chapter 9

cffAPTER 9

Building Connnunities in the World War II and Postwar Era

During the post-World War II era, Puerto Ricans and ethnic Mexicans conrinued thtir community building efforts and sought to claim recognition and Juli rights in U.S. society. Latinalo activism surged as veterans felt entitled to demand full demw,tii and citizenship rights at home efter fighting for .freedom abroad. Returning Gls joinicl civil rights activists to press for educational, legal, and voting reforms that would remove the barriers that made Latinas and Latinos second-class citizens. Latinas addressed

th e

issues _confronting their children, communities, and neighborhoods in public, ~oc<l, ,nd organized ways. Youth continued to assert their oum identities and increasingly

tht U

own definitions of citizenship and belonging, fonning their oum groups during th o

. Y'.t the patriotism of the war era and the domestic cold war that emerged i_•. th '

era.

R immediate aftermath of World War II chanaed the context of Latina/o actwis_~~

ampant antic · 0 1

t of1.c1aP

h ommunism squelched the radical activism of 19 3 Os, as governmen ~· 1•1i-

soug t to weed out "com . II :I d me po i ciansfianned th munists and "communist sympathizers," an as so ·atiotl• e flames offiear h I' •1 b associ Hearinas and t . l I ur mg accusations of disloyalty and gut t Y I t their

0 na s were held T, h d thers os

jobs. Labor unio d · eac ers, government employees, an ° 'd red too ns an commu 't . . . b const e "leftist.

11 Some Lat'

1 ni Y organizations purged mem ers the pres·

ina o groups b d to sures of the times t ,r, were conservative while others succutn e

• . 0 COl!Jorm politicall . 1

• Still, by invoking t . . y d equabfY, Latinos and Latinas hi ~~-r:tism and American ideals of democracy an 011erseas when democracy had n tgb ig ted the contradictions o+fi.,ahting for democrac)' ral cottl'

. 0 een fully h · 1 0 Seve if' 11 munity organizations d ac ieved at home in the United States, / re oft . gra ually b . t [ibera r

met with official intran . ecame radicalized as their initial efforts a post1J/a

P . sigence and . fi es on . ns

uerto Rican and Me • racist opposition This chanter ocus fi .,Jat 10

fi h . xican Ame • · r 'd h oUr•

or t e social movements oif th ncan community activism, which lat t e e 1960s and 1970s.

276

r NG COMMUNITIES IN THE WORLD WAR II AND POSTWAR ERA 13lJ!LDI

277

cVMENTS ~E9----- . . 1 bans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexican Arnericans, the years after W odd

for Cu bri·dged long-established communities with 1 ·nc d . .

II rease migration War h 1950s. In Document 1, Afro-Cuban Melb Al d h ·n t e . . . . a vara o s ares Jurt gfl tions with historian Nancy Raquel Mirabal in a

1995 • .

re ec y k c· , Interview. h" do describes New or Ity s Pan-Latino cornrnunities and relations iJvara white Cubans and Afro-Cubans, hinting at shifts Wrought b th b tween d . d . y e e Revolution an mcrease migration. In Document 2 p t Ri Cuban . . , . . , uer o can . . n Virgm1a Sanchez Korrol Writes autobiographically about grow· h1stona Sh d . Ing

. the South Bronx . e epicts the strengths of the Puerto Rican up

10

unity prior to W odd War II, the irnpact of the massive postwar migra- '°:"'and how both rnorivated her to becorne an early chronicler of the '°~unity's history. Documents 3 and 4 highlight the contradictions that co . . d Mexican American veterans experience . Document 3, a 1949 New York Times article, reveals the refusal of a Texas funeral parlor to provide services for a Mexican American veteran and the intervention of then-Senator Lyndon Johnson to secure his burial with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery. The photograph in Document 4 depicts an American GI Forum float in a Veterans Day parade in Dodge City, Kansas. Demon- strating veterans' pride, the American GI Forum promoted education and equal educational opportunity, as part of the broader activism to assure full citizenship. Document 5, a 1951 Los Angeles Times article, reveals the domes- tic cold war context and language that set the stage for public debates and activism. Here, opponents equate public housing with "socialism." Document 6 is an excerpt from Puerto Rican scholar Andres Torres' mem- oir. Depicting a scene on a New York City subway in 1960, he reveals both the challenges his deaf family confronted and the pride with which they challenged bias individually as incidents arose and collectively through a "UUnunity group. In Document 7, Puerto Rican activist Antonia Pantoja ~escnbes the founding of ASPIRA in 1961 as her most important contnbu- tion ASP · 1 . rk

· IRA promotes education and equal educationa opportumty, 1 e the L . . h 1 •unencan GI Forum, indicating the importance t at postwar groups Paced on d . . .. e ucational issues and activism.

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-Cuban Melba Alvarado Describes Relations between s· 'White Cubans and Afro-Cubans, 1940s to 1961 IOcq · h I [l 9 ]4o came, 1 lived in Manhattan in 113th and Fifth Avenue until t e eary

~\>enu~ a nd th

en, We moved to the Bronx because we bought a house on Prospect ••,

~~&o kc· illinte . 30--31 1995 New Yor 1ty. l'VJ.ew With Melba Alvarado by Nancy Raquel Miraba1,July ' '

278 P ROBLEMS IN L MAJOR

ATINA/0 HISTORY

Am rican Cuban Club] is, this 1 b [Inter- e · All . h where the c u · ce environment. the [B] hind this ouse . . t was a very m ,, h l . . . e full of jasnunes, 1 11 "town houses w ere a ot

avenue was all trees 1 t of houses that they ca pretty houses and after houses, there werhe al.~e lived. They had somhe ve~ were being torn down,

f H brew and t e 1 of the ouse f S o e d to change. Some f h using and a lot o axons they starte d h type o o . . the war the projects an ot er d t ansform into a H1spamc and then there were . hb h od and it starte to r

d from the ne1g or o move . · particularly neighborhood.... there were already H1span1cs_, ...

Wh I Came to the Bronx, Th e were still a lot of other ffi li~oow. cr Cubans ... but . . . not as many 1 H ' nic the ones that have come more . ' almost complete y ispa ' nationalities but now it s 1 f 1 r

. d Am . peop e o co o .. .. "d are Hisparucs an encan . That's what there was. Over own-

There were a lot of Puerto Ricans. .c. t to 102nd and Madison f S · d I 01ten wen town " there were a lot o paruar . s. . . . Gali . tarted this was further

, . h 1 b R rt no Casa oa, s ' where the Sparus c u ' epe o h h al s been more of a Puerto down. Over here towards the Bronx, t ere as way

Rican environment.... . · Ii d [T]here yes that was the neighborhood where a lot of Hlsparucs ve · · · · L

'1 t of Cubans in the Lenox Avenue neighborhood .... [T]here was a were a o • · , h h and Milagrosa Church, 114th and Seventh. That was th~ ;11spamcs urc , they gave the mass of each of the Hispanic countnes patron samts .. • • And there were a lot of Cubans, . . . and a lot of Cubans of color too. . . . .

The white Cuban lived in the upper part of Manhattan .... I don't know what to tell you about the separation [ of white Cubans and

Cubans of color], it's that I had some very sad experiences those years, for example in the beginning of the 60s. When I came to this country, there was a woman named Julia Martinez, who was of color, who started to orga- nize the mass of charity with other Cubans. And at the time, when I came to this country, they gave the mass in La Milagrosa, in 114th Street and Seventh Avenue. Back then I remember that it was an enormous hierarchy because a person of color who was a great musician, Alberto Socarras, played the flute and then the mass did not start until the Cuban consul, Quezada, arrived with his feathered hat a.nd then mass started .... Everyone went to the masses. But they were organized by a woman of color and a group that she had, and I also helped her. And then it turned out that with time and the like, well it turned out that this woman moved to Cuba and a woman who worked in the church said to me, "Melba you have to become in charge of the masses." I was always in charge of the masses. And at that time, well, then the Cubans started to come migrating, and the propaganda started that the real life of charity was on 156th [Street] in La Esperanza church. And the whites began masses on 156th [Street] in La Esperanza church and then the blacks over there on 114th and Seventh Avenue. And it became divided. The priests became very upset because it had already become divided and it stopped being the masses that they were before ....

This thing came about around [nineteen]-sixty or sixty-one, in the time of the revolution, when the migration started to come.

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BUILDiNG COMMUNITIES IN THE WORLD WAR II AND POSTWAR ERA 279

2. Puerto Rican Historian Virginia Sanchez Korrol Recalls Her "Intellectual Journey," 1940s to 1971

The sixth-floor, walkup apartment in the South Bronx represented the c;:enter of my universe. On that warm, spring-like day the world was close to war, but this factor had a minimum effect on the sweetness of life at that very moment. Fol- lowing the customary morning routine, a breakfast of buttered bread and warm milk laced with coffee, I sat beside my mother on the red, crushed velvet sofa set opposite tall twin windows that overlooked the neighboring tenement rooftops. The scarlet cushion fabric rubbed against the backs of my legs, making me itch and I gently shuilled my calves from side to side. "lQue dice, Marni? lQue dice?" I repeated with four-year-old persistence .... A slight hesitation, then con- centrating on the page before her, [my mother] slowly related the comic strip antics of Archie and Veronica, and then Dagwood and Blondie. Gradually, index finger pointing the way, she reached my favorite-Little Lulu. She read in measured, heavily accented English, pronouncing each syllable as surely her third grade teacher in Mayagiiez, Puerto Rico, had taught her to do.

If mother and I fully comprehended the funnies' alien words, harsh-sounding linguistic obstacles that conveyed a popular pastime in American culture, I cannot remember for sure. But what was clearly evident was that the cultural lessons I was determined to unlock in that foreign tongue held not an inkling of my own peo- ple's proud heritage. It would distance me for a long time from developing an appreciation for the connections between ancestral women on distant shores and those who, like me, would reach maturity in diaspora.

With time and a zealous Catholic school education, I became proficient in the English language. The written word flooded into my home via magazines, news- papers, and the treasured comic books my father salvaged while cleaning out the trains that came into Pennsylvania Station. Before my tenth birthday, small sister in tow, I would barge into the local public library hauling off every book within the limits of my restricted children's card. And while I reveled in this newly discovered world of words and wisdom, heroic adventures, time travel, distressed damsels, and foreign lands, not one book ever told me about me.

It was precisely because experiences like mine were common among the children of the pioneer migrant generation of Puerto Ricans who came to live in New York City during the twenties and thirties that heritage and education Were of prime concern in pre-W odd War II communities ....

• . . At the age of seven I was enrolled in the local parochial school. . . . Private schooling was made possible through my mother's sacrifices; her careful squirreling away of nickels and dimes made me feel guilty when I did not perform well. Beyond the protection of the home and familiar barrio streets, my initial encoun- ters with ethnic diversity and multiculturalism happened in this school and opened new horizons. Before I realized it, I was "being raised" Irish Catholic!

--~rom Memories and Migrations: Mapping Boric~a and Ch(cana Histories . . CoRyright ~008 by the Board of rustees of the University of Illinois. Used with perrruss10n of the Uruversity of Illinms Press.

