Latino Ethnogenesis,Child Care,and the Federal Presence in the Urban West

For many years, eastern, midwestern, and southern cities drew most of the attention from urban historians, while a small but active group of scholars published insightful works on the West. Roger Lotchin and Gerald Nash, for example, chronicled the impact of World War II and the Cold War in transforming the region. Other scholarship explored a wide variety of subjects, including the Gold Rush, the opening of the Panama Canal, port development, and immigration from Asia, Europe, and Latin America. More recent scholarship on these topics has built upon this foundation and broadened the historical inquiry in significant ways. One excellent example is Tomas Summers Sandoval’s Latinos at the Golden Gate, which dissects the ethnogenesis process many San Francisco Latinos experienced when Californios, later joined by national groups from Central and South America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, gradually created a new, pan-Latino identity—Latinidad. This was a crucial prerequisite not only for resisting Anglo pressures but also for building the community-based coalition needed to transform the city’s Latinos into a major political force. Over time, these residents, their children, and grandchildren constructed and reconstructed this identity to facilitate a united response to a series of challenges the author contextualizes into four specific periods: the Gold Rush, the 1870s and 1880s, the 1920s to 1940s, and the 1960s and 1970s. He emphasizes the vital role played by the old and new, Spanish-speaking, Catholic parishes, the Latino press, and other institutions and protests in promoting community-wide demonstrations of power and consensus in response to hangings, police brutality, the 1960s civil rights struggle, and other threats.

One might add that Summers Sandoval’s bibliography of contemporary Spanish-language sources, in addition to many other Spanish sources of the time, represents a vibrant counter narrative to the usual array of English printed sources from the West’s Anglo conquerors that historically portrayed the city’s Latinos as an inferior race of people. Much as John Walton and others have demonstrated for Native tribes in Monterey, the Central Valley, and in the Southland, once they were trivialized by various white Americans in word and print, this justified all manner of theft and denigration. ¹ The same was true for Latinos in all parts of the state. During the Gold Rush when Chileans, Peruvians, Central Americans plus Mexicans were settling their first community in the North Beach area, the U.S. and California governments were busily challenging Spanish and Mexican land grants in San Francisco, along the East Bay, and throughout the Southland in the conquerors’ attempt to obliterate all vestiges of Spanish and Mexican property rights.

Besides the injustices related to the conquest process, Latinos also faced the same urban pressures that jostled every other group in America’s cities. As Summers Sandoval and other historians of San Francisco have noted, by the early 1900s, new industries, mass transit, shifting land values, and the 1906 earthquake transformed the Mission District into a new neighborhood for Irish, Italians, and other displaced residents. After 1910, the opening of the Panama Canal and the many jobs it created, along with the Mexican Revolution, and the Great Depression also increased Latino migration to Los Angeles and San Francisco. The Latino floodtide into the Mission District increased further during and after World War II thanks to various internal and external factors. In addition, the Anglo-American tendency in many cities to build expressways, bridge approaches, and tunnels through immigrant, minority, and low-income neighborhoods ² also forced Latinos out of their longtime homes in San Francisco. By the mid-twentieth century, many settled in the Mission District after leaving their earlier Rincon Hill community, displaced by the 1930s construction of the Bay Bridge and its approaches. In later decades, immigrants poured in from El Salvador, Nicaragua, and other Central American countries experiencing revolutions or suffering from economic problems that ejected opportunistic, as well as desperate, refugees.

One of the more recent threats to Summers Sandoval’s centralized Latino community in the Mission is gentrification, but one must recognize that this process threatens many other groups in the city, too. As earlier historians and other commentators have noted, the initial effort by developers to gentrify the Mission District began in the late 1960s when San Francisco planners proposed high-density apartment towers around the proposed Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station. These plans, pushed by Mayor and former Redevelopment Agency Chair Joseph Alioto and others, would have displaced thousands of Latino families just as they did to African American residents in the Fillmore District after planners designated that area as blighted and began using the city’s eminent domain powers to push urban revitalization there. But as Summers Sandoval points out, Mission community activists mobilized to block these efforts, forming the Mission Coalition Organization partly to access Model Cities funding. However, these and many similar initiatives across urban America came to a screeching halt after 1970 once the Nixon Administration began slashing Model Cities funding. In San Francisco, these actions again left the area ripe for development once the exploding tech industry in Silicon Valley reinvigorated the gentrification movement in the 1990s.

