Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality
296
Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520969179 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 01/05/2018 |
| Series: | American Crossroads , #47 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Sales rank: | 903,224 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
The White Architects of Mexican American Education
The ignorant are allowed to live and breed under conditions that become a threat and a menace to the welfare of the community. Many cases of filth and disease and contagion are found by us in the school work. We suggest to these Mexican people that they care for themselves, but they do nothing. The personal health of the Mexican children in the grammar school affects every child in the school.
— RICHARD B. HAYDOCK, JANUARY 31, 1917
IN JANUARY 1917, SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT and city trustee Richard B. Haydock made a case for the appointment of a city policewoman deputy nurse, warning that the living conditions of Mexican families posed "a threat and a menace" to the larger school population. In December 1921, when he spoke to the Oxnard Rotary Club, Haydock framed his concerns about "local problems" with remarks about Blacks as a national problem, because, "be it ever so slight, even as in the octoroon, the unfortunate is still a negro. ... Few men will say that the American for which we hope and pray can ever be made out of such stock." These 1917 and 1921 newspaper accounts offer a unique vantage point from which to understand the collective project of White supremacy embedded in Oxnard's infrastructure and institutions from the city's founding.
As noted in the Introduction, the White architects of Mexican American education helped craft indelible patterns of racial segregation within and beyond schools. For example, before establishing municipal elections, an elite group of White men appointed each other to serve on the Oxnard City Board of Trustees. Many of these powerbrokers served on the Oxnard School Board of Trustees and had connections with the town's main employer, the American Beet Sugar Company (ABSC). Others conducted business with the schools, providing the land, building materials, and insurance for constructing and maintaining facilities. Some took on each of these roles simultaneously. White men also exerted influence as members of racially exclusive fraternal and civic organizations. White women contributed to and led educational efforts, segregated social clubs, church activities, and volunteer organizations. A small group of White women also wielded power as school leaders.
Richard Thompson Ford has observed, "public policy and private actors operate together to create and promote racially identified space and the racial segregation that accompanies it." This chapter's close examination of the White architects' public remarks and actions during Oxnard's formative years, from 1903 to 1930 in particular, demonstrates a carefully constructed, ideological architecture aimed to establish Whites at the top of a racial hierarchy. They sought to reproduce this hierarchy through the physical infrastructure of a city demarcated by racial spaces. They manufactured disparate schooling and housing conditions as a central component of these designs. West of Oxnard Boulevard and the railroad tracks meant White, first-class treatment and the promise of prosperity, while east meant Mexican, second-class treatment and little hope for social mobility. The White architects' enactment of mundane racism shaped an interconnected residential and educational system of discrimination that persisted well beyond the 1930s.
In 1903, as the newly elected president of the city board of trustees (i.e., Oxnard's first mayor), Haydock began to oversee all aspects of city planning and school construction. He led efforts to purposefully underdevelop what became the predominately Mexican east-side neighborhoods. He approved plans for substandard housing and neglected to extend basic municipal services such as sewage, electricity, and paved roads to this area. At the same time, he oversaw the development of upscale homes, a sewage and waste system, lighting, and street pavement for the west side of the city, where the White community lived. He also helped plan and place the city's elementary schools west of the tracks, in close proximity to White neighborhoods. Oxnard Grammar School was constructed in 1908, on Third Street between A and B streets, and enrolled a predominately White student population.
Though the school board began recording meetings in 1916, the minutes remain sparse until 1923, when trustees Ben S. Virden, Dr. Harry M. Staire, and Roy B. Witman expressed anxiety about overcrowding. Newspapers and other materials offer insights about the development of the town and schools during this time. Haydock's 1917 remarks, for example, set out a seemingly objective motion for a deputy policewoman nurse, but also offered an argument for segregation. Indeed, he complained, "these Mexican people" purposefully placed "every child in the school" at risk because of supposed contagious diseases. In his proposal to the city trustees, he noted, "We have laws to prevent the abuse of livestock ... but the people are allowed to abuse themselves." In acknowledging that poor parents with sick children would likely not be able to access a doctor, he expressed tolerance for Mexicans. Still, he likened these families to livestock. The city trustees reviewed no actual evidence to corroborate Haydock's presumption of a health "menace" emanating from the Mexican children. Even so, they approved his motion for a deputy policewoman nurse and "insisted that she be able to speak Spanish." Haydock patronizingly noted that if special instruction did not work, he could legally deny Mexican children access to schools altogether: "If possible, these people ought to be taught better. The law provides for the exclusion from school of children infected with a contagion. If we enforce this rule nothing is done for the children." Haydock's claim to be flouting the law by allowing contagious children to attend school belied his role in ensuring the district's funding based on daily attendance, as Mexicans comprised at least 40 percent of elementary school enrollments.
