Sonny Montes and Mexican American Activism in Oregon

Prologue: From Weslaco to Cornelius

8 PROLOGUE From Weslaco to Cornelius In the late spring of 1966, twenty-two-year-old Sonny Montes was living in Reedley, California, with his wife, Librada, and young son, Armando.1 For the past two years, he had earned a living by assisting an elderly couple in running a thirty-five-acre farm that specialized in grape production. A formidable human presence— physically imposing at six feet tall and about 230 pounds—Sonny was an industrious, powerful, able worker. He repaired the fences, oversaw the irrigation, applied the pesticides and sulfur, prepared the fields, hauled the crops to the packing sheds, and pruned the grapevines after the grapes were picked. He also supervised the grape picking, which was done by workers supplied by a labor contractor. At the outset, a few aspects of the job had been unfamiliar to him. He had many battles with the spraying machine; its defiant starting mechanism sometimes defeated his efforts to spray the crops evenly. He also made mistakes in preparing the fields for irrigation and applying the water to them. Still, in time he mastered the techniques. Agricultural work was Sonny’s métier, and he was good at it. Sonny was born on May 24, 1944, in Weslaco, Texas, in the Lower Rio Grande, and that town continued to be his family’s base of operations for the first ten years of his life. Weslaco was composed of two entirely separate communities, one inhabited by Anglos and the other by Mexican Americans. As in much of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, the segregation had initially been legally prescribed. In 1921, the newly created municipality of Weslaco passed an ordinance designating the area south of the railroad tracks for Anglo residences and businesses and the area north of the tracks for industry and Mexican American residences and businesses. The two side-by-side communities that emerged over the following decades had little in common but their name. South of the tracks, the streets were paved, a modern sewer system was in place, many of the houses were well constructed, and English was the spoken language. North of the tracks, roads were unpaved, there were no sewers, most of the houses were tiny and cheaply made, and Spanish was spoken almost Prologue: From Weslaco to Cornelius 9 exclusively. According to the U.S. Census of 1950, the population of Weslaco was 7,514. Of that number, about two-fifths were Anglos, almost all of them residing south of the tracks; about threefifths were people of Mexican descent, most of them living north of the tracks; and exactly 72 were African Americans, also living in the northern part of town. The situation that prevailed in Weslaco could be observed throughout the Lower Rio Grande Valley: Anglos were favored and dominant; brown-skinned people like Sonny were, by and large, disadvantaged and subordinate.2 As a child growing up in Weslaco, Sonny had almost no contact with Anglos, except for his teachers at the North Ward School, one of four elementary schools on the north side of town. No Anglos attended the school he went to. He had no Anglo friends, and outside of school, he rarely spoke to Anglos. While some Mexican Americans in Weslaco ventured into the Anglo part of town and a few Mexican American families even lived there, almost all of them headed by World War II veterans, the members of Sonny’s family were not among them, even though his father had served in the U.S. Army late in the war. The restaurants, bakeries, hardware stores, gasoline stations, grocery stores, clothing stores, pharmacies, barber shops, and beauty parlors they patronized; the churches, schools, dances, picnics, barbecues, and baseball games they attended; the places they swam in the summer months; the cemeteries where they buried their dead—all of these were located on the Mexican American side of the tracks. Sonny’s parents—Celedonio Armendadez Montes and Margarita Gonzales Jasso Montes—owned a house on Los Torritos Street in the Mexican American section of Weslaco. That one-storey structure, still standing today, was modest and small, with only about 300 square feet of living space. It was divided into two rooms—the kitchen, which also served as the dining room, and the living room, which also served as the bedroom for the entire family. The Montes home had no indoor toilet: a small outhouse was located on the back lot. It also had no fixed bath or shower. When it...