Chavez belonged to a vibrant group of young Mexican Americans seeking change in the United States, including Dolores Huerta, a labor organizer and civil rights activist from an old New Mexican family, and Luis Valdez, an actor and activist who created the theater troupe El Teatro Campesino. Chavez and his colleagues organized the United Farm Workers (UFW), the first independent farmworkers’ organization since the 1930s, and in 1966 they launched their first strike (“Huelga!”) against grape growers in California’s Central Valley. To pressure growers, the UFW launched a nationwide table grape boycott. California governor Ronald Reagan was reduced to pleading with Americans to eat more grapes, while Richard Nixon ordered the Defense Department to buy tons more than they needed, sending planeloads off to the troops in Vietnam. But Chavez’s charismatic and inspirational leadership proved stronger. In 1970 the growers relented and began signing union contracts. With the sympathetic support of Governor Jerry Brown, Reagan’s successor, the UFW was able to raise the wages and living standards of its members. The historic achievement capped decades of struggle. But farmworkers lost ground in the conservative 1980s, and by the time Chavez died in 1993, the UFW was in disarray.
Chavez and the grape boycott raised national awareness of Mexican Americans in the Southwest, and activists and radicals generated more notice and notoriety. In New Mexico a wildcard leader named Reies Tijerina organized an alianza of twenty thousand Hispanics demanding an investigation of the wholesale theft of land that had taken place after the Mexican War. Frustrated at the inaction of authorities, he and his followers occupied federal lands at gunpoint in 1966, declaring an independent Hispanic nation. A confrontation with authorities ended in gunfire that wounded two officers, and Tijerina went to prison for two years. In south Texas farmworker organizing spilled into electoral politics and a new political group, El Partido Raza Unida, scored a series of impressive victories in local elections. Among young people throughout the urban Southwest there was a surge of enthusiasm for mexicanismo. Amid cries of “Viva la Raza!” activists celebrated the memory of pachucos and zoot-suiters. Activists began referring to themselves as “Chicanos,” embracing with pride a slang term that Mexican Americans had used for decades to denigrate Mexican newcomers. Being from Mexico, whether recently arrived or descended from the Aztecs, meant that you were more than American or Mexican—“Somos Uno Porque America Es Una” (We are one because America is one), “Somos un Pueblo sin Fronteras” (We are one people without borders).34
United Farm Workers Union leaflet, c. 1970. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
. . .
In 1965 Congress reformed the immigration laws, abolishing the system of quotas based on national origins enacted in 1924. Over the next three decades a massive new wave of immigration brought more than seven million Latino and five million Asian newcomers to the country. Most settled near the immigration gateways—Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Houston in the West, along with New York City and Chicago. LAX—L.A.’s international airport—became the new Ellis Island. From 1970 to 2010 the Hispanic or Latino population of the nation rose from nine million to more than fifty million and the Asian American population from less than a million to more than fourteen million, the majority of them in the West. Demographers project that western metro areas of the twenty-first century will attract another thirty million Latinos and seven million Asians.
The number of migrants entering the United States through unofficial gateways also increased enormously. During the last quarter of the twentieth century about half of the illegal migrants in the postwar period crossed into the country from Mexico. In the words of one commentator, they had “an economic gun to their backs”—the turmoil of the Mexican economy. For many other Latinos, the gun was all too real. Armed conflict in Central America created thousands of refugee Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Nicaraguans. Tragedies proliferated at the border, where the desperate met a host of advantage-takers: corrupt Mexican national police, the federales, shaking down refugees; greedy middlemen, known as coyotes, extorting high fees for guiding illegals across; violent banditos lying in wait to rob vulnerable individuals of their possessions; and unknown hundreds, perhaps thousands, dying by drowning or exposure. On one California freeway near the Mexican border, traffic signs featured the silhouette of a fleeing family as a warning to drivers to watch out for illegals darting across traffic lanes. Federal authorities in the late 1990s estimated that more than 700,000 undocumented individuals crossed from Mexico to the United States each year. Ten years later, as the Mexican economy stabilized, that number had dropped to 150,000 per year.
But Latinos kept coming to work in textile factories and fruit orchards, suburban gardens and households. The rock-bottom wages employers paid for such work depressed the incomes of poor American citizens and made Latino migrants a convenient target for nativist anxiety and anger. In 1994 California voters approved Proposition 187, an initiative that would have denied undocumented aliens or their children access to public services like education and health care, but a federal judge threw out the law as unconstitutional. Four years later California voters approved another ballot initiative that curtailed bilingual education programs. Other Americans argued for draconian measures at the border—electrified fences, minefields, or the creation of a no-man’s-land between the United States and Mexico. Border militarization became a way to imagine a quick and clear solution to a problematic tangle of economic, racial, and social questions.
