From Spanish-Speaking to Latino: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in West Michigan, 1924-1978

Home , Dutch Americans, Latin American diaspora, Mexican Repatriation, Mutualista, Puerto Ricans, Teodoro Moscoso

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Delia Fernández, M.A.

Graduate Program in History

The Ohio State University

2015

Dissertation Committee:

Professor Lilia Fernández, Advisor

Professor Judy Tzu-Chun Wu

Professor Kevin Boyle

Delia Fernández

2015

Abstract

Though the concept of “Latino” is something that in today’s society is assumed to be a given category, it is necessary to examine how and why people from distinct ethnic groups embraced a panethnic Latino identity. This dissertation challenges the conventional knowledge on panethnic identity formation. Previous scholarship situates

Latino identity as political in nature and a result of 1960s and 1970s activism. My research on Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Grand Rapids, Michigan from the 1920s to the 1970s, shows that panethnicity is not only rooted in Spanish-speaking people’s relationship with and to the state, but rather also emerges from individuals’ desire for human connection. Their familiarity with religion, cultural practices, and shared language helped Mexicans and Puerto Ricans ward off loneliness in their new surrounding. Also, panethnic community and Latino identity formation emerged in Grand Rapids in the

1950s, well before other works suggest.

Though there was occasionally tension between some Mexicans and Puerto

Ricans, many established affective and kinship bonds through interactions in the Catholic

Church, on baseball fields, at dances, and even more when they intermarried. Their decades of social and cultural interaction and their shared experiences with discrimination, led this community in the late 1960s to create the Latin American Council and participate in the federal Model Cities program. This moment of unity was also ii marked by tension rooted in the complexity of Latino identity that rested on the varying intersections of ethnicity, class, and generation. While some community activists quarreled, others worked together within the Latin American Council to provide social services and cultural programming, greatly improving the quality of life in Grand Rapids.

Other activists worked closely with African Americans to change the City of Grand

Rapids’ hiring requirements and to pursue community control over policing of Black and brown communities.

As Latinos continue to grow in number and diversity, this dissertation serves as a model to understand how Latinos developed interethnic solidarities and intimate social relations that often served as the precursor to working towards collective goals.

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Dedication

For Porfirio and Juanita Murillo, Pío and Luisa Fernández, and sus compadres, comadres,

compais, y comais who took a chance on Grand Rapids in hopes of finding better lives

for themselves and for their families.

Acknowledgments

This project would not have been possible without various sources of support. I am especially thankful to Grand Valley State University for maintaining their McNair

Scholars Program in the face of constant threats to cut the program. McNair is a federally funded program to increase the number doctorate degrees awarded to students from underrepresented segments of society. This program changed my life. I am extremely grateful to Dolli Lutes and David Stark who instilled in me the confidence I needed to apply, attend, and finish graduate school. TRiO works.

I am thankful for the funding I have received to complete this project. Ohio

State’s History department, the Council of Graduate Students, the Tinker Foundation, the

Coca Cola Grant for Critical Difference for Women, and the Office of Diversity and

Inclusion (ODI) supplied me with funds for research and conference travel so that I could share my work and grow as a scholar. It was a pleasure working closely with Yolanda

Zepeda in ODI who created opportunities for me and was sure to put a smile on my face.

Thank you to the Latino Studies Program at Ohio State University for giving me an intellectual home. Theresa Delgadillo has been extremely helpful and thoughtful throughout my graduate school journey. I am so thankful for her mentoring and the time

v and energy she has spent on me. I must also thank the Multicultural Center and Indra

Leyva for their work in helping students of color feel safe and important at Ohio State.

I will never be able to repay Lilia Fernández for what she has done for me. I am extremely fortunate to have her as my mentor. She has guided me with patience and understanding throughout this journey. Dr. Fernández is the epitome of what an advisor should be. It is has been a great honor to be her graduate student. I also thank Judy Wu for her encouragement throughout these past years and her time in reading and commenting on every chapter of this dissertation. Her writing group kept me on track to finish this project in a timely manner and provided me with invaluable feedback. Thank you to Kevin Boyle for his guidance and for encouraging me to continue on with this project when I worried no one would care about Latinos in Grand Rapids.

This project would also not have been possible without the help of knowledgeable and patient archivists. I am indebted to the staff at Hunter College’s Center for Puerto

Rican Studies Library and Archives for making Centro feel like home while I was in New

York. I am very fortunate to have met Bill Cunningham at the Grand Rapids City

Archive. From the first time I walked into the archives in 2011, Bill welcomed me and found creative ways to help me document the earliest Spanish-speaking populations in

Grand Rapids. His more than 30 years of service to the City of Grand Rapids puts him in a league of his own. Thank you to Tim Gleisner and the staff at the Grand Rapids Public

Library for greeting me with smiling faces and helpful answers as I poured through their valuable documents. I also owe a special thanks to Matthew Daley, who I always seemed

vi to run into at the Grand Rapids Public Library. Thank you for all your tips and suggestions for bringing this project into fruition.

I would be remiss not to mention the oral history participants, without whom, this project could not have existed. These people had the courage to open their homes to me and reveal intimate, sometimes painful, memories of their journeys and experiences in

Grand Rapids. I admire their bravery and their resolve. For those reasons I dedicated this work to them. Thank you to Pete and Cruzita Gómez, Simon and Irma Aguilar, María

Ysasi, Maurelia Blakely, Juan Báez, Carolina Báez-Anderson, Abrán Martínez, Rosa

Perez, Carmen Bérrios, Miguel Bérrios, Rafael Hernández, Luz María Zambrana, Father

Theodore Kozlowski, Zoraida Sánchez, Lea Tobar, José Flores, Pablo Martínez, Richard

Campos, and Billy Tappin. It was an honor to record your stories. I hope this work does justice to your experiences.

Dissertating can be an isolating experience, but I have had the best of friends to keep me company on this long journey. I am especially thankful to the women of Sigma

Lambda Upsilon/ Señoritas Latinas Unidas Sorority Inc. The Hermanas of SLU have supported me from the application process to the present. Thank you to Mariana Saucedo, the soon-to-be Dr. Andrea Gómez-Cervantes, and Madeline Aguillón for their phone calls, impromptu road trips to Columbus, and reassuring words when I needed them the most. I also owe special thanks to my many sorority sisters around the country who, during my research trips, housed and fed me, drove me to the airport at inopportune times, taught me how to use the NYC subway, and who believed in me and encouraged me to finish.

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This journey would have been incredibly lonely if it were not for my friends within the OSU history department. Thank you to Patrick Potyondy, Adrienne Winans, and Peggy Solic for helping me transition to graduate school and our numerous study sessions. Leticia Wiggins has been the best travel partner. I am so happy that we had the opportunity to leave Dulles Hall and explore Puerto Rico, San Antonio, and St. Louis together. I owe a many thanks to Dr. Tyran Steward, Dawn Miles, Gisell Jeter-Bennett, and Dr. Robert Bennett III for making me feel comfortable and welcomed in Columbus and in the History Department.

The Latin@ Graduate/Professional Student Association a.k.a. the Graduate

Association of Latin@/Latin Americans has been my home base since I walked onto campus. A very special thanks goes to Dr. Danielle Olden who served as my History

Guru and opened so many doors for me because she firmly believes in “Each One Teach

One.” I am very happy to have met Dr. Eva Pietri and Dr. Gilianne Narcisse during my time with LGPSA. Thank you to Marisol Becerra for all the baked goods and conversations. I could write pages of thank you’s to Dr. Tiffany Lewis and Dr. Yalidy

Matos. Thank you for providing me with a safe place to be myself in graduate school. I look forward to creating so many more memories with you both. Special thanks are owed to Dr. Desmond Bourgeois and Daniel Leyva for the laughs and support. I am also grateful for the support I received from afar from Kelsey Calpito, Laura Mosely, and their families.

Lastly, I thank my family for helping me reach this point. Thank you to the

Fernández and Murillo families for always believing in me. Special thanks are owed to

viii my Titi Carmen Delia Fernández for showing me how to become a professional, educated

Latina. Thank you to my sister Dr. Lucy L. Ledesma for leading by example and succeeding in college so we all knew we could do it too. Thank you to Anbrocio, Emilio,

Diego, and Mateo for patiently waiting for me to finish this dissertation and come back home. I owe special thanks to my nephews and Gimely Reyes for reminding me of who was watching whenever I felt like quitting. Thank you to my brother, Professor Juan

Fernández, for in-depth, intellectual discussions about teaching, our work, and making this world a better place. I am so grateful for you, Carrie, and Luís. Thank you to my baby brother, the soon-to-be Dr. Nicolás Fernández for showing me how hard one person can work to achieve their goals. Lastly, thank you to my parents for always encouraging me to follow my dreams; teaching me that through God all things are possible, instilling in me a pride of who I am and where I come from; working long hours to give me the best education; understanding how broke a graduate student can really be; and nourishing my soul and my stomach on my trips home. I am incredibly blessed to have you all by my side.

Vita

2010...... B.A. History, Grand Valley State University

2012...... M.A. History, Ohio State University

2011 to present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of History, Ohio State University

Publications

“Becoming Latino: Mexican and Puerto Rican Community Formation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1926-1964.” Michigan Historical Review 39, no.1 (2013): 71-100.

Fields of Study

Major Field: History

Table of Contents

ABSTRACT ...... II

DEDICATION ...... IV

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... V

TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... XI

LIST OF FIGURES ...... XIII

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 1: MEXICAN MIGRATION TO WEST MICHIGAN, 1926-1944 ...... 28

CHAPTER 2: THE PUERTO RICAN DIASPORA IN MICHIGAN, 1944-1964 ...... 73

CHAPTER 3: MEXICANS AND PUERTO RICANS: FORMING A LATINO COMMUNITY

...... 110

CHAPTER 4: PARITY, NOT CHARITY: LATINOS AND THE FIGHT FOR EQUAL

REPRESENTATION IN CAP, MODEL CITIES, AND THE LATIN AMERICAN COUNCIL

...... 156

CHAPTER 5: THE LATIN AMERICAN COUNCIL: LA RAZA AND THE WAR ON

POVERTY, 1971-1973 ...... 196

CHAPTER 6: POLICING, CITY JOBS, AND INTERRACIAL ORGANIZING FOR

COMMUNITY CONTROL: 1967-1973 ...... 227

EPILOGUE: LATINOS IN GRAND RAPIDS, 1974-2014: FIGHTING WITH “PRIDE AND

HOPE” ...... 266

REFERENCES ...... 284

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List of Figures

Figure 1: Map of Grand Rapids ...... 38

Figure 2: Undated Photo of Daniel Vasquez ...... 52

Figure 3: Daniel and Guadalupe Vargas Pictured with Michigan Governor G. Mennen

Williams, circa 1950 ...... 53

Figure 4: Southeast Grand Rapids ...... 66

Figure 5: Julio Vega, circa 1948 ...... 103

Figure 6: Map of Grand Rapids ...... 124

Figure 7: Roosevelt Park and the Grandville Avenue Area ...... 126

Figure 8: The Mexican Patriotic Committee, 1952 ...... 138

Figure 9: The Fernández Bar's Float in the Mexican Independence Day Parade, 1971 . 140

Figure 10: Amelia and Juan Báez, Undated ...... 145

Figure 11: Amelia Báez at Work, Undated ...... 146

Figure 12: Domingo and Ines Silva with Children and Grandchildren, mid-1950s ...... 147

Figure 13: War on Poverty Organizational Flow Chart ...... 175

Figure 14: Jim Mercanelli and Rex D. Larson in front of Untitled Mural, 1986 ...... 266

Figure 15: Untitled Mural, 2015 ...... 266

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Introduction

Latino music echoes through open windows on warm summer evenings, the Caribbean sound of salsa, the polka-like rhythm of the music of southern Texas, the mariachi music of Mexico…

It is a community within a community, a cultural phenomenon separate from the mainstream. Driving along its side streets is like slipping into another time, another country…This is “Grandville.”

Jim Mercanelli, “A Story of Pride and Hope” The Grand Rapids Press, July 27, 1986.

In 1986, Grand Rapids Press reporter Jim Mercanelli and photographer Rex D.

Larsen spent three months interviewing and photographing the Latino population in

Grand Rapids, Michigan. Their work resulted in a series of exposés entitled “Hispanics:

A Story of Pride and Hope.” Mercanelli produced an overview of the “Growing Number of Latinos” in West Michigan and several shorter pieces on Mexican Americans, Puerto

Ricans, and other Latino ethnic groups. Topics ranged from personal tales of overcoming obstacles in migration, the role that families played in ensuring survival in a new location, and spotlights on long-time community members. Mercanelli noted that by

1986, there were people “from a majority of the 21 Spanish-speaking countries” living in

Grand Rapids. He conceded that the “the word Hispanic describes a broad spectrum of

Spanish-speaking people,” but he did not discuss how these Mexicans, Puerto Ricans,

Cubans, or Central Americans began to identify themselves as Latinos—one, albeit

1 heterogeneous, group. In Grand Rapids, the answer to that question was at least sixty years in the making.1

Though these diverse groups lived in various areas around Grand Rapids,

Mercanelli centered his piece on the Grandville Avenue corridor, where the majority was concentrated. He gave snippets of this neighborhood’s rich history, noting that the Dutch and Italians once lived on these streets, before Latinos arrived. Located on the Southwest side of Michigan’s second largest city, “Grandville” as it is known, had been home to

Mexicans who arrived in the 1920s. Puerto Ricans joined them in the 1950s. At the time, together they numbered about 5,000 out of a total population of 160,000. Though

Mercanelli labeled these populations as Latino and Hispanic, when they arrived they did not identify themselves as such. They were “Mexican” or “Tejano” or “Puerto Rican”— not Latino. Within years of their first encounters with one another they identified as

“Spanish-speaking,” but their connections went far beyond language.

This dissertation documents the processes and negotiations that encouraged a collective identity among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, the two largest groups of Latinos in Grand Rapids, throughout the 20th century. I use sociologist Felix Padilla’s framework to analyze these populations. He argues, “the Latino identity formation process entails, at its most basic form, a process through which two or more Spanish-surnamed ethnics

1 Jim Mercanelli, “A Story of Pride and Hope” The Grand Rapids Press, July 27, 1986. By the 1980s, the terms Latino and Hispanic had essentially become synonymous in the mainstream media. Among Latino activists, many rejected the term Hispanic because of its connection to Spain and Spanish culture. Instead, they argued that Latino placed an emphasis on Latinoamerica or Latin America and its inhabitants shared history as a colonized people.

2 cross their individual group boundaries and seek solidarity as a wider Latino unit.”2

Moreover, I examine his concept of Latino Ethnic Mobilization, which places analytical emphasis on the collective actions of the group.3 Though he sees identity and mobilization as two different processes, I conceptualize mobilization as an expression of identity.4 The term “Spanish-speaking” highlights these two groups’ most obvious connection in their identity, but in Grand Rapids their relationships and interactions went far beyond their linguistic linkage. I examine Mexican nationals, Mexican Americans from Texas (Tejanos), and Puerto Ricans, who settled in Grand Rapids in the 1920s,

1940s, and 1950s, respectively, as labor migrants. I also analyze their encounters in agricultural fields and factories, their community formation, and interethnic organizing to answer the following question: how and why did these groups maintain their ethnic identities but also embrace a Latino identity?

The historical literature on Latinos in the U.S. has focused primarily either on populations in the Southwest or the East Coast.5 As a result, such studies have analyzed

2 Felix M. Padilla, Latino Ethnic Consciousness: The Case of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago (Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 3 3 Padilla, 8. I utilize Padilla’s concept of Latino Ethnic Consciousness to evaluate the actions of this community. Some of the subjects in this study might have had conflicts with members of the other ethnic group, but I am less concerned with those dynamics. The evidence from various sources shows that despite this tension, they acted panethnically. 4 Padilla sees Latino ethnic identity as a basic identification with a specific language population and Latino ethnic mobilization as a series of interactions—both occurring as separate processes. He goes on to argue that these interactions are part of an influence of “certain governmental and public policies.” He focuses on external and national forces. In recognizing that Latino Ethnic Mobilization is an expression of Latino ethnic identity, I conceptualize these processes as intrinsically motivated and the product of local circumstances. This introduction and chapter 3 discuss how these groups created and embraced a Latino identity for both internal and external processes, but I stress these groups’ agency in forming Latinidad. 5 For texts on Mexicans in the Southwest, see Rodolfo F. Acuña, A Community Under Siege: A Chronicle of the East Los Angeles River (Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Research Center, Publications, University of California, 1984).José Alamillo, Making Lemonade out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a California Town 1880-1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2006); Camille Guerin Gonzales, Mexican

Latino ethnic groups in isolation from one another. “From Spanish-Speaking to Latino” intervenes in this field with a focus on the Midwest as a site of study and adds to work on these populations in this area.6 It highlights a unique region in the country where

Mexicans and Puerto Ricans encountered one another and interacted with each other in the mid-twentieth century.

Workers and the American Dream: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900-1939 (Rutgers 1994); David Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Armando Navarro, The Immigration Crisis: Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Armando Navarro, The Immigration Crisis: Nativism, Armed Vigilantism, and the Rise of a Countervailing Movement (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2009); Pablo Mitchell, Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880- 1920. (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2005);idem. West of Sex: Making Mexican America, 1900- 1930 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012); Douglas Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Monica Perales, Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2010); George Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles 1900-1945 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995); Samuel Truett,and Elliot Young, Continental Crossroads : Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.- Mexico Borderlands (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). For texts on Puerto Ricans on the East coast, see Julio Morales, Puerto Rican Poverty and Migration: We Just Had to Try Elsewhere (Westport, CT: Praeger,1986); Virginia Sánchez-Korral, From Colonia to Community: the History of Puerto Ricans in New York City (Berkley: University of California Press) Lorrin Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City; (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Carmen Theresa Whalen, Vásquez-Hernández, Victor, The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives (Philadelphia; Temple University, 2005); Carmen Theresa Whalen From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economics (Philadelphia: Temple University, 2001). 6 This work builds upon the following research on Mexicans in the Midwest, Gabriela Arredondo, Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and nation, 1916-1939 (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2003); Lilia Fernández, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Dennis Nodin Valdes, Al Norte: Agricultural Workers in the Great Lakes Region, 1917-1970 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991); Zaragosa Vargas, Proletarians of the North: A History of Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit and the Midwest1917-1933 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1993). Likewise, it builds upon studies of Puerto Ricans in the Midwest: Gina M. Pérez. The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families (Berkeley: University of California, 2004); Merida Rúa A Grounded Identitad: Making New Lives in Chicago’s Puerto Rican Neighborhoods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). This work also adds to the few works that examine Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. Lilia Fernández, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Post War Chicago, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), Eileen Findlay, We are Left Here Without a Father, Felipe Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites, Marc Rodríguez, Tejano Diaspora; Dennis Nodín Valdés, Al Norte: Agricultural Workers in the Great Lakes Region, 1917-1970, 1st ed, Mexican American Monographs, no. 13 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991).

Unlike Chicago or even Detroit, Grand Rapids’ smaller population and the size of the city forced Mexicans and Puerto Ricans to occupy the same neighborhoods. My attention to this relatively modest-sized urban center allows me to take a more intimate view of relations between these populations’ movements and relationships. Moreover,

Latinos continuously engaged with the surrounding agricultural periphery while living in

Grand Rapids. These groups did not abandon the fields all together when they found industrial work. Examining their mobility allows me to blur the lines between urban and rural histories.7

The Furniture City in the Interwar Period

Grand Rapids was unlike other Midwest cities in terms of its economic offerings.

Mexicans who arrived in the 1920s likely recognized Grand Rapids’ lack of prevalent industrial employment opportunities. Unlike Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, or Gary,

Indiana, steel and automotive industries did not dominate the economy of this city of

168,000. With the absence of such prevalent industries and their unions, the city was not considered a Democratic stronghold. Instead, furniture manufacturing provided Grand

Rapidians with jobs and only high-skilled laborers had syndicate representation. 8 Though

7 There are two major works that have examined Latinos in Michigan. Dennis Valdés’ Al Norte and Zaragosa Vargas’ Proletariats of the North. The former is an examination of agricultural labor migration and the latter looks at industrial Detroit. A study of Grand Rapids’ intervenes in the previous literature by providing an examination of migrants who lived and worked in both urban and rural areas. Other works on Mexicans and Puerto Ricans include Tejano Diaspora, which examines Milwaukee. Eileen Findlay’s work on Puerto Ricans in Saginaw includes a section on Mexican and Puerto Rican organizing. 8 For information on the furniture industry see Christian G. Carron, Grand Rapids Furniture: The Story of America’s Furniture City (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Public Museum of Grand Rapids, 1998); Thomas R. Dilley, Grand Rapids: Community and Industry (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2006); Jeff Kleiman, Strike! How the Furniture Workers Strike of 1911 Changed Grand Rapids (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Grand Rapids

5 this was a large industry, unions excluded the unskilled, a sizeable proportion of workers.

Thus these organizations did not have as large of influence in Grand Rapids. The agricultural areas surrounding Grand Rapids offered other employment opportunities, while the railroad industry presented other low wage employment options.

For those immigrants and migrants who arrived in Grand Rapids in the 20th century, they found a city where religion served as a center of daily life. In the early

1920s, native whites and Dutch immigrants constituted the majority in the city of about

137,000 people. Similar to Chicago and Detroit, Scandinavian, Polish, Lithuanian, Greek,

Italian, Irish, and German immigrants also lived in Grand Rapids. A population of a few hundred African Americans arrived in the city in the late 1800s and even more settled during the First Great Migration, bringing their population to 1,500 in the 1930s.9 Despite the variety of European ethnic groups, the Dutch in Grand Rapids quickly took up prominent positions within the city’s leadership. Their close relationship with the moral traditionalism of the Christian Reformed Church played a central role in the city’s

Historical Commission, 2006); Norma Lewis, Grand Rapids: Furniture City (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2008); For information on Grand Rapids during war time: Richard H. Harms and Robert W. Viol, Grand Rapids Goes to War: The 1940s Homefront (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Grand Rapids Historical Society, 1993); Randal Maurice Jelks, African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); For post-War histories on Grand Rapids see Gordon Olson and Susan Lovell, Grand Rapids, a City Renewed: A History since World War II; Todd Robinson, A City Within a City. For overview surveys of Grand Rapids see Z. Z. Lydens, ed., The Story of Grand Rapids (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregal, 1966); Gordon L. Olson, Flight to Freedom: The Story of the Vietnamese of West Michigan (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Grand Rapids Historical Commission, 2004); (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Grand Rapids Historical Commission, 1996); Gordon L. Olson, A Grand Rapids Sampler (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Grand Rapids Historical Commission, 1992); Linda Samuelson and Andrew Schrier, Heart & Soul : The Story of Grand Rapids Neighborhoods (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2003); Reinder Van Til and Gordon L. Olson, Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Grand Rapids (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2007). For histories on African Americans in Grand Rapids, see Jelks, African Americans in the Furniture City and Todd Robinson, A City within a City: The Black Freedom Struggle in Grand Rapids. 9 April Donaker, Nilsa Griffifth, Mary Ann Lowing, Kathy Meser, Mary Morris, Angelic Norman, Mary Ohm, Evelyn Ortiz, Jennifer Schapiro, Inez Smith, Carol Van Eck, and Maryilyn Wolma, Grand Rapids and Its People (Grand Rapids: Grand Rapids Historical Commission, 2003).

6 culture. As historian Randall Jelks concluded, for African Americans, “the quest for middle-class status based on religious notions about equality and self-accountability before God…” dictated Black experiences in the city. Longtime resident and African

American, John Melvin Burgess described Grand Rapids as “a clean, law-abiding,

Republican city…living under strict Calvinism.”10 Local residents practiced a religious conservativism that helped garner strong support for prohibition and led them to close entertainment venues on Sundays to preserve the Sabbath, for example.11 These conditions might have deterred people from settling in Grand Rapids, but larger, structural forces brought Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans to West

Michigan.

The Antecedents of Labor Migration

Long before Mexicans and Puerto Ricans arrived in Michigan, U.S. imperialist endeavors set these populations on a path of migration. Military engagements in Mexico and Puerto Rico created instability in those regions. These interactions also reinforced a notion that the people living there were racially inferior. Thus, Mexicans and Puerto

Ricans could be used for arduous, low paying work. The Mexican American War in 1848 resulted in the ceding of more than one third of Mexico’s territory to the United States and cemented a pattern of United States’ predatory relationship with its neighbors’

10 Randall Jelks, African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2/006), xii. 11 For more information on the Dutch and religious conservatism, see David Zwart, “Constructing the Homeland: Dutch Americans and the Netherlands Information Bureau during the 1940s” in Michigan Historical Review, vol. 33, no 2. (Fall 2007) 88.

7 resources, both its land and people. Some historians argue that the war and its consequences amounted to a colonial relationship between the United States and Mexico and more importantly, made Mexicans living in the United States an internally colonized people.12 The legacies of conquest and colonialism positioned Mexican Americans at the bottom (with African Americans) of the local social order in Texas. Historians have documented discrimination against Mexicans in public accommodations and also cited

Mexican American’s earnings as eight times lower than the standard cost of living. 13

These low wages were doled out as a part of a dual wage system that reified Mexican

Americans’ position as second-class citizens.14

The War of 1898 among Spain, the United States, Cuba, and the Philippines resulted in Puerto Rico’s perpetual status as a semi-colonial territory. After the change from Spanish to American control, new laws prohibited Puerto Rico from making its own trade agreements with other countries, economically binding the island to the United

States. Moreover, with help from Puerto Rico’s new American government, U.S. companies capitalized on the colonial relationship between the mainland and the island.

Proprietors in the sugar industry purchased large landholdings, causing small subsistence farmers to become wage laborers and ultimately set the island on a path of a sugar

12 See Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle toward Liberation, (San Francisco: Canfield Pr, 1972) 3- 4; Mario Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality (Notre Dame: University ofNotre Dame Press, 1979). Though Emma Perez argues that Mexicans 13 Cynthia Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, 1st ed (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009). 14 Mario Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979). Orozco, 23.

8 monoculture. This had devastating results by the 1930s. The Great Depression compounded the previous years’ damage to the export-oriented economy. 15

These colonial projects also had other effects: they allowed Mexicans, Mexican

Americans, and Puerto Ricans to move with ease across and within U.S. borders. Though

Mexico did not have a traditional colonial relationship with the United States like Puerto

Rico, the two countries shared borders (as a result of conquest), which allowed for people to pass fluidly across the border in the late 1800s and early 1900s. During the first major wave of immigration from Mexico in the 1910s and 1920s, immigration policies for

Mexicans crossing the United States’ southern border were lax compared to those for

Europeans or Chinese immigrants.16 This was possible at the urging of U.S. employers.

They welcomed Mexican workers with virtually no immigration restrictions until 1929 when congress created the Border Patrol to enforce illegal entry laws that they created in

1924.17 Puerto Ricans, upon whom the U.S. government imposed citizenship through the

1917 Jones Act, and Mexican Americans faced no immigration restrictions at all. 18 These colonial and semi-colonial relationships made these populations part of an accessible and attractive labor pool.

15 See Korral, 19-23, Gonzalez, chapter 3. 16 The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and 1924 Johnson-Reed Act instituted restrictions against Chinese and European immigrants to which Mexicans were not subjected. See Chapter 1 more information about Mexicans and immigration law. 17 Ngai,60. 18 For information on migration procedures for Puerto Ricans before 1917, see Sam Erman “Meanings of Citizenship in the U.S. Empire: Puerto Rico, Isabel Gonzalez, and the Supreme Court, 1898 to 1905,” Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Summer, 2008), pp. 5-33. See also chapter one in Lorrin Thomas’ Puerto Rican Citizen.

Colonialism and the ease of citizenship spurred labor recruitment from Texas,

Mexico, and Puerto Rico.19 Since the turn of the century, employers heavily recruited

Mexicans in Texas to work in places across the country, including Michigan. The

“segregation, poverty, and the racialized worldview of Texas,” as historian Marc

Rodríguez describes, motivated them to leave as well.20 In Grand Rapids, Tejanos constituted the majority of the Spanish-speaking. With the onset of World War II and subsequent labor shortages across the nation, the United States government formalized the technologies of imperialism and racism with their state-sponsored labor migration programs in Mexico and Puerto Rico. Both the Bracero Program (1944-1964) and

Operation Bootstrap or Manos al Obra (1948-1964) were bilateral arrangements, but this did not necessarily make the negotiating parties equal. The Mexican government conceded to the United States’ labor demands, but it did so considering the pecuniary plight of its people.21 Likewise, the insular government worked alongside the United

19 For more information on the relationship between colonialism and labor migrations see the following works: Pedro A. Caban, Constructing a Colonial People: Puerto Rico and the United States, 1898-1932 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999); Catherine Ceniza Choy. Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American history, American Encounters/Global Interactions (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Jorge Duany, “A Transnational Colonial Migration: Puerto Rico’s Farm Labor Program.” New West Indian Guide 84, no. 3–4 (2010): 225–51.Dorothy B. Fujita-Rony, American Workers, Colonial Power: Philippine Seattle and the Transpacific West, 1919-1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World. Minneapolis; (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich, Labor immigration Under Capitalism: Asian workers in the United States before World War II. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 20 Marc Rodríguez, The Tejano Diaspora, 6. 21 For more information on the Bracero Program, see the following: Kitty Calavita, Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S. After the Law. (New York: Routledge, 1992.); Deborah Cohen,Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Lilia Fernández, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Post War Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), chapter 1; David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Ana Elizabeth Rosas, Abrazando El Espíritu:

States government to fashion a plan to address the island’s economic woes. Politicians made this decision, however, in light of devastating economic conditions on the island.

Mexico and Puerto Rico did not truly have an equal choice in accepting the terms of these joint agreements. Though there were a limited number of Mexican nationals who settled in Grand Rapids due to the Bracero Program, many Puerto Ricans found this West

Michigan city through the help of Puerto Rican government agencies. With increasing turmoil in Mexico, economic depravation in Puerto Rico, and oppressive racism in Texas, migration to Michigan, among other places, served as a survival strategy. These groups became an attractive labor source for low-wage, arduous work on Michigan’s fields and in factories.22

Grand Rapids in the Post War Era

World War II and the immediate post-war period brought large demographic shifts and thus hardened Grand Rapids’ racial order. The furniture industry faded from importance in the region in the 1930s with the Great Depression, but the war brought an economic revival to the area as it did for other urban North cities.23 The local

Bracero Families Confront the US-Mexico Border; (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2014). 22 See Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997) for information on African American and European immigrant farmworkers. 23 See the following studies on the post war industrial north: Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Kevin Boyle, “The Ruins of Detroit: Exploring the Urban Crisis in the Motor City,” Michigan Historical Review 27 (Spring, 2001): 109-127; Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Kevin

11 government’s commitment to business success at all costs allowed total war mobilization to bring the city’s few manufacturing plants and the remaining furniture industries to full employment. This increase in industrial jobs pulled the remaining European immigrants out of the fields, and Mexicans and Puerto Ricans replaced them. Some of the latter groups were able to secure their own positions in the war industry, and many more secured those positions after the war was over.

African Americans encountered a rigid racial hierarchy in Grand Rapids. The

Black population doubled in this period as they sought relief from the South in Northern cities during the Second Great Migration. They quickly learned, however, that

“whites…[modified] the system of racial oppression,” in Grand Rapids in the face of any

Black challenges to the status quo, according to historian Todd Robinson.24 Randall

Jelks, the only other historian of Black Grand Rapids, also concluded “Blacks and whites lived in relative harmony in Grand Rapids because the population base of African

Americans remained small until the 1950s.”25 This peace rested on a rigid hierarchy that amounted to segregation in housing and education and discrimination in employment for

African Americans.

Part of this racial caste system included Europeans’ solidification as a white racial group in the post war era. Through federal policies in housing and war participation,

Europeans succeeded in their quest for assimilation and ultimately secured their place as

Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 24 Robinson, ix. 25 Jelks, xvi.

12 whites.26 Though many Europeans entered into a higher position on the local racial hierarchy than African Americans and Latinos upon their arrival, it was not until World

War II when the emphasis of their identity was no longer on their ethnic or national origins.27 In a time of hardened racial classifications, Europeans were white. The City of

Grand Rapids adopted, as Robinson stated, “an unofficial motto of ‘what’s good for business is good for the community,’” which privileged those white residents, while marginalizing Blacks, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans in opportunities for housing, education, and jobs.

Latino Ethnic Identity and Mobilization

The social context in Grand Rapids provides an ideal site for studying panethnic

Latino identity formation. I employ Felix Padilla’s identification of internal and external factors for forming panethnic identity among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago. I use that framework to characterize the interactions those same groups had in Grand

Rapids. Shared racialization served as an important external factor in encouraging these groups to identify as “Latino” in this conservative city. Similar to other Northern cities’

26 See the following works for information on whiteness and racial formation: Frye Jacobson, Matthew Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2008), Gerstle, Gary American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 2002), Katznelson, Ira When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America (New York: W.W. Norton Press, 2005) 27 I draw on Thomas Gugliemo’s work on Italians in Chicago for this framework. See Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). The Dutch, the predominating immigrant group in Grand Rapids, would have been both superior in color and race, using Guglielmo’s framework, compared to their Eastern and Southern European counterparts. In Grand Rapids, the Dutch would have been “white on arrival” though most of the city’s other immigrant groups would have had to wait until mid-century to be considered in the white and in the same, superior ranks as Western European immigrants. To be clear, however, upon their arrival, all of these immigrants were higher on a racial hierarchy than Latinos and African Americans.

13 racial dynamics, Grand Rapids’ black-white racial dichotomy essentially othered

Mexicans and Puerto Ricans as not white, yet also not Black. I use Lilia Fernández’s concept of brown to denote the ambiguous racial position these groups occupied due to their use of Spanish and varying skin tones.28 While Fernández analyzes a much larger city and its racial dynamics on a larger scale, the relatively small size of Grand Rapids and its Spanish-speaking population afford me a more intimate view of the ways that

Mexicans and Puerto Ricans negotiated their racial positions. The timing of their arrival at midcentury, when racial boundaries were solidifying, offers a unique context to examine how Mexicans’ and Puerto Ricans’ racialization led them to socially identify as panethnic.

A shared culture, considered an internal factor in Padilla’s framework, brought

Mexicans and Puerto Ricans together as well. Although these groups did not have identical cultural practices, the existence of some similarities provided sufficient material for moments of cultural recognition. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans both spoke Spanish, although differences in dialect existed between and within both groups. Moreover, the majority of the community in the 1950s practiced Catholicism, which ultimately led them to share space in a religious context and later in social settings as well.

A large city such as Chicago, with various neighborhoods, permitted Mexicans and Puerto Ricans to maintain separate spaces. As a small, Midwestern city, Grand

Rapids provides a model of how to study the intimate sociality of identity formation.

28 Lilia Fernández is clear in arguing that brown is not necessarily evident of racial triangulation (Black- white-brown), but rather refers to their fluid position between Black and white. Fernández, Brown in the Windy City, 7. More discussion of this concept in Grand Rapids follows in chapter 3.

Mexicans’ and Puerto Ricans’ shared social class brought them to the area via labor migration and the geographical limits of a small city put the two groups in direct contact with one another. Thus, I argue that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans cultivated panethnic affinities, often out of the simple desire to build social connections with fellow Spanish- speaking residents.

This work diverges from the popular theories on panethnic identity formation.

Most scholars, including Padilla, argue that Latinidad (Latino identity) emerged in the

1970s in a purely political context as a result of the discrimination Latinos faced and the mobilization they pursued to remedy such grievances. In focusing on the convivencia, everyday interactions between these groups, this work proves that Latino identity is not solely politically motivated.

Moreover, this work argues that the Midwest is a primary site for Latino identity formation. The presence of interethnic marriages as early as the 1950s and MexiRican children, whom Frances Aparicio refers to as “interlatino subjects,” also supports this argument.29 Other works on this topic have often ignored this geographical region and the

1950s as a plausible period for panethnic identity. Overlooking the Midwest, sociologist

G. Christina Mora stated, “during the 1960s, Mexicans Americans, Cuban Americans, and Puerto Ricans made up the majority of the Latin American diaspora, but they lived in

29 Aparicio, Frances R. Cultural Twins and National Others Literacy [I.E. Literary] Allegories of Interlatino/a Subjectives. (Santa Cruz, CA: Chicano/Latino Research Center, Merrill College, University of California, 2000).

15 separate worlds in separate parts of the country.”30 Mexicans and Puerto Ricans lived together in the Midwest, especially in Chicago, however, since mid-century.31

This work elucidates how Latinos lived in a conservative city. Activism in small and restrictive environments, though not likely considered radical compared to larger locales, has been overlooked in scholarly literature.32 This dissertation gives a voice to people who struggled with both macro and micro-level aggressions without the population or resources for large-scale resistance movements. Todd Robinson wrote that despite the oppression they faced, African Americans managed to lead lives of “dignity and meaning” in Grand Rapids.33 Embracing Latinidad helped Mexicans and Puerto

Ricans to do this as well.

The War on Poverty and Latinidad

The small size of Grand Rapids also allowed me to construct a study that employs both a bottom-up and top-down lens. By the 1960s and 1970s, Grand Rapids was in need of federal aid. Latinos looked towards WOP programs to help fight the discrimination they faced. In examining the War on Poverty (WOP) in Grand Rapids, I utilize multiple

30 G. Cristina Mora, Making Hispanics, 2. A noticeable Cuban population settled in Grand Rapids in the 1970s. My focus, however, is on how Latinidad changed among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans over the course of the 20th century. Therefore, Cubans are out of my scope of analysis. 31 See Padilla, Latino Ethnic Consciousness; Nicholas De Genova, and Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship, (New York: Routledge, 2003); Rúa, “Colao Subjectivities.” 32 See Hassan Jeffries’ book on Lowndes County, Alabama for an example of how small, restrictive locales can illuminate larger histories. In comparison to Selma, Birmingham, or Memphis, Lowndes was much smaller, but the circumstances allowed its residents to do something unlike any other city. The larger proportion of African Americans in this small area, with help form other activist groups, helped them to elect members of the Black Panther political party to the local government. This was something that occurred in a specific, conservative, racist environment. 33 Robinson, xiv.

16 vantage points to understand how Latinos interacted with these initiatives. I frame their participation in the WOP in terms of their continued engagement in panethnic relationships, which this community expressed long before the establishment of these federal programs. I ground identity negotiations in the actions and words of grassroots, historical actors. I do, however, examine the War on Poverty’s records from the top- down, but to establish that the WOP provided Latinos with the opportunity to discuss how to best serve their community.

Engagement with WOP agencies revealed fissures in the Latino community. The tension occurred within the Latin American Council (LAC), a panethnic and grassroots organization committed to improving the lives of Latinos in the Grandville Avenue area.

The clash centered on the federal funds that became available and whether or not the

LAC should accept them. Some people feared cooptation from the city government, which administered the funds. This resulted in public battles among some Mexicans and between some Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in the organization.

In showing that conflict can coexist with collaboration, I offer a new understanding of

Latinidad. I build upon Merida Rúa’s point that cooperation and tension are “part and parcel” of Latinidad. Scholars have pointed to disharmonious moments among Latinos as proof positive that Latinidad is simply impossible.34 To be sure, only focusing on the cooperation among these groups stresses homogeneity and erases their inherent differences. Instead, this work recognizes that Latinidad is a dynamic concept, and it

34 See Christina Beltran, The Trouble with Unity, Suzanne Oboler, Ethnic Lables Latino Lives. These works focus on the discontent among Latinos as proof positive that Latinidad is not a feasible conception.

17 requires continuous renegotiation as the context changes. In Grand Rapids, the availability of federal funds corresponded with an influx of more Mexicans and Puerto

Ricans in the late 1960s and early 1970s, thus necessitating renegotiation of intergroup relations. Reframing the way we characterize Latinidad gives us an expanded view of these groups’ relationships. It also provides a lens to analyze their organizing efforts.

This work shows that the presence of tension does not negate interethnic cooperation, but shows us how Latinos understand their identity and needs and operationalize as a singular panethnic group.

The tensions over War on Poverty funds did not occur only among Latinos, but also between Latinos and African Americans. Latino activists negotiated with the African

American leadership of the Model Cities program in regards to equal funding for Blacks and Latinos. This particular War on Poverty program intended to stop urban decay through an influx of dollars to bolster local initiatives and helped give poor people access to their local government. Both Latinos and African Americans worked to strategically distance themselves from one another. This work considers these conflicts as political tools activists use to maximize the resources they could demand for their communities.

After both the local and federal government supported discriminatory policies and deprived these groups of their most basic needs for years, Blacks and Latinos used varying strategies to ensure that they met the needs of their communities.

In the 1970s, many whites in Grand Rapids similar to those in Northern and

Southern cities alike resisted any changes the Civil Rights Movement and the War on

Poverty attempted to bring. Todd Robinson points out that “racial convservatism formed

18 a powerful obstructionist dimension during the postwar campaign for civil rights in the urban North. Such cities as Grand Rapids provided a controlled environment for the augmentation of statewide conservatism [and] served as relief valves for racial reform.”35

Moreover the municipality failed to recognize that it was complicit in creating the conditions that Latinos and Blacks were protesting. The city government’s commitment to the local business community prevented them from taking any substantive measures to change this. Todd Robinson notes that the “city officials and business leaders routinely sacrificed Black needs and interests for the ‘good’ of the larger community.”36 If he had examined Latinos, he would have found a similar case. The area’s record in electoral politics attests to their affinity for socially conservative, big business politicians. For example, Kent County, the city in which Grand Rapids is located, voted for Republican presidents from 1956 to 2008, with the only exceptions being John F. Kennedy, Lyndon

B. Johnson, and Barack Obama.37 The county staunchly supported their native son,

Gerald R. Ford, when he lost to Jimmy Carter. In the 1960s and 1970s, the city’s conservative culture resonated with the national backlash against the Civil Rights

Movement. In Grand Rapids, residents called for “law and order” and rejected the pursuit of equal rights.

35 Robinson, xi. 36 Robinson, xi. The role of conservativism in the Civil Rights Movement is a central theme of A City within a City . He goes to great lengths to give an accurate description of the city’s conservative culture. For more examples, see his introduction. 37 “United States Presidential Election Results,” Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/index.html. Accessed May 18, 2015. Grand Rapids voted in line with the rest of the state in those elections, with the exception of Detroit.

Though most scholarship considers the War on Poverty a failure, this dissertation reframes that discussion to focus on its effects on everyday life and power relationships among racial minorities and the city government.38 In accepting War on Poverty funds, the Latin American Council used the money to provide assistance with jobs, health, and education. Moreover, it helped to reaffirm Latino identity in providing Latinos a space in the city to celebrate their cultural identity and awareness. Scholars often cite interracial or interethnic conflicts as evidence that War on Poverty Programs were exploitative.

Depriving communities of resources for so long and making them compete with one another for limited funding was manipulative. However, this dissertation focuses on how the War on Poverty became a way for Latinos to hold the City of Grand Rapids accountable and gain community control over the social services they needed.

The War on Poverty programs offered at the very least an attempt to check the municipal government’s power. The federal government appointed the City of Grand

Rapids and thus the mayor and city commissioners, as the administrating agency that would distribute federal funds. The city also had the power to withhold funds, but the

WOP programs called for Maximum Feasible Participation of the poor. This federal mandate motivated Latinos and African Americans who struggled to find other avenues of resistance in such a culturally and politically conservative city. Both groups were unsuccessful in attempting to use more radical strategies similar to those employed in the

Chicano Movement and the Black Power Movement elsewhere in the country. These

38 Weber, Bret, and Amanda Wallace. "Revealing the Empowerment Revolution: A Literature Review of the Model Cities program "Journal of Urban History, 2012, 38, no. 1, 73-192.

20 nationalist movements called for greater identity awareness among Mexicans and Blacks and radical resistance strategies as a part of the larger Civil Rights Movements. Without the large populations to support demonstrations and with the conservative business community dominating city government, many Latino and Black activists feared the repercussions of such actions.39 This hindrance forced Latinos to utilize the Model Cities program, a program intended to alleviate blight in urban areas across the country, and the

War on Poverty, which gave them what felt like at least some leverage with the local government.

This dissertation discusses Latino attempts, with the backing of War on Poverty funds, at forcing the City of Grand Rapids to changes its hiring practices that discriminated against Latinos and Blacks. This fight brought these two groups together in an interracial attack on racism and helped to shape Latino identity. In the post-Civil

Rights era, this conservative city marked both Blacks and Latinos as inferior and politically marginal, leading them to construct a minority consciousness. In cooperating with one another against the city, Latinos and African Americans recognized their cultural differences yet also saw commonalities in their shared struggle.

Methodology

39 Robinson, xi. Robinson points out, “Grand Rapids tells a critically important story of how the political and cultural impact of the American Right impeded protest politics at the local level in numerous northern community.” These are histories that are often not included during a time of Civil Rights progress.

Finding sources on a small population of Latinos was not easy. There is no archive dedicated solely to Latinos in Grand Rapids. Instead I mined a variety of local, state, and national archives for information on the Spanish-speaking in West Michigan.

This dissertation is based on documents found in archives in the United States, Mexico, and Puerto Rico, as well as on oral histories. Since Mexicans and Puerto Ricans did not have a large population in Grand Rapids, I analyzed a diverse range of sources to find their voices. I examined collections in national archives to document the story of migration and immigration to Michigan. I consulted reports from Puerto Rico’s

Commission on Migratory Labor, Michigan Field Crops Company, the Puerto Rican

Migration Division, the Mexican Consulate in Detroit, and the State of Michigan. These sources illuminated the paths of the labor migration both ethnic groups took. I supplemented these sources with letters from Puerto Ricans and Mexicans back to their heads of state and with oral histories.

For records on Puerto Rican and Mexican settlement, I looked at sources in the

Grand Rapids Public Library and Grand Rapids City Archive. There was no clear information on the size of both the Mexican and Puerto Rican population in Grand

Rapids before the 1970 Census and even then community organizers contested census figures that year and in subsequent decades.40 To find the numbers of Mexicans and

40 It has been difficult to find a consensus on the number of Latinos living in Grand Rapids from the 1920s to the 1980s. Before 1970, the United States Census did not include categories that would accurately count the Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Latinos living in Grand Rapids. When the 1970 Census counted Latinos, they only estimated that there were about 4,000 Latinos in the city. Community organizers, however, contested that number based on the amount of clients they serviced. They also pointed out that the problems with the Census. Organizers worried that Latinos did not know how to identify themselves in the 1970 census after and many might not have participated in the survey. They called for the City of Grand

Mexican Americans, who settled first, I examined jail records, city directories, manuscript Census records, the Homeowner’s Loan Corporation’s maps and surveys, and

City Assessor files. Read against the grain, these sources allowed me to derive demographic information on this population including where they worked and lived and descriptions of the houses and neighborhoods they lived in. Manuscript census records, however, are only available for years before 1940. To find information on settlement for

Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans who came in the late 1940s and 1950s, I utilized oral histories. I also consulted baptism, confirmation, and marriage records from local catholic churches. I conducted twenty-one oral histories with eleven men and ten women.

Some of these interviewees included members of the first generation of Latinos in Grand

Rapids and their children. Others came to Grand Rapids in the 1960s and 1970s and worked for the Latin American Council. I identified interviewees from text documents.

The participants helped me to identify other potential respondents as a part of a snowball sampling method. I also reviewed ten more interviews collected by the Grand Rapids

Public Library.

As Latinos began to fight for equal treatment in Grand Rapids and the Model

Cities program came to the city, I referenced a different set of records. The Grand Rapids

Press, the city’s main newspaper since the 1930s, documented Latino struggles with

Rapids to undertake their own local census so social service organizations could have an accurate count. This survey never materialized. Research done by G. Cristina Mora illustrates that this was a national issue. See Mora, Making Hispanics, chapter 3.

Faced with these discrepancies and the Census’ limitations in regards to enumerating Latinos, I chose to use the population estimates that various local organizations calculated. For the mid 1940s and 1950s, I used the Catholic Church’s estimate of growth from 500 to 2,500. I then used the Latin American Council’s estimates of 5,000 in the mid-1960s and about 10,000 in the early 1970s.

African Americans, among each other, and with the Model Cities program. I used these sensationalized articles to give me a timeline of events, but then consulted oral histories to give me the context the newspaper left out. The Model Cities program, as a federal initiative, required documentation for all of its activities. From the Lyndon B. Johnson

Archive and Gerald R. Ford Archive, I found governmental reports on the progress of the

Model Cities program in Grand Rapids. On a local level, I consulted Model Cities’ newsletters and reports. I have been unable to locate documents for the Latin American

Council before it became a Model Cities affiliate, but for the time it was a part of the federal initiative, I found boxes with thousands of records at the Grand Rapids City

Archive with annual, monthly, weekly, and even daily reports of tasks and accomplishments.

