I spoke with an emeritus professor last Spring who suggested that community history books can be read as autobiographies when they focus on localities from which authors came of age. In other words, when a person writes a history of their birthplace, they are writing by proxy about who they are. I never considered my scholarly production in this manner. But this idea holds water the more I think about this in relation to my work as I grew up and had family living in different parts of Ventura County.
Indeed, since my early youth I always compared the homes and neighborhoods of people in my blue-collar social network with those more privileged. Granted, my home and those of my family and friends were not dumps. But they were significantly less spacious and had less curb appeal than residences owned by a professional class of educators, public employees, attorneys, and healthcare providers of the time. Hence, I noticed material disparities between my neighborhood and “nicer” properties on the northside of Oxnard or East County. This made me resentfully envious, particularly as this divide took on a racial dimension: i.e., the people of color (e.g., ethnic Asian, Mexicans, and Blacks) largely lived in one part of the city or county and white folks in other districts, with Oxnard and the City of Thousand Oaks being opposite in terms of such demographics.
In wondering about the place and power of the ethnic Mexican community of my hometown, I wrote Curious Unions: Mexican American Workers and Resistance in Oxnard, California, 1898-1961 (2012), followed by Mexican Americans with Moxie: A Transgenerational History of El Movimiento Chicano in Ventura County, California, 1945-1975 (2021). The thesis of the former examined curious cross-cultural alliances that emerged from an ethnic Mexican tradition of collective resistance in the City of Oxnard, commencing with the 1903 Japanese Mexican Labor Association (JMLA) sugar beet strike of 1903 and ending with César Chávez’s Community Service Organization (CSO) leadership versus the grower exploitation of bracero workers in Ventura County. The theoretical framework of the latter, in essence, traced the development of the Chicano movement in Ventura County, while taking el movimiento from out of the penumbra of greater Los Angeles, largely after Chávez’s departure, emphasizing transgenerational subtleties, as well as tensions among ethnic Mexican immigrants, long term residents, and citizens of the pre- and post-WWII generations.
Conceptually, my current project seeks to analyze the continuance of the Chicana/o movement from the mid-1970s to 2008, concluding with the implementation of a Chicana/o Studies degree program at California State University Channels Islands. This is to say, I will implicitly, if not explicitly, argue that el movimiento Chicana/o did not dissipate into oblivion after the Reagan era. Hence, I will examine the persistence of acts of ethnic Mexican resistance not only related to education and labor but also the establishment of community building non-profit institutions by people of the Mexican American and Chicano generations. Such outfits consist of Future Leaders of America committed to the mentorship of youth leadership and college preparation, Clinicas del Camino Real originally devoted specifically to serving the healthcare needs of farmworker families, the Inlakech Cultural Arts Center, the Rodolfo F. Acuña Art Gallery and Arts at Café on A, LUCHA an umbrella 501 (3c) entity, and the Cabrillo Economic Development Corporation (CEDC) whose mission was, and is, to address the housing needs of the underserved, specifically farmworkers.
Most, if not all, of the activists, agent founders of these organizations were and are products of the Chicana/o movement. Therefore, el movimiento Chicanx never dissolved as its legacy continues to live in them and the people they served, particularly youth. Consequently, el movimiento transformed, and as one informant commented, it became more sophisticated in channeling facets of street level direct-action and epiphenomenal higher-education knowledge to the conference rooms of public, private, and non-profit agencies.
Suitable, standard, and humane residences for farmworker families, or the lack of thereof, have been at the center of my research. After the U.S. war of conquest against Mexico from 1846-48, for example, Anglo American capitalists dispossessed Californio landowners of their property and homes, and with it their elite status, by a sequence of forces, natural and systemic, that entailed draught, floods, chicanery, usury, and legal extortion. Sociologist Tomás Almaguer exposed this systemic settler-colonial mugging in his 1995 book Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California, showing how future US senator, Thomas Bard, on behalf of Pennsylvania oil and railroad industrialist Thomas Scott, unleashed cunning attorneys after the Civil War and juridically muscled Mexican landowners out of parcels of the Rancho Santa Clara O La Colonia on what is today the Oxnard Plain.
