss. New York University,
2003. Dissertations & Theses: Full Text, ProQuest, 7.
294
force in assisting residents toward seeking quality health care.”
46
In fact, each young
“militant type” male who was initially appointed to the council was eliminated from his
position. Just as noteworthy was the gender disparity in leadership. Women were equally
invested in securing their presence in these clinics, yet, and like some of their male
counterparts their leadership roles were severely limited. Due to the financial monies
derived from OEO funds or other government and state funding, these councils had to be
carefully selected, approved, and voted for by these funding agencies. Anyone who
would deviate from these entities’ mission, even if they reflected the true needs of the
community, was not allowed to serve on the council. The goal and meaning of maximum
feasible community representation was complex and multilayered. The central tenet of
community participation meant that medical staff often found themselves at odds with
their patients. Being denied significant input into the center’s administration resulted in
conflicts over the duties and quality of the service these facilities should provide.
The ultimate goal of government sponsored community health centers is to have a
space in which “modern science was replete with the most advanced specialty services.”
To place them in neighborhoods that had been medically abandoned with few doctors
available for everyday needs and where the most elementary public health and preventive
care was frequently unavailable further cemented health care into a symbol of the
continuing inequalities in American life. The goal of creating state of the art medical
facilities had many obstacles. It also made evident that more needed to be done to
46
“South Central Multi-Purpose Health Services Center Report,” Box 93, Mayor Tom Bradley
Administrative Papers, 1973-1993, Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California,
Los Angeles.
295
organize and train a “generation of black community leaders and provide them with
exposure to the workings of local politics; exacerbated a desire for community control of
local institutions; and provided a target for minority communities’ long-held
dissatisfaction with government services.”
47
OEO officials in Los Angeles allowed
doctors like Alfred Cannon, a psychiatrist who labored for better mental and
comprehensive health facilities for South Central residents, to play a pivotal role in the
development of community health clinics in the community. He was central in the
development of Drew Medical School, Kedren Community Mental Health Center, and
the psychiatric department at Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital. Representative Augustus
Hawkins reflected upon Cannon’s death in 1988, “he is one of the brilliant minds in our
community and a venerable warrior.”
48
Augustus Hawkins was another important political figure that fought for the
establishment of these medical facilities in the community, as he believed that “enough
with the studies” about poverty, what was needed was action— action in the form of
establishing resources and social services that were needed in the community. Hawkins
believed that community input and participation was pivotal to “improve the poor
person’s image of himself and his community… thereby building a greater sense of
community pride and desire to remain in the community.”
49
Cannon and Hawkins were
truly crusaders in community health. The OEO and health officials in Los Angeles were
47
Ibid.
48
George Ramos, “Dr. J. Alfred Cannon; Health Crusader,” Los Angeles Times, March 11, 1988.
49
“Hawkins Writes Open Letter to Economic Youth Opportunities Board, March 14, 1966,” Manuel Ruiz
Papers, Special Collections, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.
296
not against activists committed to the community, but activists like Cannon and Hawkins
could not overwhelm policy and medical councils as OEO and medical practitioners
wanted to maintain control.
It is important to note, that the efforts to establish clinics in South Central were all
spearheaded by African Americans. This was due to African American’s large
demographic in the area and the level of control African Americans had on War on
Poverty programming. Health became another arena in which battles between African
Americans and ethnic Mexicans were waged. They were on a smaller scale, and primarily
involved clinics hiring practices, but showcased how the multiracial character of Los
Angeles complicated the community centered approach of the War on Poverty.
Health Activism Across California’s Landscape
My investigation into community health centers through a historical, social, and
cultural lens is not to show health outcomes, but to illustrate the struggle of residents and
activists to establish centers in Southern California. Like Alondra Nelson’s
comprehensive study on community health clinics in Northern California, I demonstrate
how the emergence and longevity of community clinics is largely a reflection of resident
and health advocates’ dedication to health social justice and equity. Nelson, in her
dissertation, argues that the late 1960s and early 1970s was a watershed moment in U.S.
race relations and in domestic health care policy as “federally-funded health care
programs dramatically expanded (and then swiftly contracted) corresponded with the
time during which a new wave of black nationalism, this time in the form of Black Power
297
movement, crested.”
50
Black Power, in Nelson’s analysis, corresponds with the emerging
Black health care activism of the time, as under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations
“healthcare systems became politicized and publicized as never before in U.S. history.”
51
The debates surrounding health care policy in the late 1960s and 1970s was preoccupied
with the task of how to best provide for the medical needs of the poor and elderly. For
decades, the American Medical Association had successfully “lobbied against plans to
establish any form of national health insurance,” but Democratic legislators’ “moral
leverage (and a congressional majority in 1964) resulted in the passage of the legislation
that created the Medicare program.” Bundled into this legislation was Medicaid, a
federally funded program that provided health care services for those living in poverty
irrespective of age.
52
African Americans are “symbolically implicated in the rhetoric
surrounding the Medicaid program.” Despite the fact that the majority of recipients were
non-minorities, African Americans who “received health benefits were scapegoat as “the
undeserving poor,” and Black women, in particular, were depicted as dishonest welfare
mothers out to defraud the state with bogus medical claims.”
53
In Northern California, African American activists called for the government to
fund medical clinics. The “medical industrial complex” was an institutional critique of
medicine that highlighted power and knowledge differentials between the medical
profession and patients. Nelson argues that the civil rights movement literature must
50
Alondra Nelson, Black Power, Biomedicine, and the Politics of Knowledge, 1.
51
Ibid., 3.
52
Ibid., 4-5.
53
Ibid., 10.
298
include instances of health activism from the turn of the twentieth century to the Black
Power movement. Activists leading this movement were staunch advocates of acting to
improve health care. An analysis of African American health activism in the early 1970s
shows Black Power health activists’ deployment of diverse strategies towards garnering
support for health needs in the community, they used the streets and the courts. By
utilizing a broad concept of health, Black Power health activists ventured “beyond
matters of the corporeal, individual black body to include the collective body, and went
beyond the thin concept of disease to include an overall conception of wellbeing.”
54
It is
this holistic approach to health that residents, activists, and medical practitioners in South
Central Los Angeles attempted to emulate and create as a standard of health in the
community. According to Nelson, “medical racialization” meant that activists worked to
provide access to health care for black communities, as well as alternative theories of
health and illness that sometimes implied and asserted alternate racial ideologies.
55
Non-
professional African American health activists mostly took up the “challenge of
confronting biomedical racialization while simultaneously pursuing grassroots institution
building projects.”
Black nationalists understood the importance of community-controlled
institutions as well as the relationship between the body, illness, and overall personal
health. Over the course of the twentieth century, African American activism around
health involved three strategies and tactics: grassroots institution building, integrationism,
54
Ibid., 12.
55
Ibid., 14.
299
and the politics of knowledge. The trajectory of institution builders were people who
formed and built basic medical facilities, disseminated information, and created networks
composed of both professional and residents and community activists that provided
medical services to African American people. From the 1900 to 1950s, African American
community and medical professionals engaged in large-scale institution building
throughout the United States. African Americans worked with predominantly white
philanthropists, medical establishments, and state and local governments to fund hospitals
in underserved African American communities and established schools to train black
medical professionals.
56
The integrationist strategy “rallied against segregation in
professional schools, organizations and hospitals, and demanded an end to Jim Crow in
mainstream medicine and often turned to the court for their battles.” Health advocacy and
organizing occurred through the church, political and social organizations, and women’s
advocacy clubs.
In Susan Smith’s Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired, she studies African
American women’s health centered activities and argues that health activism was a
significant element in the larger struggle for African American civil rights and American
citizenship.
57
The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a pivotal period in
which African Americans fought to improve health conditions, most especially the right
to equal access to government resources. According to Smith, African American health
“advocacy was characterized by the yoking together of civil rights activism with a
56
Ibid., 37.
57
Susan Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women’s Health Activism in America, 1890-
1950 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 10.
300
concern for the physical well-being of black communities, where African American
activists who focused on health issues frequently expressed an awareness of “Black
health” as both literal and figurative—as concerning the individual, corporal black body
as well the black body politic.”
58
It was not enough to get clinics that catered and serviced
the needs of African Americans, but it was equally as important to fight racial exclusion
since in this period medicine became an important venue in which scientific
classifications were justified to discriminate against people. Part of the integrationist
efforts was to built institutions, but also fight against racial exclusion and segregation.
Smith and Nelson both argue that the African American civil rights protest tradition has
been characterized by “men led but women organized” as men “held most of the formal
leadership positions and [lay and professional] women did most of the grassroots
organizing.”
59
These institution building and integrationist activists were heavily
gendered.
According to Nelson, the third trajectory of African Americans’ engagement with
community health clinics was the creation of a “politics of knowledge” which “debated
both scientific construction of race and racialized theories of medicine on their own
terms.” The politics of knowledge has two emphases (1) health activists’ challenge of
inaccurate or biased biomedical, scientific knowledge, and concerns about African
American bodies (2) activists’ recognition that the knowledge claims of biomedicine
were often related to discrimination outside of the health care sector.
60
Demystifying how
58
Ibid.
59
Ibid., 47.
301
disease has been linked to racial hierarchy where Blacks had been erroneously “viewed
as posing a major public health menace.”
61
In her understanding of the “politics of
knowledge” Nelson devotes much energy to documenting the activist efforts of the Black
Panther Party (BPP) for health equity. Recent health campaigns in poor communities and
communities of color have focused on the effects of air pollution, heart disease,
hypertension, diabetes, malnutrition, women’s reproductive rights, and the HIV/AIDS
epidemic, but historically the African American community has organized its health
concerns around bringing awareness to tuberculosis, cholera, sickle cell anemia, and
venereal disease. The BPP organized around sickle cell anemia awareness, as this disease
had been consistently cast as a “Black disease” through a series of scientific iterations.
The BPP “didn’t dispute the conclusions of social scientists and geneticists in strictly
theoretical terms, but asserted its own interpretation of the social consequences of the
disease in order to create a counter narrative.” W.E.B. Dubois’s study, The Philadelphia
Negro, in the late nineteenth century discussed the tuberculosis epidemic faced by
African Americans in Philadelphia. Dubois concluded that tuberculosis was not a “racial
disease but a social disease” that was linked to poverty, housing conditions, and working
conditions.
62
Similarly, a high rate of infant mortality in the African American
community was “not a Negro affair, but an index of social conditions.” Nelson’s concept
of “framing” proves helpful to understand the BPP’s education and politicizing efforts
60
Nelson, Black Power, Biomedicine, and the Politics of Knowledge, 87.
61
Ibid.
62
W.E.B. Dubois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995);
Samuel Kelton Jr. Roberts, Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation
(University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
302
around sickle cell anemia. They were able to “spin” the disease as “evidence of the
welfare state’s neglect of the Black community and more drastically, of a plot to eradiate
Black people.”
63
The BPP’s support of neighborhood health centers was connected to the group’s
feelings that War on Poverty efforts had failed to take into account African American
leaders and residents’ needs. Like Smith’s documentation of the tireless efforts of African
American women to establish clinics in the South at the turn of the century, women in the
Black Panther Party were equally invaluable to the establishment of the free medical
clinics during the civil and Black Power eras.
64
The BPP’s health programs became one
of the most important aspects of its “survival kit.” The Black Panthers viewed health as
the “state of physical, social and mental well-being. The highest level of health attainable
is one of the most basic human rights of all human beings,” where “it is the government’s
responsibility to provide its people with this right and other basic human rights.” Indeed,
63
Nelson, Black Power, Biomedicine, and the Politics of Knowledge, 21. Nelson not only documents the
BPP’s efforts to bring awareness of the social conditions that lead to the increased presence of sickle cell
anemia in the community, but also documents the development of the Center for the Study and Reduction
of Violence at UCLA. She discusses the CSRV to shows how the BPP tackled these health discourses
differently. The BPP waged a war on the social interpretations of sickle cell anemia and addressed the issue
with opening health clinics that paid close attention to the disease by providing screening procedures for
the disease. For BPP, sickle cell anemia represented a success to BPP from an “integrationist perspective,
and failure from an ideological perspective as treatment of the disease was incorporated into public health
care, but in the process its utility as a component of the Party’s larger arguments that black Americans were
under attack from white society was diminished.” The BPP’s efforts to thwart the establishment of UCLA’s
Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence was different as they argued against the scientific
principles that guided the implementation of the center (i.e. that African Americans are inherently violent).
Along with the NAACP, the BPP took to the courts to argue against the principles behind studies that
suggested that people of color are violent, and rather argued that violence was a byproduct of decades
worth of economic, social, and political disenfranchisement and inequality. This fight in the court, along
with the social turn against these scientific studies, led to the proposal for the center to be defeated. An
investigation into the BPP health efforts illustrate how their politicization around the sickle cell anemia
health campaign and legal challenge to this UCLA center illustrates the latter two segments that define
African American health activism: integration and politics of knowledge.
64
Ibid., 105.
303
they claimed, that medical clinics were vital to the black community, because “private
hospitals and doctors charge fees far more expensive than poor people can afford while
public hospitals and clinics were so overcrowded and understaffed that their services are
almost totally inadequate.” The People’s Free Medical Research Clinic aimed to offer an
alternative and possible solution to this problem.
65
In 1969, the Southern California
Chapter of the BPP opened a BPP: Bunchy Carter Free Medical Clinic. This clinic, along
with its counterpart in Northern California, “tested for high blood pressure, lead poising,
administered childhood immunizations, and optometry and gynecological exams.”
Unlike, the U.S. government and state funded clinics, these clinics got their funding for
these programs from local businesspeople, churches, and social organizations, with
volunteers soliciting donations for these programs by going door-to-door in black
communities.
66
In 1972, the BPP released the following statement:
“WE WANT COMPLETELY FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL BLACK AND
OPPRESSED PEOPLE. We believe that the government must provide, free of
charge, for the people, health facilities which will not only treat our illnesses,
most of which have come about as a result of our oppression, but which will also
develop preventative medical program to guarantee our future survival. We
believe that mass health education and research programs must be developed to
give black and oppressed people access to advanced scientific and medical
information, so we may provide ourselves with proper medical attention and
care.”