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280 MAJ OR P R O BLEM S IN LATINA /O HI STORY

It happened almost automatically when you attended St. Anselm's Roman Catholic School in the South Bronx, at the dawning of the great population shifts from Puerto Rico to New York City .. .. St. Anselm's . . ·. boasted a _predominantly Irish American student population, a smaller concentratlon of Italian Americans and an even less significant smattering of Puerto Ricans. Nurturing Irish antece~ dents and catering to a more established immigrant community, the school culti- vated close ties to the old country and culture through its many activities ....

. . . [T]he children the nuns taught ensured cultural and spiritual bonds between Ireland and America for decades to come .... I admired the tenacity of a people who so fiercely resisted acculturation. Engaged in the national business of Americaniza- tion, replete with civic duties, English-language dominance, democratic values, and worthy founding fathers , these teachers still remembered how to infuse pride in the "Old World" heritage. And so at some level I must have internalized the notion that you didn't have to give up one identity in order to assume another-that both strands could coexist without conflict. That understanding, however, would not manifest itself until I was much older.

Contradictions abounded for me and other Puerto Rican youngsters caught in an assimilationist one-way street. For the teachers and admirristrators, many of whom had not encountered a cohort of non-English-speaking youngsters in the classroom since the great immigrations of the early twentieth century, Puerto Rican children were virtually invisible; their rich multicultural and multiracial history, language, life-cycle commemorations, ritual kinships, and affirming institutions were inconsequential. Hundreds of Puerto Rican children became casualties of an Americanizing cultural onslaught that, coupled with intense wartime patriotism, absorbed them into a national ideal that promoted equality yet maintained a colonial stranglehold on Puerto Rico and sanctioned ethno-racial divisions on its own shores. Throughout those formative years I finnly embraced the American dream even as a nagging inner voice vacillated between my public and private beings .... For most of my generation who experienced this painful dilemma, survival would rest on selective adaptation; the ability to pick and choose cultural elements from both cultures, blending "American" and Puerto Rican ways of being into something unique called U.S . Puerto Rican, Boricua, or Nuyorican. But it was, nevertheless, a rough job for a kid . . ..

In spite of the dedication of a few Puerto Rican professionals, by the time I entered high school in the mid-fifties, stereotypical attitudes and distortions about Puerto Ricans had increased. Almost from the first discemable Puerto Rican presence in the United States, articles reeked with negative portrayals of our communities.. . . Throughout the forties and fifties, the media referred to the group as the "Puerto Rican problem." . ..

[N]egative and controversial writings titillated a reading public eager to believe the worst about the group . For young Puerto Ricans grappling with identity and self- worth, one of the most damaging was Oscar Lewis's l..,a Vida . I borrowed a copy from the library and felt its portrayal of Puerto Ricans, especially women, was insulting. Touted as an objective anthropological study, it overgeneralized both the island and diasporic realities from the experiences of one poor extended family engaged in prosti- tution .... Despite claims of impartial scholarship, Lewis studied a small sample and used a San Juan ghetto, the city's unofficial red-light district, as a representative site . . . .

BUILDING COMMUNITIES IN THE WORLD WAR II AND POSTWAR ERA 281

Without doubt, such pervasive negativity affected the schooling of young Puerto Ricans . . ..

. . . Absence from the curriculum, historical invisibility, negative stereotypes, and low teacher expectations meant that if I wanted to continue my education, to strive for that elusive American dream, I had to fight for it every step of the way . ... I confronted the senior guidance counselors on the day before gradua- tion .... Preferring to comment on my "poor choice" of lipstick color, the coun- selors condescendingly informed me about the existence of a free city university system with a campus right there in . . . Brooklyn.. . . Left to research college admissions on my own, . . . I nonetheless became the first in the family to attend .. .. By the time I earned the baccalaureate degree, a mere 1 percent of the graduating classes of the entire CUNY system were Puerto Rican.

My first impression of Brooklyn College, nestled in what seemed to me a bucolic oasis that defied its urban location, was everything I could hope for . ... Nonetheless, obstacles appeared at every turn. My bosses in the factory where I worked as a bookkeeper would have preferred that I dedicate all my time to their business, and "What are you going to college for? You'll only get married anyway" became a constant refrain. Few of my neighborhood friends were in school, so there was no one who could understand what I was doing. In time, I became socially and intellectually distant from family and_ friends as I struggled to open unknown paths for myself. . ..

. . . I soon discovered the hallowed halls were neither immune from the ethno-racial prejudice of the period nor eager to question social science dogma. In retrospect, I found it difficult to reconcile a nurturing home, the hub of an extended family, and community with social science rhetoric that frequently reinforced a notion of Puerto Rican downward mobility. The per- vasive invisibility of anything Latino silently echoed its very absence through- out my education. I was drawn to piecing together evidence to counteract negative Puerto Rican images in the literature ....

[In 1971] I sought admission to graduate studies in the History Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook with a well-defined agenda in mind: to tell the story of the New York Puerto Rican community from my parents' pioneering generation to the present, to set straight the historical record, and to ensure that Puerto Ricans would forever find themselves in the national narrative .... And so began my intellectual journey into the study of Puerto Ricans, Latin Americans, and U.S. Latinos ....

3. Mexican-American GI Denied Burial in Texas, 1949 WASHINGTON, Jan. 12-A soldier's funeral and burial were arranged today by the Government of the United States for Felix Longoria, late private, Infantry, Anny of the United States, who died in action on Luzon in the Philippines.

--F;om_ the New York Times, January 13, 1949 © 1949 The New York Times . All rights reseived . l!se~ by p Illl.!ssion and protected by he Copyright Laws of the United States. The pnntmg, copymg, red1stnbu- tion, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission 1s prohibited.

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l I 282 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN LATINA / O HISTORY

He will receive full military honors, in Arlington National Cemetery, where lie some of the more illustrious dead ... •

Private Longoria's widow, Beatrice, and such ofh~s friends_as live in his little town of Three Rivers, Tex., had reported some difficulty m having funeral services there for him.

Dr. Hector P. Garcia informed Senator Lyndon D. Johnson of Texas, in fact, that the manager of the one undertaking parlor in T_hree Rivers had refused the use of his facilities with the explanation: "Other white people object to the use of the funeral home by people of Mexican origin."

Dr. Garcia is president of a veterans' organization known as the American GI Forum.

"In our estimation," he telegraphed to Senator Johnson, "this action in Three Rivers is in direct contradiction of those same principles for which this American soldier made the supreme sacrifice in giving his life for his country and for the same people who now deny him the last funeral rites deserving of any American hero regardless of his origin."

Mr. Johnson telephoned to old friends in South Texas and, he said, found that the case in its substance had been correctly reported. As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee he got in touch with the high military authorities and made arrangements for a different sort of burial.

He sent then to Dr. Garcia a telegram of his own, which said in part: "I deeply regret to learn that the prejudice of some individuals extends even

beyond this life. "I have no authority over civilian funeral homes, nor does the Federal

Government." "However, I have today made arrangements to have Felix Longoria

reburied with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery here at Washington where the honored dead of our nation's wars rest. Or, if his family prefers to have his body interred nearer his home, he can be reburied at Fort Sam Houston National Military Cemetery at San Antonio (Tex.). There will be no cost."

Mr. Johnson then asked Private Longoria's widow to indicate her preference "before his body is unloaded from an Army transport at San Francisco on Jan . 13."

Mrs. Beatrice Longoria, in a telegram to the Senator, then closed these exchanges. "Hun:1-bly grateful," she said, "for your kindness in my hour of humiliation

and. suffenng. Gladly accept your offer for reburial of my husband at Arlington National Cemetery. Please arrange for direct shipment to Washington . Forever grateful for your kindness." ...

_Private Longo~a was born on April 19, 1919. He began active military service on the anmversary of an old armistice, Nov. 11, 1944. He fell less than a year later-on June 16 1945 in the last mo th f · · h phiJi· · es . . ' , n s o action m t e ppm · This 1s all that could be learned from the w D d il ble h

ar epartment recor s ava a ere.

"I am _sorry," Mr. Johnson said, "about the funeral home at Three Rivers. But there 1s, after all, a fine national funeral h h h · sort, out at Arlington." ome, t oug of a rather different

BUILDING COMMUNITI A ES IN THE WORLD WAR II AND POSTWAR ER

4. Photo of American GI Forum Float at a Veterans Day Parade in Dodge City, Kansas, 1950s

'"if ... ~~ "'

An American GI Forum float at a Veterans Day parade in Dodge City, Kansas. The AGIF motto, "Education is our freedom and freedom should be everybody's business," indicates the emphasis the Forum has always placed on learning as a means to social betterment. From the group's early days, local chapters organized back-to-school drives, attendance campaigns, and scholarship programs, while the national worked through legal channels for equal educational opportunity. SOURCE: Dr. Hecror P. Carda Papers; Special Collectio11s and Arc/1ii1es, Bell Library, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

Reprinted in Henry A. J. Ramos, The American G.l. Forum: In Pursuit ef the Dream, 1948--1983 (Houston: Arte Piblico Press, 1998), p. 33.

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284 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN LATINA/O HISTOR y

5. Opponents of Public Housing Decry "Socialism" in Los Angeles, 1951

The label of Socialism was applied repeatedly to proposed F d · fc e eral H . proJects or Los Angeles yesterday as scores of persons appeared b fc ousing C il al fi

e ore the C ounc to appe rom decisions of the City Planning Comnu· · ity · fc h ss1on appr .

sites or t e government-subsidized building programs. OVJ.ng Nine sites involving 10,000 units to cost $100,000,000 were in th

· Th C il h b · e proceed-mgs. e ounc c am ers were packed as the heanngs went into th · d d h

. 1 . 1 . b d 1 eir second ay an t e city egis ative o y he d one of its first all-day session ·

h . s m recent

years, opmg to reach an end of the protests. Particularly vigorous in presenting their case were residents and busm· e

fr . . ssmen

om the Rose Hill area where 2000 umts, some of them to be incorporated · 13-story buildings, are scheduled to be erected in what is now a single-fa~n residence zone. y

"There are many ways that we can handle the housing job and do better through private enterprise-ways far superior to this proposed socialized co~cen- tration camp," said one speaker for the Rose Hill delegation. The Rose Hill group even embellished their presentation with a series of stereoptican slides, showing homes which would be demolished if the housing site were approved.

The presentation brought from Councilman Ed Davenport, admitted propo- nent of the housing projects, the statement that "this is the most forceful and con- vincing presentation I have listened to in my six years of sitting of the City Council."

Byron Jones, director of the Montecito Hills Improvement Association, was particularly eloquent upon the charge of Socialism.

He said in part: "The real issue that should govern our decision is the issue between private

enterprise and Socialism ... in summation, the questions are, 'Shall we light the match that spreads the conflagration which will destroy private homes and pri- vate enterprise in our city? Shall you gentlemen be the guards at the gate who tear it down to permit the entry of a Trojan horse which will destroy our American ideal of American privately owned homes?'" .. .