At the start of the twentieth century, the Oxnard brothers, magnates of beet sugar in the US, created crude, adobe barracks for betabelero (sugar beet worker) families that reified their subordination while their white counterparts resided in midwestern-styled bungalows with lighted and paved streets, sidewalks, and sanitation services. The isolated company housing of the American Beet Sugar Company, owned by the Oxnard brothers, permitted its managers to stabilize the presence of sugar beet fieldworkers that entailed men, women, and children while monitoring the activities of their worker-tenants, particularly in relation to their contact with labor organizers. Growers, in and out of sugar beets, chiefly in citrus, established similar farmworker housing throughout Ventura County. The grower class also exerted their integrated power in real estate to cement spatial templates that systemically segregated white residents from ethnic Mexican, Black, and Asian families. As analyzed by David G. García in Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Education Equality (2018), this legally sanctioned algorithm of de facto and de jure apartheid ran its course for much of the twentieth century.
The centrality of farmworker housing developed principally by grower associations surfaced with the Ventura County Citrus Strike of 1941, which commenced in the Spring of that year and concluded just prior to the US entrance into WWII, with the eviction of the families of strikers from the company housing of Rancho Sespe, Limoneira, Saticoy, and other compounds. This part of Ventura County history is autobiography for me as the family of my paternal grandparents, Frank V. and Josephine H. Barajas, and their five children were expelled from Rancho Sespe due to my grandfather being one of the citrus strikers. So, whereas industry subsidized farmworker housing, fully or in part, was affordable for occupant citrus worker families, provided a stable pool of labor for the citrus industry, and served as a prophylactic against labor organizers to maximize their profits, growers such as citrus baron and union buster Charles C. Teague wielded it as a tool of coercion and punishment against workers who dared to collectively challenge exploitive work conditions of low pay, wage theft, long and unpaid hours (e.g., wet time), and the lack of benefits of medical, retirement, and paid vacation.
With the defeat of the American Federation of Labor-affiliated Agricultural and Citrus Worker Union (ACWU), many of the citrus strikers did not return to the Rancho Sespe, or like housing camps. Some relocated to San Jose as it was a nodal point of the migrant circuit on the West Coast. Many citrus workers did resume employment for the citrus associations as pickers or packinghouse workers, though, while they lived in residences, often substandard, in the open market.
This was the context in which farmworker housing was an ambiguous space of community power, social control, and retribution. In its crudest form, the grower class destroyed the collective power of workers by evictions. This in turn served as an admonition to workers who sat on the fence of resistance about the punishment they could expect if they sympathized or joined brethren in struggle.
Fast forward thirty-years, and an insurgency of agricultural strikes arose in Ventura County in relation to citrus, lettuce, eggs, and strawberries. Most, if not all, were inspired by the geist of job actions by the National Farm Workers Association, subsequently rebranded the United Farm Workers (UFW) union, initially in the San Joaquin Valley in 1965. The first took place in the citrus orchards of Fillmore, adjacent to Rancho Sespe, in 1968, followed by strikes in Santa Paula and other parts of the Santa Clara River Valley, as well as the Oxnard Plain.
Chávez was central to the inspiration of these job actions as he had founded a CSO in the City of Oxnard in 1958 to undergird the efforts of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA). As leader of the UPWA, Ralph Helstein underwrote this campaign on the condition that Saul Alinksy of the Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago appoint Chávez to this project. They believed that an organized community would strengthen the unionization of citrus packinghouse workers. The CSO in Oxnard transformed into a countywide institution with a strong contingent of true believers in the Santa Clara Valley, Santa Paula specifically led by Pablo Yzquierdo.