I also examined how Latinos and African Americans confronted the City of Grand

Rapids on issues of police brutality and job discrimination. I looked at monthly meeting minutes from the city’s Human Relations Commission and the sparse records kept from the Mayor’s Committee on Police Brutality. I complimented this with state level records from Michigan’s Civil Rights Commission and national records from the National

Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. I also looked at newspaper articles, City

Commission meeting minutes, and conducted oral histories to look at the issue of job discrimination.

Women played an important role in community formation, Latino ethnic identity, and activism, but some sources did not readily reveal women’s contributions. For example, newspaper articles often portrayed men as the primary leaders of the

24 community without mention of women at all. I turned to oral histories as a method to gain knowledge about women’s roles. In some of these interviews, however, even women failed to recognize their actions as valuable. Their children, some of whom accompanied them during interviews, often attested to the hard work these women performed for their families and communities. I was also able to consult detailed reports and minutes from the Model Cities Program to gain insight into the various roles women played during the

War on Poverty. These sources and oral histories revealed that women played integral roles in establishing some of this community’s primary recreational spaces and fighting for equality in the 1960s and 1970s. Though there is not a specific chapter dedicated to women’s plights, their voices and their experiences are weaved throughout the dissertation.

Terminology

I use specific terms throughout the dissertation to denote particular populations. I use “Mexican” to refer collectively to Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals. For clarity, I note when I am talking about Mexican nationals to differentiate them from U.S.- born Mexicans. I also use the term “Tejano” to refer to Mexican Americans born in

Texas. I use “Latin American,” “Latino,” and “Spanish-Speaking” interchangeably to reflect the ways in which the community identified itself. I opt for “Latino” instead of

“Hispanic” for the same reasons. The labeling of this heterogeneous group is important, but I am primarily concerned with analyzing their collective actions rather than micro- level debates over which terms were preferable to whom.

Overview

This dissertation is made up of three chronologically organized sections. The first examines the migration journeys of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. Chapter one details

Mexican migration from the early 1920s to the late 1940s and concentrates on railroad and agricultural recruitment. Chapter two focuses on Puerto Rican migration to

Michigan in the late 1940s to the 1960s.

The second part of this project examines community formation in Grand Rapids.

Chapter three draws on oral histories and archival sources to discuss how Mexicans and

Puerto Ricans came to identify as Latino from the 1940s to1960s. It reveals the shared characteristics these groups had in common. I also analyze panethnic spaces and recreational activities that helped to bring the community together.

The third section looks at Latinos during the War on Poverty era. Chapter four covers the founding of the Latin American Council (LAC) and the subsequent controversy within the LAC over Model Cities funding. Chapter 5 discusses the accomplishments of the Latin American Council and puts Grand Rapids Latinos’ struggles in the context of national movements. Chapter 6 examines Latino and Black interracial organizing against City of Grand Rapids’ discriminatory hiring practices and calls for community controlled policing. Chapters five and six cover the same time period and are organized thematically. Finally, the epilogue analyzes the decline of the LAC from 1975 to 1978 due to the federal government’s cessation of Model Cities funding, which had supported the Council since 1971. It also notes how the community proceeded

26 without the Latin American Council and introduces the various other organizations activists established to meet the growing community’s needs.

With a focus on the Midwest, this dissertation highlights a unique region in the country where Mexicans and Puerto Ricans encountered one another and interacted with each other in the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, this study of Grand Rapids provides a model for understanding how distinct Latino ethnic groups develop interethnic solidarities and intimate social relations that often served as the precursor to working towards collective goals.

Chapter 1: Mexican Migration to West Michigan, 1926-1944

Introduction

The Vasquez and Vargas families settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the late

1930s and early 1940s. The two Mexican families had connections to Texas and had traveled to Grand Rapids for the same reason: jobs. The families’ patriarchs, coincidentally both named Daniel, took positions in the city’s industrial tool and dye factories after performing railroad work, agricultural labor, and service jobs. Guadalupe

Vargas, Daniel Vargas’ wife, worked as a domestic laborer in the homes of wealthy residents, while Consuelo, Daniel Vasquez’s wife, took in laundry. For both these women, these were typical types of employment in this era. While these were not the first

Mexicans to settle in Grand Rapids, these two families had a large impact on the city’s first sustained Mexican community. Mexican men and some families arrived in the late

1920s, but the community remained likely under a hundred people until after World War

II when it grew to over 500. In the late 1940s, the Vargas and Vasquez families made their mark on the small population. They described the abundant economic opportunities to their relatives and friends in Texas and assisted new migrants in settling in Grand

Rapids. Daniel Vargas even traveled to Crystal City, Texas and San Pedro, Mexico to

28 recruit workers for his employer. Though their wives made integral contributions,

Mexicans in Grand Rapids regarded their husbands as the community’s founding fathers.1

Using the Vargas and Vasquez families as guides, this chapter examines the

Mexican community in Grand Rapids from the late 1920s to the late 1940s. It identifies the migration patterns and the challenges associated with settling in this Midwestern city for two distinct waves of Mexican immigrants and migrants. The interwar migration consisted of mostly young, male workers. Though there were few families, those that came were from Mexico. This first group of migrants followed a step-migration pattern; that is they made a series of migrations before settling in a specific place. The post-World

War II migration, in contrast, included mostly families from Texas. They certainly practiced chain migration, when members of a family or tight-knit community follow each other to a new location. Though major events like Repatriation during the Great

Depression and the Bracero Program had profound effects on Mexican communities around the nation and in Michigan, Mexican Americans in West Michigan experienced these periods differently. They did not face forced repatriation and large numbers of braceros did not settle in Grand Rapids, unlike other areas in the state.

This chapter argues that jobs brought people to the area through step and chain migration and their small population allowed them to go largely unnoticed by the local government and other ethnic communities from the 1930s to the 1940s. These circumstances allowed the population to form intimate bonds with one another that

1 Jim Mencarelli, “Hispanic Seniors Pick Couple of the Year,” The Grand Rapids Press, May 23, 1988. “Obituary of Guadalupe Vargas,” The Grand Rapids Press, November 18, 1999; Gordon L. Olson, A Grand Rapids Sampler (Grand Rapids, Mich: Grand Rapids Historical Commission, 1992).

29 sustained them in the post-WWII period. Though they lived among African Americans and European immigrants, they created their own spaces and retained their cultural identity despite pressures to assimilate. During the war, as many European immigrants assimilated and became white through their participation in the war, Mexicans remained decidedly non-white.

This chapter traces two distinct migrations, settlement patterns, and lived experiences of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. First, it examines how Mexicans came to Grand Rapids in the late 1920s and 1930s. It then analyzes their settlement patterns once they arrived. Once in Grand Rapids, many of them settled on the Southwest side of the city in an industrial area though some went to other neighborhoods. The chapter also identifies the challenges these migrants faced. In the 1930s, while living among African

Americans and Europeans, their small population allowed them to go undetected. Local law enforcement made it clear, however, that although Mexicans were not being repatriated, they did not consider them to be “white.” Life for these first few families and early bachelors revolved around maintaining economic stability during the depression to avoid forced deportation. This chapter then examines the effects of World War II on

Mexican and Mexican American migration. Though Braceros came to Michigan, many of them did not settle in Grand Rapids. Instead, a generation of Tejano migrants, Mexican

Americans from Texas, relocated to Michigan. I explain their migration patterns and experiences on the south side of Grand Rapids and compare them to the 1930s’ wave of migration.

Migration Al Norte

Modesto and Manuela Pequeño left Mexico for Texas in 1915. Their seven-year- old daughter, Guadalupe Pequeño, would later grow up and marry Daniel Vargas. Her parents chose to leave her behind with her grandmother while they ventured out first. The

Pequeño family’s situation was very typical for the time period. The outbreak of revolution in 1911 caused many families to leave Mexico and settle in nearby Texas, while others went directly north to the Midwest. Though the conflict technically ended in

1920, the Cristero Wars from 1926 to1929 also caused instabilities in central Mexico.

General civil unrest that followed prompted many more people to leave as well. In the

United States, World War I labor shortages provided agricultural opportunities from those fleeing violence, while railroads and other industries also sought workers.2

Many Mexicans built new lives in Texas and the Southwest in the 1910s and

1920s. Modesto Pequeño and his wife settled in Del Rio, Texas while he worked on the railroads. By the 1920s, Guadalupe joined her parents and the family relocated to Crystal

City, Texas where they worked as farm laborers. Mexicans from across Mexico and

Mexican Americans in Texas traveled north for more economic opportunities while employers went south to advertise their positions. The railroads, mining, and agriculture industries had a great demand for Mexican labor in the early 20th century.

2 See Lilia Fernández, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Post War Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); .Kathleen Mapes, Sweet Tyranny: Migrant Labor, Industrial Agriculture, and Imperial Politics, The Working Class in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Dennis Nodín Valdés, Al Norte: Agricultural Workers in the Great Lakes Region, 1917-1970, 1st ed, Mexican American Monographs, no. 13 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991).

The Pequeño family followed an industry that created much of the Mexican and

Tejano diaspora in the late 1800s and early 1900s. For many, railroads not only provided employment, but also transportation to new labor markets. According to historian Jeffrey

Garcilazo, by 1920, 54,000 Mexicans went north, many of them either to build the railroads, ride them, or both.3 There they joined Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese,

European immigrants, and native whites in constructing the second industrial revolution’s infrastructure.4

With the escalation of anti-Chinese sentiment and eventually the 1882 Exclusion

Act, Mexican workers largely replaced the Chinese in the Pacific Northwest.5 The earliest traqueros, or track workers, also contributed to the Southwest’s economic development.

By the mid-1920s, railroad work had become “Mexican work.” According to Garcilazo, they provided the “best source of inexpensive labor for railroad construction.”6 These mostly male Mexican laborers did not only seek out the work themselves, but railroad companies recruited in cities like El Paso, Laredo, and San Antonio.

Modesto Pequeño did not ride the rails outside of Texas, but many other

Mexicans did. Daniel Vasquez, one of Grand Rapids’ first community leaders, arrived via train. Traveling by train, Daniel Vasquez left San Luis Potosí, Mexico, arrived in El Paso,

Texas, and moved to Chicago and then Detroit. Eventually he settled in Grand Rapids in

3 Jeffrey Marcos Garcilazo, ""Traqueros:" Mexican Railroad Workers in the United States, 1870 to 1930.", University of California, Santa Barbara, 1995, 68. 4 Garcilazo, 48. 5 Garcilazo, 51. 6 Garcilazo, 94.

1929.7 Juanita and Luciano Cerda’s family, one of the first to settle in Grand Rapids, also shows one of the many railroad migration routes Mexicanos took. In 1923, they were in

Mexico for their son Theodor’s birth, but by 1926, Juanita gave birth to son Octavio in

Oklahoma. They arrived in Grand Rapids sometime in 1929, as illustrated by their daughter, Socorro’s, birth record.8 As demonstrated in the Vasquez and Cerda family stories, traqueros arrived in Michigan on various lines. Railroad hubs in San Antonio and

Laredo connected to Kansas City, which linked to Chicago.9 From Chicago, Mexicans could work on the Pere Marquette line, which brought them to Grand Rapids, Detroit, and New York. Other lines ran strictly within the Midwest. For example, Mexicans and

Mexican Americans reported working for the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O), the Michigan

Central Railroad (MCR), and the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) lines. In the 1920s, traqueros could travel to Michigan from West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois,

Pennsylvania, and New York.10 Once in Michigan, railroads stopped in Detroit,

Saginaw, Lansing, Jackson, Battle Creek, Kalamazoo, and Grand Rapids, as well as cities further north in the state.

Daniel Vasquez’s wife, Consuelo San Miguel, found her way to Michigan through migrant farm work, another key employer for Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

Many of these migrants usually followed step-migrations for agricultural labor. San

7 Shelly Stephans,“The History of Mexican-Americans in Grand Rapids,” senior thesis, Calvin College, 1992, 3-5, folder 34, Hispanic Apostolate, GRA. 8 Luciano Cerda, 1930 Manuscript Census. 9 Gabriella Arredondo, Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation, 1916-1919 (Illinois University Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2008), 23. 10“History of the C&O Railway,” Chesapeake and Ohio Historical Society, http://www.cohs.org/history/ accessed May 20, 2012.

Miguel did not intend to spend time in Grand Rapids in the summer of 1938. However, the bus her father fixed up for their trip from San Antonio, Texas to Mount Pleasant,

Michigan broke down on their way back from the sugar beet fields. They were en route to a job near Chicago when a flat tire in Grand Rapids forced them to stay overnight.

The decline in European immigration during World War I and restrictive immigration quotas from the 1924 Johnson Reed Act created demand for Mexican workers in industries that depended upon immigrant low-wage labor.

Though Consuelo’s family was in Mount Pleasant, a rural area in central

Michigan, much of the early recruiting for Mexican Americans came from the east side of the state. Small and mid-size cities like Saginaw, Bay City, and Caro looked for workers to replace Europeans who moved out of the fields and into industrial jobs during

WWI and the early 1920s.11 Though it is unclear how Consuelo’s family heard of labor opportunities in Michigan, it is possible that employers recruited them from their home in

San Antonio. Michigan sugar companies had advertised job opportunities in Texas throughout the 1920s, especially in San Antonio and border cities.12 Other migrants who arrived in Grand Rapids in the 1930s provide evidence for this trend. For example, Pedro

López, a Mexican migrant, had been in San Antonio, Texas in 1928 and Saginaw,

Michigan in January of 1930 before arriving in Grand Rapids in the mid-1930s. 13 López may very well have followed an agricultural migrant trail.

11 Mapes, Sweet Tyranny.,66. 12 Ibid. 123. 13 Pedro López arrest record, Arrest Book #1, Grand Rapids City Archives (GRCA)

For many early agricultural workers, urban areas lured migrants with higher paying jobs and sustained them during the off-seasons. According to historian Kathleen

Mapes, “sugar companies hoped that Mexicans would tend to the crop as needed and return south of the border when no longer wanted.”14 In fact, many Mexican Americans, including Consuelo San Miguel, did not return south. Instead, they found jobs that would hire them after fieldwork was done. Detroit was about 100 miles away from most of the sugar beet fields and much closer than Texas. 15 Saginaw’s Chevrolet Foundry also provided work for some Mexican Americans close to their agricultural employment.16

Much to the growers’ dismay, Mexican Americans began to “winter” in Michigan. For example, Pedro Hill and Alfred Benavides worked in Saginaw before heading to Lansing,

Jackson, and finally Grand Rapids, instead of returning to San Antonio or Mexico.17

In much of the Midwest, various manufacturing industries attracted Mexican workers, but Grand Rapids did not. In Chicago and Gary, Indiana, for instance, the steel industry employed thousands of Mexicans. Chicago meatpacking plants also hired them en masse. Henry Ford utilized Mexican workers in his automobile dynasty, as historian

Zaragosa Vargas describes in detail.18 Grand Rapids, however, did not have a major industrial pull. The furniture industry had anchored the city since the mid-1800s and native whites dominated these jobs. By the early 1920s, some European immigrants also moved into skilled work in the industry. As Randall Jelks points out, these companies

14 Ibid. 15 For a detailed look at Mexicans in Detroit, see Vargas, Proletarians of the North. 16 Juanita Vásquezwith author, December 18, 2011. 17 Pedro Hill, Arthur Benavides, Arrest Records, Book 1. 18 Vargas, Proletarians of the North.

35 excluded African Americans from skilled employment. If they did hire them, it was usually in unskilled positions as sweepers or janitors. These businesses also excluded

Mexicans in the pre-WWII era.

During the depression, many men stayed in their positions as agricultural workers, railroad laborers, and some took up service work. Frank Arredondo worked as a cook in a restaurant below his apartment.19 Daniel Vargas cleaned streets and shoveled snow in the cold winter months for less than fifty cents an hour.20 Daniel Vasquez was one of few

Mexican men to move outside of those service positions. After being in Grand Rapids for ten years and working on the railroad, by 1938 he obtained a job as a general laborer at the Crampton Manufacturing Company.21 For the most part, however, many manufacturing jobs did not open up for Mexicans until World War II. The earlier migrants relied on railroads and agriculture instead.

The Bachelor Community’s Experience

In the 1920s and 1930s, at least ten years before Daniel Vasquez and Daniel

Vargas arrived in Grand Rapids, the small Mexican community that settled in Grand

Rapids had distinguishable characteristics. The newcomers were usually born in Mexico,

25-35 years old, single men, and many of them arrived via railroad in the late 1920s. Yet, there were still a few Mexican Americans and families and married couples living among them. Most of the single men who arrived in the 1930s did not stay long, while those with

19 Frank Arredondo, Grand Rapids City Directory, 1930, Grand Rapids Public Library (GRPL). 20 Guadalupe Vargas, interview with author, December 18, 1997. Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, GRPL. 21 Daniel Vásquez, Grand Rapids City Directory, 1938, GRPL.

36 children settled permanently. Many of the bachelors in this migration lived in temporary housing as boarders in racially and ethnically mixed neighborhoods near the railroads. A few others found housing near St. Andrew’s Cathedral, likely a familiar institution.22 For example, in the 1930 census, Louis Fernández reported living with three other Mexican nationals, one of whom was his brother, in a boardinghouse across from the cathedral. All four men were railroad workers. These two locations reveal that their employment and the Catholic Church might have provided the necessary resources for survival in their new city. Many of the Mexican newcomers also likely relied on one another for financial support, since many of them lived together, thereby pooling scarce resources.

In examining the neighborhoods near the railroad tracks, it is evident that

Mexican migrants likely told each other of housing opportunities. The King Court neighborhood for example, on the Southwest side of the city featured two homes that regularly housed Mexican men. In 1930, Benino Tovar lived at 307 King Court while

Pedro Cortez resided at 315 King Court, for instance. Throughout the 1930s, different

Mexican men and families lived in those residences or near them in the industrial

Southwest side. The fifteen or so streets closest to the railroad offered affordable housing.

Situated just steps from the Pere Marquette Railroad depot, a milieu of European immigrants, African Americans, and a few Mexican immigrants lived in close quarters in some of the city’s poorest houses.

22 Due to the legacy of colonialism, I assume that the Catholic Church was a familiar institution for these Mexican migrants, however, I was not granted access to records from the 1920s and 1930s from the Catholic diocese of Grand Rapids.

Figure 1: Map of Grand Rapids

Note: The first Mexicans settled in the quadrant encased by Franklin to the South, Oakland to the West, Wealthy to the North, and Buchanan to the East. As shown in the HOLC image above, this area was not identified for surveying, though two areas nearby were. Source: “The HOLC Map,” Grand Rapids Historical Commission, http://www.historygrandrapids.org/tilemap/2596/the-holc-map

During the Great Depression, New Deal programs did not serve this neighborhood. With the creation of the Federal Housing Authority and the Homeowner’s

Loan Corporation (HOLC), the federal government looked to reform housing and bail out homeowners who were behind on their mortgages. In an effort to determine which neighborhoods would be fit for investment, the government asked the HOLC to survey

239 cities, including Grand Rapids. HOLC appraisers did not include King Court or the other areas near the railroads, however. The neighborhoods may have been too close to the industrial areas or perhaps those particular streets were in such close proximity to other redlined areas that carrying out surveys seemed unnecessary. Appraisers examined adjacent areas with dismal results. In an effort to determine the neighborhood’s suitability for investment, the HOLC assigned neighborhoods a grade of A, B, C, or D based on the occupants, age of the house, income level of the inhabitants, and nearby structures, among other factors. Those in the D grade were deemed unfit for investment in a practice called “redlining.”23

King Court was not surveyed, but the area closest to it that was surveyed fit the description for D grade security levels. For one area “the type of inhabitants” (African

Americans and Italians) determined its redlined status. For the other, the “age and obsolescence” of neighborhood structures qualified them for a D level security grade, but the appraiser added that it was “not by any means a slum area.” These comments reveal local ethnic prejudices. Even though neighborhood residents were also immigrants, they were Dutch and did not seem to pose the same threat to neighborhood security as Italians did.

If HOLC appraisers had surveyed the industrial Southwest side, they likely would have assigned the area a security grade D upon first glance due to its racial and ethnic make-up, deteriorating properties, and low-wage earning inhabitants. The diverse

23 For more on the HOLC and FHA, see Dolores. Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (New York: Vintage Books, 2004).

39 neighborhoods near King Court intersected with the railroad yards. In fact, the Pere

Marquette line went right through the neighborhood. Mexicans, Russians, Latvians,

Lithuanians, Syrians, and African Americans from Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama,

Mississippi, and Tennessee worked as car washers, concrete workers, and painters just steps from their homes. While some European immigrants worked in low-skilled jobs on the railroads, many of them worked in semi-skilled and skilled positions in the waning furniture industry. For example, Daniel Tushkevich, who moved from Russia to Poland, immigrated to the United States, and moved to King Court in 1919, was a cabinetmaker while his wife cleaned one of the city’s banks.24 African Americans, as Randall Jelks has documented, did not have the same job opportunities. Instead those living on the same block as the Tushkevich family worked as laundresses and maids for private employers, while others worked as doormen and porters in area hotels.25 This neighborhood would have surely secured a poor assessment if it had been surveyed.

This working class area contrasted starkly with others in Grand Rapids. In the

Ottawa Hills area, just five miles away from King Court, the two-story, one-family homes sold for $25,000 before the stock market crashed and $15,000 after. In comparison, the houses on the Southwest side could be bought for $2,500 to $1,800, respectively. New immigrants and migrants resided in a mix of single-family units as well as boarding houses and two family units on King Court. Most families, however,

24 Daniel Tuschkevich, 1930 Manuscript Census. 25 Randal Maurice Jelks, African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

40 rented their homes for an average of $22 per month.26 Typical of the era, both African

Americans and Europeans lived with extended family members or boarders in dilapidated houses. Many of the homes, built in the late 1800s, needed repairs. Though it was not quality housing, it provided a space for Mexicans and Mexican Americans to live and earn wages during the Depression.

As county relief rolls grew around the nation, both local and federal officials called for Mexican repatriation. Across the United States, between 500,000 to one million

Mexicans left the United States during the Great Depression.27 In Grand Rapids, however, no such repatriation campaigns occurred. County and federal officials targeted

Mexicans in the Southwestern United States particularly, but the Midwest also experienced forced and voluntary repatriation during the 1930s. In large and small cities alike, Mexicans left en masse. For example, Chicago, Illinois saw a decline of 9,000 people while Gary, Indiana deported 600 Mexicans and Mexican Americans in 1932 and

Toledo, Ohio deported 300, in 1934.28 The Chicago Consulate expressed frustration with

Miss Mary Grace Wells, a Township Trustee of Lake County, Indiana, who repeatedly tried to send Mexicans back to the border on her own without consulting with the

Mexican Consulate.29 The consulate wrote Miss Wells on three occasions asking her to

26 This sum comes from an average of rent prices from King Court, Grant Street, and Grandville Avenue SW from the 1930 Manuscript Census. 27 The large range comes from disputes over who was counted and how people were counted. For more information, Decade of Betrayal. See Francisco E. Balderrama, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, Rev. ed (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006). 28 "Telegraphic Dispatches" The Washington Post, July 28, 1932, “300 Mexicans to Leave Ohio” New York Times, March 20, 1934. 29 “To Miss Mary Grace Wells from the Secretary of Foreign Relations”, June 9, 1932,

41 halt her activities. Her insistence on forcing Mexicans to leave despite official Mexican government requests is one example of the level of nativism in the Midwest.

In Michigan, Mexicans and Mexican Americans left under coercion and through their own volition. For example, 18 families in Detroit voluntarily boarded a train in May of 1930. They lamented that “no hay trabajos” (there are no jobs) but thanked the Detroit welfare office for their help, according to Phillip A. Adler who wrote the news article.30

Many Mexican Americans who stayed, however, felt increasing pressure to leave. In

Detroit, the Centro Cultural (Cultural Center) wrote the Detroit consulate notifying them that the U.S. press vilified Mexicans. Moreover, since the American League and the

American Federation of Labor announced that the US should “not permit Mexicans into the country” and excluded them from jobs as well, it became harder to make a living in the United States.31 Detroit’s Mexican Consulate received numerous petitions for help in fighting coerced repatriation. Cities and towns on the east side of the state experienced larger repatriation campaigns, including Detroit, Saginaw, Shiawassee, Genesee, Lapear,

Bay, Uscola, St. Clair, Macomb, Oakland, Flint, Shepard, Mt. Pleasant, Porterton, and

Mount Clemens.32 The west side of the state, however, did not face the same demands from native-born residents.

The small population of Mexicans and their relatively stable employment in

Grand Rapids allowed them to go unnoticed. Reviewing records for the Detroit and

Chicago consulates revealed that Mexicans living in Grand Rapids, Lansing, or

30 Phillip Adler, “69 Mexicans Say Adios” Detroit News, Ocotber 19, 1931 IV-355-5, Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores (SRE) de México. 31 Centro Cultura to Manuel C. Telles, SRE V-355-5, SRE. 32 Repatriaciones, Detroit Consulado, SRE, IV-355-5, SRE.

Kalamazoo were not on lists for voluntary repatriation or forced deportation. Annual reports from Grand Rapids’ Police Department did not mention Mexican immigration as a problem they investigated.33 There is the possibility, however, that some Mexican immigrants left on their own. Many, however, had jobs that sustained them throughout the depression. In city directories and arrest records throughout the 1930s, Mexican men listed their place of employment in railroads and the service industry, likely keeping them off relief roles.34 For example, Louis and Rosendo Fernández both started working on the railroad in the early 1920s and in 1948 they both still reported the C&O as their place of employment.35 It is also important to note that most of the men who arrived in Grand

Rapids in the 1930s were Mexicans and not Mexican Americans. Either those Mexicans were in the country with documentation or the local police did not look into their status.

Moreover, arrest records in the 1930s point to a very mobile Mexican population. If they did find themselves under pressure to leave the United States, many of them could have simply left one city in Michigan for another or left the state altogether.

Though Mexicans did not face repatriation threats from the federal government, the local government at times did call attention to immigration violations. Chinese immigrants’ arrests aptly demonstrate the local enforcement of immigration law. During the Chinese exclusion era, for example, the police jailed Choy and Fung Laun for a violation of immigration law in 1930. The department listed the Laun's, whose relationship is unclear, as “Chinamen.” Less than a month after the police arrested them,

33 Police Annual Reports from 1931-1939, Police Department, Annual Reports, Boxes 1-3, GRCA. 34 Ignacio López, Luciano Cerda, Peter López, Benino Tovar, Polk Grand Rapids City Directories, 1948, GRPL 35 Luis and Rosendo Fernández, Polk Grand Rapids City Directories, 1948, GRPL.

43 the Laun's were deported. It would seem that if local officials enforced the Chinese

Exclusion Act, they might also be inclined to enforce immigration policies that pertained to Mexicans. When the police officers arrested Mexicans and Mexican Americans for criminal offenses, however, in all but one case, they did not find immigration violations.36 Immigration laws for the Chinese and Mexicans differed greatly. In the

1920s, Mexicans moved with fluidity across the borders. Deportations hardly occurred for Mexicans until the Great Depression. Those deportations, however, were often based on the whether the individual was a public charge.37 In contrast, the Chinese Exclusion

Act prohibited Chinese laborers from being in the United States regardless of their economic standing. The absence of a large-scale enforcement of immigration laws that pertained to Mexicans points to the possibility that Mexican immigrants at this time were relatively financially stable and were not in need of relief.

Though it is likely that Mexicans simply blended in with the mix of European immigrants living in close quarters on the Southwest side, there is evidence that

Mexicans were racially othered in this era. Mexicans in the United States were largely treated as non-white though many claimed whiteness in an effort to secure better treatment. Since the 1848 Guadalupe-Hidalgo Treaty after the Mexican-American War, the United States government imposed citizenship on those Mexicans in the annexed

36 Jacinto Vásquezarrest record, Arrest Book #1, Grand Rapids City Archives (GRCA) 37 For more information immigration restriction based on class, and other factors such as sexuality, race, or gender see:, Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: Harper Collins, 1990); Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (2009); Martha Gardner The Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870-1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Ericka Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

44 territories and legally regarded Mexicans as white until the 1930 census.38 The onset of the Depression motivated the government to record their race not as whites as they had done before, but as “Mexican.” This helped enumerate how many Mexicans lived in the country and may have been used to legitimize repatriation campaigns. During the

Depression, though European immigrants could hardly claim a white identity as many had only arrived in the 1910s and 1920s, they were recorded as “white” while Mexicans were decidedly non-white.

Examining the census for King Court shows just how local officials dealt with the hardening racialization of the city’s new immigrants. They had their instructions to specifically identify people as “White, negro, Mexican, Indian, Chinese, Japanese,

Filipino, Hindu, or Korean,” but classifying immigrants clearly posed a problem to the

Census taker on the Southwest side of Grand Rapids, especially when Syrians also settled into the area. Though they recorded families from Russia, Holland, and Ukraine, for example, as white without hesitation, the census taker first wrote “Syrian” then crossed it out and wrote “white” for the Syrian families in the 1930 Census. The olive-skinned newcomers might have closely resembled Italians or even Mexicans, but according to the

Census rules, they were white. When the census taker reached a Mexican household on the same block, the census taker wrote “white” then crossed it out and wrote

“Mexican.”39 Both families in these examples arrived in the United States between 1913

38 Ian Haney López, White by Law, 104. Neil Foley, The White Scourge, 22. 39 Ignacio López, 1930 Census Manuscript.

45 and 1919, but Mexicans were perceived as a non-white population in Grand Rapids and nationally.

Examining the racial classifications on arrest records for Mexican Americans also reveals that their presence confounded local whites’ understanding of race and color.

From the late 1920s to 1944, Grand Rapids police records asked for both the color and the complexion of the arrestee. While white offenders had a “white” color and “white” or

“light” complexions, Mexican Americans had various combinations. In the case of Albert

Aguirre, for instance, arresting officers described him as “light chocolate” in complexion, but listed his color as “white.” The fingerprint cards described other offenders as

“Mexican” or “white” in color and for complexion they were marked as “Mexican,”

“medium copper,” “light,” “dark,” “medium, “dark,” “dark chestnut,” “swarthy,” and

“white.”40 The practice of indicating Mexicans’ color as “white” or “Mexican” could reflect that the police saw a clear difference between them and African Americans who police labeled “Black” or “negro” in color and “dark brown,” “medium brown” and “light brown” in complexion.41 Regardless of the differences between Mexicans and African

Americans, Mexicans were clearly not white in the same way native-born or European immigrants were.

Local interactions between Mexicans and whites reified the former’s position as non-white. For example, Jacinto Vasquez’s and Betty Fisk’s shared residence at 211

West Wealthy Street posed a problem to the local authorities. Vasquez, a Mexican

40 Albert Aguirre, Ysmael Flores, Epitosio Duarte, Joseph Zaragosa, Joseph Valdez Box 1-4, CA, 1924- 1961, 1913-1974, fingerprint cards, Police Records Division, GRCA. 41 Pearl Brown, Louie Hildreth, Lila Lett arrest records, Arrest Book #1, GRCA.

46 immigrant, and Fisk, who would be considered a “native white” at the time, were 25 and

20 years old, respectively. Fisk and her father, Wardell, worked for the postal telegraph and the Fisks’ owned their own home. Vasquez, in contrast, held a position as a general laborer for the railroads. When police arrested the two for the first time in 1932 for “lewd and lascivious cohabitation,” the local courts suspended their sentence. Jacinto and Betty certainly would have constituted a racially mixed marriage. The local police identified

Vasquez as “dark” and “Mexican,” while Fisk was most certainly white and

“American.”42 After their suspended sentence, Vasquez and Fisk continued to live together throughout the 1930s. The Grand Rapids City Directory even listed them as a married couple, though a marriage certificate is unavailable.43

In 1938 police arrested Jacinto Vasquez again for the same charge and added an immigration violation. Records explaining Vasquez’s fate are unavailable, but after 1938, both Jacinto and Betty no longer lived in Grand Rapids. Perhaps he went back to his native Mexico either on his own or via deportation or the pair looked for another city in which to settle. Though the local government had no authority to deport Vasquez, they alerted federal authorities to his case. It is possible that a local resident(s) found Vasquez and Fisk’s interracial union objectionable and complained. This idea is further confirmed when examining arrest records of the early 1930s. Local authorities only pursued lewd and lascivious cohabitation charges against people who were still married and living with

42 Jacinto Vásquez, Betty Fisk, Arrest Records, Arrest book #1, GRCA. 43 Jacinto Vásquez, Polk Grand Rapids City Directories. 1932, 1934, GRCA. There is no record of marriage for Fisk and Vásquez. The directory, however, listed their names as a married couple and not as borders. For married couples, directories list the male head of household followed by the first name of his wife in parenthesis. Borders and other family members would be listed underneath those.

47 another partner or if they were part of an interracial couple.44 Essentially, only unmarried white people could live together without consequence. Michigan’s anti-miscegenation laws, which prohibited Black and white couplings, had been overturned since 1875.45

Still, without such laws in place, local police found ways to enforce the local social order that disapproved of racially mixed unions of whites like Betty and non-whites like

Jacinto.

The local customs that marked Mexicans as racially non-white might have encouraged them to try to pass for something other than Mexican. This is evident in examining one of the first families to settle in Grand Rapids. The López family, from

Tlaxcala, Mexico, arrived in Grand Rapids in the mid-1920s. Ignacio, his wife, Juana, and their two boys, lived in King Court. After a few short years in Grand Rapids, the family subscribed to a common Americanization practice: they Anglicized their names.

Their older son Felipe went by Phillip in local yearbooks and the census, the younger son went by John, and the family name changed from López to “Lopex.” Moreover, Ignacio looked to education for upward mobility for his family. With his wife’s earnings as a laundress and his as a fire chaser, a low-wage railroad job, Ignacio sent Phillip to

Catholic Central, one of the best schools in the city, with upwardly mobile, Catholic

Europeans. Though they took measures to provide their son with the best education money could buy during an economic depression and altered their names, a closer look at

44 John Lauw, a Chinese man, and Mildred Hill, a white woman, were both arrested on April 12, 1929. They, however, were not as lucky as Jacinto Vásquezand Betty Fisk. Lauw and Hill were sentenced to six months in Ionia county jail. John Lauw and Mildred Hill, Arrest Records, book 1. Arrest book #1, GRCA. 45 Peggy. Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) 2.

48 the López family also shows that they still faced barriers. The family did not leave the industrial area of the Southwest side until World War II. Efforts at assimilation did not change the socioeconomic or racial status of early Mexican settlers that would have excluded them from affluent, white neighborhoods.46

Besides racial boundaries, the first Mexicans to arrive in Grand Rapids also encountered difficulties as a result of cultural differences. The local enforcement of vice laws likely differed from Texas and Mexico, especially considering that Mexico did not prohibit alcohol consumption as the United States had. In the 1930s, the police arrested three of the first Mexican settlers for violating the city’s liquor laws, which were no doubt dutifully enforced in this Christian stronghold. Considering the police department arrested on average 1,800 people a year for being drunk, violating the liquor law, being drunk and disorderly, or driving drunk, the early Mexican community made up a small percentage of those offenders. The authorities also heavily monitored gambling. From

1932 to 1937, the police department increased its vice arrests six-fold. As Peter Cortez,

Antonio Arellano, and Guadalupe Trevino found out, Grand Rapids did not tolerate gaming. Police arrested all three men on May 23, 1935. Arellano and Cortez were

Mexican nationals and Trevino a Mexican American from Texas. Cortez listed an address on the city’s Southwest side as his residence, Trevino said that he lived in the southeast part of the city, and Arellano had no permanent address.47 Because all three reported their occupation as laborers, it is likely the men knew each other not from their neighborhoods

46 Ignacio López, Manuscript Census, 1930; Ignacio López, Grand Rapids City Directories, 1948, GRPL. 47 Antonio Arrellano, box 118/8/2/2, (A-f), CA 1924-1961; Peter Cortez, box 118/8/2/2, (A-f), CA 1924- 1961; Guadalupe Trevino, box 4 18/8/1/2 (S-Z) CA 1924-1961,fingerprint cards Police Records Division, GRCA. Clemento Torres and Frank Batista, Arrest Records, Book 1.

49 but from work. Drinking and gambling, while illegal, were smaller offenses, but they reveal some of the activities these bachelors enjoyed together and the consequences of their actions.48

Most of the crimes committed by Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in Grand

Rapids from 1925 to 1940 were typical of the era and show that this immigrant population was overrepresented in arrests. Many of those jailed committed some kind of larceny, including from a store or an automobile.49 Throughout the Depression, there were numerous arrests for larceny from varying racial and ethnic groups in Grand Rapids.

Mexicans made up a small percentage of those arrests. From 1933 to1938, there were on average 139 arrests for larceny per year. From the Mexican community of about 150 members, police made on average 1.5 arrests per year.50 This could indicate the dire economic straits Mexicans faced. Three others were arrested for violating the law against carrying a concealed weapon, a sign perhaps that they felt the need to protect themselves in a foreign place.

The few arrests for assault reveal that the men might have been safer in this new city than they thought.51 Epitasio Duarte was the only person arrested for a violent crime.

“Peter Duartee,” his alias as listed on his fingerprint card, was suspected of murder. The fingerprint card does not list his case’s disposition, but it was unique among the first

48 African Americans were also being arrested for similar crimes in this time period. See Jelks, African Americans in the Furniture City, 96. 49 Paul Gonzalez, box 1,18/8/2/2 G-L, CA 1924-1961, fingerprint cards, Police Records Division, GRCA. 50 Annual Report from the Grand Rapids Police Department, 1932-1933, 1934-1935, 1935-1936, and 1936- 1937, Police Department, Annual Reports, Boxes 1-3, GRCA. 51 There were only three arrests for assault in the 1930s. See the arrest records for Margarito Medallin, Pedro López, and Mikel Brutata,Arrest Book #1, GRCA.

50 settlers. The bachelors in Grand Rapids appear for the most part to have coexisted peacefully as they settled into the city. These early crimes serve as a window into common problems these men faced. Violence, however, did not appear to be one of them.

The Tejano Diaspora in Michigan

Though the earliest settlers faced many challenges, this did not dissuade more

Mexican immigrants and migrants from coming to Grand Rapids. Despite the worsening of economic conditions in 1938, Consuelo San Miguel settled in Grand Rapids and later brought her extended family to Michigan. After the San Miguel family’s car broke down in the city, they found housing at a boarding house in the King Court neighborhood the very same day. Upon entering the house, Consuelo saw Daniel Vasquez eating at the kitchen table. He had been living at the boarding house for some years already. She called it “love at first sight,” but once the family fixed their car, Consuelo left with her family to pursue work outside of Chicago.52 Weeks later, Daniel Vasquez caught up with them to ask her father for permission to marry Consuelo. He obliged and Daniel and

Consuelo made a home for themselves in Grand Rapids. Less than four years later, three of Counselo’s brothers and their families had also moved to Grand Rapids.

52 Mencarelli, “Hispanic Seniors Pick Couple of the Year.”

Figure 2: Undated Photo of Daniel Vasquez Source: Grand Rapids Public Library, Latinos Western Michigan Collection

Figure 3: Daniel and Guadalupe Vargas Pictured with Michigan Governor G. Mennen Williams, circa 1950 Source: Grand Rapids Public Library, Latinos in Western Michigan Collection.

Likewise, Guadalupe and Daniel Vargas moved from their Crystal City, Texas home to Grand Rapids in 1941. When the couple met in the celery fields in Texas in the late 1920s, Guadalupe had already been married once and lost her husband and young daughter to illness. Daniel quickly assumed a parental role for Guadalupe’s surviving son

Magdelino. Daniel had been in Texas for about five years before he met Guadalupe and her family. He swiftly advanced from a general labor to a crew leader. His English language skills and formal schooling in Mexico helped him. He and Guadalupe married in 1932 and soon began working a migrant circuit that included Wyoming, Montana,

Ohio, and places in between. Guadalupe’s sister, who lived in Wisconsin, suggested she stop in Grand Rapids because of the jobs available there. Daniel and Guadalupe, who were concerned about Magdelino’s future if they were to return to Texas, settled in Grand

Rapids in 1941 with the hope that it might provide the best opportunities for him off of the fields. Soon after, Guadalupe’s parents and extended family joined them in

Michigan.53 Fewer economic opportunities and forced repatriation likely stemmed the flow of Mexican and Mexican American migration to Michigan during the Great

Depression, but World War II served as a catalyst for the growth in the Mexican

American community.

As soon as the United States entered the war, Michigan’s state government in collaboration with the area’s United States Employment Services (USES) recognized that a labor shortage would soon affect the local economy. In 1942, Governor Murray D. Van

Wagoner issued a letter to all city mayors to identify “where labor resources exist that are not being used to a maximum” to help USES in the war effort if and when a labor shortage occurred. The letter, however, went on to state that cooperating with this plan would “reduce undue migration of workers into our state who will tax existing social

53 Guadalupe Vargas, interview with author, December 18, 1997. Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, GRPL.

54 facilities without making commensurate contributions to their support.”54 Though the governor did not specifically identify those migrants, he might have been referring to

African Americans or Mexican Americans, who in that period travelled north in pursuit of industrial jobs, or he might have referred to the streams of white and Mexican

American farmworkers from the South and West. Compared to other cities in the

Midwest like Cleveland and Detroit, however, Grand Rapids did not actually have a high labor demand. In ranking cities based on their labor needs, in 1944 the War Manpower

Commission declared Grand Rapids and 118 other cities across the country as areas in which “a slight labor reserve will remain after six months,” compared to industrial cities that they defined as experiencing an “acute labor shortage.”55

Even though there were higher demands for labor in other places and the state government made attempts to prevent labor migration, African Americans and Mexican

Americans still arrived en masse during and after the war. In 1940, Kent County, the county in which Grand Rapids is situated, had about 2,800 African Americans. By 1960, the Black population had increased to 14,630.56 Likewise, the Mexican and Mexican

American population increased exponentially during the war years. Though there were probably more, in 1940 the U.S. census only recorded only six Mexican families living in

54 Letter from the Governor to All Local Governmental Leaders” Governor Murray D. Van Wagoner, RG 211 Records of the War Manpower Commission; Records of the Bureau of Placement, Records of the Industrial allocation division, records of the labor recruitment and transportation section, general records, 1942-1946, entry 191, Michigan, 1942. 55 War Manpower Commission Reports and Analysis, Adequacy of Labor Supply in Important Labor Market Areas, March 1, 1944. NARA, RG 211 Records of the War Manpower Commission; Records of the Bureau of Placement, Records of the Industrial allocation division, records of the labor recruitment and transportation section, general records, 1942-1946, entry 191, Mexican Workers. 56 Social Explorer Tables(SE), Census 1960 Tracts Only Set, Social Explorer & U.S. Census Bureau http://www.socialexplorer.com/tables/C1960TractDS/R10958509

Grand Rapids.57 By 1945, the Diocese of Grand Rapids estimated that there were “100 families or 500 individuals” living there. In 1950, the diocese estimated there were about

235 Mexican families in the city.58 The Grand Rapids Police Department (GRPD) records reflected this dramatic increase. From 1940 to 1945 there were only six Mexican or

Mexican American men fingerprinted, but from 1945 to 1950 the Grand Rapids police arrested almost thirty Mexicans or Mexican Americans.

This WWII and post-war migration was distinctively Mexican-American. Many of these people came from small towns in Texas like Beeville, Floresville, Waco,

Hidalgo, and Eagle Pass, as well as from major cities like San Antonio and Houston. In a sample of 32 couples that married between 1942 and 1953, 69% were born in Texas, while only 12% were born in Mexico. The remaining 19% of people hailed from Denver,

California, Chicago, and Michigan. The majority of Mexican Americans came via chain migration. Within a couple of years, extended families and parts of small Texas towns had relocated to Grand Rapids, Michigan. This new location offered both men and women work in various sectors. Much like the earlier wave, manufacturing, railroad work, and farming encouraged families to relocate to West Michigan.

Unlike the 1930s, manufacturing, including the furniture industry, and other industrial work opened up to Mexican Americans during and after World War II. For example, Daniel Vargas became an acid pourer at the JC Miller Company, which made

57 U.S. Census Bureau, “Foreign Born Population Characteristics, 1940”. Prepared by Social Explorer. http://www.socialexplorer.com/tables/C1940CompDS/R10861222?ReportId=R10861222 This number did not take into account Mexican Americans and likely also did not count migrant workers who were in the city only for seasonal work. 58 “Pastoral Plan of the Diocese of Grand Rapids,” 1. Hispanic Apostolate, Grand Rapids City Archdiocese archives.

56 and sold welding equipment during the war.59 While with that company, Vargas said that

JC Miller himself asked him to recruit more people from Texas to work at his company.

On behalf of JC Miller, Vargas traveled to Texas and brought back his brother and 20 other Mexican men to work at the plant.60 Other industries attracted workers more indirectly through word-of-mouth. Daniel Vasquez continued to work for Crampton

Hardware after the war and by 1946, his wife’s three brothers, Cecil, Elias, and Narciso

San Miguel, joined him.61 These two examples are representative of Mexican Americans’ labor migration in this era. In a survey of 50 Mexican American families in the mid-

1940s, 76% of them worked in some type of manufacturing industry. They served as die casters, sanders, machine operators, and general laborers for Kent Castings, American

Seating Company, Mueller Furniture Company, Grand Rapids Brass Company, and

American Excelsior, among others.62 The majority of them worked in industry quickly after arriving. Juanita Rincones’ family arrived in Grand Rapids and within weeks her father, mother, and cousins started working at the Wolverine Metals plant.63 The jobs that were once reserved for native whites and European immigrants finally became available to Mexican Americans.

59 “Miller Welding Supply Company: Family owned company dives into robotics.” March 15, 2008. http://www.weldingandgasestoday.org/index.php/2008/03/miller-welding-supply-company/ 60 Daniel Vásquez, interview with Gordon Olson, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, GRPL. 61 Cecil San Miguel, Elias San Miguel, and Narciso San Miguel, Polk’s Grand Rapids City Directory, 1946, GRPL. 62 I examined at 50 Spanish-surnamed families listed in the Polk’s Grand Rapids City directory and recorded their listed employment to calculate this data. Grand Rapids City Directory, 1946-194, GRPL. 63 Juanita Rincones, interview with Gordon Olson, Grand Rapids, Michigan, May 6, 2000. Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, GRPL.

The railroads still remained a viable avenue for employment after the war, though the positions became less desirable. Only 8% of a sample of 50 Mexican Americans worked for the railroads, a stark contrast to the 1930s.64 Heightened discrimination likely played a role in Mexican Americans decreased participation in that field. This can be seen in Daniel Vargas’ experience with the railroads. In the early 1940s, before Vargas began working in tool and die, he briefly worked for the railroad industry. He did not stay long, however, because the local union refused to train him as a mechanic.65 Another

Mexican American man found similar discrimination in the railroad industry. In the

1940s, Santos Rincones, who grew up in Burnee, Texas, heard about railroad work in

Grand Rapids from his brother. He stopped working in cotton in Missouri and arrived in the city on a Monday. On Tuesday, he went to work for the C&O railroad laying spikes for two and half years. He recalled working on segregated work crews that separated whites from nonwhites (Mexicans and African Americans).66 Those conditions and arduous labor led Santos to seek work elsewhere. Though white workers likely discriminated against Mexicans in the 1920s and the 1930s, in the World War II and postwar era, more job opportunities allowed Mexicans to escape such treatment in that industry.

Rincones and other Mexicans found work in an unlikely place: commercial bakeries. The Keebler Cookie plant operated in Grand Rapids in the early 1940s and

64 I examined at 50 Spanish-surnamed families listed in the Polk’s Grand Rapids City directory and recorded their listed employment to calculate this data. Grand Rapids City Directory, 1946-194, GRPL. 65 Olson, A Grand Rapids Sampler, 175. 66 Santos Rincones, interview with Gordon Olson, Grand Rapids, Michigan, May 6, 2000. Latinos in West Michigan Oral History Project, GRPL, Collection 321.

Santos Rincones secured work there as assistant mixer. About 10% of Spanish-surnamed people in the mid-1940s worked for bakeries. Rincones described some of the challenges he faced at the bakery. He had little formal education and had never learned to read which forced him to memorize all of the ingredients for the cookies. “No one knew he couldn’t read except for the boss,” his wife remembered. It did not bother his supervisors and Rincones went on to work for the company for 34 years—24 of those years as assistant mixer. Though bakeries were hardly the most popular industry in the post-war era, they allowed people like Santos Rincones to gain access to skilled and stable employment.67

Bakeries served as one industry, among few others, that employed both men and women for decent wages. Michigan Bakery, another local company, recruited Anastacio

Rodríguez from his job at Silver Cup Bakery in Chicago where he worked as mixer. A widower, Rodríguez moved his four children and two brothers to Grand Rapids with him.

Though his daughter, Juanita, learned shorthand and typing in high school, local businesses would not hire her. Instead she worked alongside her father as a mixer’s helper.68 The Rodríguez’s story is very typical.

Increasingly more women worked outside of the home in the 1940s and 1950s.