This has been a problem not only in San Francisco, but in many other cities over the past few decades. Still, while the rate of gentrification has been recently increasing in many places, in some cities, minorities have gained control. Or have they? As of the 2010 Census, Austin, Phoenix, and Las Vegas became cities where minority groups, when counted together, became the majority population. However, in Las Vegas, probably the least gentrified of these three downtowns, white leadership is currently pushing downtown revitalization and gentrification. It has removed downtown’s historic rail yards and replaced them with a modern center for the performing arts and a research arm of the Cleveland Clinic. Upscale residences and other projects already on the planning board are designed to attract high-income suburbanites back to the city, just as municipal administrations elsewhere are doing in a determined effort to capture a more opulent tax base. ³ But, if successful, it will raise land values and transform land use significantly, eventually destroying many of the city’s current Latino neighborhoods.

In San Francisco, in particular, growing divisions within the Latino community made the response to gentrification more difficult, but so did the migration of more affluent Latinos to the suburbs after 1970—something Summers Sandoval could explore more fully. To be sure, gentrification is not the only major force threatening and fragmenting the long-centralized, Latino community in San Francisco. While projections have the Latino percentage of the city’s population increasing at least until 2040, various factors increasingly opened up the suburbs to thousands more of them in the last decades of the twentieth century. ⁴ The efforts of state and local governments as well as Justice Department court action greatly reduced restrictive covenants and similar impediments. In addition, the increased availability of Veterans Administration and Federal Housing Authority mortgage insurance for minorities, especially after 1970, opened up housing across the bay and elsewhere in the metropolitan area. In the 1980s and 1990s, Latino business owners, professionals, and investors, as well as some middle-class people increasingly joined other whites, African Americans, and Asian Americans in the flight to the suburbs. By the 2010 Census, tens of thousands more Latinos resided in Contra Costa and Alameda counties than were there thirty years earlier.

Aside from the centrifugal effects of suburbanization, other factors also weakened the traditional Latinidad community in San Francisco. Latino public school students, for instance, increasingly behave as second- and third-generation Irish Catholics, Eastern European Jews, Chinese, and other children of immigrant families have in various periods of American history by not speaking their native tongue in school. Older Latino adults complain about how their children insist on speaking English with their friends in school and even at home. In some ways, the acculturation process these third- and fourth-generation kids are experiencing can be as fragmenting to the ethnic community as gentrification and other forces. Moreover, the increased effort to promote diversity in enrollment at San Francisco State and other Bay Area institutions of higher learning is, and will, further acculturate and financially empower these young people. As Latinos increasingly enter local colleges and universities, they are more likely to embark on careers and earn incomes that will broaden their residential options even further, making them less likely to remain in the traditional Latino community or even in the city of San Francisco.

As Enrique and Gilda Ochoa found in their study of Los Angeles, class is more important than race in determining Latino opportunities. ⁵ Indeed, one cannot underestimate the power of dispersal forces upon minority city residents. As Bryant Simon has remarked about Atlantic City, once casino gambling invaded this mostly poor African American city in 1978, land values soared for several blocks back from the Boardwalk, as black homes and businesses were priced out of existence, much as they were by the gentrification process in the Mission District and other low-income areas in San Francisco during the same period. ⁶ But now that casino gambling has spread to neighboring Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New York, Atlantic City has fallen into state receivership and may someday once again be under the control of its minority residents. In San Francisco, however, the city will not fall back into the hands of minority residents. In the coming decades, more of that city will be priced beyond the means of local Latinos, and the once vibrant community will fragment even more.

Some will no doubt move to East Bay cities, which have experienced their own share of growth-related problems. Marta Gutman’s award-winning A City for Children traces the century-long efforts of elite and middle-class women in Oakland to protect children from the evil influences of urban life. They did this by building and repurposing existing structures to function as orphanages, kindergartens, nurseries, settlement houses, and other “nodes” in the city’s “charitable landscape.” These projects and the services they offered allowed women to enter the political sphere of men to lobby for state and local government assistance. But, as Gutman points out, the middle-class socialization that children experienced cut both ways. While they learned a dizzying variety of middle-class values from these women, including hygiene, frugality, and industry, they also learned how to discriminate on the basis of class, race, religion, and national origins. Reformers even split over whether their children’s institutions should be integrated or not after the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. And, as in New York and other cities, Protestant reformers used orphanages and kindergartens to convert Catholic kids to Protestantism, while rejecting Asian children altogether.

