Southern California
Los Angeles
San Pedro and Ventura County carry the record of Mexican-American displacement across Southern California, from Terminal Island in 1942 to the citrus-camp evictions of the 1970s.
Southern California carries two distinct displacement stories that share a single thread. San Pedro and Wilmington, at the port, lost the multi-ethnic waterfront in two waves. Terminal Island fell in February of 1942. The Harbor Freeway cut Mexican-American Wilmington a decade later. Ventura County, farther north, lost its farm-labor communities to ranch evictions, to flood-control takings along the Santa Clara River, and to the Channel Islands Harbor that the Army Corps scooped out of Chumash wetlands in 1960. The essays under this city hold the record of those losses and of the cooperatives, the strikes, and the community centers that survived them.
Places
Multi-ethnic
San Pedro
Two waves of demolition erased the harbor's multi-ethnic waterfront. Terminal Island fell in February of 1942. The Harbor Freeway cut Wilmington a decade later.
1899–1965
Mexican-American
Ventura County
La Colonia in Oxnard, Cabrillo Village in Saticoy, and the citrus-belt strikes in Fillmore, Santa Paula, and Rancho Sespe carry the Mexican-American record of Ventura County.
1898–1979