Some went to work in bakeries while others went to packinghouses.69 Yet still many of them met discrimination in trying to find better paying jobs. This confined some women

67 Santos Rinconces, interview with Gordon Olson, Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, Grand Rapids Public Library (GRPL). 68 Juanita Baltierrez, with Gordon Olson, 2001. Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, GRPL. Box 4. 69 Lola Hernández, interview with Gordon Olson, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2001. GRPL, 321,

59 to low-paying domestic service positions. For example, Guadalupe Vargas cleaned houses for 40 cents a day in the early 1940s. These labor constraints made it particularly hard for women in the city who did not have a partner to survive on their own. Instead, many women, married or not, pooled their wages with other members of their household.

Mexicans were an integral part of Michigan agriculture. The sugar beet industry on the East side of the state attracted Tejanos since the early 1920s. Mexicans also had a visible presence in the west side of the state’s fruit industries in the 1940s as they made up 40% of the farm labor force in Michigan.70 Farms covered 63% of Kent County and the rural areas relied on farming income more so than any other county in the state.71

About 190 small family farms dotted the rural areas in the county in contrast to the East side of the state’s larger commercial farms.72 Some of the farmworkers who tended to these lands belonged to a larger migrant circuit that spanned the South, West, and

Midwest, much like Guadalupe and Daniel Vargas had done before settling in Grand

Rapids. Others, however, were part of a Michigan circuit that started with sugar beet work in Saginaw and Bay City. Alongside Mexican Americans, a small number of

Japanese Americans left internment camps to join “Okies from Oklahoma, Missouri, and

Arkansas,” and African Americans, who made up 35% and 20%, respectively, of

70Sidney Fine, Expanding the Frontiers of Civil Rights: Michigan, 1948-1968, Great Lakes Books (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000) 163. 71 Michigan Farmer, Net Paid Circulation by counties as of 1940. December 31, 1940. RG 211 Records of the War Manpower Commission; Records of the Bureau of Placement, Records of the Industrial allocation division, records of the labor recruitment and transportation section, general records, 1942-1946, entry 191. 72 These farms were between 180-219 acres, which were the smallest category of farms recorded. “Number of Farms by size in Michigan, 1939.” RG 211 Records of the War Manpower Commission; Records of the Bureau of Placement, Records of the Industrial allocation division, records of the labor recruitment and transportation section, general records, 1942-1946, entry 191.

Michigan migrant laborers.73 Despite the diversity in labor, Mexican Americans made up an integral part of the farm labor system. "Approximately 14,000 Mexicans from Texas are needed to block, thin, and harvest our sugar beet crop…Snap beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, and other truck crops which ripen from July to October naturally supply work for the Mexicans when they are not engaged in sugar beet” wrote the Emergency Farm

Labor office in Michigan.74 Most of the migrant laborers were concentrated on the east side of the state, but if they did not stay there after sugar beets, some went to West

Michigan farms to work in onions and celery. In comparison, however, Saginaw and Bay

City employed many more Mexican Americans than the 3,000 who normally worked in

West Michigan in the early 1940s.

In the mid-1940s and early 1950s, many Mexican Americans decided to settle in

Grand Rapids, rather than return to Texas. Maria Aguilar Ysasi’s family decided to stay in 1948 after her father found a winter job in Grand Rapids, for example.75 Evidence of these migration and settlement patterns appear in baptismal records in the late 1940s and early 1950s. For example, Carlos Mancha, born to Tejano parents in 1951 thirty miles away in Grant, Michigan, a small agricultural town on the west side of the state, was baptized in Grand Rapids in 1952. This suggests that his parents might have been working in the agricultural industry before settling in the small urban center. St.

Andrew’s also baptized other Mexican American children born in rural Michigan in

73 “Michigan Farm Labor is Diversified,”, Fine, 164. 74 “Estimated Agricultural Labor Requirements for Michigan,” 1943. RG 211 Records of the War Man Power Commission; Records of the Bureau of Placement, Records of the industrial allocation division, records of labor recruitment and transportation section, State (MD-MICH) entry 198. 75 Maria Ysasi, interview with author, 2012.

61 towns such as Freemont, Cedar Springs, Zeeland, Lakeview, and Alma, all of which were twenty to fifty miles away. Agricultural work brought Mexicans to rural West Michigan, but many of them settled in Grand Rapids. This did not mean that Mexicans abandoned the farms altogether. Oral histories reveal that agriculture provided work for Mexican

Americans even if they held other jobs in manufacturing and railroads. For example, in the winter, Miguel Navarro, a Mercedes, Texas native, worked for the railroads, but in the summer he and his wife Isabel, traveled to Hart, Montague, and Whitehall in

Northwest Michigan to harvest celery, lettuce, and beets.76 Many other migrants used surrounding farms as part-time or weekend work to make ends meet in Grand Rapids.

Without Mexican Americans as full-time farm labor, the state government and local growers looked to Mexican nationals to fill the void. In 1942, World War II labor shortages led the federal government to pursue a bilateral agreement with the Mexican government to contract workers for temporary farm and railroad labor. Known as the

Bracero Program, initial six-month contracts, with the opportunity to renew, granted

Mexican men “free transportation to and from Mexico and between places of residence and work.” These contracts also guaranteed “hygienic housing, water, and facilities…and either cooking privileges or prepared meals of sound nutritional value.”77 Though its purpose was to fill war shortages, the program lasted until 1964, bringing over two million Mexican nationals to the country.

76 Darlene Bos, Journey to Grand Rapids: Oral Histories of Mexican American Senior Citizen Women in Grand Rapids, 1998, Grand Rapids History and Special Collections, GRPL. 77 Valdes, 93.

The majority of Braceros went to the Southwest, but many Midwest companies contracted the workers. Many went to small agricultural cities like Millington or Port

Huron, Michigan and even smaller ones like Ashtabula or Bellefontaine, Ohio.78

Bracero workers also came to Michigan, but they did not make up a large portion of the

Mexican community in Grand Rapids. In comparison to other areas like California,

Michigan received a small portion of workers. For example, California growers requested anywhere from 40,000 to 60,000 workers in 1942, while Michigan needed much less.79 In

1944 about 2,000 Mexican nationals came to Michigan, while a total of 62,000 in total went across the nation. Even when the number of Braceros increased in 1949 to 100,000 across the country, Michigan still received only 2,200 workers.80 With 40% of farm labor coming from Mexican Americans and a diverse range of others, farmers did not need

Braceros as much. Even when Michigan got its peak of foreign contract workers (14,500) in 1951, it was still less than 8% of the total number of braceros in the country.81 The subtle increase in braceros in Michigan in the 1950s can be explained by examining postwar economic mobility. Many Mexican Americans no longer relied on fieldwork for their only source of income, as seen in Grand Rapids. Moreover, as European immigrants left the fields during the war, many of them also left agricultural work for good.82 This

78 Valdes, 100. Alfonso V. Velásquez to President Manuel Ávila Camacho, October 29, 1945. Folder 4, 546.6/120, MAC C 793, Archivo General de la Nación (AGN); Gregorio Cisneros, G. Sánchez y demás Firmantes to President Manuel Ávila Camacho, Folder 4, 546.6/120, MAC C 793, AGN. 79 Philip L. Martin, Promise Unfulfilled: Unions, Immigration, and the Farm Workers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 46. 80, Fine, 164. Mencarelli, “Hispanic Seniors Pick Couple of the Year.” 81 Fine, 164. 82 Sugar Beet Journal, Volume 1, October 1935, Number 1. 2,Whalen, 74.

63 point is further supported by the fact that Michigan farms began recruiting Puerto Ricans in the late 1940s and 1950s to meet agricultural labor needs (see Chapter 2).

Despite contractual agreements to provide humane treatment to Braceros, mounting evidence showed that American farmers treated the workers poorly. This might have led braceros to seek other areas in which to settle. The Detroit consulate received reports of “mal trato” (bad treatment) from braceros around the state. They, like other braceros nationwide, reported “comodidades antihigiencias” (unsanitary amenities), long workdays, shorted paychecks, and that local bars and restaurants prohibited them from entering. Though many men deserted their contracts, there is no evidence of those braceros settling in West Michigan. Some wrote their president asking for help in returning back to Mexico before their contracts expired saying, “por ningún motivo, deasean continuar trabjando en ese país” (they have absolutely no desire to continue working in this country).83 The discrimination and harsh working conditions they faced likely led them out of the area.84

Tejano Experiences in Grand Rapids

The growing Mexican American community in Grand Rapids after WWII followed some of the patterns of the earlier migration. Some of them moved into the

Southwest side’s industrial neighborhoods living alongside their predecessors, but others found housing across the railroad tracks on what would be considered the southeast side.

83 Gregorio Cisneros, G. Sánchez y demás firmantes to President Manuel Ávila Camacho, Folder 4, 546.6/120, MAC C 793, AGN. 84 Contratacion de trabajadores agricoles, AEMEUA 1454-1, SER.

These racially diverse neighborhoods that housed African Americans, Italians, and native whites, scored a D-level security rating from the HOLC. According to the appraisal, this

“old district [provided] housing at minimum levels.”85 The neighborhood had equal parts of single family and two family homes, but many Mexican American families lived together in one dwelling, much as in the 1930s. For example, Vicente Perales, John

López, and Daniel Gonzales all listed 625 Cass Street Southeast as their home, while 733

Grandville Avenue housed five Mexican Americans families in the mid-1940s. Chain migration also influenced housing strategies in a way that did not occur in the earlier migration. In many cases, family members lived near one another. Soon after Daniel

Vasquez’s brothers-in-law arrived in Grand Rapids, they moved into 569 Sheldon, just one door down from Consuelo and Daniel.86 In a survey of fifty-seven Spanish surnamed residents in the mid 1940s, almost two-thirds of them rented, while one-third listed themselves as the homeowners in the city directory. This data indicates that it might have been cheaper to live together or in boarding houses or apartments and also that some

Mexican Americans had access to homeownership. Similar to the earlier Mexican presence on King Court, multiple Spanish-surnamed families lived in homes on Pleasant

Street Southeast near Division. It is likely that newcomers sought out this area as a safe place for Mexican Americans. Their growing presence, however, did not cause a large disturbance and many folks likely kept to their growing, but tight-knit community.

85 Area Description_Security Map of Grand Rapids, Michigan, D-2. http://www.historygrandrapids.org/uploads/files/document/HOLC-D2-SouthCentral.pdf 86 Narciso San Miguel, Elias San Miguel, Cecil San Miguel, and Daniel Vásquez, Grand Rapids City Directory, 1946.

Figure 4: Southeast Grand Rapids Note: The southeast side area in which Mexicans lived is marked in red and with the D2 designation. Source: “The HOLC Map,” Grand Rapids Historical Commission, http://www.historygrandrapids.org/tilemap/2596/the-holc-map

The only interactions between the local government and Mexican Americans came in the form of arrests by the Grand Rapids Police Department. As Mexican

Americans developed social interactions with one another, conflict and tension between acquaintances, friends, and family occasionally occurred. In some instances, fights and disagreements escalated and police arrested and charged migrants and immigrants with crimes. Sometimes these offenders, mostly men, used violence to solve their problems.

Still, there is little evidence that they had more encounters with law enforcement than other populations. Between 1946 and 1951, Mexicans and Mexican Americans made up less than 1% of the city’s population and 2% of total arrests for violent crimes in Grand

Rapids.87 Though they were arrested at slightly higher rates than their numbers would suggest, they did not seem to constitute a problem for law enforcement or experience disproportionate encounters with police.

The witnesses and complainants against Mexicans arrested for violent crimes reveals that there might have been problems within the community. Many of the victims of violent crimes had Spanish surnames. For example, Louise Gómez and Abel Sánchez filed a complaint against Eugene Sánchez for felonious assault with a knife. Considering the small size of the community and the prevalence of chain migration could indicate that it could have very well been a familial dispute. Similarly, Monroe Rodríguez was arrested after he allegedly attacked John Rodríguez with a chisel. In the remaining cases, the offender and the complaining witnesses did not share surnames. Marcos Gómez was listed as a witness for the prosecution against Juan Deleon in the only murder case to go to Felony Court.88 Assaults with a weapon were also frequent crimes. Defendants were charged with using a range of weapons, including a “knife,” a “deadly weapon,” a “jack knife,” a “shotgun,” a “switchblade,” and a “pistol.”89 In the only larceny case that listed

87 These statistics are derived from an analysis arrests for rape, assault, and murder for both the Mexican American community (11 arrests out of 500 people) and the entire Grand Rapids population (370 arrests out of 175,000 people) from 1944 to 1951. Grand Rapids City Archives, Fingerprint Cards. Grand Rapids City Archives, Grand Rapids Policy Department Annual Report, 1944-1951. 88 People of the State of Michigan v. Juan De Leon, case 72370, and People of the State of Michigan v. Juan De Leon, case 75081, book 34, Felonies, Police Court, City of Grand Rapids, GRCA. 89 Books 26-36, Felonies, Police Court, City of Grand Rapids, GRCA

67 a complaining witness, Oscar Pérez allegedly robbed Jesus Gutiérrez for an amount over

$50 in 1952.90 The assaults and larceny that occurred during this period illustrate that the disputes between these groups were serious and likely between friends and family. This could also indicate the extent of spatial segregation in Grand Rapids in that there were few opportunities for Mexicans to be around non-Mexicans in social settings.

Those same arrest records also reveal that the influx of more Mexican Americans did not necessarily help local officials decide Mexican Americans’ racial status. In the

1940 Census, the federal government indicated that it would once again classify

Mexicans as white, regardless of their treatment in society. In Grand Rapids, Mexican’ racial classification varied similarly to how it did in the 1930s. After 1944, fingerprint cards only asked for a detainee’s color, which revealed that Mexican Americans, the bulk of Spanish-surnamed offenders, could be “white” “brown,” “Mexican.” Though chapter three will discuss the larger implications of this racialization, it is important to note that the growth in the community or their access to higher paying jobs in the 1940s did not grant them access to whiteness.

Mexican American Women and the Law

Mexican American women encountered specific challenges in the community in dealing with their partners. This is evident in Maurelia “Molly” Blakely’s experience with her husband in Grand Rapids. A Mexican Irish American woman from Beeville,

90 People of the State of Michigan vs. Oscar Pérez, Case 88792, book 29, Felonies, Police Court, City of Grand Rapids, GRCA.

Texas, she moved with her then-husband to Grand Rapids. Explaining that her husband treated her abusively, she argued that she was a victim of machismo, masculine pride and excessive authority. Blakely found strength from family and friends and left her husband not long after she arrived in Grand Rapids.91 She was not alone. Women who felt that their husbands or boyfriends were not supporting them or their children often looked to the judicial system to alleviate their plights. Although it seems that it would have been a rare event for women in a new place to have confidence in the court system, Mexican

American women utilized the court system for generations. Historian Miroslava Chavez

Garcia revealed that women in the Southwest had long used the courts to challenge their husbands’ neglect of their families.92 Many of these women took this tactic with them to

Michigan.

In Grand Rapids, women used the state’s law of “non-support” to force men to take financial responsibility for their children. Between 1946 and 1955, over half of the

Spanish-surnamed men who appeared in the Felony Police Court record book were charged with nonsupport (See Table 7). Elisa Ledesma, Melba Zamora, and Aurora Pérez were among many women who took their husbands to court in this period.93 While wives used the law of nonsupport, unmarried women used the “bastardy” law to make their children’s fathers support them.94 The court usually ordered convicted men to pay anywhere from $2 to $25 a week to their wives or the mothers of their children. For example, in 1952 Juanita

91 Maurelia Blakeley, interview by author, Grand Rapids, Michigan August, 28, 2011. 92 Eileen Suarez Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870-1920 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); Stephanie J. Smith, Gender and the Mexican Revolution: Yucatán Women & the Realities of Patriarchy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 93 Books 27-29, Felonies, Police Court, City of Grand Rapids, GRCA. 94 Only about 8 percent of all felonies recorded were for bastardy.

Laredo took her husband Rocque Bueno to court for nonsupport three years after their son

Laurence was born.95 Bueno was no stranger to Grand Rapids’ Felony Police Court: he had been arrested on two charges of bastardy before he married Juanita and also for violating narcotic laws.96 The courts released Bueno after he posted a $300 bond. Laredo soon moved on to another relationship: in 1954, the GRPD arrested her for “lewd and lascivious cohabitation” with a man named Robert Rodríguez.97 Juanita relocated with her son to

Chicago in the early 1960s.98 As new migrants to Grand Rapids, women found ways to protect themselves and their children.

Conclusion

By the late 1940s, many of the earlier Mexican settlers in Grand Rapids had moved on and Daniel Vargas and Daniel Vasquez served as leaders in the community.

Though Mexicans in the 1930s did not leave the area by force, the Mexican bachelor population waned as the depression raged on. Discrimination in railroad jobs, arduous farm work, and limited opportunities in manufacturing likely led them to seek other work opportunities in the US or in Mexico. The war, however, changed Grand Rapids’ racial and ethnic landscape. Vargas and Vasquez brought word to their family and friends of higher paying jobs and social climate devoid of the overt and oppressive racism found in

95 People of the State of Michigan v. Rocque Bueno, case 89699, book 29, Felonies, Police Court, City of Grand Rapids, GRCA. 96 People of the State of Michigan v. Rocque Bueno, Cases 76028, 79722, book 29, Felonies, Police Court, City of Grand Rapids, GRCA. 97 People of the State of Michigan v. Juanita Laredo, Robert Rodríguez, case 2434, book 30, Felonies, Police Court, City of Grand Rapids, GRCA 98 Laurence Bueno, Baptism Records, 1952-1957, St. Andrew’s Cathedral, Diocese of Grand Rapids. In the comments section of this record, it is noted that Bueno was confirmed in Chicago, Illinois, in 1964.

Texas. The Braceros, in large part, did not make West Michigan their home. Poor treatment in rural areas likely deterred them from trying to stay and if some did want to remain in the US, they might have sought out places like Detroit or Chicago for greater opportunities.

Though they faced struggles, the Vargas and Vasquez families’ goal in finding a better life for them outside of the Southwest essentially came true. Both family patriarch’s left railroad jobs and fieldwork for industrial jobs in the post-war era.

Guadalupe and Daniel left Crystal City, Texas and did not return because she wanted something more for her son, Magdelino. He spent much of his youth in Grand Rapids and served in World War II. He came back a veteran and worked alongside other Mexican

Americans in commercial bakeries.99 Since he left Texas as a child, Magdelino did not need to support himself by picking cucumbers, beets, or onions. Other Mexican

Americans who arrived via the migrant stream also shed their dependence on farm work for higher paying industrial jobs, despite the subtle discrimination they faced. As more

Mexican’s came in the late 1950s and 1960s, the city took notice of this community— something they had not done in the decades before. At the same time, Mexican

Americans used their citizenship to argue for better treatment and started to hold the local government responsible for some of the obstacles they faced in Grand Rapids. Another set of Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens would soon join them. As the next chapter shows,

Puerto Ricans also followed chain and step migration and worked and lived alongside

99 Magdeleno Rodríguez, Grand Rapids City Directory, 1964, GRPL.

Mexican Americans in the agricultural fields of Michigan, and eventually in Grand

Rapids.

Chapter 2: The Puerto Rican Diaspora in Michigan, 1944-1964

Introduction

In the mid-1960s, each Christmas, the Bérrios, Fernández, Hernández, Ramirez,

Vega, Sánchez, Doñez, and Ayala families took turns hosting one another for parrandas, a traditional Puerto Rican Christmas celebration. The guests brought instruments to play aguinaldos (Puerto Rican Christmas carols). Though the hosts prepared food for everyone, Edwin Ramirez, a child at the time, remembered Ana Doñez traveled “with a chicken from the grocery store just in case the house we were at didn’t have anything to eat, she [could] make arroz con pollo.”1 In Puerto Rico, during parrandas, a group of people would walk to a person’s house to sing them carols and together they would travel to another’s and so on until they arrived at a final destination. These particular parrandas, however, had been transplanted to West Michigan. Walking to one another’s homes would have been unthinkable in the frigid Midwest winters, so people traveled by car.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, these families all decided to leave the island. Puerto

Rico’s limited economic opportunities could not provide them with the stability they sought. Some of them met one another once they arrived in West Michigan and others belonged to immediate and extended kinship networks. Usually, a male family member

1 Edwin Ramírez Carrión, correspondence with author, March 7, 2015.

(father, brother, husband) left the island first and sent for his extended family once settled. Michigan agricultural companies recruited many of these first male migrants and governmental agencies also sent men to the Midwest to do agricultural work. Many of these migrants worked in other areas of the Midwest and in New York before settling in

Michigan and others circulated back and forth from the island, New York, or Chicago, and Grand Rapids various times throughout their lives. When they lived in Grand Rapids, however, they all used familial and fictive kinship networks to make a living and survive in West Michigan.

Family migration stories, documents from both the federal and Puerto Rican governments, and local sources from Grand Rapids, illustrate that the economically desperate conditions Puerto Ricans faced forced them off the island. State-sponsored programs and agencies helped facilitate their migration. These employment services gave

Puerto Ricans access to jobs in other places or allowed them to relocate to a new city where the Puerto Rican Department of Labor’s Migration Division, an agency that assisted migrants in their transition to the mainland, had placed their relatives or friends.

For Puerto Ricans who settled in West Michigan, jobs and the desire to be with kin brought extended families to the area. Even though Chicago, Detroit, or even Cleveland offered more plentiful job opportunities in higher-paying industrial work, Grand Rapids became a desirable destination for a small Puerto Rican community.

Unlike Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans’ presence in the Midwest only occurred after the post-war era. While some Mexican immigrants had come to Grand

Rapids in the 1920s, Puerto Ricans during those same years had sought out New York

74 and other east coast locations instead. As a result of a prolonged depression on the island in the mid-1940s, however, the insular government launched its plan to revive the island’s economy, which included relocating people to the mainland. Migration to the

Midwest became viable as employers looked to fill labor shortages during World War II and after. These programs put them in contact with Mexican Bracero workers and Tejano farmworkers who were also in Michigan at this time. Michigan companies sought Puerto

Ricans, just as they looked to Mexicans, as a source of cheap, expendable, and “foreign” labor. However, unlike Mexican nationals, Puerto Ricans’ status as United States’ citizens allowed Michigan growers to contract workers without consulting U.S. immigration policies. Instead of receiving workers through a state-to-state agreement, like in the Bracero Program, private companies worked directly with the Puerto Rican government to recruit workers, many of them through the Farm Labor Placement program. Unlike Mexican nationals, Puerto Ricans left their farm jobs without risk of deportation and engaged in step migration and chain migration. In these instances, their experience mimicked that of Mexican Americans who often followed an agricultural migration circuit from Texas to various states in the Midwest.

Scholarly studies of Puerto Ricans outside of the Northeast corridor of the United

States have focused on large industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia and smaller cities like Lorrain, Ohio.2 This chapter argues that the small industrial city of

2 Lilia Fernández “Of Immigrants and Migrants: Mexican and Puerto Rican Labor Migration in Comparative Perspective, 1942-1964.” Journal of American Ethnic History, v. 29 issue 3, 2010, p. 6-39; Lilia Fernández, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Post War Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012); Pablo Mitchell, “Making ‘The International City’ Home: Latinos in Twentieth Centry Lorain, Ohio” in Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America eds. Adrian

Grand Rapids with its agricultural periphery allowed Puerto Ricans to use both sectors

(industry and agriculture) to make a living in Grand Rapids and make it a viable place for settlement. Only two other studies examine Puerto Rican agricultural workers in the

Midwest and those focus on a particular wave of labor recruitment in Saginaw, Michigan in 1950.3 This chapter builds upon those works but also traces Puerto Ricans’ migration from Saginaw to West Michigan. Puerto Ricans received poor treatment in Michigan including misleading contracts and miscommunications, which often meant farmworkers found themselves without adequate food, housing, or pay. Yet, despite these conditions,

Puerto Ricans continued to come to Michigan from the 1950s to late 1960s as agricultural workers, many of them settling in both Detroit and West Michigan. Detroit’s automobile industry and Grand Rapids’ commercial bakeries and manufacturing industries attracted them to those respective areas. Economic opportunities as well as Grand Rapids’ reputation as a relatively safe city, compared to larger cities like Chicago or New York, motivated them to settle there.

Burgos Jr. et.al. (New York: New York University Press, 2010); Julio Morales, Puerto Rican Poverty and Migration: We Just Had to Try Elsewhere (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1986); Gina Pérez, The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families, (Berkeley: University of California, 2004); Eugenio “Gene” Rivera, “La Colonia de Lorain, Ohio,” in The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives eds. Carmen Theresa Whalen and Victor Vásquez-Hernández, (Philadelphia; Temple University, 2005); Mérida Rúa, A Gounded Identidad: Making New Lives in Chicago’s Puerto Rican Neighborhoods (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012); Carmen Theresa Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies (Philadelphia, Temple University, 2001), 3 See Denis Valdes, Al Norte: Agricultural Workers in the Great Lakes Region, 1917-1970 (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1991). See Eileen Findlay, We are Left Without a Father Here: Masculinity, Domesticity, and Migration in Postwar Puerto Rico (Durham, Duke University Press 2014). Valdes’ work analyzes Puerto Ricans in Saginaw in 1950, as well as Mexicans’ long history in the area. Findlay’s work details Puerto Rican workers’ plight in Saginaw, Michigan as a part of a broader examination of gender and the state.

This chapter first examines the economic factors that led Puerto Ricans to seek work off of the island. It then discusses the various plans to alleviate those circumstances, which ultimately resulted in widespread migration to the mainland. The chapter also describes Michigan’s continuous need for agricultural workers and the process growers undertook to contract Puerto Ricans. I analyze the experiences of Puerto Rican workers across the state, including West Michigan in the early 1950s. I explore the early families’ success in utilizing kinship networks to find housing and employment. This chapter also highlights women’s roles in contributing financially to their families in these years.

The Economic Legacy of Colonialism

Puerto Rico’s position as a colonial entity dates back to the 1500s when the island became part of Spain’s empire. In the late 1800s, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines, however, were Spain’s only remaining colonial holdings. All of Spain’s other protectorates had successfully obtained their independence. Throughout the mid-1800s,

Puerto Ricans openly rebelled against their colonial overseer to no avail. Although the

Spanish finally agreed to give Puerto Rican’s a measure of autonomy over island affairs in 1897, by April of the following year Spain entered into a war against the United States.

Just four months after the war began, however, it ended in August of 1898. After the war,

Cuba purchased its independence from the United States, Filipinos entered into war against the United States for their freedom, and Puerto Rico became a U.S. territory.4

The United States instituted an insular government in Puerto Rico, staffed with mainland administrators that kept their own interests in mind. Puerto Rican Governor

Charles Allen led by example. Besides his gubernatorial duties, he also owned the

American Sugar Refining Company, which operated out of Puerto Rico. The island government devalued the Spanish peso and replaced it with the dollar, making it easier for sugar companies to purchase large land holdings in Puerto Rico. This in turn instituted a sugar monoculture on the island. By the 1930s, the United States, Puerto

Rico’s only sugar purchaser, also located other sources of cheap sugar. By the Great

Depression the island was in economic ruin.5

The economic devastation on the island was worse than most places on the mainland. Twelve-hour workdays paid 50 cents a day led to significant labor unrest, a sign of Puerto Rico’s financial despair. Throughout the fiscal crisis, however, according to one source, company “profits remained high.”6 Attempts to diversify the island’s sugar-based economy failed, leaving widespread unemployment and dire living conditions for most of the population. Luisa Fernández, who arrived in Michigan in 1955, was a small child living in Caguas at the time of the depression. Her mother became ill and her father’s wages alone could not support their family. As a result, at just eight or

4 Juan González, Harvest of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2011). Carmen Teresa Whalen and Víctor Vázquez-Hernández, eds. The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives, 5-7. Virginia Sánchez-Korral, From Colonia to Community: the History of Puerto Ricans in New York City 13-15.

5 Whalen, The Puerto Rican Diaspora, 5-7. Sanchez-Korral, 13-15. 6 Gonzalez, 85.

78 nine years old, Luisa went to live and work for a family that fared better during the depression.7 The island’s sugar dependence and the economic depression had dramatic effects on everyday life for the island’s inhabitants.

Operation Bootstrap and the Farm Labor Placement Program

Formal relief came to the island with World War II. The nation’s engagement in total war called for the importation of Puerto Ricans, among other foreign and domestic workers, to fill impending labor shortages. As the previous chapter discussed, the War

Manpower Commission looked to Mexican Bracero workers. Hiring Puerto Ricans, however, allowed both the federal and state governments to recruit people who were

United States citizens during a time of patriotic fervor. From the island, in 1944 alone, the War Manpower Commission helped place over 2,000 workers in industrial jobs across the United States.8 Migrants went to work on railroads, in manufacturing plants, and in food-processing companies, like Campbell Soup for example, among many other jobs.9

Despite the improving economic conditions on the mainland as a result of the war, the island’s economy continued a downward spiral. To rectify the economic issues policymakers established a two-prong plan, called “Operation Bootstrap.” The insular and mainland governments helped attract mainland businesses to the island to industrialize it and encouraged workers to go abroad to alleviate “putative

7 Luisa Fernández, interview with Kate Schramm, Calvin College, 2001. Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, GRPL. 8 Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia, 52. Fernández, “Of Migrants and Immigrants” 15. 9 Whalen, 55.

‘overpopulation.’”10 Historian Carmen Theresa Whalen describes the first half of the strategy as “government promotion of private enterprise in manufacturing.”11 Promote they did, indeed. Insular government agencies through the Puerto Rican Economic

Development Administration/Administración de Fomento Economico (Fomento) in conjunction with the Puerto Rican Department of Labor, attracted foreign investment with “tax holidays, loan assistance programs, and wage and rent subsidies” according to researcher Gina Pérez.12 Slogans like “Puerto Rico, USA” attracted businessmen.

Specifically, the Puerto Rican Industrial Incentives Act allowed companies to move to the island without paying “insular and municipal property taxes, certain excise taxes, and licensing and other fees.”13 In addition to low taxes, the minimum wage in Puerto Rico was lower than the mainland. Moreover, the Partido Popular Democrático, the political party in power, had also sold its government-owned industries. According to Whalen, they were “exclusively in the business of promoting private, mostly US investment.”14

They formalized this process with the creation of Puerto Rican Industrial Development

Company (PRIDCO), which along with Fomento continued to entice industries to come to Puerto Rico. As director of PRIDCO, Teodoro Moscoso Jr. bragged to Time Magazine in 1947 about the low wages in Puerto Rico (15 cents an hour), and the government subsidized electricity. Essentially, businesses received the benefits of lower-cost

10 Fernández, “Of Migrants and Immigrants,” 16. 11 Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia, 28. 12 Pérez, 44. 13 Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia, 28. 14Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia, 28.

“foreign” labor, while not having tariffs or duties on their goods as they shipped them back to the United States.

The plan did succeeded in diversifying the Puerto Rican manufacturing industry, but it also furthered the island’s economic reliance on the U.S. Five years after the program’s implementation, Puerto Rican factories were creating “pearl buttons, artificial flowers, pharmaceuticals, handbags, radios, and televisions” according to a New York

Times article in 1949.15 The article praised the operation and the island’s governor, Luis

Muñoz Marín, who had erased the island’s debt considerably. In addition to manufacturing plants, Fomento helped bring the seven million dollar Caribe Hilton Hotel to the island. The government advertised the island as the ideal location for American business and leisure. By 1953, through advertising and recruitment, 229 firms operated in Puerto Rico, though only 25 of them were “locally owned.”16 By 1949, Muñoz Marín had successfully brought 42 companies specializing in everything “from rayon to radios.”17 Fomento and PRIDCO predicted that by 1960, over 300,000 mainland U.S. jobs would be on the island.

“Operation Bootstrap” did not produce the desired effects for Puerto Rican workers, however. The press touted the program as a success in 1949 because the island was “doing for itself,” meaning it would not have to depend on state welfare programs

15 "Puerto Rico Plan Called A Success: Economic Recovery Program, Now in Fifth Year, Is Hailed as Post- War Achievement." New York Times, October 2, 1949. 16 Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia 30. Whalen also notes that Operation Bootstrap did not just bring companies to the island—it also meant that the Puerto Rican government privatized many of its public industries. With the onset of the Cold War, public holdings threatened the United States’ fierce anti- communist stance, particularly in a region threatened by the leftist politics burgeoning in Guatemala and Cuba. 17 “Gods Pamphleteer” Time Magazine, November 29, 1949.

81 but rather industry would sustain the economy. Nonetheless, the Puerto Rican people felt the harsh disappointments and limitations of the economic development plan.18 While sugar production was already reduced in the 1930’s, a considerable part of the island’s population depended on subsistence farming and wage work at the sugar mills. As the government intensified industrialization, agriculture suffered and so did rural workers.

Abrán Martínez’s family lived in Toa Alta, a small, landlocked, municipality near the center of the island. Facing bleak economic conditions, they migrated to the coast and settled in Arécibo. Once there, he quickly found work as a salesman. Like Abrán, many

Puerto Ricans left rural areas to find employment near the industrializing seaside cities.

As a result, the rural areas became desolate without workers. According to the

1950 Census, “the numerical increase and rate of growth of the urban population exceeded those for the rural population.”19 From 1899 to 1950, the rural population declined from 85.4% to 59.5% as a result of industrialization.20 Unfortunately, when workers left the farms, they did not find economic security in urban areas. As agricultural workers abandoned farms and fled to the coasts, a food shortage occurred. Moreover, there were not many options available for former rural workers. The new industries mainly employed women, whom they paid less. With high rates of underemployment for women and unemployment for men, Puerto Rican workers began to look for opportunities on the mainland. Abrán Martínez’s brothers began seeking work outside of

18 "Puerto Rico Plan Called A Success: Economic Recovery Program, Now in Fifth Year, Is Hailed as Post- War Achievement" New York Times, October 2, 1949. 19 United States Bureau of the Census, Characteristics of the Population of Puerto Rico, 1953, Prepared by the Population and Housing Division, Bureau of the Census, Washington D.C., 1953, iv. 20 United States Bureau of the Census, Characteristics of the Population of Puerto Rico, 1953, Prepared by the Population and Housing Division, Bureau of the Census, Washington D.C., 1953, iv.

82 the island and eventually he did as well since sales did not provide a stable living. Abrán eventually followed one of his brothers to West Michigan in 1958.

The second prong of Operation Bootstrap included encouraging emigration to the mainland. Agricultural work was the primary option for Puerto Ricans leaving the island.

Carmen Whalen succinctly describes the Farm Labor Placement Program: American

“farmers requested Puerto Rican workers through the local offices of the United States

Employment Services. The requests were forwarded to the regional office of the Bureau of Employment security, which certified the need for laborers and contacted Puerto

Rico’s Bureau of Employment and Migration for recruitment.”21 By 1951, the bureau became a branch of USES, making it eligible for federal funding, and thus easing the recruitment process.22 The Farm Labor Placement Program sent workers across the

Northeast to rural areas near New York and New Jersey, as well as cities across Ohio,

Illinois, and Michigan.

This labor migration did not solve overpopulation on the island, but rather it offered an alternative way for Puerto Rican laborers to earn living wages. Reflecting the concerns and protocols expressed during World War II about workers’ potential to settle permanently on the mainland, employers contracted single men for temporary periods.

Similar to the Bracero Program, the government wanted to ensure that workers would, in fact, return to their families on the island. Though the Farm Labor Placement Program solicited male workers, women workers sought ways off the islands as well. Puerto Rican

21 Whalen, 48. 22 Whalen, 68.

83 women migrated to do domestic work in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, for example.23 This domestic labor migration, however, did not bring women workers to

Michigan. Instead, the state received a predominantly male agricultural workforce whose contracts promised forty hours a week, the local prevailing wage, and no discrimination in employment or housing. Workers were to be provided with free housing, meals at specified prices or food to cook on their own, and employers would deduct the cost of their transportation from the island to Puerto Rico from their paycheck.

Michigan Needs for Workers

In the 1950s, Puerto Ricans were just the latest ethnic group to perform agricultural work in Michigan. Max Henderson, secretary of Michigan Field Crops, a

Saginaw-based growers’ association that represented over 38 Michigan companies, described the first group of migrant workers as recent European immigrants.24 Workers from Belgium, Germany, Poland and other places in Central Europe made up the labor force in the 1910s and 1920s. These people, however, achieved social and economic mobility, especially with more opportunities opening up in industrial work with the onset of World War I. Others acquired their own small farms. “The next generation was pretty much Americanized and the young people preferred to work in the cities under industrial

23 See Fernández, Brown in the Windy City, 40-48. See also Mérida Rúa’s first chapter in A Grounded Identitdad and Carmen Whalen’s third chapter in From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia for information on doemsticas in Chicago and Philadelpha, respectively. See Virginia Sánchez Korrol’s From Colonia to Community, 2, 29, 92, 107, and 111, for information on Puerto Ricans and domestic service in New York. Grand Rapids’ small population did not require as many domestics that larger cities requested. Moreover, these were some of the only positions available to African American women in the city. 24 Farmers and Manufacturers Beat Sugar Association, Sugar Beet Journal, Volume 1, October 1935, Number 1. 2;Whalen, 74.

84 conditions and industrial rates of pay,” according to Henderson.25 The 1924 immigration quotas halted the continued migration from Europe and thus created a demand for a new labor source.

As European immigrants left the fields, Mexican Americans and Mexicans became an attractive labor pool. Michigan sugar companies advertised job opportunities in Texas, especially in San Antonio and border towns.26 According to historian Kathleen

Mapes, “sugar companies hoped that Mexicans would tend to the crop as needed and return south of the border when no longer wanted.”27 Mexican Americans provided migratory labor across the Midwest and Southwest at this time so they seemed a reasonable solution for sugar beet growers and farmers. In 1942, Mexican nationals joined Mexican Americans in large numbers through the Bracero Program.

Braceros continued to work the sugar beet fields even after World War II, but in

1950, there was an extreme shortage in the labor supply. There are multiple and intersecting reasons for this quandary. The complaints of strenuous labor and low pay, and alternative labor opportunities likely deterred Mexican Americans from coming to

Michigan’s “thumb” area. For years, Mexican Americans constituted an essential part of the sugar beet workforce. Max Henderson recalled that farmers “have come to expect

[them] to put in an appearance in the spring and to as mysteriously disappear in the fall after the crops are harvested.” Much to the growers’ dismay, however, Mexican

Americans began to “winter” in Michigan, particularly after World War II when job

25 Proceedings of the Fifth Regional Meeting of American Society of Sugar Beet Technologists, Eastern United States and Canada, Detroit, Michigan 1949, 25. 26 Mapes, 123. 27 Mapes, 123.

85 opportunities in industry had increased. Mexican Americans gained greater access to industrial jobs and thus avoided having to toil in the fields. Instead of returning south after harvest season, many found jobs locally. Detroit was about 100 miles away from most of the sugar beet fields and the city provided much closer opportunities than Texas.

Saginaw’s own Chevrolet Foundry also provided work for some Mexican Americans near their agricultural work, thus providing greater employment stability year round. As chapter 1 illustrated, some of these workers abandoned the fields for Grand Rapids’ economic opportunity as well.28

Discrimination may have contributed to the acute labor shortages as well. With growing numbers of Mexican Americans and Mexicans working and living in Michigan, white residents noticed their increasingly visible presence. A 1951 article in the

Washington Post sums up the nativist fears: “...the annual migration of Mexican laborers into this country [has] reached ‘invasion’ proportions.”29 The article cited a “large illicit

Mexican migration” on the east side of Michigan. These anti-Mexican feelings likely dated back to the late 1940’s but became exacerbated as more Mexican workers migrated to the beet fields and settled in the state. The hostile environment may have dissuaded other Mexican Americans in Texas from making the journey north.

Michigan growers realized they needed another source of cheap labor to maintain their profitable crops. In 1949, the Farmers and Manufacturers Beet Sugar Association feared “there [was] no great pool of workers from foreign countries or from over-

28 Juanita Vásquez, interview with author, December 18, 2011. 29 “‘Invasion’ spreads, ‘Wetbacks,’ Move into Industrial Midwest” The Washington Post, September 16, 1951.

86 populated agricultural sections from which to draw for seasonal labor supplies.” 30 That same year, at the Regional Meeting of the American Society of Sugar Beet

Technologists, Henderson believed that he would never find a “situation where there are large pools of willing, trained and tractable labor who [sic] will work at the wages, which farmers can afford to pay.”31 Puerto Ricans provided a perfect panacea to their problem.

Historian Dionicio Valdez notes that Henderson reached out to Michigan Congressional

Representative Fred Crawford. The Congressman then used his relationship with Puerto

Rican governor Luis Muñoz Marín to contract Puerto Ricans.32 Through this connection,

Henderson and the FMBSA found their large labor supply of workers that had experience with harvesting sugar and who were foreign enough to exploit, but American enough to get to Michigan without having to engage in bureaucratic immigration procedures.

Since World War II, the War Manpower Commission’s Region V, including

Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, contemplated importing Puerto Rican workers, though did not follow through. In a December 1943 telephone conversation with Washington D.C.’s

War Manpower Commission (WMC) headquarters, Mr. Hamm, the DC coordinator, asked Mr. Graver, region V clearance representative, if he had received the WMC’s wire

30 Proceedings of the Fifth Regional Meeting of American Society of Sugar Beet Technologists, Eastern United States and Canada, Detroit, Michigan 1949, 26. These proceedings do not mention the recruitment of African Americans for agricultural labor. A telephone conversation with Bob Reed, whose fathr owned the Lake Odessa Canning Company, revealed that migrants from Pascagoula, Mississippi came to harvest crops and work in the canning company during World War II and after. African American agricultural migration is well documented in Cindy Hahamovitch’s The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 31 Proceedings of the Fifth Regional Meeting of American Society of Sugar Beet Technologists, Eastern United States and Canada, Detroit, Michigan 1949, 27. 32 Valdes, 121.

87 about contracting Puerto Rican workers for their labor needs in the Midwest.33 Mr.

Graver had received the wire, but showed a bit of hesitation in bringing Puerto Rican workers to the area. Mr. Graver first inquired if prisoners of war would be available to take any available positions instead of Puerto Ricans. Unaware that Puerto Ricans held

United States citizenship, he also wanted to ensure that he would not run into any immigration restrictions. Lastly, he wondered if there were any available single Puerto

Rican men who could come.

His questions reveal a very specific type of laborer he wanted. Using prisoners of war was a common tactic to fill labor shortages, but it also suggested that he wanted a group of workers who could be easily controlled. At the same time, his comments connote that he needed flexible workers who could come at the immediate request of employers. Immigration laws and families could pose barriers to that flexibility. Puerto

Ricans fit those requirements. Mr. Graver’s insistence that the workers be single men resembled the Bracero Program provisions.34 For both of these state-sponsored migrations, American employers and the federal and regional governments implied that they did not want workers to settle permanently in the mainland United States. Without their families, they hoped Puerto Ricans would return home rather than stay in local communities. Despite Mr. Gravers’ misgivings about the workers, he still asked the

33 Clyde Hamm to Mr. Wood, “Employment of Puerto Ricans in Regions I-V,” Records of the Manpower Commission, Records of the Bureau of Placement, Records of the Rural Industries, General Records of the Farm Placement Service, 1939-1946, Md-Mich, Puerto Ricans, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). 34 Telephone Transcript Mr. Hamm and Mr.Graver, 1. December 29, 1943, RG 211, Records of the Manpower Commission, Records of the Bureau of Placement, Records of the Rural Industries, General Records of the Farm Placement Service, 1939-1946, Md-Mich, Puerto Ricans, NARA.

Washington, DC coordinator about the possibility of bringing skilled Puerto Rican laborers to work as electricians, automobile mechanics, arc welders, “and others who will accept foundry employment.”35 Though there is no record of Puerto Ricans actually coming to Michigan for the war effort, this conversation and that of Max Henderson foreshadowed the contract labor program that the mainland and the island undertook in subsequent years.

Operation Airlift

The first large wave of Puerto Ricans in Michigan arrived through agricultural contracts. Juan Báez, who arrived in Grand Rapids in the early 1950s, came through this route. His friends, and brothers, Juan and Rafael Pérez, asked him to join them in

Saginaw, Michigan in 1948.36 The three bachelors arrived just two years before a large, planned migration of Puerto Ricans landed in Saginaw. In March of 1950, Michigan sugar companies solicited Puerto Ricans to alleviate their severe work shortage.37 The

FMBSA and MFC worked with the Migration Division to secure workers. Over the course of the summer more than 5,000 Puerto Rican men came to Michigan save that year’s crops in what the press dubbed as “Operation Airlift.” The majority of them left

35 Telephone Transcript Mr. Hamm and Mr.Graver, 1. December 29, 1943, RG 211, Records of the Manpower Commission, Records of the Bureau of Placement, Records of the Rural Industries, General Records of the Farm Placement Service, 1939-1946, Md-Mich, Puerto Ricans, NARA. 36 Juan Báez, interview with author, October 15, 2011. 37 The Korean War also started in 1950. A labor shortage occurred in many industries. However, by 1950, Michigan farms were relying heavily on Mexican national labor and Mexican American labor. If a shortage was felt, it was from Mexican Americans who were drafted at this time. It is also important to note that Puerto Ricans were also drafted. Many of them served in the 65th infantry for the US Army. For more information on Puerto Ricans in the Korean War see, Gilberto N. Villahermosa, “Honor and Fidelity: the 65th Infantry in Korea 1950-1953” (Department of the Army, 2009) Volume, 73.

89 families on the island that depended on their wages. Within weeks of announcing this plan, however, the program appeared to be an utter failure.

A plane crash in June served as an omen for what became a tumultuous summer for Puerto Rican workers in Michigan. Though labor migrants had been coming since

March, in June growers needed more workers to block and thin the crops. In response,

Michigan Field Crops contracted Eastern Airways to fly 65 Puerto Rican workers from

San Juan to Saginaw. 38 The Curtis-Wright Commando plane, however, went down over the Atlantic, killing 28 of the 65 Puerto Rican passengers. 39 Despite all that occurred that fateful night, alluding to the economic desperation on the island, only three men wanted to return to Puerto Rico, two were undecided, and the majority of the men continued on to Michigan.

Those workers and others who continued to take flights from the island, came with expectations that they would make between seven to fifteen dollars a day, depending on their employer, from June to September. By most calculations, workers would be able to sustain themselves while on the mainland and send money back to their families with those wages. One Puerto Rican worked in New Jersey the previous year and made close to $1,200 for an entire season and expected to do the same in Michigan.40 On the sugar

38 “Plane with 65 Goes Down”, Chicago Daily Tribune, June 6, 1950. 39 “Puerto Rico Halts ‘Airlifts’” The Saginaw Times, June 10, 1950.Findlay, We Are Left without a Father Here. Valdés, Al Norte. 40 Leonard Jackson, “Puerto Rican Toils for Seven Weeks for 20 Cents” Bay City Times, August 7, 1950.

90 beet fields, they were to block and thin the fields from June to early August. For those eight weeks of laboring many of them expected to make at least $400.41

Unbeknownst to the workers, employers did not pay them at an hourly wage or even regularly. Instead, the farmers calculated their pay on a per-acre rate and arranged to pay the workers at the end of the season. Many workers described working ten to eleven hour days on the fields and calculated their payment based on that.42 This payment arrangement did not meet the worker’s needs as many of them took those positions to support a wife and children at home. As reporter Leonard Jackson noted, the workers needed regular paychecks “so money could be sent home to mama and the kids.”43 One man with “10 youngsters” at home had arranged for a grocer to give his family food on credit, and to his dismay, his family’s credit was revoked because he was unable to pay.44

The Michigan Field Company had grossly ignored that the lack of regular payments and sufficient wages affected dependent family members on the island.

When workers finally received payment, they were shocked to see what remained of their checks. One worker, Santos Cintrón, who had calculated his earnings for one paycheck at over $47 dollars, discovered on pay day that the Michigan Sugar Co., a company represented by the MFC, contended he owed the company $9.69.45 Others

41 With no direct sources to attest to the total the workers expected to make, it is impossible to give a definitive amount. However, considering they worked at least 5 days a week at an average rate of $10 a day for 8 weeks, $400 is a likely sum. This could vary considering the amount of days and rate of pay. 42 Leonard Jackson, “Puerto Rican Toils for Seven Weeks for 20 Cents” Bay City Times, August 7, 1950. 43 Leonard Jackson, “Puerto Rican Toils for Seven Weeks for 20 Cents” Bay City Times, August 7, 1950. See Eileen Findlay, We are Left Here Without a Father. Her work discusses, in great detail, workers’ intentions of sending money home. She also thoroughly examines the gendered language in letters from workers and their families to the governor of Puerto Rico. 44 Leonard Jackson, “Puerto Rican Toils for Seven Weeks for 20 Cents” Bay City Times, August 7, 1950. 45 Walter Rusch, “His Wages ‘Minus,’ Migrant Relates” The New York Times, September 13, 1950.