In fact, with the loss of land and home in Arizona during the midst of the Great Depression, Chávez experienced firsthand the merciless toil the old and young endured as migrant workers. As detailed in Jacques Levy’s oral history César Chávez: Autobiography of La Causa (1975), Chávez also understood the misery of migrant families living in leaky tents, foul-smelling barns, congested homes, and densely segregated barrios. He experienced this wretchedness working in the fields and orchards of Ventura County and other places. When he returned to Ventura County in 1958, he quickly learned that another cycle of farmworkers, all male, were being pitted against long-term resident and US citizen ethnic Mexicans. They were labeled braceros and lived in spartan barrack facilities, often former stables, owned and controlled by ag associations. The largest-bracero facility of its kind in the nation was that of Buena Vista in Oxnard, created as part of a total 165 such sites, by the Ventura County Farm Labor Association.
The bracero labor camps actually flowed cash into the pockets of grower elites, augmenting the wealth already accumulated from ag production. Contravening the first bilateral bracero agreement with Mexico in 1942, the grower associations deducted from bracero paychecks room and board, on top of other services at inflated prices such as transportation, medical, as well as gear used for their work. This also defined the lives of non-bracero resident families that lived in the citrus association owned camps. This form of feudalism made it difficult for workers to afford housing at a significantly higher market rate outside of the camps. Therefore, many families found themselves tied to the land of the grower associations.
Cabrillo Village
In 1937 the Saticoy Lemon Association created Cabrillo Village, consisting of 100 cabins to stabilize the presence of citrus pickers. The homes were 480 square feet in size, initially designed for male migrant workers from Mexico. But as time passed, families joined the camp as permanent residents. In 1974, the citrus workers of Cabrillo Village elected the UFW as its bargaining agent. The next year, as part of its regular two-year inspections, the California State Division of Building and Housing Standards cited the Saticoy Lemon Association (SLA), owners of Cabrillo Village, with 150 code violations. Putatively, due to the exorbitant expense to remedy the violations, the S & F Growers Association, the organization that leased the camp from the SLA, served eviction notices to the resident of Cabrillo Village on October 10, 1975, along with a $500 relocation stipend to raze the community. By May of 1976, bulldozers began to demolish vacated homes at Cabrillo Village. On November 25, 1976, the remaining residents of Cabrillo Village resisted their expulsion as they formed a human chain to prevent the continued bulldozing of unoccupied structures.
In response, the UFW proposed that the state of California purchase the camp. If the state declined, Chávez suggested that the 80 remaining families at Cabrillo Village purchase the 18.5-acre site by pooling $1,000 from each family, much of it borrowed, for a total of $80,000. Due to public sympathy for the plight of farmworkers, largely cultivated by the public relations of the UFW, by January 1, 1976, the Saticoy Lemon Association agreed to meet with resident representatives and their allies to negotiate the sale of the Village. Factionalism, however, existed at the camp between citrus workers and foremen as well as residents who favored cooperative tenure over others who desired the individual ownership of their homes. Ultimately, the faction that favored a cooperative venture prevailed. Tensions also persisted between long-term and US-born ethnic Mexicans and more recent residents. As a former resident raised in Cabrillo Village commented, she had no problem with whites; her biggest enemies were US-born ethnic Mexican classmates who made her life tough with xenophobic slurs and taunts.
With the mentorship of the UFW, families formed the Cabrillo Cooperative Housing Corporation to raise capital for an additional 82 residential units at the site as well as build a church, school, grocery store, butcher shop, ceramic tile works, and administrative offices. Financing and funds came from the UFW, the Catholic Migrant Ministry, California Department of Housing and Community Development, the Farmers Home Administration, the Department of Labor and Rural America, and the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act. Jaime Bordanave — a staff person with the Rural Community Assistance Corporation, a Sacramento-based nonprofit, that provided technical assistance for the development of housing and community facilities in the West — served as the project director of the Cabrillo Cooperative.