Highway sign near the California-Mexico border, c. 1991. Author’s collection.
Ground zero for the new immigration was southern California, which became, in the words of historians Leonard and Dale Pitt, “the most ethnically diverse metropolitan area in the world.” At the turn of the century the city of Los Angeles was home to immigrants from 140 countries, including the largest communities of Mexicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Koreans, and Filipinos outside their homelands, as well as the country’s largest concentrations of Japanese, Cambodians, and Iranians. In broad categories, the 2010 census found that the county was 48 percent Latino, 14 percent Asian American, 9 percent African American, and only 28 percent Anglo (defined as “non-Hispanic white”).35 “Our modern metropolis is returning to the enduring Puebla de Los Angeles of years past,” declared California state senator Al Torres, who in 1998 became chairman of the state Democratic Party. Essayist Richard Rodriguez, reminding readers that Mexicans were a mestizo people, offered the observation that “Los Angeles has become the largest Indian city in the United States.”36
In a great arc from the Gulf coast to the Pacific, the Southwest was in the process of turning “majority minority”: New Mexico in 1996, California in 2000, Texas in 2005, and Arizona in 2010. According to Thomas Chan, an international lawyer from Hong Kong living in Los Angeles, the region was “moving rapidly from being a ‘melting pot’ of Europeans to a ‘world city’ with links to virtually every inhabitable part of the globe.” The rise of foodie culture and fusion cuisine reflected this trend. Tortillas and ceviché joined egg rolls and fish paste on western plates and cooktops. The urban West would be unescapably and impressively “multi” in the twenty-first century, achieving an epic mishmash of people and cultures. But adjustment to the new reality was slow. The West had always been multicultural, with uneven levels of contentment. Anglos made up a third of the Los Angeles County population but were 70 percent of the registered voters and 80 percent of the jury pool. They also controlled 90 percent of the fixed wealth. Although the economic gap between whites and minorities was narrowing nationally, in the Southwest it was growing.37
EMERGING MINORITY MAJORITIES
“Can we all get along?” Rodney King speaks to Los Angeles during the riots in 1992. Author’s collection.
That contradiction broke open in the Los Angeles riots of 1992, demonstrating the intensity of popular anger that grew in the shadows of “world city” inequality. For decades the African American and Mexican American communities had complai
ned of systematic brutality by the Los Angeles Police Department. When news outlets played an amateur videotape of four white officers brutally beating a black motorist named Rodney King, their guilt seemed obvious. The officers were indicted, but when a white suburban jury acquitted them of all but one charge, the city exploded. For three days rioters swept through black and Latino neighborhoods, looting and burning. At a news conference held at the height of the violence, Rodney King pleaded for calm. “People, I just want to say, can we all get along?” he said. “I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out.” Before the National Guard restored order, at least fifty-one people died and the equivalent of several square miles was torched. More than twelve thousand people were arrested. The 1992 riots echoed the Watts uprising of 1965, but there were also differences. Not only was the later event deadlier and more destructive, but it was more multicultural. Forty-one percent of those arrested were African American, but 45 percent were Hispanic, and 12 percent were Anglo. And much of the violence was directed at the shops of Korean Americans, many of whom owned businesses in minority communities. Like its food and its population statistics, L.A.’s urban cataclysms had diversified.