91 reported similar deductions.46 The company explained that the subtractions were for their travel expenses and food. Workers countered that the weekly food advance did not even cover four days. Puerto Rican officials agreed that the “medical, travel and insurance expenses were ‘exorbitant.’”47 Others also complained of poor accommodations.

This ill treatment was not confined to paychecks and deductions nor was it an isolated incident that occurred only in Saginaw. During the summer of 1950, workers from across the state of Michigan wrote letters to the governor about the treatment they received. The Farm Labor placement program sent Puerto Ricans to over fifty locations in the state. About 50 percent of them worked in places near Saginaw in Eastern

Michigan, including small towns like Pigeon, Hope, Kingston, Palgrove, and Gagetown.

Almost a fourth of all workers went to towns with less than 200 people or areas that were unincorporated territories of counties. Only six percent of these workers lived in cities over 25,000.48 Small and mid-sized towns alike introduced challenges for these all male work crews. Lorenzo Ramírez, who settled in Grand Rapids in 1951, wrote a letter to the governor to inform him of the conditions, before leaving his work assignment in West

Michigan. Another man wrote a letter on behalf of himself and other workers. Matías

Cabán, wrote to inform the governor of Puerto Rico that his employer in Pigeon,

46 Leonard Jackson, “Puerto Rican Toils for Seven Weeks for 20 Cents” Bay City Times, August 7, 1950. Leonard Jackson “Puerto Rican Farm Workers Embittered By Deplorable Plight” Bay City Times, August 8, 1950. 47 “Puerto Rico Seeks Workers’ Return” New York Times, August 20, 1950. 48 These figures are derived from a random sampling of 60 letters sent to the Puerto Rican government from Michigan fieldworkers. File 743-Michigan-A-B-C, Michigan-D-E-F, Michigan-G-H-I, Michigan-J-K-L Box 2275, Tarea 96-20, FOG, AGPR; File 743-Michigan-M-N-O, Michigan-P-Q, Michigan-R, Michigan- S-T-U, Michigan-V-Z, Box 2277, Tarea 96-20, FOG, AGPR

Michigan ran out of work for them to do and thus ceased payments.49 The governor assured Cabán and his compatriots that they could find work on other remolcheras (sugar beet fields). These smaller towns often could not support the workers as their contracts stipulated and there was no oversight to prevent these work shortages. These letters also revealed that accommodations were often unsatisfactory. Pablo Moreno de Jesus, Taurino

Zayas Moreno, Pedro Rivera Meléndez, Pedro Soria López, and Fransisco Ortiz Santos, all contracted to work in Albion, Michigan received a similar letter from the governor when they asked to be sent home due to illness. Poor housing had likely exposed them to the elements. As in Saginaw, Puerto Ricans around the state experienced similar conditions on a number of farms.

The 5,000 contracted workers responded to the work contract fiasco in several ways. First, some wrote to the Puerto Rican government asking for intercession. In response, the governor sent Eulalio Torres to Saginaw to assist workers and farmers in amending work agreements. Other workers often sought allies in surrounding communities in nearby Detroit to help them address their labor issues. Lastly, some of the farmhands simply walked off their jobs. Their U.S. citizenship allowed them easier access to other jobs as compared to Braceros or other foreign workers. Similar to

Mexican nationals who once toiled on Saginaw fields, they sought other opportunities in nearby industrial cities like Detroit or Cleveland. Others continued to do farm work in

California, Colorado, New York, Ohio, and Illinois, while some followed Mexican

49 Luis Munoz Marin To Leocadio Aponte, September 19, 1950, File 743-Michigan-A-B-C, Box 2275, Tarea 96-20, Fondo de la Oficina del Gobeirno, (FOG), Archivo General de Puerto Rico (AGPR)

Americans back to Texas. Many of them returned to Puerto Rico without aid from the

Puerto Rican government.50

Despite what seemed to be a catastrophe of a migration experiment, in the years that followed, more Puerto Ricans continued to come to Michigan. Their numbers paled in comparison to the numbers sent to other destinations like Chicago or cities in the

Northeast. The lack of large metropolitan cities and opportunities and farm work’s reputation likely deterred large numbers of Puerto Ricans from coming to Michigan. The

Farm Labor Placement Program, however, continued into the 1960s attracting much smaller groups of migrants. The desperate conditions on the island still led some to take their chances in Michigan.

The Migration Division and Diaspora

The Migration Division of the Department of Labor in Puerto Rico facilitated migration. In 1947, the New York Office of the Migration Division (MD) opened to the public. Historian Virginia Sánchez-Korrol aptly describes their “primary responsibilities

…[as] organizing and monitoring of the general migratory stream from Puerto Rico, including seasonal agricultural migration.” More importantly it served as “a clearinghouse for employment, housing, welfare, health, and educational needs.”51 The

Migration Division worked with the USES and the Puerto Rican government to identify

50 Eileen Findlay includes an in depth analysis of the workers’ responses to the issues they faced on the fields. She explains their actions as a part of a larger process of bregando,(struggling or negotiating) with both the Puerto Rican government and their position as colonial subjects. See chapter 4 in We are Left Here without a Father. 51 Sánchez Korrol, From Colonia to Community. 35.

94 industries in need of workers and workers in need of jobs.52 Less than a year later,

Chicago opened up its own office of the Migration Division. In Chicago, for example, the

Migration Division was able to find jobs for over fourteen thousand people in 1953.53

During the 1950s, Cleveland, Ohio; Hartford, Connecticut; Philadelphia; and Rochester,

New York followed suit.

The various Migration Division offices assisted Puerto Rican migrants in settling in places around the Northeast and Midwest. The Migration Division of New York sent

Paco Sánchez to West Michigan in 1951. After he arrived in New York City from Tao

Bajo, Puerto Rico, the New York MD sent Sánchez to the muck lands south and west of

Grand Rapids to work as a cook for other Puerto Ricans working on the fields. The New

York Office looked to send new arrivals to areas outside of the Northeast due to growing backlash against migrants in New York. A booklet published by the Puerto Rican

Department of Labor informed migrants that “Nueva York no es la unica ciudad” (New

York is not the only city).54 The department printed these brochures with a range of information. They reviewed reasons why people left the island and discussed the prejudice they might face on the mainland. They also encouraged people to take jobs outside of New York City. The pamphlet informed readers that there were cities in

Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, and California where they would find other Puerto Ricans.

52 Sánchez-Korral, 35. 53 Fernández, Brown in the Windy City, 49. 54 Emigracion: Un Librito para el pueblo, numero 8. Department of Labor, Puerto Rico, 1955. Box 1207, Tarea 96-20, FOG, AGPR. For information on the backlash against Puerto Ricans in New York City see the following: Michael Lapp, Managing Migration: The Government of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in New York City, 1948–1968 (PhD Diss. Johns Hopkins University, 1990). González, Harvest of Empire. Chapter four of Gonzalez’s work discusses the challenges Puerto Ricans faced as they entered into New York neighborhoods.

Throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s, the Chicago MD office sent Puerto

Ricans to work in West Michigan. On the recommendation of the Migration Division, commercial nurseries, pickle plants, and mushroom farms employed Puerto Ricans in agricultural areas surrounding Grand Rapids like Zeeland, Holland, and Borculo. The majority of Puerto Ricans migrating to West Michigan came to do agricultural work. The

Farm Labor Placement program and the Migration Division helped in this process, but family and friends drew the majority of Puerto Ricans to the area.

West Michigan Migration

The Migration Division did not have much contact with Grand Rapids in comparison to other cities. With major metropolitan cites under the Migration Division’s purview like Chicago or Detroit, Grand Rapids’ less numerous job opportunities did not lead the agency to send many Puerto Ricans in that direction comparatively in the late

1940s or early 1950s. MD reports from Chicago and Cleveland, however, noted that there was a small Puerto Rican population in Grand Rapids and nearby cities like Lansing and Kalamazoo.55

A close examination of Migration Division records and oral histories reveals that the agency bolstered Puerto Ricans’ mobility when it placed members of extended family networks across the Northeast and Midwest. Through the influence of the Migration

Division, Puerto Ricans in Michigan, similar to Puerto Ricans in the Northeast, engaged

55 Annual Report, 1958-1959, 135. Box 2533, Folder 6. Office of the Government of Puerto Rico in the United States (OGPRUS).

96 in varying types of migration. Some arrived via chain migration (when family members or members of communities relocate to a new destination and others join them later).

Others followed a step migration pattern and lived temporarily in various locations across the Northeast and Midwest. Puerto Ricans also engaged in circular migration, which according to scholar Jorge Duany, means “to move back and forth, or circulate, between their places of origin and destination” throughout their lives.56

The small Puerto Rican population in Lake Odessa, Michigan in the 1950s reflected this trend. After leaving fields in Saginaw and Edmore, Michigan, Juan Báez and Juan and Rafael Pérez arrived in the small farming town thirty-five miles east of

Grand Rapids.57 Puerto Ricans in Edmore experienced poor conditions as evident by the letters they wrote to the Migration Division and Governor Luís Muñoz Marín about the pay and living conditions.58 Lake Odessa, however, proved to be a place of steady employment and fair treatment. Mexican Americans had settled in the area during World

War II. They joined interned Japanese Americans, Jamaicans, and southern migrants both in the fields and at the Lake Odessa Canning Company, supplying food for the war.59 The

Migration Division took notice of the area in a monthly report and mentioned that not a single Puerto Rican had quit his job in July of 1955, an unusual occurrence given the

56 Duany, Jorge. 2002. "Mobile Livelihoods: The Sociocultural Practices of Circular Migrations between Puerto Rico and the United States" International Migration Review.36 (2): 355-88. 57 Juan Báez, interview with author, October 15, 2011. 58 Louis A. Delgado To John Kearney, “Field Trip to Niles, Michigan, January 4, 1960” Department of Labor-Migration Division, Chicago Regional Office, Box 2402, Folder 861, OGPRUS. 59 Bob Reed, telephone interview by author, August 24, 2011.

97 poor reputation Michigan companies held.60 Instead, a small and relatively stable Puerto

Rican population emerged in Lake Odessa.

It is unclear how Nicolas Escribano found his way to the area, but when Báez and the Pérez brothers arrived, he was already living there. In fact, by 1951, according to a

Pan American passenger manifest, Escribano engaged in circular migration, traveling back and forth from Lake Odessa to New York to San Juan in the early 1950s.61 His cousin moved to New York City in the mid-1940s, other family members still lived on the island, and he maintained seasonal employment in Lake Odessa, all of which allowed him to have a mobile lifestyle. By 1953, Escribano’s relatives, Marcial Hernández and

Pío Fernández, joined him in Lake Odessa. Without their wives and children present, early male migrants often lived with one another. Despite notions of a gendered division of labor that marked cooking as women’s responsibility, the Pérez brothers cooked and sold Puerto Rican food to other farmworkers in the area.62 Without traditional family structures, these men defied gendered divisions of labor in order to survive in Lake

Odessa.

Area business owners continued to seek out Puerto Rican labor throughout the

1950s. A representative from the Lake Odessa Canning Company even attended a

60 Monthly Report, Midwest Office of the Migration Division, Department of Labor, July 1955, Box 2744, Folder 13, OGPRUS, 61 Nicolas Escribano, Passenger Lists, Arrival: New York, New York, Microfilm Serial: T715, 1897-1957; Microfilm Roll: Roll 8042; Line:19; Page Number: 41. Ancestry.com. New York, Passenger Lists, 1820- 1957 [database on-line]. 62 Juan Báez, interview with author, October 15, 2011.

98 conference in Puerto Rico in 1960 to learn other ways of bringing workers to the area.63

By 1955, the jobs that Lake Odessa offered were not enough to support Hernández and

Fernández. Hernández had married a Mexican woman in Lake Odessa and Fernández had a family of four children and a wife in Caguas, Puerto Rico. They joined Báez,

Escribano, and the Pérez brothers, who had left the area in 1953 and 1954 for Grand

Rapids, which was becoming a budding industrial area.

The Migration Division and familial connections played an important role in leading migrants to Grand Rapids and allowed them increased mobility. For example, after failing to make a living in sales in Arecibo in 1958, Abrán Martínez, one of nine children, contacted one of his brothers who had left the island a few years earlier. Abrán hoped his brother could help him find a job on the mainland. Though Martínez is unsure of how his brother found work in Holland, Michigan it was likely through the Migration

Division since they had sent workers to the area for years. Employee records and reports from the Chicago office indicate that the division sent workers to cities near Lake

Michigan’s west coast.64 Abrán and his brother performed the arduous task of picking blueberries and strawberries in Holland. Working in the area, though difficult, put Abrán in close proximity to other Puerto Ricans in Grand Rapids. He frequented the area often, but in 1960 he decided to relocate to Cleveland where another brother (whom the

Migration Division likely placed) lived. He worked in a greenhouse in Lorain for a few years before moving to Chicago, where he had another brother. There Abrán met and

63 Salvador E. Ferraras To Luís Muñoz Marín,“Report on Trip to Puerto Rico” January, 24, 1961. Box 2402, Folder 13, OGPRUS. 64 Employer Record Cards forGilden Co, Green Acres Turf, H.J. Heinz Co, Holcombe Sod Frams, Dawn Fresh Mushroom, and Bill Mar Foods, Box 2402, Folder 861, OGPRUS

99 married his wife who had three children already.65 Citing his prior knowledge, he suggested moving the family to Grand Rapids as the midsized city had job opportunities and reputation as a safe city.

Sara and Lorenzo Ramirez decided to settle in Grand Rapids, after briefly living in New York, for the same reasons. After Lorenzo walked off of his Farm Labor

Placement job in 1951, a friend he made on the fields, Rafael Amador, helped him find a job in Grand Rapids. After marrying and spending a couple years in the area, his wife missed her family and Lorenzo and Sara moved to New York to be closer to them. Just two years later, after concerns over his growing children’s contact with gangs, the family returned to Michigan. Though Puerto Ricans certainly faced obstacles in Grand Rapids their small population in the city allowed them to go unnoticed unlike Puerto Ricans in

New York or Chicago. In those urban areas, Puerto Ricans often had to share space with other groups, particularly ethnic whites who were not receptive to Puerto Ricans’ presence. In placing people in Grand Rapids or areas near it, the Migration Division showed Puerto Ricans an alternative to living in the nation’s largest urban centers.

More Puerto Ricans came to the area via chain migration. After the Migration

Division placed Paco Sánchez in West Michigan, he sent for his wife. Santa Sánchez, a domestica on the island, joined her husband just a year after he left.66 She did not leave

Toa Alto by herself. Her neighbors, Guadalupe and Leopoldo Figueroa, came as well.

65 See Fernández, Brown in the Windy City. Chapter four discusses the development of Puerto Rican youth gangs in response to physical and verbal attacks that their white peers perpetrated. Though the Martínez and Ramírez families imagined Grand Rapids as a safer urban space than New York and Chicago, Puerto Ricans in the city met their own challenges with racism and space, as illustrated in the next chapter. 66 Santa Sánchez, Census Manuscript Record, 1940, Gurabo, Puerto Rico.

100

Faced with a similar economic condition, the Figueroa’s also left the island for opportunities in Grand Rapids. Though they were not biological family members, these two couples maintained a close relationship. The Sánchezes had served as witnesses for the Figueroa’s marriage on the island.67 Their fictive kinship connection served as an influential factor in encouraging their migration and settlement in West Michigan.

Settling in Grand Rapids

As Puerto Rican migrants arrived in Grand Rapids, trends among the new population emerged. Many of them found affordable places to live on southeast side of the city, living next door to African Americans and Mexican Americans. They employed multiple strategies to find affordable, quality housing when they first arrived. As chapter one discussed, the southeast side neighborhoods often had housing in desperate need of repairs. As the HOLC surveyor remarked, it was “an old district providing shelter at close to minimum levels.”68 Though migrants might have been able to afford the average rent of $18-$30, they utilized multiple strategies to make life easier for them both financially and socially.69

67 Leopoldo Figueroa and Guadalupe Martínez, 1946 Registro Civil, 1836–2001. Departamento de Salud de Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico., Ancestry.com. Puerto Rico, Civil Registrations, 1885-2001. 68 Area D-2, Area Descriptions for Grand Rapids Michigan, 1937, 1. Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, box 105, City Survey Files, Record Group 195: Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. Accessed March 24, 2015. http://www.historygrandrapids.org/uploads/files/document/HOLC-D2-SouthCentral.pdf 69 Area D-2, Area Descriptions for Grand Rapids Michigan, 1937, 1. Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, box 105, City Survey Files, Record Group 195: Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. Accessed March 24, 2015. http://www.historygrandrapids.org/uploads/files/document/HOLC-D2-SouthCentral.pdf

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Migrants utilized a common strategy of doubling up. Immigrant and migrants had been living together for generations upon their arrival to save money.70 This practice was also common in the 1940s among returning soldiers as the nation experienced a housing shortage.71 For Puerto Ricans, this pattern illustrates the continued role familial and friendship networks played in surviving in a new city. For example, Dionisio Bérrios and his wife, Carmen, moved into a house on 718 Oakland Street Southwest in 1954.72 By

1955, Carmen’s sister, Irene Agosto moved with them.73 Just two years later, Irene married Dionisio’s brother Mateo and the two couples lived together in the Oakland

Street house.74 Eventually, Dionisio and Carmen moved to Cass Street Southeast, while

Irene and Mateo found their own home on 582 Lafayette Street Southeast.75 Living with one another helped migrants save money and get adjusted in their first few years in the area.

70 Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives serves as one of the earliest documentations of this strategy among European immigrants in New York. Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890).Though this did not occur in Grand Rapids, other scholarly work documents the process of doubling up or taking in lodgers and the state’s attempt to limit and control this through zoning laws. Steven Bender’s, Tierra y Libertad: Land, Liberty, and Latino Housing (New York, New York University Press, 2010) discusses in detail in his Chapter 7 the ways that Latinos encountered zoning laws from to exclude them from neighborhoods. He also discusses how Chinese immigrants were also subject to these exclusionary zoning laws. See also Susan Blank and Ramon S. Torrecilha, “Understanding the Living Arrangements of Latino Immigrants: A Life Course Approach,” International Migration Review 32 (1998): 3, 10–11 for a more contemporary analysis of the practice of taking in lodgers. 71 See Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, Basic Books, 2008) for information on housing shortages in the post war period. 72 Dionisio Berros, Grand Rapids City Directory 1954, Grand Rapids Public Library (GRPL). 73 Irene Agosoto, Grand Rapids City Directory, 1955, GRPL. 74 Mateo Bérrios, Grand Rapids City Directory 1957, GRPL. 75 Dioniso Berros, Grand Rapids City Directory, 1959, GRPL.

102

Figure 5: Julio Vega, circa 1948 Source: The Vega Family’s personal collection.

Irene and Mateo Bérrios found their new home with the help of other Puerto

Rican migrants. In Grand Rapids, it was common to live in a house in which Puerto

Ricans had previously lived. Pío Fernández, who befriended the Bérrios, lived at 582

Lafayette for two years before Irene and Mateo Bérrios moved in and Fernández moved to a house on the Southwest side.76 625 Curve Street Southwest served as another house in which different Puerto Rican families lived. Dionisio Bérrios’ other brother, Rafael and his wife Rosa lived there for two years before Julio Vega, a Puerto Rican man from

Caguas, Puerto Rico, lived there for over thirty years.77 Likewise, Ringuette Court

76 Pío Fernández, Grand Rapids City Directory, 1956, GRPL. 77 Rafael Bérrios, Grand Rapids City Directory,1956, GRPL.

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Southeast provided a home to many roving bachelors who settled in the city before finding their own place. Before moving to Curve Street, Julio Vega lived at 813

Ringuette.78 Later after Julio married, José Ramos, a distant relative of Julio, continued to live there for a couple of years. When Ramos moved out, other Puerto Ricans took over the home. This small court took on a reputation for being a safe destination for Puerto

Ricans as 809 Ringuette became home to Pedro and Cruzita Gómez, who came from East

Chicago, Indiana.79 Eventually Pío Fernández’s brother-in-law, Marcial Hernández, moved his family into the home.80 These stories likely indicate the housing market’s rigidity for Spanish-speaking people. Migrants sought out houses where they could be sure the owner would rent to them, as evident by the presence of previous Puerto Rican tenants. This constant mobility also represented a strategy Puerto Ricans used to make ends meet. Luisa, Pío’s wife, recalled “[We] moved because the house was too big for me and the bills were high. They were hard to pay.”81 She also remembered moving a lot because the landlord was “going to sell [the house].” The changing racial dynamics in those neighborhoods and the availability of suburban housing might have encouraged white owners to abandon the area. This pushed many migrants to seek out purchasing their own homes in the Southeast side area when they could. Until then, they sought out

78 Julio Vega, Grand Rapids City Directory, 1958, GRPL. 79 Pedro Gómez, Grand Rapids City Directory, 1958, GRPL. Pedro’s wife, Cruzita, was actually Mexican American, but she and her husband spent a lot of their with Puerto Rican friends and family when they first arrived. See chapter 3 for information on their Cruzita’s relationship with both the Mexican and Puerto Rican communities. 80 Marcial Hernández, Grand Rapids City Directory, 1959. GRPL. 81 Luisa Fernández, interview with Kate Schramm, Calvin College, 2001. Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, GRPL.

104 housing that they knew they could obtain. This interchanging of houses also suggests the close ties among the earliest Puerto Rican families.

As with housing, migrants use family and kin networks to locate employment.

Though some of these islanders worked in subsidiary factories of the automobile industry, commercial bakeries employed the majority of those who first arrived in the early 1950s. Dioniso Bérrios’ two years of college helped him get a job at General

Motor’s Fisher body stamping plant and just a year later Julio Vega, also worked there.82

Pío Fernández and his wife’s uncle worked at Peter Wheat Bakery while other familial groups worked at Michigan bakery.83 Like their Mexican counterparts, early Puerto Rican newcomers found jobs in Michigan bakeries. For many who lacked English language skills, they occupied unskilled jobs such as janitors, like Nicolas Escribano. Lorenzo

Ramirez, who had been in West Michigan since 1951, however, knew English well and worked as in a skilled position as a machine operator in the late 1950s.84

For all of these families, however, industrial work was not their only source of income. Many Puerto Ricans used fieldwork to supplement their earnings. Luisa

Fernández worked on cherry fields when she first arrived while her husband worked at a bakery.85 As their children grew older, they joined them. Marcial Hernández’s son,

82 Dionsio Bérrios, Grand Rapids City Directory, 1955, 1956, GRPL. Carmen Bérrios, interview with author, March 21, 2012. Julio Vega Grand Rapids City Directory, 1957,GRPL. 83 Pío Fernández, Grand Rapids City Directory. 1956 Rafael Pérez, Grand Rapids City Directory, 1956. 84 Francisco Sánchez, Grand Rapids City Directory, 1958. GRPL; Lorenzo Ramírez Grand Rapids City Directory, 1956, GRPL. 85 Luisa Fernández, interview with Kate Schramm, Calvin College, 2001. Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, GRPL.

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Rafael, recalled going to fields on breaks from school to help his family.86 Though the small city had fewer job opportunities than larger metropolitan areas, it did provide multiple industries for workers.

Some area businesses welcomed Puerto Rican workers and provided avenues for women to engage with the formal economy. For instance, Ajax Aluminum provided work for the extended Bérrios clan. During World War II, the company’s founder, Maurice

Blyveis, worked on “aluminum airplane engineering.” In the 1950s, the company produced aluminum storm windows and doors.87 Carmen Bérrios’s sister, Irene Agosto, first started working at this small, family-owned business in 1954, just a few short blocks from her home. After she had joined Ajax, so too did the rest of the Bérrios family: “por ella empezar a trabajar, todos los Berríos trabajamos allí.”88 In 1955 and 1956, Carmen, and her sister-in-law, Rosa Bérrios, joined Irene at Ajax. These women started as general laborers, but within three years they had advanced to semi-skilled work. Carmen’s work as a screener involved cutting aluminum and fitting mesh screen to storm doors, while

Rosa worked as a glasscutter.89 Ajax also provided a reprieve for Carmen’s husband who temporarily worked there when laid off from General Motors.90 In the 1950s, Ajax employed about 30 employees and five of them were from the same extended Puerto

Rican family, revealing the importance of familial networks in securing employment. It

86 Rafael Hernández, interview with author, 87 “Polar Seal Windows.” Accessed May 5, 2015. http://www.polarseal.com/polar-seal-windows. 88 Carmen Bérrios, interview with author, March 21, 2012. 89 Jason Bylveis, phone interview with author, March 2, 2015. Bylveis, the grandson of Maurice, indicated that these women would have needed specialized training to perform their job duties. He also noted that the small company still has extended family networks among its employees. 90 Carmen Bérrios, interview with author, March 21, 2012.

106 also illustrates the importance that local businesses had in attracting and sustaining the

Puerto Rican population. Moreover, the Bérrios and Agosto women indicate how women workers contributed to their families’ economic survival.

By the late 1950s, more women worked outside the home and they used their networks to find gendered labor opportunities. Maria Zambrana found her job through

Luisa Fernández. After moving to Grand Rapids with her husband from Florida,

Zambrana sought out other Puerto Ricans in her neighborhood. Luisa worked at a commercial floral company when Maria arrived in 1964. Maria recalled how Luisa and three other Puerto Rican women rode to work together to as their husbands took turns driving them. To help pass the time at work, the women chatted about the latest happenings in their barrios and also sang the lyrics to Puerto Rican songs. Despite being so far away from home, these women created new bonds and found ways to keep their cultural identity.91

Conclusion

By the late 1960s, a single parranda did not suffice at Christmas time as more families and friends arrived in the city via chain migration. The early tight-knit community remained close with one another, but welcomed more Puerto Ricans to the area. The

Migration Division and the Farm Labor Program continued to play a role in sending people to the area in the 1960s. Those programs and Puerto Ricans’ citizenship allowed them mobility to travel back and forth from the Northeast, the Midwest, and Puerto Rico.

Though few scholarly works discuss Michigan as a part of the postwar Puerto Rican

91 Maria Zambrana, interview with author, May 12, 2012.

107 diaspora, this chapter detailed how the economic conditions on both the island and in

Michigan created the possibility for a large-scale labor migration and eventually settlement in West Michigan.

Several factors created an all-male migration to Michigan in the early 1950s. The growers requested single male workers, unemployment and underemployment in urban

Puerto Rican areas affected men severely, and West Michigan’s small population could not support a domestic labor migration, thus leaving women on the island. Though this might have appeared to be a bachelor migration, it was not. For many of the men who left

Puerto Rico, they had families at home with whom they wished to be reunited. Those reunions often happened, not on the island, but in “economic exile,” in Michigan.92 For the few single Puerto Rican men who had made the trek to the Midwest, some of them formed partnerships with Mexican American women, who came to the areas with their families. These familial formations helped to keep Puerto Ricans in the area. For the

Puerto Ricans who stayed in Michigan, and especially Grand Rapids, many of their experiences in making the area their home coincided with those of Mexican Americans.

Similar work and migration patterns forced Mexicans and Puerto Ricans into contact with one another. The impetus for Puerto Rican migration developed due to a lack of Mexican Americans and Braceros to do much-needed farm work for Michigan growers. While some Puerto Ricans came via state-sponsored programs, both Mexicans and Puerto Ricans came via recruitment. Upon arriving they faced many of the same issues, such as poor treatment from employers, and looked for work outside of the

92 Findlay, 181.

108 agriculture. Many people worked and lived briefly in other areas before settling in Grand

Rapids. Once there, as the next chapter shows, the same companies employed them.

Friends and family in Texas and Puerto Rico followed them to their new destination.

The next chapter illustrates that the similarities in their migration journeys and their experiences in Grand Rapids led Mexicans and Puerto Ricans to build personal relationships with one another. However, this chapter has illustrated that Puerto Ricans strived to build and maintain a culturally Puerto Rican community. Even though they availed themselves of the resources the larger, longer-established Mexican American population offered, Puerto Ricans did not lose their identity as Puerto Ricans by engaging in a panethnic Latino community. Mexicans maintained their identity as well. Embracing

Latinidad meant taking on multiple identities as either Mexican and Latino or Puerto

Rican and Latino. It did not mean completely discarding their original ethnic identity.

109

Chapter 3: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans: Forming a Latino Community

Introduction

“Puerto Rico is a tiny little island. Mexico is huge!” a Mexican American boy told Puerto Rican Miguel Bérrios on the playground at Franklin Elementary School on the Southwest side of Grand Rapids. Bérrios recalled quickly replying to the insult: “it might be huge, but it’s a desert. At least, Puerto Rico has palm trees and mountains!”93

After their quick exchange, Miguel remembered that he and the Mexican boy went back to playing together. He also recalled the shock and confusion Spanish-speaking children felt when they first entered their West Michigan classrooms and teachers Anglicized their names. Both Miguel and his friend went by their new “English names” shortly after starting school.

This was not a sophisticated conversation, but it highlights the state of Latino ethnic identity formation in Grand Rapids in the late 1950s. First, it illustrates that even the youngest members of Grand Rapids’ Spanish-speaking populations contemplated their differences and similarities. Their presence at Franklin Elementary School reveals that they likely lived in the same working-class neighborhoods on the Southwest side of the city. Their shared assimilation experience of having teachers Anglicize their Spanish

93 Miguel Bérrios, interview with author, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2011.

110 names also reveals that they occupied a similar position as newcomers to Grand Rapids.

The exchange also demonstrates, however, that although these boys had many commonalities, they understood that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans were, in fact, different.

Though their differences provided fodder for playground teasing, they also tell us something about Latino identity—although it rests on similarities, it is also fraught with interethnic tensions.

This chapter explores the internal and external forces that prompted Spanish- speaking people to form a panethnic identity.94 As Felix M. Padilla noted in his work on

Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago, “Latino ethnicity is fabricated out of shared cultural and structural similarities and functions according to the needs of Spanish- speaking people.”95 In Grand Rapids, I argue that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans formed interethnic solidarities and bonds in the 1950s and early 1960s based on shared experiences in housing, assimilation, religious activities, recreation, and interethnic relationships.

The factors that contributed to panethnic formation include both internal factors— dynamics within the Spanish-speaking populations—and external ones—those beyond the boundaries and control of Mexican and Puerto Rican communities. External issues include structural obstacles resulting from capitalism and racism. Structural inequalities in the labor market also followed migrants into local housing markets. As the previous two chapters discussed, Latinos had access to jobs in the manufacturing industries, but

94 Padilla, Felix M. Latino Ethnic Consciousness: The Case of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago. Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985, 12. 95 Padilla, 5.

111 they were neither the highest paying nor highly skilled jobs that afforded whites economic and social mobility. Economic inequalities were also intimately tied to and rested upon racial hierarchies. Latinos occupied a middle position: their racial ambiguity gave them more flexibility than their African American counterparts, but it did not give them access to whiteness in the same way European Americans experienced in the postwar era. The shared experience of being neither African American nor white led

Mexicans and Puerto Ricans to create their own Latino spaces. For many of them their

“brown” skin helped to mark them as racially other. Though Afro-Puerto Ricans or lighter Mexicans or Puerto Ricans could have shared experiences with the city’s Black or white residents, their use of the Spanish language served to “other” them as a distinctive population.

Their shared language acted as an internal factor that brought these two groups together. It provided a way for them to communicate and build relationships with one another, despite differences in their Spanish dialects. For many, their shared Catholicism provided venues to connect and form personal relationships beyond the workplace. I argue that in the 1950s and 1960s the ability of both groups to speak Spanish and their similar cultures inspired Mexicans and Puerto Ricans to seek out social connections with one another. It is important to note that women were indispensible in these processes.

They created and maintained social spaces like festivals and gatherings that allowed people to interact with one another on a consistent basis. This chapter takes seriously the analysis of convivencia, meaning the shared aspects of Mexicans’ and Puerto Ricans’

112 daily lives. Even if they were not Catholic, however, they still went to the same grocery stores, restaurants, bars, baseball fields, and dance halls.

In his groundbreaking study on Latino panethnicity in Chicago, Felix Padilla describes the phenomenon as ethnic mobilization, “the action or actual result of interaction among two or more Spanish-speaking groups.”96 Padilla argues that Latino panethnicity emerged among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans when they identified shared political goals or struggles against employment discrimination, for example. This chapter departs from Padilla and other scholars; however, in that it locates Latino identity formation in the daily lives of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and not in the political context.97 In arguing that panethnicity emerged in the early 1950s and early 1960s, it predates panethnic political activism of the Civil Rights Movement and acknowledges it in the shared churches, social spaces, recreational venues, and homes of Mexicans and

Puerto Ricans. These populations sought one another out not to make demands to the state (though eventually they did), but to form social connections with other people with whom they could relate and identify. Though they likely thought about ways to improve their treatment from the local government, their experience in forming a Latino ethnic consciousness did not depend on those motivations.

96 Padilla, 8. 97 Padilla and other scholars, G. Cristina Mora and Tomás Summers Sandoval examine Latino identity, but they examine the 1960s and 1970s. Summers Sandoval examines several Latino groups in an earlier period, he does not elucidate on how those Latinos formed an ethnic identity Mora, G. Cristina. Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American. Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014..Summers Sandoval, Tomás F. Latinos at the Golden Gate: Creating Community and Identity in San Francisco. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

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This panethnicity, however, did have weaknesses. Latinos constantly negotiated their relationships with one another. Though this chapter mainly discusses the formation of Latino activities and organizations, it takes seriously Mérida Rúa’s assertion that

“…misunderstandings, disagreements, and conflicts…are part and parcel of everyday group interaction [and how] expressions of Latinidad are articulated.”98 Interethnic marriages and relationships did not please everyone, but despite protests Mexican and

Puerto Rican couples married, reinforcing the panethnic ties the community built. These tensions reveal the complexities in the process of forming Latinidad rather than simply providing evidence of the futility of panethnic alliances.

This chapter first examines the external factors that brought Mexicans and Puerto

Ricans together including and ambiguous racial identity, housing patterns, discrimination, and assimilation. It then discusses how Latinos were internally motivated to engage in

Latino ethnic consciousness through an examination of shared spaces and more importantly, interethnic relations. Though Miguel Bérrios and his Mexican friend negotiated their differences, as Miguel became Mike, and his classmates went from

Rosalia to Rosie and Jose to Joe, these young people and likely their parents, recognized elements of their shared cultures, despite their distinct ethnic origins.

External Factors: Racialization

98 Mérida Rúa, "Colao Subjectivities: PortoMex and MexiRican Perspectives on Language and Identity". Centro Journal. 2001. 13, no. 2.

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Latinos’ racial ambiguity informed their identity. I borrow from historian Lilia

Fernández in using her term “brown,” as applied to Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in

Chicago to describe Mexicans’ and Puerto Ricans’ racial identity in Grand Rapids. This word does not solely refer to many Latinos’ skin color. Fernández argues “in the racial taxonomy of the United States, brown stands in as a placeholder that captures the malleable meaning assigned to the social differences most Mexicans and Puerto Ricans are believed to embody.”99 “Brown”, however, is also not a part of a triangulation, but rather it represents the various shades (read: positions in a social hierarchy) in between two poles. This racialization allowed Latinos the fluidity to be neither Black nor white in a highly segregated time in Grand Rapids.

Latinos’ treatment in the city depended on their physical appearance and the extent to which they engaged with their culture, in terms of retaining language and eating and listening to traditional foods and music. This fluidity also resulted in varied experiences with individual discrimination in the community from the 1940s to the early

1960s. For many Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, this also meant that they occupied a higher social position than African Americans in the city’s racial hierarchy.

Grand Rapids’ had a relatively small non-white population in the 1940s and

1950s. Historian Randall Jelks also notes “Blacks and whites lived in relative harmony in

Grand Rapids because the population base of African Americans remained small until the

99 Lilia Fernández, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Post War Chicago, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) 17.

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1950s.”100 This was also true for the Mexicans and Puerto Ricans who arrived during these postwar years. The small community they formed did not disrupt the status quo in

Grand Rapids. Roughly 2,500 Mexicans and Puerto Ricans were hardly noticeable in a city of 180,000 in the 1950s. By 1965, however, the population had doubled and although it was still small, the city’s white inhabitants certainly noticed the newcomers as well as the African Americans who arrived as part of the Second Great Migration whose population had more than doubled.101 As Mexicans and Puerto Ricans moved in to the city, they negotiated their position in the city’s strict racial hierarchy. The post-World

War II boom led them into the same industrial jobs that African Americans found, but unlike the latter group, Latinos’ racial flexibility allowed them entry into all Dutch and other white-ethnic neighborhoods that had long excluded African Americans. This ambiguity did not always shield them from discrimination, however.

Mexicans and Puerto Ricans negotiated their race and ethnic identity in Grand

Rapids while simultaneously arguing for first-class treatment based on their citizenship.

Given the context of Cold War politics, however, they were moderate in their strategies and approach. After the war, Latinos came to Grand Rapids with pride in their country as many of the men had served in WWII. Those who had migrated from Texas hope to escape the overt discrimination they faced there and find a more welcoming environment in Michigan. They tried to follow the patterns of assimilation that their European predecessors followed when they settled in Grand Rapids. Many of them tried to learn

100 Jelks, Randal Maurice. African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006, xvi. 101 Reports Nonwhite Rise Here Higher than in Nearby Cities, The Grand Rapids Press, January 18, 1957.

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English and spoke only English to their children so they could better adjust to life in the city. Some distanced themselves from Mexican bracero workers, while others tried to use their citizenship as justification for demanding fair treatment. Though pressure to assimilate came from the local white community, external pressure also came at the national level. In 1954, the federal government launched Operation Wetback to round up undocumented Mexican workers.102 This gave the community in Grand Rapids reason to assert their Mexican-Americanness. In the conservative political climate of the fifties,

Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, much like others around the country, did not make radical demands. Instead they engaged with civic and patriotic groups like League of United

Latin American Citizens.103

For Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, the contradiction of being othered while simultaneously trying to be accepted resulted in increased reliance on each other, which furthered community development. For example, a member of the Moose Lodge of

Grand Rapids, a men’s social club and fraternal order, invited Miguel Navarro to join.

Upon inquiring when his initiation would be, the club told Navarro that the member had extended the invitation by mistake. Navarro said the lodge refused his entrance because he was “not considered as a Caucasian because of [his] Mexican heritage.” They went on to tell him “Mexicans are not considered ‘white people.’” He responded, “I was born in this country, but this is the first time in my experience here in Grand Rapids, ‘the All

102 For more information on Operation Wetback, see Cohen, Deborah. Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Hernández, Kelly Lytle. Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. American Crossroads 29. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 2010. 103 I have found no evidence of radical organizing or commentary in the 1950s.

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American City’ that such a thing has happened to me.”104 The incident underscores the racial exclusivity of social spaces that white Grand Rapids’ residents created for themselves as well as the racial ambiguity of Mexican Americans. The fact that a Lodge member mistakenly extended Navarro an invitation reveals the in-between position that

Mexican Americans occupied. After being denied access to a “white” fraternal order and social club, Navarro strengthened his resolve to make the neighborhood bar he owned, the Alma Latina, a meeting place for other Mexicans and Puerto Ricans to convene.

In some cases, racialization in West Michigan also met a comparison to African

Americans. Abrán Martínez’s experience at a restaurant in Holland, Michigan illustrates how local whites viewed African Americans, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans. A sign on the door of a restaurant in Holland read “No Blacks or Mexicans.” These types of signs were common in cities in Texas. This sign’s location in West Michigan then made it clear that the Tejano diaspora reached the Midwest and Tejanos’ presence had affected the local racial order.105 Martínez, who was Puerto Rican, did not let the sign dismay him. Instead, he went into the restaurant, but the staff refused to serve him. He tried to explain that he was neither Black nor Mexican and thus could be in the restaurant. The worker’s response of “get the hell out of here,” illustrated to him that Puerto Ricans occupied the same racial strata as Mexicans and African Americans.

Despite Navarro and Martínez’s experience, Latinos who arrived between 1930 and 1960 reported varying levels of individual discrimination in Grand Rapids. There are

104 Human Relation Commissions, Meeting Minutes, January 20, 1964, GRCA, HRC Files 105 See Cynthia Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, 1st ed (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009).

118 multiple explanations for this. Some migrants were simply too young to realize what the older members of their families experienced. At eleven years old, Juanita Rincones came to Grand Rapids in 1947 and remembered no discrimination at all, not “even against

Black people.”106 Irma Garcia, however, also recounted a period of time as a young child that she “didn’t realize the rejection” she experienced was the result of racism.107 Other migrants’ thoughts on racism in Grand Rapids represented a situational understanding of the concept. Puerto Rican Juan Báez, who came to Grand Rapids in 1948 and could have passed for African American if not for his Spanish accent, reported that Grand Rapids was not that bad in comparison to his brother’s experience in Georgia. Community leader

Daniel Vargas reported instances of police brutality in 1958. After a fight at the Franklin

Bar police struck Puerto Rican and Mexican spectators with their nightsticks. Vargas felt

“the police action [was] precipitated and excessive and was directed against the Latin

American group.” Later police countered that language issues prevented them from communicating clearly, which exacerbated the tension in the conflict and thus was an explanation of their use of force.108

External Factors: The Education System

For those that remembered discrimination, they recalled receiving this treatment due to their physical traits and language. Both Mexicans and Puerto Ricans looked to the

106 Juanita Rincones, interview with Gordon Olson, May 6, 2000.Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, Grand Rapids Public Library (GRPL). 107 Irma Garcia Aguilar, interview with Laura Retherford and Christian Miller, April 4, 2001. . Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, GRPL. 108 Human Relations Commission, Monthly Meeting Minutes, September 4, 1958. GRCA, HRC Files. See Chapter 6 for a discussion on police brutality.

119 education system to give them greater social mobility and eventually, equal treatment.

From the 1940s to the 1960s, Grand Rapids’ schools served a primary role in assimilating the children of new migrants and immigrants. Though the school system was theoretically supposed to facilitate social mobility for working class children, English language immersion had detrimental effects. As the prevailing method for teaching

Spanish-speaking students in the 1940s and 1950s, immersion meant that many students lost their Spanish language skills and essentially resulted in a loss of culture. Bilingual education became an important demand for parents and children alike in the 1960s, but until then, the school district held students back one to two grade levels in order to promote English language learning. Irma Garcia, whose Mexican American family went from San Antonio to Chicago to Saginaw and finally settled in Grand Rapids in the

1940s, remembered the couple of years she spent in third grade as she mastered what

“sounded like gibberish” at Madison Park Elementary in the 1940s.109 Other families recalled the damage that English immersion did to their children’s ability to retain

Spanish. Juanita Baltierrez, a Mexican American and Chicago native, recounted that in

“those years, they didn’t want you to speak Spanish to your children because they thought when they went to school they would have problems, so as a result none of our children speak Spanish.”110 For Latino children, without the ability to speak Spanish, many of them felt disconnected from their culture.

109 Irma Garcia Aguilar, interview with Laura Retherford and Christian Miller, April 4, 2001. Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, GRPL. 110 Juanita Rincones, interview with Gordon Olson, May 6, 2000. Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, GRPL.

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English immersion created a very isolating experience as many Mexican and

Puerto Rican children did not always live near one another and therefore did not attend the same schools. The winter after Rosalia Fernández’s 11th birthday, her parents moved the family from Caguas, Puerto Rico to Grand Rapids. Her first experiences in the local school system traumatized her. She recalled her teacher allowing her to bring her younger brother who was not yet school age with her to class so she would have someone to talk to during breaks. She remembered getting into physical confrontations with classmates due to a lack of communication when she first arrived.111 Other migrants recalled similar instances of isolation and confusion as they navigated new social hierarchies. For many students, this was the first time they went to school with white children, Black children, or both.

Many of these young students actively considered where they fit in between the poles of Blackness and whiteness. Ideas of Americanness and citizenship often influenced their understanding of race and belonging. Of her time in Grand Rapids Public

Schools, Irma Garcia recounted: “Life was a struggle, life was hard. I was not white. I was not Black. I was other…And in school, minority was the other and even going into

South High School that meant there was [sic] only about 10-15 friends that you had…So it was difficult. There was a lot of parents that would not allow anybody to play with somebody as dark as you.” 112 The “other” experience truly isolated her and many other

Mexicans and Puerto Ricans who were neither light enough to be categorized as neither

111 Rosalia Espindola Fernández, interview with author, October 3, 2013. 112 Irma Garcia Aguilar, interview with Laura Retherford and Christian Miller, April 4, 2001. Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, GRPL.

121 white nor dark enough to be Black. She went on to describe her experience, however, as not only one that was based on her skin color, but also her culture: “Our lunches might have consisted of tortillas with some leftover meat or something and rolled up in a

Butternut Bread wrapper…then you would get to lunch and put [the tortilla] under the table because tortillas were not known then so everybody would look at you like ‘what are you eating?’”113 She references Butternut Bread, a national brand that had a large regional bakery in Grand Rapids that happened to employ a large number of Latinos. To

Michigan raised-Irma, carrying your lunch in a Butternut Bread wrapper symbolized that she belonged in her Grand Rapids, Michigan classroom regardless of the ethnically distinctive food inside.

Some families turned to Catholic schools to try to provide their children with more opportunities for mobility. Such schools did not provide better options for bilingual education, but they did have a reputation for discipline and quality education that appealed to many migrants. This also served as a sign of Mexican and Puerto Rican religious devotion and their faith in the Catholic system as a more credible educational institution. These young Latinos attended both St. Joseph’s the Worker and St. Andrew’s elementary and middle school and a select few went on to Catholic Central High School.

Cost prohibited many of those who wanted to attend these schools. Puerto Rican Pío

Fernández sent many of his 10 children to parochial schools. He managed to do this by sending them in intervals: he sent them in groups of three for a couple of years at a

113Irma Garcia Aguilar, interview with Laura Retherford and Christian Miller, April 4, 2001. Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, GRPL.

122 time.114 For him, the quality of the education made the sacrifice he and his wife made in working long hours worth it. Two of his daughters graduated from Catholic Central, while three of his younger sons and two other daughters attended St. Joseph the Worker, across the street from their home. Simon Aguilar also attended St. Andrew’s and Catholic

Central High School. Though his parents could not afford to send him to Catholic

Central, he got a job to pay for his own tuition.115

Latino students’ presence in the Catholic school system represented the deep relationship their families had with the Church, but it also signaled a slow rise of some migrants families out of poverty and into the lower middle class—exactly what many of their families had hoped for when the left their homes in Mexico, Texas and Puerto Rico.

The majority of their Latino peers did not attend parochial schools, however, suggesting that not everyone attained upward mobility equally. The choice to send children to parochial schools did not necessarily protect children from the discrimination other students felt in public schools, but for many parents it seemed like a valuable sacrifice for the perceived mobility it offered.

114 Rosalia Espindola Fernández, interview with author, October 3, 2013. Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, GRPL. 115 Simon Aguilar, interview with Laura Retherford and Christian Miller, April 4, 2001. Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, GRPL.

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Figure 6: Map of Grand Rapids

External Factors: Housing

Despite having a choice in schools for their children, many families did not have complete control over where they lived. As chapters 1 and 2 showed, Latinos lived on both the Southwest and southeast side of Grand Rapids, though some ventured out to the

Northwest side. The Dutch community in Grand Rapids claimed the Roosevelt Park area, which was South of Hall Street and Grandville Avenue, and allowed other ethnic whites entrance. The street names in this area are evidence of the long-standing Dutch

124 presence—VanRaalte, Tulip, and Tenhaaf, for example.116 In the 1930s and 1940s, the neighborhoods off Grandville Avenue were highly segregated. African Americans,

Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans lived north of Hall, close to the Southwest’s side industrial area, while Dutch Americans and other white ethnics lived south of Hall in Roosevelt

Park (see Figure 7). After the Great Migration, housing for African Americans became even more rigid. As scholars like Peter Bratt and Todd Robinson have shown, real estate agencies clearly segregated African Americans into specific streets, mainly on the southeast side of Grand Rapids.117 Latinos slowly crept into previously all white neighborhoods in Roosevelt Park, but not without contestation from their white neighbors. The area did not become available to African Americans and Mexican

Americans in large numbers until after suburban development in the 1950s gave white residents other appealing and subsidized residential options.

116 Tulips are a flower largely associated with the Netherlands. The Dutch’s large presence in West Michigan was also present in a city on Lake Michigan named Holland, Michigan. The city has held a yearly Tulip Time festival to honor its Dutch heritage since the 1930s. 117 Peter A. Bratt, “Renewing a Grand Center: Postwar Planning in Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1949 to 1959,” The Michigan Historical Review36 (Fall 2010): 143. Todd Robinson, “A City Within A City: The Social and Economic Construction of Segregated Space in Grand Rapids, Michigan 1945-1975” (Ph.D. Diss. University of Michigan, 2006).

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Figure 7: Roosevelt Park and the Grandville Avenue Area

Grand Rapids’ oldest suburbs, East Grand Rapids and Grandville, incorporated in

1926 and 1933, respectively, but they did not draw whites out of the cities in the 1950s.

