ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Sol y Sombra: San Bernardino’s Mexican Community, 1880-1960

By

Mark Anthony Ocegueda

Doctor of Philosophy in History

University of California, Irvine, 2017

Professor Vicki L. Ruiz, Chair

This dissertation documents San Bernardino's Mexican American people and their

quest for civil rights in the day to day. Citrus and Santa Fe railroad workers, as well as

Mexican middle class business owners, utilized defense committees, newspapers,

baseball teams, mutualistas, and the local the Catholic Church, to counter discrimination,

especially segregationist ordinances. I argue that San Bernardino’s geographical

placement as a gateway into southern California solidified the city as an important

regional economic hub during the early twentieth century that ultimately nurtured the

development of a diverse and distinct Mexican American community. Sol y Sombra

explores how the city became an important space for the propagation of conceptions of

juvenile delinquency and their use to uphold the segregation of public parks and pools. I

reveal resistance to segregation through community grassroots mobilization. Led by the

Valles family, Puerto Rican newspaper editor Eugenio Nogueras, and Catholic cleric José

Nuñez these efforts culminated in Lopez v. Seccombe (1944), one of the first successful

judicial challenges to racial segregation. I connect how this little known case eventually

made waves throughout the region by influencing other important legal challenges,

including Mendez v. Westminster (1947).

This study also showcases the Mitla Café as a centerpiece of community life and

as a site that reveals the untold history of a prosperous Mexican American business

community along Route 66. Moreover, this dissertation explores how postwar urban

renewal projects, such as the development of the Inland Empire’s U.S. 395 freeway

contributed to the decline of this vital business district once renowned to travelers along

Route 66. Ultimately, this study posits the Inland Empire and the city of San Bernardino

as an important contested space for furthering our understanding of U.S. history.

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Return to the Mission:

Gendered Bonds, Women, and Colonization in San Diego, 1769-1930

By

Jessica Christian

Doctor of Philosophy in History

University of California, Irvine, 2019

Professor Vicki L. Ruiz, Chair

My dissertation explores the interactions, relationships, and bonds among women across race and class in the greater San Diego area, including what is now Riverside County. Under Spanish, Mexican, and American colonization, settler and native women played pivotal roles, especially in the areas of education and labor. Whether church or state sanctioned, through private organizations or personal relationships, new Office of Indian Affairs arrivals deployed strategies of “uplift” in their dealings with indigenous peoples as a way to exert power and control over them. And native people resisted these efforts to “uplift” them in a myriad of ways. While I look at the motivations and actions of both settler and colonized people, particularly women, good intentions do not negate the violent impact of Spanish, Mexican, and American colonization on native communities. Colonizers committed what feminist scholars refer to as gendercide, a sustained attack to destroy gender roles through emotional, physical, psychological, sexual, and spiritual violence. My work interrogates the continuities in colonial relationships, especially with regards to women. Approaching the subject by focusing on continuity demonstrates how gendered education and labor served as the foundation of colonial settlements across time.

The Hawaiian community remains central to southern California life. From early public surfing exhibitions to aloha shirts to Hawaiian BBQ, “Hawaiianess” has permeated mainland U.S. culture. This dissertation brings visibility to a Los Angeles Hawaiian community, a presence that goes undetected since it lacks a residential center. I offer insight into the politics of place and Hawaiian racial hybridity as a means to track not an exclusively “Hawaiian” ethnic group, but rather to locate self-identified Hawaiians who navigate within a system of constant appropriation of Hawaiianess whether from the islands or from U.S. consumer culture. I examine the interregional network of a “diasporic” Hawaiian community in southern California and the ways in which Hawaiians in Los Angeles create community practices based on historical memories. I argue that their notions of Hawaiianess are negotiated through a “transgenerational imaginary,” the ways in which cultural knowledge transfers from one generation to the next and at times produces new expressions. The Hawaiian mainland community encompasses a broad identity beginning with those of native Hawaiian ancestry; people of other ethnicities born in Hawaii; individuals born on the mainland with ancestors from Hawaii; and spouses married to Hawaiian community members. Focusing on the production of identity and social agency, I investigate how Hawaiianess manifests itself on the mainland through the experiences of families, community members, civic clubs, the growing food circuit, and community-driven projects like the Hokulea sailing canoe. I track the manner in which “Hawaiianess” develops in Los Angeles through ethnic foodways and how food identity is represented in the larger culture. I consider how issues around food become sites for identity formation and the extent to which ethnic entrepreneurs, as operators of these establishments, see themselves as connected to foodways in Hawaii. Hawaiianess also remains in dialogue with commercial appropriation or “contesting alohas” – competing ideas, representations, and discourses of the meaning of “Hawaiian.” Hawaiian migrants and their families, however, maintain their ties to the islands and self-identify as “Hawaiian” across ethnicities and in the process navigate a system of a constant commercial appropriation of Hawaiianess.

In 1978, the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) began construction on newly commissioned border fences in the El Paso and San Diego regions of the U.S.-Mexico border. These fences, infamously nicknamed the ‘Tortilla Curtain,’ became the center of a cross-border controversy due to their initial, violent design. This flashpoint over the commission and construction of a weaponized border fence marked an important shift to increasingly unilateral border enforcement underscored by the U.S. intention to use threats of both direct and environmental violence to deter and punish unauthorized border crossers. The incident exacerbated ongoing racialization and criminalization of migrants in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and fundamentally altered the development of policy, policing, and public perceptions pertaining to the U.S.- Mexico border. The Tortilla Curtain was thus a critical turning point in the history of border enforcement, and a significant step toward the ‘Prevention Through Deterrence’ strategy that the INS has embraced since the early 1990s.

The Influenza Pandemic killed as many as 60 million people worldwide in 1918. Contemporary American history renders this specific epoch as part of the “American Experience.” Through research in oral histories alongside state archives, this dissertation examines public health and medicine in the interwar period between 1918 and 1941. The Influenza Pandemic offers an entrée into discussions of public health, wellness, and medicine through an examination of care during and after the crisis. Current historiography examines the attitudes of public health officials and local mandates in racializing bodies of color, using disease as the marker for citizenship and belonging. In dialogue with scholarship about public health, this work examines the importance of mutual aid, professionalization, and alternate medicine as challenges to prevalent medical discourses.

Health was a contested environment. Communities of color, especially Asian Americans, navigated through a marketplace of options, making choices grounded on availability, affordability, and an understanding of healthcare and public health. Japanese American physicians and Chinese herbal doctors presented options for communities of color in combating health inequalities in southern California. In doing so, they formed an important counter conversation to public health that rendered the Asian American community as health menaces. Significantly, the work of these men and women, alongside their families presented a challenge to medical discourses in the early part of the twentieth century.