The riots marked a turning point in the history of migration to California. Over the half-century from 1940 to 1990, the state’s population expanded by 332 percent. But beginning in the 1990s California began losing more domestic migrants than it gained. Although the loss was counterbalanced by the flood of foreign migrants as well as natural increase—the state’s population grew by 29 percent from 1990 to 2015—during that twenty-five-year period an estimated 3.4 million Californians left the state. Three-quarters were poor or low-wage individuals, leaving because they couldn’t find work or pay the high cost of housing. There was a huge migration from Los Angeles east to the suburbs of Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. “People go on the freeway and drive until they can find a house they can afford,” said Randall Lewis, head of a development company in San Bernardino. But thousands left the state for other locations in the West, for Phoenix, Las Vegas, or the metro complexes of Texas, Colorado, or Washington. California became the largest “sender” state in the nation, with a flow of outmigration greater than the eastern states of New York, Illinois, or Michigan. Often these transplants sparked resentment in their destination communities. A southern Californian who relocated to Idaho warned of the dangers. “I’ve seen it all happen on the coast,” he declared, and “now it’s happening here—trout streams dug up for freeways, the smog, the elk herd declining. It’s the same old story of unplanned growth.” Sentiments were capsulated in a Boise bumper sticker: “Don’t Californicate Idaho!”38
FURTHER READING
Carl Abbott, The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West (1993)
Peter A. Coates, The Trans-Alaska Pipeline Controversy: Technology, Conservation, and the Frontier (1991)
Lawrence Culver, The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America (2010)
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990)
Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (2010)
David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (1995)
Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (1995)
Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985)
Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (1996)
Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987)
Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (2012)
Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (1985)
12
“It Ain’t Where You’re From, It’s Where You’re At”
The vigilantes paid a visit to the Geffen spread to impart a lesson about the open range. The rambling manse blocked access to a key western resource: the southern California beach. In 1983 music and movie mogul David Geffen agreed to allow a “vertical easement” along his property to open a public access point to Malibu’s coastline, trading the hypothetical walkway for state permits to install a swimming pool and other amenities on his property. Then he reconsidered, sued the California Coastal Commission to keep beachgoers from tramping past his place, and watched as the story went viral. Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist behind “Doones bury,” poked fun at “Lord Geffen” in a series of comic strips. Here was one of Holly wood’s most famous liberals behaving like a spoiled monarch. Who did he think he was, stifling the American desire to bask in the sun? They might not have perfect cheekbones like movie star Charlize Theron or gaudy stock portfolios like Eli Broad, founder of two Fortune 500 companies and another Malibu homeowner, but ordinary people had just as much right to sink their toes in the wet sand as the rich and famous.1
Armed with maps and tape measures, the Los Angeles Urban Rangers rode out to Malibu to enforce their rights. A performance art collective founded in 2004, the rangers sponsored “safaris” to downtown’s Bonaventure Hotel and the concrete-lined L.A. River, outings to Hollywood Boulevard, and reconnaissance missions to Malibu’s public beaches. The rangers dressed in Stetsons and starched khaki shirts and pants and wore badges with a palm tree framed by an emblem of a looping freeway interchange. The costumes announced intent: they were public servants on hand to guide Angelenos through bewildering urban habitats. The rangers were dramatists—no state bureaucracy sanctioned their professional put-on—but their staged officialness underscored the revelatory potential of their art. The rangers instructed their audiences to see power as a show and perceive how performances of authority shaped their experiences of urban nature.2
Malibu, California. Photograph by Pierre Andre LeClerq, 2012. Wikimedia Commons.
Geffen and his neighbors made the rangers’ point beautifully. For years homeowners in Malibu had been pretending that they owned the beach. California law declared the state’s beaches public below the “median high tide line.” But Malibu property owners used various props and techniques to discourage outsiders from reaching this space. They installed fences, built false-front garages to block street parking, posted official-looking “private beach” signs, and put out orange traffic cones each morning to close off public streets. The rangers countered these tactics with information and unbreakable facades of “scout-tastic chipperness.” When homeowners cursed them out as “scumbags” and wrote emails asking for their addresses so that they could demonstrate the horrors of public access by coming over to “use your yard as a toilet and your porch as a garbage can,” the rangers responded with humor and calm, quoting the law while encouraging their safari participants to continue to engage in “typical beach activities” like doing yoga, building sand castles, and reading trashy novels.3
The rangers, however, were careful not to push their amiability too far. They stopped leading tours to Malibu in 2010 and turned to high tech to continue the fight. In 2013 Jenny Price, a founding member of the Rangers, launched a Kick-starter campaign to finance a smartphone app that not only equipped would-be beachcombers with Malibu maps and tips for determining the median high tide line but encouraged them to share photos documenting blocked access points and misleading signs. The app was free for downloading. Self-anointed rangers could use their handhelds to exact justice at their leisure.
The Los Angeles Urban Rangers using a narrow public-access pathway to Malibu beach. Photograph by Nicholas Brown, 2007. Creative Commons.
The Malibu beach conflict and the Los Angeles Urban Rangers’ creative response to it demonstrated how much and how little had changed in the American West. People still fought over turf. Those with wealth and privilege fenced squatters out, turning public land into private real estate. Long-ti
me residents rallied to protect their homes against invading hordes. Villainy and victimhood depended on where—and when—you stood. California Indians and Spanish-speaking Californios, whose domestic tranquillity had also been trampled by Americans touting a self-proclaimed right to go wherever they pleased, might sympathize with Geffen. Shift the perspective, and the battle resembled the struggles of the West’s small producers against corporate goliaths that denied them access to water, grass, and timber. This particular fight over a patch of Malibu sand—with its smartphone apps and postmodern wryness—might seem very much a product of the twenty-first century. But the issues harkened back to the moment when Columbus breached the median high-tide line and engaged in the typical beach activities of a conqueror—planting crosses, unfurling flags, and reading proclamations—before the exasperated Taínos.
The American West Page 48