H. J. F. Hanemann, a civil engineer, . .. labeled the Rose Hill project as "contrary to the city's master plan of zoning and a movement which would per- petuate Socialism in Los Angeles." . . .

6. Puerto Rican Scholar, Andres Torres, Reflects on Being "A Hearing Son," 1960

"STEP LIVELY, STEP LIVELY." The conductor's command came sharply ove~ the loudspeaker as they jumped aboard. Life had taught them to regar

· ht "Housing Project Socialistic, Opponents Tell Councilmen," Los Angeles Times, June 23, 1951. Copyng © 1951. Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with Pennission . An~res ! 0 rres, Signing in Puerto Rican: A Hearing Son and His Deef Family (Washington, DC: Gallaudet Uruversity Press, 2009), pp. 1-5 .

BUILDING COMMUNITIES IN THE WORLD WAR II AND POSTWAR ERA 285

punctuality as a vital habit. Too often they had been overlooked or left behind, so they were al~eady poised at the doors as the subway slowed to a halt. My parents were gom~ downtown to the Friday meeting of the Puerto Rican Soci- ety for the Catholic D ea£ Together with their friends Isaura and Oliverio, they were riding the A train to the meeting hall, located in the central office of the New York City Archdiocese, near St. Patrick's Cathedral. I was with them as usual. The year was 1960.

Pop worked as a stock clerk in the garment center where his weekdays were spent packing men's shirts into cardboard boxes. His hands were callused from the daily handling of those boxes, and the years of lifting and lugging molded his body into an athletic frame. He arrived home gritty and tired, but on those Friday evenings of the Deaf Society, of which Pop was president, he was a trans- formed man. In his grey suit and blue tie, his face sweetly scented with his favor- ite lotion, he could have passed for someone well beyond his true station in life. As president of an organization, he might as well dress up for the role ....

The five of us worked our way through the busy car and in the far comer Mom and Isaura, dressed up and perfumed, found seats. They fit snuggly in a dou- ble seat, while I grabbed an empty spot some distance from them .... Fortunately, I had already convinced my parents that a twelve-year-old boy didn't need to be making a fashion statement for these meetings. With my blue striped polo shirt, unadorned cotton slacks and Converse sneakers, I was good to go. Pop and Oliverio stood nearby, holding onto a silver pole where there were already two men. As the train pulled out of the station Pop and Oliverio faced each other.

"Do you think there'll be many people tonight?" Oliverio wondered, in signs. "Maybe twenty-five to thirty. It will be a good crowd," Pop responded

with his hands. Signing on a subway that alternates between a stop-and-go crawl and a

bouncing sprint is not the easiest thing to do. Elbows and knees were in constant motion, as the men braced themselves against the gleaming silver pole. Each would've been grateful for the use of a third arm.

"We have a lot of business to discuss: the credit union and planning for the dinner, and Monsignor Lynch wants to talk to us. Then we will have the movie. I hope we do not waste time on silly arguments." Pop liked to run the meetings efficiently and leave time for socializing.

They kept the signs to themselves, trying to conceal the conversation like poker players sheltering their hands . Pop didn't like to verbalize loudly or put his gestures on display, as did other deaf people I knew. Nevertheless, the other two men at the pole were startled; they weren't sure what to do. I had seen this before and I knew what they were thinking: Is it wrong to look? Or do you just pretend they're not there?

These two just stayed where they were, fidgeting and looking away. Pop had been through this often and he didn't care. He wasn ' t going to be a z~mbie on the subway. On he went, signing with Oliverio, discreetly, but _witho~t shame. Next to me Mom and Isaura were gossiping too, chismeando with their hands. As soon as we'd jumped aboard they'd gone strai?ht fo~ the comer seats, to avoid the view of other passengers . They conversed with their hands down on

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286 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN LATJNA/0 J--IJSTOR Y

their laps, making only the s~btlest of facial movements. I was accustomed to this scene: watching my parents sign m the subway, and watchmg the hearing people

Pop and Oliverio continued, as did Mom and Isaura, oblivious to the atten-watch them. tion gathering about them. By now the other passengers, not iust the two men at the silver pole, noticed the deaf people talking. Then, toward the center of the

car a group of young kids had noticed: ' "Hey, look over there," one of them said. "Look over there at the deaf and

dumb people!" Then came the bulging eyes and giggles. "Oh yeah, look." Another chimed in, pointing at my parents. A third one let out, "Hey I can do that, can't you?" They threw their hands about, competing for the loudest laughs. Any exag-

gerated movement would do: fingers in acrobatic maneuvers, clownish faces, grunting noises. Standing and sitting, they were bunched together and making like they were trading signs. They pretended it was an inside joke, but they must've known my parents could see what was going on .

... The train raced downtown as the show continued. And in the audi- ence I saw a variety of reactions: embarrassment, pity, and fear . I perceived varieties of anger as well. There was anger directed at the troublemakers. And there was another anger reserved for my parents, for starting the whole

mess in the first place. Up to now, I was a bystander, seated apart from them. "Ahtay!" (I was known as "Andy" in the hearing world, but "Ahtay," with

the accent on "tay" is how it sounded in the Deaf world.) Pop waved at me to get my attention. He said for me to get the time from someone .

Of cow:se, Pop knew the time. What he wanted was not the time but for everyone else to know that I was with him. I asked an elderly lady sitting across the aisle. I always preferred approaching older people. I signed the time to Pop; he told m_e to thank the elderly lady; she told me to tell Pop he's welcome; Pop nodded Ins head at her,_ with the trademark grin that barely curled the corners of his mouth. He raised his hand in thanks and the lady smiled at me.

Then the passengers turned to me, interpreting the scene .... And now the ~o_nfus1on }eepened, ~e faces_ changed again, and I gnessed at what they were hinking. Hey, I don t get this. Don't deaf people have deaf children?" ...

I remember what went thro h - d . . hea · 1 h ug my mm m these situations: "Somenmes nng peop e, t ey get so stupid. Like the kid h . · ki .c. of

my parents with thei· h . 1

s on t 1s train, ma ng 1un . r P ony sign anguage."

Once, earlier, on another subwa -d I felt so bad for them that I g t dy n e when people were staring at my parents,

Y

o up an screamed "H h , h ·th u? ou never saw deaf people b fc ? Th , . ' ey, w at st e matter Wl yo · e ore. ey re JUSt regul 1 I"

... You should've seen th h ar peop e, you know. sign. How quickly their faces e~; :: _:ey realized I could hear and talk and they were home, they'd laugh h g i' ut I knew when it was all over, and that! So yelling or making a t emse v~s silly. To think they were fooled like h TI scene every t , d t at rom Pop . He might give a di loo rme wasn t worth the trouble. I learne rty k, but that was about it. But that Friday

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BUILDING COMMUNITIES IN THE WORLD WAR II AND POSTWAR ERA 287

night, when I was an eighth grader and the kids were mimicking my parents and their friends, something else happened ....

As the train screeched into 59th Street, where we would switch to the D line, w~ were ;,eady to get off Finally. On the way out, Mom poked at my shoulder: Ahtay.

She pointed to the kids so they could see her then she angrily signed to me what she ~anted them to know. Then she crouched her short, chubby body in their direction, flashed a menacing look that left no doubt what she thought of them, and threw them the middle finger of her right hand.

The kids recoiled, giggled nervously, then stopped laughing. Mom poked again at my shoulder, ordering me to translate. I relayed her words. "She says God will punish you for making fun of us;

she says your children will be born deaf"

7. Puerto Rican Activist, Antonia Pantoja, on the Founding of ASPIRA, 1961

If you asked me, "What was the most important and impacting work that you have ever done?" I would reply, "The founding of ASPIRA." ASPIRA occupies a very special place in my heart ....

This time period actually spans over seven years, ending in 1961 .... The original idea that I presented to Dr. [Frank] Home was called "New

Leaders in New York." It was to organize youths into clubs that would become the vehicles to encourage them to find their identity, learn leadership skills by working on problems that their communities suffered, complete high school, and enter college to pursue a career that would allow them to give back to their community. The idea had germinated in my mind as a result of various experiences that I had when I arrived in New York. The idea began to haunt my thoughts after having heard discussions from Puerto Rican high school students who attended the youth conferences that PRACA [Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs] was holding. These conferences were orga- nized and held by the youths themselves, who were the leaders and speakers telling us how powerless and insignificant they were made to feel by their classmates and teachers. The students discussed their fear of speaking in their classes, their shame because of their native language, their fear of the gangs from other ethnic groups, and their fear of the police. I was deeply concerned about what I was hearing.

The implementation of my ideas would not come easily. I had to pursue many different persons and approaches before I could succeed .. . .

My idea was to . . . provide a way for their "hanging out together" (the clubs), following a behavior that was natural to their age group. In the clubs, they would learn about their culture and the country of their parents, and also learn how to survive in the school and the neighborhood. The club would pro- vide opportunities to develop feelings of self-worth and appreciation for their --Excerpt, pages 90-109 is reprinted with pemussion from the publisher_ of "Memoir of a Visionary: Antonia Pantoja" by Antonia Pantoja (© 2002 Arte Publico Press-University of Houston).

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288 MAJOR PR O BLEM S IN LATINA / O HISTORY

culture as they learned leadership skills to work in their c~mmunities. The clubs would substitute for the gangs that were already becommg popular protective groups for Italian, Polish, and black youths ....

We needed to design ways to attack the root causes of these myriad fires and begin to develop in the community other people who would join the battle at different points in the problems. The approach I prepared suggested two roads: the immediate help brought by youth clubs that could engage in giving attention to selected problems; and the longer road that would develop educated leaders committed to the resolution of the problems at policy levels, in the political and economic spheres of the total society ....

After months of work, our group had prepared a philosophy, a mission, objectives, and a work plan. Everyone agreed that this new leadership program should not become a service agency; instead, in form and methods, it should be a movement. However, we all were wise enough to understand that it had to ren- der some service if it was to be successful in raising funds.

The very important act of naming the project engaged the group in discus- sions that clearly indicated a philosophical position and a profound understanding that to work with youth we had to impart values, optimism, and the decision to succeed. We wanted an upbeat name, one word to express belief in one's self The word aspira was finally selected. It was chosen because to aspire is upbeat. We all wished the meaning would be "I will aspire and I will attain." The Spanish command form ASPIRA, of the verb aspirar, was perfect.

We made fast progress in organizing ASPIRA .... In the autumn of 1961, we received letters from the :five foundations accepting

our proposals and assigning funds. The Forum board called a meeting. . .. [T]hey all concluded that I should resign my position with the city of New Yark to come and direct ASP IRA ... .

The club programs grew to be very impressive in membership size, number, and impact. The ASPIRA Club Federation became a very powerful organization with very successful programs .. .. The important fact about the model of the work in clubs was that it was invented by the youth . .. .

The reader will understand why ASPIRA became the most important work of my life . In terms of numbers, ASPIRA of New York alone, from 1963, to 1999, can easily be shown to have touched the lives of approximately 36,000 young people from Puerto Rican and other Latino groups ... .

. . . Today, there are seven ASPIRAs: in Connecticut, New y ork, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Florida, and Puerto Rico. They are served by a national office in Washington, D.C.