67
The BPP’s steadfast activism around the existence and accessibility of neighborhood and
community health centers in the community serves to bolster Nelson’s argument
concerning the different trajectories that defined health activism in the African American
65
Ibid., 122.
66
Ibid., 124.
67
Ibid.
304
community. The BPP’s commitment to helping working class and working poor people
of color did not end with simply discussing this issue. They were very vocal in fighting
for Oakland clinics striving to “meet the basic health needs of the communities…all
ethnic groups, including Mexican Americans and Chinese.”
68
Along with BPP’s efforts to politicize the community along health equity,
Chicana/o organizations in East Los Angeles were also drafting information and
pamphlets to make ethnic Mexicans aware of health disparities. The NCHO Newsletter:
Salud y Revolucion Social was operated by Chicanos as a venue for residents to become
critically attentive of the ways that poverty and inequality are largely to blame for health
disparities. The newsletter showcased articles on poverty’s role in the social ailments in
the community; showcase the small percentage of Mexican American doctors in the U.S.
due to discrimination in medical school admittances; the need for healthy daily practices;
and overall discourse of the diseases affecting the community. Their goal was to make
people cognizant of the issues and gain support by residents to fight for health equity.
69
The National Council on La Raza was also extremely active in establishing medical
centers throughout the State of California, with particular interest for that of
undocumented Mexican immigrants in rural towns across the state. They believed that
68
“Black Panther Party Plans Health Clinics,” Los Angeles Times, November 25, 1969, A24.
69
“Poverty Americas No. One Health Problem” NCHO Newsletter: Salud y Revolucion Social Volume 3,
Number 3, November 1973; “Chicano Health- A Statistical Nightmare” NCHO Newsletter: Salud y
Revolucion Social Volume 3, Number 5, January 1974; “Epidemics A Barrio Specter” NCHO Newsletter:
Salud y Revolucion Social Volume 4, Number 2, October 1974.
305
not providing adequate healthcare for this population would undercut the objectives of
health reform.
70
In the case of South Central Los Angeles, coalition politics around Nelson’s three
organizing medical activism principles was varied. Instances of interracial unity were
most obvious through the Watts Health Foundation, since from its origins the area they
serviced catered to Mexican American and African American residents. Both racial and
ethnic groups had to work collaboratively to craft medical discourse, programming, and
services reflective of the multi-racial community needs. I do not aim to suggest that these
interracial efforts were easy and not met with some trepidation. Such work often pitted
Black Power movement advocates against Chicana/o movement activists, most especially
on the issue of the distribution of War on Poverty funds and programming in their
respective communities. However, both movements for the most part were in agreement
with how the nation state had failed to protect their rights as first class citizens.
In the end, Nelson offers an important and useful framework towards
understanding African American health activism. Scholars have failed to discuss the vast
trajectory of ethnic Mexican health activism over the course of the twentieth century.
Most studies have focused on regional and current health topics without considering the
historical trajectory of health activism within the Chicana/o community. Natalia Molina
in Fit to be Citizens? enriches our understanding of public health in the Mexican
immigrant community. In her monograph, she argues that at the turn of the twentieth
70
“Immigrants and Health Care Reform” and “Statement on Immigrants and Health Care Reform”
Collection 295, Manuel Ruiz Papers, Special Collections, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.
306
century public health officials had a particular role in the production of racial knowledge
and racial hierarchies. As whites looked to Los Angeles as the land of sunshine and better
health options, public health officials crafted an image of “diseased” Asian and Mexican
immigrants who posed a threat to the idyllic image of Los Angeles. Health officials and
institutions, rather than tend to the dangers of communicable diseases like tuberculosis,
they paid more attention to the policing and containment of racial groups. In effect,
disease was defined by “sociocultural beliefs” regarding the uncleanliness of immigrants
and nonwhites.
71
This racialized discourse further stigmatized already marginalized groups in the
city. Molina illustrates how health officials, health discourse, and health institutions
became another site of racialization. The Public Health Department served as
“gatekeeper” with regards to how health and hygiene were used to determine who could
become a part of the body politic. Officials had the incredible power to restrict people’s
sense of social membership and shape their relationship to the nation state as “cleanliness
became something more than a way to prevent epidemics and make cities livable—it
became a route to citizenship, to becoming American. It was, in fact, confrontation with
racial and cultural outsiders that transformed cleanliness from a public health concern
into a moral and patriotic one.”
72
In this way, health is an arena for creation of social
membership.
71
Natalia Molina, Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 (University of
California Press, 2006), 2.
72
Ibid.
307
In her study, Molina illustrates how health officials manufactured statistics to
make Mexican and Asian immigrants seem diseased, unclean, and unfit for citizenship.
She shows the fluidity in racial and social hierarchies as Asian and Mexican immigrants
did not fit neatly within the black/white paradigm and thus were allowed some
“mobility.” The small percentage of African Americans in early twentieth century Los
Angeles meant they did not figure prominently in the public health discourse of Los
Angeles. Public health concerns over African Americans increased with population
growth and as the community began to organize for health clinics in their communities.
During Molina’s periodization, Mexican and Asian populations were in demand as
exploitable labor force and under different forms of racialization. Mexican immigrants
were viewed as able to assimilate unlike Asian immigrants. Mexican immigrants were
given Americanization classes to make them into ideal immigrants and citizens, while
Asian immigrants’ alleged “foreignness” was cast as different, as the “yellow peril.” Such
select “openness” and receptiveness towards Mexican immigrants did not endure. During
the economic depression of the 1930s, health officials conflated race and “alien” where
the increase in tuberculosis cases to the “diseased tuberculosis-ridden Mexican
population” justified their massive deportation.
73
Mexican immigrants were not passive
victims against public health officials’ racialization. They waged letter-writing campaigns
to their council regarding public health officials’ dehumanizing procedures. Molina
illustrated the ways that racial hierarchy was not static but ever changing.
73
Ibid., 150.
308
In my analysis of health in South Central Los Angeles, I am not focusing on the
ways that health officials and health institutions created a hierarchy between African
Americans and ethnic Mexicans, but rather the ways that health officials failed to provide
equitable care for impoverished residents in Los Angeles. By the mid-1960s, African
Americans were no longer in the periphery of the health discussion in Los Angeles, but
were in the center of it. The health issues that affected the African American community
became a concern for public health officials, and the activism for a hospital and
expansion of community health centers placed them as leaders in the development of
community health. In many respects, African Americans went from being peripheral to
central in the health discourse. Ethnic Mexicans were not far behind. Concerns over
ethnic Mexican health practices and concerns also played a role in public health
discourse. Unlike African Americans, proposals for clinics in East Los Angeles had
clauses that ensured the protection of undocumented residents as well as bilingual
services.
74
Despite their efforts, Mexican immigrants did not figure prominently, but
rather second to African Americans in the discussion in War on Poverty’s efforts for
health equity.
The health concerns between these two communities overlapped in many ways as
both groups have been associated as carriers of tuberculosis. By the 1970s, for African
Americans in Los Angeles the discourse around tuberculosis was muted. The large influx
of Mexican immigrants and Asian immigrants caused concerns over tuberculosis rates.
From 1970 to 1990 the rise in tuberculosis cases in Los Angeles was attributed to
74
“Proyecto Del Instituto para El Programa Medico-Hospital Contra La Pobreza” Collection 295, Manuel
Ruiz Papers, Special Collections, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.
309
foreign-born persons, with the largest percentage coming from Latin America (a little
over 50 percent of cases).
75
Reports of Mexican immigrants seeking treatment for
tuberculosis occurred after they came back to the United States after visiting Mexico or
other parts of Latin America. Tuberculosis is a social disease found in high percentages
in economically disadvantaged communities because of poverty, deteriorating housing
conditions, and homelessness, but public health officials discussed it in terms of race.
Tuberculosis is a disease that has consistently played a prominent role in African
American and Latinos public health discourse.
76
Health officials have racialized
tuberculosis, diabetes, and folk medicine as largely a concern in the Mexican immigrant
community while concentrating on venereal disease, cancer, sickle cell anemia, and heart
disease for African Americans. Attributing different diseases to certain racial and ethnic
groups has posed challenges for establishing community health centers that catered to
both groups.
One clinic in South Central that serviced Latino immigrants early on was the
Hubert Humphrey Comprehensive Health Centers at the intersection of Slauson Avenue
and Main Street. The clinic opened in 1976, and serviced roughly 600 patients a day. Its
location placed it a couple of blocks away from 49
th
Street and Main Street, the area in
which Mexican immigrants I discussed in Chapter 1 settled in the early to mid to late
1970s. The day the clinic opened it serviced 37 percent Latino, and by 1979 it was about
45 percent. The prenatal sector of the clinic was almost all Latino. They attributed the
75
Anatomy of a Crisis.,80; “Immigrants Called Source of TB Increase,” Los Angeles Times, March 12,
1979, A10.
76
Epidemics a Barrio Spector: TB, Typhoid, Hepatitis Linked to Illegal Immigrants,” NCHO Newsletter:
Salud y Revolucion Social, Volume 4, Number 2 October 1974.
310
high percentage of Latino patronage because the clinic did not ask for immigration status.
Clinic administrators said that if they asked for documentation, “we’d probably frighten
them away. I’m personally very happy that Latinos are less afraid of coming than they
once were. We can provide a service for them and also prevent the spread of disease
within the community.”
77
Officials stated that the high level of Mexican immigrant patronage has caused
complaints from African Americans, as “perhaps many Blacks identify this facility as one
of their own.” Despite the relative newness of the facility, African American residents
were eager and felt entitled to claim this clinic as their own, much like many other
institutions throughout the community. Administrators said that such sentiments were not
their concern as it was a county facility and they had the responsibility to provide health
care to everyone in the area. The demographics of this clinic are uncharacteristic of many
clinics in the area. The Mexican immigrant population in South Central in 1970 was
roughly 10 percent and by 1980 it was 20 percent. The 45 percent patron rate is reflective
of its location in a highly Mexican immigrant pocket of South Central as well as
openness that Mexican immigrants felt with the institution. Maria Ruiz stated, “this clinic
offered lots of care, easy to get to. I spent most of the time on the bus for work, last thing
I wanted was another trip on the bus for the doctor. Its closeness made it appealing, I
could, and did, walk to it when my kids or I got sick. Didn’t ask for papers, which I
didn’t have. At the time, we didn’t go to government institutions, because of deportation
77
William Overend, “South Central L.A.: Minority Meets Minority,” Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1979.
311
fears… It was just a clinic, nothing really to remember about… It did the job.”
78
She
elaborated that everyone she knew went to this clinic, in part she felt it was the one space
throughout South Central that did not feel overwhelmingly Black like most spaces in the
neighborhood, as “we spread the word amongst each other that this was an open, free
clinic.” By investigating multiple social and government providers, most especially their
placement in the community, one learns that even as early as the late 1970s a clinic in
South Central had a half of its patrons ethnic Mexican. This speaks not only to the
particular space in which Mexican immigrants settled in neighborhood, but very early on
the clinic had to match its services to the community.
Health officials concern over what disease impacted African American and
Mexican immigrants respectively were matched with concerns over findings that
described why these groups underutilized health services. Health officials believed that
race and culture explained Mexican immigrant underutilization. Health officials created a
study to investigate this phenomenon. Medical delivery services found it prudent to begin
their study on the Mexican immigrant and Chicana/o population in East Los Angeles.
They created a bilingual household survey, with the majority of respondents answering
the survey in Spanish. This 1974 study’s questions centered on why the Mexican
community was not seeking emergency medical services.
79
In ELAHSI’s view, the
Mexican population in East Los Angeles was divided into three cultural groups: 1)
Mexican American who are culturally most integrated into the “American way of life” by
78
Oral history with author, Maria Ruiz.
79
“Proposal to Study the Cultural Barriers to Utilization of Emergency Medical Services- May 23, 1974,”
Record Group 381, Community Action Program, National Archives Records Administration, College Park,
Maryland.
312
either rejecting the customs and heritage of Mexico or practicing them from lack of
knowledge 2) Mexican Americans usually second or third generation who have
experienced acculturation into American life, considering both the cultures of Mexico
and United States suitable and consistent with their lives 3) Mexican American who cling
tenaciously to Mexican customs and heritage. The last group, Mexican Americans who
“cling tenaciously” to their culture was the most worrisome and the hardest to engage by
the medical profession. This group poses a real threat to themselves and families as their
avoidance of the medical field means that treatable illness go unnoticed, but most
worrisome to health officials was that this third group was the largest percentage of East
Los Angeles residents. In researchers eyes, these unassimilated Mexicans weary of
physicians go to physicians only as a last resort, when all folk medicine and healers have
failed. This study listed folk illnesses: mal de ojo, empacho, caida de mollera, and susto,
and how folk healers and curanderas cured these illnesses as a major part of their
findings.
An investigation into Latino health produces the theorization of the Latino health
paradox. Despite the low socio-economic status of Latino immigrants, at the point of
migration they have a healthier health index. Latino immigrants in the U.S. have positive
health outcomes in adult mortality, infant mortality, and mental health. Not in all areas as
obesity, diabetes, and HIV continues to be of great concern for Latino immigrants.
Scholars like David Hayes-Bautista argue that “culture and social cultural factors” like
family, religion, social support amongst Latino immigrants produces positive health
313
outcomes; however, with increased time spent in the U.S. any positive health outcomes
erode and diminish.