Gutman’s work brims with data that either confirm or contradict a multitude of earlier scholarly findings. However, she also extends the frontiers of knowledge on this subject by emphasizing architecture with photographs of building exteriors, maps of interior designs, and pictures and discussions of room décor, which brings material culture more dramatically into the historiography. Still, the author might relate her subject a bit more to Oakland’s larger story, because they are interrelated. As her narrative moves from the Gilded Age into the Progressive Era and on to World War II and the postwar era, the author needs to connect children’s charities more directly to the larger context of Oakland’s ongoing development. Only a few sentences relate to the 1906 earthquake, the Panama Canal, America’s growing commercial empire in the Pacific and Latin America, and to port expansion. The San Francisco earthquake disaster suddenly and permanently forced thousands of impoverished white and minority residents across the bay to Oakland, Alameda, and neighboring towns. In addition, Oakland’s successful battle with the Southern Pacific Railroad for control of the port allowed the city to capture much of San Francisco’s oceanic and river trade, a triumph that substantially increased Oakland’s importance and one that needs more treatment in the book. For some reason, there is virtually no mention of World War II and the incredible strain it put on Oakland’s society and services, including children’s services, just as it did in other cities up and down the West Coast. All these events filled Oakland with thousands more people of all classes, expanded its built environment, and greatly enlarged its population of indigent children, as well as its base of women reformers. Moreover, the growing number of wealthy residents and the city’s expanded tax base only provided more money for women reformers to tap for their charitable agenda.

Similar institutions funded by Catholic Charities in Oakland were often run by nuns, who contributed to the number of local women helping indigent children. These sisters, along with lay women, often fought different battles than their Protestant counterparts within the city’s male-dominated diocese, just as they did in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and elsewhere in the West. ⁷ Then there is the question of how closely child care and the charitable landscape of these cities and those farther north paralleled the Oakland experience and how much they diverged from it. Still, these and other minor concerns aside, Gutman’s work will no doubt spur research along similar and related lines in other first- and second-tier, western cities. As Summers Sandoval makes clear, the constant infusion of Latino as well as Asian immigrants, along with the relatively recent arrival of white Americans filled with an air of conquest, elements that eastern cities generally lacked, makes the study of charitable institutions and overall social reform in the West even more enticing.

Of course, western towns not only functioned as sanctuaries for thousands of immigrants and children from all groups but also served as sites for housing special wartime populations and nuclear facilities. In Perimeters of Democracy, Heather Fryer examines four groups in the region that federal officials sought to isolate during World War II: the Klamath Indians on their Oregon reservation, atomic scientists at Los Alamos, the interracial workforce at the Portland suburb and Kaiser shipbuilding town of Vanport, and Japanese Americans at the Topaz internment camp 150 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. To be sure, these were four very different communities. Topaz and Vanport were active during the war. But, once established, Los Alamos continued well into the Cold War, and the Klamath Reservation dated back to the region’s pioneer days. The author is well aware of the disparities among these places but argues convincingly that comparing entities and ideas that are not highly similar can yield insightful results. She is correct. Fryer wisely avoids a narrative history of each community, since previous scholars have already provided background information on them. Instead, she employs a “constellatory comparative approach,” popularized by the German philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno, to develop a variety of themes that quickly transformed these “model” government places into “inverse utopias,” where lower-class white and minority war workers, interned Japanese, and Indians were subject to all kinds of federally mandated restrictions. ⁸ Despite their location in the fabled western land of opportunity and freedom, residents in these government-run communities experienced less freedom than other Americans.

The author integrates the term enmification into her interpretative framework to highlight the tensions underlying some of these arrangements. Certainly, Oregonians in the 1940s had no great desire to integrate Klamath Indians or African American war workers from Vanport into their town populations, despite the pressing need for low-income labor during the war. As various scholars have shown, Indians were more successful in securing war work and other labor in the Bay Area and Los Angeles than in the Beaver State, and the same was true of African Americans. ⁹ Regarding the Nikkei, even though Hawaiians and Japanese in the East and in Hawaii raised few suspicions among most residents there, that was certainly not the case in the Far West. In addition, anti-Semitism, anti-Bolshevism, and even xenophobia, as much as security concerns, colored the thinking that convinced federal officials to isolate the nuclear physicists, many of them left-wing Jewish émigrés, who ultimately built the bomb at Los Alamos. In many ways, the thinking behind the organization and governing principles of these four communities reflected the jumble of fears and biases embedded in mainstream American culture. Clearly, containment hardly began in 1947 with George Kennan’s Cold War policy. The policy was an outgrowth of the federal government’s earlier strategies in the World War II West and in places like Boulder City, the guard-gated community overtly designed to confine Hoover Dam construction workers in the 1930s, and, earlier still, on myriad Indian reservations. All four of Fryer’s communities embodied this containment approach, reflecting the American penchant for denying minorities the very freedoms embraced and celebrated by the country’s Euro-American majority. But the author also highlights how these communities combated government mandates. This was part of a trend throughout U.S. history for minorities of all types to oppose White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) tyranny, whether they be Catholics challenging antebellum nativists in the 1830s, or Catholics and Jews defying the 1920s Klan. Japanese Americans, Indians, and minority workers in the 1940s resisted federal officials and mainstream white Americans beyond the gates.