~ESSAYS

Puerto Rican and Mexican ~erican community activism in the postwar era was shaped both by_ the patnottsm invigorated by being a country at war and by the cold war, which took root in the immediate aftermath of World War II. In the first essay, Lorrin Thomas, professor of history at Rutgers University,

BUILDING COMMUNITIES IN THE WORLD WAR II AND POSTWAR ERA 2S9

Camden, examines how Puerto Ricans and their advocates invoked citizenship rights to defend their interests in postwar New York City. Within the cold war context, a liberal discourse emphasized the individual. Thus, Puerto Rican students confronting ethnic attacks in high school, educational reformers, and Puerto Rican community activists all focused on individuals and citizenship rights. Increasingly, Puerto Rican youth asserted their own sense of the meaning of citizenship and began to shift the discourse to one that also included the rights of groups to be recognized as belonging in American society. Challenging the pervasive negative portrayals of Puerto Ricans, these community activists laid the groundwork for the increasingly radical activism of the late 1960s and 1970s.

In the second essay, Ronald W. Lopez II, professor of Chicano and Latino Studies at Sonoma State University, analyzes the efforts of Chavez Ravine's predominantly Mexican American residents to remain in their homes as the city of Los Angeles invoked eminent domain to remove them from their homes and their community to build public housing in its place. Lopez reveals that women were the most vocal activists in resisting the government's plans. Testifying in city hearings and writing letters of protest, women used a language of "patriotic post-war motherhood," emphasizing their citizenship and their sacrifices to U.S. war efforts as the wives and mothers of veterans. From their perspective, they represented American values of patriotism and home owner- ship, while the government and commercial interests were behaving in ways "un-American."

Puerto Rican Youth Activism in Postwar New York City LORRIN THOMAS

In 1951, a group of Puerto Rican students from Benjamin Franklin High School (BFHS) in East Harlem wrote a plaintive letter to El Diario asking the editors to publicize a series of attacks they were suffering at school. The students reported that members of Italian gangs at Franklin were targeting Puerto Rican boys, stealing their lunch money, and beating them up to the point that several, they said, had left the school in fear. "We believe that we have the right to study without being harassed by anyone," the students wrote, "since we are American citizens and our parents pay taxes jµst like [the Italians] do." A couple of months later, El Diario reported again on gang attacks against Puerto Ricans at Franklin, ··· and remarking on the principal's handling of the conflicts internally. Leonard Covello, who had steered Franklin through a number of previous anti-Puerto ~can incidents as principal of the progressive and multiethnic high school since he founded it in 1934, made no public statements about the harassment. Be did, however, speak on the issue to the school's Club Borinquen, _which ?e had helped organize in the late thirties following the first wave of ethmc conflict

--Lorrin Thomas "J Q c·t· , ._ •rantes and Young Lords: Youth Activism in a New World Ord " . ' uan . I 12en, n:.p1 ' C N y; k C't (Ch' lJ . er, 10 Puerto Rican Citizen· History and Political Identity in Twentieth- entury ew or

I Y icago: n1vel]·ty f . · 1 o Chicago Press, 2010), pp . 200-244.

290 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN LATINA / 0 HISTORY

between Puerto Rican and Italian youth in East Harlem. In their discussion of the injustice of these attacks, both the students and Covello framed the problem as one of the denial of individual rights in a liberal framework. That is, their status as citizens should protect the students from discrimination at the very least, giving them the freedom to study and thereby, they implied, the opportu- nity to become even better citizens.

For the Puerto Rican students, this was a new kind of assertion, expressive of the second generation's efforts both to gain a foothold in the city's social landscape and to demand their individual rights as aspiring members of the mainstream. In terms of relations with the Italian community, on the other hand, their lament was old news: members of both communities testified to the Italians' anti-Puerto Rican sentiment dating back to their first contact in the twenties ....

[W]ith the postwar migration from Puerto Rico still escalating, Italian Americans all over East Harlem expressed resentment about the changes in their community, as did New Yorkers throughout the city who feared the "dan- gerous influx." Puerto Rican youth continued to bear a heavy burden of the anti-Puerto Rican fury on the streets. Throughout the 1950s, Puerto Ricans under the age of twenty-five comprised New York's most rapidly expanding demographic group, so they were ready targets of the public's anxiety about a postwar world in flux. Widespread fears about young Puerto Ricans and their fitness as American citizens had developed alongside the national obsession with youth, especially those with dark skin, that dominated the media in the decade following the "zoot suit" riots in 1943 .... While Covello and some of his pro- gressive colleagues had been working to counter the vilification of poor youth since the thirties, their efforts on behalf of the growing Puerto Rican population touched only a small fraction of the city's migrants. A larger number of Puerto Rican children and families were drawn into New York' s education and social service institutions via the more dominant liberal agendas that would, by the mid-fifties, describe the ideal new migrant as '1uan Q. Citizen." Adult migrants were barraged with messages from the Migration Division and other social ser- vice agencies about voting and learning English, as well as about comportment in the workplace and proper standards of dress and housekeeping, and younger Puerto Ricans were targeted by liberal educators who hoped to provide the most promising students with the tools to embark on middle-class lives. The Puerto Rican students at Franklin who publicized their experience of discrimina- tion in 1951 would have heard dozens of versions, sometimes indistinguishable from one another, of these progressive and liberal messages directed at youth.

Shortly after the gang harassment incidents at Benjamin Franklin, in a con- formist cold war milieu that intensified nationwide fears about juvenile delin- quency, a growing number of Puerto Rican youth leaders began to take the reins from their white liberal allies, defining themselves as the future leaders of their community. They worked to create a new image of Puerto Rican youth, plotting a path of selective assimilation-and navigating around obstacles like West Side Story's gang ~tereotypes or the publicity surrounding the Capeman murders-to be recogmzed as equal members of postwar American society-

BUILDING COMMUNITIES IN THE WORLD WAR II AND POSTWAR ERA 291

Theirs was not a direct challenge to th ·mil · . . Rican migrant into "Juan Q c· . e ~ssi atiorust ideal of turning the Puerto

• 1t1zen although · t . f h . ower to articulate the ideals of Am . ' . . _1 was an assert10n o t eir

P encan citizenship for themselves Gradually, over the course of the fifti thi fi . ·

• l d b es, s rst generat10n of young Puerto Rican ea ers egan to emphasize demands fc • • .

d d l . . . . or recogrut1on as a group alongside

more stan ar c auns for mdiVIdual rights And b h 1 • • . · , Y t e ear y sixties, many of the young mamstream leaders began to challeng th li · al d · · · · f h · • e e po tIC an mst1tut1onal assumpt10ns o t e social liberals who supported th r- h firs . . . . . em, 10r t e t time making colomalism p art of the mamstream conversation about p rt Ri d . ue o can a vance- ment m New York ... .

*** While the postwar em~hasis on rehabilitating delinquents and training citizens to fight t~e cold war d~mmat_ed the city's education agenda, Covello and Benjamin Franklin ~aculty qmetly if less optimistically persisted in their intercultural programmmg and bolstered support of Puerto Rican students, whose numbers increased every year between 194 7 and 1955 . By the time the first big wave of postwar migrants began settling in East Harlem in 1946, Covello and other BFHS staff had modified most aspects of the school programming to include issues concerning Puerto Rican children and their families. Club Borinquen continued to sponsor regular dances and cultural events, and by 1948, it had established the annual "Latin American Festival," which quickly attracted high- profile artists, writers, and performers from El Barrio, who donated their time "for the aid of the poor Puerto Rican student." . . . His progressive advocacy notwithstanding, Covello never rejected traditional postwar educational ideals. He noted proudly, for instance, that "we are interested in preparing these [Puerto Rican] boys for active participation and useful citizenship in the U.S."

Their agenda was not limited to Franklin. Partly due to Covello's advocacy on the issue, by 1951 there were ten bilingual teachers in the handful of schools with the highest Puerto Rican concentration . . .. As early as 1936, following the controversy over Puerto Rican children's IQ scores, Covello also argued that the standard IQ testing practices in the United States were not valid. for "foreign- bom" children, including Puerto Rican migrants. In 1947, Covello was still demanding that current tests of academic achievement and mental ability for Puerto Rican students should be reevaluated, and "appropriate instruments of measurement should be developed for [them]." ...

During these first years of New York 's anti-Puerto Rican backlash, Leonard Covello was second only to Vito Marcantonio in terms of actively fostering the "mutual respect" that so many white liberals talked about. Covello addressed other New York City school principals on what he saw as their obligation to the city's Puerto Rican families: "The post war world requires of citizens and teachers more than mere understanding of their neighbors-immediate or dis- tant. It demands, in addition, an understanding, mutual respect, and a mutual sharing of our cultures. [We have] an opportunity for gaining such an under- stand· · " D · h f mg of our fellow Americans-the Puerto Ricans. unng t e summer o 1947, Covello traveled to Puerto Rico to deliver a series of lectures at the

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292 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN LATINA / O HISTORY

University of Puerto Rico .... Covello visited twenty or so towns in a quest "get to know" the island from which so many of his students had emigrate~ hand-delivering scores of letters written by Benjamin Franklin students to th . ' friends and family. [T]he New York Herald Tribune praised the principal w~: "walked the walk" of progressive educators. As far away as Pittsburgh, the Courier ... tout[ed] the school's "fine program for Puerto Ricans," which offered a "new approach" to educating "foreign youth."

It was no surprise that the nuances of Covello's work, his progressive and pluralist approach to "education for citizenship" that challenged the orthodoxies of traditional assimilationism, were absent from the discussion of what he was actually attempting to do in East Harlem. Altliough his vision of Puerto Ricans as ''just like other immigrants" was in many respects similar to the liberal social service ideal of training the migrant to become "Juan Q. Citizen," Covello's advocacy on behalf of Puerto Rican youth-as in the case of the aggrieved stu- dents in 19 51, among countless others-helped foster their leadership skills inde- pendent of the social service establishment. Ultimately, this generation of young leaders would contribute substantially to the challenging of the old liberal ortho- doxies via new discourses of group rights in the 1960s.

***

a

In 1952, the Mayor's Advisory Committee on Puerto Rican Affairs established a scholarship fund for Puerto Rican students, explaining its primary goal as "to promote maximum integration of our citizens of Puerto Rican background into the general New York citizenry in the shortest possible time." Their publicity materials did not actually use the '1uan Q. Citizen" phrase that the Migration Division included in at least one of its pamphlets in that era, but the idea was the same: assimilation facilitated by a shared national citizenship .... Emphasizing that the scholarship was about more than just educational achieve- ment, a 1953 press release explained the committee's vision of the "next steps" of the scholarship fund: housing; "integration," focusing especially on English- language proficiency; "mutual understanding" and civility; employment; and b uilding a Puerto Rican leadership base in New York.