80
The logic behind the aforementioned study on ethnic Mexican use of medical
providers illustrates county health officials’ own racist and reductionist understanding of
health and healthcare needs in the Mexican American community. In their view, the
assimilated and acculturated residents in the community are the easiest to get into the
medical clinics and easiest targets for assistance, unlike the unassimilated. The premise of
culture and cultural practices as the largest deterrent in seeking medical services
illustrates the ineptitude of the medical profession to consider different medical
approaches. Medical professionals were quick to blame culture and cultural difference, as
the source of people’s limited engagement with healthcare rather than reflecting back on
how they, as medical experts and professionals, failed to fit and meet the needs of the
particular community or provide services in a language that is accessible to them (as a
good percentage of East Los Angeles residents were fluent in Spanish not English). This
latter concern, language mismatch, has posed a two fold problem: “first, the person
seeking the services is rarely informed of the method by which he could obtain the
necessary services; second, the system does not adequately provide for bilingual,
bicultural personnel capable of receiving an emergency communication and
understanding the nature and extent of the problem.”
81
80
David Hayes-Bautista, “The Latino Health Research Agenda for the Twenty-first Century” in Marcelo
Suarez-Orozco and Mariela Paez, eds. Latinos Remaking America (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002).
81
Ibid.
314
Culture and cultural difference are reasons given for why working class people of
color have failed to seek services, rather than medical practitioners failure to address how
their racist practices towards people of color have been a source of distrust in U.S. based
medicine. Feelings of second-class status upon patronizing government sponsored clinics
contribute to people’s unwillingness and inability to trust medical practitioners. Also,
people’s undocumented status plays a role in Mexican immigrants unwillingness to seek
services, as they fear deportation. Rumors of people getting deported after seeking
services at the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center were true.
82
Undocumented
Mexican immigrants were weary of frequenting some government funded clinics. Similar
fears were found around the community and places of employment. The 1970s were a
period of genuine fear of deportation in all facets of life. The struggle for health centers
that serviced and protected the unanimity of undocumented Mexican immigrant
population was not part of the discourse and debates for health options in South Central.
This discussion was waged in East Los Angeles community centers and amongst
activists. In this regard, some of the clinics in South Central were ill prepared to handle
the growing Mexican immigrant population in the community in that they had to learn to
create spaces in which people felt safe and free of deportation threats to seek services.
Some government funded clinics like Hubert H. Humphrey Comprehensive Health
Center became a safe zone for Mexican immigrants. Clinics throughout East Los Angeles
similarly built reputations of servicing undocumented patients without repercussions. La
Clinica Familiar del Barrio was one such clinic. East Los Angeles Health Task Force
82
“Epidemics a Barrio Spector: TB, Typhoid, Hepatitis Linked to Illegal Immigrants,” NCHO Newsletter:
Salud y Revolucion Social, Volume 4, Number 2. October 1974.
315
director Jose Duarte discussed that studies like the one discussed above needed to
concern themselves more on establishing clinics rather than cultural practices of the
community.
The “success” of this study, namely that they were able to recruit participants,
meant that a similar study for African American residents in South Central and Watts was
viable. The results or whether this study was actually conducted is undetermined, but I
would speculate that similar to health practitioners reading of Mexican American
unwillingness to visit a doctor as a cultural and racial pre-disposition guided the study.
These studies failed to understand that the lack of services and distrust in the system
could also contribute to why people of color did not seek medical services. None of the
findings speculate how having people from the community work within the medical
profession could change the relationship between people of color and public health, but
one can speculate that it could have a positive impact.
Budget Cuts to Health Programs in South Central Los Angeles
The aforementioned study required that the findings would produce meaningful
changes to how medical practitioners approach community health. Funding for these
medical centers proved a challenge in the late 1960s and 1970s, they became all the more
difficult during the Reagan and Bush presidencies. President Jimmy Carter was
committed to health centers and during his administration support grew. Conversely,
Reagan expected programs like Head Start and healthcare centers—original War on
Poverty programs—to be combined in a prevention block grant that included health
centers, alcohol and drug abuse care, mental health centers, and maternal and child
316
health. Placing these programs under one block grant, rather than individual grants made
sure that these services shared in already diminishing financial resources. Under Reagan,
community health clinics faced the greatest budgetary cuts with a 25 percent reduction.
83
A renewal in commitment to community health centers came under President Bill
Clinton. His administration believed that “health centers were in the most highly
protected budget category, as were AIDS and family planning.”
84
The budgetary cuts
were devastating to many of the government and community clinics, just as clinics like
the South Central Multipurpose Health Services Center felt they were making inroads in
meeting the health needs of the community. At the very least they were increasing their
numbers of patients served—a remarkable feat for a population who has a history of
staying away from medical care and centers.
On July 24, 1981, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors met to discuss
the budget cuts waged on health programs and services in the county. The cuts were
going to have meaningful repercussions as funds to operate hospital outpatient clinics,
district health centers, and public health programs like family planning and drug and
alcohol rehabilitation centers were threatened with severe cutbacks or termination. These
closures would mean the termination of 2,000 county health employees.
85
At this meeting
were all the county supervisors (a very conservative county board of supervisors),
Maxine Waters (then member of the California State Assembly, she later would become
83
Lefkowitz, Community Health Centers, 18.
84
Ibid., 100.
85
“Hearing on Los Angeles County Budget Cuts in Health Programs and Services,” Assembly Committee
on Health (Sacramento: The Committee, 1981), 1.
317
member of the U.S. House of Representatives), and county health workers
representatives. Waters was present at the meeting as she was, and continues to be, a key
advocate and ally to the African American and South Central community. This was a
very contentious meeting. It revealed the disjuncture between conservative supervisors
that found it justifiable to eliminate important community resources and community
advocates like Maxine Waters who opposed such approach.
The Los Angeles County total budget for health services in 1981-1982 was $1
billion—making it the largest funded county department. The county operates a network
of seven hospitals, three comprehensive health centers, and 50 health clinics. It ranks as
one of the largest county in California, yet the Los Angeles system during that period was
second only to San Francisco in the ratio of beds to population.
86
The budget cuts would
cut health clinics from 50 to 42, as eight were deemed small and ineffective. The county
supervisors suggested that the patients from these soon to be closed clinics would be
moved to the larger comprehensive health centers. Such closures would mean that the
central tenet of having health clinics within five miles radius for nearly every citizen in
the county would be eliminated. The distance would increase to eight miles. This increase
may have seemed minor, when it actually makes a world a difference for a population
that has very limited means of transportation. Public transportation in Los Angeles is
inadequate and unreliable. Such closures would prove particularly devastating for the
elderly. They were forced to venture out from their own neighborhood where they are
familiar. In many cases, this meant an absolute inability to get to a distant clinic or
86
Ibid., 21.
318
hospital.
87
In supervisor’s Hufford’s assessment of the necessity of such budget cuts he
explained,
“we provide a full range of basic health care and public health service as well as a
generous range of optional county financed services, such as paramedic services,
emergency and major trauma services, and alcoholism and drug services well
beyond state funding levels. Our health system is one the largest and finest in the
nation and represents a major investment in staff, equipment, and facilities by the
people in this county. The county is also mandated to provide such services as fire
protection, elections, law enforcement, justice in the courts, welfare, social
services, land use and planning. In addition, we operate parks, beaches,
recreational programs, and library systems. The county’s budget must fund all of
these services, which benefit all our residents, including the poor… this year,
there simply isn’t enough money to provide all of these services at the level we all
agree is desirable.”
88
He also clarified and stressed that health was not the only sector experiencing cuts, but
departments across the board faced similar strains. Hufford’s discourse of “generosity”
and “finest” services in the nation could easily be refuted by many working poor or
working class community residents that sought medical attention from any of the
county’s operated clinics or hospitals. Long waits, poor service and medical expertise,
and depressing conditions made an already charged experience all the more depressing
and devastating. The county Section 17000 of Welfare and Institutions Code required the
county to “relieve support all incompetent or indigent persons and those incapacitated by
age, disease or accident while lawfully residents of the county and who are not supported
and relieved by their own means or by state hospitals or other state or private
institutions”
89
This mandate ensured that deep cuts were possible, but complete
87
Ibid., 53.
88
Ibid.
89
Ibid., 5
319
eradication of a county sponsored health program was impossible. This guarantee, while
an important recourse to ensure services did not protect many health clinics from county
budgetary cuts.
Throughout the meetings’ opening comments Maxine Waters was quiet, but once
Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital was brought up she quickly voiced her concerns. She
was upset over the funding threats to the hospital, as she believed that the hospital bore
the brunt of these cuts. The hospital was expected to absorb an extra 10 percent cut,
compared to other county operated hospitals. County supervisors defended this
penalization because the hospital was unable to show expenditure receipts and collect
patrons’ debt. Waters’ frustration increased as she felt that the supervisors were not
answering her questions and concerns. She was particularly frustrated with Hufford, and
angrily called out, “Well just don’t bring your goobly-gop here in terms of what you’re
talking about. Put it in plain English so that everybody will understand exactly what
you’re saying.”
90
For county supervisors, payment for services rendered at Martin Luther
King, Jr. Hospital was of great concern as the rate of payment was 13 percent below that
of UCLA-Harbor Medical. Waters explained this disparity as an outcome of the different
patient populations treated at each of these medical centers. The patients at Martin Luther
King, Jr. Hospital are “indigents, the working poor use MLK, they are 50 percent of our
population, 70 percent in our ob-gyn, those are the people who are trying to pay their
bills—the indigents, working poor, who do not have the dollars, and that makes a
90
Ibid., 25.
320
significant difference in the collection.”
91
In her view, reductions to the hospital were
unmerited as county supervisors failed to acknowledge the population the hospital
serviced. She further elaborated and takes Hufford’s comments to task as she argued,
“what we have been doing is maintaining county health services at the expense of
other essential county services. To me, your [Hufford] bias is showing. What
could be more essential than health services? And we know that if you take away
services, you take away preventive services, that eventually you’re going to have
illness, you could have a reoccurrence of communicable disease in this
community, and you wouldn’t need another year other services because it’d
thoroughly wipe out your population. I’m concerned as to your statement, and the
bias that’s obvious there.”
92
Waters’ comments were forceful and drove her message home with regards to the
dangers associated with cutting services paving the way for the genocide—eradication—
of the community. She stressed the importance of preventive health as an important
safeguard toward ensuring improving the overall health of the community, so that
communicable disease would not become an issue again. Waters was unapologetic and
unwavering in her assessment of the situation at hand. She was the only person in the
room that spoke out on behalf of the hospital, community clinics, and overall community,
and understood that these funding cuts by the county were of critical importance as they
are the last line for the funding of health services. The distribution of funds begins at the
federal, city and state, and finally, county. Reagan’s plans to cut state and federal funds
for these programs meant that county reductions would only further devastate these
clinics. Cutting down on health centers meant that the three largest comprehensive
centers in the South Central Los Angeles radius, like the Hudson, Humphrey, and
91
Ibid., 28.
92
Ibid., 33.
321
Roybal, would bare the brunt of in-taking patients. The windfall would mean that waiting
rooms, already filled at overcapacity levels, would increase wait times. There would be
additional cuts made to the number of social workers, nutritionist, and health educators at
each of these clinics. The lack of preventive care would also mean an increase in
emergency room visits.
Throughout this discussion most of the indigent patients discussed were thought
of predominantly as African American. Sporadically the discussion would address the
growing Mexican immigrant population. Maxine Waters expressed, “our undocumented
worker population at MLK has increased significantly in the past few years.”
93
It is
unclear what she meant by this comment, as the employee demographics of the MLK, Jr.
Hospital do not suggest an increase in hiring undocumented people. But she could have
been motioning not only how the employee population was shifting, but also how the
community’s demographics were changing. What is clear is that this comment stands
almost as a throw away statement throughout her testimony in the meeting. Nonetheless,
it does reveal how early into the 1980s medical centers in South Central were not only
serving the needs of African Americans but also Mexican immigrants—overwhelmingly
racialized as undocumented.
In a 1985 Los Angeles Sentinel newspaper article, Maxine Waters recounts her
“heated battle” with the conservative members of the county board of supervisors in early
1981. She recollected how these drastic cuts to the health care clinics in the area meant
that these men failed to realize or care for the ways that sponsoring health initiatives “was
93
Ibid., 27.
322
one way they can help eliminate poverty in Watts—by making sure that people are
healthy and thus productive. I doubt if it crossed their minds one time. It was a clearly a
political decision by the conservatives who have more than once been accused of being
racist who demonstrated by their actions the exclusion from county healthy service
people who needed it the most.”
94
The county approved the budget cuts to these medical
centers despite Waters’ and community health advocates’ disapproval. Waters’ fervent
tenacity and commitment to fighting for the sponsorship of clinics and hospitals—the
health needs of the community—make her one of South Central Los Angeles’ residents
favored politician. These budgetary cuts, increased immigration from Latin America, and
economic restructuring framed the social, economic, and political milieu in which health
faced multiple challenges.
The health status of residents of South Central and Watts did not dramatically
improve throughout 1965 to 1992, the period between the two greatest social upheavals
in U.S. history. By 1992, Los Angeles had the highest uninsured rate with 32 percent of
its residents being uninsured in comparison to the overall state average of 23 percent and
the national average of 13 percent.
95
In Los Angeles County, Latinos were far more likely
than members of any other ethnic group to be uninsured with 49 percent of Latinos
without any health insurance coverage, compared with 27 percent of Asians, 17 percent
of African Americans, and 19 percent of Anglos. The loss in manufacturing jobs in Los
Angeles accounts for the county’s rising uninsured rates, as the economic sectors that
94
Maxine Waters, “Watts: My View,” The Los Angeles Sentinel, August 22, 1985.
95
E. Richard Brown, et al. “Inequalities in Health: The Sickness in the Center of Our Cities,” in South
Central Los Angeles: Anatomy of a Crisis, Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, Working Paper No. 6,
June 1993, 43.
323
experienced growth were retail and service sectors—industries that do not offer medical
insurance.