Fryer can be faulted for not selecting communities that would yield even more insights and not contradict one another in so many ways. After all, there are limits to comparing places like Los Alamos—where Edward Teller, Robert Oppenheimer, and other prominent physicists collaborated day and night to beat German and Japanese scientists in the race to build a fission bomb—with places like the Topaz detention camp where loyal Japanese Americans were forcibly incarcerated far from their homes in California and neighboring states. Fryer could have taken the racist angle even further by not focusing on the Topaz relocation center at all but on others in Arizona and elsewhere where the federal government appropriated Indian territory, rather than using its own lands, to establish detention camps for the Nikkei. Such actions underscore the frequently racist actions of the Roosevelt Administration not only during the war but also in its agricultural, industrial, and other New Deal programs. ¹⁰

Moreover, as some New Western historians have noted, the American West was never really a place where minorities thrived. Many Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans faced constant discrimination. Native Americans, in particular, were, in the words of Edward Said, especially “othered” much like minorities in other empires. ¹¹ Indeed, colonialism played a major role in the so-called “pioneering” of the American West just as it did later in the Philippines and later still in how writers and ordinary Americans treated nonwhite colonists, African Americans, immigrants, and native peoples not only in their histories of the West but in their daily lives as well.

In contrast with Heather Fryer’s “utopias,” Kate Brown concerns herself with “Plutopias,” two communities in the United States and the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR): the city of Richland, Washington (and its Hanford Nuclear Reservation) and the city of Ozersk (and its Maiak Plutonium Plant). While Brown’s plutopias certainly relate to Fryer’s Los Alamos community, Brown’s story is really a dramatic extension of it. Unlike the often-resentful people in Fryer’s inverse utopias, residents of Brown’s plutopian communities benefited from enhanced purchasing power to encourage the consumption of goods, which promoted a heightened standard of living beyond that of ordinary Americans and Russians. This was in return for their loyalty to the government’s secret nuclear programs and for their willingness to live comfortably near dangerous plutonium-producing plants that powered the nuclear stockpiles of both nations. Unlike the temporary danger posed by the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979 and the actual meltdown and subsequent community isolation at Chernobyl seven years later, plant operations at Hanford and Maiak, although heavily polluting, operated for the most part in uneventful secrecy. But conditions at both facilities were evolving catastrophes. Due to budget cuts and other reasons, in the 1950s, 1960s, and later years, the Richland and Ozersk plants released large streams of radioactive isotopes into both the surrounding and downriver towns and countryside. Despite the obvious peril, most people in these plutopias remained loyal, voicing few complaints. Even resident scientists asked few questions about the danger of plant operations. For many years, both central governments successfully bought them off, Brown argues, by containing them with physical, class, and racial buffers, and by keeping them in a state of relative affluence.

The U.S. government accomplished much the same thing in the 1950s and 1960s at the Nevada Test Site (NTS). Scientists, engineers, and ordinary workers mingled constantly as they prepared atomic and hydrogen bombs for detonation. The same was true afterward when they returned to the site to measure radiation levels and restore the testing area to its natural state before the explosion. Numerous interviews with these NTS workers yield a number of common themes that might extend or even contradict Brown’s findings. The salaries paid to many of the scientists and engineers were not exorbitant, and living conditions on the site were hardly ideal. Barracks-like communities with army-like mess halls and “rec rooms” were the rule. The daily 160-mile round-trip commute to Las Vegas and its ordinary 1950s tract homes was the only other option. ¹²

But most of those interviewed supported nuclear testing. They spoke matter-of-factly about returning to a bombsite where, even weeks after a nuclear blast, the desert rocks were still noticeably hot to the touch day and night. Later in the 1960s and after the atmospheric test ban treaty, there were few complaints from scientists, safety experts, and even working-class miners and excavators who now were underground sifting through blasted tunnels to clear debris and measure radiation levels. Miners willingly returned for later tests even after recording dangerous readings on their bodies that resulted in mandatory wash downs and a few weeks off from work, and even after hearing from former colleagues who had contracted life-threatening tumors. While it is true their salaries were somewhat higher than for many positions in midcentury Las Vegas and for mining jobs elsewhere, workers cited other reasons why they shrugged off the danger.