Aro u nd the same time, the Riverside Neighborhood Assembly, a liberal o rganization on the Upper West Side, established a more experimental leader- ship program, involving exchanges of promising youth between Manhattan and Puerto Rico. Upon their return , the "Goodwill Ambassadors" would write a weekly newsletter on issues in the Puerto Rican community and speak to New York-area youth groups about their experiences on the island .... The Board of Education's experimental "Higher Horizons" program was part of the same con- stellation of initiatives geared toward supporting minority children, and it received praise from Puerto Rican educational activists. Unlike other programs that focused on training participants in practices of "good citizenship," which proliferated in the first decade after the war, Higher Horizons provided for edu- cational enrichment broadly conceived: more guidance counselors, remedial reading and math teachers, and specialty teachers in its target schools, as well as trips to the opera, the theater, and science laboratories.

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BUILDING COMMUNITIES IN THE WORLD WAR II AND POSTWAR ERA 293

The advocacy of liberals like Covello and the members of MACPRA was only a small part of the story of efforts to change educational outcomes for-and the public image of--Puerto Rican youth in the fifties. Early in the decade, young migrants themselves, including a small but growing cohort of college students, sought to strengthen their community and take control of the negative discourses about Puerto Ricans in New York by creating youth-based leadership initiatives and youth-run community organizing campaigns. Certainly the public's focus on juvenile delinquency helped galvanize Puerto Rican youth to promote their own agenda of "civic pride" for Puerto Ricans by the mid-fifties. But the force of youth activism had more to do with demographic change in the Puerto Rican community. Second and third generations were now attending high schools and colleges, and growing numbers of Puerto Rican youth were inspired to build networks and create alliances with existing community organi- zations to promote their own agendas for change ....

Among the new generation of young Puerto Rican leaders in the 1950s, Antonia Pantoja would become the best known, although, as a migrant herself who arrived in New York in her twenties, her background was different from that of many of the second-generation members of her cohort. Soon after her arrival in the city near the end of World War II, Pantoja fell in with a multi- ethnic group of artists and radicals, lived downtown, and briefly attended the radical Jefferson School for a course on the "Marxist Interpretation of the His- tory of Puerto Rico," a set of formative experiences more cosmopolitan than those of many of her contemporaries who spent their youth in New York's barrios. What Pantoja did share with the other young leaders of her generation, many of them students and activists at a number of New York's high schools and colleges, was a sense of anger at the discrimination and exclusion experi- enced by the people of her community and a determination to challenge the anti-Puerto Rican status quo.

Pantoja had been a youth worker at a community center, a job that was a point of entry for many young activists by the early sixdes. She then became one of the leaders of the first formally organized, youth-led Puerto Rican organiza- tion in New York, the Hispanic Young Adult Association (HY AA), while she was an undergraduate at Hunter College in the early 1950s. HY AA's goal was to create a forum to bring together the energies of an emerging cohort of activist Puerto Rican youth. One of its central objectives was to influence the images of Puerto Ricans circulating in New York, images that HY AA felt were being "managed" somewhat ineffectively by liberals in the Migration Division and in the city's educational and social service establishment. A growing and increas- ingly divisive debate emerged within HY AA's leadership between, on the o?e hand, a moderate, liberal, and nonpolitical response to elevating the community through its youth, and, on the other hand, a more politicized faction that sought to call attention to the ways in which existing institutions and city officials were failing to meet the needs of the Puerto Rican community, and young Puerto Ricans in particular . ...

This split was partly responsible for the emergence, out ~f HY AA, of t~e Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs (PRACA), m 1956. PantoJa

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294 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN LA TINA / O HISTORY

recalled that the motivation for the change in the organization's name came from a desire to make the organization explicitly a Puerto Rican one, a group that would proudly assert its Puerto Rican identity rather than retaining the more vaguely assimilationist label "Hispanic." Though not officially organized to serve youth, PRACA was led by young Puerto Rican professionals and acti- vists. Shortly after the creation of PRACA, Pantoja, who had gotten a master's degree in social work from New York University, was offered a staff position on the new Commission on Intergroup Relations. Her mentor there, Dr. Frank Home, encouraged her in the creation of the Puerto Rican Forum, a larger and more powerful organization than PRACA. Pantoja modeled the Forum after a similar group that Home had founded for young African Americans in the South and designed it to support both general institution building in the Puerto Rican community and the fostering of young leaders who would initiate Puerto Rican-run programs. Many of the participants in these groups described them as modeled after "uplift" and "community defense" groups like the NAACP.

Although this movement of youth activists was well under way before the Capeman murders in 1959, the incident, and the renewed flood of anti-Puerto Rican vitriol that followed, inspired a new flurry of organizing by young leaders focusing primarily on educational issues. A group calling itself the Hispanic Association Pro-Higher Education (HAPHE), founded in 1959, sponsored the first in a series of annual conferences for Puerto Rican youth that met through- out the sixties. The second Puerto Rican Youth Conference, in 1960, articulated a goal that still echoed with the Puerto Rican community's trauma following the Capeman incident: "to set a positive image to counter 'pathology and fear' to show the Puerto Rican as ambitious, with a desire and increasing ability to climb upwards, as have all past newcomers to the city." ...

In 1961, members of the Puerto Rican Forum's board of directors created a youth organization that Pantoja had envisioned, she recalled, since the mid-fifties, "an instrument to develop leaders from among our youth." They named the orga- nization Aspira [See Document 7] .... Though often accused-especially by Puerto Rican activists in the late sixties and early seventies-of promoting a conservative or assimilationist agenda, Aspira served as an early model of cultural pride and community autonomy that would become central to Puerto Rican community organizing in the sixties. Its programs, emphasizing educational skills and achieve- ment and access to higher education, were indeed more moderate than radical, but its firm commitment to a Puerto Rican-run leadership structure . . . and to the teaching of Puerto Rican history and culture marked Aspira as a challenger of the status quo within New York's social service networks.

Pantoja would later describe Aspira's relationship to the Puerto Rican social service sector, dominated by the Migration Division, as an uneasy one. She acknowledged that the Office of the Commonwealth "believed that their mis- sion was to help the community solve its problems" but said that it "was equally concerned with maintaining a position of control over New York Puerto Ricans and keeping the leadership in the hands of the government of Puerto Rico." Moreover, she remembered its approach to community as one limited by racism:

>

BUILDING COMMUNITIES IN THE WORLD WAR II AND POSTWAR ERA 295

"The leadership of the [Mi·gr t · n · · · ffi d · · and a ion iv1S1on] o ce espouse mtegration

assimilation, but I knew that only those of us who were white-skinned had any hope of this kind of acceptance." .. .

. . · · · al[M]any _Aspirante lea~ers, along with other Puerto Ricans, [pursued] bilingu . education.·•· (And m 1974, Aspira filed a lawsuit against the New Y~rk City Board of Education, charging that teaching non-English-speaking children m a language they did not understand violated their constitutional rights.) Gradually, Aspirantes' critical stance about Puerto Ricans' educational experience led to more aggressive positions on the teaching of Puerto Rican his- tory a,~d ~u~tu~e · · : • ,~n spite. of its identity by the late sixties as a moderate and even assimilatiorust orgaruzation, Aspira's young members considered it their nussion to challenge this prevailing orthodoxy concerning Puerto Rico and its pe_ople. It wa~ not just about demanding individual rights for young Puerto ~cans to _achieve "respect" in American society. More important, and increas- ingly, their struggle was about insisting on group justice-an argument for recognition that Jesus Colon, ahead of his time, was making already in the mid- fifties: "The community is struggling to express itself more forcefully, to unite itself, to gain recognition and the rights it is entitled to, in the city at large."

*** When the Board of Education named its new middle school enrichment program "Higher Horizons" in 1956, the presumption was that the many Puerto Rican students it served could look forward to greater opportunity and material gains in the near future. Although for some young Puerto Ricans-those who benefited from new bilingual teachers, social service support for their families, and the strong start of grassroots youth organizations like HY AA-the late fifties and early sixties did look brighter, most Puerto Rican children lived in house- holds in which poverty and insecurity still outweighed opportunity ....

Puerto Rican New Yorkers did not need the State Department of Labor or the Bureau of the Census to tell them-how things were going on the ground. It was clear that their compatriots were losing the slight income gains they had made in the fifties, and losing the tenuous security and faint hopes for advance- ment they had nourished just a few years before. The early signs of these socio- economic losses were alarming but not surprising, and they helped confirm the sense of mission that was already driving activists. Housing was still a persistent problem at the top of the agenda of many Puerto Rican community leaders in this decade but it was education that became the real focal point. By 1960, with the implic;tions of the Brown decision reverberating throughout northern cities, the politics of school integration mobilized parents and activists alike in New York. That year, residents of African American and Puerto Rican communities in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Manhattan began pushing the Board of Education to site new schools in mixed-race areas or on the borders of more segregated neighborhoods, to encourage racial integration... . . .

A more pressing issue than integration in the early sixties was the_ lack of any Puerto Rican or even Hispanic, presence on the Board of Education. Puerto Rican childr~n comprised almost 16 percent of the city's public school

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296 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN LATINA/O HISTOR y

· · h · rity or near majority in over a population m 1961, and they were t e maJO . h dfi 1 f h 1 · · d h B rue and m a an u o sc oo s m dozen schools m both Manhattan an t e ro , . ,, . B kl L

· h t "th e i·s no group so completely voiceless m the roo yn. amentmg t a er _ _ . city, the Puerto Rican Bar Association petitioned the may~r to appm~t a scho_ol

b d b th t the Pue rto Rican community would see [their]

oar mem er to ensure a . . . . role changed from that of a voiceless subje~t of soci~logical _thesis [Sic] and studies, to that of equal citizens with a share m the policy making of a system so vital to themselves." ...

By the mid-sixties, activists working on education i~sues were ~so asking why so many black and Puerto Rican students were bemg pushed mto v~ca- tional training schools instead of academic high schools.••• [B]y 19~5 African Americans and Puerto Ricans were suggesting that the failures of vocat10nal edu- cation and a declining economy exposed the weaknesses, and perhaps th~ empty rhetoric, of President Lyndon Johnson's new War on Poverty. At an antipoverty conference early in 1965, Michael Harrington, whose 1962 book The Other America had painted a shocking portrait of poverty amid prosperity in the United States, joined Aspira's Antonia Pantoja in arguing that the War on Poverty needed to focus on youth .... Both criticized the tendency to steer poor teenagers toward vocational high schools . . . ; indeed, one 1963 study cited by the New York Amsterdam News reported that over 80 percent of Puerto Rican students who graduated from New York public high schools in 1963 received their diplomas from vocational programs ....

Its critics notwithstanding, by 1965 money flowing through Johnson's War on Poverty initiatives supported a proliferation of new grassroots organizations in New York's poor neighborhoods. In 1964, ... the Puerto Rican Forum applied to the Office of Economic Opportunity to fund a comprehensive, citywide agency that would promote, integrate, and supervise a system of projects designed to assist the Puerto Ricans in New York. The Puerto Rican Community Development Project (PRCDP) won a half-million-dollar grant from the city to distribute among twenty-five hometown clubs and other civic groups participating in a coordinated self-help initiative ....