96
The severity of having a large uninsured population has grave consequences as
uninsured people wait until they have severe health problems to receive assistance in
overcrowded emergency rooms. Hospital emergency rooms bare the unusually high
burden of coping with the overwhelmingly uninsured and severely ill population. This
means that county funded hospitals typically operate at 90-100 percent occupancy,
compared to less than 55 percent occupancy in private hospitals. In the 1990s, the wait
time in county urgent-care clinics and emergency rooms averaged more than 6 hours,
however, in the last few years wait times have reached “dangerous” levels with 12 to 16
hours being the average time. In 2011, hospitals began a pilot program in which people
could pay a fee of $15 to $25 dollars to make an appointment over the internet or phone
to receive emergency care within 15 minutes.
97
While $15 dollars seems like a minimal
cost to receive immediate attention, it actually creates another layer of unequal
distribution in health services as not everyone has access to pay this fee, phone, or
computer. Prompt treatment for emergency care should not be something that is paid for,
but a right for every citizen. Wait times did not only define emergency care, as patients
are expected to wait weeks and months to schedule an appointment for a routine checkup.
96
Ibid., 44.
97
Ibid., 46; Molly Hennessy-Fiske, “Dangerously Overcrowded Conditions Persist at L.A. County-USC
Medical Center’s Emergency Room,” Los Angeles Times, November 9, 2010; Molly Hennessy-Fiske,
“Making an appointment for the emergency room a growing trend,” Los Angeles Times, January 30, 2011.
324
The lack of healthcare providers and lack of routine checkups for South Central residents
meant that in 1990 the health concerns of the community were as follows:
Table 3: Residents in Low-Income Areas Compared to Affluent Areas
17 times more likely to be hospitalized for hypertension
9.6 times more likely to be hospitalized for diabetes
9 times more likely to be hospitalized for respiratory infection
6.3 times more likely to be hospitalized for heart failure
6 times more likely to be hospitalized for bronchitis/asthma
3.8 times more likely to be hospitalized for kidney/urinary tract infections
3.7 times more likely to be hospitalized for pneumonia
Community and neighborhood health centers were touted as “the wave of the future”
because they aimed to tackle the health issues plaguing the community that surrounded
them. These clinics were to benefit from community input. It is this last provision, as
Lefkowitz and Nelson document in their insightful studies, that set these clinics and
health centers apart. Countless studies focus on the working class and working poor
community residents fight for equitable employment and housing opportunities, however
little is mentioned with regards to community health.
In South Central and Watts, the struggle to bring these clinics to the community
did not bring about large-scale marches, but were battles waged between elected officials,
doctors, community residents, and county supervisors. The establishment of these clinics
was in large part to the tireless efforts and collaboration between residents, doctors, and
government officials. The South Central Multipurpose Health Center serves as one
example in a web of government sponsored community health clinics in the area that had
similar beginnings and trajectories. The clinic had community residents as part of its
governing board and originated through the ingenious efforts of community residents and
325
doctors committed to serving indigent residents. As documented in this section,
establishing and funding government funded community health centers in the community
has not been an easy endeavor. Residents like Maria Sancen, Maria Ruiz, and Harriet
Goslin each benefitted through the presence of these government and community clinics,
either as patrons or employees. These clinics were not ideal health care providers, but
provided a more humane approach to health care. Patients had to wait months for an
appointment, routine check-up, medical buildings are sometimes old and unkept, and
waiting rooms are filled with similarly impoverished residents. A sense of sadness is
palpable at these clinics.
Teresa Garcia’s experience at the South Central Los Angeles Family Health
Center, a community government sponsored clinic in the heart of South Central for over
27 years, shares that while the services at the clinic could be better, they are decent
enough considering her other options. She has gone to various clinics, but this one, she
believes is the “best.” At the very least she says it is clean, well-lit, and organized, “there
is something to big windows, lots of lighting. Clinics with no lights just make you feel
worse. And trust me there are plenty of those clinics here.”
98
They also have the TVs that
broadcast the latest shows on Univision and Telemundo. She believes that while the
clinic provides free-to-low-cost medical care it should not minimize its obligation to
provide equitable and up-to-date care irrespective of race, class, and gender. Garcia notes
that while the clinic now services primarily Mexican immigrants from the community,
this was not always the case, “I don’t know what happened to all the Black people who
98
Oral history with author, Teresa Garcia, Los Angeles, November 12, 2007.
326
use to go there. Much like my street changing, the clinic, schools, and grocery store
patrons have changed too. I guess you can say we are taking over in everything. [laughs]
But I do wonder where have they gone?” Garcia’s inquiry is valid, and the best
explanation is that South Central Los Angeles Family Clinic is located in close proximity
to the section of this community that are overwhelming Mexican (the eastern section of
the community).
African American health patients continue to share a fraught and complex
relationship to medical care, and like Teresa they have their own clinics of preference.
They tend to frequent the county sponsored clinics Hubert H. Humphrey Comprehensive
Health Center and H. Claude Hudson Comprehensive Health Center, as well as Compton
Central Health Clinic and Watts Health Clinic. Conversations around health dominate
these clinics’ waiting rooms, but also reflections about relationships and life. At the H.
Claude Hudson Comprehensive Health Center, on a Sunday afternoon, patients make
temporary friends with the people waiting alongside them. The routine begins with
patients passing through security into a fifty-seat waiting room. They stand in line to be
checked in by an angry health worker who constantly repeats to the patients to look/read
the sign “Only the patient approaches the window when called.” Once checked in, they
sit down to wait for their name to be called. The waiting room is covered with posters
about important vaccinations, how to protect against a cold, and the importance of health
visits. The chairs all face the door in which medical practitioners call their name. The
direction of the chairs produces more anxiety, as each time the door opens peoples’ hope
for their name to be called heightened. While they wait, patients cannot help but strike a
327
conversation with those around them. They form “friendships” to “pass the time.” As
African American health patron, Marcus told Mexican patron Mario, “Man I’ve been
waiting a long time. As long as they don’t bring out the stretcher, we good. [laughs]”
Mario smiles and agrees that waiting is better than being on a stretcher. As time
progresses Marcus tells Mario, “man I got my girl waiting for me outside. She’s good to
me. This is why I don’t come. Waiting… they poke you all over the place.” Mario, nods
and says “and all they tell you is you are ok. Wasted day. But my mujer makes me
come.”
99
The exchange between these men illuminates that racial difference was not a
deterrent for their moment of dialogue. I do not aim to say that race relations are as easy
as this exchange makes evident, but rather that there are moments in which people look
beyond racial difference to find camaraderie (even if temporary) in the similarity of their
experiences. It also illustrates, men’s engagement with doctors or pursuit of medical care
was largely due to their respective female partner’s urging. From their interaction, one
can discern that they were there to have a routine checkup, thus practicing preventive
care. Preventive care, having people seek medical care in the form of routine check-ups
on a regular basis was equally important for community health advocates as dignified and
quality medical care. This interaction, as well as other encounters and interactions
discussed in this section, are reflections of what takes shape in government sponsored
community clinics across South Central Los Angeles’ medical corridors. They illustrate
99
On a Sunday afternoon in November, I found myself at the H Claude Hudson Comprehensive Health
Center waiting room. I overheard this conversation between Marcus and Mario (pseudo names created by
author). Informal conversation between Marcus and Mario, pseudo names, Los Angeles, November 14,
2010.
328
that community health clinics have made small inroads in the quest for health equity.
Residents, health activists, and political officials must continue to struggle for health
equity.
Killer King: Hope Becomes Despair
The Los Angeles Times coverage of the hospital began with the central theme of
hope that gave way to concerns, race, incompetence, fraud, and politics. The Times
questioned if the hospital was really up to the challenge, “how much of an impact can a
modern medical center have on the healthcare problems of the urban ghetto?” The
hospital’s funding was also contentious as King/Drew relied on property tax revenues and
with the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, “this “political earthquake” reduced property
tax revenues by 57 percent and put even greater pressure on L.A. County Supervisors to
ration funding to public services like healthcare.”
100
Along with the decline in taxpayer
funds, the Times wrote articles documenting horror stories of the hospital that implied
neglect and incompetence among staff, especially nurses; local doctors dissatisfaction
with the county’s billing system; insufficient waiting room space for the large daily
influx of clinic patients; and shortages in registered nurses which prevented the opening
of a much needed intensive care unit.
101
In 1982, Anthens Park Hospital, Avalon
Memorial Hospital, Broadway Community Hospital, Metropolitan Hospital, and
Centinela Hospital Medical Center were all for-profit emergency care centers. Martin
Luther King, Jr. Hospital, USC Medical Center, and Harbor-UCLA hospital were the
100
Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramon, “Killing “Killer King,” 294.
101
Ibid.
329
only county operated centers that could service the needs of residents in the area.
102
The
Times articles on King/Drew’s failures proved all the more devastating as King/Drew was
the only affordable and realistic option for working class and working poor residents in
Watts and South Central Los Angeles.
The emergence of the moniker for the hospital, “Killer King,” is loaded with
negative meanings and images. To juxtapose the name of a non-violent civil rights leader
with death went against all the dreams and hopes for the hospital that desired to be
associated with the “pride of black America as embodied by King.” Instead the hospital
failed to do what competent hospitals do—save lives. The death of patients in emergency
rooms is common, however, the mortality rate at King/Drew was exceedingly high.
Doctors at King/Drew complained that, “private hospitals in the area routinely dumped
indigent patients on King/Drew… they keep them for five or six hours, discover they
have no cash or insurance then dump them on us. By then, it maybe too late… and we get
the reputation of Killer King.”
103
Along with indigent patients, the violence in the street
associated with gang territory between the feuding gangs like the Bloods and Crips and
escalating drug trade meant that many of the emergency concerns were also associated
with fatal wounds like gunshots. This title would plague the hospital well beyond its
conception in the 1970s.
As the name became part of everyday lexicon, the hospital in the 1980s was also
grappling with accusations of incompetence and political and racial warfare. The hospital
102
“Inventory and analysis of Health Facilities Services and Resources in South L.A., Huntington Park,
South Gate, July 30, 1982,” Box 83, Folder: Watts Extended Health, Incorporated, Augustus F. Hawkins
Papers, 1935-1990, Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
103
Ibid., 296.
330
was servicing more than 30,000 patients a year, 50,000 annual emergency room visits,
and a trauma center that handled about 3,500 medical crises a year or about 20 percent of
the county load. About 583 babies were born a month in the hospital maternity ward.
104
In
a newspaper article titled, “Ain’t it a Shame,” supporters of the hospital discussed, “we as
people should give very little credence to what is said about a hospital for the minorities
in South Central Los Angeles… King Hospital has been a boom to this community and
despite the detractors it still stands as the beacon of light for life in this community. There
are problems at King. There have been some serious lapses there,” but these problems
could be remedied.
105
These lapses were in healthcare, as well as leadership. In the fall of
1989, King/Drew administrator William Delgado, an employee of King/Drew for nearly
17 years, was reassigned to the administrative offices of the County Department of
Health Services. Watts’ residents protested his reassignment and students and faculty at
Drew called for the resignation of Robert Gates, Director of Department of Health
Services, charging him and the board of supervisors with racism. Delgado was accused of
allowing the hospital fall into various stages of infrastructure despair, understaffing,
antiquated equipment, and medical care that was just not up to par. Defenders of Delgado
believed that his transfer was an assault and insult to the Black community, “we see this
transfer as racist and systematic attempt to deplete Black leadership within the Black
community.” Not only were activists rallying around the protection of the hospital’s
leadership, but they also believed that “charges of overcrowding have plagued King
104
Malaika Brown, “Sweat and Pride Help Keep ML King Hospital Alive,” The Los Angeles Sentinel,
January 13, 1994.
105
“Ain’t it a Shame” Los Angeles Times, October 8, 1989.
331
Hospital as well as other hospitals, however, King Hospital has been singled out by the
board of supervisors despite it not having received the funds to meet the needs of patients
in the area.” A year before, residents had successfully reinstated Delgado after he had
been accused of mismanagement. But this time, residents’ pleas were not being heard.
106
The veracity with which residents of Watts fought for Delgado was more of a
representation of residents’ sense of protecting “their/our” institution. The hospital’s
presence in the community for close to three decades meant that residents felt and
believed they owned the hospital and thus acted “blindly and fell victim to the very things
they detest: arbitrary and insensitive acts.” This sense of ownership also caused other
problems for the hospital as the demographic changes of the community could not be
ignored. By 1989, the Latino patient population at King/Drew was well over 50 percent
and it exacerbate the problems with implications not only in changes for concern in
healthcare, but equity in employment at King/Drew.
107
Tensions between Latino and
African Americans escalated in the wake of the 1992 uprising. Supervisor Gloria Molina
followed up on the Chicano Employees Union discrimination complaint against
King/Drew that was based on a 1987 investigation by the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission. She wanted to asses if these complaints had any merit and if
King/Drew’s employee makeup matched it patrons. The Department of Health Services
had 26,000 workers: 33 percent African American, 29 percent white, 20 percent
Hispanic, and 11 percent Asian. At King/Drew, about 11 percent of its employees were
106
Sheena Lester, “Blacks Condemn Delgardo Ouster,” Los Angeles Times, August 28, 1989.
107
Larry Aubry, “King-Drew: Another View,” Los Angeles Sentinel, October 5, 1989.
332
Hispanic. Latino healthcare employees believed that this percentage was not reflective of
the proportion of Latino residents in the community.
108
By 1990, the Latino population
had grown to 45 percent, where more than half the babies born at Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hospital were from Latino mothers.
109
Molina, along with Chicano health employees
wanted Los Angeles County to provide better opportunities for Latinos in the health
department, most especially at King/Drew.
Members of the 35 member African American community health taskforce
believed that asking about the employee make up in the form of current positions, names
of employees, promotions, applicant flow, new hires, outreach activities, and affirmative
action was an overreaching of Molina’s supervisorial duties. Dr. Ernie Smith critiqued
Molina’s efforts as a strategic ploy because she did not “request the same info from LA
County/USC, which was in her supervisorial district.”
110
Molina defended herself by
stating that she was not stepping on supervisorial lines, but that her interest in King/Drew
was due to her responsibility in overseeing the county’s affirmative action programs.
