The creation of a Latino community on the North Coast

<p>The Sonoma County Museum exhibit “La Frontera del Norte” runs through Jan. 11. It include audio recordings from Gerald Cox and George Ortiz.</p><p>Sonoma County’s Latino history is written in two distinct chapters. The first begins in 1823 with the Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma and ends in 1846 with the Bear Flag Revolt and the U.S. acquisition of California in the Mexican War.</p><p>The results of the 23 brief years of Mexican rule in this area can be found in the history books, the ruins, the state park restorations and a scattered few descendants of the 24 Californio families who once owned most of the arable land in this county.</p><p>WHEN the Mexican War brought California to the United States — by fair means or foul — most of the land grantees and their families retreated south.</p><p>And for the next 100 years or more there was no significant Latino presence in this area.</p><p>The second chapter of our Hispanic history does not begin until the attack on Pearl Harbor that put us into World War II sent men to the military and the California Japanese to internment camps. Lobbied by frantic growers, the federal government scrambled to establish a program that would replace the missing workers and be ready for the harvest of ’43.</p><p>The contract labor agreement between the U.S. and Mexico was known as the Bracero Program (bracero from the Spanish word brazo for arm, meaning strong-armed worker).</p><p>They were the pioneers. They came in the summer of ’43, in special buses from the border, young men between the ages of 16 and 25 carrying little more than their precious “green cards,” the clothes they wore and the straw hats that would become their trademark. No sooner did the American dollars start flowing home to Mexico than the parade of undocumented workers started crossing the border. They worked where they could, dodging immigration by hiding in haystacks and ditches.</p><p>A worker with a green card could stay on at the end of the harvest season if a rancher agreed to employ him year-round. By the 1950s, some had sent for families and settled into a new life.</p><p>For the first time since the 1840s, Latinos were growing in population in Sonoma County. By the early 1960s, they had a champion. Or two.</p><p>IT’S DIFFICULT to say just how many Latinos there were in Sonoma County at the time fate (and the Catholic Church) delivered us Monsignor Gerald Cox.</p><p>Demographers agree that the census count was inaccurate because of the growing number of undocumented workers and how they were counted. Mexican-born residents were tallied with Filipinos, Pacific Islanders, etc. as “all other.”</p><p>When Cox arrived in Santa Rosa in 1962 after four years at Hanna Center in the Sonoma Valley, a rough calculation put the county’s Latino population at about 2,500 (in a total population of 147,000).</p><p>Cox, born in the East Bay to an upper middle class Irish family, had been named as chancellor of the new Santa Rosa Diocese. Influenced by his early association at an Oakland inner-city parish with Father Charles Phillipps, who had been a labor activist pastor of St. Sebastian’s in Sebastopol during the Depression years, Cox had learned Spanish and worked with urban Mexican families.</p><p>While he was still in Oakland in the late 1950s, he became acquainted with a small group of Mexican activists, including Cesar Chavez. In a Chavez biography by the late Santa Rosa writer Jacques Levy, the Mexican labor leader credits the organizing aid of Oakland’s Father Cox.</p><p>Monsignor Cox had barely moved in to the rectory at the newly designated St. Eugene’s Cathedral when he began asking, “Where does the Mexican, the Spanish-speaking, community hang out?”</p><p>It may well have been the first time the term “community” had been applied to Latinos locally and the answers he got were vague; but most led him to a Mexican restaurant at the end of Fourth Street where he met some of the farmworkers.</p><p>As the only Spanish-speaking priest in the diocese, he was soon officiating at marriages and funerals and quinceañera celebrations all the way to the Oregon border.</p><p>At the same time, he saw a notice in the newspaper saying that a Sonoma County social worker named George Ortiz was teaching an English class for Spanish speakers in Healdsburg. He called and invited Ortiz to lunch.</p><p>Both men remember where they met that day in ’62 — at the Sizzler in Coddingtown. That’s when and where the modern history of Latinos in the county begins.</p><p>Cox talked Ortiz into attending a MAPA (Mexican American Political Association) convention in Los Angeles.“He paid my way,” Ortiz remembers. “Ihad a wife and kids. I couldn’t afford to go.”</p><p>Oritz came back “all fired up” to organize. He was joined by some of the original braceros — Rafael Morales, Leo Ramirez, the Nieto family, the Vera family, Danny Novella.</p><p>“Jerry and I connected,” Ortiz remembers. “We started the United Latins scholarship with $500 Jerry said he got from a gambler, and we gave five $100 scholarships that first year. It wasn’t the money, it was a symbol of community support.”</p><p>Within a very few years, United Latins had 1,000 members. And Candido Morales, then a student at Sonoma State, organized MAYO, the Mexican-American Youth Organization.</p><p>Meanwhile, Ortiz and others were bringing Sonoma County workers to march with Chavez. And Monsignor Cox was out “picketing in my Roman collar.”</p><p>Meanwhile Ortiz was working on the formation of the North Bay Human Development Corp., a nonprofit for community work. It expanded to the California Human Development Corp., led by Ortiz as executive director until his retirement in 2004.</p><p>Resurrection Parish on Stony Point Road was added to the diocese, with Monsignor Cox as pastor. In Windsor another priest, Father Ken Bubb, was organizing what became Guadalupe Parish with a $10,000 grant to start a mission for Mexican-American workers.</p><p>THE ’60S and ’70s were a turbulent period in the nation, in the Mexican community and certainly in the Catholic Church.</p><p>By the mid-1970s, many priests and nuns, discouraged by the failed promises of Vatican II, had left the church, Cox and Bubb among them.</p><p>Today, at 83, Jerry Cox lives in Navarro with his wife, Kathleen. Their daughters Rebekah Rocha and Mary Ann Doble live in the area. Rebekah Rocha works as a bilingual coordinator for the Santa Rosa School District, causing her father to wonder, jokingly, if there is such a thing as “social activist DNA.”</p><p>George Ortiz, still volunteers on behalf of Latinos, serving on the board of the Health Initiatives of the Americas. He points out proudly that the United Latins scholarship is named for Gerald Cox. And Cox tells you, with pride, that Ortiz is Rebekah’s godfather.</p><p>These two old warriors are discouraged by what they see as a lack of initiative in the present-day Latino community.</p><p>Cox laments the absence of student organizations devoted to social justice and questions whether progress has been made.</p><p>Ortiz is more emphatic. “Political power is not given, it’s taken,” he says. “When we started United Latins, with about 2 percent of the population, our political clout was zero. Now it’s less than zero, and we are 22 or 23 percent of the population in this county.”</p><p>Recalling the credo of the ’60s, Ortiz recites: “We’re as good as anybody, and we can do anything. The only thing that stops us is ourselves.”</p>