To the extent that Puerto Rican activists and community leaders saw their work as insurance against the explosion of poor urbanites' resentments-as in the 1964 riots, which happened in mostly African American neighborhoods-they did not succeed. In the summer of 196 7, ... El Barrio exploded. This was its first full-scale riot, and the spark was the fatal shooting by police of a twenty- fiv~-year-old ~uerto Rican man who had allegedly stabbed another man. Jour- nalist Peter Kih~s, who had covered issues in Puerto Rican neighborhoods for th: New York ~tmes throughout th~ sixties, opened his description of the events with the ques~io,n that man~ outside th: community were asking: "Why did New York -~ity s Puerto Ricans erupt mto violence when they had endured ghetto con~tions for so many years and had struggled to rise above them with- out such disorders before?"

The following day, Mayor Lindsay assembled a group f fc rty p Ri . , . o o uerto can leaders. As Kihss s question suggested there was no si·ngul h. h h . . ' ar cause to w ic t e community leaders could attnbute the riot [A] young · k · · · · commuruty wor er, ...

BUILDING COMMUNITIES IN THE WORLD WAR II AND POSTWAR ERA 297

Arnold Segarra addressed the conference, emphasizing the need for "more mean- ingful dialogue" between East Harlem youth and both police and antipoverty workers .... Meeting attendees decided on the spot to assign Segarra, already an employee of the city's Human Resources Administration, to form a youth council. Kihss interviewed another young man, Anibal Solivan, a former vice president of MEND (the Massive Economic Neighborhood Development program) involved in several Community Action Program-funded organizations, who more pointedly than Segarra criticized the participants in the Gracie Mansion conference for being removed from El Barrio's problems on the ground: "That's the established power structure of the community. None of those cats was there during the weekend. They're not in the streets when they're needed. They don't relate ."

Two months after the riots, Puerto Rican writer Piri Thomas, whose noto- rious memoir Down These Mean Streets appeared in May that year, testified before the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders . Thomas posed a series of questions that sounded merely rhetorical only because his real interlocutors, his barrio neighbors, were not present:

Did you ever stand on street comers and look the other way, at the world of muchos ricos [sic] and think, I ain't got a damn? Did you ever count the garbage that flowed down dirty streets, or dig in the back yards who in their glory were a garbage clump's dream? Did you ever stand on rooftops and watch night time cover the bad below? Did you ever put your hand around your throat and feel your pulse beat say, "I do belong and there's not gonna be nobody can tell me, I'm wrong?"

In trying to explain why East Harlem had exploded, Thomas had little interest in the local politics of the riot, in the resentments over who controlled antipoverty funds and at what distance from the streets. His interpretation had more to do with what he might have called the existential pain of the rioters, a larger framework for understanding the "why now" question: for how many years can a group of people be told, in a thousand ways, "you're wrong" before they explode? In this sense, Thomas's reading of the riot and the beating pulse of El Barrio was not just about class and the impossibility of Puerto Ricans' belong- ing to "the world of muchos ricos." It was also about Puerto Rican New Yorkers' ambivalence and anger about the various forms of exclusion they experienced in the United States-the consistent rejection of their claims for recognition as people who "belonged" and whose status as citizens promised some measure of sovereignty, over both their community and their island nation ... .

Echoing Piri Thomas's suggestion in his postriot testimony [Puerto Rican writer and activist] Andreu Iglesias insisted that poverty itself was only part of the struggle for Puerto Ricans. The lack of sovereignty, the lack of freedom to address their island's problems independently of the United States, was the real key to the riddle. More significant than the material failures they had accumu- lated during the sixties was Puerto Ricans' intensifying sen:e ~f d_isem~ower- ment . . . that created motivations for widespread rad1cahzat10n m the New York barrios.... young radicals would thus hammer another nail into

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Juan Q. Citizen's coffin and ... demand recognition of the "free and sover- eign" Puerto Rican in his stead.

*** . . . [T)housands of activists ... were determined to make a connection between the liberal antipoverty agenda in the United States and a new nationalist vision for Puerto Rico by the late 1960s. The sixties' Puerto Rican nationalist move- ment still identified itself with Pedro Albizu Campos's Nationalist Party of the 1930s, but now it was also defined by the increasing militancy of young radicals who were animated by the Cuban revolution, by decolonization struggles across Africa and southeast Asia, and by their opposition to the United States' war in Vietnam. In defining the field of struggle in this way, young Puerto Rican independentistas connected themselves to a complex network of radicals in the United States and to a worldwide network of radicalism beyond . ... [B]y the mid-1960s ... Puerto Rican, Chicano, and African American activists ... sought to hold their liberal democratic society accountable for its violent exclusions and oppressions of so-called minority peoples ....

The politicized "inner colonized" of New York' s barrios, whose families had come from an actual colony, now seized on every opportunity to link their local experience of oppression to the larger problem of colonialism ....

In 19 51, aggrieved students had appealed simply to their status as American citizens, and their parents' credentials as taxpayers, to defend their rights to an education free from violence and discrimination. Two decades later, Puerto Rican youth (some of them graduates of Benjamin Franklin) . . . helped shift the discourse from a language of individual liberal rights to a language of global recognition on the basis of justice.

Defending Chavez Ravine in Postwar Los Angeles RONALD W. LOPEZ II

On 8 May 1959, the City of Los Angeles evicted the Arechiga family from their Chavez Ravine home of 36 years. Once the family had been removed, a bull- dozer reduced the home to a pile of rubble. Eminent domain proceedings had begun 8 years earlier, when the city planned to seize the land for a major public hoqsing project. Long before the final evictions, however, the housing project had been canceled, and the Los Angeles City Council was in the process of trans- ferring the land to the Los Angeles Dodgers, for the future site of Dodger Stadium. The 10-year debate over the use of the land leading up to the dramatic final evictions came to be known to the people of Los Angeles as the Battle of Chavez Ravine.

This article examines the vocal, organized resistance of the people of Chavez Ravine to the destruction of their community, and the displacement of the

Ronald W. Lopez II, "Co1:1m~,nity _Resista~ce and Conditional Patriotism in Cold War Los Angeles: The Battle for Chavez RaVlil~, Latino Studies 7:4 (December 2009): pp. 457-479. Reproduced with pemussion of Palgrave Macmillan.

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residents for the construction of a public housing project that was never built. Largely women, they _sp?ke out during public hearings, wrote letters, and made statements to the media m a gendered discourse of resistance to displacement. In a language of patriotic post-war motherhood, the women made direct references to husbands and sons in military service to underpin the moral legitimacy of their statements. And yet, they made it clear that their patriotism was conditional. They had worked hard, purchased property and sent their men to war despite the discrimination that they faced at home. If the Government could take their homes, the symbol of American belonging, it threatened the foundation upon which their patriotism was based, and suggested that the United States had failed to live up to its promise. The people of Chavez Ravine, moreover, challenged projects that were supported by the entire left, liberal, and labor community, projects that promised to help poor communities, including Mexican Americans, nationwide. In doing so, they opposed positions taken by Mexican American leaders, and allied themselves, if only briefly, with local conservatives . .. .

*** In late 1949, the residents of Palo Verde, Bishop Canyon, and La Loma - collectively known as Chavez Ravine - learned of a planned public housing project that required the entire community to be displaced and relocated. Located in the hills immediately northeast of downtown Los Angeles, Chavez Ravine was home to over 1100 families, many who had lived there for sev- eral generations. Developed as a Mexican suburb early in the century, Chavez Ravine had become a healthy, multigenerational Mexican barrio by the end of World War II. Since at least that time, the residents had been working to improve their community. They had petitioned the city council to put in streetlights, pave streets and provide bus service to the area. Through their own efforts, they had been successful in decreasing juvenile delinquency and crime, and in increasing attendance at the local schools. After all these efforts, they were shocked to learn that their community had been declared "a blighted area," and that they would have to move so that their homes and community could be destroyed, and public housing put up in its place.

The residents had good reason to defend their community. While Chavez Ravine had its share of social problems, it had the highest proportion of property owners and the highest social indicators of any Mexican American community in the Los Angeles area. Furthermore, a shortage of affordable housing, residential segregation, and the exclusion of Mexican Americans from new housing devel- opments made the prospect of being displaced and finding new homes especially onerous. A public housing project in Chavez Ravine would thus tum a sizeable group of homeowners into renters. Those who moved out did not receive ade- quate compensation for their homes and l~nd and found that segregation and h. , igh Prices excluded them from many areas. . By opposing the public housing project, the people of Chavez Ravine were

r_eJecting a program supported by the entire Mexican American and liberal estab- lishment, including Councilman Edward Roybal, the first Mexican American elected to the City Council since the nineteenth century. Although he was one

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of the strongest and longstanding supporters of public housing, including the units planned for Chavez Ravine, Roybal steadfastly defen~ed the residents' rights to fair treatment and a fair price for their homes. The City Center District Improvement Association (CCDIA), a Chavez Ravine community organization, publicly rejected assistance from the leftist Asociaci6n Nacional Mexico- Americana, or ANMA, refusing aid from any organization that did not adhere to "American Principles." Instead, the community allied itself with the conserva- tive real estate lobby, which argued that public housing was "socialist," and that adequate low cost housing could be attained by the enforcement of existing laws and building codes. That the residents allied themselves with the real estate interests is not surprising, since their traditional allies were unanimous in support- ing public housing. And yet, they were reluctant to denounce public housing altogether, refusing to adopt the real estate lobby's mantra that public housing was "socialist."

Most importantly, the majority of those who spoke out and wrote letters were women - Mexican, Mexican American, white and Asian American - who lived in Chavez Ravine . They spoke and wrote in the language of conser- vative post-war patriotism, but it was a tentative, conditional patriotism. Their sons, brothers and husbands fought in World War II, and in Korea. Speaking in the gendered discourse of mothers and wives of veterans, they emphasized their contributions to the "war effort" of World War II as citizens who had earned the right to enjoy their homes in peace. Settlers of Chavez Ravine, they were pioneers who built their homes with their own hands, and raised their children to be patriotic citizens, just like earlier generations of Americans. They had worked to improve their community, and they rejected a project that pro- posed to benefit others at their expense. In doing so, Chavez Ravine residents challenged, head on, the City Council and the dozens of high profile civic lea- ders and "experts" that supported the public housing projects, denouncing what they saw as an unjustified plan. They walked a fine line, both defining them- selves as exemplars of American patriotism and suggesting that if the City forcibly displaced them, they might be radicalized in the process.

Los Angeles, with a city administration dominated by liberal social planners, was one of the first cities to take advantage of the passage of the 1949 Housing Act, applyi ng for $110,000,000 in Federal Funds to construct 10,000 units of low-rent public housing at 11 sites around the city .... In August 1949, the City Council unanimously approved the plan. . Two competing visions of Los Angeles' urban redevelopment had emerged m the po~t-war ~~a: the co_nservative vision, favoring the free play of the market, ~nd the liberal vision that mclu~ed desegregation and an aggressive public hous- m~ yrogram. S~pporters o~the liberal program included organizations such as the Citizens Housmg Council, organized labor, veterans religious organizations the Natio~al Asso~ation for_ th~ Advancement of Color~d People (NAACP), th~ Commumty S~rvice Orgamzation (CSO), and Mexican American civic leaders such_ as Co~ncilman Edward Roybal and, publisher Ignacio Lopez. Advocates for public housmg . . . argued that the infusion of federal m ld ·d · b . · oney wou provi e JO s for workers, contracts for local busmesses, housing for the needy, and would

BUILDING COMMUNITIES IN THE WORLD WAR II AND POSTWAR ERA 301

stimulate the local economy. They argued that slums and "blighted" conditions caused overcrowding and fostered delinquency and rat infestations that spread dis- ease and endangered public health. A coordinated program of urban redevelop- rnent, coupled with a racially integrated public housing program would address these ills.