According to members of the African American community and the healthcare taskforce,
Molina’s intrusion into the racial background of King/Drew employees’ was viewed as
“sabotage and pushing for a Black/Hispanic confrontation at King.”
108
“Hispanics Not Getting Equal Chance at Jobs,” The Los Angeles Sentinel, September 10, 1992.
109
Maria Newman, “After the Riots: Riots Put Focus on Hispanic Growth and Problems in South Central,”
New York Times, May 11, 1992, B6; Hector Tobar, “Latinos Transform South L.A.,” Los Angeles Times,
February 16, 1992, A1.
110
Dennis Schatzman, “Molina Sparkin ‘Black/Hispanic Confrontation’ over King/Drew,” Los Angeles
Times, June 30, 1992.
333
Edward Corbet accused Molina that her concerns about the hospital were
ultimately going to benefit the growing Latino population by using “blown up figures” of
the level of attendance and use of Latinos at King/Drew. Corbet admitted to an increase
in the Latino population but said that their numbers were “blown up figures,” and that
many Latinos (as well as African Americans) are brought to the facility from all over the
county, not just from South Central. He attributes the growth in Latino admittance to the
large number of the Latino childbirths delivered from “illegal aliens” which he mentioned
are “flawed stats.”
111
These statistics are not flawed. Undocumented parents giving birth
to their children at this hospital (about 50 percent of the births at the hospital) was not an
indicator that they were not part of the community— but were rather the opposite. It was
reflective of the growing and permanent Latino population in South Central and Watts.
Corbet, dismissal of the undocumented population was outdated and unreflective of the
community was racially changing.
The racial and ethnic mirroring between the workforce and community does not
guarantee respectful and dignified service. Joao Vargas documents this point when he
discusses Shannon’s utilization of services at King/Drew. Shannon is a resident in the
housing project where Vargas conducted his ethnographic research. He documents her
frustration with social services in the area—as primarily hostile institutions. He recounts
many instances in which he sat with Shannon and other South Central residents in the
King/Drew waiting room. In one instance, an unfair altercation between police obligated
Shannon to take her daughter to the hospital for emergency care. Her “baby girl Sheila”
111
Ibid.
334
needed immediate medical attention because her sweats and shaking were uncontrollable,
yet this did not merit King Drew’s health staff’s prompt attention or care. The more
Shannon protested for care in the hospital waiting room, the longer they waited.
112
This type of backlash against patients who asked their place in the “waitlist
queue” was met with anger and frustration by hospital personnel. Shannon recounts the
scene as “you just go there, do what they ask you do to, and your own business. Those
sisters over there think they’re the smartest asses around. Fucking oreos is what they are.
Black skin, but they sure are white inside.”
113
This is a very powerful assessment of the
people who work at these medical centers—especially coming from an African American
woman about African American women. Vargas points out how these women, because of
different job opportunities, have little in common with each other as government
employment options (and the lack of) have ensured that they appear gulfs apart.
Shannon’s statement poses a difficult challenge in our understanding of race relations,
most especially in an assessment of multiracial and interracial relations of solidarity and
tension. Vargas acutely argues that Shannon’s complaints stem not only from that
particular incident but countless others. Women like Shannon must “endure the
bureaucratic procedures… the employers’ moods at hospitals, police stations,
rehabilitation clinics, and welfare offices remind them of the multiple overlapping ways
112
Vargas, Catching Hell in the City of Angels, 72.
113
Ibid., 72.
335
they are marginalized. Only underprivileged Blacks (and increasingly, poor Latinas) were
clients in those places. Experience had taught them to meekly comply.”
114
This forced compliance upsets working class and working poor Mexican
immigrant and African American residents—as their engagement with social services is
one that involves docility, humiliation, and subservience. This process requires patrons,
South Central Los Angeles residents, to forfeit their dignity within an already
dehumanizing social service regime. As Carmen Magallanes said, “we [my husband and
I] are not used to that treatment. I have always had insurance because of my husband. He
lost his job. I lost my job. There went the paycheck and my healthcare. It takes a toll on
one’s dignity to ask—beg—for help. That’s what it feels like, begging.”
115
Long-term
South Central resident Carmen’s statement is very revealing. She spent her entire adult
life laboring in the garment industry in Los Angeles, and her husband in the
manufacturing industry. The economic downturn of the last few years, manufacturing
sectors’ relocation to other countries, and her and her husband’s elderly age do not make
them ideal candidates for new employment. She never imagined that she would one day
be standing in line asking for government assistance in the form of low-cost health care,
“I was spoiled by my private insurance. I would see a doctor immediately. My tests were
covered. My medicine was easy to get. When you get to my age, the doctor is
important.”
116
114
Ibid., 73.
115
Oral history with author, Carmen Magallanes, November 20, 2007.
116
Ibid.
336
Magallanes elaborated, that she received help from unlikely people. She
explained,
“You would think that because the girl working the desk is Latina you would have
an easier time. Not really. Yeah, they sometimes speak Spanish, and that’s good,
helpful but they can be the meanest. There’s something to the tone in which they
say, ask things. Sometimes the Black ladies are nice to me. Sometimes, not all the
time. I don’t know why. You never know. I think they need to hire competent
people. Gente que sea gente con la gente. [People who can be humane.] We put
up with their treatment because we don’t have a choice. Not because we want to.”
Carmen’s assessment, like Shannon’s, is one in which the experience should not be this
way— irrespective of race. With regards to healthcare and services, both African
Americans and Mexican immigrants experience similar dehumanizing medical care,
where overlapping discrimination waged on working class communities of color because
of race, class, gender, as well as spatial discrimination means that South Central residents
continue to feel undeserving of basic services like medical care. The mission of the 1960s
to offer meaningful healthcare did not and has not materialized for a large segment of
uninsured residents of South Central Los Angeles.
The public discourse of King/Drew’s strife, internal politics, inadequate
leadership, and racial tension overshadowed the real problems at King/Drew—lack of
resources. Leading up to the hospital’s closure the hospital was not deemed a welcoming
hospital. Patients wait in the hospital’s emergency room under the watchful eye of a
security team placed next to the metal detector. The personnel at the front desk were
behind bulletproof Plexiglas. This lobby failed to deliver a sense of welcome, but rather
was an extension of the police state. To this reality, county supervisor Yvonne
Braithwaite Burke said, “something was deadly wrong with the hospital, and a significant
337
portion of the community seemed hell-bent on keeping King/Drew a Black-controlled
institution—even if it meant incompetent staffing, rampant fraud, surveillance, and
needless patient death. This seemed particularly problematic because the community
surrounding King/Drew was no longer majority African American, and this fact was
reflected in the hospital’s predominantly Mexican immigrant patient population.”
117
Like
Burke, Hunt and Ramon argued that King/Drew was never really an African American
institution as the “Black administrators running the facility throughout most of its history
actually had little to no control over its budget or workforce due to what was described as
a “colonial” oversight arrangement with the county.”
118
But more important, this false
sense of African American ownership and leadership led to many of the tensions between
African Americans and Mexican immigrants working at the hospital or utilizing hospital
resources.
The hospital’s eventual closure in 2007 came after countless county and state
health reports pointed to its ineffectiveness, poor leadership, and medical lapses. Its
closure was marred with controversy, and its original vision of promise and hope almost
eradicated. Such a reading placed blame squarely on the officials running King/Drew,
without a real acknowledgement of the ways that Proposition 13 eliminated the financial
base to provide adequate resources to successfully operate King/Drew. On May 20, 2007,
the Los Angeles Times ran the story of 43-year-old mother of three Edith Isabel
Rodriguez. Her death captured headlines and poignantly illustrated Martin Luther King,
117
Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramon, “Killing “Killer King,” 302.
118
Ibid., 308.
338
Jr. Hospital’s failed promise. Rodriguez had been to the hospital days before her death
due to excruciating stomach pain. She was discharged with prescription medication and
given a doctor’s appointment for a later date. However, her pain did not subside, so she
returned to the hospital’s emergency room. On her final visit, she could not bare the pain
and fell to the linoleum floor. As she was writhing in pain, hospital staff continued to
work at their desks tending other patients. Only one patient checked on her condition, but
overall no one helped her. A janitor even cleaned the floor around her as if she were a
piece of furniture. It was later noted that a closed-circuit camera captured everyone’s
apparent indifference. Her agony was considered a public disturbance by hospital staff,
and believed that the only way to put an end to it was to alert police. Police officers rather
than inquire about her pain, ran her name through the system and discovered that she had
an outstanding warrant. Despite her cries of pain, officers picked her up from the floor
and informed that she was going to be placed in the custody of the police. She did not
make it beyond the hospital’s emergency room. She died right before she could be placed
inside the police squad car. All this happened in the last 90 minutes of Edith life.
119
The story surrounding Edith’s death has many layers as it highlights the
relationship between law enforcement and health. In part the readiness by the police to
arrest a person in pain, and not think twice about their actions, speaks volumes to the
ways that residents of South Central have been racialized and dehumanized beyond
second-class citizenships. It also illustrates the lack of options for poor uninsured people,
as well as the policing involved at all layers of South Central lives. The rapid response by
119
Charles Ornstein, “Tale of last 90 minutes of woman’s life” Los Angeles Times, May 20, 2007
339
police, means that police officers are ready for deployment at the hospital and other
sectors of the community at a moments notice. Policing, in South Central, is not only on
the streets but also in the hospital waiting rooms and clinics. The presence of police at
hospital entrances, surveillance cameras, and bulletproof plexiglass are visual markers of
the policing of residents, and confirmation of their second-class citizenship. The promise
of welcoming centers, at least in the last decade, is shattered as the reality that the
majority of clinics are an extension of policing as well as representations of old,
dilapidated, and uncared for buildings. Teresa Garza’s earlier assessment of the South
Central Los Angeles Family Health Center government sponsored community clinic
cleanliness as one of the primary reasons she goes to this clinic illuminates the difficulty
of finding a clinic that fills this one essential requirement. By its closure, King/Drew
became “popularly understood as a model not to be replicated, an experiment whose
findings work to prove the futility of noble goals.”
120
King/Drew failed to provide first-
rate healthcare for the poor, good jobs for area residents, and community self-
determination, rather its demise represented one more failed government and social
promise.
I do not aim to place blame on the people working at the hospital, those that
believed in its mission, nor see the hospital as a futile enterprise. Rather the lack of
sustained political and economic support for working class people of color’s efforts and
resources as worthy of protection is to blame. The hospital originated from the efforts of
activist women like Caffie Greene and Mary Henry, and doctors like Alfred Cannon.
120
Ibid.
340
Their goals of achieving health parity should be something we continue to strive for.
Green was part of a powerful group of African American women living in Watts who
dedicated their efforts to community improvement and pushed local officials to support
building MLK/Drew. Green helped organize a local committee to build the Watts Health
Foundation, which sponsored community health clinics and was the driving force behind
the King-Drew Auxiliary, which raised funds to build the hospital and medical school.
Throughout the 1970s, Green was in charge of training and job development programs
for youths interested in health careers, and was at the forefront of all the affairs regarding
King/Drew.
121
Similarly, Henry was critical to the rise of the King/Drew Medical Center
and worked on another OEO initiative like Head Start programs. She is described as
speaking out for children and healthcare, especially for the Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hospital.
122
Los Angeles Council Woman Jan Perry said, “They just don’t make these
women anymore,” signaling Henry’s, and by extension Green’s, tenacity and
commitment to the community. These women’s organizing and belief that poor uninsured
people deserved proper and equitable healthcare continues as the basis for political
officials, community residents, and health care providers’ mission to re-open Martin
Luther King, Jr. Hospital in the near future.
121
Elaine Woo, “Caffie Greene Dies at 91; Activist was a Leader in Creation of King/Drew Hospital,” Los
Angeles Times, June 7, 2010.
122
Carol Williams, “Mary B. Henry dies at 82; civil rights activist improved education, healthcare in L.A.”
Los Angeles Times, August 16, 2009.
341
La Cliniquita: Family Planning
The growth and presence of comprehensive centers occurred alongside, and in
many respects in large part due to federal, state, and county support and funds for family
planning programs. This is especially true of the San Pedro Family Health Center
(SPFHC). On any given day, by mid-morning the San Pedro Family Health Center
exceeded its capacity with patients in the waiting room having to stand to wait to be
called in to see the doctor. Nestled in the corner of San Pedro Place and Main Street, in
South Central Los Angeles, it quickly became an important community resource. In part,
the good treatment, care, and concern of “las doctoras” (Ann Turner and Catherine Bax),
as well as the sliding scale payment options made this clinic one of the most important
resources in the community. Who are the patients at this clinic? Mothers, children, and
young couples with newborns filled the pleasant, cozy, and small waiting room.
123
For the
most part, patients went into the clinic seeking pregnancy tests, family planning, or
medical attention for young children’s fever or flu. For Dolores Rosas, a recently arrived
Mexican immigrant to South Central, her first visit to the clinic was, “I will always have
fond memories of la cliniquita (small clinic)… las doctoras were so nice. The clinic was
humble, warm, welcoming. The waiting room was full of women like me, waiting to get
back pregnancy results, taking their children when sick. The talk in the waiting room—
children and pregnancy. Not to say that we were the only people there… elderly African
American folks also were in the waiting room.” Small clinics like SPFHC who relied on
sliding scale payment plan, but also government funds in the form of family planning
123
Kathleen Hendrix, “Health Center Practices Justice by Practicing Medicine” Los Angeles Times, April
16, 1985, G1.
342
programs were often described as, la conejera, the bunny factory by community
residents. This nickname was given to this clinic because the waiting room was full of
expecting mothers, many of whom already had children. Thus, la conejera was shorthand
to describe the reproduction of women of color in the neighborhood. This name might
conjure a chuckle or laugh, but in fact its loaded with racist, gendered, and sexist
understandings of women of color’s sexuality and fertility. The ease with which SPFHC
established itself as a resource for pregnant women in the community was due to federal,
state, and county officials financial commitment to clinics that offered extensive family
planning services. In this section, I discuss the ways OEO’s sponsorship of Los Angeles
Regional Family Planning Council has had a lasting impact on the ways that family
services are delivered in the region. Unknowingly, SPFHC opened at the very moment in
which LARFPC family planning efforts had taken hold in the community, as well as the
pivotal moment in which the community was undergoing demographic change.