Townships like Walker, Paris, and especially Wyoming, all of which were incorporated in the late 1950s, enticed white Grand Rapidians to settle out of the city limits. The

General Motors stamping plant and the Nash Kelvinator plant, which made refrigerators, made Wyoming attractive. Located just south of the city and right outside of the

Roosevelt Park area, it provided short commutes to the city’s large employers and access to a booming commercial district. In 1956, Grand Rapids held 189,000 people. That same year, while the city’s other suburbs each held less than 13,000, Wyoming sprouted to

126 over 40,000.118 According to urban studies scholar Peter Bratt, the other suburbs housed upper-class families, but Wyoming “became [a] solidly white working-class community,” many of whom came from the Roosevelt Park area, which had begun opening to African

Americans and Latinos.

Finding Latinos in a history of Black-white housing segregation is difficult. Most of the city government’s and non-profit groups’ studies focused their efforts on understanding housing discrimination against Blacks. Not until the late 1960s did city officials began studying Latinos and their experiences with housing discrimination.119

From looking at the patterns of Black and white neighborhoods in Grand Rapids, however, in combination with oral histories, city directories, and census data, it seems that Latinos slowly entered into the Roosevelt area and they gained entrance before

African Americans in the early 1950s, though many Latinos remained on the Southeast side until the 1960s. The census first tracked Grand Rapids in 1960. The census data shows that Wyoming and the other suburbs were 97-99% white and that parts of the southeast side were 70 and 80 percent Black.120 By 1970, the percentage of whites in the suburbs stayed the same, but the numbers of Blacks concentrated on the southeast side increased to 85 and 90 percent, showing the increasingly limited housing options for

118 Press, Charles. When One-Third of a City Moves to the Suburbs: A Report on the Grand Rapids Metropolitan Area. (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1959), 13. 119There are limited ways to see how and where Latinos fit into the racial hierarchy and housing structure before the 1960s. Census data and both government and non-profit agencies were either simply not aware of the Latino presence in the city, there numbers were statistically insignificant, or there condition was perceived similar to African Americans so they lumped them together. Also, Grand Rapids was only tracked in 1960, 1970, and 1980. Though in 1960, the survey asked for Puerto Rican heritage, there was still no way to track how many Mexican Americans were in the city in this year. 120 These numbers are taken from two census tracts (0024000 and 00250000) that comprise this neighborhood. U.S. Census Bureau, “Population Characteristics by race, 1960.” Kent County, Michigan.

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African Americans. In 1960, the Roosevelt Park area was 85% white and by 1970 it had dropped to 65% with 16% of residents in that track reporting some kind of Spanish origin, which was the highest concentration of all Latinos in any census tract in Grand

Rapids.121 This data shows that though whites left the Southwest side, they did so more slowly than they had in other areas.

Curve Street Southwest exemplifies how a neighborhood can change over time.

This small street located off of Grandville Avenue consisted of only nine houses.

Grandville served as a major throughway from the city to the suburbs before the state approved the building of an expressway nearby. In 1940, Curve Street housed only white residents. Many of them and their parents were born in Michigan. As the nation slowly came out of the depression, the average income in the country was $950. Middle class families living on Curve Street averaged $1050 a month with some on the block making as much as $1700. In 1948, the city directory listed houses with ethnic European last names like Wiersema (Dutch) or Barbachyn (Polish), and those of families that had been in the U.S. for generations like Kenneth Sterling, who belonged to the third generation of his family in the United States.122

Eligio Castro and his wife Elvira Flores briefly claimed an address on Curve

Street—the first Spanish-surnamed families to do so. They used this address for their children’s baptism record in 1949. They likely rented the home as the city directory did not list Castro as the homeowner and the 1950 edition did not report him as living there at

121 U.S. Census Bureau, “Population Characteristics by race, 1970.” 122 Kenneth G Sterling, 1930 Census Manuscript.

128 all. The baptisms of his other children in later years reveal that he and his wife moved to the southeast side. The Castro’s might have made it possible for other Spanish-speaking families to live on the block. Dioniso and Carmen Bérrios moved to 625 Curve Street in

1956—the same house the Castros lived in just six years earlier. By 1959, the city directory listed the Ortega, Villarreal, Murillo, and Vega families on the block. The

Vega’s lived in the same house in which the Bérrios and Castro’s lived. Only three of the white families present in 1949 still lived there. Of the white residents who left, some moved to Wyoming while other residents ventured north and east of the city center.123

The block witnessed an attenuated process of racial turnover, one that occurred much more slowly than when African Americans breached racial boundaries.124

A small number of Mexican Americans started to move into an area further down

Grandville Avenue in the mid-1940s. Many members of the community remember the

Alvarez family as one of the first to settle on that Southwest side. In 1949, Columba

Santos’ family moved into 730 Grandville Avenue at the corner of Franklin and

Grandville. The 70-year-old Santos lived with her sons Matias, Santos, and their wives in a home above a grocery store and barbershop. In 1949, Raymundo Hernández, a mixer at the Michigan Bakery, moved into Graham Street SW and lived next door to the only

Italians on the block. Hernández later opened his home to Domingo and Paula Medina when they arrived from Del Rio, Texas.125 In 1940, Graham Street was all white with

123 Kenneth G Sterling, 1930 Census Manuscript. 124 Latinos’ entrance into previously white neighborhoods was not limited to Grand Rapids. Many other urban areas around the country experienced an influx of Latino migrants. See Fernández, Brown in the Windy City, for another example of Latino mobility in the post war period. 125 Raymundo Hernández, Grand Rapids City Directory, 1951, GRPL.

129 second-generation ethnic Europeans, but by the end of the decade both Hernández and

Medina lived there and may have had an African American man living as a boarder.126

Though the Medinas stayed for a year and found a home on the southeast side of Grand

Rapids, Hernández stayed in the neighborhood well into the 1960s.

As it became apparent that whites were leaving Roosevelt Park for the suburbs, many Latino and African American families sought access to this area. Both Mexicans and Puerto Ricans reported mixed experiences in their quest. Miguel Navarro, a migrant from Mercedes, Texas, saved enough money to buy his own home in 1957. Navarro approached a seller on Tulip Avenue in Roosevelt Park about his home but the owner refused to sell to him. Only when Navarro sought the intercession of his previous employer, also a Dutch man, did the owner agree to sell. Even then, Navarro said, his neighbors tried to create a petition to get him out of the neighborhood. After that failed, it took six or seven months for his neighbors to acknowledge him with a greeting.127 When

Simon Aguilar’s family moved into Roosevelt Park, he felt that the neighbors did not know how to interact with him. He remembered speaking Spanish to one of his cousins at the grocery store below the Alvarez’s house. Quickly after they started talking, the young woman cashier wondered aloud to another employee if the Mexican teenagers were talking about them in Spanish. Aguilar snidely responded that she should “really not be

126 Raymundo Hernández and Domingo Medina, Grand Rapids City Directory, 1951, GRPL. Raymundo Hernández, Census Manuscript, 1940. 127 Shelly Stephans,“The History of Mexican-Americans in Grand Rapids,” senior thesis, Calvin College, 1992, 3-5, folder 34, Hispanic Apostolate, Grand Rapids Archdiocese Archives.

130 so vain.”128 Luisa Fernández’s experience reflected the restriction against Blacks in the

Southwest side. She recognized that the area was “white, Dutch” and remarked, “they don’t like the Black-skinned… [and] not the Puerto Ricans at all.” Her Puerto Rican family represented the range of indigenous, Spanish, and African ancestry so she took only her lightest children with her and her brother to find an apartment because if you were “dark-skinned, you couldn’t get an apartment” in the early 1950s in Roosevelt

Park.129

Not everyone had the same experiences though. Juanita Murillo and Marilyn Vega fondly remembered the Griswold family, one of the few remaining white families on the block, welcoming them to their houses on 629 and 625 Curve St SW, respectively. The three women built a strong relationship with one another and Mrs. Griswold even helped to keep an eye on their children as they played in the neighborhood. Many factors explain this positive relationship. Murillo was born and raised in Saginaw, Michigan so she spoke

English fluently and was familiar with Michigan’s racial dynamics. Vega, however, (born

Marilyn Lett before she married) was actually biracial, Black and white. She married a

Puerto Rican man in the late 1940s and had largely passed for Puerto Rican in the Latino community. Before she married Vega, her family passed for white for much of her life.

She described her childhood home on a street “without any Negros” and when asked if her neighbors ever found out about her family’s racial background, she replied “no” and

128 Simon Aguilar, interview with Laura Retherford and Christian Miller, April 4, 2001. Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, GRPL. 129 Luisa Fernández, interview with Kate Schramm, Calvin College, 2001. Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, GRPL.

131 that she “was only a little bit Black.”130 These positive individual experiences reflect acceptance for some Latinos, but they also reveal a negotiation of racial categorization that Latinos engaged in Grand Rapids. Discrimination in education and housing in Grand

Rapids and Latinos’ experiences as racial others served as the external factors that brought Mexicans and Puerto Ricans together.

Internal Factors: Culture

Internal factors rested on religion and language, the latter of which opened up the possibility for shared recreational activities. Though Latinos cooperated in these spaces, tensions existed as well. The Catholic Church usually provided the first point of interaction for Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in the city. Mexican Americans played an integral role in shaping the Catholic Latino community. St. Andrew’s Cathedral had been the first stop for many migrants since the 1930s. Located in downtown Grand Rapids, the cathedral was less than one-half mile from both the Southwest and Southeast sides. In the early 1940s, the Vargas and Vasquez families worked with the Catholic Church to create the Mexican Apostolate, the diocese’s official branch of outreach to the Mexican community.131 As a part of this apostolate, Father Titus Narbutes, a Lithuanian priest, gave mass in Latin to Mexican Catholics in the basement of St. Andrew’s Cathedral until the

Mexican American community raised funds to purchase a house to be converted into a

130 Marilyn Vega, interview by author, October 10th, 2013. 131 Stephens, 14.

132 chapel in 1952.132 María Aguilar remembered when Father Narbutes approached her father about becoming the building’s caretaker. Though the family worked as migrant workers, taking care of the capilla (chapel) provided the Aguilar family with both housing and employment .133 Moreover, it afforded the community its own space to worship and interact with one another.

By the early 1950s, Puerto Ricans arrived in the city and also sought out the church and found the Mexican Apostolate. The diocese still referred to it as such even though both ethnic groups attended mass in the chapel. Mexicans, however, constituted the majority. Of the thirty-five couples that married at the apostolate from 1949 and 1952, only one Puerto Rican couple tied the knot. The marriage records also reveal a unique trend: the first nine marriages apparently took place on the same day, according to the entries for April 19, 1949 in church records. This might indicate that they may have been waiting for a Spanish-speaking priest to perform their nuptials as the church listed Father

Olivario Garcia as the officiate. Some of the pairs listed one home address. This may mean that they had moved in together as they waited for a Spanish-speaking priest to marry them or like Daniel and Consuelo Vasquez, had already gotten married in the court, but had not had a church ceremony until 1949. Daniel and Guadalupe Vargas also attended the nine nuptials that year, not to get married, but to serve as witnesses for the marriage of Andrea Alvarado and Arturo Medina, both from Laredo, Texas. The

Vargas’s served in the same capacity for three other couples that year, showing not only

132 “Obtain House for Chapel, Catholics Plan Mexican, Latvian Services,” The Grand Rapids Press, February 14, 1952 133 María Aguilar, interview by author, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2012.

133 that they were continually present in the capilla but that they were readily welcoming new parishioners.

Other couples also served as witnesses for one another’s marriages. While it was more common for family and friends to serve in such a capacity, that was often not feasible for many migrants who did not have extended family members with them. When

Florencio Paez of Flores, Mexico, and María Luisa Araisa were married, Gilberto García and Aurora González, who also married that day, served as witnesses. By the mid-to late

1950s, many of those getting married chose their friends and family to serve as witnesses, indicating that chain migration likely brought extended family networks to Michigan. In the early 1950s, couples often chose witnesses of their same ethnic group. This reveals that though Mexicans and Puerto Ricans shared this space, it might have taken them time to build relationships with another.

Tension between these groups arose when, at the community’s urging, the diocese decided to make the Mexican Apostolate an official parish.134 Though just a child at the time, Miguel Bérrios remembered the conflict over what to name the church. Some

Puerto Ricans opposed the Mexican community’s suggestion of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

However, the Mexican majority community won that decision. The conflict surrounding the naming of the church reveals the obstacles that nationalism poses in constructing

Latinidad. A single patron saint that captured both Mexicans’ and Puerto Ricans’

Catholic devotion did not exist. In 1956, the diocese opened the parish in another house

134 Rt. Rev. Mnsr. Joseph C. Walen, Black, Helen eds. The Information Guide and Directory of the Diocese of Grand Rapids, Volume II, August 1, 156 to July 31, 1958.

134 and despite this tension, the community continued to interact at the parish until it closed in 1958.

There is no clear reason for why Our Lady of Guadalupe closed. According to

Father Ted Kozlowski, the church’s Spanish-speaking priest who started in 1956, the diocese moved him to St. Joseph’s the Worker on the Southwest side, so the parishioners followed.135 Other churchgoers remembered that the diocese wanted to “mainstream”

Latinos, which meant that they wanted to help assimilate the new migrants by forcing them to attend other churches with non-Latinos.136 Regardless of the motivation, the

Latino community started attending St. Joseph the Worker, a previously Dutch church after Our Lady of Guadalupe closed. This shift coincides with the Dutch community’s exodus from the Roosevelt Park neighborhood. Illustrating this shift in parishes, from

1956 to 1960, 35% of the families whose children made their Holy Communion and

Confirmation at St. Joseph’s had been baptized at St. Andrew’s in the late 1940s.

Families eventually moved to the same neighborhood as the church. The Fernández family, for instance, lived at 415 Graham when three of their 10 children, Carmen, Linda, and Alex, attended St. Joseph’s parish school. The numbers of parishioners continued to grow well into the late 1960s and 1970s as the Latino population in the neighborhood increased.

The move from St. Andrew’s to St. Joseph also solidified Mexicans’ and Puerto

Ricans’ position as one ethnic group. The Diocese of Grand Rapids had other churches in

135 Ted Kozlowski, interview with author, Grand Rapids, Michigan 2011. 136 Miguel Bérrios, interview with author, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2011.

135 the area for specific ethnic groups.137 For example, Our Lady of Sorrows had an Italian congregation throughout the 20th century, even as the Italians who lived there moved to the suburbs and returned only to attend mass on Sundays. With St. Joseph’s increased visibility as the church for the Spanish-speaking, it continued to attract both Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. After arriving in Grand Rapids from 1950 to1955, the first Puerto

Rican families began participating in Church sacraments at St. Joseph’s. Jorge Bérrios and Michael Fernández, for instance, were born in 1955 and 1953 in Guayama and

Caguas, Puerto Rico and at eight years old made their First Holy Communion in Grand

Rapids. Together, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans claimed space for themselves in the diocese of Grand Rapids that reflected their shared language and culture.

Mexicans and Puerto Ricans also came together through other religious sects.

Protestant Latinos likely numbered less than a couple hundred people by 1965 in a community of at least five thousand people at that time. Mexican Americans established the first Baptist Spanish-speaking church in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Mexican

Baptists were relatively common in Texas so the presence of this religious community in

Grand Rapids comes as no surprise.138 Juanita Rincones’ family was one of those

Mexican Baptists. Her mother had been a practicing Baptist in McAllen before they left so she sought out that same faith community when she arrived in Michigan. She found

137 This was a typical phenomenon. For more information on ethnic Catholic churches, see Orsi, Robert Anthony. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. 138 See Ruíz, Vicki. From out of the Shadows Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008. Though not on Baptists specifically, Felipe Hinojosa’s work on Latino Mennonites illuminates the history of non-Catholic Latinos in Texas and the Midwest. Hinojosa, Felipe. Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture. Young Center Books in Anabaptist & Pietist Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

136

Reverend Leonard Ortiz and a house that he converted into a chapel located at 1020

Jefferson Avenue on the southeast side.139 When the Rincones’ family arrived, only about three or four families attended services with him.140 Leah Tobar, who arrived in Grand

Rapids from Puerto Rico in 1965, also quickly immersed herself in Grand Rapids’ Baptist

Latino community through her marriage to a Mexican Baptist man. Besides Reverend

Ortiz’s church, Spanish-speaking Protestants could also attend the Assembly of God that

Eleazor Pérez headed. He held services out of his home on National Ave SW. The presence of a Protestant Mexican and Puerto Rican community in Grand Rapids also suggests that though Catholicism bound the groups together, they also formed interethnic bonds beyond that specific colonial tradition. Their shared language facilitated other forms of interactions, such as through alternative forms of religious worship.

Though the Latino community included Catholics and Protestants, La Sociedad

Guadalupana, a mainly Mexican male Catholic organization, and the Mexican Patriotic

Committee, planned many of the community’s social events. As illustrated in Image 1, men like Daniel Vargas and Manuel Alvarez served on the Mexican Patriotic Committee, but oral histories reveal that women also played an integral role in carrying out these activities. They did all the “cooking, cleaning, [and] washing” necessary to put on community-wide events.141 Some women did not even recognize their own contributions:

139 Leonard Ortiz, Grand Rapids City Directory,1960, GRPL. “Obituary for Leonard Ortiz” The Grand Rapids Press, November 5, 1998. 140 Juanita Rincones, interview with Gordon Olson, May 6, 2000.Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, Grand Rapids Public Library (GRPL). 141 Guadalupe Vargas, interview with Gordon Olson, December 18, 1997. Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, GRPL. Juanita Rincones, interview with Gordon Olson, May

137

Guadalupe Vargas recalled that her husband Daniel was responsible for these events but her daughter recalled “she used to help my dad all the time.” The community organized

Mexican religious celebrations like the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Other events like potlucks and outings to local parks likely attracted more people, including Protestant

Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. These spaces allowed the different segments of the community to get to know each other.

Figure 8: The Mexican Patriotic Committee, 1952 Source: The Grand Rapids Public Library, Latinos in West Michigan Collection

With a predominantly Mexican leadership, Mexican Independence Day became a staple event. Often held in the local Catholic high school’s gymnasium in the late 1940s, these celebrations started off very small with mostly Mexicans attendees. As the Latino

6, 2000.Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, Grand Rapids Public Library (GRPL)..

138 population grew, so did the celebrations. By 1956, more than 600 people attended the

Mexican Independence Day festival.142 The smaller Puerto Rican community held small gatherings for their own celebrations in their homes, but by the early 1960s it was commonplace for Puerto Ricans not just to attend the celebrations, but also to participate in them.143 Puerto Rican sisters Nilda and Virginia Fernández danced to Mexican folkloric routines alongside their Mexican friends in the mid-1960s during an independence parade. Years later, their father’s business even had a float in the parade.

As seen in Image 2, the car boasts red, green, and white streamers in honor of Mexico, but also American and Puerto Rican flags, illustrating the multiple identities the Latino community represented and the close relationships they created and maintained.

142 37 Stephans, 13.“Mexicans Find New Home,” Grand Rapids Press, February 2, 1956, 13. 143 Cruzita Gómez, interview with author, 2011.

139

Figure 9: The Fernández Bar's Float in the Mexican Independence Day Parade, 1971 Source: The Grand Rapids Public Library, Latinos in West Michigan Collection

Intermarriage and Interethnic Compadrazco

Examining Catholic baptism and godparentage reveals that the Church provided the basis for long-term relationships among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. These pairings are evidence that despite cultural differences, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans could see one another as part of a broader, more inclusive social network rather than just distinct ethnic groups. Latinos’ choice of baptismal godparents for their children indicates the strength of these bonds. In the Catholic tradition, according to sociologists Helen Rose Ebaugh and Mary Curry, “the primary responsibility of sponsors [godparents] is to instruct the

140 child on faith and morals and, in the event that parents die or neglect their spiritual duty, to raise the child as a good Christian.”144 Whether or not people followed through on these commitments, the gesture of choosing godparents served as a meaningful public symbol since the parents would become compadres. This term describes the unique bond that forms when a couple entrusts another couple with the well being of their child, effectively linking them in a kin-like relationship. Ebaugh and Murray also argue that it

“sets up mutual rights, obligations, and relationships between the godparent(s) and the child’s biological parents.”145 Picking a non-family member as a godparent was a way for new migrants to form not only affective networks and kinship bonds, but also access social capital like better access to jobs and organizations through their compadres.146

Active couples in the church were popular choices for godparents. In the majority of cases, Mexican parents chose Mexican godparents: Arnulfo and Josefina Colunga, for example, served as godparents for four children unrelated to them.147 Puerto Ricans also

144 Helen Rose Ebaugh and Mary Curry, “Fictive Kin as Social Capital in New Immigrant Communities,” Sociological Perspectives, Vol 43, No 2. (Summer, 2000) 195. 145 Ebaugh, 196. 146 Compandrazgo has served as an effective way to build social networks since colonial Latin America to the present. In colonial Latin America, slaves used the practice of choosing godparents to connect their children to prominent members of their communities. For more information on godparents in colonial Latin America, see David Stark, “Parish Registers as a Window to the Past: Reconstructing the Demographic Behavior of the Enslaved Population in Eighteenth-Century Arecibo, Puerto Rico,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 15 (Winter 2006): 1-30; and Stuart Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992). In the present, sociologists and anthropologists have examined how immigrants in the United States and communities around Latin America utilize compadrazgo to gain social capital. For more information on US immigrants, see Ebaugh and Murry. For information on urban Mexican compadrazgo, see Robert V. Kemper, “The Compadrazgo in Urban Mexico,” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Jan., 1982), pp.17-30. Some sociologists have examined the impact of interethnic compadrazgo through examining indigenous communities. See Jerome M. Levi, “Hidden Transcripts among the Rarámuri: Culture, Resistance, and Interethnic Relations in Northern Mexico”, American Ethnologist, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Feb., 1999), pp. 90-113. 147 María del Carmen Chappa, Juan de la Cruz, Linda Monsalvo, and María de Jesus Ruiz, Baptism Records, 1952-1957, St. Andrew’s Cathedral, Diocese of Grand Rapids.

141 sought Puerto Rican godparents for their children, but since the community leadership was mostly Mexican, a reliable figure like Daniel Vasquez became a prime choice for

Puerto Rican parents Saturnino and Priscilla Ayala when Vasquez became godfather to their son Carlos in 1954. That day, they baptized all three of their children and chose two

Mexican couples and one Puerto Rican couple to become their compadres. Puerto Ricans

Leopoldo and Guadalupe Figueroa likewise chose Mexican Gregorio Chavez and Puerto

Rican Santa Sánchez as their son Santiago’s godparents.148

While baptizing one another’s children was a way for Mexicans and Puerto

Ricans to come together, marriage was the ultimate forging of family unions. Working, living, and worshiping in the same places allowed for people to get to know each other and for some, develop romantic relationships. These Mexican-Puerto Rican marriages provide further evidence of the similar position that these two groups occupied in the local social and racial hierarchy.149 Mexican and white intermarriage occurred at lower rates and Puerto Rican and Black marriages even less frequently. Mexican and Puerto

Rican marriages far outnumbered other endogamous unions, reinforcing the notion that the two groups saw one another as social equals and suitable marriage partners.150

148 Santiago Figueroa, Baptism Records, ibid. 149 It is also important to note that many of these marriages were between Puerto Rican men and Mexican American women. This gender and ethnicity pattern is likely due to these groups’ migratory trends. Often times, Puerto Rican men came to West Michigan as bachelors, while Mexican Americans came in a familial unit. Some of the earlier Puerto Rican-Mexican marriages were between Puerto Rican men and young women who traveled to Michigan with their parents and siblings. 150 In the St. Andrew’s Cathedral Record books, out of 50 records of baptisms, only 3 were from Mexican and White unions and only 1 was from a Puerto Rican and Black union. This might also suggest that if interracial marriages did occur, they either did not happen among Catholics or they were not viewed as socially acceptable enough to be recognized in church ceremonies.

142

Most of these romantic unions developed in the workplace. For example, Mexican

Americans Angelita Arizola and Rosa Vasquez and Puerto Ricans Marcial Hernández and Juan Vasquez met their respective partners on farms in Lake Odessa, about 30 miles east of Grand Rapids. All four of them followed a similar step migration from the island or Texas to other Michigan agricultural towns, and finally arrived in Grand Rapids. The women’s families were all originally from Texas and had come north as migrant workers.

Angelita’s parents were migrant workers from Gillespie, Texas.151 They began bringing their nine children with them to Michigan in the 1930s and decided to settle in the North in the late 1940s, though many of her siblings continued to do migrant farm work with their own families.152 Marcial Hernández and Juan Báez came from Puerto Rico to harvest sugar beets in Michigan. Fields became shared spaces where these two groups encountered one another. Yet farm work was not the only place where people met. For example, Amelia Silva and Juan Báez lived in a boarding house next to their manufacturing factory. Silva and other Mexican American women lived on the third floor, while Báez and other Puerto Rican men lived on the first floor.

Reactions to these relationships showed that though at a group level Mexicans and

Puerto Ricans coexisted without incident, that perhaps, individually, the differences among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans still caused concern for some. Amelia Silva’s father, for example, never quite supported his daughter’s choice in a husband. Perhaps Domingo

Silva thought Juan Báez’s clear African ancestry thwarted Silva’s pursuit of whiteness

151 Angelita Arizol,a, Manuscript Census, 1940. 152 Rafael Hernández, oral history interview, 2013.

143 and full acceptance for his Mexican American family. Amelia’s MexiRican children, however, never felt any particular poor treatment from their grandfather. In contrast,

Angelita’s father did not have a problem with her marrying Marcial, but instead other

Puerto Rican women hesitated to accept Marcial’s new wife. Angelita’s daughter-in-law recalled the family matriarch’s struggle to gain acceptance from the women, at first. After a few years and opportunities to get to know Angelita personally, however, Puerto Rican women accepted her as Marcial’s wife and befriended her.

Angelita and Marcial’s marriage also helped to bring together the community.

They belonged to two large Mexican and Puerto Rican families in Grand Rapids. After they were married, their in-laws formed relationships and brought their other friends into the fold, helping to shape the pan-ethnic Latino community. Puerto Rican Pete Gómez, and close friend of Marcial, recalled that the Hernández-Arizola marriage allowed him to become close friends with Marcial’s brother-in-law, Pete Arizola. They soon found themselves hanging out at the bar or after community baseball games without Marcial or

Angelita. These marriages were not always without protest, but the Arizola-Hernández children did not recall any lasting ill feelings about the interethnic pairing.

These couples were important not only because they crossed ethnic lines, but also because their children represented the forging of a new ethnic identity: MexiRicans. The presence of MexiRicans in Grand Rapids as early as the 1950s and early 1960s represents how West Michigan and the Midwest served as prime locations for interethnic interaction. This medium- sized city with its agricultural periphery created the conditions for Mexicans and Puerto Ricans to come together. Growing up, their families exposed

144 them to both sides of their families and as adults they continued to self-identify as

MexiRican. “I don’t feel more Mexican or Puerto Rican, I’m MexiRican,” Rafael

Hernández, Marcial and Angelita’s son explained. Juan and Amelia’s daughter, Carolina

Báez Anderson, also agreed that though she did not grow up in a Latino neighborhood she could not identify as more Mexican or more Puerto Rican.153

Figure 10: Amelia and Juan Báez, Undated Source: Carolina Báez-Anderson’s Personal Collection

153 For more on MexiRicans see the following work in sociology and anthropology, Frances Aparicio and Susana Chavez-Silverman, Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997) Angie Chambram Dernersesian, “Chicana! Rican? No, Chicana- Riqueña!: Refashioning the Transnational Connection,” in Multiculturaism: A Critical Reader ed. D. T. Goldberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)Kim Potowski, and Janine Matts "MexiRicans: Interethnic Language and Identity". Journal of Language, Identity &; Education. 2008. 7, no. 2: 137-160. Mérida Rúa, "Colao Subjectivities: PortoMex and MexiRican Perspectives on Language and Identity".

145

Figure 11: Amelia Báez at Work, Undated Source: Carolina Báez-Anderson’s Personal Collection

146

Figure 12: Domingo and Ines Silva with Children and Grandchildren, mid-1950s Note: Juan and Amelia Báez are standing, back left. Source: Carolina Báez-Anderson’s Personal Collection

Mexican and Puerto Rican couples also provided the structure necessary to unite the larger communities. For example, in organizing this community to fight against discrimination (see chapter 5), Mexican-Puerto Rican couple, Cruzita and Pete Gómez played extremely instrumental roles in accessing both Mexican and Puerto Rican social networks. This became increasingly important as the city began to grow and the older,

Píoneer families were no longer the only Latinos present. Both Pete and Cruzita bridged gaps and showed both groups what they had in common through their shared obstacles.

Other Puerto Rican and Mexican pairings helped the community to progress as well.

Leah Tobar was 20 when she left Puerto Rico after she met her Mexican American

147 husband, Felipe, when he visited Puerto Rico on a mission trip. With a few years of college completed in Puerto Rico, she arrived in Grand Rapids in 1965 ready to help the community integrate itself into a civil rights struggle.

Sites of Recreation

The interactions between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans were not limited to mixed marriages—people bonded informally in recreational settings as well.154 Feeling unwelcomed in some of the city’s leisure spaces, the community created their own. For example, Grand Rapids had all-white women’s and men’s baseball leagues, and even a

Negro league in the first half of the twentieth century. Without access to those teams, many members of the Spanish-speaking community met at Rumsey Park, on the

Southwest side of Grand Rapids and formed a team for a “Spanish league.” In the 1940s,

Mexican baseball teams traveled to different areas in West Michigan to play against other

Mexicans. María Aguilar remembered watching her brothers and in-laws play together.

By the early 1950s, when Puerto Ricans arrived in the region, they joined Mexican players on the Grand Rapids team. If anyone objected to including new players, especially Puerto Ricans, some reconsidered, particularly if the newcomers were talented.

Many of the Puerto Ricans, including Juan Báez and Pete Gómez, had previous

154 Historians such as Nan Enstad, Cathy Peiss, and Vicki Ruiz documented the ways in which immigrants and migrants claimed space in recreational venues like movie theaters, amusement parks, and dances among others. See Enstad, Nan. Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999);Peiss, Kathy Lee. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Ruíz, Vicki. From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

148 experience playing baseball competitively with their company teams. While higher pay and less arduous work made the Lake Odessa Canning Company attractive, the company baseball team played a part in Báez’s decision to leave the sugar-beet fields. Pete Gómez played in several leagues in East Chicago, Indiana, and he boasted about his days playing against Orestes “Minnie” Miñoso, who later became a legendary Chicago White Sox player.155 As the Latino population grew, so did the team. Players came not only from the church but also through connections built at work or in the neighborhoods.156 This team’s transition from being part of a Mexican league to becoming a “Spanish” team shows how the team’s identity changed from a singular ethnic group to a pan-ethnic club. It also showed that Latinos were forming bonds outside of a religious context.157

Both Mexican and Puerto Rican women carved out a niche for themselves at these games as well. There were no women baseball players, but many Latinas used these games as an opportunity to earn money. Luisa Fernández, who lived three blocks from the park, made and sold alcapurrias, a traditional Puerto Rican food to the Spanish- speaking crowds. Other Mexican women sold beverages and candies.158 Though this may have seemed like a small part of the baseball games, through such activity, women made large contributions to the community. Selling typical Puerto Rican and Mexican foods

155 Pedro and Cruzita Gómez, interview by author, October 9, 2013. 156 Pedro and Cruzita Gómez, interview by author, October 9, 2013. 157 See the following for information on the role that baseball has played in community formation: Alamillo, José M. Making Lemonade out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a California Town, 1880-1960. Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Centennial Series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Burgos, Adrian. Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line. American Crossroads 23. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Innis-Jiménez, Michael. Steel Barrio: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago, 1915-1940. Culture, Labor, History Series. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 158 Juan Báez, interview by author, Grand Rapids, Michigan, October 15, 2011.

149 was as an attempt to preserve their culture and introduce these foods to one another.159

Through these baseball games people strengthened their communities by increasing their self-reliance.

A lack of grocery stores and restaurants that carried traditional Mexican and

Puerto Rican foods made it difficult to preserve culinary traditions, but the community found ways to resolve that. For example, when Juanita Baltierrez first moved to Grand

Rapids from Chicago as a teenager in 1946, there was no grocery store that contained the food items her family needed. They quickly found out that many Mexicans in the area traveled to Chicago to purchase food in bulk for their own supplies and to sell to their neighbors. Baltierrez in fact recalled buying 100 pounds of beans on one trip!160 The community made do with informal home-based grocery stores well before formal ethnic grocery stores were established. In 1952, La Estrella Distributors opened on the south side of Grand Rapids, which ended the long haul grocery trips for the Grand Rapids community. The company became a distributor to both Puerto Rican and Mexican restaurants and grocers in Grand Rapids, other cities in Michigan, and even surrounding states.161

159 Scholars have found that leisure spaces like theaters, restaurants, and dance floors have been integral parts of community formation among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. See the following: Gutiérrez, David. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.Sánchez, George J. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City. Latinos in American Society and Culture 5. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.Whalen, Carmen Teresa. From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. 160 Juanita Rincones, interview with Gordon Olson, May 6, 2000. Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, GRPL. 161“Mexicans Find a New Home”

150

Latinos could walk to the first Mexican-owned bar and restaurant in the area, the

503 Bar, located on South Division in the 1950s 162 The bar served Mexican and

American food and became a meeting place for the first wave of Mexican immigrants. It later welcomed Puerto Ricans.163 The Fernández Bar, which opened in the late 1960s, was one of the first Puerto Rican-owned businesses and it catered to a diverse population of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, whites, and Blacks on the Southeast side. Just as at baseball games, women held responsibility for feeding the masses and simultaneously building community. Luisa Fernández cooked Mexican burritos, Puerto Rican arroz con gandules, and hamburgers for the family bar. Demonstrating what Vicki Ruiz refers to as cultural coalescence, Latinos found comfort in retaining these cultural practices and embracing some elements of mainstream American food culture rather than completely assimilating and abandoning their traditional ethnic foods altogether.164

Nightlife in Grand Rapids also offered Mexicans and Puerto Ricans the opportunity to enjoy familiar music. The entertainment offered at the Roma Hall sustained many generations. J. B. Russo owned the property on the corner of Wealthy

Street and Division Avenue since the 1930s.165 With acts ranging from tap dancing to orchestras, Roma Hall became a trendy spot for young people. African American jazz

162 Although this area and the neighborhoods near Grandville Avenue were home to Mexicans at this time, they had been the first stop for many new immigrants as they arrived in Grand Rapids. For more information on African Americans as they settled into Grand Rapids’ neighborhoods, see Jelks, African Americans in the Furniture City, 95. 163 Irma Garcia Aguilar, interview with Laura Retherford and Christian Miller, April 4, 2001. Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, Grand Rapids Public Library (GRPL). 164Ruiz, 50. 165 “Roma Hall Story” West Michigan Music Historical Society, An Interactive Archival Database for Wes Michigan Music History, http://www.westmichmusichystericalsociety.com/roma-hall-story/, Accessed May 18, 2015.

151 performers and Mexican bands frequently used this building. Not that there were many of the latter, but those that did appear played for packed audiences. Cruzita Gómez remembered family bands as the only musical option available. The Ortega, Rincones, and Castillo family bands brought the Latino population to their feet. Santos Rincones and his family arrived in Grand Rapids in 1950. Santos and his brothers made up a four- man band in a Tejano conjunto style that included the accordion, bass, drums, and the bajo sexto [sixth bass]. After his brothers quit the band, Santos played with his own sons.

Though they provided much of the music in Grand Rapids, they also traveled to areas outside of Chicago and smaller cities in Indiana and Ohio to play for Mexican communities.166

Although the music did not reflect this, the Rincones family band played for a crowd that was both Mexican and Puerto Rican. At times the bands could only play

Mexican music; Cruzita recalled them trying “a little mambo,” but they could not replicate the Puerto Rican music her husband Pete enjoyed. Julio Vega’s Puerto Rican family attended such dances with their children.167 Cruzita Gómez and Marilyn Vega both remembered a mixed crowd that tried to pick up the steps to the Mexican dances and have a good time. In fact, some of the young Puerto Rican men who grew up in the 1950s used their dance skills to aid them in their romantic pursuits of Mexican women.

Eventually, Puerto Ricans brought salsa bands from Chicago to play in Grand Rapids in the late 1960s when more Puerto Ricans arrived, but until then the Mexican American

166 Santos Rinconces, interview with Gordon Olson, Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, Grand Rapids Public Library (GRPL). 167 Marilyn Vega, interview by author, October 10th, 2013.

152 family bands sustained the Spanish-speaking community.168 Though the rhythms might have differed in Mexican and Puerto Rican music, the language was enough to bring them together.

Movie theaters were another place that might have excluded Latinos because of language barriers. Though many people in the community spoke English, watching movies in Spanish allowed people to feel comfortable in a new place. Theaters began showing Spanish-language movies in the early 1950s, during the Mexican film industry’s golden age. María Aguilar’s mother-in-law, Aurora Chavez, periodically ordered movies from Mexico and was able to get the Liberty Movie Theater to show the films.169 Many

Puerto Ricans and Mexicans went to these theaters at Division Avenue and Liberty Street to find entertainment in a language they understood. Older sisters, aunts, and mothers often escorted young ladies who wanted to go outside of their homes for entertainment.

Rosa Pérez remembered frequenting the movie theaters with her female friends before she was married.170 Married couples also found movies to be an affordable night out. The

Gómezes usually went to the Town Theater on Grand Rapids’ Northwest side. In 1950, a third theater downtown started playing Spanish-language films on the weekends.171 The fact that movie theaters in Grand Rapids were willing to play these films could mean that

Grand Rapids theater owners recognized the potential profitability of catering to a growing population and that they gained recognition in Grand Rapids as a legitimate

168 Cruiza Gómez, interview with author, 2011. Simon Aguilar, interview with author, 2014. 169 Irma Garcia Aguilar, interview with Laura Retherford and Christian Miller, April 4, 2001. Latinos in Western Michigan, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, Grand Rapids Public Library (GRPL). 170 Rosa Pérez, interview by author, Grand Rapids, Michigan, October 14, 2011. 171 “Mexicans Find New Homes.”

153 constituency, not just a community on the margins. Though movies reflected Mexican experiences and culture, Puerto Ricans could relate to the storylines and for an hour and a half they could watch the big screen in a language they could understand. While a movie can be simply a form of popular mass culture, in Grand Rapids movies were another way of forging a Latino identity.172

Conclusion

To this day, Miguel Bérrios and other Puerto Ricans call Mexican Americans some of their best friends, despite their early tense interactions. This chapter demonstrated that

Latinidad does not rest solely on a relationship to the state, but also in the intimate bonds people formed with one another. Although there is a tendency to homogenize the Latino experience, this chapter illustrates that there were multiple spaces of interaction for these groups. It also examines disagreements and acknowledging difference. External and internal forces in Grand Rapids contributed to the formation of a Latino identity.

Shared racialization and its consequences, as seen in education, housing, and social spaces helped to form a Latino ethnic consciousness among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans.

They both experienced difficulties transitioning to school in Grand Rapids that for many represented a contradiction between their identity as citizens (most of them were as

Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans) and their treatment by local white residents.

They also experienced some difficulty getting access to the Roosevelt Park area after

172 For more information on how cultural production influences communities, see Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

154 both groups had previously lived on the southeast side with African Americans. Their ability to enter the previously restricted area at a greater rate than their Black counterparts, however, suggests that they truly occupied a “grey” zone in the Black-white racial binary.173 Though Grand Rapids experienced increasing segregation among Blacks and whites in residential patterns, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans moved more easily between these boundaries.

In the mid-1960s, the number of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Grand Rapids increased. Many of the newcomers settled directly in the Roosevelt Park area and attended the neighborhood schools that earlier migrants did. Those who came in this later migration did not have access to the same postwar economic boom and the jobs that went along with it as earlier migrants had. The new migrants who were looking to escape poverty often remained impoverished once in Grand Rapids. The economic deprivation was not isolated to Grand Rapids or to Latinos. Nationwide cities across the country fell into decay. On the local level, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Grand Rapids engaged in grassroots activism to help their growing community progress. Lyndon B. Johnson declared a War on Poverty as part of the federal government’s response. These agencies and initiatives were for the poor and were to be run by the poor. Administering these programs, however, revealed tensions in the community that had not been seen before.

173 Fernández, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Post War Chicago, 17.

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Chapter 4: Parity, Not Charity: Latinos and the Fight for Equal Representation in CAP,

Model Cities, and the Latin American Council

Introduction

Their signs read “Latins Won’t Take a Back Seat,” “Brown Power, Viva La

Raza,” “Latinos do not Support Tio Taco,” “Latins Want Parity, Not Charity,” and

“Latinos, Sí, Tio Taco, No!”1 About 20 people holding those signs gathered to protest the

Model Cities program, a War on Poverty initiative. The newspaper headline Friday,

March 20th 1970, a day after the protest, read “It’s Latins Picketing Latins at Model Cities

Meeting Here.” A half page photo taken outside of the Model Cities office on Jefferson

Street accompanied the text banner. The grainy photo depicted the crowd as mostly men, one woman and two children standing outside the building in their heavy jackets appropriate for springtime in Grand Rapids, Michigan. These “Latins” picketed the meeting because they charged that the federally funded, African American-dominated

Model Cities program and the War on Poverty as a whole discriminated against them and they boycotted it in response. Those outside of the meeting felt the Latinos who attended the Model Cities meeting betrayed them. To make matters worse, on his way into the meeting, Alfred Chambers, a frustrated African American Model Neighborhood Citizens

Committee member, told the group “the problem with you people is that you don’t speak

1 Mike Niemann, “It’s Latins Picketing Latins at Model Cities Meeting Here” GRP, March 20, 1970.

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English.” This situation exemplifies the issues Latinos faced among themselves and with

African Americans in Grand Rapids, Michigan and on a national level in the late 1960s and 1970s.

President Lyndon Johnson created the Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO) to wage a full scale “War on Poverty” across the country to rescue those barely surviving in the margins of society. The results, however, did not quite measure up to the projected goals. As many scholars have argued, the War on Poverty did not address the root causes of poverty.2 Historian, Eric Foner aptly declared that the federal government did not “consider guaranteeing an annual income for all Americans, creating jobs for the unemployed, promoting the spread of unionization, or making it more difficult for business to shift production to the low-wage south or overseas...” in attempting to eradicate inequality.3 Instead, Lyndon Johnson created the Office of

Equal Opportunity as a clearinghouse for several piecemeal projects meant to address poor people’s predicaments.4

This chapter examines two of those specific initiatives, the Community Action

Program (CAP) of 1964 and the Model Cities program started in 1966, and the conflicts

2 See the following works for Model Cities programs and the challenges they faced: Bledsoe, Carolyn E. Lewis. A History of the Model Cities program in Richmond, Virginia 1969-1975. Thesis (M.A.), 1992. Howell, Ocean, In the Public Interest Space, Ethnicity, and Authority in San Francisco's Mission District, 1906-1973. 2009. Ryan, Elizabeth Mary, We Thought We Should Do Something Ourselves Citizen Participation, Southwest Denver and the Model Cities program, 1964-1994. (Missoula, Mont.: University of Montana, 2011), Weber, Bret A., Denver's Model Cities program. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Dept. of History, University of Utah, 2007. Weber, Bret, and Amanda Wallace. "Revealing the Empowerment Revolution: A Literature Review of the Model Cities program "Journal of Urban History 38, no. 1 (2012): 73-192. 3. Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty!: An American History (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2014). 4 Adina Black, “‘Parent Power’: Evelina López Antonetty, the United Bronx Parents, and the War on Poverty,” in The War on Poverty : A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980 (University of Georgia Press, 2011) 185.

157 that occurred within them. CAP served to give funds to community programs. Guiding the distribution was principle “that poor persons were themselves to be involved with the development and operations…that were intended to help them.”5 This led to available funds for both public and private entities that committed to solving poverty.

Originally called the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act of 1966, the Model Cities program aimed to address poverty and crisis in the inner cities. Both programs rested on the idea of “maximum feasible participation of residents the areas and groups served.”6 Though this was designed to ensure that local community prejudices would not prevent poor people from accessing these programs, as seen with

New Deal Programs, this provision exacerbated local tensions along racial, ethnic, class, and gender lines. Various groups wrestled for control over the newly available resources, which they had been deprived of for generations.

These programs led to two distinct, but related controversies. The first controversy involved Latinos and CAP. From 1968 to 1970, reflecting a trend in War on Poverty programs nationwide, Latinos in Michigan argued that middle class African

Americans dominated leadership positions in the Community Action Programs and relegated poor Latinos to a few less powerful posts only after very public debates. In

1970, African Americans and Latinos made up 10 and 5 percent of the Grand Rapids

5 Debra Newman, “Preliminary Inventory of the Records of the Office of Economic Opportunity” National Archives and Records Service, (Washington, D.C., the United States Government, 1977) 2. 6 Guian A. McKee, “‘This Government Is with Us’ : Lyndon Johnson and the Grassroots War on Poverty,” in The War on Poverty : A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).

158 population, respectively.7 Latinos struggled to call attention to their own needs. If tension among African Americans and Latinos existed previously in Grand Rapids, it went largely unnoticed in the public sphere until the War on Poverty era.

The second conflict involved a grassroots program and the Model Cities. In

1971, War on Poverty administrators approached the Latin American Council (LAC), a grassroots organization, about the opportunity to become an official project of the

Model Cities program. This meant the community would receive federal funds in exchange for local oversight. After another set of public conflicts, the Latin American

Council obliged. These conflicts exposed fissures in the panethnic identity and pan-

Latino relationships that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans had built in the 1950s and 1960s.

The previous chapter argued that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans from the 1940s through the early 1960s had cultivated a panethnic identity through their everyday interactions with one another rather than in a political context as other scholars have asserted. This chapter argues that by the late sixties Latinos found themselves having to renegotiate their panethnic alliances as the social, political, and economic landscape of

Grand Rapids had changed in the intervening years. This resulted due to two interrelated dynamics that the existing Latino population had to address. The first involved internal relations within the community. The continued in-migration of Mexicans and Puerto

Ricans throughout the 1960s changed the composition of the local Latino population. In particular, the presence of more Puerto Ricans in the 1960s put pressure on the delicate balance of power that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans had managed to negotiate. The

7 U.S. Census Bureau, “Population Characteristics by race, 1970.”

159 relative peace among them rested on Puerto Ricans occupying a secondary position in relation to the larger, older established Mexican population. A decline in manufacturing jobs inflamed racial and ethnic rivalries in Grand Rapids, similar to other places around the nation. Moreover, the rise of the Chicano Movement inspired more radical, nationalist politics among some Latino residents in Grand Rapids, a stark departure from earlier generations’ strategies for survival.

Secondly, however, Latinos now also had to consider their panethnic solidarities and social formation more directly in relation to the other racial minority in the city,

African Americans. Throughout the 1960s, Grand Rapids’ Black population had grown significantly. As the city began receiving federal monies for poverty programs, and as these were funneled primarily to Black residents, Latinos now had to contemplate their relationship to African Americans and how they too would access federal funding to address community needs. Given the growing diversity of the Latino population and the dynamics described above, Latino leaders varied in their opinions about which political strategies would most effectively serve the interests of their struggling constituency.

The dissemination of War on Poverty funding in Grand Rapids underscores how generation, ethnicity, class, and gender influenced Latinos’ ability to maintain unity and decide on how and who would lead this diverse group. Though interethnic clashes within the community might suggest that Latino identity is inherently unsustainable, those identity negotiations are a necessary process of Latinidad. As Merida Rúa points out, studies of Latinos rarely include “…analyses of…misunderstandings, disagreements, and

160 conflicts, which are part and parcel of everyday group interaction”8 Addressing the tensions inherent in Latinidad, but also the cooperation reveals the public and private negotiations required to elaborate panethnic identifications and alliances.9 Disagreements are an inherent and essential part of Latinidad. In dismissing conflict, Tomas Summers

Sandoval warns of “the ‘potential to perpetuate intra-Latino exclusions and injustices’ by homogenizing the diversity of Latino and Latin American experiences.”10 In Grand

Rapids, the Model Cities Program helped Latinos recognize their differences and gave

Puerto Ricans a more equal voice vis-à-vis Mexican Americans than they had in previous years. This process also brought out more Latino leadership from both Mexicans and

Puerto Ricans who through their contributions ultimately strengthened the power, scope, and ability of the Latin American Council to effect change.

The Community Action Program and Model Cities forced Latinos to revisit the question of their racial identity and ultimately led many to identify as distinctly non-

Black. The delegation of War on Poverty programs to the Black community prompted

Latinos to distinguish themselves as population separate and distinct from African

Americans.11 Though the communities faced similar barriers, in order to get federal

8 Merida Rua, “Colao Subjectivities: PortoMex and MexiRican Perspectives on Language and Identity” Centro Journal 2001 XIII (2). 9 See, Felix Padilla’s Latino Ethnic Consciousness: the Case of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago (South Bend, University of Norte Dame, 1985), Rua “Colao Subjectivities,” Tomas Summers Sandoval, Latinos at the Golden Gate: Creating Community and Identity in San Francisco (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 10 Summers Sandoval, 5. 11 These discussion on representation often dichotomize Latinos and African Americans without acknowledging that some people would identify as Black Latinos, as in the case of Afro Puerto Ricans, for example. Though I interviewed a family that might be considered Afro Puerto Rican, they were not involved in the conflicts at the LAC and did not express there identity as being Black Latinos. Further research for this project aims to interview people who would identify as Black and Latino.

