LeBaron: Long history of immigration in Sonoma County still being written

The president’s Nov. 20 executive order on immigration will affect thousands of Sonoma County residents as it opens yet another chapter in our local history. It is an immigrant story that begins at a ranch northwest of Santa Rosa 72 years ago.

It was the summer of 1943 when a couple of chartered buses stopped at the Wood Ranch on River Road, where Talmage “Babe” Wood, a third-generation grower, managed his father’s hop yard and prune, apple and pear orchards.

The 125 young men who stepped off those buses and the others who followed constituted the first significant Latino presence in this area since the Bear Flaggers and the United States government seized California in the 1840s.

The new arrivals, most between the ages of 16 and 25, carried little more than the clothes on their backs and the straw hats that would become their trademark.

They heralded a change in demographics that would increase their number to 127,986. That is the current census figure for Sonoma County’s Latino population, representing 26 percent of the county’s total.

Getting from there to here, demographically, has been - like all immigrant stories - an epic journey.

Immigration has long been a partner of agriculture. Harvests depend on an available labor force.

In the first half of the 20th century, estimates placed the number of pickers needed in Sonoma County, for hops alone, at 10,000 - more than the population of Santa Rosa at the time. Labor statistics for the 1930s set the total number of harvest workers required here annually - picking not only hops but apples, prunes, pears and walnuts - at more than 12,000.

From the earliest times, farmers relied on recent immigrants: Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Filipinos, Dust Bowl migrants, some coming through labor contracts, some just going into the fields for a first job in a new country. Each has a unique story.

The young Mexicans who arrived at the Wood Ranch that day were braceros, a new word in the California lexicon. From the Spanish “brazo” for “arm,” it was coined to refer to those who work with their arms.

Each held -“clutched” might be the better word - a precious “green card” that had made their journey possible.

They came under the auspices of a landmark labor agreement between the U.S. and Mexico to aid the frantic farmers who had seen their workforce disappear.

Able-bodied men and women - some local, some migrant workers - had gone to fight World War II, either in the military or the shipyards.

In the case of the Japanese families who had followed the crops in California for four decades, there had been “relocation,” by another executive order, to detention camps in inland states.

The growers’ agreement with the government, as Wood recalled in a 1980s interview, was to provide food, housing and medical care.

“We put up tents with cots and blankets,” he said. “We built a community kitchen and a place to eat, we had a big cook stove and a cook who fixed three meals a day. It was a shaded campground. We drilled a well. And when they wanted to swim, we dammed Mark West Creek.”

Benny Carranza arrived in Sonoma County, where he would later make his home, in that first summer. In an interview 30 years ago, Carranza remembered that summer as “a beautiful time.” He talked about the hard-working men who felt lucky to be earning U.S. dollars to send home to families.

They were a proud and joyous community, Carranza remembered. There were parties and dances in off hours. “It was like a carnival, a fiesta,” on the ranches.

Within the year, as these happy reports (and money from the better, north-of-the-border wages) came home to Mexico from the green-card workers, the illegal border crossings began.

Those stories are not so happy.

Another term entered our vocabulary, one that became pejorative as numbers increased and isn’t heard in polite company anymore. That word would be “wetbacks,” used to describe Latinos who evaded border patrol by swimming or wading a boundary river.

Rafael Morales, who became a foreman at Windsor Vineyards and a respected leader in the Latino community, talked, in a 1980s interview, of crossing to work in the Imperial Valley in the harvest season, hiding by daylight, traveling at night, sleeping in haystacks, going hungry.

He was caught and sent back to Mexico 18 times before a chance encounter on a Sunday morning with a truck full of workers brought him to Healdsburg to pick prunes.

He had been digging potatoes in the Stockton area, working with a short-handled hoe (now illegal). He was coming from church, where, he said, he had prayed for a better job. He would come to feel that his prayers had been answered.

That first job was on the Grace Ranch in Alexander Valley. He remembered it vividly because “the boss bought hamburgers for everyone,” a kindness he found surprising in light of his previous employers.

Morales, who found year-round work on a Windsor ranch, was here for seven years before he was able to send for his family.

Lolita Tamayo talked about how she “came as a wetback” with husband Antonio and remembered “crying and hiding in a creek near Sebastopol, when I was eight months pregnant with our first child, praying that the immigration men would pass me by.“

These were the veterans talking 40 years later, the ones who became citizens, raised their families here. They told of the difficult early days, of the good work they had done - both braceros and undocumented immigrants - and of the respect they had earned.

The Central Americans who were coming in the ’80s, Morales reported with great pride, were telling growers they were Mexican “because everyone knows Mexicans are hard workers.”

So we come to the next part of the story, without any idea how it will end. Approximately 37,000 of the 128,000 Latinos living in Sonoma County today are foreign-born noncitizens, both legal and undocumented.

What changes will come of President Barack Obama’s executive order remains to be seen. There are, perhaps, 10,000 Latinos in this area who could find opportunity for a change of status in the new order.

Some will be able to stop fearing that they will be separated from family.

Others may have an opportunity to visit their hometowns - and come back.

For still others, there could one day be steps on a path to citizenship.

This story, the longest and most complex of all the Sonoma County immigration tales, is still being written.