National security was a common response. Some workers recalled that since they had not served in World War II or Korea, this was how they compensated for it. Others pointed to the Cold War and the threat that Soviet possession of nuclear weapons posed to America and to their families. Others were proud they had a steady job. For some minority workers, the test site represented upward mobility and increased status. ¹³ The Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandated an end to discrimination against minorities on many fronts, and federal bases and weapons facilities were among the first places during the Great Society era where minorities could get better jobs. Indeed, Reynolds Electric, EG&G, and other federal contractors, after prodding from the Justice Department, quickly opened up higher-paying jobs to African American and Latino employees, which now allowed them to become operators of advanced underground machinery. Some of them moved quickly to qualify for these better positions, thus confirming Brown’s higher-pay thesis.

The relative lack of concern for safety on the test site also resembled that at Richland and Ozersk. In their interviews, 1950s and early 1960s safety experts often minimized the danger of radiation exposure for NTS workers as well as for animals and farm-ranch families bordering the test site, even though there was a significant rate of illness and mortality “downwind” and farther away in southern Utah, thanks to contaminated clouds and prevailing winds. Government contractors and physicians working for the government regularly trivialized the dangers or even lied about them—even to test-site workers who contracted cancerous conditions, attributing their symptoms, including tumors, to hunting trips and all manner of preexisting conditions. Doctors and safety experts did this more out of loyalty to the U.S. security mission than for high salaries. It was really a patriotic extension of the World War II era and its “a slip of a lip can sink a ship” mentality that servicemen and civilians had practiced for four long years. Only this time, the enemy was the Russians, not the Axis powers. In Brown’s plutopias, however, residents’ health often exceeded that of average Americans, owing to the skilled medical care available, a relatively young population, and a nutritionally sound diet that only affluence and doting government officials could support. ¹⁴

Since the prevailing winds in southern Nevada were usually to the north and northeast, most of the farmers, ranchers, and townsmen affected by test-site radiation were primarily Indians, relatively poor ranchers, and Mormons in eastern Nevada and Utah. In the Soviet Union, the downriver populations affected by the Maiak plant’s pollution of the Techa River were often ethnic minorities and working-class people. No urban, upper-class populations were ever threatened in western Washington, and while bomb-related radiation invaded the towns of southern Utah and even Salt Lake City and Provo in the North, federal officials were satisfied that Los Angeles and the closer city of Las Vegas were unaffected. Still, it should be emphasized that southern, central, and northern Utah contained a large network of towns and cities west of the Wasatch Front populated mostly by Mormons, long a marginalized and denigrated religious minority in America.

Support for continuing operations at Hanford came not just from many residents in the Tri-Cities area of Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco, but from others in Washington as well. The same was true in Las Vegas where many residents and especially business groups supported continued nuclear testing at the NTS. In addition to Brown’s work, other research also documents substantial support in Washington for maintaining operations at Hanford. As historians John Findlay and Bruce Hevly demonstrate in their recent book, eastern Washington-area boosters used the plant to try and diversify this longtime farm belt with industry. Despite continuing rumors about radioactive pollution in the area, they recruited powerful U.S. Senator Henry Jackson (Democrat Washington; D-Wash.) and his successors to protect the plant and secure as much federal funding as possible for its continuing operation and eventual cleanup into the twenty-first century. As Findlay and Hevly show, far from being despised, nuclear waste was viewed by many of the state’s industrial advocates and politicians as a “necessary evil” that had to be destroyed, not quickly but slowly, as part of a long-term treatment requiring billions of dollars in additional funding. ¹⁵ This was a view hardly shared by most southern Nevada residents and Senator Harry Reid, himself a Mormon, who blocked the Nuclear Waste Repository at Yucca Mountain for more than thirty years.

Clearly, more research is needed on these subjects. All four authors contribute to our knowledge and raise new issues that require further investigation. The same is true of western cities more generally. As more urban historians are drawn to the region and its dynamic past, our field can only benefit from their findings.