161 funding for their needs, especially translators, Latinos further differentiated themselves and made a case for why they had unique needs that were not met by programming aimed at Black residents. According to Sonia Lee who analyzed Black and Puerto Rican relations in New York City during these years, the move to separate oneself “did not reflect fixed cultural incompatibilities but was a strategic political decision to create a political base.”12 These types of interracial deliberations were also present in communities around the country including cities throughout Texas, Oklahoma,

Mississippi, California, and other population centers where more than one ethnic or racial group coexisted.13 Organizers also negotiated equal representation and disagreements that arose within one ethnic/racial group due to differing ideologies.

Opponents of the War on Poverty, however, used these disagreements as proof positive of the program’s inefficiency and local press coverage helped their cause. The

Grand Rapids Press covered every misstep and argument between African Americans and Latinos and among Latinos in the late 1960s and 1970s, which served to discredit and delegitimize minority community organizing and the War on Poverty as a whole. Despite the criticism and failures of the initiative, the program brought unprecedented attention to the plight of both the urban and rural poor.

Urban Unrest in a Changing Landscape

12 Lee, Sonia Song-Ha. Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City. Justice, Power, and Politics. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014) 6. 13 See Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, eds., The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011) for an edited volume that shows the multiple racial and ethnic group participation in the War on Poverty.

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In April of 1967, the City of Grand Rapids applied for desperately needed federal funding under the Model Cities program. The Department of Housing and Urban

Development (HUD), however, denied their application. Three months later, on July 24th, the southeast side of Grand Rapids erupted in a three-day urban rebellion, one day after a similar situation broke out in Detroit. Police quarantined the area, established a curfew, and banned the sale of liquor and gasoline. Rioters responded by throwing Molotov cocktails at police officers and local businesses. By July 26th, the riot had ended. There were no fatalities, but the revolt injured 40 people. Police arrested 274 individuals.

African Americans constituted the majority, but 12 of the arrestees had Spanish- surnames. People under the age of twenty-five comprised 75% of those detained. Eugene

Sparrow, the director of the Human Relations Commission (HRC), the City of Grand

Rapids’ entity for fostering mutual understanding and respect among all racial, religious and nationality groups reported that, “a Negro boy (unidentified) who had stolen a car was apprehended by police…and [that] people began to accuse the police of brutality when the boy was arrested.” Other residents said a police officer was rough with a handicapped man. Regardless of the source, the urban unrest garnered little national attention, overshadowed by Detroit only 150 miles away.

Though the City of Grand Rapids’ administration postulated a number of reasons for what incited the riot, it did not point to the growing frustration with police brutality and lack of quality housing, jobs, and educational opportunities for African Americans and Latinos in the city, especially those on the southeast side. Instead, the Superintendent of Police, and even middle class Black leaders in the Community Action Program blamed

163 angry pimps who resented the over-policing of their turf. Local politicians and city employees also pointed to the presence of out-of-state license plates in the area as evidence of outside agitators. City Hall denied that the disturbance constituted a real riot, but instead argued it was an isolated incident.14

Afterwards, however, the Kerner Commission, also known as the National

Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, began its investigation into the Grand Rapids uprising.15 The commission revealed stark contrasts in the quality of life between whites and nonwhites in Grand Rapids. White families’ incomes were 65% higher than non- white families and the unemployment rate among nonwhite men and women grew to 2 to

2 ½ times higher than their white counterparts in the 1960s.16 The commission’s report had only proven what community activists already knew.

For many African Americans in Grand Rapids and around the nation, years of rigid de-facto segregation angered their communities. As Grand Rapids historian Todd

Robinson has stated, African Americans quite literally lived in a segregated “city within a city,” and faced a “renewed commitment to racial prejudice in the postwar era” as evidenced by a lack of access to the suburbs and their accompanying prosperity.17 In examining this exclusion, it was clear that African Americans were living in deteriorating

14 “Post-Riot Study Indicates Low Police Prejudice Against Negro” The Grand Rapids Press, November 30, 1967. 15 Field Research Reports, Field interview Folders, Grand Rapids- Grand Rapids Team Interview Report to Grand Rapids- Arrest Record, Box E49, page 25, Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Archive. 16 Socio-economic profile of Grand Rapids, Michigan, October 9, 1967, 1-2.RG 220 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Investigations, Englewood-The Englewood Police Department Report to New Haven- Socio-Economic Profile, Grand Rapids Memos. Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Archive. 17 Todd Robinson, A City Within a City: The Black Freedom Struggle in Grand Rapids (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, 2013).

164 conditions: 77% of all Black homeowners owned properties that were built before 1939, compared to 38% of whites in Grand Rapids.18 Between 1967 and 1972, Grand Rapids experienced four other incidents stemming from racial inequalities. Robinson details these school walkouts and large fights during attempts at integration that appeared to indicate Black dissatisfaction. Though Robinson focuses on African Americans and especially the youth, Latinos often participated in these incidents, though in smaller numbers, and faced the same injustices.

Whether intentionally or not, the urban rebellion communicated African

Americans’ problems to the local government. When federal initiatives became available in Grand Rapids in 1968, middle class Blacks took influential positions within local agencies. African Americans’ long history in Grand Rapids equipped them with generations of leaders who familiarized themselves and their constituencies with the government bureaucracy. In the case of the Spanish-speaking community, however, the city seemed oblivious to their plight.19

Latinos’ quiet entry into the Southwest side of the city in the mid-1950s gave way to a rapid, noticeable change in the neighborhoods in the following decade. From the

1960s to the 1970s, Grand Rapids’ Latino population almost quadrupled. In 1960, 2,500

Latinos lived in the metropolitan area. By 1972, about 11,178 Latinos called Grand

18 U.S. Census Bureau, Table B-2, SMSA 1-22, Selected Characteristics of Persons and Families by Residence in Census Tracts with Poverty Rate 20% or More: 1970. 19 See Randal Maurice Jelks, African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006) for more information on African Americans in Grand Rapids from the late 1800s to the 1950s. See Todd Robinson A City Within a City: The Black Freedom Struggle in Grand Rapids (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, 2013) for a history of African Americans in Grand Rapids from the 1930s to the 1970s.

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Rapids home.20 Though they continued to live on the Southeast and Northwest sides, most Mexicans and Puerto Ricans ended up in the Roosevelt Park neighborhood. Their choices, however, “were limited to what they could afford and what the community allows him [sic]," as a Human Relations Commission report on the new migrants to the city noted.21

In the 1960s, the HRC focused much of its attention on the changing milieu of the city. African Americans and whites from the South arrived in Grand Rapids at the same time as Mexican-Americans from Texas, and Puerto Ricans. The HRC report also noted a difference between the earlier Mexican migrants and the foreign-born who arrived in the

1960s and “usually [entered] the U.S. for the first time as contract agricultural laborers

[braceros].” Though the rest of the city was experiencing economic prosperity, the commission stated “the new comers [were] occupying the older, more dilapidated, blighted housing in the core or central city, surrounding the downtown business district."22

By the 1970s, businesses and white residents left the city center. It appeared deserted but for the government buildings that remained there. Like many urban areas around the country, the majority of Grand Rapids’ growth after World War II occurred outside of the city. The suburbs grew immensely and though the city contained over 700 manufacturing companies, these employers generally excluded Blacks and Latinos from

20 U.S. Census Bureau, Population Counts and Estimates- Latin Americans, Grand Rapids Metropolitan Area, 1923-1972, Equal Opportunity Department, Human Relations Commission Records, 1956-1970, Series No.13-14, Box number 4. Grand Rapids City Archives (GRCA). 21 Ethnic and Racial Background of Newcomers to the City of Grand Rapids, GRCA, HRC Files. 22 Ethnic and Racial Background of Newcomers to the City of Grand Rapids, GRCA, HRC Files.

166 their higher paying jobs.23 The HRC began paying attention to this issue in the 1950s and early 1960s. They sent Daniel Vargas, one of the community’s pioneers, to the Fair

Employment Practices Committee Conference in Lansing in early 1960. Upon his return, his reports foreshadowed events to come: “[expect] continued increase in the demand for durable goods, the basis of Michigan’s economy, but no increase in employment in manufacturing, where increased automation would demand a greater proportion of skilled workers.” Moreover, he further noted, “the greater demand for skilled technicians would aggravate existing problems for economically, educationally, and culturally deprived minorities.”24 That was exactly what happened. Though early Mexican and Puerto Rican migrants first found work in Grand Rapids in the fields, the postwar boom allowed most to leave that sector or at least not rely on it as their main source of income. Their late

1960s counterparts however, did not have the same access to jobs as earlier migrants had enjoyed.

Latinos in Grand Rapids as a whole struggled to make a living and survive.

By 1970, half of families lived below poverty on the Southwest side and one third did not have a job.25 Vargas kept the Human Relations Commissions updated, even if the city at- large did not recognize Latinos’ precarious plight. Kathy Post, an anthropology student at

Michigan State working on a project on Mexican Americans wrote to the HRC inquiring about the problems facing Mexican-Americans. Alfred Cowles, HRC director, replied that many receive, “some unfair treatment based on their ethnic groups in the field of

23 Employment Industrialization Survey, August 1, 1955, GRCA, HRC Files. 24 Meeting Minutes, Human Relations Commission, January 28, 1960. GRCA, HRC Files. 25 1970 U.S. Census Tracts.

167 employment. Part of this is discriminatory, but some if it is due to language barriers and inferior training.”26 Though both Post and Cowles were referring to Mexicans, Puerto

Ricans had similar experiences due to their ethnicity and lack of English language skills.

Cowles, however, did not explain the structural barriers Latinos faced in Grand Rapids.

He mentioned language and inferior training as a problem, but he stopped short of detailing the educational system that failed to adequately prepare Spanish-speaking students for lucrative employment opportunities.

Grand Rapids’ lacked quality schools for Latinos. Similar to many other public school systems, throughout the mid-1960s, Grand Rapids Public Schools (GRPS) did not offer bilingual education nor did they have many Latino faculty or staff. The compulsory assimilation the schools promoted made many children feel isolated and out of place in a school system that did not want them (see chapter 3). GRPS’s payrolls reinforced their disinterest in Latinos. They employed only six Latino teachers and two custodians, no secretaries nor bus drivers in 1971.27 The Board of Education argued that they could not find qualified Latinos for those jobs. They never questioned, however, the quality of their schools as a contributing factor to the lack of qualified Latinos. Two out of three Latinos in Grand Rapids did not graduate high school in the late 1960s.28

Language played an important role outside of schools as well. In the early 1940s and 1950s, Daniel Vargas and Cruzita Gómez translated for most of the smaller, more,

26 Alfred Cowles to Kathy Post, “Problems Facing the Mexican American Community,” May 5, 1965. GRCA, HRC files. 27 “Meeting dealing with curriculum and how it reflects the Latin American” May 22, 1972. GRCA, Model Cities, Latin American Council Files. 28 To Philip Runkel from Alfred Wilson, Action Model to reduce the Latin American drop out rate, May 16, 1972. GRCA, Model Cities, Latin American Council Files.

168 manageable number of monolingual Spanish speakers in the city. With the doubling of the population, however, that model proved unsustainable. Community activists concerned themselves with the lack of Spanish-speaking employees in local agencies like the Welfare office or the unemployment office. Vargas, who held a job at manufacturing company Doehler Jarvis, lamented that he “had to personally serve as an interpreter without remuneration” for people who needed to have contact with local agencies.29 The absence of interpreters disadvantaged Latinos and prohibited them from accessing benefits to which they were entitled.

Without a command of English, Latinos also found themselves at the mercy of the

Grand Rapids Police Department. In 1968, the GRPD had no Spanish-speaking officers.

Reports of police brutality surfaced in the 1950s (see chapter 3). By the 1960s, community leaders like Vargas concerned themselves with resolving the language barrier issue. In 1965, Vargas gave a speech at the Michigan Welfare League Conference entitled “Giving the Poor a Voice in Their Own Destiny.” Building on the War on

Poverty’s principles, he argued for a “bold new approach, which will give ‘poor’ people a strong voice in their own destiny.” He pinpointed language as an issue, particularly with

“police, school authorities, and social workers.” To resolve this, he embraced the War on

Poverty rhetoric and argued for “representation in large numbers on the Leadership

Policy Committee for Community Action Programs.” He also called for participation in urban planning committees, grassroots operations to inform people about the federal programs available, and most importantly, “the opportunity to select our own

29 Meeting Minutes, April 22, 1965, GRCA, HRC Files.

169 representatives rather than having the agency decide who should represent the poor.” 30

Though he retired three years later, Vargas outlined a fairly comprehensive strategy for securing equal rights in Grand Rapids.

Forming the Latin American Council

That same year, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans formed the Latin American Council to address the issues they faced. In year’s prior, several small cultural and philanthropic organizations served the community including the Sociedad Mutualista Circulo Mexicano and the American G.I. Forum. Though earlier organizations geared their programming towards Mexicans and Mexican Americans, identifying as a Latin American organization signaled a more inclusive conceptualization of Spanish-speaking people. Though

Mexicans and Puerto Ricans began developing interethnic solidarities and exchanges in the early 1950s and 1960s, by the end of 1960s they began to formalize these alliances by using the term “Latino,” in addition to “Latin American” and “Spanish-speaking,” rather than just identifying as “Mexican.” The Council validated a political notion of panethnicity.

The Council’s seven-member Board of Directors included two Puerto Ricans and five Mexicans.31 All on the first board represented more established members in the community. Mexican Americans Carolina Cantu, Ubaldina Paíz, Francisco Vega, and

Porfirio Murillo, had arrived in Grand Rapids in the 1940s and mid-1950s. Abrán

30 Daniel Vargas, “Giving the Poor a Voice in Their Own Destiny” at the Michigan Welfare League Conference, November 16, 1965. GRCA, HRC files. 31 Latin American Council Contract with Model Cities, GRCA, Model Cities, Latin American Council.

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Martínez and Dioniso Bérrios, the two Puerto Ricans, came to Grand Rapids in the same era. While the Mexican contingent served people through the Mexican Patriotic

Committee and the mutual aid society, Bérrios and Martínez worked informally welcoming new Puerto Ricans to the city after they settled. Both their formal and informal experiences helping the community equipped them for running the Council.

At the end of 1969, the LAC secured a grant to purchase a physical location for their organization. Their benefactors included the Archdiocese of Grand Rapids and the

Grand Rapids Foundation. With the money they received they settled into a house on

Grandville Avenue on the Southwest Side.32 Increasing white out-migration and Latino in-migration contributed to the area’s growing reputation as the city’s barrio. The LAC also hired a director, though volunteers mainly staffed the organization. The grant from the archdiocese marked the strength of the relationship between Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Catholic Church. All of the Council’s directors attended Our Lady of Guadalupe and later St. Joseph’s. They used the church as a base for community activities in early decades.33

The Council had two equal goals. For the first, the LAC wanted to unite Spanish- speaking groups under one umbrella organization. Cultural organizations aided the community throughout the previous decades. In order to present themselves as a united group, however, they needed to consolidate. Daniel Vasquez had established the

Sociedad Mutualista Circulo Mexicano in the 1930s, for example, and it served both

32 First Year Evaluation Report, Latin American Council, Model Cities program, Grand Rapids, Michigan, June 20, 1972. GRCA, Model Cities Files, Latin American Council. 33 Though Liberation Theology likely played a role in this, it is important to note that Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the diocese as a whole had supported Latinos since their arrival in the 1940s.

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Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. By the 1960s, the population outgrew the mutualista’s services and its name did not signify the unity leaders had embraced not only in rhetoric, but also in action. Calling their organization the Latin American Council, resolved that issue. The formation of the umbrella group allowed other people to form their own groups and have a physical space for them. For example, the Puerto Rican Organization and Latin American Youth in Action housed their associations under the LAC’s roof in the early 1970s. Establishing a unified stance allowed Mexicans and Puerto Ricans to take on pressing issues.

The second goal was to help Latinos gain access to social services to improve their living conditions.34 The lack of Spanish-speaking staff at various agencies in Grand

Rapids prevented many residents from accessing services. The LAC saw a need for

Spanish language translators. This would allow people access to benefits and also provide community residents jobs. Until the unemployment office, for example, hired those people, the Council provided volunteer translators to those who needed it. One could arrange for someone to accompany you to an appointment anywhere in the city. With an all-volunteer staff, however, this proved unsustainable as more people moved to the area.

Hiring translators remained an issue that the LAC fought for until the mid-1970s, but they did not care only about the ability to communicate. Rather, they wanted the social service agencies to truly understand their cultural barriers, including language. The

LAC contacted United Fund and Community Services (UFCS) in Grand Rapids to ask for

34 Latin American Council, Request to UFCS and CAP Executive Committees, June 23, 1969. GRCA, Model Cities Files, Latin American Council.

172 their assistance in getting more Latinos employed in social service agencies. CAP, the recipients and distributors of War on Poverty funding, sprung up all over the country after the Equal Opportunity Act and the establishment of the Office of Equal

Opportunity. In many cases, however, communities who applied for funding through

Community Action Program did not start new organizations, but instead worked through already established social service agencies. In Grand Rapids, CAP worked with UFCS, a

City Hall designated non-profit organization that organized social service agencies.

Together CAP and UFCS held the purse strings for the federally funded community coffers. Holding UFCS and CAP accountable allowed Latinos to address the issues of representation and decision making that Daniel Vargas had called for just four years earlier.

The LAC knew that to accomplish real change “Spanish Americans [must] be involved on all Committees and Boards that make decisions about human services that affect the lives of our people.”35 The LAC detailed exactly what they wanted from the

UFSC and CAP: cooperation in helping to “guarantee that to the maximum possible degree Spanish Americans are participating in staff and committee positions,” similar to the “maximum feasible participation” the War on Poverty required. To that end, the LAC asked CAP and UFCS to help them ask the “City of Grand Rapids, the Kent County government including especially the Department of Social Services and the Department of Health, the Grand Rapids Board of Education, the Michigan Employment Security

35 Latin American Council, Request to UFCS and CAP Executive Committees, June 23, 1969. GRCA, Model Cities Files, Latin American Council.

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Commission, and all private human service agencies, United Fund-affiliated and otherwise,” to examine their staff for ways to incorporate “Spanish-Americans” into their administrations.36 This action and the early approaches from the LAC to alleviate poverty set a path for a model of political activism that the community embraced whole-heartedly in the 1970s. This moment also marked the beginning of negotiations between Latinos,

African Americans, and white liberals who participated in UFCS and ran CAP.

36 Latin American Council, Request to UFCS and CAP Executive Committees, June 23, 1969. GRCA, Model Cities Files, Latin American Council.

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War on Poverty (Federal Government)

City Demonstrang Agency (The City of Grand Rapids)

Community Acon Program (United Model Cies Fund and Program Community Services)

Model Neighborhood Cizens Commiee

Lan American Council

Figure 13: War on Poverty Organizational Flow Chart Note: Funds originated from the federal government and went to a designated City Demonstrating Agency. In most cases, the municipal government served in this capacity. The CDA then directed funds to War on Poverty Initiatives. In Grand Rapids, the Community Action Program and the Model Cities program were two of those programs in operation. In 1971, the Latin American Council (LAC) became a project of the Model Cities and thus eligible for federal funds. In many cases the LAC administration corresponded directly with CAP and CDA administrators.

Citizen Participation

For the next ten years, the LAC fought battles with every federally-funded program to ensure they understood and met Latino needs. They used a variety of methods

175 including some strategies in popular use in the late 1960s like protests or demonstrations.

Unlike many of their counterparts around the country, Latino activists operating under the LAC were not necessarily trying to dismantle the system, but rather they worked within it to improve the lives of Latinos living in Grand Rapids. In a step to get CAP and

UFCS to recognize Latinos as a legitimate constituency, the LAC approached the

Community Relations Commission (CRC) (formerly the HRC) for help. Latino leaders had found a home in the CRC since 1958 when Daniel Vargas began his ten-year tenure as a commissioner. By 1962, Irene Alba, a Mexican American woman originally from

San Antonio joined him. In 1968, Francisco Vega, a business owner and college graduate, replaced Daniel Vargas.37 A former teacher, Puerto Rican Juan Maldonado also served on this commission throughout the 1970s. The CRC even tapped Father Ted

Koslowski, the priest who worked closest with the Latino population in the Grandville

Avenue area to be a commissioner. Though these representatives called attention to

Latino issues, the CRC itself did not hold much power for radical change. Critics pointed out that the mayor’s office appointed people “at random without considerable scrutiny of their activities on a voluntary basis.... [and] without the assistance of the professional particularly in this field.”38 Nonetheless, the CRC agreed to appoint a Latin American

Liaison Committee to help persuade UFCS and CAP to help them.

CAP and UFCS needed persuasion. From their target programs to their administration, CAP via UFCS primarily attended to the needs of the African American

37 “City Fills Relations Body Seats” Grand Rapids Press (GRP), May 23, 1968. 38 “Outline for Comments with the City Manager” September 8, 1967. GRCA, Equal Opportunity Department, Human Relations Commission Records

176 community. A white liberal, Wendell Verduin, ran UFCS/CAP as the first director.

African American brothers Raymond and Melvin Tardy took over as director and planning director, respectively, in 1969, just as Latinos started to inquire about equity.

CAP offered a variety of services including drug/alcohol rehabilitation, Upward Bound,

Neighborhood Youth Corps, Job Corps, and a variety of volunteer-based service organizations. CAP administration boasted about the founding of “the complexes,” one- stop-shop buildings that housed a variety of social services in particular neighborhoods.

The Franklin-Hall Complex and Sheldon Complex, for example, delivered services to

Black and Latino clients.

CAP and other War on Poverty initiatives certainly faced challenges. Trying to determine the maximum feasible participation to qualify for War on Poverty money plagued cities across the U.S. as well as West Michigan. While Black and brown neighborhoods housed CAP complexes, language barriers prevented many Latinos from taking advantages of the services. The lack of access to social services prompted the LAC to ask the CAP/UFCS to hire more Spanish-speaking staff. By 1971, CAP/UFCS still had not changed their hiring practices very much: they employed “46 Blacks, 28 whites, six

Latin Americans, and one Indian.” The agencies they directed also failed to make any major changes, motivating LAC to take over social service outreach for Latinos in 1972.

Also, as the complexes evolved into whole-scale community centers in the early 1970s,

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Latinos complained that they did not have a chance to use them for their own cultural events. The problems within CAP/UFCS carried over into the Model Cities program.39

To be clear, in Grand Rapids, African Americans made up the majority of the inhabitants in the Model Cities target area, making their control of the programs warranted. Latinos made up about 10% of the area, compared to Blacks’ 67%.40 For

Latinos, the issue was not always about equal representation, but about having their interests and specific needs recognized. Latinos saw their predicament as not only one predicated on race/color, but also a combination of race/color, ethnicity, and most importantly language—something that did not affect African Americans. Grouping these people together did not work for either of them. Latinos sought recourse for their issues via the Latin American Council, leaving African Americans at the Model Cities’ helm.

During the planning stages, Latinos ignored Model Cities just as much as the

Model Cities ignored them. They did not take part in the 1968 Model Cities election. 101 candidates vied for 41 positions on the first-ever permanent Model Neighborhood

Citizens Committee (MNCC), the governing body of the Model Cities program that made decisions about funding. All of the candidates and electorate lived in the Model

Neighborhood, the area designated for Model City money. Voting districts A-1 and B-2 contained the neighborhoods with the largest number of Latinos, but only Black and

39 The Model Cities application for 1967 did not mention Latinos one time. Though it did make references to non-white people, the majority of content addressed problems in reference to African Americans on the Southeast side of the city. Latinos could have been incorporated into the non-white group, since the city had a habit of lumping them together. However, after the City of Grand Rapids implemented the Model Cities programming and administration, it consisted of mainly African American members. 40 U.S. Census Bureau, “Population Characteristics by race, 1970.” Census Tract 26, Kent County, Michigan.

178 white candidates ran for the election. In the A-1 district, the four African American candidates (three women and one man) held seats on the CAP-run Franklin-Hall

Complex Advisory Council. In B-2, two of the three potential commissioners had affiliations with the Franklin-Hall Complex. In B-2, two Dutch men and one African

American woman ran.41 All of the candidates worked or volunteered for other organizations including Parent Teacher Associations, the NAACP, or the Urban League and held white-collar jobs. Their previous engagements allowed them a better chance at transitioning into the increasingly bureaucratic Model Cities program. Also, many of the candidates were part of the middle class, which likely meant they had the social capital and knowledge of how to participate in electoral politics.

The first two years after the Model Cities program started, it had trouble getting off the ground, in part due to conflicts among African Americans and with Latinos. The

Model Cities administration scrapped the 1968 elections after members of the target area boisterously complained about the over-representation of CAP people among the elected candidates. Because of CAP’s affiliation with UFCS, and UFCS’ affiliation with the City, the Model Cities participants accused “City Hall of trying to run the show.”42 The new elections produced more working-class citizens than the first had and the addition of one

Latino: Mexican American Thomas Martínez. For the most part, however, not much had changed. African Americans dominated the new MNCC, including the executive board, and it maintained a conservative strategy for change, according to a more militant

41 “Model Cities Election Most Unusual in Area May be City’s Most Important” GRP March 3, 1968. 42“Model Cities Group Picks Lewis as Chief” GRP, November 11, 1968.

179 segment of the population.43 These disruptions left the Model Cities unable to effect change. More Latino participation exacerbated the issue as they too wanted a share of the funds.

Armand Robinson’s friends asked him if he was out of his mind for accepting the

MNCC chairman position in November of 1969. Not only did the MNCC have impending deadlines to turn in their progress report to HUD by December 15th, but

Latinos in the city had also started to make demands of the program in recent months.

They recognized the equity issues in the Model Cities administration. Emily Hawkins, a representative from the regional HUD office in Chicago, visited Grand Rapids for

Robinson’s transition and witnessed these challenges as well. She told the Grand Rapids

Press that “the committee should try to improve the participation of Latin Americans within the program to prevent the public from thinking Model Cities here is catering only to Blacks.”44 Unfortunately, her statement came too late. At the end of the year, Latinos garnered press attention for their struggle to gain recognition within the Model Cities program.

Just a year before, Latinos had not even participated in the Model Cities election.

What changed that made them so interested in a program they had initially avoided?

Martin Morales is likely the answer. This Mexican American man, originally from the

Rio Grande Valley, caused quite a stir in Grand Rapids when he started advocating for equality in the Model Cities program. He pointed out that the War on Poverty had

43 Model Cities Body Will Accept Grant April 30 1969 44 Steve Vibregg, “Model Cities Fills $15,000 Position” November 14, 1969.

180 actually alienated poor people and called on it to be more inclusive. His charismatic, over-the-top personality made him the focal point for many Grand Rapids Press (GRP) articles that sensationally chronicled the conflicts within the Latino and Black communities. The GRP wrote more than one exposé on Morales, always focusing on his compelling life story. He left home at nine years old and became a migrant worker with his uncle because his single mother could not support him and his six siblings. On his own since his childhood, Morales settled in Mansfield, Ohio and worked for the city’s transportation department. Then he worked for the mayor before leaving his wife and children and relocating to Grand Rapids. He accepted a job working for the Catholic diocese’s Human Relations Commission shortly after he arrived in 1968. Daniel Vargas recommended him for the post because “he was an outsider who had not yet made enemies.”45 Vargas may have misjudged the value of Morales’ outsider status. On some issues, he polarized the community. He was not one of the Latin American Council’s founding members nor part of the older more established generation. Often times, the older guard tried to distance themselves from him. Not everyone appreciated his tawdry tactics, and yet others felt he rejuvenated the base of Latino activism that had previously settled for a pared-down Latin American Council with limited power.

Morales caught everyone’s attention when he led a group of sixty “Latins” to interrupt a MNCC meeting in December of 1969. They demanded the MNCC appoint three to four Latinos to the 41-member MNCC. Apart from Morales, the records are unclear as to why other Latinos appeared to suddenly take an interest in Model Cities.

45 45 Mike Neimann, “Latin’s Voice Grows Louder Here” GRP, June 14, 1970.

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The African American leaders on the MNCC suggested that the mid-year planning deadline in December motivated Spanish-speaking people to act when they did.

Excluding Latinos, through elections or appointments, meant the MNCC did not comply with HUD guidelines on participation and this would have been apparent in their report on personnel. The timing might have indicated frustration not just with Model Cities, but also with CAP, which had been consistently ignoring Latino demands. CAP’s and

MNCC’s links likely added to the problem. For example, Morales remarked that the

Latino community was “overpowered” and “did not have a voice,” (a common refrain from Latino communities across the country) when the MNCC asked him why if Latinos felt so enraged about being left out, did they refrain from running candidates in the March

1968 or 1969 election.46 When the MNCC appointed two Latinas and not four to the

MNCC, this did not satisfy the Latino community.

Both minority groups knew the power to make substantive changes lay in the decision-making positions on the MNCC. Tensions between the two communities worsened after Armand Robinson and the MNCC appointed Cedric Ward instead of

Tomas Martínez to Assistant Chairman, a full time job with a salary of $10,000 a year.47

Morales charged that the two general member seats given to Latinos on the MNCC essentially made them into “errand boys and errand girls.” To have real parity, Morales wanted the MNCC to create another assistant chairman opening so a Latino could have

46 Mike Lloyd, “Latin-Black Arbitration?” The Grand Rapids Press, March 18, 1970. See William Clayson’s “The War on Poverty and the Chicano Movement in Texas,” for more about Latino exclusion in the War on Poverty. Clayson points out that the middle class nature of the agencies limited poor people’s ability to work within them. 47Steve Vibregg, “Model Cities Refuses to Appoint Latin”, GRP, December 29, 1969.

182 that title alongside Cedric Ward. Some African Americans understood Morales’ frustration. For example, Phyllis Scott, an MNCC member, told the 60 Latinos who interrupted the meeting, “What you are saying is what we have been saying to whites for years- ‘Let us have some policy-making power on your committees.’”48 She argued that the MNCC should take Latino demands more seriously, considering Blacks were in “that position before.”49 Nonetheless, the two most powerful positions in the MNCC remained in the hands of African Americans.

Morales went to great lengths to show how Latino needs differed from those of

African Americans. He centered his comments on language barriers. “How can they claim to know what our problems are when they cannot even speak to us?” he asked. His remarks referenced the LAC’s interpretation program and suggested Spanish-speaking people could get much more help with federal funds to such services. He went on to tell the GRP reporter, “We feel like no one knows our problems like we have lived, and therefore, we will wage our war against any program that tends to exclude us and not recognize our problems.”50 Latinos felt they would not have power if they did not have a

Latino assistant chairman.

The community mobilized in three public actions to achieve the appointment of a

Latino to assistant chairman. First, the two MNCC Latina appointees, Carolina Cantu and

Ophelia Garza, resigned in a symbolic move to show their disapproval of Cedric Wards’ hiring. Their second strategy tried to bring the national spotlight to Grand Rapids. They

48 Steve Vibregg, “Latin Threat Nets 2 Model Cities Seats” GRP, December 10, 1969. 49 Steve Vibregg, “Latin Threat Nets 2 Model Cities Seats” GRP, December 10, 1969. 50 “Latins Demand Federal Probe of Model Cities.”

183 began a letter writing campaign to prominent politicians. The recipients included Grand

Rapids’ congressional representative Gerald R. Ford among other Michigan congressmen and included former Michigan governor and HUD Secretary George Romney. They also sent letters to American G.I. Forum founder Dr. Hector Garcia Pérez and New Mexico senator Joseph Montoya. The letters’ signees included representatives from the Sociedad

Mutualista Circulo Mexicano, the Latin American Council, the G.I. Forum, the Raza

Unida Party, and the Jalisco Club. The signatories argued that they had “been systematically excluded from jobs and participation” and went on to say that “our candidates for employment are not given consideration…when we asked why we are not given consideration, we are immediately offered the lowest paying jobs available.”51

More importantly, their letters called for an investigation into federal agencies in Grand

Rapids, including CAP. For their third step, Morales’ backers supported his call to boycott the Model Cities program until they “were given a fair say in planning federally aided projects.52 Historians recognize mass demonstrations and wide-scale boycotts as a part of Civil Rights activism. In War on Poverty initiatives, organizers in Grand Rapids and even in places like San Antonio and Los Angeles, used these tactics on a much smaller scale.53

Complaints to the federal government of unequal representation in War on

Poverty programs occurred nationwide in small and large cities receiving aid. Though the

51 To Floyd Hyde from Representatives from Latino Community, January 2, 1970. NARA, Committee on the Spanish-speaking, General Correspondence Box 24, folder 14. “Latins Demand Federal Probe of Model Cities” GRP, December 30th, 1969. 52 Lloyd, Mike “Black-Latin Arbitration?” GRP, March 18, 1970. 53 See Robert Bauman’s “Gender Civil Rights Activism, and the War on Poverty in Los Angeles” and William Clayson’s “The War on Poverty and Chicano Movement in Texas”

184 federal government likely looked into some of these issues, it is unlikely that they were able to investigate every claim. These debates splintered minority communities and became very public conflicts. In Grand Rapids, Latinos garnered more attention than usual when they employed protest strategies in opposition to another minority group and not the local power structure. Opponents often cited such incidents to discredit Black and brown communities. Municipal governments and critical politicians used these as examples of the War on Poverty’s flawed notion of trying to allow poor people to make decisions. The Grand Rapids Press articles on this public conflict depicted Latinos as a population that continually mired itself in controversy.

Despite Latino attempts to publicize their disagreement at all levels, records indicate that no federal investigation of Grand Rapids’ Model Cities or CAP took place.

Instead the MNCC created a part-time “citizen participation specialist” position with a requirement of Spanish language skills. The MNCC chairman told the GRP that “Latins should not consider the [position] as a subterfuge of their demands” as his committee had come up with the idea before the public debate. 54 To Morales and supporters, a half-time specialist did not compare to the assistant chairman position they wanted a Latino to hold. After months of no federal action the Latino faction settled for a local intervention.

In March 1970, they asked the Grand Rapids City Commission to look into the discrimination charges. The commissioners found that there “were some findings of

54 Steve Vibregg, “Model Cities Refuses to Appoint Latin”, GRP, December 29, 1969.

185 discrimination.” This inquiry did not produce the second chairman Morales wanted, but he used the attention to garner 12 general member seats on the MNCC.55

After Latinos spent the winter of 1969 fighting with Model Cities, the program showed slow but steady progress in hiring more Latinos. Irene Alba, former Human

Relations Commissioner, filled the opening for the part-time citizen participation specialist and worked to advocate for the Model Cities program. Ernestine Savala and

Cruzita Gómez worked in paid auxiliary positions. Gómez and Alba had long histories of serving the community in both formal and informal ways. Alba worked on the HRC and familiarized herself with the city’s procedures. The Model Cities program opened up avenues for women to secure jobs that previously would have been given to the more boisterous male leadership in the community. These women, who had long played an integral role in the community, finally had public positions that valued the work they did.

Gómez had translated for Mexicans and Puerto Ricans at their social service appointments on a voluntary basis in the 1950s and 1960s. She also acted as a bridge between the two ethnic groups. As a Mexican American, her marriage to a Puerto Rican man and her long history in the community allowed her to bring the two groups together.

By the early 1970s she often acted as a mediator when interethnic conflicts arose.56

In March of 1970, Grand Rapids’ Latinos needed Gómez’s negotiating skills. As stated in the introduction, Irene Alba’s meeting about Model Cities programs for Latinos resulted in a very public schism in the community. When Alba and others crossed the

55 Lloyd, Mike “Latin-Black Arbitration? GRP, March 18, 1970. 56 See chapter 3 for more information on Cruzita Gómez’s role in the Latino community.

186 picket line to enter into a meeting to discuss the benefits the Model Cities could provide to the Latino community, protestors shouted insults at her in Spanish. Self-appointed spokesman, Martin Morales passed out flyers that read:

We do not condemn her because her needs are as human as ours. We condemn the Model Cities program that forces our people to such depths. Therefore, we ask a continuing boycott of the Model Cities program. Beware of their Tricks! They still need our participation to get federal Funds. Do not listen to anyone who comes to your door to offer second-class citizenship to our proud people. Boycott this evil program. We must not sell our souls, our culture, and our destiny for a crust of bread. Viva La Causa.57

The Latin American Council did not have an interest in the Model Cities program and therefore did not try to gain access to it likely for the same reasons Black militants avoided it—they saw it as an extension of the establishment. Morales, however, played both sides. He boycotted the program because it did not include Latinos but when it did try to include them in a more meaningful way, he called it second-class citizenship. He focused his attention on gaining a leadership position and used Chicano movement rhetoric to rally his supporters. The insults directed at Irene Alba also suggest that there was a layer of gendered tension. Historians have long pointed out that Chicano nationalism did not welcome feminist organizing nor in the very least, female leadership despite evidence of a multitude of contributions on the part of Chicana activists. Morales wanted a leadership position, but it was Alba, a woman, who instead emerged as the most visible Latino leader. Moreover, although he showed some sympathy in the way he characterized Alba, he essentially accused her of being a vendida, or sell-out, which was

57 “It’s Latins Picketing Latins”

187 often the criticism cast at Chicanas who did not agree with all facets of the Chicano movement.58 Meanwhile, those who did not stand with Morales reaped the benefits of the new programming.

Irene Alba knew that the Model Cities program could provide the community upward mobility. She had spent the previous eight years trying to work within the City government through the HRC. She recognized that if the Model Cities started to extend their programming to Latinos then “why shouldn’t we take advantage of it?” She went on to tell interested Latinos at her meeting, “why should we be left out? Model Cities has said [more] Latin Americans will be hired when the program (action phase) begins.” Alba, who appeared demure in stature next to Morales’ six-foot tall frame, held her position in the face of Morales’ and his supporters’ threatening behavior.

She took her own shot at Morales. Alba told the attendees “how can he represent the Latin community when he has been here only five months?” Alba clearly saw

Morales as an outsider unlike others like herself who had lived in Grand Rapids for decades and had put work into establishing community. Morales had no deep ties to the area. Newer immigrants, Mexican and Puerto Rican alike, faced tension when the older leadership expected the recently arrived to fall in line with the hierarchy they created.

Part of that hierarchy positioned Mexicans at the top. Still Puerto Ricans, both more established and new arrivals, attended Alba’s meeting. Ruben Sánchez, whose family was one of the first Puerto Rican families to settle, told a GRP reporter after the meeting, “I am one of the silent minority that is silent no more. I have lived here 20 years

58 See Maylei Blackwell, Chicana Power!

188 and I want to help represent the Puerto Rican community.” His sentiments in singling out the Puerto Rican community indicate a level of frustration at the Puerto Rican community’s overshadowing by Mexican Americans. Other prominent Puerto Ricans, like Latin American Council founder Dionisio Bérrios, attended the meeting as well. The increased participation of new Puerto Ricans and availability of federal funding made it possible to have a louder voice among Mexican Americans. For many of them, they may have assumed that if Morales got his way and an MNCC chairman position opened up for

Latinos, it would have likely gone to a Mexican-American. They had nothing to lose in going to the Model Cities meeting.

Once the Model Cities started implementing projects in 1971, Puerto Ricans quickly took advantage of them. New mothers Lea Tobar and Juanita Larruiz took a parenting course and proudly displayed their certificates in the bilingual Model

Neighborhood Newsletter.59 Lea Tobar even landed a paid position as a Model Cities planning aide, while MexiRican Laura Gómez, and Puerto Rican Antonio Martínez served on the MNCC. This inclusion gave the Puerto Rican community the means to organize. That same year, Puerto Ricans formed the first Puerto Rican Organization in

Grand Rapids. Though they had developed tight networks with one another for years before, this formal group made improving Puerto Ricans’ standing in Grand Rapids a priority. Juan Maldonado, former HRC commissioner and teacher led the group with

Cruzita’s husband Pedro “Pete” Gómez, Lea Tobar, and Juanita’s husband William

Larruiz. Maldonado and Tobar, both from Puerto Rico, represented college-educated

59 Model Cities Newsletter, January 1971. GRCA, Model Cities Files.

189 leadership for Puerto Ricans. Puerto Ricans’ ability to access higher education on the island significantly surpassed the ability of Mexican-Americans from Texas and in Grand

Rapids to access the same privileges. In this time period, the Spanish-speaking community did not discuss the educational divide much, but they certainly noticed it.

With a new college-educated leadership, Puerto Ricans attended the Model Cities meeting and mobilized their compatriots. This more politically active Puerto Rican population altered the relationships among Latinos in Grand Rapids and initiated greater changes to come.

After the meeting, Ruben Sánchez, a Puerto Rican activist, called for unity among

Blacks, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans because they were all a “minority group fighting the same problem.” The Grand Rapids Press, however, saw a more entertaining story.

Reporter Mike Neimann ran an exaggerated story with the headline “Latinos Here

Listening to Tough-Guy Morales.”60 Niemann not only identified Martin Morales as the leader of the entire community, but also commented on the inter-Latino conflict: “further frustrating Latin leaders as they attempt to unify in an attack on these problems is the reluctance of the 2,000 Puerto Ricans and 900 Cubans in Grand Rapids to fall in step under the Mexican banner.” The newspaper article belied the cooperation the two groups had cultivated since the 1940s. Morales contributed to the erasure when he did not speak out to correct it. Most importantly, the article fanned community tensions and portrayed

Latinos as dysfunctional to the paper’s broader readership.

60 Mike Neimann, “Latin’s Voice Grows Louder Here” GRP, June 14, 1970.

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Morales made matters worse when he referred to Puerto Ricans who crossed the

Model Cities boycott picket lines as scabs. Though the newspaper articles do not say where he said this, Morales likely said it publicly since he followed up with a public apology in the form of an open letter to Puerto Ricans. The comment further enraged

Puerto Ricans who did not appreciate the Morales exposé. Morales said he uttered the word out of frustration in “trying to unify our people to get justice for all,” and he also apologized in the name unity.61 Still, the presses’ and Morales’ evaluation of the Latino situation in Grand Rapids did not accurately reflect Mexicans and Puerto Ricans relationships. Dionisio Bérrios forgave Morales, but no one forgot Morales’ statement.

His comments reflect some of the limits of Chicano Movement rhetoric. As political scientist Cristina Beltrán aptly explains, “the movement’s perception of conflict as something external and unnatural to the community meant that those who challenged the norms and traditions become culturally and politically suspect.”62 To Morales both Puerto

Ricans who crossed the picket lines and Irene Alba represented a threat to unity.

The Latin American Council: A Model Cities Project

Despite the conflict over the Model Cities, the Latin American Council agreed to become an official Model Cities project in July of 1971. They submitted to oversight from the Model Cities and in exchange, received operating funds to run their grassroots organization. Some members in the community, including Martin Morales, still worried

61 Mike Niemann, “Morales ‘Regrets’ Charges” 62 Cristina Beltrán, The Trouble with Unity, 56.

191 about the possibility of cooptation from the city government who administered federal funds as the City Demonstrating Agency for the Model Cities program. The Latin

American Council decided interference from the city did not outweigh the benefits of receiving much need funds.63

Another issue, however, developed in trying to choose a director for the newly minted LAC. In August of 1971, the director stepped down leaving a vacancy. The

Model Cities program suggested Al Wilson to the Latin American Council after the

LAC’s board of director’s could not agree on the former director’s replacement. Not only did the recommendation feel as if the Model Cities attempted to intervene in the LAC affairs, Al Wilson was a white man. During a time of representative politics, to many

Latino community members, appointing Wilson seemed out of the question.64

Wilson’s supporters, however, had good reasons for their choice. The director had a résumé that made him an ideal candidate in many ways. A trained social scientist, he lived and worked in Mexico City, Kenya, Nigeria, and Puerto Rico since the mid-1950s.

Moreover, he had experience working with Mexican Americans in other parts of the state through the US Department of Labor. For the Department of Housing and Urban

Development, he assessed the Model Cities’ formation in Lansing. Lastly, he held multiple degrees, including one from the Universidad de las Americans in Mexico.65

Wilson had all of the credentials necessary to lead an organization receiving federal funds. He was familiar with the bureaucracy of the War on Poverty and the federal

63 Cruzita Gómez, interview with author, 2011. 64 Cruzita Gómez, interview with author, 2011. 65 Paul Aadrsma, Wilson, Al “Proposal and Study Plan: For a Census and Socio-Economic Survey of the Latin American Population of Kent County”, GRCA, LAC

192 government. He had the intercultural experience necessary to understand the plight of

Latinos in the Midwest. Serving an all-Latino Board of Directors, Wilson agreed to take the position on a temporary basis and vowed to step down once the Council was operating sufficiently. Still, his appointment was not without contestation.

Martin Morales and others vowed to boycott the Latin American Council due to

Wilson’s hiring. This caused tension between Latinos who saw the increase in funding as a way to further help the community and those who ideologically opposed a white man running the Latin American Council. For instance, Miguel Navarro accepted LAC funds from Wilson to help supply equipment for a youth boxing program he ran. Two months later, Navarro wrote a check for $350 to the Latin American Council and mailed copies of a letter to the Council, the City of Grand Rapids, and the Model Cities program explaining that his program did not need the money. Though Navarro initially seemed excited about the money, Martin Morales “began ‘kidding’ Navarro about having accepted money from the Latin American Council even though [Navarro] had been initially outspoken” against Wilson’s hiring. Morales went on to tell Navarro that he

“‘sold’ his support to the Council by accepting the equipment.” This enraged Navarro who not only returned the money, but also then unsuccessfully attempted to raise the money on his own. Morales’ influence on Navarro is representative of the power he held in the community. For some community members who felt they had long been ignored,

Morales’ boycott and other antics illustrated that he was willing to stand up for Spanish- speaking people, even if it meant losing out on federal funds. Yet for others, many of whom worked for the LAC or received services from them, they saw supporting the

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Model Cities as a means of uplift for the entire community. Within a few short months, with Model Cities funds the Council excelled beyond expectations.

Conclusion

Throughout 1970s, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans worked together through the

Latin American Council and Model Cities, while consciously negotiating their identity with and against one another. The Model Cities fiasco made Mexicans and Puerto Ricans more equal in terms of leadership within the community but did not prevent them from working together going forward. After the LAC started receiving funds, Mexicans and

Puerto Ricans, especially women, continued to work together in advocating for more programs and services. The next chapter discusses how community activists advocated for a panethnic Latino identity just a year after the community seemed to fracture publicly.

Relationships with African Americans improved after the LAC became a Model

Cities program. Substantive change in Grand Rapids’ War on Poverty Program started to occur by the early 1970s. In 1967, the application for the initiative did not mention

Latinos, but by 1972, the Black and white printed cover of the second year report featured a drawing of Black and white hands shaking. It read: “Working To Put it All

Together, Trabajando Juntos para Ponerlo Todo Junto.” The illustration was very revealing. The Black hand clearly represented African Americans, while the white hand

194 could have represented whites or Latinos. The Spanish translation and the different color hands represented cooperation in a multiracial community, at least visually.66

Though the drawing was probably meant to convey a sense of unity, it and the years of controversy signaled that these groups held different ideas about who they were in Grand Rapids. The War on Poverty helped to establish “Latino” and “Black” as separate identities whose difference was predicated primarily on language but also culture. It was not that intersections in their identities did not exist, but rather these groups used their differences as political tools to better advance their individual causes.

During the late 1960s, African Americans and Latinos experienced turmoil in their relationships as they vied for federal funding. Critics of CAP and Model Cities point to this in-fighting as evidence of the programs’ many failures, but looking beyond these issues reveals evidence of social change.67 The next chapter will discuss how after federal funding became available, Latinos generally worked together to improve their community despite individual disagreements. Chapter six demonstrates that the community’s accomplishments simultaneously strengthened a Latino identity and created a minority identity among Blacks and Latinos.

66 In Adina Back’s article on Evelina López and Puerto Rican and Black organizing in New York City, she reveals that the United Bronx Parents organization also used a similar logo and concludes that this is a representation of a multiracial society. See Adina Back, “Parent Power: Evelina López Antonetty, the United Bronx Parents, and the War on Poverty.” Adina Black, Annelise Orleck, and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, “‘Parent Power’: Evelina López Antonetty, the United Bronx Parents, and the War on Poverty,” in The War on Poverty : A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). 186. 67 Bret A. Weber, Wallace, Amanda, “Revealing the Empowerment Revolution: A Literature Review of the Model Cities program” in Journal of Urban History. 38 (1), 171-192.