The California Family Planning Council (CFPC) was established to provide
meaningful and positive public information and services to strengthen the family and
quality of life.
124
In their view, it was not enough to simply enhance women’s quality of
life through family planning, but “stress family planning in the context of comprehensive
health services.” They particularly wanted to disseminate material on child health and
voluntary family planning practices, and specified that no coercion, direct or implied,
were attached to seeking family planning services.
125
They believed that the staffs of
124
By 1997, the Los Angeles Regional Family Planning Council (LARFPC) and the California Family
Planning Council (CFPC) merged to form California Family Health Council.
343
medical chapters throughout California—California State Department of Education,
Mental Hygiene, Corrections, Public Health, and Social Welfare— were adequately
trained to facilitate family planning information. They wanted to provide family planning
services to all California residents desiring assistance, most especially low-income
families. For the CFPC, public information should be “directed to all individuals who are
interested and should not be regarded or conducted as a means of influencing the birth
rate among any particular group or class.”
126
This last tenet, about servicing everyone
irrespective of class or race, was disingenuous.
In May 1967, discussions between Family Planning Program directors, HEW, and
over forty California county representatives yielded information indicating that over $2
million dollars of federal funds were urgently needed to effectively operate California
Family Planning Programs during the next fiscal year across the state.
127
At the local
level, this meant in 1968 the Los Angeles Regional Family Planning Council (LARFPC)
was awarded $448,000 in OEO funds to coordinate and expand Family Planning Services
in the Los Angeles area. The grant funded 11 public and private health and social
agencies. This financial support made Los Angeles the largest federal grant recipient for
family planning services, and one of its kind in the country. The majority of funds were
earmarked for health services and not for staff support. This oversight would pose a
problem in the implementation of the program, as the council realized that ensuring the
125
“California Council of Family Planning” Folder 3751: California Interagency Council on Family
Planning, State Office of Economic Opportunity, California State Archives, Sacramento, California.
126
Ibid.
127
Ibid.
344
program operate smoothly meant hiring supporting staff to operate the program.
However, with most of the grant budget allotted to services offered, employment
opportunities within LARFPC proved difficult.
Along with financial assistance, the Family Planning Office assembled a taskforce
to assist LARFPC. The taskforce linked consultants with physicians, usually a specialist
in obstetrics and gynecology. The consultants were “experienced in the educational
parameters of health programs for the underprivileged in general, and in family planning
services in particular.”
128
On December 29, 1967, consultation days were broken down in
the following fashion:
Table 4: Family Planning Specialist Consultation Days, 1976
Specialist Consultation Number of Days
Family Planning 800
Neighborhood Health 100
Emergency Food 100
Narcotics Rehabilitation 40
Environmental Health 40
Alcohol Rehabilitation 20
Other 20
The disproportionate number of days for family planning consultation indicates the
commitment by the Family Planning Office and OEO officials to set up clinics that would
be “prepared” to provide these services to residents most in need. As they saw it,
consultants would provide the necessary training to “assist the individual family planning
programs in utilizing most effectively the local resources available to them, and
ultimately to assure optimal coordination of all such resources to provide highest quality
128
Office of Health Services Community Action Program,” Folder 3750: Health, State Office of Economic
Opportunity, California State Archives, Sacramento, California.
345
care to the greatest number of people at the lowest possible cost in the most dignified and
generally acceptable manner.”
129
A generous reading of the OEO’s effort would recount
the OEO’s commitment to establishing these health centers as quickly and easily as
possible. If the OEO were solely committed to establishing medical centers that were
about comprehensive health, then they would utilize their consulting services more in
terms of neighborhood health as opposed to family planning. The disproportionate
number of days allotted to family planning is an indicator of their commitment towards
establishing programs and services that aimed to regulate and control the reproduction of
working class women and women of color. The mantra of setting up centers irrespective
of race and class is challenged as the projected location of these centers in Los Angeles
were around working class and working poor communities of color. Not in affluent areas,
as family planning services had already been available for patients that could pay for
services. Despite the language of “choice” and “option,” government community health
clinics and hospitals aggressively pursued providing women with family planning options
they must practice to keep receiving care, and in some cases performed procedures that
were irreversible like sterilization.
Los Angeles did not have a centralized organization or mechanism that offered
family planning options for its residents. In the late 1960s, an estimated 32,000 of
132,000 poor women needing family planning services were being served, meaning that
roughly 77 percent of women were still not served. A study by the USC Medical Center
corroborated these findings. Their study of health attainment in the city proved that one
129
“Memo: Family Planning Office Consultation,” Folder 3751, State Office of Economic Opportunity,
California State Archives, Sacramento, California.
346
of every four medically indigent pregnant women had never received prenatal care.
Women who lived beyond a ten-mile radius to a clinic or hospital cited distance as the
obstacle for getting prenatal care. If prenatal care was not acquired by poor women, then
much less family planning services. Before the establishment of LARFPC family
planning was under the domain of Planned Parenthood programs that operated in public
hospitals.
130
LARFPC utilized Planned Parenthood as an example. Planned Parenthood
discussed birth control as the key to women’s liberation. This organization’s
understanding of women of color sexuality was loaded with racial and gender stereotypes
that vilified and limited women of color’s reproductive rights. With Planned Parenthood
as its model and supporter, LARFPC funding application cited its primary focus as an
extension of services to a high risk population in need of hospitals and clinic offering
round-the-clock availability and a network of health department and Planned Parenthood
clinics that could make expanded family planning services more readily available in a
large number of geographic locations. In the funding application, they also encouraged
the involvement of physician of the Watts Extended Health Program.
131
The plan was to provide funding for clinics that served all women in need, serve
women postpartum, serve men who desire contraceptive services, provide assitance to
women who desired abortions, and treat indigent men and women in need of infertility
services.
132
In the first year of the OEO funding of LARFPC delegate agencies, they
130
Lynn C. Landman, “L.A. Experiment with Functional Coordination: A Progress Report,” Family
Planning Perspectives Vol. 3, No. 2 (April 1971), pg. 5-14, 4-5.
131
Ibid., 7.
132
Ibid., 8.
347
served patients at 19 clinic sites in some 1,953 individual patient sessions. In this third
year of funding, services available in 40 locations in a projected 5,580 clinic sessions.
The growth in locations meant that residents were becoming increasingly aware and
receptive to the services offered by the family planning agency. With these goals in mind,
LARFPC’s mission to set up operational centers in South Central Los Angeles and Watts
proved of utmost concern. By the early 1970s, clinics in Watts benefited from LARFPC
services as 28 doctors in the area served patients referred to them by LARFPC delegate
agencies outreach personnel. There was a financial incentive to participate in the program
as Watts physicians received $17 dollars per patient and $12 dollars if they came back for
family planning, thus the inceptive to educate and provide family planning was set in
place.
133
Dr. Alfred Cannon, a vocal advocate of community health clinics and hospitals
in the area, said that “2,639 women had obtained family planning from LARFPC
funding… this method of delivering family planning services in the ghetto has defused
millitants’ charges that family planning is genocidal.” Cannon’s assertion of how
community residents view family planning as part of a genocidal project are warranted,
as family planning by medical practioners for women of color often meant the practice of
forced sterilization at childbirth. Forced sterilization became common practice and the
way to “control” the reproductive health of poor families of color.
The LARFPC’s mission was to provide family practice services and education,
not outright support of forced sterilization. In fact, family planning services became a
contentious issue among doctors in South Central and Watts. Many doctors in the
133
Ibid.
348
community believed that such issues were not the purview of interal medicine
practitioners, but left to gyncologists. Some physicians believed that bringing up this
subject to women was uncomfortable, as they feared offending the patient as it was “too
sensitive a topic to raise and most appreciated the patient initiating the conversation
regarding family planning.” Most patients believed that bringing up family planning
should be the doctors’ priority, as they would be more versed in what services to offer.
Patients requested a real discussion of what family planning is something that is beyond a
cataloging of the various methods. This, to patients, meant a real education of family
contraception. Through programs like LARFPC that encouraged doctors to offer family
planning services and education as it provided doctors with financial incentives like
reimbursements. In doing so, minimizing some of the medical taboos against talking
about these issues.
134
Despite all these efforts, women in South Central still believed that
family planning was part of a genocide project.
135
The geographic landscape of Los Angeles, its sprawl, posed a challenge to
establish comprehensive family health clinics. The LARFPC was the first time a grant
was written to support multiple organizations collectively. LARFPC’s delegate agencies
were meticulous about their training procedures for educating people about how to
implement these programs with a focus on how to address questions and concerns about
“teenagers and family planning; family planning and the male; health education in family
planning; therapeutic abortion and sterilization; attitudes toward family planning;
134
Randall C. Hulbert and Robert H. Settlage, “Birth Control and the Private Physician: The View from
Los Angeles,” Family Planning Perspectives Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter 1974), 50-55, 52.
135
Lynn Lilliston, “Birth Control Color Blind,” Los Angeles Times, November 14, 1971, D9.
349
alternative strategies for outreach; and the role of state and national family planning
agencies.”
136
At training sessions, LARFPC organizers were made aware of how ill
versed they were in the kind of outreach that was occurring and was needed in the
community. Establishing employment opportunities like that of a “community aide” was
one of the most important job opportunities established through the fund. The community
aide would the direct line between resident needs and LARFPC personnel. They were
also responsible for recruiting of patients, following-up on missed or broken
appointments, and assisting with baby-sitting and transportation for patients, and
speaking at community meetings.
Community meeting forums continue to be an outlet for health advocates to
engage residents. Family planning budget proposals justified the need for “community
aide” as the most effective resource in the delivery of family planning in this
“predominately black community” as it “requires specific skills related to its culture, its
varying institution and the accompanying life styles of community members. To engage
and involved them require a delivery system that operates under a philosophy and set of
principles that are compatible with the community value system.”
137
The presence of the
community aides was essential for an ethical approach in the distribution of services as
the needs of the community were to be taken into account with such a hire and position.
Community aides were meant to ease the transition of community residents into seeking
services.
136
Lynn C. Landman, “L.A. Experiment with Functional Coordination: A Progress Report,” Family
Planning Perspectives Vol. 3, No. 2 (April 1971), pg. 5-14, 9.
137
“Watts Extended Health, Inc. Proposal” Box 64, Mayor Tom Bradley Administrative Papers, 1973-
1993, Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
350
Making family planning desirable in the community meant providing outreach
and education programs via mature, indigenous female outreach workers who knew what
having too many babies can mean. This meant that these outreach workers were from
these impoverished areas and would go door to door, visit mothers in hospitals, and
address groups.
138
One such beneficiary of LARFPC community aide positions was Diana
Richardson, 27-year-old Watts resident. Her engagement with LARFPC illustrates the
possibilities of the program. As a mother of two children, she was finding it difficult to
make ends meet as her husband continued his education. Her two-year-old baby was very
sickly, and her medicine and doctor bills were becoming increasingly high and posed a
problem. For Diana, “every penny we have is measured out for actual living expenses.
We were really desperate not to have another baby.” She told her doctor about her
financial troubles, but he never spoke to her about any form of contraception. He wanted
her to ask him about birth control. Upon her inquiry, “he said he’d be glad to prescribe it,
and he did… he told me return in three months for a checkup.” The doctor’s first bill
came with a $15 charge, “it was the end of the world” for Diana. She could not pay it,
could not face the doctor again. She later found out from a friend that there was a way to
get free birth control service, so she went for the first time to a free county health clinic.
It was a great resource, “sure, there was a wait, and everyone was in a hurry, but the
doctor gave me a real thorough examination, answered all my questions, reassured me,
and there was no charge for all this.” Richardson was excited and believed that this was
the greatest thing that had happened to her. However, as she walked out of the office, the
138
Ibid.
351
attendant made her feel ashamed, embarrassed, confused and then just mad as she said,
“Well just don’t forget, you’re getting this service off the taxpayers’ back.”
139
Diana’s
experience is not unique. The free services at these clinics often made recipients like
Diana feel ashamed and humiliated, because their use of the service was free. The role of
the “community aide” was to have workers who are sensitive to the plight and need of
working class community residents as they utilized these centers. Diana’s experience
inspired her activism within community health clinics in the area. The clinic actually
reached out to her and asked her if she would represent the patients for a clinic LARFPC
was setting up. Her high/low experience with the clinic and LARFPC services meant that
she wanted to “help set up things right for others, so I jumped at the chance.”
140
LARFPC presence in Los Angeles and South Central occurred in the midst of
women of color’s quest for equal reproductive rights. Feminist scholars Dorothy Roberts,
Jennifer Nelson, Elena Gutierrez, Laura Briggs, and Andrea Smith have each documented
the plight and state sanctioned violence on African American and Native American
women’s bodies in the United States.
141
Roberts insightful book, Killing the Black Body,
argues that the “systemic, institutionalized denial of reproductive freedom has uniquely
139
Landman, “L.A. Experiment with Functional Coordination,” 12.
140
Ibid.
141
See more: Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
(New York: New York University Press, 2003); JenJael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross,
Elena Gutierrez, eds., Jennifer Nelson, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement (New
York: New York University Press, 2003) Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organizing for Reproductive
Justice (South End Press, 2004); Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide
(South End Press, 2005).
352
marked Black women’s history in America.”
142
The denial of reproductive freedom is also
extended to Latina women. She argues that the legacy of “slave masters’ economic stake
in bonded women’s fertility to the racist strains of early birth control policy to
sterilization abuse of African American women during the 1960s and 1970s to the current
campaign to inject Norplant and Depo-Provera into the arms of teenagers and welfare
mothers in the 1980s “are all connected apparatuses of control.” Roberts’ argues that
public and scholarly debates about reproductive rights and freedom have largely focused
on abortion, obscuring the basic reproductive rights and health that women of color seek.