Rodney Fernandez
Rodney Fernandez functioned as a central person in the negotiation of the purchase, rehabilitation, and the expansion of Cabrillo Village. Coming of age in Los Angeles, graduating from Cal State LA in 1968, and having started his career in public service at the Los Angeles Redevelopment Agency during the 1960s and early ’70s, Fernandez witnessed the social justice storms of resistance of the Chicana/o movement. After five years at the Los Angeles Redevelopment Agency, in 1973, at the age of 28, he moved northward to work at the Ventura County Human Relations Commission. And as the Cabrillo Village controversy unfolded, he acted as a mediator to avert the complete eviction of residents and negotiate the eventual sale of the site to the remaining families in 1976. One of the fundamental values of Fernandez’s career was to provide affordable housing to farmworkers and other low-income families priced out of a profit maximization market. Fernandez viewed the provision of standard housing as critical so that families could flourish, especially for children to realize their full potential, go to college, and achieve upward mobility.
The next year, in 1977, the Cabrillo Cooperative Housing Corporation, the precursor to the Cabrillo Economic Development Corportation, commissioned Barrio Planners Incorporated and architect John Mutlow to rehabilitate the extant homes of the village as well as construct additional units at the site, subsidized in part, but not entirely, by the federal Farmers Home Administration (FHA). The architectural design of Mutlow won several awards, including one from TIME magazine in 1981. In its recognition of nine objects for fashion, TIME contended that objects of design were practical with an element of flair, whereas those of fashion were not preoccupied with function. The writer also stated that, “Design is supposed to combine the practical and economical with a dash of artistic flair so that the result is pleasant, perhaps even a joy, both to use and to behold.” This certainly was the case with the new Cabrillo Village townhomes.
The Rancho Sespe Affair
Four years after the residents of Cabrillo Village faced eviction, another community of citrus workers was served with similar notices at the Rancho Sespe camp situated between the communities of Santa Paula and Fillmore after Rivcom purchased the 4,300-acre property in 1979, twenty acres of which existed the homes of one hundred farmworker families, many intergenerational residents who had lived there dating back to the early twentieth century. As the workers of Rancho Sespe were unionized in 1978 by the UFW, the workers challenged the eviction as an unfair labor practice as they were simultaneously fired and replaced with contracted labor from Fresno. Subsequent stays of eviction by the Agricultural Labor Relations Board (created by California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975) and superior, federal, and California Supreme Court judges found that the actions of Rivcom contravened established labor law.
Cited for code violation, this time by the County of Ventura, as opposed to state officials in the case of Cabrillo Village, the new owners of Rancho Sespe argued that the rehabilitation of the homes was not cost effective. In addition to the homes being substandard, the complex required upgrades to its systems of sewage, utilities, and potable water. All health hazards according to county officials. Indeed, Rivcom attempted to manipulate governmental regulations not only to evict the farmworker families as well as prevent them to make the required repairs themselves or purchase the property. This took place as Ventura County farmworkers and those Rancho Sespe were represented by the UFW and made successful demands for improved work conditions. On February 16, 1979, 100 men, women, and children stopped a Bulldozer at Oak Village, one of two housing areas at Rancho Sespe.[i]
By March of 1979, the Ventura County Board of Supervisors found itself caught at the center of this controversy, especially Maggie Erickson who represented the Third District. In a 1984 MA thesis, Pauline Bee, who served as an administrative assistant to Supervisor Erickson, provides a detailed account of the Rancho Sespe affair, especially how anti-union Rivcom was determined to eliminate the camp and the ways in which the local communities of Santa Paula, Piru, and Fillmore in NIMBY-like fashion vehemently opposed the relocation of Rancho Sespe homes and residents nearby.
Meanwhile, the residents of Rancho Sespe organized the Rancho Sespe Residents Committee and enjoyed the support of the Cabrillo Improvement Association which Fernandez headed and Karen Flock of Channel Counties Legal Services (CCLS). As the legal stays were temporary, Flock worked assiduously with families facing eviction. In this capacity, she served as a liaison with the Ventura County Board of Supervisors and the cities of Santa Paula and Fillmore when the residents of Rancho Sespe urgently sought a site to relocate their existing homes or develop a new farm worker residential project nearby.
