Frank P. Barajas. Courtesy photo.
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By Frank P. Barajas / Guest contributor
Hello Friend,
The past, present, and future exist concurrently. History matters because the present and past manifest in the now. This is why historical events such as the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon Case of the Zoot Suiters and the Deportation Campaigns of the 1930s speak to us today in relation to the overcharging and over-sentencing of convicted ethnic Mexicans regarding the former and the vicious Gestapo kidnappings of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency with the latter.
The white supremacism embedded in these instances has been historically documented. But their human impact is best conveyed in the novel. History books detail the public consequences of events; fiction and autobiographies demonstrate the private experiences of people. Neither genre is better; they complement each other. There are several novels and memoirs that I am grateful to have read, as they explained the personal impact of racism. And from this I understand why ethnic Mexican and Blacks have been treated not the same, but similarly.
Although certain works of fiction and memoirs do not speak directly to white supremacism in the US, they informed my understanding of linkages and how racism advances capitalist territorial conquests and the oppression of people over time. And they are Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973), Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958).
In one way or another, these narratives spoke to my community’s history of struggle, psyche, marginalization, and exploitation under a brutal, inhuman system of racial capitalism as defined by Cedric Robinson in his magisterial book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983). Like many important historians, Robinson articulates the documented intricacies of racial capitalism with skillful references to the novel. How can any person have read and distilled so much knowledge? Like Edward Said’s Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978).
In sum, historians like Robinson and Said call out the tradition of white supremacy central to Western Civilization since the Middle Ages. A tradition that my community, my people, not only suffered but also internalized by way of a mindset of colonization.
Consequently, I make “call outs” of my own. In my last two newsletters, I detailed how our system of law enforcement oppressed and continues to oppress economically exploited, lumpen ethnic Mexican defendants (i.e., cholos y cholas, homies and homegirls, bangers) because they are easy pickings in so many ways. Mainly because they are institutionally undereducated and financially poor. Law enforcement officers and prosecutors, many ethnic Mexicans themselves, build their careers and augment their material livelihoods by putting away Brown people for long prison sentences by exploiting popular tropes, stereotypes, prejudices, and historical blind spots of the ethnic Mexican in the Southwest.
Historical lacunae are often masked over with distortions, lies, omissions, and erasures in the form of myth. The power of myth integrates these elements to form propaganda that many mistake as history. A discourse of winners and losers. Losers, if recognized at all, are depicted as pathetic, inferior, and deserving of their condition. The victors, or the hunters, narrate the story of the hunt.
This is why I love Achebe’s verse within a 1994 edition of the Paris Review: “There is that great proverb—that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail—the bravery, even, of the lions.
”I must be that historian in Ventura County as the lions here are ethnic Mexicans and the hunters consist of a feudal, agricultural dictatorship that glorifies the history of settler colonial families that stole lands from indigenous and Mexican people by several means—one being legal extortion. Mexican elites of the Californio era did the same, but they got their comeuppance soon after the US’s 1846 bloody invasion of Mexico’s territories of Tejas, Nuevo Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Kansas, Utah, and Oklahoma as well as Mexico itself. This has been documented and conveyed by Los Tigres del Norte’s Somos Más Americanos (2001).
An example of the power of myth returned to my attention yesterday in an Instagram reel titled “WHEN 700 MEXICAN FAMILIES WERE EVICTED FROM THEIR HOMES” (click here to view) by Suenos del los Chicanos. The video resurrected the history of the 1941 Citrus Strike that Ventura County’s ag dictatorship has erased from its white supremacist, Jeffersonian, racial capitalist marketing literature such as the Farm Bureau’s Central Coast: Farm & Ranch quarterly magazine. When ethnic Mexicans are featured in such literature, they are portrayed as subordinate, recently arrived “alien” workers who serve their master with grateful glee while their actual historical significance is omitted.
The reel expresses how the county’s ag dictatorship, which ran company concentration camps and towns throughout the region, evicted citrus pickers who demanded to be treated with dignity and respect, signified in a living wage, benefits, the end to racist abuse, and collective bargaining by way of Agricultural and Citrus Workers Union representation. Rather than negotiate with “easy-going, kindly Mexican people” who he felt were misled by white labor organizers, Charles Collins Teague and his fellow ag dictators fired and evicted their workers from their concentration camps. In fact, Teague, the CEO of Limoneira and one of the corporate architects of the violent, vigilante, union-busting outfit the Associated Farmers, declared that his ilk ought to deed their properties to the county rather than to bargain as equals with the workers.
Evictions were one method of choice that Ventura County’s ag dictatorship used to quash the determination of ethnic Mexican workers to be treated with dignity, as this happened later at Cabrillo Village in Saticoy in 1975 and at Rancho Sespe in 1978.The ag dictatorship of the past lives in the plantation present. No doubt about it. Just examine who occupies the seats of public, private, and non-profit boards of Ventura County today. If you do, you will see the names of the progeny of mighty agribusiness Medici families.C/SfpbYour feedback is welcome. Email me.
— Frank P. Barajas is a lifetime resident of Oxnard and Professor of History, Faculty Early Retirement Program at California State University Channel Islands.
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