Thus, she argues that reproductive freedom is a matter of social justice, and intimately
tied to racial politics.
143
Roberts illustrates the multiple policies that continue to degrade African
American, and by extension women of color’s reproductive decisions. The distribution of
Norplant in poor communities of color was a means by the state to “address poverty, law
enforcement practices that penalize Black women for bearing a child, and welfare reform
measures that cut assistance to children born to welfare mothers all proclaim the same
message.” This contraceptive was based on an understanding of how the United States’
social problems can be solved through curtailing African American women’s birthrates.
African American reproduction is treated and viewed as a form of degeneracy, as these
women impart a deviant lifestyle to their children through their example. This damaging
imagery and theorization led reporters to “call them ‘welfare babies,’ ‘crack babies’ ‘at-
142
Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 4.
143
Ibid., 4-5.
353
risk babies’ or ‘deficit babies’ by whatever term, they constitute a new ‘biounderclass’ of
infants who were disadvantaged almost from the moment of conception.”
144
Such racist
and sexist understandings of poor women of color’s reproduction not only frames their
options, or lack of options, but also these reductionist statements psychologically,
emotionally, physically, economically, and socially harm the life chances of children of
color.
Roberts, along with the aforementioned scholars, discuss the complex relationship
between white and women of color’s activism around reproductive rights. Margaret
Sanger advocated for the availability and option of birth control, but after World War I
moved her rhetoric for birth control from feminism to eugenics and racial health. For
eugenicists, birth control was a means of controlling a population rather than a means of
increasing women’s reproductive autonomy.
145
Eugenicists and its birth control
movement served to reinforce a racial hierarchy that rested on the ways that social
problems are caused and can be fixed by controlling the “deviant” reproductive options
practiced on the poor. Roberts documents how despite the fact that differential fertility
rates between whites and African Americans nearly disappeared from 1880 and 1940.
One explanation for this decrease was due to poor health, as well as findings that African
American women were using contraceptives. In the 1930s and 1940s, Black Women
Clubs were educating black families about birth control. Women were taking
reproduction choices that best fit their families, and it was not under the purview of
144
Ibid., 10.
145
Ibid., 80.
354
government-sponsored programs. Roberts and Elena Gutierrez both illustrate the tension
and divergence between white feminists and women of color feminists over the issue of
sterilization. In the 1970s, white feminists believed that enforcing a three-day waiting
period on sterilization procedures after childbirth impinged on their reproductive rights.
This three-day grace period was a guiding principal of women of color feminists who
were resisting and fighting against coerced sterilization in their communities. The
divergence over sterilization was based on the fact that white women actually had a
choice and informed knowledge of sterilization, while working class women of color did
not. Sterilization for these women was coerced and uninformed. Women of color and
white feminists clashed in terms of the meaning and activism behind reproductive rights.
The discourse around African American and white women’s sexuality and
pregnancy are mutually constituted and informed. Rickie Solinger documented the
differential treatment of middle-class women’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy versus poor
African American women in the post WWII period. According to Solinger, the discourse
surrounding a white woman’s virtue and respectability shaped not only a discourse about
white women’s sexuality but also African American women. White single pregnant
women who did not want their children were encouraged to give up their children for
adoption in an effort to regain respectability and an opportunity at landing a respectable
husband. This was not recommended among African American women. These women
and their children were considered a product of African Americans uncontrolled and
natural sexual prowess, and therefore left to raise their children and not afforded the same
355
“second” chance as white women.
146
By the 1960s, the “sexual revolution” excluded
African Americans, as instead of liberation these women’s sexuality was associated with
the “population bomb.” The discourse surrounding abortion, sterilization, and
overpopulation had racial, class, gender, and sexual overtones that could not be ignored.
The aforementioned texts have largely focused on the reproductive rights of
African American women, with little attention to the particular plight of women of
Mexican descent. In the early twentieth century, Mexican women were also prime targets
for health officials. The Health department sponsored prenatal, birthing, and well-baby
programs aimed at indoctrinating Mexican women with American ideals to move them
away from their “backward” culture and moved towards fitting into the “modern city.”
147
Health officials hoped to curtail the “threat” of unwanted pregnancies and alleged bad
parenting. Concern over Mexican women’s fertility has not only been a concern of health
officials, but of social, government, immigration, and economic policy makers. Mexican
women were considered “socially peripheral” because of their small population in the
early twentieth century, but were “symbolically central” because “unless they could be
won over Mexicans as a group would continue to threaten health officials’ construction
as a bastion of health.”
148
By the mid-to-late-twentieth century, the growth in Mexican
immigration meant that Mexican women moved from being socially peripheral and
symbolically central to socially and symbolically central.
146
Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade (Routledge, 2
nd
Edition, 2000), 8-10; Rickie Solinger, Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in
America (New York: New York University Press, 2007).
147
Molina, Fit to be Citizens?, 10.
148
Ibid., 10.
356
The 1978 Madrigal vs. Quilligan case illustrates how Mexican women became
socially and symbolically central for health officials. Through this case Mexican women
challenged the widespread perception of their hypersexuality of having “too many
children.” Their reproductive behavior was deemed a social problem that the federal and
medical profession was most apt to fix through compulsory sterilization. Hundreds of
Mexican women were forcefully sterilized in the early 1970s. The 1978 Madrigal vs.
Quilligan culminated in a moratorium on the compulsory sterilization of women and
adoption of bilingual consent forms. Bilingual consent forms was a major achievement,
as the case demonstrated the ways that Mexican women were given forms to sign at the
moment of childbirth without proper knowledge of the documentation they were signing
due to language barriers and not being the right frame of mind. Fears of Mexican women,
or for that matter African American women, as hyperfertile is not a new phenomenon. By
the 1960s and 1970s, anxieties about overpopulation, birthrates, and fertility had become
a “concern” for government officials, demographers, and the general citizenry.
149
Despite
the anxiety being discussed in terms of overpopulation, most especially that of women of
color, the national birthrates since 1955 were declining. Elena Gutierrez in Fertile
Matters discusses how a survey of 209 county hospitals, Planned Parenthood clinics, and
welfare departments showed a need to improve the states’ family planning services. This
meant that welfare funding had to make considerable inroads in providing funding for
contraceptives, public education about family planning, physician involvement in
promoting family planning and smaller family size, and state funding of demographic
149
Elena Gutierrez, Fertile Matters: The Politics of Mexican-Origin Women’s Reproduction (University of
Texas Press, 2008), 21.
357
centers housed in universities. This funding was spearheaded by what policy officials
viewed as the “immigration invasion” of Mexican families, an “invasion” that would be
curtailed through the forced sterilization of women of color.
War on Poverty funds had a particular role to play in the funding of sterilization
efforts. Prior to 1969 the U.S. government had prohibited federally supported family
planning services from subsidizing sterilization and abortion services. In 1970, Nixon
passed the Family Planning Services and Research Act. This legislation provided federal
funds for family planning services and research and supported the formation of the Office
of Population Affairs within HEW. This was, according to Gutierrez, the first piece of
federal legislation exclusively concerned with family planning and thus demonstrated a
new government investment in population matters.
150
With this federal act, the
government financing of sterilization procedures was substantial. In 1971, funds for
sterilization became accessible. Medicaid covered 90 percent of the cost. Some federal
funds were offered through the OEO. The combination of technical advances in
sterilization, increased availability of federal funding, and relaxing of requirements for
the procedures led to sterilization becoming the most popular form of birth control in the
United States. California led the charge with the highest rates of sterilization in the
nation. At first glance, such a statement might appear that women were volunteering for
such procedure, however, as Gutierrez illustrates that was not the case.
150
The new rules meant that a protocol had to be established in which women must provide informed
consent and third day waiting period requirement. Hysterectomies were prohibited if performed for
sterilization purpose and federal funds to sterilize minors and mentally incompetent and institutionalized
persons was outlawed. Ibid., 16.
358
The sterilization of women of Mexican descent followed a pattern similar to that
of other women of color. Doctors at USC-LACMC believed that,
“Mexicans weren’t really “American,” and [they] had come to Mexico pregnant
on the bus just so that they could have their baby born a U.S. citizen. So they
can’t be deported themselves. It was frequently expressed that the poor bred like
rabbits and ate up money on welfare, that the women were promiscuous and just
having babies because they couldn’t control their sexual desire or were too stupid
to use birth control … the prevailing attitude was that one or two children were
enough for any mother and that any mother who had four or more was
undisciplined and ignorant burden upon the country.”
151
Such rendition on Mexican women’s femininity and migration illustrates how doctors
and welfare officials mischaracterized and misunderstood Mexican women’s fertility.
These clinics’ moniker becomes la conejera. For many South Central Los Angeles
residents, the very women for who this claim is waged against, fail to understand how
such a term and understanding originates from a racist, gendered, sexual, and class
reading of women of color’s fertility that has a discriminatory, dehumanizing, and
damaging origins and results. Such an understanding of Mexican and African American
women illustrates medical officials’ concerns over citizenship, legitimacy, welfare
dependency, hyperfertility, overpopulation, and opportunistic Mexican women. These
beliefs were entrenched within the presupposition of Mexican cultural difference and
inferiority, where family size is one in which Mexican families have failed to modernize
and assimilate.
Unfortunately, Mexican women had no real choice against the practice of
sterilization. Most doctors and residents were not fluent in Spanish, this language barrier
proved one problem among many. Women were asked, in broken Spanish, “Mas niños?
151
Ibid., 52.
359
[More Babies?],” to which they replied, “No.” Doctors took this answer as a sign that
women were consenting to a hysterectomy. In other cases, medical residents and nurses
approached women to sign consent forms immediately before childbirth, and would tell
women that they would get a painkiller to ease the pain if they signed the consent forms.
Under such duress many women blindly signed the form. A plaintiff in the case, Mrs.
Orozco told nurses countless times that she and her husband had decided against
sterilization. After numerous solicitations from doctor and nurses, Orozco signed the
consent for sterilization because in her words, “I just wanted them to leave me alone, sign
the papers and get it over with… I was in pain on the table when they were asking me all
those questions.” Mrs. Orozco shared that she agreed to the operation because “I thought
the doctor meant tying tubes only. Then they could be untied later… if they would have
put the word sterilization in there, I would not have signed the papers.” She, along with
many other women, thought the procedure was reversible.
152
In the case, countless women
testified that they signed the documents because they were misinformed. The case was
unsuccessful, but the publicity meant that medical centers had to offer bilingual
documents with all the information with regards to the procedure, three-day period, and
informed consent. The absence of any guidelines for monitoring doctor and nurse actions,
the existence of federal funding for sterilization procedures, and poor, non-English
speaking clientele all facilitated an environment for these abuses.
The urgency for family planning mobilization in the community was guided by a
belief that it was “almost too late.” Director of the LARFPC Richard Sandville claimed,
152
Ibid., 42.
360
“Most of the problems of our times are smog, water pollution, poverty, caused by the fact
that we’re practicing death control without birth-control. A couple with three children
may have more than their share. No one should do more than reproduce himself.
Otherwise, we’re facing absolute disaster.”
153
Unfortunately, Sandville’s sense of the
level of reproduction that is deemed appropriate and necessary guided the LARFPC
under his leadership. Such discourse is terrifying as it placed restrictive reproduction as a
worthwhile goal and priority, an issue that rightly so, should be left to the patient-
individual. Sandville softens his discourse by suggesting that his mission, and in turn,
LARFPC’s mission, was to “substantially reduce the incidence of unwanted pregnancies,
infant deaths, stillbirths, premature babies, abortions, and illegitimate births, and make a
significant contribution toward complete health care for the medically indigent” and
“raise the standard of living and the health level of the population.” Due to Sandville’s
controversial perspective his role as director was short-lived. In 1972, Joyce Henderson
became the new executive director of the council. She was responsible for addressing
family planning skeptics that called “birth control a black genocide plot.” The LARFPC
was strategic in hiring an African American woman as its leader and advocate. It was
believed that she would lend credibility and acceptance of family planning as a “health
service generally acceptable everywhere among black women and all women who want
to space their children… where not talking about population control but about giving
women a choice as to whether they want to get pregnant.” Unlike her predecessor, who
discussed optimal reproduction, Henderson was trying to craft and project a new image of
153
Jean Murphy, “Almost too late: Birth Control Being Mobilized Here,” Los Angeles Times, July 23,
1969.
361
the program when she stated that “overall our programs are well received by the black
and brown communities.”
154
In her view, LARFPC programs and needs had not peaked in
the community as they are still growing and developing. By the early 1970s, council
members were the majority women (about 80 percent). These members had all
participated and in LARFPC’s family planning program.
Critics of LARFPC, like Norman Fleishman Executive Director of Planned
Parenthood of Los Angeles, believed that LARFPC was not “activists” enough. In his
view, it was not enough to service the needs of the poor, but “recognized the importance
of population problem, and move away from servicing only the poor to serving the
middle class.” The middle class was “largely responsible for the population explosion. It
should help educate Americans on such issues as family size, abortion, sterilization, and
ecology.”
155
This is a radical reading of the efforts of LARFPC or government and social
services, as population control is often relegated as a problem that must be control
amongst the poor and communities of color. Fleishman’s assesment is much more broad.
He interprets reproductive health as a problem across class. Fleisman and Dr. Alfred
Cannon in Watts believed that in many respects LARFPC “has not pushed hard enough to
get the county to establish additional clinics and support comprehensive care.” Dr.
Cannon believed that LARFPC officials overly relied on data collection that can be
misconstrued as there being “too narrow an interpretation of family planning, and hopes
it will move in a direction of comprehensive care.”
156
The call for the combination of
154
Lynn Lilliston, “Birth Control Color Blind,” Los Angeles Times, November 14, 1971, D9.
155
Lynn C. Landman, “L.A. Experiment with Functional Coordination: A Progress Report,” 12.
362
family planning efforts that prioritized comprehensive care is indicative of the ways that
doctors and officials on the ground saw the need for holistic healthcare.
