Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration

3. The Oakview Barrio

CHAPTER THREE The Oakview Barrio Mexican immigrant women and men are often referred to as "pools of immigrant labor" or as "migrant streams" or "waves" responding solely to economic currents; such phrases provide a picture which flattens the varied contexts and experiences of migration.1 This depersonalized language says little about the primary actors and why they behave as they do in the variegated drama of migration and resettlement. This study was designed to look more intimately at immigrants' lives, examining both the social context in which immigrants decide to migrate , and the new social environment that they encounter and help to create in the United States. While it is necessary to examine the macroeconomic and political impulses behind Mexican undocumented immigration , recent research has drawn attention to the complex social networks and family ties that support migration processes. Gender is a vital part of this social landscape, conditioning people's opportunities and responses, and enabling them to act in particular ways. Gender relations, however, are not uniform or always predictable; they interact with immigration in multiple ways. This chapter describes how the Oakview barrio has matured from a small male immigrant outpost to a bustling, demographically diverse, settled immigrant community. A typology suggests varied patterns of family migration, and profiles of five families illustrate the multipleways in which these immigrants organize their daily lives. 34 The Oakview Barrio 35 THE EVOLUTION OF THE OAKVIEW BARRIO Today the Oakview barrio is a busy, relatively self-contained immigrant community where Mexican immigrant families can worship, cash paychecks , get medical attention, and buy groceries in Spanish. But as recently as the 1950s, Mexican immigrants were a numerical minority in this area. Most of them were men who lived together with other men, usually kin and friends, and who came from a particular municipio (rural county) in Michoacan, a state in western Mexico with a long tradition of U.S.-bound migration. At this point, the area surrounding Oakview was not yet a major metropolitan area, but consisted of orchards, flower nurseries, light industries, and a series of suburban towns linked to San Francisco by highway and railway. Some of the study participants recalled Oakview in the 1950s as a time when language barriers inhibited communication. Community social ties were then quite narrowly circumscribed for Mexican men who lived there. Back then there were about twenty people whom we knew as paisanos [people from the same place of origin], but we didn't all live together. When the few of us that were in this one house would get the urge to talk to someone else in Spanish, we'd say, "Well, let's go visit what's-his-name to talk a bit." (Marcelino Avila; arrived 1957) There was almost no one [from Mexico] here. To communicate with store clerks, you would just have to make hand signals. It was the same at work. . .. There were people who were of Mexican descent, who were born here, and I think they came from Texas. ... In total, there were probably ten, fifteen, maybe twenty Mexican families, but they were all born here [inthe U.S.]. And in certain respects, they helped us establish ourselves. Because sometimes one had to fill out an application, take care of some business, and since we didn't know English, sometimes we'd go to them for help. An elderly Spanish woman also helped us. (Arturo Barrios; arrived 1952) I knew about five or six guys from Mexico, all of them from my village.If there were other Mexicans here, I didn't meet them. There were pochos [Mexican Americans], but they didn't want anything to do with us mojados [wetbacks], that is, with the exception of Fred Villedas.2 For fun, we'd go listen to boleros on a jukebox at a Portuguese guy's bar. (Manuel Galvan; arrived 1950) By the late 1960s, the area surrounding Oakview included an expanding number of office buildings, high-technology industrial parks, and new suburban homes for middle-class and upper-income residents . Employment opportunities in the service sector expanded, and newly arrived Mexican workers took jobs in restaurants, private 36 The Oakview Barrio Figure 1. Percent Hispanic or Spanish-surnamed Students in Three Neighborhood Elementary Schools, 1964-87 households, laundries, hospitals, construction, and the Japaneseowned flower nurseries that ranked as a key industry in Oakview before residential property values rose. During the late 1960s and the 1970s...