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Chapter 5: The Latin American Council: La Raza and the War on Poverty, 1971-1973

Introduction

A small line on the cover of Grand Rapids’ first bilingual publication read “Que

Pasa is a monthly newspaper published by the Latin American Council for Western

Michigan under a grant from the Model Neighborhood Citizens Committee.”68 Unlike many other Spanish-speaking communities around the nation, up until the 1970s, Grand

Rapids did not have a newspaper for its community. The Model Cities program and the

War on Poverty’s funds allowed for a paid staff and volunteer contributors. Despite fierce opposition to making the Latin American Council a Model Cities program, the community thrived with the funds. In the pages of Que Pasa writers informed local residents of the status of the United Farm Workers’ lettuce boycott; contributors wrote columns contemplating the loss of the Spanish language among the youth in Grand

Rapids; Planned Parenthood activists and Chicano men debated the use of contraceptives and abortion; and the front page donned pictures of Latina queens of a community beauty contests, among other topics. The majority of activities and programs featured in Que

Pasa received federal funding. For the first time the community not only had an avenue to express its concerns through Que Pasa, but the Latin American Council also gave

68 Que Pasa, Vol 2 No 2, November 1972, MC, LAC, GRCA.

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Latinos a space to come together. The program’s funding supplied jobs and social services to community members.

This chapter argues that Grand Rapids’ Latinos reaffirmed their panethnic identity through their engagement in programming and services at the federally-funded Latin

American Council. Latinos still negotiated with one another, especially over the changing gender roles in the community. Though federal funds did not resolve all the tensions in the community, they improved the quality of life for many Latinos and some African

Americans who utilized their services. Though the dominant narrative on the War on

Poverty dismisses it as a failure from both the right and the left, as historian Tomas

Summers Sandoval notes, “even a flawed model…can produce unintended beneficial results.”69 Like Summers Sandoval’s work on San Francisco and Sonia Song-Ha Lee’s book on New York City, this chapter examines grassroots organizing within War on

Poverty programs. 70 Though the distribution of federal monies was often accompanied by conflict, the successes these Model Cities achieved in a short amount of time changed the political landscape of their respective communities.

This work also builds upon studies of nationalist movements in the 1960s and

1970s in the Midwest. Latinos in Grand Rapids experienced el movimiento in their own way. Unlike Chicanos or Puerto Ricans in the Southwest and the East Coast, these

69 Tomás F Summers Sandoval, Latinos at the Golden Gate: Creating Community and Identity in San Francisco (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013) 129. 70 Sonia Song-Ha Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2014) 13. See Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, eds. The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964- 1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). Orleck’s introduction to this anthology argues that the works included take nuanced and complex approach to evaluating the War on Poverty.

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Mexicans and Puerto Ricans did not engage in direct, militant action to solve the inequality they faced. Instead, they used the War on Poverty, specifically Model Cities' funds, to provide for the community and address their issues through social services.

They also embraced the dominant rhetoric of Latino civil rights movements and utilized federal monies to create programming that helped them to assert their ethnic and panethnic identities. Latino activists in Grand Rapids adhered to a model of organizing that the Midwest Council of La Raza espoused. Formed in 1970 in nearby South Bend,

Indiana, the Council focused on giving “greater cohesion to the efforts of Spanish- speaking groups in advocating their own interests and focusing attention on the presence of Spanish-speaking people in the Midwest.”71 For Latinos in Grand Rapids and the

Midwest, el movimiento included more than just Mexicans and Mexican Americans. This chapter and other histories of Latino organizing in the Midwest shift the narrative of the

1960s and 1970s from nationalist movements to a more inclusive panethnic framework.

This chapter first discusses the services that the Latin American Council (LAC) provided to the community. It focuses on Latino youth organizing and the role that college students played in local activism. It also examines the ways in which the Chicano movement and its gendered tensions manifested in Grand Rapids. It also explores Latino attempts at electoral politics. Lastly, it details the LAC’s fight to retain its funding in the face of impending budget cuts to the War on Poverty initiative.

71 Ricardo Parra, “Latinos in the Midwest: Civil Rights and Community Organization” in La Causa: Civil Rights, Social Justice, and the Struggle for Equality in the Midwest, Gilberto Cardenas, editor (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2004)

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Serving the Community

The LAC established three realistic goals for their first years under the Model

Cities program in the early 1970s. First, the LAC hoped to provide a “Spanish-American cultural center” in the Model Neighborhood area located on Grandville Avenue. Next they wanted to create a cultural library. Lastly they also sought to increase its “capability

[as a] social service organization by providing for a salaried staff, and assisting the

Spanish-speaking people in gaining greater access to social services.”72 Over the next two years, they far exceeded their modest goals. Their activities addressed issues associated with culture, education, employment, social services, youth needs, and political participation. They carried out programs with the help of other organizations and started their own initiatives. Despite internal disputes among Latinos and external ones with

African Americans for equal access to Model Cities’ funding, the LAC’s programming reveals that they worked well with one another to help both Black and Latino communities.

With limited resources from the Model Cities, the LAC used other existing programs and agencies to provide social services to their community. Gloria Torres

Arizola, who worked at the Council in 1971 and helped to run the food and clothing pantry, remembered asking local companies for donations. Her efforts persuaded Hush

Puppy Shoes, a local company, to donate to the Council and provide shoes for area children. LAC staff also worked with the Kent County Health Department (KCHD) to

72 LAC First Year Evaluation, May 1972. Model Cities Collection (MC), Latin American Council Files (LAC), Grand Rapids City Archives, (GRCA).

199 host well-baby clinics. The KCHD and the Neighborhood Youth Corps, another War on

Poverty Program, helped to supply nurses’ aid trainees to help operate the clinics.73

Hosting this service at the Latin American Council made public health accessible to those residents who had limited language skills or those without transportation. The LAC also secured a room in St. Joseph the Worker Parish for a Head Start program, which served

15 children in in 1972.74 With the bilingual education program in its infancy in the Grand

Rapids Public Schools in the early 1970s, the bilingual program coordinator for the district, Luis Murillo, offered English-language classes at the Council as well. Within one month of the transition to a Model Cities program, the Latin American Council provided

16 children, “none of whom [had] a rudimentary skill in English,” with specialized classes taught by a bilingual and bicultural teacher.75 For their oldest members of the community, the LAC in conjunction with the KCHD offered senior citizen services such as nutritional and diet information.76 Through important partnerships the concilio worked to feed, clothe, educate, and care for some of the poorest people in the growing community.

The staff at the LAC staff also maintained an employment program. The Council sought to address the lack of Spanish-speaking employees in city social service offices like the unemployment and welfare agencies. Without translation services available for client visits, the Council staff often had to transport, translate, and assist Spanish-

73 Monthly Narrative Report, Latin American Council, January 1972. MC, LAC, GRCA. 74 Monthly Narrative Report, Latin American Council, April 1972. MC, LAC, GRCA. 75 The fight for bilingual education that occurred across the country also included a demand for bicultural teachers. Communities asked for teachers who not only spoke the language but understood their children. See Sonia Song-Ha Lee’s Building A Latino Civil Rights Movement, chapter 5. 76 Monthly Narrative Report, Latin American Council, November 1971. MC, LAC, GRCA.

200 speaking applicants in “establishing eligibility for welfare and related social service benefits, establishing eligibility for unemployment compensation, and [learning] job screening/interviewing [skills].” After two years of requests, a Spanish-speaking intake worker began working at Kent County Social Services offices in 1972, lightening the caseload for the LAC staff.

The LAC continued to try to find employment opportunities for neighborhood residents also. Their jobs program consisted of a staff member simply calling employers, asking if they had any openings, and recommending clients.77 Since the city’s Manpower agency had no Spanish-speaking employees, the LAC’s bilingual staff truly made a difference in obtaining employment for Latinos in Grand Rapids. Through these efforts, the LAC helped between 200 and 400 people a month.78

Outside of social services, the LAC became a place for cultural development for area youth. Before the Model Cities program, the LAC had a youth group that included over 70 registered members, but the group disbanded without funds and leadership.79 At the urging of young Latinos, Al Wilson, the director, worked to revive the program. In

Wilson’s early correspondence with the City Demonstrating Agency (the City of Grand

Rapids), Wilson asked for two additional staff members: a community service worker and a youth programs coordinator. The amount of social services that the LAC provided justified their desperate need for a community service worker. The position of Youth

Coordinator, however, needed a bit more explaining. Wilson wrote the position to include

77 Monthly narrative, Latin American Council, March 1972, MC, LAC, GRCA. 78 Monthly narrative, Latin American Council, March 1972, MC, LAC, GRCA. 79 Al Wilson to Gus Breymann, November 9, 1971, MC, LAC, GRCA.

201 such responsibilities as “initiating, implementing, and sustaining a varied program of educational, recreational, and service activities among young people in the target area population…The youth programs coordinator will strive, where feasible, to promote sharing and cooperation in LAC youth activities with similar activities of other youth oriented agencies both in the Model Cities neighborhood and through the city.” While waiting to get approval for this important new position, Wilson tried securing a volunteer coordinator, but the young people asked to work with someone in a more permanent position.80

Wilson continued to persuade the CDA coordinator to consider that Mexican and

Puerto Rican youth had specific needs that the Latin American Council should address.

Though they did “have physical access to several recreational and service centers in the neighborhood and in the city, they have no center with permanent, on-going programs which they can call ‘their own.’”81 Employing his sociological training, Wilson rested his argument for Youth Coordinator and programming on the idea of racial/ethnic difference.

In his correspondence with the CDA coordinator, he pointed out that “young people, similar to adults, have a legitimate need to identify with ‘their own kind,’ in order to achieve a sufficiently self-assured personal and social base from which, subsequently, to engage in interpersonal and intercultural trade offs [sic] with youths who are perceived by them, and who in turn perceive Latin American youth, as significantly ‘different.’” In his statement, Wilson referred to the fact that African Americans dominated both the

80 Al Wilson to Gus Breymann, November 9, 1971, MC, LAC, GRCA 81 Al Wilson to Gus Breymann, November 9, 1971, MC, LAC, GRCA

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CAP-run Sheldon and Franklin-Hall Complexes for their programming, leaving Latino youth without a place for themselves. Though Wilson used racial/ethnic difference as an argument for the youth coordinator position, he did not want to advocate separatism.

Rather, he saw the Latino youth program as a base for developing Latino cultural identity, which could then be used to form relationships with African American and white youth. Wilson’s ideas represent a common trend in both the War on Poverty and interracial organizing throughout the 1970s.82 As chapter 4 illustrated, Latinos used

“difference” as a political tool to gain access to funds, much like Wilson did in this scenario.83 His reasoning also reflects the impact of social movements in bringing attention to acknowledging racial and ethnic identity as important to one’s life.

Wilson’s urging bore fruit and the CDA granted the Council a full-time youth coordinator position.84 The LAC wasted little time in hiring Rachel Campos, a young

Mexican American woman. Campos was part of the first generation of Latinos born and raised in Grand Rapids. She and her peers exemplified the pan-ethnic consciousness that their parents before formed in the 1950s when they settled into the city. While the fight for Model Cities funding publically threatened the panethnic consciousness in the city

(see chapter 4), the youth deliberately pursued an inclusive conceptualization of Latino identity. For example, once the Latino youth club restarted under Campos’ direction, they quickly made a statement regarding the club’s identity. They named it Latin

82 Lee, see chapter 4 and 5. 83 In the 1970s in New York City, African Americans and Puerto Ricans also accentuated their differences in order to garner more resources for their communities. Sonia Lee, Building A Latino Civil Rights Movement. 84 Gus Breymann to Al Wilson, “Latin American Council” November 12, 1971, MC, LAC, GRCA.

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American Youth in Action (LAYIA), referring to a panethnic representation of who they were. They also paid special attention to equal representation of Latino ethnic groups, making sure to note that their activities included Mexican, Puerto Rican, and even Cuban cultures, reflecting a small but growing presence of Cubans in the area.85 Their executive board also mirrored the community’s diversity: they had a MexiRican president, Victor

Báez, a Mexican American vice president Delia Murillo, a Mexican secretary Lee López,

Puerto Rican treasurer Elsie Rodríguez, and a Mexican American sergeant at arms Rudy

Escobar.86 Rafael Hernández, who attended the LAC when he was 13 or 14 years old, said he remembered ethnic tensions among the adults, but dismissed it saying, “Politics

[happen] everywhere.”87 Instead, his memories centered on the relationships he built there with Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and even African Americans. Billy Tappin, an

African American man, frequented the club as a teenager. His friend, African American

Malcolm Montgomery also attended with him. Tappin felt welcomed and even served as the club’s Sergeant at Arms for one year.88 Judging from the youth club’s success, it is likely that the rest of the young community also recognized LAYIA as a hospitable and safe place for interethnic, interracial interaction. The club’s openness also reflects a generational shift that allowed younger Latinos and African Americans to see the strength

85 A wave of Cuban migration came to West Michigan in the early 1960s. These refugees, however, did not integrate themselves into the larger Spanish-speaking community. Instead, with sponsorship from Christian Reformed churches, their families lived among whites in the suburbs and their children attended private schools. By the early 1970s, other Cubans began arriving and settling in the Grand Rapids area, though their population remained small. 86 “L.A.Y.I.A” Que Pasa, Volume 1, No 2, 6. May 1, 1972, MC, LAC, GRCA. 87 Rafael Hernández, interview with author, 2014. 88 William “Billy” Tappin, interview with author, Grand Rapids, June 2, 2014.

204 in their unity, even if adults in the community constantly negotiated with each other for funding.

LAYIA grew from 20 to over 60 members in less than three months.89 One of their first projects included establishing a space for their activities. By February of 1972, after hearing that the LAC budget did not include money for renovating the Council’s basement for a space for the youth, the group held multiple bake sales to paint, decorate, and furnish a teen drop-in center. Using that as their base, LAIYA took on a wide variety of youth-oriented activities including cooking classes, silk-screening instruction, hair care and grooming classes, recreational outings like sledding during Michigan’s cold winters, and “rap sessions” with Planned Parenthood.90 They also used LAYIA as a place to practice dances for the Mexican Independence Day festival, in which both Mexicans and

Puerto Ricans often participated. Through their activities and membership, youth in the community led a charge to maintain the unity many of them grew up seeing among their families and friends.

Que Pasa was one of the Council’s greatest achievements. The Council and the

Model Cities staff disagreed, however, when trying to decide in what language the newspaper should be written.91 The volunteer editor of the newspaper, Irma Aguilar, concerned with the council’s limited budget, wanted an English publication so it could inform potential donors of the LAC’s activities and accomplishments. The Model Cities’ newly hired assistant, Puerto Rican Lea Tobar, insisted the LAC publish a Spanish-

89 Monthly Narrative Report, Latin American Council, November 1971, MC, LAC, GRCA. 90 Monthly Narrative Report, Latin American Council, May 1972, MC, LAC, GRCA. 91 Leonard Ortega to Al Wilson, LAC Director, “Publication of a monthly newsletter in Spanish by the Latin American Council” March 20, 1972. MC, LAC, GRCA.

205 language paper to better reach out to the residents who were often isolated because of a lack of English skills. The women eventually agreed on a bilingual paper.92 After a slow start, Que Pasa, the weekly periodical, provided the community with invaluable resources on a wide range of topics including Model Cities happenings, the Chicano

Movement, reproductive rights, cultural enrichment and education, tenants’ rights, local examples of discrimination, and local celebrations. Que Pasa’s cultural identity pieces were especially important as Latinos in Grand Rapids positioned themselves in the national context of the social movements like the Chicano movement and the Puerto

Rican Nationalist movement.93

The LAC and El Movimiento

Latinos in Grand Rapids did not hold mass demonstrations or public protests like other communities that were part of the Chicano or Puerto Rican Nationalist movement.

The conditions for that type of organizing were not present. The small Latino population

(about 5% of the city) paled in comparison to the larger numbers of white, conservative residents. Instead, the Latin American Council and its constituents engaged with the movement ideology in different ways than other communities in the Southwest or East

Coast. Among the small number of Puerto Ricans in the city, when interviewed very few mentioned Puerto Rican nationalism as a part of their experience in Grand Rapids. In contrast, Mexican Americans often referred to concepts of Chicanismo, Chicano cultural

92 Irma Garcia, interview with author, June 02, 2014. 93 Que Pasa, vol. 1, no. 2, May 1972; Que Pasa, vol. 2, no. 3, September 1972, Special Issue; Que Pasa vol. 2, no. 2 November 1972.

206 nationalism, but they expanded some of these ideas. For example, in Michigan when

Chicanos talked about “La Raza,” a phrase used in the Southwest to identify the Mexican and Mexican American “race,” they often used it as an all-encompassing term that included other Spanish-speaking people. In a September issue of Que Pasa, a list of

“Raza Candidates” for the MNCC election included Puerto Ricans Orlando Carrión and

Pedro Gómez. Que Pasa also listed Gómez’s MexiRican daugher, Laura, as a Raza candidate. In Grand Rapids, “Raza” included Puerto Ricans and mixed Latinos.94 Also, when the Midwest Council of La Raza hosted the “Mi Raza Primero” conference in

Muskegon, Michigan, about forty-five miles away from Grand Rapids, the Council sent

“many of the staff of the Council.”95 In a LAC newsletter, one of the 50 staff members and community members that attended wrote a two-page account of the conference and made sure to include that “Spanish-speaking leaders (Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and other Spanish-speaking groups)” attended the conference.96 In the Midwest, el movimiento was panethnic.

The movement in Grand Rapids, like many other places in both the Midwest and

Southwest, included traditional gendered perspectives. The Latin American Council became a site for a struggle against machismo rhetoric. Women in the LAC were not

94 “Letter of Introduction to the Office of the Mid-West Council of La Raza.” August 5, 1970. CMCL – 1.001. Misc Memos & Correspondence. 95 Latin American Council Newsletter, February 23, 1972. GRCA, Model Cities Collection, Latin American Council Files; Gilberto Cardenas, editor La Causa: Civil Rights, Social Justice, and the Struggle for Equality in the Midwest (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2004); Midwest Council of La Raza, Leticia Wiggins, “Las Mujeres in the Heartland: A Revolt of Chicana and Latina Women in the Midwest Borderlands, 1972” (Master’s Thesis, Ohio State University, 2013); Leticia Wiggins Institutionalizing Activism, Deconstructing Borderlines: La Raza in the Midwest, 1970-1978 (Mater’s Thesis, Ohio State University, 2013). 96 Latin American Council Newsletter, February 23, 1972, MC, LAC, GRCA; Monthly Narrative, January 1972. GRCA, MC, LAC, GRCA.

207 outspoken feminists like Chicanas in Houston, TX or Long Beach, CA, for example.

Many of those women boisterously campaigned the equality between the sexes, access to reproductive rights including birth control and abortion, economic justice, and direct action against race and gender based oppression, as well as condemning the war in

Vietnam.97 In Grand Rapids, aggressive male leaders often overshadowed women’s voices. Women, however, found quiet ways to respond. Youth Coordinator, Rachel

Campos, brought Alice Garza, a Mexican American woman who worked at Planned

Parenthood, to talk at the LAC on several occasions about birth control and abortion. Her affiliation and the Council’s cooperation with Planned Parenthood upset one of Que

Pasa’s male contributors, Felix Ybarra. In a letter to the editor, Carolyn Heines, a

Planned Parenthood community educator, refers to a letter Ybarra wrote to the editor

“concerning sterilization and genocide” in regards to contraception, a fear many nationalist-minded men voiced in the 1970s.98 Heines acquiesced that “Latinos have historically been exploited by the white majority…and that sterilization should never be mandatory for women on welfare or anyone else,” but she went on to defend the right for women to have access to birth control in any format. “We think that sterilization as well as any other birth control method, should be made available to the Latin community on

97 See Maylei Blackwell’s Chicana Power! for more information on Chicana organizing in Texas and California. Though women in Grand Rapids wanted many of those same issues, I have yet to identify oral history participants or text sources to that point to organized campaigns on behalf of women’s issues. The oral history participants I interviewed did not recall any particular meetings, conferences, or spaces that women attended or utilized to discuss issues that pertained specifically to women in the 1960s or 1970s. For example, none of the oral history participants recalled the Adelante Mujer conference, which took place only forty miles away in Muskegon, Michigan in 1972. Further research will seek out more oral history participants who can elaborate on women’s organizing in Grand Rapids. 98 Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2004). Jennifer Nelson, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement, (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

208 the same basis as it is offered to the white or Black community.” Que Pasa often ran pieces that agreed with the dominant machismo Chicano rhetoric of the 1970s, but allowing Heines’ letter to run in the publication could have been an act of dissent on the part of the editor, who was a Mexican American woman.

Rachel Campos and five other students from around Michigan started Grand

Valley State College’s first Chicano student group, La Lucha, in September 1971. A small number of Latinos attended the new liberal arts institution, which had just opened in 1961. Through Campos’ connections with the LAC, La Lucha used the Council as their organizing base. They advertised their group in Que Pasa. They stated their purpose as: “para asistir a los Chicanos que ya estan en las universidades y para informar a otros

Chicanos acerca de la Raza/to help those Chicanos in universities and to inform

Chicanos about La Raza.”99 They also made a concerted effort to educate their campus.

Starting with their peers at GVSC, they organized typical campus programs, such as film festivals and concerts. Their programs, however, had a Chicano agenda. For example, La

Lucha’s choice in films for their festivals revealed how the group saw its mission connected to other nationwide and global movements. In January 1972, they selected I am Joaquin, a staple film of the Chicano Movement, but also added films on Guatemala,

Puerto Rico, and Vietnam.100 Not many students attended the films, but it served as their first foray into educating their peers.101

99 “La LUCHA” Que Pasa, volume 1, issue 2, May 1972. 100 University Press Release, January 1972. Grand Valley State University, University Libraries, Special Collections and University Archives. Other films included My Country Occupied, “a documentary of Guatemala’s guerilla movement;” The People are Rising, about the Young Lords Party; Historia de una

209

La Lucha tried a more alluring strategy for educating their peers in the concerts they hosted. With Paul Mitchell, one of their members, working at the school’s newspaper, The Lanthorn, La Lucha broadcasted their activities to the entire campus community. La Lucha quickly exposed college students in the agricultural town of

Allendale, Michigan to live concerts featuring popular bands such as Azteca and El

Chicano, major acts in the early 1970s. Azteca’s performance comprised just one part of an inaugural “Latino Day.”102 At this celebration, GVSC students enjoyed “a Chicago street theater” performance by El Teatro del Barrio, an address from Jane Gonzalez, the

Muskegon-based Chicana activist, and workshops on “The Chicano in American Society;

College Orientation; Latin-American Student Organizations, and Chicano Awareness.”103

La Lucha attempted to educate their campus about Latino experiences through a variety of approaches.

With Richard Campos at the helm, La Lucha also sought to help Latino youth get into college. Campos, who was also the younger brother to Rachel Campos, was the only

Grand Rapids’ native in the group and had intimate knowledge of the struggles Latino youth faced in the city. Other members, however, quickly learned of those challenges and

Lucha dedicated part of their mission to working in the community. La Lucha members then began working at the LAC through the Urban Corps. Felix Ybarra, Richard Campos,

Batalla, which focused on the Bay of Pigs invasion; and 70 Springtimes of Ho Chi Minh, a documentary on North Vietnam. 101 “La Lucha Is Active in GR” The Lanthorn, Volume 4, number 11, 4. April, 6 1972. Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives. 102 “La Lucha Is Active in GR” The Lanthorn, Volume 4, number 11, 4. April, 6 1972. Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives. 103 “Azteca Headlines Latino Day” The Lanthorn, volume 5, number 14, 4. May 10, 1973. Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives.

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Henry Vasquez, and Paul Mitchell worked as aides for the Councils’ various outreach programs and on Que Pasa’s writing staff. Using the contacts they made at the LAC and

GVSC’s financial resources, La Lucha organized a “Latin American

Admissions/Recruitment Day” in January 1972. One hundred and twenty five high school students from Holland, Muskegon, and Grand Rapids attended the event. Their efforts also eventually led to GVSC hiring Walter Acevedo, the first Chicano recruiter.

During the fall semester of 1972, due to Acevedo’s and La Lucha’s work, 34 Latino students enrolled at Grand Valley State College. This tripled the number of Latinos on campus that semester.104 La Lucha did not stop at recruiting students, however. They also wanted those new Latino students to see their experiences reflected in the curriculum. At their urging, the college allowed Walter Acevedo to teach “The Chicano Experience” a course in Latin American Studies through the College of Arts and Sciences. Plans for the interdisciplinary class included guest speakers, comparative analysis of social movements in the U.S., discussions on foreign relations between Mexico and the U.S., and lectures on the Brown Berets and the United Farm Workers union.105 Though 34 students is a modest number, La Lucha successfully carved out a space for them and those Latinos who arrived in the years that followed.

La Lucha also worked to understand why so few students matriculated into GVSC and other area colleges. Using the LAC funds, they interviewed 108 students “on their likes, dislikes, ambitions…” as they related to high school and college. The students

104 “‘La Lucha’ Works,” The Lanthorn, Volume 5, number 6, 3. January 4, 1973. Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives. 105 CAS Offers Chicano Course, The Lanthorn, Volume 5, number 9, 7. February 15, 1972.

211 reported that “counselors ‘made a big thing’ out of how the student’s grades were not very good, and how college would be a ‘long tough haul and it cost a lot of money.’”

Many of them left meetings with their counselors feeling “discouraged from college.”106

Moreover, 50% of those students interviewed had never spoken to their counselor and only 17% of those that did talked to them about career counseling. La Lucha also discovered that 67% of Latino students did not finish high school in Grand Rapids.107 The

LAC used the report to launch a full-scale attack on the lack of Latino teachers, faculty, and staff in Grand Rapids Public Schools.

Richard Campos had a seat at the table with the Personnel Department of the

Board of Education when they met to discuss the dropout rate. Other invited guests included Luis Murillo, bilingual coordinator for GRPS; Al Wilson, LAC director, Rachel

Campos, youth coordinator, Carmen Fitte, LAC employee, and Henry Vasquez, La Lucha member and LAC employee. The Latino representatives wanted a major overhaul of the

Grand Rapids’ public school system that included more Latino teachers and counselors, better curriculum, improved school-community relations, and the establishment of assessment measures focused directly on Latino student achievement.

Al Wilson called for bilingual and bicultural staff in the high school to help the dropout rate. Speaking Spanish alone would not suffice; the teachers they hoped to hire would need to understand Latino cultural issues. The district had previously employed

106 “‘La Lucha’ Works,” The Lanthorn, Volume 5, number 6, 3. January 4, 1973. Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives. 107 La Lucha “Latin American Student Attitudes in Grand Rapids High Schools (An Exploratory Study), 1971, Personal Collection of author.

212 four Latino teachers for elementary and adult education, but it did not retain them.108

Though they improved in hiring Latino teachers’ aides (from 17 to 24 in one year), the

Senior High level, when most students dropped out, had no Latino aides. To resolve this issue, the group proposed establishing “an acceptable and equitable” hiring process for

Latin American professionals and paraprofessionals, creating communication lines with local universities for “more effective Latin American teacher recruitment.” Lastly, they called for “hir[ing] or train[ing] competent bilingual bicultural” counselors. Where possible, they also recommended that community members serve in “short term instructional capacities.” The LAC also encouraged GRPS to continue working with the

LAC’s youth coordinator.109 As a result of these recommendations, Rachel Campos expanded her responsibilities as LAYIA’s advisor to include holding dropout and disciplinary interventions. Working with administrators, parents, and students, in one month, Campos stopped three students from dropping out, arranged for English language classes for three other students, and arranged for part-time employment for two other students.110 The LAC and GRPS hoped that a community-driven approach would help reduce the dropout rate.

As a way to keep students in school, the LAC called for culturally relevant materials.111 The Council reviewed the current textbooks and found that many had

108 “Meeting with Personnel Department of the Board of Education and the Latin American Council Representatives,” Latin American Council, May 22, 1972, MC, LAC, GRCA. 109 Meeting with Personnel Department of the Board of Education and the Latin American Council Representatives,” Latin American Council, May 22, 1972, MC, LAC, GRCA. 110 Monthly Narrative Report, Latin American Council, February 1972, MC, LAC, GRCA. 111 Demands for representation in textbooks resonated with Latino communities across the country. The student walkouts in East Los Angeles are the most well-known action taken to address Mexican

213 outdated and incorrect information on Latinos, if they had any at all. Even the district’s

Social Studies coordinator thought their current materials were “unsound and racist.”

Until new materials could be identified and purchased, the coordinator stressed the need for cultural literacy and improvement of teacher skills.112 In 1972, the district responded to similar calls from African Americans and purchased elementary texts that focused on diverse ethnic groups and included secondary level materials with updated information on African Americans. The books, however, did not have updated material for Latin

Americans.113

Since the school system did not provide culturally stimulating material, the LAC filled this gap. Using Model Cities’ funds, the LAC set up a cultural library in March of

1972 and hired Carmen Fitte, a Puerto Rican woman with a college degree, to operate it.

With the help of the Kent County Library technical assistants, they set up procedures for book borrowing and purchased a wide array of materials.114 The library provided access to literature that the Grand Rapids Public Schools did not provide its students. Central

American’s erasure in textbooks. Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (New York: Harper Collins, 1988) 336. Ian Haney-López, Racism on trial: the Chicano Fight for Justice. (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003); Mario T García and Sal Castro Blowout!: Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

Though not included in this dissertation, the LAC worked diligently to urge GRPS to implement a bilingual education program throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. Though I did not research this topic in depth, it is likely that women activists would have been at the forefront of this issue. Other research (see Sonia Song- Ha Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement and Lilia Fernandez, Brown in the Windy City, among others) have documented women’s roles in fights for quality education and bilingual for their children. Future research will examine the struggle for bilingual education in Grand Rapids.

112 Meeting with Personnel Department of the Board of Education and the Latin American Council Representatives,” Latin American Council, May 22, 1972, May 22, 1972, MC, LAC, GRCA. 113 Meeting with Personnel Department of the Board of Education and the Latin American Council Representatives,” Latin American Council, May 22, 1972, MC, LAC, GRCA. 114 Monthly Narrative Report, Latin American Council, December 1971, MC, LAC, GRCA.

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High School, which most of the Latino population on the Southwest side attended, had only “35 books and one film strip” on Latino topics and most of the “desired material had to be specially ordered.”115

With Model Cities' funds, the Council quickly bought 175 English and 50 Spanish books to stock their shelves, concentrating on literature by Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto

Rican authors.116 The books ordered for the library reflected their efforts to target children and young adults, and it also reflected the Mexican dominant community. Titles included the periodical La Raza, and books like Chicanos Can Make it, Health in

Mexican-American Culture, and Mexican Americans in the United States. Two books on

Puerto Rico, one in English and Spanish, also sat on the shelves.117 The topics varied: poetry from Pablo Neruda, children’s pictures books, sexual education, and sociological studies on the plight of minorities in the United States.118 Even though Grand Rapids’

Midwestern location could feel isolated for Latinos, the library provided a way for them to stay connected to larger, national issues and to Latin America and the Caribbean.

La Lucha also helped in this effort when they supplied the movies for community film screenings. In Al Wilson’s monthly reports, he recounted to Model Cities director,

Ora Spady, that their films “dealt with the Chicano movement, Puerto Rican ‘Young

Lords’ activities, the campaign to eradicate illiteracy in Castro’s Cuba, and the guerilla

115 Lucy Maillette, “Latin American Council Creates Library to Promote More Latino Awareness,” GRP, March 25, 1972. 116 Lucy Maillette, “Latin American Council Creates Library to Promote More Latino Awareness,” GRP, March 25, 1972. Monthly Narrative Report, Latin American Council, January 1972, MC, LAC, GRCA. 117 Monthly Narrative Report, Latin American Council, April 1972, MC, LAC, GRCA. 118 Monthly Narrative Report, Latin American Council, June 1972, MC, LAC, GRCA.

215 movement in Guatemala.”119 Only a small number of people actually viewed the films, however. The Council reported 35-50 attendees at their viewing in 1972. The Council cited their “poor viewing facilities” for the modest crowd of moviegoers. Their largest crowds congregated at the showings outside of the Council at the Mexican-American- owned Alma Latina Bar, the Puerto Rican-owned Fernández Bar, and the Mexican

American-owned Rodríguez Record Shop.120 Through this type of outreach, the LAC established a visible presence in the community.

To further advance the community’s development, some Latinos tried to effect political change through electoral politics. On a few occasions, some even entered local races. For example, in 1971, Porfirio Murillo and Miguel Navarro ran for Charter

Revision Commission, a nine-member body tasked with periodically reviewing the city government’s structure. Murillo and Navarro both formerly worked as farm laborers, but by 1971 Murillo had secured a job at the American Seating Company and Navarro owned his own tortilla company in Grand Rapids.121 The two men ran against 96 other candidates and lost. Murillo’s 1,863 votes or 2% of the total and Navarro’s 5,170 or 5% of the total did not come close to former city manager Donald Oakes’ 9,129 votes nor former deputy city attorney Thomas Shearer’s almost 12,000 votes.122 Other winners

119 Monthly Narrative Report, Latin American Council, January 1972, MC, LAC, GRCA. 120 Monthly Narrative Report, Latin American Council, March 1972, MC, LAC, GRCA. 121 Juanita Murillo, Oral History interview with author, October 12, 2014. 122 Voter Registration Total, February 7, 1970. City Clerk, Series 2-32, Election Documentation File, 1970- 1975. Acc. 13 Box 3; City of Grand Rapids, Kent County, Michigan, April 6 1970 Election, City Clerk, Series 2-32, Election Documentation File, 1970-1975.

216 included an ex-city commissioner, a police chief, engineer, and a teacher.123 Martin

Morales, the rabblerousing community activist, failed twice in his pursuit for public office, once during a School Board run in 1973 and then a mayoral campaign in 1975.

Though he earned five percent of the votes in the school board race, successful candidates garnered an average of nineteen percent of the vote.124 In his mayoral attempt, the third ward, the area where LAC operated, gave him over half of his total 383 votes.

Though Murillo, Navarro, and Morales lost, their campaigns reflect an effort to empower the community via the political system.

Midwest Latinos, however, had largely rejected the political route as a means to substantive change. While in Texas, La Raza Unida Party (LRUP) won considerable gains in Crystal City and San Antonio; small Midwestern cities simply did not have enough people to win an election against the larger, white majority.125 The Midwest

Council of La Raza, based in South Bend, Indiana, promoted LRUP as more of a political organization instead of an actual political party. In Grand Rapids, without a large number of Latinos or a political party to organize the population, Spanish-speaking politicians had little chance of winning an election.

123 James H. Svara, More Than Mayor or Manager: Campaigns to Change Form of Government in America’s Large Cities (Washington D.C, Georgetown University Press, 2010). 166-167. 124 School Elections, City of Grand Rapids, Kent County, Michigan, Monday, June 11, 1973. Cumulative Report: Wards 1-3. City Clerk, Series 2-32, Election Documentation File, 1970-1975. Acc. 13 Box 3; City of Grand Rapids, Kent County, Michigan, April 6 1970 Election, City Clerk, Series 2-32, Election Documentation File, 1970-1975, GRPD General Election, KISD General Election. 125 See the following works on La Raza Unida Party, Ignacio M. Garciá, United We Win: the Rise and Fall of La Raza Unida Party, (Tucson: MASRC, the University of Arizona, 1989; Armando Navarro, La Raza Unida Party: a Chicano Challenge to the U.S. Two-Party Dictatorship, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000).

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The LAC and grassroots organizing in general proved to be one of the most effective ways of improving lives for Latinos in Grand Rapids. After the first two years using Model Cities funding, the LAC quickly gained in popularity and status in the

Latino community. In the LAC’s 1972 survey, 64% of respondents recognized the Latin

American Council as the community’s primary service organization. They also recognized the LAC as the center for Latino leadership. When asked if the President of the United States came to Grand Rapids to talk about the needs of Latin Americans, 56% of interviewees felt the president should meet with the Council. The survey takers eschewed the oldest organization, the mutual aid society, and another popular organization, the Club Jalisco in favor of the better-funded and more visible Latin

American Council. True to their grassroots beginnings, almost half of the respondents learned about the LAC through family and friends. Notably, ten percent of respondents were African American and white. Despite resistance to sharing funds with African

Americans and infighting among Latinos, the LAC actively worked to improve the lives of both these groups.

Fighting for Funding

Latinos fought for their share of Model Cities funding as support for War on

Poverty waned across the country. As early as 1971, President Richard Nixon sought to change the funding process for the poverty programs. As opposed to the federal government directly funding local initiatives, he recommended a “special revenue

218 sharing” system.126 Under revenue sharing, according to urban planning scholars,

Bernard J. Frieden and Marshall Kaplan, “these… allocations [were] virtually free of federal strings and can be used for tax relief or to fund any of the normal local government activities.”127 Though most cities would technically receive more money, there would be no requirement that they use these monies to fund any War on Poverty programs, Model Cities or its initiatives like the Latin American Council.128 At first, the president’s proposed bill for this stalled in Congress when the parties could not agree on one version. According to political scientist, William S. Meyers, when the act finally passed in both chambers, it did not specify if funding would come from “federal aid to achieve broadly defined, overriding national objectives, nor [if it would come from] pure revenue sharing, designed to give all state and local governments complete discretion on how to use the money.”129 The passing of that legislation, though ambiguous in how it would achieve a change to financing, worried the administrators of War on Poverty programs. In fear of their budgets being cut in the near future, they began to scale back their programs.

These cutbacks led to tension among the Latin American Council and the Model

Cities program administrators and the city commissioners. When the LAC asked for a budget of $116,000 for the next operating year in January 1973, the Model Cities only

126 Liz Hyman, “Model Cities Faces Project Cuts” GRP, February 19, 1973. 127 Berjard J. Friedan, Marhsall Kaplan, The Politics of Neglect: Urban Aid from Model Cities to Revenue Sharing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974) 239. 128 Weber, Bret A. "Denver's Model Cities program." Order No. 3258573, The University of Utah, 2007, 342-345. 129 Will S. Myers, “A Legislative History of Revenue Sharing” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 419, General Revenue Sharing and Federalism, ay 1975, 11.

219 approved half the amount. The $56,000 they offered was $8,000 less than the previous year’s budget.130 Ora Spady, the Model Cities director saw this action as a “belt- tightening” mechanism. The City of Grand Rapids, which acted as the City

Demonstrating Agency responsible for distributing the funds, supported this decision.

The LAC, however, questioned the logic behind the budget cuts considering the larger population growth in the Latino community. Moreover, LAC officers believed their recent successes in offering services warranted expansion. The five full-time staff members simply could not adequately serve their over 400 clients.131 To the LAC, this was just another example of how local and federal administrators ignored Latino community needs.

In response to proposed budget cuts, the LAC launched an initiative to save it’s funding and hold the city of Grand Rapids accountable to its Latino constituents. LAC board members pleaded with the Model Cities’ director to increase their budget and lobbied the city commissioners to bypass the Model Cities and approve an increase in their budget. The Mayor, who had the greatest fiscal power, received letters from the

Grand Rapids Urban League, the Grand Rapids’ Tenant Union, and other service- oriented organizations asking him to grant the LAC its desired budget.132 Writing in solidarity, Chester Eaglemen of the Inter-Tribal Council, wrote “the local Indian community” was “familiar with a 'minor' minority attempting to upgrade the

130 “Latin-Americans Carry Budget Fight Into City Hall” GRP, January 3, 1973. 131 Liz Hyman, “Model Cities Faces Project Cuts” GRP, February 19, 1973. 132 Francisco Vega to Lyman Parks, December 28, 1972; Jo Willis to Lyman Parks, December 27, 1972; Executive Files, Mayor’s General File (Lyman Parks), K-Ma, 1970-1975, 28-2, 7, GRCA.

220 socioeconomic standard of our people.”133 Eaglemen’s use of “‘minor’ minority” likely refers to how African American needs overshadowed that of both Native Americans and

Latinos, who had smaller populations in Grand Rapids. Jane Gonzalez, civil rights activist and a city councilwoman in nearby Muskegon, went further and stated that by not giving LAC the funds they requested, the City was dismissing the work that the LAC had been doing, which was “already well known, not only to you as a City Council, but throughout the Mid-west.”134 Gonzalez was right. Shortly after the city received her letter, Ricardo Parra of the Midwest Council of La Raza wrote advocating on the LAC’s behalf as well.135 The Council’s work had gained a regional reputation, but the Model

Cities program and the City of Grand Rapids said they could not justify more funds in the face of cutbacks.

Nonetheless, Latinos and the LAC continued to plead their case. At a city commission meeting in February of 1973, Al Wilson reminded the commission that the

Council had received positive evaluation reports and the Model Cities administrator had rejected earlier attempts to request more funding during the previous fiscal year. Martin

Morales, however, accused the Model Cities of “never [wanting] to help the Latin

American people although many of the Latins live there… they [do not] want to see the

Latin Americans go forward.” Morales may or may not have actually believed that, but it was typical of his militant tactics to help Latinos gain funding (see chapter 4). By

133 To Mayor Lyman Parks from Chester J . Eagleman, Inter-Tribal Council, Executive Files, Mayor’s General File (Lyman Parks), K-Ma, 1970-1975, 28-2, 7, GRCA. 134 Jane Gonzalez to Lyman S. Parks, December 28, 1972, Executive Files, Mayor’s General File (Lyman Parks), K-Ma, 1970-1975, 28-2, 7, GRCA. 135 Ricardo Parra to Lyman S. Parks, December 29, 1972, Executive Files, Mayor’s General File (Lyman Parks), K-Ma, 1970-1975, 28-2, 7, GRCA.

221 positioning the issue of funding as one of “us (the LAC) versus them (Model Cities),”

Morales garnered more support among the Latino population and furthered his reputation as an ardent leader in the community. His audience included over thirty Latinos who attended the commission meeting, including five people who traveled from South Bend,

Indiana on behalf of the Midwest Council of La Raza. Mayor Lyman Parks encouraged

Latinos and the Model Cities administration to come to some sort of compromise and instructed them to “stop their ‘petty quarrels.” Community organizers Richard Campos and David Rodríguez noted that denying the LAC more funds in a time of need was not just unfair, but reflected the city’s usual treatment of Latinos. The City of Grand Rapids did not contribute financially to the well being of its Latino residents. The Latin

American Council received 100% of its budget from federal funds and the city still had not made progress in hiring an adequate number of bilingual or bicultural staff at its agencies.136

After much urging, Model Cities administrator, Ora Spady, finally agreed to give the LAC a $75,000 budget. Spady defended this small increase by arguing, “only about

20% of the Latin American community live in the model Neighborhood [so we] felt we shouldn’t be obliged to pay all the cost.”137 The Latino population had clearly dispersed beyond the Grandville Avenue area but the LAC also transcended the Model Cities program’s original goals of strengthening specific neighborhoods. Latinos from

136 Liz Hyman, “Model Cities Faces Project Cuts” GRP, February 19, 1973. 137 Latins’ Protest Over Budget gains them $19,000” GRP, February 7, 1973.

222 throughout and even beyond the city sought out the Council for services that the City of

Grand Rapids or Kent County did not offer.

In February of 1973, the LAC also approached Kent Community Action Program

(KCAP), a countywide agency that received federal funds, in an attempt to make up its budget shortfall. The KCAP commissioners, however, worried that funding the LAC for one year would lead to their dependence on the funds for their operating costs. Other commissioners expressed concerns over funding an organization that served “particular minority groups.” In reality, the LAC offered their services to anyone who walked through their doors. Martin Morales defended the Council and pointed out to KCAP,

“the Council came into existence because of discrimination against Latin America[ns],” and he noted KCAP’s failure to hire any Spanish-speaking staff members. 138 The Latin

American Council and the Inter-Tribal Council, which was also going through a similar financial crisis, did not receive money from KCAP. Instead, after lobbying the City further, the Latin American Council received an additional $25,000, bringing their operating budget to $100,000—not quite the $116,000 they originally asked for, but significantly higher than what the Model Cities administration had first approved.139

As Wilson promised when the Board of Directors appointed him Council director, he formally resigned in March of 1973 though he agreed to stay on until the LAC received a final budget. After years of asserting himself as a voice for the community,

Martin Morales was selected to replace Wilson. The Council experienced a high number

138 Maury De Jonge “Latin Americans Ask Kent for Cash,” GRP, May, 15, 1973 139 “Latin American Council Progress Report, 1973’” 7, MC, LAC, GRCA.

223 of staff departures during the transition, but as a report on LAC’s progress indicated,

Morales resolved those issues in “a spirit of cooperation and unity of purpose among the various elements of the Latin American Council.”140 Despite the struggles to secure operating costs, under Morales’ one-year tenure, the LAC functioned with a program planning director and coordinators for programs related to senior citizens, employment, education, youth, and community services, as well as several aides and assistants. They provided over 2,855 “units of service” in addressing clientele’s needs in driver’s training and licensing, employment, welfare assistance, clothing, and housing.141 They formalized a relationship between the Council’s educational programming with Grand Rapids middle schools and through La Lucha, continued to develop ties between its youth services and

Grand Valley State College. On all accounts, the Council succeeded in utilizing its allotted funds to meet the needs of a growing Latino community.

Conclusion

In Richard Nixon’s 1973 State of the Union address, he reiterated the need to move to a revenue sharing plan, putting the LAC’s budget at risk once again.142 The president finally signed legislation that achieved this aim in February of 1974.143 Despite continuous threats to funding, the Latin American Council continued to fight to provide

140 “Latin American Council Progress Report, 1973’” 7, MC, LAC, GRCA. 141 As a way to show the breadth of their impact, instead of counting clients, units of service denoted each time the LAC helped someone. For example, they would count three units of service for helping an individual with translation at a doctor’s appointment, taking them to the unemployment office, and giving them a clothing donation. 142 Wendell E. Pritchett, “Which Urban Crisis: Regionalism, Race, and Urban Policy, 1960-1974,” Journal of Urban History, vol. 34, no.2, January 2008, 281. 143 The president signed the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974.

224 for its constituents. This legislation, however, marked a shift in how the country thought about providing for its poor. Mayors across the country often supported the change in funding. Many of them felt the War on Poverty programs, with federal funds specified for their needs, challenged the local power structure. Despite the infighting that occurred within War on Poverty programs and the public battles with municipal governments, these programs provided many Latinos with solutions to the problems they faced.

Operating with Model Cities’ funds, the LAC served as a place to celebrate individual ethnic identities and a panethnic sense of peoplehood. With federal funds they published a newspaper that connected them to the larger ideas of el movimiento and used

War on Poverty money to pay for conference travel. LAC organizers screened revolutionary films and expressed their concerns over the plight of local Latinos. Even when federal cutbacks threatened their budget, they used grassroots tactics to lobby the city for more funding.

From 1968 to 1970, Latinos and the Model Cities negotiated over a limited amount of federal monies. African Americans’ larger presence in the Model Cities administration resulted in tensions between them and Latinos. Their distinct struggles necessitated separate funding streams, they argued. In 1973, the fight with Model Cities could have been rehashed as another instance of the Model Cities' African American leaders withholding funds from the city’s Latin Americans, but that did not happen.

Instead, from 1970 to 1973, Latinos and African Americans together engaged in a campaign against the City of Grand Rapids’ hiring policies. Activists realized that both communities suffered a similar plight—the over-policing of their populations and

225 excessive use of force by local law enforcement. Although tensions between the two groups may have lingered, they focused their energies on addressing their shared enemy, the municipal government.

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Chapter 6: Policing, City Jobs, and Interracial Organizing for Community Control: 1967-

1973

Introduction

“My God, what do we have to do to prove we are citizens?” Commissioner

Lyman Parks asked Grand Rapids’ Mayor Robert Boelens. The AME pastor and only

African-American City Commissioner expressed his frustration with the city’s minority hiring at a commission meeting in April 1971. Just as the Michigan Civil Rights

Commission had started to investigate the state’s hiring policies, the city’s manpower coordinator issued a report on minority hiring for police and firefighters in Grand Rapids.

This led to a confrontation between the community, Lyman Parks, and the mayor. Harold

Oliver, the manpower coordinator, suggested the city take up an intensive minority- recruiting plan that called for every six out of ten new police and firemen to be Black and

Latino (three each) until the city achieved “reasonably representative integration.” The mayor first argued that there was no room in the budget for more police officers or fire fighters. Juan Maldonado, a Puerto Rican teacher and activist in the community, spoke in support of the manpower report. Maldonado garnered applause from the 20 Latino audience members in the packed city commission meeting. Mayor Boelens replied that the report made only suggestions and that the commission and the mayor would take up the issue on their own at a later date. That provoked Commissioner Parks to tell the

227 mayor he was “a little shocked. I don’t believe that three Latin Americans out of 10 is asking too much. I don’t believe that asking three Blacks out of 10 is too much.” A shouting match then ensued.1

This conversation was about more than just the city hiring a few more Latino and

Black employees. Having the city accept an affirmative action plan struck at the heart of the concerns Maldonado and Parks had: changing the ethnic and racial make-up of the police department. An interracial coalition of residents, representing the 10% of African

Americans and 5% of Latinos in the city, had recently protested the police department’s unnecessary use of force against their communities. Forcing the Grand Rapids Police

Department to hire more Black and Latino police officers would alleviate the tension among police and inner-city residents, they argued.