. . . [I]ts most outspoken advocate was CHA Information Director Frank Wilkinson, who epitomized the social engineers who believed that razing the slums and building low-cost public housing would improve the living standards of the poor and reduce poverty, crime, delinquency, disease, and residential seg- regation citywide.

Conservative interests, such as the real estate lobby that included the Los Angeles Times, and smaller groups like the Small Property Owners Association (SPOA) wanted slum clearance and urban redevelopment too, but argued that the need for housing was being met by private developers, and that public housing was socialism, or ·at least "creeping socialism." They pressured the City Council on public housing, and almost immediately after approving the program, council members shifted, one by one, from unanimous support for public housing, to a slight majority against it. Two weeks after the passage of Proposition 10, which made future housing programs subject to the approval of voters, the City Council approved the selection of 11 sites for public housing projects, this time by a major- ity. Chavez Ravine was one of the approved sites.

The public housing project planned for Chavez Ravine would have included almost one-third of the units planned for the city. To be called "Elysian Park Heights," the project proposed . . . [t]he mostly single family dwellings would be replaced with 163 two-story buildings and twenty four 13-story apart- ment towers .... For their sacrifice, the displaced residents were promised, m writing, first choice of the new housing, without respect to race.

*** Despite these promises, the people of Chavez Ravine were shocked and angered; they had worked hard, built a thriving community, and many of them owned their own homes. Thus, building public housing there would destroy what was arguably the most successful barrio in the city, and would tum a sizable group ofhomeowners into renters. Along with the homeowners of a number of other areas, they refused to cooperate with the city's plans, and spoke out vigorously against the choice of their district at public hearings held before the Planning Commission and the City Council. Their resistance, although unsuccessful, was passionate and organized, and the rhetoric they employed and the alliances they forged ran counter to conventional expectations of Mexican American political behavior for that era.

Frank Wilkinson, accompanied by Ignacio "Nacho" Lopez, walked door- to-door convincing Chavez Ravine residents to move . The CHA guaranteed ~hem first priority on new housing, rent scaled to income, and no racial discrim- ~nation. On the other hand, some residents reported being threatened with forc- ible eviction, and were intimidated into selling their homes for a low price. Through guarantees of future rental housing, and through intimidation, a large number of residents reluctantly agreed to sell and left their homes .. ..

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The people of Chavez Ravine had been well organized as a community since at least the end of the war, long before the proposed project had been announced. In patticular, the CCDIA represented a number of Chavez Ravine residents . . ..

. . . In the case of CCDIA, their militancy reflects the fact that they viewed themselves not as foreigners but as citizens entitled to all the rights of citizens including the right to own homes and preserve their community. . . . '

At the same time, their protest was couched in the conservative language of post-war patriotism . . .. They emphasized that their homes were not blighted. Many pointed out that their sons, brothers, and husbands had fought in World War II . Was this what they had fought and died for? ...

*** The women of Chavez Ravine spoke out forcefully against the destruction of their community for the construction of Elysian Park Heights during two sets of public hearings held in .. . 1951.... [W]ith the CCDIA clearly occupying leadership, ... men occupied the nominal leadership of the organization in the role of President and lead counsel, [while] women clearly occupied the vanguard of the discursive attack on the housing project .. .. [T]he arguments presented by the men directly responded to statements made by proponents of the projects, while the women articulated their objections in terms of their role as patriotic mothers and wives of veterans, and spoke from a position of moral authority that the men on both sides of the issue could not .. ..

. . . Traditionally, Mexican American women were expected not to engage in political or other public activities without the knowledge, assent, and even guidance of family members, ideally fathers or husbands. When women did become active, however, their "activism originated in family concerns and community networks, then generated broader political concerns and networks." Thus, activities that are extensions of women's domestic roles, such as those involving the home, the Church, or the schools, were increasingly seen as accept- able or even appropriate areas for women's activism .. .. The outspoken testimony by Chavez Ravine women at public hearings in defense of their community was thus consistent with their "family and community relationships," and obligations.

The first set of . . . hearings' official purpose was to detennine if the project sites should be approved, but in truth, the contract between the City of Los Angeles and the Federal Housing Authority had been made .... The first day of hearings ... was an emotional affair attended by at least 500 persons. Opponents packed the hearing chambers and harangued the council, making it clear that they had no faith in the intentions of the CHA, shouting "Don't believe them. They're trying to take your land. They've never cared about you before. Why should they now?" . . . On the one hand was an impressive pantheon of civic leaders speaking on behalf of the proposed project: the CHA, representatives of the Catholic Church, and labor unions. On the other hand, speaking against the project were representatives from Chavez Ravine and their lawyer, Mr G.G. Bauman ....

BUILDING COMMUNITIES IN THE WORLD WAR II AND POSTWAR ERA 303

. . . Stanley Furman, Development Counsel for the CHA, . . . asserted that temporarily hou~ed veterans would have first preference at the new housing, making no mention o~ the people of Chavez Ravine ... .

. .. [T]he commumty, represented by the CCDIA, declared their desire to keep their homes and preserve their community .... The CCDIA, said Baum[a]n, had for several years been trying to improve conditions in the area, but to no avail ....

. . . That public housing would be a tax burden on the community became the most salient and compelling argument to the public, as the debate evolved from one specific site location to a national debate in which public housing was equated with socialism. Another issue, one that was dropped as time went on, was the immigrant and non-citizen status of many of the residents of Chavez Ravine. Baum[a]n refuted earlier assertions that all current residents would be "given priority" for moving into Elysian Park Heights, noting that some of the people of Chavez Ravine were "of Mexican-Spanish descent, some Italians," and that "Federal Law does not permit them [to live in public housing] unless they are citizens." Homeowners were also ineligible for public housing.

Responding to pictures of run down conditions, Manuel Cerda displayed photos of well-maintained properties, stating, "If you call this a slum, I don't know what would be a good house ." Cerda emphasized ... , "We have plenty of facilities in there. We have gas, water, lights." He also pointed to the city's failure to maintain the area, noting that, "The streets are very poor - but that is due to the City Engineer and Council. They have not done anything for us."

Mabel Hom, local Girl Scout troupe leader and an Asian American, ... [declared], "I am an American Citizen," [and] spoke at length .... She denounced veteran support of public housing ... [:]

I should think you know how it feels to go over to protect a piece of what you call your home . ... We did not know the Veterans were against our purpose of keeping our homes and ... I think it is very undemocratic of people to place the preference of ... Veterans over our 1100 families in Chavez Ravine . We have just as much right to a home as they have.

Furthermore, Ms Hom noted, the property owners of Chavez Ravine were "forced" to live there because "discrimination forced us to buy into this area" When it was consider~d unsuitable for development. "But now these Capitalists (sic) find we have a lovely place, located close to every facility there is, and you Want it." .. . [R]ather than calling public housing "creeping socialism,"_ Ms Horn suggested that the evicted residents might themselves become un-Amencan · · · [:]

If this plan goes through, I assure you there will be 1100 families that Will not be as American, with attitudes that they should possess. I am sure if you label us 'Reds' from now on it will be the fault of the Bousing Authority group which has no right to push _people around, as they have been pushing 1100 families in Chavez Ravine .

. The pro-American tone of her statement, her defense of private property tights and her attack on both big government and big capital make her statement

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especially interesting .... Ms Hom's perspective illustrates the intensity of the anti- public housing feeling that was felt by many, especially those who were threat- ened with losing their homes, that public housing was a conspiracy of powerful interests arrayed against them ....

The final statement recorded in opposition was given by Agnes Cerda, the Secretary of the CCDIA, and the wife of Manuel Cerda. Speaking as a "taxpayer and American Citizen," and speaking on behalf of "the Mexican people," ... [s]he likened the early generations of Mexican American homeowners of Chavez Ravine to other generations of American pioneers. . . . She also denounced the CHA as un-American for taking their homes ... [:]

I represent all of . . . the Mexican people . . . they came out here to the land of liberty and justice for all. They started one by one to build to the best of their ability .... Now, when they have them built, with the sweat of their brow . . .. The Housing Authority comes in now and tries to take their homes away from them. It is not justice and not American policy.

Mrs Cerda, emphasizing the Mexican people of the community, equated their experience with the American ideals of liberty and justice. Although she denounced the proposed public housing project in Chavez Ravine, Mrs Cerda, like Ms Hom, chose not to suggest that public housing was "socialistic," empha- sizing "I don't say housing projects are not right. They might be all right for the people that want to live in them, but we, as property owners, we want to keep our homes." ... [L]ike Ms Hom, Mrs Cerda also warned the Commission about the disenchantment and anxiety that dispossession and dislocation would cause .... Identifying herself as the mother of a combat veteran and an American citizen, she appealed to public sympathy for veterans and their families ... [:]

Take our homes away from us and you are taking away our incentive to be good American Citizens, [that] ... we are trying to raise our children to be. I know, I had a boy in the Second World War. Thank God he was lucky to come back. I have another one . . . is he going to fight over there and have to come and fight over here for a home he hasn't got? Would you put your mother out of your home to give it to the Housing Authority? You would not.

. . . The women positioned themselves at the center of America's patriotic and pioneering spirit, building their own homes by "the sweat of their brow," and articulating their patriotism by raising their children to be good American citizens, even soldiers in wartime. But it was these idealized American values and trust in government that were now endangered by the very actions of the City Council and the CHA, representatives of both big business and big govern- ment. The expression of conditional patriotism was . . . clearly well-thought out, but it may also have been true.

Despite the thoughtful and strategic arguments of the residents, the policy- oriented arguments in favor of public housing prevailed. On 17 May, the City Planning Commission approved eight sites for public housing, including Elysian

..... -

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Park Heights. · ·· The residents did not give up, but appealed the Planning Com- mission's approv~ · · · argu[ing] that the projects were not properly located and that the CHA did not have legal standing to seize their properties. The City Council agreed to hear the appeals . .. .

On 21 June, the City Council began what turned out to be a week of rau- cous public hearings . Hundreds of people packed the Council chambers ... .

Manuel _Cerda, leader of the CCDIA, was the first speaker on behalf of Chavez Ravm~ property owners. Arguing that the will of the community was against the pro3ect, he asserted that, "The people of my district don't want to be renters. They want to be honest taxpayers. We don't want anybody else to have to pay our taxes ." Finally, he said, "We don't want to be socialized." ... Angie Villa stated that she had lived in Chavez Ravine for 39 years, that she and her father wanted to keep their home, and that public housing had poor living conditions .. ..