About three weeks later, in February 1917, Haydock selected Policewoman Eloise M. Thornton, a graduate nurse who had "organized school nursing in the city of Los Angeles" and had experience working with police, health, and school departments as a "probation and humane officer." Her appointment, "as a deputy marshal and a deputy health officer," reified the shared belief among the White architects that educating Mexican children required policing. These unexamined beliefs effectively criminalized Mexican children and their parents.
In 1916, the White architects, led by school superintendent and city trustee Haydock and the president of the school board of trustees and city treasurer Virden, had overseen construction of a new school to accommodate a growing student population. In 1917, the school trustees officially named this facility the "Haydock Grammar School," supported by a petition organized by landowner Charles Donlon. Over thirty people signed the petition "in recognition of the long years of able, faithful, and efficient educational work [Haydock] has done in this community." When the Richard B. Haydock School opened in March 1917, on the corner of Wooley Road and C Street, it enrolled approximately two hundred upper- and lower-grade elementary students who lived in "the south part of town."
Local claims about Mexican children being a "menace" within schools reverberated with regional and national nativist arguments to halt immigration from Mexico altogether. However, these voices conflicted with those of industrialists and growers, whose successful lobbying between 1917 and 1920 facilitated increases of over seventy-three thousand temporary Mexican immigrants and more than one hundred thousand permanent Mexican immigrants throughout the United States. The very low wages paid to Mexican farmworkers and the seasonal availability of employment meant that families often worked together and followed the crop harvests. Men, women, and children worked in the fields.
Ventura County school officials encouraged such work, knowing that child labor laws exempted agricultural work and that compulsory education laws exempted children working in the fields. For example, in May 1917, the Oxnard Daily Courier updated readers about the notices sent out by Ventura County school superintendent James E. Reynolds for assistance in harvesting crops, stating: "More than 300 families in Ventura [C]ounty have responded favorably. ... High school children generally are likewise responding in good shape to the request of the officials for aid in harvesting the crops of the county." While the top educational official in the county encouraged children working in the fields, other local officials expressed concern about Mexican children not attending school regularly.
When Policewoman Thornton outlined her initial work in January 1918, she "told of the necessity of keeping the children in school, of poor housing conditions, and advised that only English be spoken to the children." These brief remarks foreshadowed the complex structural inequality shaping Mexican children's experiences, which would not be sufficiently addressed by a policewoman nurse. By August 1918, her report to the city trustees demonstrated she had accepted Haydock's approach to ignore the conditions shaping schooling experiences and focus on Mexican children as the problem. As she discussed her efforts in "Teaching Foreign Children Our Ways," Thornton took on some of Haydock's patronizing tone, remarking, "the Mexican must learn to keep his word if he expects to get help when he needs it. ... He is slow to learn some things."
Thornton stepped down from the position after about one year, citing that she could not sustain her own health while engaging in such a difficult job. Haydock complained of the problems occurring in her absence, "especially in connection with the grammar schools." He noted several cases of "pinkeye" that caused students to be sent home from school, remarking: "If they had medical care, or any kind of attention ... the children would soon be cured, and back to school. As it is they spread the disease and do not get cured easily." Consistent with his previous comments, Haydock could barely muster empathy for the Mexican children, and remained principally focused on the average daily attendance funds these students represented.
DESIGNING POOR LIVING AND HEALTH CONDITIONS
Haydock, along with the other city trustees, actually contributed to the very conditions of "filth" they claimed occurred because of Mexican "ignorance." Two weeks after his motion for a policewoman nurse, in mid-February 1917, he and the city trustees confirmed street paving plans for the town. They purposefully designed the pavement plans to cover only the west side of Oxnard in the commercial and residential sections of the White community. In the meantime, neither city nor school leaders made efforts to secure the safety of the Mexican children who walked daily on dirt- or mud-filled streets and across the railroad tracks to attend west-side schools. These actions and refusals to act exemplified the mundane disregard shown for the tax-paying Mexican community.
Another example came with the flu of 1918, when the newspaper confirmed that Mexicans were not admitted to St. John's Hospital west of the tracks. On November 4, 1918, The Oxnard Daily Courier reported front-page health updates about White residents recovering from the flu at St. John's Hospital, and in the next column over announced that Police Chief Murray had opened a "temporary city detention hospital to care for Mexicans stricken with the 'flu.'" Reportedly, in a building on Seventh and Meta streets, east of the boulevard, "homeless and helpless" Mexican flu victims lay on donated cots and bedding, while Murray and an untrained, unnamed male citizen volunteer administered "heroic measures." The article further noted that in the first night the makeshift facility served five patients, though one died because "some were too far gone. ... The 'hospital' has been needed badly for several days."
