Curious Unions: Mexican American Workers and Resistance in Oxnard, California, 1898–1961

Conclusion

261 CONCLUSION The importance of the development of the Oxnard Mexican community is wide ranging. Unlike other California community narratives of the twentieth century, this one is ballasted in the production of beet sugar—one of the region’s first capital-intensive specialty crops—that later came to be entwined with the citrus industry just as in other communities within and outside Ventura County. As Mexican workers trekked to the Oxnard Plain for employment in the emergent industries of agriculture, they brought with them and cultivated families among an ethnically heterogeneous population with origins in Africa, America (south of the U.S.-Mexico border), Asia, and Europe. Along the way these groups formed networks, facilitated by technological developments in travel and communication serving as the infrastructure of resistant community building grounded in cross-culturalism. Throughout the twentieth century, men, women, and children of Asian, European, and Latin American origins not only formed alliances but also lined up against each other. One of the early examples of this dramatically arose in the 1903 betabelero strike. This strike and its unsuccessful sequel in 1933 demonstrated not only the crossculturalism among Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese, and white agents but also the interlocked power of financiers, growers, the media, and law enforcement against them. But a clear dichotomy of opposition was complicated when civically engaged residents strategically allied themselves with the political and economic leadership of the city to broker concessions. This usually, and most effectively, occurred when mutual aid societies such as La Unión Patriótica Benéfica Mexicana Independiente, Las Guardianes de la Colonia , and the Alianza Hispano Americana represented the interests of the Mexican and increasingly Mexican American community in public and private discussions with Oxnard’s leadership. This was shown in the desire to promote the observance of the national holidays of both Mexico and the United States or to create safe recreational spaces for the city’s Mexican American youth. The attempt to negotiate concessions from the city’s elite fostered the emergence of a Mexican American mentality not limited by place of birth or residency. And this is not to say that tensions were erased, but that the dominant population of white residents recognized the importance of making accommodations with the Mexican community’s civic representatives, at least to a point. Since the 1990s, a cadre of academics, often mentored by veteran professors of Chicana/Chicana history, have researched the continuities and differences of communities outside Los Angeles and California. In the process, a more nuanced understanding has developed regarding how Mexican communities were imagined and viewed as a people, by others and themselves. A dynamic interplay also existed among groups of varying national origins, residency, generational periods, and class. These stories have revealed not only untold episodes of conflict but also collaboration in the midst of unscripted struggles. And as students and academic investigate the histories of lesser-known working-class communities, and reexamine those already performed, new discoveries will reveal stories of additional curious unions. Coda The foundation of Curious Unions lay in the stories passed along casually in conversation with friends and family as well as formally in the form of oral-history interviews. The lessons drawn from these narratives often complemented and complicated the accounts documented in newspapers, 262 conclusion government documents, and academic literature. But what stood out from all this, and from my own upbringing in the city of Oxnard, were the mundane curious unions that often, but not always, compromised fissures based on race and ethnicity. These associations were neither completely harmonious nor completely contentious. It was a mixed bag that compelled individuals and groups to make concessions. These accommodations were often painful, and scarred the memory of individuals. Others downplayed or did not question their knowledge of de facto and de jure discrimination. But they recognized and recalled their existence nonetheless. Therefore, this book was inspired by stories of my community. Darlene Serros related the story of having to comfort her young son Jerry each day after his return from school due to his experience of overt acts of discrimination by teachers. Other accounts passed down from my paternal grandmother, Josephine Hernandez Barajas, detailed growing up within the Rancho Sespe citrus labor camp, where she met my grandfather, Frank Vargas Barajas, and from where they were ultimately evicted, with their five children, during the 1941 Ventura County Citrus Strike. Stories such as these were wrenching to listen...