From the 1970s onward the LARFPC reported that they would not force women
into one particular form of family planning, most especially not a plan that was an
irreversible procedure like sterilization without proper information. However, LARFPC
postpartum bedside behavior illustrates the aggressive features that defined previous
coerced efforts were maintained. LARFPC hired social workers and nurses that built a
referral system around the postpartum patient. The patient was a prime candidate for
family planning with the hospital as the hub of coordinated service. The initial bedside
visit to every maternity patient in the five hospitals under LARFPC umbrella meant that
each patient was provided with a “temporary” method of birth control (condoms)
followed by an appointment for a six week postpartum return visit to the hospital or
community clinic to maintain continued care to set up a more “permanent” form of birth
control.
157
Through this practice, along with hiring bilingual family planning counselors
to service the needs of its increasing Latina clientele, they ensured that each new
mother’s discharge left with a “commitment” to practice some form of birth control. No
woman was released from the maternity ward until this was promised.
The vigor with which LARFPC labored to get women to “commit” to a form of
contraception was inspired by health officials reporting that the majority of sexually
active teens did not use contraception. Estimates placed 62 percent of sexually active
156
Ibid., 13.
157
“Office of Health Services Community Action Program,” Folder 3750: Health, State Office of
Economic Opportunity, California State Archives, Sacramento, California.
363
high school students never having used birth control. White and affluent teenagers were
more likely to use contraceptives than working class teenagers of color. In a late 1980s
survey of low-income women in Los Angeles, found that 30 percent of women aged 18-
20 reported not using any contraception, while only 19 percent reported having some
knowledge of where to obtain low-cost contraceptives. It is this void in knowledge that
family planning centers in the area aimed to remedy.
158
The Reagan and Bush
administrations severe budget cuts to social services hindered many of the gains in
reproductive health. In the mist of budgetary cuts, family planning clinics continued to
work towards working class women of color’s adoption of some form of contraception.
Researchers reported that women in working class neighborhoods’ contraception choices
were as follows: first choice was the pill with over 60 percent, intra-uterine device (IUD)
was 30 percent, and 10 percent utilized a diaphragm or rhythm system.
The goal of convincing women to use birth control meant that women got caught
in a web of counselors and monitoring system that involved multiple calls and letters to
remind them of their appointments. To reduce women missing their appointments, these
clinics and programs offered free transportation and child-care services for their children.
This level of commitment to women’s reproducive health was largely due to how these
clinics received the majority of their funding through family planning grants. This was
true in the 1970s, and most especially now. On any given day, a walk along a South
Central street with a clinic could lead to a casual greeting by a clinic employee asking if
158
E. Richard Brown, et al. “Inequalities in Health: The Sickness in the Center of Our Cities,” in South
Central Los Angeles: Anatomy of a Crisis, Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, Working Paper No. 6,
June 1993, 57.
364
one needed a pregnancy, STD, or HIV test.
159
Not only conselors standing outside the
clinic disrupt your monotomous walk along the neighborhood, but banner, signs, and
most recently digital billboards advertise these clinics’ speedy, free, and painfree
pregnancy and venereal disease tests and check-ups. When a new clinic opens in the
community the advertising flyers boast confidential and free family planning services.
This suggests that the greatest concern and financial source of revenue for these clinics is
family planning. Once clinics get patients inside they know they have them secured. The
persistance with which they follow through with appointments and other medical
procedures means that beyond an initial pregnancy and STD test, you will become a
long-term patient/client in their clinic. Most especially because once they can check off
that women walk-in for family planning, they can offer other services like run yearly
papanicolaou test and cervical and breast cancer exams free of charge.
160
Under family planning funding, personnel and doctors at these small health clinics
(unlike the larger hospitals) are able to conduct these exams at no-cost to its patients
without having to run low-income eligibility questionaires. These clinics’ funding and
159
As a resident of South Central Los Angeles, this has occurred to me on multiple occasions as I walk the
city streets. I have been stopped and asked, “do you think you are pregnant?.” I have witness this not only
happen to me but countless other young women walking the streets. Interestingly, such questions I’ve
observed have been posed to young women.
160
Breast cancer rates are higher amongst working class African American and Latina women than white
women. This is because of the cultural, language, and practice of utilizing mammography-screening
services. A study of mammography utilization rates, found that lack of health insurance, low-income,
negative experience with health practitioners, lack of preventive health measures, and anxiety diminished
the likelihood that poor women would use available services. Similarly, the lack of access to low-costs
county mammography screening services severely limited the utilization of these services. Thus, the racial
and ethnic differences in access to cancer information, screening services, and treatment explain why the
breast cancer mortality rate for African American women is higher than that for Anglo women, even
though Anglo women have higher breast cancer incidence rates. See: E. Richard Brown, et al. “Inequalities
in Health: The Sickness in the Center of Our Cities,” in South Central Los Angeles: Anatomy of a Crisis,
Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, Working Paper No. 6 (June 1993), 79-81.
365
reimbursements are based on how many women and families they can get onto their
family planning network. The logic of these clinics are based on racist, gendered, and
sexist notion of women of color’s reproduction and fertility, most women will admit that
if these clinics did not exist they would not get all other medical exams done. The vast
majority of female patients in these government sponsored community clinics utilize the
social services alloted to them in the most beneficial manner possible to them. Despite
the commitment to the reproductive health of women of color, longterm patronage at
these clinics requires (as discussed throughout the chapter) all day wait-time in clinic
waiting rooms, months wait for an appointment, and sometimes rude personnel. Women
utilize these services to their benefit as they realize this might be the only way to get their
children and their health issues treated. Women may arrive at the clinic without the
intention of signing up for family planning, but they have to become “strategic.” Dora
Escobedo, patron at South Central Family Health Center explained, “I can’t pay for tests,
checkups. If they check off that I am there for birth control—do it!... without hospitals or
big clinics, I have to be smart. La Cliniquita is what I got. Y que bueno! I sometimes sit
there all day so I can get checked. The doctors and nurses will have to do.” When asked if
she felt she was forced into some form of contraception, “No, not really. I told them that I
wanted the IUD and she gave it to me. We really didn’t talk about it. I knew what I
wanted. They are strict about giving me the yearly STD checkups—especially for
HIV/AIDS. That’s the test I am always scared of.”
161
161
Dora Escobedo, oral history with author, Los Angeles, March 2, 2009.
366
Latina and African American women often utilize these services despite being
born out of racist and gendered preconceptions and goals. The activism of women in the
1970s against sterilization afforded Maria having a “choice” as to what form of
contraception she preferred using. She was not forced into an irreversible procedure like
sterilization but had other options. Mexican women’s activism through the case sparked
their activism in other realms. They formed their own community-based organizations
like Comision Femenil Mexicana Nacional. This organization was a resource for women
to collectively organize, share their grievances, become informed regarding their
reproductive rights, and craft another image of Mexican women’s sexuality, fertility, and
identity. The struggle for women of color’s reproductive rights continues to this day.
Fears over women of color’s sexuality have not been curbed. In 1998, media coverage
documented the National Center for Health Statistics report on the “dramatic rise” in
Hispanic births between 1989 and 1995. They attributed this growth to the “soaring rates
of teenage pregnancy” most especially by Mexican American teens.
162
The concern over
ethnic Mexican pregnancy, according to Gutierrez, overtook the concern of African
American pregnancy for the first time in history. This did not mean that concerns over
African American reproduction were eliminated altogether however, as Ronald Reagan’s
demonization of African American women’s fertility and utilization of welfare and social
services, “welfare queens,” continued to constitute the public image of African American
women and families. In California, concerns over Latina women’s reproduction played a
role in the success of Proposition 187. This proposition eliminated social services for
162
Elena Gutierrez, Fertile Matters, 3.
367
undocumented immigrants because proponents of the measure worried that “Mexican
women and families were crossing the border to have children in order to attain social
services.” This misconception of Mexican immigration to the United States ensured that
propositions like 187 passed, as well as justified budgetary cuts in social services for
undocumented residents under hard economic times. Women of color continue to
confront the repercussions of negative images and stereotypes despite the fact that by
2004, a study on Latina fertility in Los Angeles County had illustrated that it had
“plunged” and their fertility rates “were like everyone else.”
163
The reports’ language and
assessment of Latina women’s fertility, “like everyone else,” represents how Latina
women continue to be cast and viewed as the “other.” This finding went against
researchers’ racialized notions of Mexican women’s fertility. Mexican women, and
women of color broadly, must continue to fight against these racist and sexist notions
about their sexuality and fertility.
By the 1990s, family planning programs and councils moved away from a sole
discourse and concern on contraception to that of prenatal care. In a 1990 study, the
number of children born to mothers who did not receive prenatal care was about 1 in 14
children and about 7 percent of these children born sick or disabled enough that they are
immediately transferred to intensive care. Delayed prenatal care occurred at a higher rate
in Los Angeles County than other places in California. In 1990, 29 percent of Los
Angeles County mothers did not begin prenatal care until after their first trimester,
compared to 27 percent of all California mothers. It is not only a lack of providing care,
163
Ibid., 79.
368
but also the way and source of care given to African American and Latino women. In the
first half of 1988, 27-30 percent of women who delivered at Martin Luther King, Jr.
hospital received no prenatal care at all, compared to the over 80 percent of pregnant
women living in more affluent areas of Los Angeles County who received care since the
first trimester. The rates of low-birth rates, newborn deaths, and infant mortality are due
to poor access to prenatal care and high rates of drug abuse.
164
In 1990, California ranked
36 out of 50 states in the percentage of women receiving late or no prenatal care, and Los
Angeles County ranked in the worst sixth of California counties for low birth weight and
inadequate prenatal care.
Lack of prenatal care not only affects children at birth, but also increased the
occurrence and likelihood of hospitalization throughout the children’s early life and
adolescence. A unique program like the Watts Health Center’s Maternal and Children
Health Program was a resource center that guided women through pregnancy through a
combination of “motherly advice, medical care, education, and professional counseling.”
Women in South Central were of particular concern as they were considered “ ‘at risk’
for a poor pregnancy outcome.” Program director Rosyland Frazier, stated “they may be
poor, uneducated, unmarried teen-agers: they (may) smoke, drink and have poor diets;
they (may) live in homes where there are financial problems and stress, a lack of
emotional support. And they don’t realize that effect all this has on their pregnancy and
their chances of delivering a healthy baby,” thus, “we have to educate them as well as
164
Ibid., 58
369
care for them.”
165
Frazier discussed Watts resident, Maria, as an example as she had three
children, two of which were born with severe health problems because she failed to visit
a doctor during pregnancy. Maria, like most community residents, first doctor’s visit was
during the advanced stages of pregnancy. Frazier said that “it is common knowledge that
anyone can deliver at the country hospital for free, so many women go through their
pregnancy without any medical care, then they just show up (at MLK hospital) when
they’re in labor… those women tend to have a very poor outcome.” These women, along
with their infants, have a one in four chance to return to hospital because of small sickly
children. When the program opened in the mid-1980s, the clinic boasted a reduction of
low-birth weight babies for women treated in the early stages of their pregnancy.
166
Infant
mortality rates slowly declined, yet the rate in African American families is twice as high
as white babies. Programs like Maternal and Children Health Program are pivotal in
providing women with nutrition and parenting classes to safeguard the health of the
mother and child.
The government funded community clinic San Pedro Family Health Center in
South Central served as an entryway to this section on family planning efforts in South
Central for two reasons. First, las doctoras (Ann Turner and Catherine Bax) in their
attempt to open a comprehensive health clinic quickly realized that the bulk of their
services would center on family medicine and family planning. By 1985, when the San
Pedro clinic opened, residents weary of family planning services still looked to the clinic
165
Sandy Banks, “Health Center a Vital Aid in Distressed Community: A Success Story in Watts: Infant
Death Rate Coming down,” Los Angeles Times, January 27, 1985, B1.
166
Ibid.
370
as a resource in this regard. In the early 1990s, 300 African American women in Los
Angeles reported that they continued to view with alarm family planning services
because of fears of racial genocide. They were amenable to family planning if they were
offered information, but what was a major concern was “a distrust of the county
system.”
167
This distrust has defined the relationship between poor people of color and
health care services. Residents, activists, and even some practitioners in the community
family planning associations funded by the War on Poverty, OEO, and the LARFPC
believed that the U.S. government was trying to reduce African American poverty
through the reduction, control, surveillance, and genocide of African American families.
The forced sterilization of Mexican women in East Los Angeles created a discourse
amongst women of color that the government and medical officials’ were committed to a
genocidal plot. The clinic and las doctoras were well aware that they faced an uphill
battle, but it was one worth waging. The gains from the Madrigal vs. Quilligan case and
the presence of clinics like SPFHC that increasingly depended on government funds that
are truly committed to patient needs, meant that women like Dora and Diana looked to
family planning as not a government and state imposed project, but one in which they
willingly entered. Also, extending an understanding of family planning beyond
contraception to prenatal care and overall women’s health reduced some of the anxiety
that these programs once caused.
168
167
Laurie Becklund, “The Teen Birth Explosion: Two Generations of Children Grow Up as One,” Los
Angeles Times, March 16, 1993, A1.
168
A big concern in women’s health has been how to get women who are menopausal to take hormones
and calcium to protect their bones. Cervical cancer is a real concern for women of color. Clinic across Los
Angeles embarked on a campaigns, for poor women to test for cervical cancer, as low income women have
371
Second, the documentation around SPFHC’s opening illustrated that community
las doctoras thought they were going to service had changed. Both, Ann Turner and
Catherine Bax, were surprised to find that their clientele was Spanish speaking and
undocumented. These women began their practice in South Central because, as Ann
Turner put it, she was “deeply troubled by the overwhelming poverty she was seeing and
the inequities that existed between rich and poor.” She decided that for her practicing
medicine was a way of practicing social justice. She understood that “pretty much the
bottom line for us is that we want to provide the kind of health care for these patients that
we would want for ourselves or that people in more affluent areas would want… that
does not