Speaking in defense of the projects, CHA chief Holtzendorff argued .. . that the real estate lobby was behind opposition to the projects. Others argued that the housing projects would provide better living and a healthy environment for youth, that private development had failed to provide adequate and affordable housing, that it was a community responsibility to provide low-rent housing, that the human rights of the many must prevail over the property rights of the few, and that the benefit to the community as a whole offset the damage to a few individuals. Trinidad Rodrigues of the Railroad Workers union argued that the project would help the Mexican community, since the location was close to downtown where many Mexicans worked .

. . . Only a few homes were to be lost for the Rose Hills development, while the Chavez Ravine homeowners were to be forced out completely. The Rose Hills site representatives argued, in classic "not-in-my-backyard" fashion, that public housing would lower their property values, and that there were better ways to address the housing problem, in the words of one speaker, than "this proposed socialized concentration camp" [See Document 5] ....

There were explicit examples of racial bias as well. Some letters to the City Council denounced the racial integration the public housing program proposed. For example, H . G. Tuthill, a Rose Hills property owner . . . , said that he was one of those parents who,

... want their children to be free from the influence of a mass of negro, Mexican and a lot of others who have little regard for the better aspirations of American Citizenship ... we . . . know i~ is h~rd enough to keep children out of trouble without moving them nght mto_ a n~st of melting pot hudleums (sic) who care very little about what th~ir c~ildren do or say ... . How would you like to have your own little girls (if you had any) be left to play with a bunch of rough negro, and others no better, would you like it?

Tuthill's racial invective was wrapped in the language of citiz_enship, mffiuch lik h f M H M Villa and Mrs Cerda, but to different e ect. e t e statements o s om, rs . . "\YTL" h d ·t· to public housing developments m their vv 1we t ey share an oppos1 10n

306 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN LATINA/O HISTORY

communities, Rose Hills residents vociferously embraced the argument that pub- lic housing was creeping socialism, and that integration threatened the racial integrity of their white daughters. The people of Chavez Ravine, on the other hand, were defending their already integrated community from complete destruction on the basis of their exemplary upholding of American ideals, such as their military service in World War II ....

That same day, the Council approved resolutions denying the appeals of Manuel Cerda and the other residents of Chavez Ravine, and granted the final approval to the CHA to proceed with public housing in Chavez Ravine and the other sites. The Los Angeles Times ... echoed Bauman's demand that the Council place the issue on the ballot . . .. [A] referendum on public housing was placed on the June 1952 ballot.

*** After the approval of the Elysian Park Heights housing project, and with eminent domain looming, many Chavez Ravine residents gave up and sold their land to the CHA. Some held out, hoping for a reprieve, some stubbornly refused to leave, and some wrote, letters to the City Council, protesting their impending evictions. These women continued to express themselves in a discourse of condi- tionally patriotic mothers, such as Faustina Tele Ibarra, who wrote,

I do not see the necessity of my paying rent or to be burdened with a debt in buying a home when I already own one, and ask, why it is that we mothers of veterans do not have a right to own property and live in peace without being molested?

At 66 years old and in poor health, Maria Longoria Esparza, caring for her 11 orphaned grandchildren, was no longer able to work. She wrote that she would not be able to buy a new home for the price offered for her house, which was paid in full ....

Mrs Esparza's concerns were echoed by a neighbor, ... who reiterated that many people would not be able to obtain new housing for what was offered ....

By August of 1951, two-thirds of the Chavez Ravine residents had packed up, sold their homes and land, and moved on. Those that remained refused to sell. Women such as Agnes Cerda, Angie Villa and Arana Arechiga, who were leaders in the struggle to preserve Chavez Ravine from redevelopment, expressed resentment at their treatment by the City, and their determination to continue the fight to retain their homes.

The concerns of the women mirrored those expressed months before at the public hearings .... Agnes Cerda, one of the guiding forces of the holdouts, .. • (argued] that "We built our homes here, not the government .... Taking away our homes takes our incentive to be good American citizens." Avrana Arechiga concurred, adding that "I know nothing of slums. I only know this has been my home and it was my father's home and I do not want to sell and move. I am too old to find a new home. Here is where I live. Here, in Chavez Ravine."

Their desire to stay was reinforced by the negative experiences of those who had moved out before, only to suffer discrimination and hostility in their new

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neighborhoods. Mrs de Le6n reported that "There are families that have moved into the City and they have come back to us and they have had tears in their eyes. And the~ ~ay they are not accepted outside." . . . By this time, less than a third of the ongmal property owners remained.

Earlier in the year, the property owners had met with Los Angeles City Councilman Edward Roybal. A progressive Mexican American leader and a consistent supporter of public housing, he understood, from experience, the challenges faced by the residents of Chavez Ravine .... [H]e advised the property owners that they would only be fairly paid for their property if they remained united, collectively refused to sell their properties to the CHA, and demanded a higher price from the CHA . ...

The residents of Chavez Ravine were supposedly offered "market prices" for their land .... Although the CHA was to provide relocation assistance in finding new living quarters, . . . Roybal . . . said that the people were not paid fairly .... "Under the right of eminent domain they went in there and took their property." The CHA "told them your house is worth 'so much,' and that's all there was to it."

Many resisters, such as the Arechigas, . . . stayed on, :fighting the evictions in the courts. During the Condemnation proceedings the Arechigas were offered $10,500 for three lots and two houses. Unsatisfied, the Arechiga family hired a private appraiser, who appraised their properties at $17,000 . . .. [I]n court, the Arechigas lost and the courts set the price at $10,050. When the Arechigas refused to accept the money, the payment was placed in an account in their name and the sale declared consummated by the judge. Eviction proceedings began . .. . In all, the Arechiga family resisted the City Council, police officers and the courts for 10 years.

*** On 3 June 1952, Los Angeles voters rejected the public housing program in a citywide referendum, but the vote was merely symbolic; the courts had ruled that the measure would have no effect, and that public housing in Los Angeles would continue . The property owners of Chavez Ravine had been unable to prevent the mass condemnation of their properties, and they had been unable to obtain satisfactory prices for their homes. Those who refused to accept the Prices offered, like the Arechigas, found that the CHA brought the matter to superior court, where their lands were condemned, prices set low and "sales" forced on unwilling landowners. . . . .

Within a week of taking office [in 1953], the new Mayor [Noms Poulson] :ggested a compromise to end the controversy. CHA Director. Holtzendo_rff

ould agree to renegotiate the contract between the Federal 1:ousmg Autho1:1ty and the City of Los Angeles that would cancel the controv~rs~al Chav~z Ra~ne ~nd Rose Hills projects, and Poulson would leave the rema1mng public housmg intact, and ask his allies in Congress and Los Angeles to end their attacks .... [T]he Chavez Ravine and Rose Hills projects [were] canceled . . . •

· · · [T]he City Attorney's office continued to condemn Chavez Ravine Properties until the very minute they received word that public housing there

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was officially canceled. The Rose Hills properties wer~ left untou_ched. The peo- ple of Chavez Ravine had their land seized under emment domam for a purpose that no longer existed. Dispossessed of their land and forced to move, they were largely forgotten .... Los Angeles was able to buy the _ land in ':havez Ravine for a minimal sum, and a few years later succeeded m attractI~g the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city by offering them 315 acres of Chavez Ravine.

There were still some of the old residents living there, however, who had to be forcibly evicted, including the Arechigas, who were evicted in May 1959. The home was bulldozed moments after the eviction, and the family conducted a "sit-down strike," camping out for a week on the site. Aurora Vargas, a daughter of the Arechigas and a war widow, hung her husband's dress uniform up in front of the wreckage of the house with a handwritten sign that declared; "My husband died in World War II to Protect Our Home." The dramatic evic- tion and its aftermath quickly overshadowed the earlier struggle of the people to preserve their homes 8 years earlier. Although there were other evictions, it was the Arechiga eviction, filmed by television reporters and covered in detail by the newspapers, that seared the fate of Chavez Ravine into the minds of Los Angeles residents.

*** The residents of Chavez Ravine fought to preserve their community against destruction by the intrusion of a public housing project during the years 1950- 1952 .... The people who spoke on behalf of Chavez Ravine used a variety of ar~~ents, bu~ were consist~nt in their expressed belief in American political pnnciples and ideals, a?d thei':" commitment to the democratic process. Largely women, they spoke m a hig~y ?~ndered language, making unambiguous references to hus?ands an? sons m military service to underpin their moral legiti- macy .... The residents reJected a sacred cow of liberal ideology f th _ th t

bli h . o e era a pu c ousmg was a greater good destined to help M · Am · d exican encans, an other poor communities. Their protest challenged cont ·

. . . . emporary expectations of Chicano political behavior of the era· they were t · 1 h 1

. . . . · no srmp y poor, ap ess slum-dwelling Mexicans, but politically astute Mexi· Am · d · d

d fc . . can encans etermme to e end their commuruty. In the end alth h h · · · d 1 , oug t e1r oppos1t1on to the re eve opment of Chavez Ravine was unsucce ful h

Ch R · b ss , • • . t e struggle to preserve avez avme ecame part of the popul ar memory of L An 1 ' M · American community Th •d f os ge es exican . e res1 ents O Chavez R • k . f

their homes and their polit· all 1 .. avine spo e out m defense o . . ' ic y comp ex position im d L An 1 . politics. They reiected the lib al bli pacte os ge es city :.1 er esta shment' · al . .

despite their desire to be fully includ d . h s s?c1 engmeenng because, be they, and not the liberal social pla:ne: t Amencan body po~tic, it would

' w O would pay the pnce.

FURTHER READING

L_ Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age ef White F .

Angeles (2004). light: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los

BUILDING COMMUNITIES IN THE WORLD WAR II AND POSTWAR ERA 309

Lilia Fernandez, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (2012).

Mario Garcia, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930-1960 (1989). Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, LAbor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater

Los Angeles, 1900-1970 (2001). Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Angelo Falcon, and Felix V. Matos Rodriguez, eds., Boricuas in

Gotham: Puerto Ricans in the Making of Modem New York City (2004). Olga Jimenez de Wagenheim, "From Aguada to Dover: Puerto Ricans Rebuild Their

World in Morris County, New Jersey, 1948 to 2000," in Carmen Teresa Whalen and Victor Vazquez-Hernandez, eds., The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives (2005).

Anthony Macias, Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles (2008).

Nancy Raquel Mirabal, "Melba Alvarado, El Club Cubano Inter-Americano, and the Creation of Afro-Cubanidades in New York City," in Miriam Jimenez Roman and Juan Flores, eds., The Afro-LAtin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (2010).

Felix M. Padilla, Puerto Rican Chicago (1987). Antonia Pantoja, Memoir of a Visionary: Antonia Pantoja (2002). Eugenio "Gene" Rivera, "La Colonia de Lorain, Ohio," in Carmen Teresa Whalen and

Victor Vazquez-Hernandez, eds., The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives (2005).

Merida M. Rua, LAtino Urban Ethnography and the Work of Elena Padilla (2010). Vicki L. Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the

California Food Processing Industry (1987). Andres Torres, Signing in Puerto Rican: A Hearing Son and His Deaf Family (2009). Dan Wakefield, Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem (1959).

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