SDSU documents the Mexican immigrant experience
“In fourteen-hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”
So begins a poem that many students learn to help them remember when the Spanish navigator stumbled onto the Americas and set the stage for European settlement.
It’s a useful trick for recalling information that can be found in thousands of textbooks. But imagine if this piece of history resided in no book and were taught in no school; what if the poem were all there was?
Swap the “ocean blue” for the San Diego-Tijuana border, and you get a reality — not a mind exercise — for millions of Latinos like Rodolfo Jacobo.
SDSU professor Rodolfo Jacobo explains a mural
depicting the founding of Mexico City.
The SDSU Chicana/Chicano Studies professor’s family immigrated to the United States, and ultimately San Diego, from 1942 to the late 1960s under the Bracero Program, which brought guest agricultural workers from Mexico to U.S. farms from 1942 to 1964.
Five million men migrated across the border during the program’s duration and later brought their families, but little is known about the exodus beyond the families and their descendants.
“There was relatively little interest by academia, so there were millions of people whose stories would not have been known if it weren’t for the oral tradition,” Jacobo said.
The spoken stories he collected during research for the book “Memories of Bracero Workers, 1942-1964,” helped filled in that historical gap and allowed him to learn more about his roots.
“These oral traditions provide validation,” Jacobo said. “A lot of young people of Mexican ancestry who are raised in the United States are seeking their heritage and their identity.”
Many of these young people turn up in Jacobo’s courses; he finds that large numbers of his students are descendants of Bracero workers, hungry to know more about the program.
“They find a sense of connectedness in knowing about it; that’s a very important aspect of oral traditions.”
A sense of identity
Handed down from generation to generation, oral traditions are intimate links to recent and distant familial and public histories. They are often thought of as both a diary of the people and a barometer of popular opinion.
Because many of the stories reveal heroic actions undertaken to escape harsh political and economic conditions in Mexico, they resemble fiction, but are factually accurate.
A Chicano Park mural illustrates the plight of
agricultural workers.
“That’s one of the powerful things about this oral tradition in the Mexican community in San Diego,” said Chicano Studies lecturer Mario Aguilar. “It’s not something that is mythic or distant; you’re actually sitting there with your grandfather who is the protagonist of the story you are hearing.”
While many of the stories relate injustices endured by Mexicans, they also highlight the character of the people in overcoming the adversity — harassment, hazardous employment conditions, racial profiling and political disenfranchisement — they often experience after immigrating to the United States.
“These narratives give you the ability to see the world as belonging to you because they give you a sense of grounding. You know who you are, where you came from, and the sacrifices your family made,” Aguilar said. “That gives you strength to decide where you want to go next.”
More than just stories, "consejos" (advice), "dichos" (sayings), "benediciones" (blessings), "corridos" (songs), games, events like quinceañeras, and even dance, help Mexicans living in San Diego remember and find strength in the struggles of the past.
“Oral traditions live on after we’re gone. They stay with the upcoming generations, so they can savor them and have a better understanding of how things came about, rather than thinking things are just given to us at one time,” said Ramon “Chunky” Sanchez 
, leader of the influential Chicano folk group Los Alacranes, which means “The Scorpions.” “Everything takes sacrifice, time and effort to acquire.”
'Chicano Park Samba'
Sanchez, an SDSU alum who has risen to folk hero status locally, penned the anthem Chicano Park Samba." 
By putting the story of Chicano Park — one of San Diego’s best-known oral traditions — to music, he has ensured that the struggle for the park land is not forgotten.
In 1971, Barrio Logan residents won
the rights to develop Chicano Park.
In the 1970s, the City of San Diego greenlighted development that residents feel decreased the quality of life in Logan Heights. Barrio Logan, as the neighborhood is affectionately called, is the heart of the Mexican community in San Diego. First, there was industry: junkyards, chrome-plating plants and the like. Next came the Interstate 5 extension and the Coronado Bay Bridge.
“It took out a lot of homes and destroyed the sense of community,” Aguilar said.
Seeking to regain the sense of community lost to development, residents and activists fought to reclaim a portion of land underneath the bridge that was slated for development as a California Highway Patrol substation. It took three years and a lot of negotiation with the city, but Barrio Logan residents finally won the right to develop a 4.5-acre plot of land that would become Chicano Park.
“They city was basically saying, ‘you’re not important to us; you’re dispensable,’” said Jacobo. “When the old ladies and young kids went to the park and started planting trees and holding hands, stopping the tractors, they were responding, ‘this is our home, you’re not just going to push us out.’”
“Chicano Park Samba” has been played at countless rallies and marches and for audiences including United Farm Workers leader César Chávez and Agricultural Workers Association founder Dolores Huerta, but Sanchez prefers to perform it at schools.
“We play the song in mostly educational settings,” he said. “We’re trying to educate young people about Chicano history and heritage.”
Today, the story is represented in mural form at Chicano Park, next to murals of national and international events. Muralists have used the bridge pylons to depict events like the founding of the UFW, the birth of Mexico City, the creation of the Chicano Free Clinic by Laura Rodriguez and the San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre of 1984.
These murals communicate a theme common throughout oral tradition: the struggle to preserve Mexican identity and cultural meaning despite political and economical marginalization, according to Richard Griswold del Castillo, retired chair of the SDSU Department of Chicana/Chicano Studies.
For the record
Though the traditions deliver a powerful impact when delivered in story, song and other oral means, people like Jacobo and Griswold del Castillo are working toward a day when the local Mexican immigrant experience is documented in print so that validation and identification are readily available.
Chicano Park murals communicate the struggle
to preserve identity and cultural meaning.
The stories depicted in Chicano Park murals have found a home on the Internet, thanks to Griswold del Castillo. More than 10 years ago, he became inspired by a class he was co-teaching to set up a Web site for Chicano Park with SDSU’s Instructional Technology Services department.
“It’s still up and is the only real Web site that has any history or images of Chicano Park,” he said.
With an increasing Web presence and a proliferation of books like “Memories of Bracero Workers” and Griswold del Castillo’s “Chicano San Diego: Cultural Space and the Struggle for Justice,” to be released in December, the academic silence on this facet of history is finally being broken.
Related information
Credits
- Story by Lauren Coartney
- Graphics by John Signer
- Photographs by Lauren Coartney
- Edited by Coleen L. Geraghty
Division of University Relations and Development
San Diego State University
5500 Campanile Drive
San Diego, CA 92182-8080
(619) 594-1476