The same night the "hospital" opened, the city trustees directed firemen to wash some of the west-side streets and sidewalks, "as a precautionary health measure." The following week, the superintendent of streets, Charles Green, received the assistance of "some 12 or 14 Mexicans" to clean "the alleys in the Mexican section of the city as a precaution against the spread of influenza, through unnecessary filth." Praising their volunteerism, the newspaper recognized that "a great many Mexicans since the influenza epidemic started have been doing splendid work in co-operating with the city authorities." The article did not explain why the city trustees directed firemen to clean the paved streets on the west side of town and left Green alone to sanitize the dirt alleys on the east side. This lack of explanation, and the evidence of Mexicans working to compensate for the lack of city resources or personnel hours, reflects the commonly held understanding that the east side simply would not receive the same treatment as the west side. City and school leaders rarely made public statements justifying this disparate treatment, but when they did, they usually identified Mexicans themselves as the problem. This attribution of blame functioned to absolve the companies recruiting and profiting from the low-wage labor Mexicans provided.
In October 1919, the city's newly hired policewoman nurse, Mrs. May Webb, continued this pattern of casually blaming Mexicans regardless of the facts. She complained almost immediately of the conditions on the east side of town that she believed contributed to a potential health disaster: "If typhoid fever ever broke out in your city I don't see where it would stop on account of these swarms of flies," she declared, detailing, "the conditions here that draw flies and breed flies are 'simply terrible.'" She publicly critiqued "housing conditions in some of the poorer quarters" as "terribly bad," and reminded the trustees that these problems lay "only two blocks from the main part of your city." She also observed "bad" conditions west of the tracks, on C Street, and asserted, "You spend plenty of money ... you have a good man on the job. It must be the fault of your people." While detailing her observations, she expressed frustration that while she had expected to be a "nurse inspector," her work in Oxnard took on "more of a social service nature, to teach not only the minds but also the five senses," and "to teach common sense." She condescendingly remarked, "Getting hold of the ever elusive Mexican children, whose parents have no conception whatever of the need of their children going to school," required her to be more of a truant officer than a nurse.
Webb's claim that Mexicans were a problem shifted attention away from the infrastructure issues she had just outlined and back onto familiar ideological territory. In response, the city trustees took some blame for the "torn-up condition of the streets due to paving and gas improvements [on the west side]" and thanked Policewoman Webb for her report. With their silence about the east side, they endorsed Webb's reasoning that lack of "common sense" on the part of Mexicans caused the "terribly bad" conditions.
As Natalia Molina has explained, "Portraying people of Chinese, Mexican, and Japanese ancestry in Los Angeles as threats to public health and civic well-being obscured the real causes of communicable disease and illness — inadequate medical care, exposure to raw sewage, and malnutrition." In Oxnard, as in Los Angeles and elsewhere, such institutionalized neglect toward Mexicans did not go unchallenged.
About a week after Policewoman Webb's report, at an October 1919 meeting of the Monday Club, Charles H. Weaver, an ABSC representative, discussed newly built houses for "foreign laborers," and work to promote Americanization by developing "a better understanding between the laborer and the beet growers." Weaver's remarks about the "industrial standpoint" echoed the ABSC directive from the previous July, which had instructed factory managers and supervisors to treat the Mexican sugar-beet workers well, so they would continue to stay "loyal employees." His anecdotal observation of "the necessity of these foreigners being taught some idea of thrift" exposed the paternalistic approach of the ABSC. At the same meeting, Father Gorman spoke on behalf of Father Ramirez, a priest working "among the people of his nationality here in Oxnard," to convey his colleague's concern for "the necessity of understanding these people before you could expect to help them to become good American citizens." Ramirez's call foreshadowed collective efforts to improve living conditions by working "among" Mexicans. This contrasted with Weaver's call for understanding "between" the sugar-beet workers and their supervisors, which reified the unequal power dynamics between Mexicans and Whites. Such tensions of race and class, east and west, intensified as the Mexican population continued to grow in the city and schools.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ixPreface xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1 • The White Architects of Mexican American Education 12
2 • Pernicious Deeds: Restrictive Covenants and Schools 39
3 • “Obsessed” with Segregating Mexican Students 55
4 • Ramona School and the Undereducation of Children in La Colonia 79
5 • A Common Cause Emerges for Mexican American and Black Organizers 100
6 • Challenging “a Systematic Scheme of Racial Segregation”: Soria v. Oxnard School Board of Trustees 129
Epilogue 162
Appendix: List of Interviews Conducted and Consulted 167
Notes 169
Bibliography 247