Flock also worked alongside Jaime Zepeda, captain of the Rancho Sespe UFW and president of the Rancho Sespe Committee. Before joining Channel Counties, she worked for the UFW as a contract administrator between 1973 and 1980 during and after her completion of her Economics degree at Reed College in 1975. Her UFW duties entailed contract administration with ag companies, working with ranch worker committees and holding elections, addressing worker grievances, and legal filings with the ALRB. This is to say she was well experienced to represent the interests of the Rancho Sespe families. After Rancho Sespe Improvement Residents Committee was able to secure a site near the unincorporated town of Piru, Flock joined Rodney Fernandez at the CEDC.
The Low Down Behind the Eviction and the Acts of Collective Resistance
At both Cabrillo Village and Rancho Sespe, the evictions notices followed the certification of the UFW as the bargaining agent of citrus workers. To undermine the victories and power of unionized farmworkers, growers and their association decided to utilize labor contractors to legally divorce themselves both from the direct employment and housing of workers. This being the case, the growers who owned Cabrillo Village and Rancho Sespe decided to shut down their housing operations and return the acreage to production. But to avoid bad public relations resulting from the callous closing the farmworker camps, the S & F Growers Association at Cabrillo Village and Rivcom at Rancho Sespe cunningly took advantage of state and county camp inspections to provide the pretext for their demolition not only to destroy the community power of unionized farmworkers but also outreach efforts by the UFW to non-unionized documented and undocumented migrants who lived outside the camps. Regarding Rivcom, Ventura County Supervisor Ed Jones of the second district stated on record, that Rivcom asked County Board to have the Health Department close them down and went on to comment that, “They [Rivcom] wanted us to do their dirty work for them.” 136.
In the case of Cabrillo Village, the S & F Growers Association, the group that leased the farmworker housing facility from the Saticoy Lemon Association, misrepresented the 1975 inspection report of the State Division of Building and Housing Standards. Whereas Robert Dudley of S & F Growers announced to the residents of Cabrillo Village that the State Division of Building and Housing Standards had condemned Cabrillo Village, it had only issued citations of violation for rectifications to start, not be completed, within a 30-day grace period. Quintard Jones, speaking for the State Division, denied that Cabrillo Village had been condemned. In fact, up until then Jones knew of no instance when an rectification order of violation led to a camp being closed. So the S & F utilized the cited violations as pretext to destroy the power of community at Cabrillo Village.
Conclusion
The successes of the UFW, in terms of supporting worker protests, unionization, and improved work conditions, encouraged growers’ associations and companies to implement Machiavellian means by which to undermine the power of community at places such as Cabrillo Village and Rancho Sespe. Therefore, in both cases the ag industry utilized governmental housing regulations, state and local, as pretexts to the destruction of community sites to increasingly shift to the use of contracted labor, often, if not predominantly, undocumented.
Another takeaway from this study is how the expression of resistance manifested among agricultural families associated with ethnic Mexicans, such as Rodney Fernandez, on the one hand, and white allies, such as Karen Flock on the other. In this manner, the expression of community resistance was also exhibited in the creation of non-profit institutions such as the Cabrillo Economic Development Corporation to serve the housing needs of underserved farmworker families. It is the rise of such non-profit institutions in Ventura County that I argue the Chicana/o movements transformation into variant forms of resistance and social justice advocacy.
Therefore, the agricultural industry in Ventura County opposed farmworker housing due to these critical sites of community being antithetical to their interests in that independent housing stripped growers of one salient strand of control over their workers. Independent farmworker housing also allowed residents to meet, consort, and organize in challenging the hegemony of what Christian O. Paiz, in The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-and-File History of the UFW Movement (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2023), labels a Rancher Nation. Indeed, rancher opposition to housing development of, by, and for farmworkers existed despite a crisis in the availability of such homes. For example, in 1983, as Flock continued to finalize the county’s approval of the new Rancho Sespe site between Fillmore and Piru, 15-20,000 farm workers existed in Ventura County with only 2,000 state-licensed farmworker units existent.
[i] Bee, 41