That April commission meeting had very different dynamics than previous years.

Just a year earlier, African Americans and Latinos seemed to be at odds with one another over War on Poverty Funds. In their attempts to secure Model Cities funding, these groups amplified their differences to gain community control over the social services they needed, but had not yet found a way to control the over-policing that both communities experienced from the Grand Rapids Police Department (GRPD). In describing a similar predicament in New York City, historian Sonia Song-Ha Lee argues “Puerto Rican and

Black antipoverty leaders certainly competed for antipoverty funds, but they also experienced an internal transformation of political consciousness by participating in this federal program.” This happened in Grand Rapids as well, as leaders realized the “slow

1 Robert Holden, “Latins Demand Police Jobs” The Grand Rapids Press, April 7, 1971.

228 pace of change” in the War on Poverty Programs.2 Black and brown people then committed themselves to interracial organizing based on their status as residents and citizens of Grand Rapids.3

This multiracial front influenced Latino consciousness. I argue that for Latinos, the issues of over-policing and underrepresentation of minorities in the police department motivated them not only to continue calling attention to their plight as an underserved population, but also led them to identify as “minorities” alongside African Americans.

Though the term “minority” had been in use since the 1950s, this political moment prompted African Americans and Latinos to see their issues not as a zero-sum gain, like with federal funding, but as a shared struggle for respect and equality in Grand Rapids.4

This chapter builds on previous studies of urban centers in the early 1970s. Like

Sonia Song-Ha Lee’s work, this last part of this dissertation examines interracial cooperation and recognizes that racial and ethnic identity serve as a political tool for organizers.5 In this particular struggle, Blacks and Latinos used it as a unifying trope to demand equality. Other works on cities in California and Texas view Black and Latino organizing as part of separate movements.6 I examine how a small minority population in

2 Sonia Song-Ha Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2014) 13. 3 The majority of the Latino residents in Grand Rapids were citizens in this era. Mexican Americans constituted the long-standing ethnic Mexican community and Puerto Ricans maintained citizenship since the U.S. government imposed it on them in 1917. These community activists did not necessarily argue for better rights as citizens of the United States alone, however. Many of them argued for equal treatment based on their status as US citizens and residents of Grand Rapids. Most of the residents that this affected had lived in Grand Rapids for most of their lives and emphasized their claim to the city. 4 Lee, 12. 5 Lee, 5. 6 See Mark Bauman, Race and the War on Poverty: From Watts to East L.A. (Norma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008); Brian D. Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African

229 a second-tier, conservative city organized with one another for greater community control. Their small populations forced them to see their plight as a shared experience, while simultaneously keeping in mind both Blacks’ and Latinos’ distinct needs. As such, this chapter supports other works on interracial organizing in other Midwest areas like

Milwaukee or Northwest Indiana.7 While in larger cities like New York, Chicago, or Los

Angeles, Blacks and Latinos used their larger populations to engage in radical tactics and electoral politics to gain representation, Grand Rapids’ small minority population did not have enough people to carry out either of those strategies successfully.8 Instead, I focus on Grand Rapids’ grassroots activists’ use of multiple strategies ranging from issuing radical demands to more reformist letter writing campaigns and filing suit against the city to achieve the control they sought.

Key actors served as leaders in this interracial struggle—Al Wilson from the Latin

American Council; Martin Morales, director of the Catholic Diocese Human Relations

Commission; Alphonse Lewis Jr., director of the Model Neighborhood Citizens

Committee; and Melvin Tardy, Director of two Community Action Program complexes.

Ironically, just a year earlier, the four of them had publicly argued for separate Model

Americans, and the struggle for Civil Rights in Texas (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 2011). Mark Brilliant, The Color of America has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941-1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 7 See Felipe Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Marc Simon Rodríguez, Tejano Diaspora: Mexican Americansim and Ethnic Politics in Texas and Wisconsin (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 2011). 8 Various scholars have looked at Latino activism in regards to electoral politics. I offer these works as a brief overview of those attempts: Ernesto Chávez, "Mi raza primero!" (My people first!): Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966-1978 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Ignacio M. Garciá, United We Win: the Rise and Fall of La Raza Unida Party, (Tucson: MASRC, the University of Arizona, 1989); Sonia Song-Ha Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement; Armando Navarro, La Raza Unida Party: a Chicano Challenge to the U.S. Two-Party Dictatorship, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000).

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Cities Funds based on the distinct racial and ethnic populations their programs served. In those conversations, they stressed their differences as a political tool to ensure that their constituents received federal aid. In this battle for community control over policing and more city jobs, however, Morales, Lewis, and Tardy saw the benefits of identifying

Blacks and Latinos together as minorities in the city. Also important to note, Al Wilson, as a liberal white ally, contributed to this struggle through his writings on institutional discrimination and by securing monetary and legal resources. As a white man with extensive education and experience working with different Spanish-speaking ethnic groups, Wilson saw the ramifications of larger societal forces that oppressed Mexicans,

Puerto Ricans, and African Americans. Martin Morales’ endorsement of this fight also influenced Latinos to see themselves as not only one ethnic group, but helped them develop a minority consciousness needed to take on the city.

The principal actors in this chapter are men and the dominant rhetoric about changing policing also focuses on the recruitment of minority men. Yet women also played an integral role in the broader Civil Rights struggle for both Latino and Black communities.9 In the early 1970s, however, it is clear that gendered ideas about paid

9 For more information on women in social movements, see the following texts: Maylei Blackwell, Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011); Angie Chambran-Dernersesian,"I Throw Punches for My Race, but I Don't Want to Be a Man: Writing Us--Chica-Nos (Girl, Us)/Chicanas--into the Movement Script." In Cultural Studies Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1992); Laurie Boush Green, Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America's Second Wave (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Anneliese Orleck, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought their Own War on Poverty, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Lorena Oropeza, ¡Raza Si! Guerra No!: Chicano Protest and Patriotism During the Vietnam War Era, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Deborah White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994, (New York:

231 leadership in both the War on Poverty and who could be a police officer only included men. The records regarding community control come from correspondence between men, newspaper articles that quoted men, and committee reports in which men served as the chairs. Thus, although the history of policing affected both men and women, this story is told through male voices.

I begin with a brief overview of the issues with policing and tensions in Grand

Rapids. I then explore the rhetoric behind the demands for a community-controlled police force that elucidates a minority consciousness among Latinos and African Americans.

The varied reactions from the white majority then illustrate that Grand Rapidians utilized popular colorblind language to argue for maintaining the status quo. Activists used national calls for affirmative action to push the city into giving them more representation in the local government. Lastly, I detail a lawsuit against the City of Grand Rapids to show that Blacks and Latinos engaged in continuous grassroots organizing to reach their goals despite resistance.

A History of Tension and Failed Resolutions

Before the 1967 urban uprising, Grand Rapids Police and minority residents clashed regularly. By the late 1960s the Black population in the public schools on the southeast side increased and the number of whites in that area decreased due to white flight. Like in other school districts around the country, Black parents demanded integration. The city’s short-lived plan of busing students resulted in a number of racial

W.W. Norton, 1999).

232 disputes as Black and white students became classmates. As historian Todd Robinson notes, a 1964 racial dispute at Union High School stemmed from whites’ use of slurs directed at African Americans. The result ended in police clashes with African American students.10

Southeast side neighborhoods also plummeted further into poverty. Learning from the Watts rebellion in 1965, the Grand Rapids Police Department (GRPD) identified

“Wealthy St and Jefferson Ave SE and Franklin St and Jefferson Ave SE…Anywhere between Franklin and Wealthy on Jefferson” as potential spots for a “riot.” The GRPD concluded that because there was a high concentration of “boys 14-18” who had “no jobs, nothing to do, they [would be] out until 2 or 3 in the morning getting into trouble.”11

Instead of finding solutions to the lack of youth-centered activities, increasing poverty, or unemployment, the police employed respectability rhetoric and asked “ghetto fathers” to go out at night and find their children. This suggestion indicated the limited level of understanding the police department and the city had of the problems that faced Black, inner city residents. As predicted, an urban uprising occurred less than a year after the report and small disturbances occurred throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s.12

Though Latinos attended the same schools and some lived in the same neighborhoods as African Americans, their interactions with police often occurred in

Latino-dominated recreational places, especially on the Southwest side. The Grandville

10 Robinson, 138. 11 “Police Ask Dads Ease Riot Peril” The Grand Rapids Press, September 10, 1966. 12 See chapter 4 for more information on the urban disturbance in July of 1967 in Grand Rapids. See Todd Robinson, A City Within a City: The Black Freedom Struggle in Grand Rapids, Michigan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013) 138-139 and 158-160 on racial tensions at Union High School and Creston High School, respectively.

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Avenue area had become home to over 4,000 Spanish-speaking residents in the late

1960s.13 When Latinos had issues with the police, they often did not go to the department to place complaints likely out of fear but also because police officers did not speak

Spanish. Instead they took their issues to community leader Daniel Vargas and the

Human Relations Committee, a body with no enforcement power (see chapter 4). In

1958, a couple sought Vargas’ help after a fight outside the Franklin Bar. Police officers struck a Puerto Rican man who was trying to profess his innocence to them in Spanish.

They also struck his wife when she attempted to intervene. The police department quickly dismissed any allegations of abuse and instead pointed to language issues as the source of the confusion, believing this was an adequate explanation. Community leaders agreed that language was indeed an issue, but since the city did not attempt to address it, Latinos viewed it as the perpetuation of a “dual system of justice.” 14 The fact that African

Americans endured similar treatment, but without communication issues to blame, suggested the problem in police-community relations did not stem solely from language barriers.

Minority communities called for an increase in Black and Latino officers to mitigate the issues they faced. They felt that the excessive use of force in communities of color could be immediately remedied through hiring of officers who looked like them.

Though this concept assumes that white police officers, and not policing in general, were the problem, after a long history in the city Latinos and Blacks were hardly represented in

13 Mike Neimann, “Latin’s Voice Grows Louder Here” GRP, June 14, 1970. 14 Meeting Minutes, Human Relations Commissions, September 4, 1958. Human Relations Commission Files (HRCF), Grand Rapids City Archives (GRCA).

234 the police force. With only 13 African Americans and no Latinos on the 371-strong police force in 1970, minorities in Grand Rapids felt particularly vulnerable.15 White police officers could not begin to relate to the challenges racial and ethnic minorities faced in Grand Rapids, they thought. For Latinos, Spanish-speaking officers meant they could have officers who could literally understand their language. Moreover, asking for police of color also indicated that activists were looking for community control of this public service. Unlike white police officers, these minority officers would likely come from the same neighborhoods as the residents. Activists hoped they would have a vested interest in listening and responding to community needs.

Despite activists’ clear reasoning for why Grand Rapids needed more minority officers, the city resisted any actual changes to the police force. In 1967, at the urging of community members, the Human Relations Commission (HRC) carried out a study on city hiring. It informed the City Commission that it found “’passive’ racial discrimination in city employment’”—including in the police department. Mayor C.H. Sonnevelt challenged the commission’s findings, responding “it seems to me that what they (HRC officials) really are talking about is special employment privileges.” The city manager,

Joseph Nabers, supported the mayor’s position and called any changes “some of the gobbledygook that comes out of Fair Employment.”16 Nabers might have been referring to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that barred discrimination in hiring, but more importantly he revealed the city’s position through his dismissal of the report. Regardless

15 “Ethnic Survey” May 8, 1969, HRCF, GRCA. 16 Floyd Allbaugh “Mayor Defends City Job Policy” The Grand Rapids Press March 15, 1967.

235 of the city’s official position on the hiring situation, continued tension in Grand Rapids, especially the urban uprising that occurred just months after this meeting, forced the city to recognize it did in fact have an issue with policing.

The city and specifically the police department tried a numbers of other measures to fix community relations. In 1967, they began holding Sensitivity Training Programs for the officers already on the force. Part of the program consisted of “five policemen, and five citizens” working together “to clarify misconceptions, identify mutual concerns and set objectives toward which the group can work.”17 The citizen-police pairings then went into Black and Latino neighborhoods to try to create conversations with area residents.18 They stopped at neighborhood establishments like a Black-owned barbershop and a Mexican American-owned grocery store to talk to their patrons.

Grand Rapids Press (GRP) articles on these excursions revealed the level of social separation and distrust between white officers and minority residents. GRP journalist Robert Alt, also present on these outings, wrote that the community member and policeman would be visiting “one another’s ‘world,’” seemingly indicating that white cops did not venture into the Grandville Avenue area outside of work purposes. An incident at a local restaurant the two attended confirmed this. Irene Alba, community leader (see chapter 4), and Sgt. Vincent Vicarie went to a Southwest side restaurant for their outing. When the officer ordered a “soda pop,” the counterman replied that they were all out and out of coffee as well. In essentially refusing to serve the white police

17 Robert Alt, “Friendly Smile Dissolves Hostility” The Grand Rapids Press, April 14, 1967. 18 Robert Alt, “Friendly Smile Dissolves Hostility” The Grand Rapids Press, April 14, 1967, Robert Alt, “You Have to Learn to Live together” The Grand Rapids Press, April 13, 1967.

236 officer, the restaurant employee displayed his skepticism that a white police officer would be in the area simply to have lunch. A pairing of one of the few Black police officers with a white volunteer also displayed how rare it was for Blacks and whites to be together in certain places. When the two entered a Southeast side bar, patrons met the white woman’s presence with confusion. This element of sensitivity training illustrates that whites, especially white police officers, and Black or Latinos experienced a degree of racial isolation.19 These trainings did not measure up, however, to the calls for community-controlled policing.

Other aspects of the training included making officers directly aware of minority voices and experiences. For example, they practiced an “ego dialogue…in which a police officer acted out the process of giving a citizen a ticket, while a Negro participant stood behind the officer saying what the Negro feels the officer is really thinking.” The police force thought these simulations would help make officer participants more “aware of their own attitudes and those of their counterparts.” Trainees also read letters

“representing problems and points of view raised by minority group organizations and police officials.” 20 Though these efforts tried to address the dissonance between officers and minorities, it attempted to change the department from within, limiting the possibility of radical transformation. Moreover, activists complained that the program only sought

19 Robert Alt, “Friendly Smile Dissolves Hostility” The Grand Rapids Press, April 14, 1967. 20 Joseph R. Grassie. “Sensitivity Training Strengthens Police-Community Relations,” Public Management, Volume 50, no. 12, 294-295. December 1968, Executive City Manager, General Subject File, 1970-1977, Police Clip- Police Traffic, Police Sensitivity Folder, GRCA.

237 the help of middle-class minorities who often had very different interactions with the police than the rest of the community.21

With continued tense interactions between the police and minorities, activists proposed recruitment programs for minority officers. In 1968, coalition leaders hoped successful completion of the “Train and Employ Minority Police Officer” (TEMPO) program would prepare young men to be “pre-cadets,” ready to enter the police force directly. Community leaders suggested TEMPO candidates also bypass the civil service examination. Without a funding source, however, TEMPO never materialized. When War on Poverty funds became available in Grand Rapids, TEMPO administrators sought

WOP funds but did not receive them. With no avenue for redress, activists continued to pressure the Grand Rapids Police Department.22

These local demands echoed national calls for minority recruitment. The

Michigan Civil Rights Commission, based in Detroit (where an urban rebellion had also occurred one year earlier), notified the Grand Rapids Police Department of a report on how to improve community relations based on a survey that included six major cities including Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, Newark, and New York.23 The report indicated that more minority recruiting could ameliorate tension among police and

21 These class tensions in organizing were common in the late 1960s and 1970s as communities of color determined the best course of action. See Rhonda Y. Willians, “‘To Challenge the Status Quo by Any Means’: Community Action and Representational Politics in 1960s Baltimore’” in The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980 Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, eds. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). 22 Wilburn S. Warren, “Pre-Police Cadet Program: Project Tempo,” July 29, 1969, Executive City Manager, General Subject File, 1970-1977, Police Clip- Police Traffic, Police Recruiting, GRCA. 23 Thomas E. Johnson, “Minority Recruitment in Six Major Cities” May 9, 1968. Executive City Manager, General Subject File, 1970-1977, Police Clip- Police Traffic, Police Recruiting, GRCA.

238 residents. Their suggestions included targeting advertisements. For example, ads should display “white, Negro, and Latin American” officers and they should be in English and

Spanish. They should also work with community activists to create and distribute information on the positions. They also highly recommended a more flexible and engaged civil service test-taking culture. The department could sponsor prep classes in the neighborhoods where they sought to recruit, allow for Spanish-language instruction in such prep classes, and allow for multiple retakes. The Grand Rapids Police department, however, did not heed these suggestions.24

Making Demands, 1970-1972

In May of 1970, after the school district forced the busing of Black students to

Creston High School, another physical confrontation occurred between Black and white students. The Creston Ku Klux Klan circulated a letter to African-American students with the intention of intimidating them.25 This led to a fight in the school and a walkout on the part of African-American students. Once outside the building, the police considered the students to be a disorderly group and began arresting them. Black parents charged police with excessive use of force against their children. The incident at Creston led to increased racial tension in the city. Borrowing the phrase from then President Richard Nixon and likely other mayors and police chiefs from across the country, the newly elected Mayor

24 Thomas E. Johnson, “Minority Recruitment in Six Major Cities” May 9, 1968. Executive City Manager, General Subject File, 1970-1977, Police Clip- Police Traffic, Police Recruiting, GRCA. 25 Robinson, 160-161. Robinson points out that there was not likely an actual group of Ku Klux Klan members convened at Creston High School, but the intention to intimidate was still there.

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Robert Boelens promised to reinstate “law and order and peace in the city” at a city commission meeting.26

This mayor’s framing of the issue as a security matter proved divisive for the

African-American community. African American Reverend W.L. Patterson, whose church was affected by this incident, and a manager of a local restaurant, Wesley Young, backed the mayor at the meeting. Boelens went on to accuse different Black leaders in the community of “taking part and helping to foment the disturbance.” In response, activists from the Black and Latino communities penned a joint letter. The heads of the local

Community Action Program, Model Cities, Model Cities Committee, Ambassadors Club, local NAACP chapter, Franklin-Hall complexes, YWCA, Black Unity Council, and Latin

American Council signed a statement condemning the mayor and the commission’s statements about the latest disturbances. The coalition agreed that the mayor’s comments exacerbated an “already volatile situation.”27 The Grand Rapids Press published an account of the city commission and the community’s response, marking a tumultuous and public discussion between the police, the city commission, and the greater Grand Rapids population. The variety among the long list of signatory organizations reveals that if some African Americans agreed with the mayor, the majority did not and that Latinos saw this as a problem for their community as well.

After failed attempts from within the police department to change its hiring practices and the mayor’s dismissal of Black and brown concerns, the coalition focused

26 “‘Law, Order’ Demand Scored” The Grand Rapids Press, May 13, 1970. 27 “‘Law, Order’ Demand Scored” The Grand Rapids Press, May 13, 1970.

240 their energy on reforming the department’s policies. They modeled their efforts on changes that the Human Relations Commission suggested three years earlier. The HRC’s

“list of recommendations included proposals to have minority group members on all appointive committees, commissions, and boards; to send notices of city job openings directly to groups having greatest contact with minority groups; hire a special recruitment officer to deal with these special personnel needs; and to include at least one Negro on the reorganized Civil Service Board.” The 1970 grassroots coalition presented three of those demands listed and two others to the city of Grand Rapids. The Black community specifically asked for a withdrawal of all tactical units from their neighborhoods. Both

Latinos and Blacks wanted to change the hiring requirements for police officers, the hiring of a special assistant to the superintendent to help with minority hiring, and the establishment of a community advisory board to the police. The first demand referred to the presence of police officers on the southeast side, in which the majority of Black population resided and the police and community interactions occurred. Though some activists labeled all of these demands as written on behalf of the “Black community,”

Latinos had a stake in the last three. A militant branch of Black organizers demanded

“immediate action.”

Other groups recognized the hardships that direct action could place on local

African Americans and Latinos. Together, they only made up a mere 15% of the city’s population. Some may have feared retaliation for their militancy from employers who

241 were often friends with city administrators.28 Instead of pursuing radical tactics, activists took a more conservative route and urged the mayor to support these issues and to use his position to action. Model Cities chairman Alphonse Lewis Jr. told the mayor and the commissioners that he believed the police had not “properly investigated the charges of police brutality that have been made.”29 Melvin Tardy, director of the War on Poverty funded Franklin-Hall Complex, also wrote to support this cause. Both Al Wilson, Latin

American Council director, and Martin Morales, during his post as director of the

Catholic Diocese Human Relations Commission, wrote the mayor asking him to reconsider changing the hiring requirements for police officers specifically.30

The GRPD wrote their eligibility guidelines in a colorblind fashion. In the early

1970s, to be a police officer (or fire fighter), one had to be an American citizen, be 5’8” or taller, weigh at least 160 pounds, hold a standard high school diploma, have a valid license, and pass a written civil service exam. One also needed a clear criminal record, a limited traffic record and had to be able to pass a physical exam. Though these requirements did not mention race or gender, activists felt these standards favored white men specifically.31

28 Richard Campos , interview with author, 2014. Campos revealed that he refrained from marrying and having children due to his organizing for the Latino community. He worried that he could lose his job and would not be able to support a family. 29 Alphonse Lewis Jr to Honorable Mayor and City Commissioners, May, 8, 1970. Executive Files, Mayor’s General File (Robert Boelens), App-Con, 1970-1971, 28-2, 1, GRCA. 30 Martin Morales to Robert Boelens, June 18, 1970. GRCA, Executive Files, Mayor’s General File (Robert Boelens), App-Con, 1970-1971, 28-2, 1, GRCA. 31 Black Police Officer Survey, August 18, 1970,Executive City Manager, General Subject File, 1970-1977, Police Clip- Police Traffic, Police Recruiting, GRCA.

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Minority leaders voiced their concerns about the hidden bias in the list of requirements. They focused their organizing efforts on challenging the requirements that would allow minority men to enter into the police force. This may have reflected the organizers’ own gendered perspectives on who could be a police officer. Perhaps this reflected the conservative political climate of Grand Rapids as well; organizers may have consciously chosen to fight for male officers to appeal to the social and gender norms in the city at the time. For Latino activists, they felt the height requirement sent a clear message about what type of body could protect the community: a tall male with a larger frame. They had successfully lobbied the police department in 1968 to bring the height limit down from 5’10’ to 5’8,” but they argued that 5’8” still disqualified many willing and able men in the community.32 Though many Latinos in Grand Rapids were Mexican

Americans and Puerto Ricans, the qualification of being an American citizen could have posed problems for Mexican immigrants who sought these jobs.

The high school diploma complicated matters for both Latinos and Blacks. Two- thirds of Latinos did not graduate from high school.33 In 1960, Grand Rapids only graduated 49 Black students.34 The police department did not accept candidates who passed the General Education Development (GED) test either. Passing the civil service examination proved difficult for those who managed to graduate from GRPS. Lastly,

Latinos and African Americans argued that they had higher rates of criminal records or traffic violations than their white counterparts since law enforcement over-policed their

32 Irma and Simon Aguilar, interview with author, June 02, 2014. 33 La Lucha “Latin American Student Attitudes in Grand Rapids High Schools (An Exploratory Study), 1971, personal collection of author. 34 Robinson, 95.

243 neighborhoods. Combined, these factors resulted in the low the number of minority police officers and it emphasized the discrimination that Latinos and African Americans faced.

After multiple attempts to bring these issues to the city commissioners, it seemed that the new mayor wanted to respond. The city commission held various meetings with residents and sent out surveys to ascertain the best course of action. The questionnaires revealed that the commission had in fact heard the resident demands and wanted more information. After admitting that the GRPD could not assign Black officers to appease neighborhood demands, “due to a shortage of Black officers,” the mayor asked area residents to complete a survey on policing.35 In response to complaints about the requirements for becoming a police officer, the survey asked participants to rank the qualifications in order of most important to least important. Questions like, “would you be more likely to actively participate in crime prevention if there was a regular walking patrolman with whom you could become familiar?” reveal that the city commission recognized the resident requests for community policing and building relationships with police officers.

Other questions show the city’s attempt to understand representation. They asked if “a Black officer would be more effective in recruiting Black men for police work “or if

“Black people would become police officer applicants if the city advertised for them, such as displaying recruitment posters with Black policemen on them.” Two years after

35 Mayor Boelens to Mr. Benjamin Armstrong and Mr. William Blickley, . Executive City Manager, General Subject File, 1970-1977, Police Clip- Police Traffic, Police Recruiting, GRCA.

244 the city received the report on police and minority recruitment from the Michigan Civil

Rights Commission, they started to take their recommendations more seriously. Though most of the survey included color-blind language, the last question asked directly “which would you prefer a policemen to be? Black, white, or Spanish-speaking?” In asking this question, the City affirmed the idea that representation was a legitimate concern for police and community relations. This inquiry also reveals that to the City of Grand

Rapids, “Spanish-speaking” appeared to be a racial group rather than an ethnic group in this context. Though the survey referred often to scenarios with Black officers, the mention of Spanish-speaking officers in the last question also illustrates that to the survey writers, Latinos were in fact a distinct though much smaller population compared to

African Americans.

Melvin Tardy wrote a report urging a change in requirements that reflected his understanding of the shared struggles of Blacks and Latinos, but acknowledged their different needs. As head of the Franklin-Hall Complex, he held first-hand experience with the youth of the community. He understood that many young men of color who frequented their centers had potential to become effective in community-controlled policing. Tardy wrote, “the fact is that the young drop-out who has tangled with the police himself, who speaks Spanish or the street-language, is potentially exactly the man who can relate to that part of the community now fighting with the police.” 36 Tardy hoped that through their experiences as minorities, Black and Latino police officers

36 Melvin Tardy, Police Program, Executive City Manager, General Subject File, 1970-1977, Police Clip- Police Traffic, Police Recruiting, GRCA.

245 would provide more empathy for the community than their white counterparts: “These men will be able to relate and communicate in the many domestic issues…they will find it easier to seek out runaway children, to caution the mischievous.” He went on to make an argument about the value of representation. He thought that Latino and Black officers could “teach by their very presence the practice of safety and respect for the law.”37 He added, though representation was a start, true transformation in policing could occur with education. He recommended that all officers take courses on the “history of crime and violence…and of punishment and rehabilitation…honest studies of the effect of harshness, harassment…police and prisons.” This would have resulted in a more peaceful, empathetic form of policing. The GRPD did not heed these radical suggestions but instead heeded the overwhelming calls from white residents to stop considering

“special treatment” for minorities in hiring requirements.

A letter to the editor of the Grand Rapids Press called any measures to change the requirements, “discrimination in reverse.” Using the rhetoric of color blindness, the author of the letter did not “believe that standards should be lowered to permit any one, of any race or color, to qualify for service in either branch of the city government, especially since the emphasis in such departments around the country is to raise standards.”38 This provoked a ferocious response from Al Wilson. As the director of the

Latin American Council, part of his vision for the city included helping to unify Blacks and Latinos. He used his position, his experience, and his education to sternly respond to

37 Melvin Tardy, Police Program, Executive City Manager, General Subject File, 1970-1977, Police Clip- Police Traffic, Police Recruiting, GRCA. 38 “City Jobs for Minorities”, February 23, 1972, The Grand Rapids Press.

246 the letter. Rejecting the idea that that the United States provided equal opportunity for all its citizens, Wilson suggested the writer needed “an introduction to institutional discrimination before attempting his next analysis of minority problems.” He went on to point out the current requirements’ futility:

How relevant to policing and firefighting is the acquisition of an extensive 'proper' English vocabulary, or the ability to identify and remember esoteric names for various geometric shapes? Or for that matter, how relevant to the adequate performance of a wide range of city jobs is the ability to perform well on a written (or verbal) examination of any sort? These skills, including the exam-taking skill itself, are behaviors acquired as young people pass through our school system—a system which still today harbors countless obstacles to motivation and successful learning on the part of the colored and economically underprivileged students. 39

His insights informed readers that the problems of policing connected to larger societal issues of class, race, and education. His letter, however, was never published.

Wilson also lambasted the police department for its ineffective efforts to address demands for community policing. He stated: “The GRPD can justify the effort and expense of sending a dozen of its Anglo officers to take intensive Spanish language instruction at [Grand Valley State College], but cannot justify the effort and expense of training Spanish-surnamed and Black officer candidates to increase their skills in recognizing geometric shapes and using the white majority dialect of English?"40

Wilson’s response echoed Melvin Tardy’s words on what skills officers actually needed to provide community policing. He went further to propose what seemed to be realistic

39 Al Wilson to The Grand Rapids Press, February 23, 1972, Editorial Page Editor, February 23, 1972. Model Cities, Latin American Council Files, GRCA. 40 Al Wilson letter to the Editor, February 23, 1972, Editorial Page Editor, February 23, 1972. Model Cities, Latin American Council Files, GRCA.

247 plans to change the police force. Indirectly, he also exposed the police department’s attempts to maintain a white police force through giving white officers more education rather than educating minorities to become officers.

While also trying to change the department’s requirements, the community also demanded a more direct way to affect hiring: a special assistant to the superintendent of police to recruit minorities. Black activists demanded, “an aware Black Administrative

Assistant to the Chief of Police endorsed by selected persons from the Black community.”41 This wording refers to the aforementioned tension among African

Americans. Activists did not want someone who allied himself or herself with the mayor.

They wanted an assistant who would represent more radical ideas on police and community relations. When Melvin Tardy envisioned the position, he included a Black assistant to the superintendent, a Black office manager, and a Latino assistant manager.42

Tardy’s inclusion of two positions for African Americans may have reflected the larger

Black population. His inclusion of a Latino assistant manager shows recognition of

Latinos’ need for representation, even if their population was half the size of African

Americans. Tardy witnessed the disputes between Latinos and the Model Cities administration over equity in War on Poverty positions and adjusted accordingly. Though both groups suffered from similar issues as minorities, he recognized the need for proportional representation.

41 “Position Paper” Executive City Manager, General Subject File, 1970-1977, Police Clip- Police Traffic, Police Recruiting, GRCA. 42 Melvin Tardy, Police Program, Executive City Manager, General Subject File, 1970-1977, Police Clip- Police Traffic, Police Recruiting, GRCA.

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He also echoed earlier calls for an advisory board for the police department. This group would not only advise but help “[plan] the orientation program, would take part in it…so that there is much greater involvement of the inner city community not only in police training, but the community itself will become totally familiar with the police department and its goals and programs.”43 He asked for various representatives from the

Black community and added that representatives should also come from “more than one segment of the Latin community.” The latter idea illustrated his nuanced understanding of Latino community dynamics as seen in chapter 4. Martin Morales also echoed Tardy’s idea of a civilian advisory board in a letter to the mayor. If the police department would not change their requirements or hire an assistant to the superintendent, a community advisory board, they thought, would still give Black and brown people a small degree of control over the policing they faced.

The police department, especially the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), and the white citizens of Grand Rapids, however, did not wish to relinquish control. The mayor received letters that condemned any changes to the power structure. The correspondence illustrates how whites used the language of freedom to justify their rejection of the gains made in the Civil Rights Movement. The FOP pressured the mayor to ignore any requests for a Civilian Advisory Board of the police, especially if that opened them up to civilian reviews of police hearings. According to the FOP, that would only lend “credence to the

43 Melvin Tardy, Police Program, Executive City Manager, General Subject File, 1970-1977, Police Clip- Police Traffic, Police Recruiting, GRCA.

249 claims to police brutality.”44 The group vocally opposed any lowering of the requirements to become a police officer based on the belief that it would hinder the efforts to make police work more professional. They went on to state that it was their duty to protect the “freedom of every citizen,” but the FOP did not view a lack of Black and Latino police officers as a contributing factor to over-policing of those communities and thus a restriction in their freedom. The FOP dismissed the challenges that minorities had faced vis-à-vis law enforcement for generations.

Citizens of Grand Rapids also used the idea of freedom to challenge minority demands. One resident wrote, “I do not feel free to drive, let alone walk to the streets on the core area after dark. But the people living there are free to go anywhere in the city without fear for their very life.” Unbeknownst to him, “the people in the core” did in fact fear that harm would come to them in their own neighborhoods and even white neighborhoods, not from civilians but from the police. The writer asked the mayor to

“give…police officers all the necessary backing to get the law and order back on our streets…and do it now,” to correct what he perceived as an injustice towards white residents like himself.45 According to this rhetoric, racial minorities already threatened white residents’ privileges and freedom. Rather than making any concessions to them, law enforcement needed to get them under control.

44 Robert Row, President FOP, Norman Visser, Recording Secretary, “A Position Paper to the City Commission- May 5, 1970” GRCA, Executive Files, Robert Boelens, 45 To Robert Boelens from Robert Denick, May 8 1970, Executive Files, Mayor’s General File (Robert Boelens), App-Con, 1970-1971, 28-2, 1, GRCA.

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The FOP also opposed the idea of a Black aide to the superintendent, because it ran contrary to “civil rights hiring laws” and it was unconstitutional.46 When it seemed as if the idea of an assistant gained traction in the mayor’s office, the FOP deemed it a

“symptomatic overreaction” and informed the mayor they would sue the city should it follow through.47 Moreover, they proposed that if a Black aide was hired, they should also consider hiring one for “other categories such as Japanese…Dutch, Puerto Rican, and Anglo-Saxon.”48 The FOP did not acknowledge the structural discrimination that

Latinos and African Americans faced, nor did it recognize that the chief of police and the majority of the officers were, in fact, whites or “Anglo-Saxons.” They were already very well represented on the police force and in City Hall.

References to the Polish or the Dutch reflect a revival of ethnic pride in the

United States in the 1970s. Historian Bruce Schulman argues that “the clamor of cultural nationalism echoed throughout the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s, spreading from the Black power movement to the other racial minorities, and eventually manifesting itself in an ethnic revival among white Americans.”49 Essentially white

Americans began to reject a homogenous WASP identity and accentuated their distant immigrant pasts.

46 Robert Row, “A Position Paper to the City Commission,” May 5, 1970, Executive Files, Mayor’s General File (Robert Boelens), App-Con, 1970-1971, 28-2, 1, GRCA. 47 Robert Row, “A Position Paper to the City Commission,” May 5, 1970, Executive Files, Mayor’s General File (Robert Boelens), App-Con, 1970-1971, 28-2, 1, GRCA. 48 Robert Row, “A Position Paper to the City Commission,” May 5, 1970, Executive Files, Mayor’s General File (Robert Boelens), App-Con, 1970-1971, 28-2, 1, GRCA. 49 Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (De Capo Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001), 80.

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The emphasis on European ethnic heritage, however, allowed them to disregard white people’s racial status and privilege. Mrs. Douglas Reimersma’s letter to the mayor reflected this kind of thinking: “If the Polish of the west side demanded these things, no one would pay any attention them.”50 She added, “We have to stop bending over backwards.” By saying that minorities’ requests were unmerited and arguing against special treatment for them, Mrs. Reimersma ignored the racial privilege Polish-

Americans enjoyed as white Americans. More letters from white citizens poured into the mayor’s office that lamented the idea that people could make a demand and simply receive “things they are too lazy to work for.”51 These letters assumed that whites earned their positions through merit while racial minorities wanted benefits and jobs handed to them without having to work for them.

Other complaints went much further than discussing what was fair or unfair.

Some of them revealed the deep-seeded racism that whites held against minorities. After

African-American activist John Toliver wrote an editorial advocating for greater minority representation in city jobs and inclusion of African-American history in the schools’ curriculum, he received a letter that told him “get yourself to Nigeria. Kenya is also a good place for you, then you can have your full [sic] of nigger history.” This particular writer, using the pseudonym Töten Shwartzen, claimed “we are getting sick and tired of

50 Mrs. Douglas Riemersma to Mayor Boelens, May 8, 1970, Robert Row, “A Position Paper to the City Commission,” May 5, 1970, GRCA, Executive Files, Mayor’s General File (Robert Boelens), App-Con, 1970-1971, 28-2, 1, GRCA. 51 Robert Denick to Robert Boelens, May 8 1970, Robert Row, “A Position Paper to the City Commission,” May 5, 1970, GRCA, Executive Files, Mayor’s General File (Robert Boelens), App-Con, 1970-1971, 28-2, 1, GRCA.

252 lazy god damned niggers, on welfare, trying to dictate policy to the white tax payers.”52

Since the 1950s suburban explosion, whites had utilized colorblind rhetoric of economic freedom and taxpayer rights to keep minorities out of the suburbs. In one sentence the author explicitly revealed the link between taxpayer rhetoric, meritocracy, and racism. He added a threat to the end of his letter: “Please let this letter make you hate whites just a little more than you do already. When we slaughter your asses we want to feel justified.

Your days are numbered on this earth.” Whether or not Mr. Shwartzen’s racist rhetoric represented a majority of whites in Grand Rapids, the larger community remained hostile toward minority community intervention in the nearly all-white police department.

The proposal to change the requirements and create an assistant to the superintendent of police completely disappeared from public discourse by the fall of

1971. City Commissioner Howard Reinstra tried to advocate for a “special assistant who recognized the needs of African Americans and Latins,” without explicitly mentioning the race of the proposed aid, but he met resistance from other commissioners and the police chief. The latter said, “the community would not accept the position, if it was created the way it was proposed.” The chief likely received similar letters to the ones the mayor received. Mayor Boelens’ actions indicated that he might have been interested in making substantive changes, however. He sent four police officers to take part in a statewide initiative on police and community relations. Upon the completion of the program, the Grand Rapids task force suggested the creation of a police-community

52 Töten Schwartzen to John Toliver, June 1970, Executive City Manager, General Subject File, 1970-1977, Police Clip- Police Traffic, Police Recruiting, GRCA. Töten translates from German to “death” in English.

253 relations' board that held the power to make policy decisions. Boelens fell short of executing the idea, however. He established a short-lived “Mayor’s Committee on Police

Brutality” that held no decision-making power. Without any real authority, community activists aimed their efforts at changing the structure of city hiring. In trying to reform hiring practices across the board, activists hoped it would provide a way to increase the number of minorities in higher paying jobs. Moreover, it would limit the FOP’s and the police department’s power to resist more minority hires.

Affirmative Action and City Jobs

Affirmative Action came to Grand Rapids’ municipal government only by way of force. For the federal government, the Nixon administration announced in 1969 that it would take up the Philadelphia Plan (named for the city in which it originated) that

“required contractors on government-funded building sites to hire minority workers in skilled trades to fit government-determined quotas; in 1970 the program was expanded to cover all federally funded hiring and contracting.”53 In February of 1970 the Department of Labor also announced that cities should devise their own plan to increase minority hiring with which “contractors would be required to make a ‘good faith’ effort to comply.”54 By November of that year, the city of Grand Rapids had not made any changes to its hiring or contracting policies. The minority coalition intended to propose a local Philadelphia Plan at the November 24th city commission meeting. After getting

53 Maurice Isserman, Michael Kazin, The Civil War of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) 258. 54 "U.S. Department of Labor-Brief History of DOL - Nixon and Ford Administrations, 1969-1977." U.S. Department of Labor, Accessed March 28, 2015. http://www.dol.gov/dol/aboutdol/history/dolchp07.htm

254 wind of the community’s plan, the deputy city manager Joseph Zainea wrote a memo to the city commissioners and the mayor asking them to consider an affirmative action policy. Zainea claimed the city had its own policy in the works already, but in order to prepare for the November 24th meeting, he consulted Paul I. Phillips, Urban League director and long-time activist, to ask if he had any informative affirmative action materials the city could reference.55 The community’s well-organized plan to confront city hall on affirmative action forced the mayor and city commissioners to take up the issue.

The minority coalition forged ahead with its intention and presented a detailed proposal to the city. Their plan stipulated that “any contractor doing business with the city must submit a plan of action to assure that at least 15% or a reasonably representative number of Blacks or other minorities” are employed in their firm and “if a contractor is found violating its affirmative action commitment, the city has the right to cancel the contract or withhold funds until compliance has been met.”56 The city commission with the help of the city attorney reviewed affirmative action polices nationwide and Detroit’s in particular. They also consulted the Michigan Civil Rights Commission that would enforce the policy for the Office of Equal Opportunity. In 1971, after much planning, the

City of Grand Rapids finally developed a plan. City hall proposed that any company contracted to do business for the city over $10,000 needed to comply with “federal

55 Joseph Zainea to Joseph Grassie, “Policy Statement on Affirmative Action in Employment Under City Contracts” November 12, 1970, HRC, GRCA. 56 “A Plan of Affirmative Action- A Guide to Hiring” Presented by the Grand Rapids Urban League in cooperation with the GR Coalition of Minority Groups, November, 1970, HRC, GRCA.

255 affirmative action standards.”57 The following June, the policy went into effect and it required contractors to “hire 8% of their workforce from minority groups.”58 This served as a victory for the minority coalition. Enforcing the policy, however, revealed the city’s stubborn resistance to affirmative action. After a year of implementation, the city continued to ignore affirmative action guidelines for “‘professional’” positions such as engineering, auditing, and legal services, citing the “difficulty to get minorities in these types of fields.” 59 At a city commission meeting, a representative from the Michigan

Civil Rights Commission explained, “the affirmative action program is supposed to correct inequities, and if you meant what you said, you can’t talk about exceptions.’”60

Though the city had accepted the guidelines for contracts, many minority residents questioned if the city truly wanted to fight inequality.

City Hall’s hiring process for its own employees did not signal that sentiment.

The city subjected contractors to hiring rules the city itself did not follow. The city employed a dismal number of minority employees. A 1967 survey revealed of all city employees, Blacks made up 8 percent of the workforce, on par with the 10 percent they made up in the city’s population. The majority of them occupied the lowest paying positions in refuse and park maintenance, however. Latinos made up less than half a percent of the city’s workforce, much less than the 5 percent that lived in Grand Rapids.61

A follow up survey in 1971, showed “only 1% of all Blacks employed by the city and

57 “No Exceptions to Minority Hiring Policy” The Grand Rapids Press, November 3, 1971. 58 “No Exceptions to Minority Hiring Policy” The Grand Rapids Press, November 3, 1971. 59 “No Exceptions to Minoirty Hiring Policy” The Grand Rapids Press, November 3, 1971. 60 “No Exceptions to Minoirty Hiring Policy” The Grand Rapids Press, November 3, 1971. 61 Ethnic Survey, 1969. HRC, GRCA.

256 half a percent of all Latin Americans were earning salaries of more than $7,000 a year.”62

Grand Rapids’ rates of minority employees closely mirrored the state of Michigan’s. As of January 1971, twelve percent of all state classified employees were non-white, but many of them were left out of high paying positions. For example, there were no nonwhites among 40 personnel officers, 10 personnel directors, or 21 training officers.63

The issue in Grand Rapids represented a broader issue of exclusion in both local and regional governments.

The community recognized that in order to change these statistics (and make a way for hiring more police officers) they would need the city to embrace affirmative action. The issue came to a head at the city commission meeting in April of 1971. These statistics on minority employees precipitated the confrontation between Commissioner

Lyman Parks and Mayor Boelens, referenced at the beginning of this chapter. As a commissioner, Parks fell in line with the mostly conservative board and city but on the issue of affirmative action he advocated for minorities, opposing most of the other city commissioners. When discussing affirmative action and city contractors he often pleaded that the city “needed to get [their] own house in order, first.”64 When Commissioner

Parks and Mayor Boelens argued at the city commission meeting, they did so in front of a full crowd of Latinos. A group of them had come to support Juan Maldonado who spoke to the commission on their behalf. Maldonado expressed his frustration that talks about

62 Mike Lloyd, “City Job Policy Found Not Fully Unbiased” The Grand Rapids Press, April 13, 1971. $7,000 would be roughly $40,000 in 2015. 63 Prepared by Mrs. Alice Kocel, Case 74-90, B30 F5, Employment Studies, State Employment Review 1971, Summary of Findings, Review of Michigan state government by civil rights commission and civil service commission, Summary of Findings, Civil Rights Commission, Compliance Division, May 3, 1971 64 Mike Lloyd, “City Job Policy Found Not Fully Unbiased” The Grand Rapids Press, April 13, 1971.

257 policing never amounted to changes. He pointed out that nearby cities like Holland,

Muskegon, Lansing, and Detroit had “Latin Americans on their force,” yet Grand Rapids had none. Martin Morales, also in attendance, bluntly asked, “If this isn’t a racist city, what is it?” Morales pleaded for the city to take action and not “do any more studies” of the issue. Boelens, however, requested that Latinos, come back in two weeks. Frustrated with repeated refrains to wait, Latinos and African Americans used a report from the manpower coordinator to launch their next attempt at changing the Grand Rapids Police

Department and the city.

Harold Oliver, the city’s manpower coordinator, also attended the meeting and reiterated a portion from his official Manpower Hiring Report. After recommending that

3 of every 10 new police officers hired should be Black and 3 should be Latino, Oliver called on the city “to be a shining example” of commitment to diverse hiring. He suggested that it was “only logical and equitable to assume that if the city is to call upon other organizations to achieve reasonable integration, then it, too, must follow suit by developing an affirmative action plan.”65 To achieve change, he suggested that the city take out ads in Black-owned newspapers, go to community organizations to recruit new officers, hold job fairs in Latino and Black neighborhoods, and lastly, he wanted the

“qualifying test” to be validated to “determine whether they are predictors of job success, whether [they asked] for knowledge unrelated to a specific job, and whether they [were] culturally unbiased.”66

65 Mike Lloyd, “City Job Policy Found Not Fully Unbiased” The Grand Rapids Press, April 13, 1971. 66 Mike Lloyd, “City Job Policy Found Not Fully Unbiased” The Grand Rapids Press, April 13, 1971.

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The Manpower Hiring Report and the argument between Boelens and Parks did not amount to any immediate changes, but it set up the framework for a legal assault on behalf of minorities against the city’s hiring practices. The ongoing controversy over affirmative action, special aids, attempts to change the police requirements, and requests for civilian advisory boards proved to be too much for Mayor Robert Boelens. After less than two years in the position, he resigned. His fellow commissioners appointed Lyman

Parks as acting mayor in 1971. He ran for mayor in 1973 and won, becoming the first and only African-American mayor in Grand Rapids’ history. With the Manpower Hiring

Report in hand and Lyman Parks installed as mayor, the Latin American Council prepared to file suit against the City of Grand Rapids.

Filing Suit for Representation

Al Wilson proved to be a formidable ally for Blacks and Latinos in their fight against the city. With all other avenues exhausted, Wilson looked for a test case to sue the city. This proved to be a successful strategy for African American parents who sued in order to integrate the Grand Rapids Public Schools just a few years earlier. With that model in place, Wilson waited for a case to emerge. In 1972, he found such a case in a failed fireman candidate, Pablo Martínez. Though activists hoped to get more police officers, the fire department had similar requirements. Dismantling the fire department qualifications would ultimately bring down the GRPD’s requirements as well. Thus this candidate’s experiences with the application process proved pivotal to the broader struggle for equal rights and representation.

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Martínez applied twice to be a fireman, but was denied—the first time, on the basis of his driving record and the second because of his test scores on the civil service examination. Martínez’s aspiration to become a firefighter came after a brief career in the military. He dropped out of high school, received his GED, and enlisted in the marines.

He never went to Vietnam, but his experiences at Camp Lejune shaped his thoughts on discrimination. His awakening, he said, happened in a drunk tank in Jacksonville, North

Carolina. After getting off duty on a Friday night, he and other Latino soldiers met in the downtown area to discuss their plans for the night’s activities. Two police officers, however, came by twice to tell them not to speak Spanish when they were in the area.

After the soldiers ignored their requests, the police officers arrested the four men for being drunk in public. Martínez argued that between the time he punched out at work and when the police arrested him, he would not have been able to even order a drink. His superior agreed and declined to take any disciplinary actions against him. When Martínez came back to Grand Rapids after his time in Marines, he had a heightened sense of the discrimination in the city. 67

Even with calls to hire veterans, Martínez could not find a job in Grand Rapids.

Like many Latinos in the city, he looked to the Latin American Council for help. The

LAC employed him on the Que Pasa staff as a part-time photographer while they helped him look for work. After meeting Pablo at the LAC, Al Wilson inquired about his application process with the fire department and if he knew of any African Americans who also failed to get into the department. After a couple months of looking for a man he

67 Pablo Martínez, Oral history interview with author, March 14th, 2014.

260 met while taking the Civil Service Exam, Martínez located James B. Ragsdale, a Vietnam veteran. With two test candidates secured, Wilson approached the Steelcase Corporation for funds for a lawyer. With 6 Black firefighters and no Latinos out of a 294-person fire department it seemed like a clear case of discrimination. Wilson had a great relationship with the multimillion-dollar company, as illustrated in the grants they awarded the LAC under his tenure. With the plaintiffs in place, and now a lawyer, Rhett Pinksy “sued on behalf of all other persons of their minority groups, charging the department’s hiring standards [were] not ‘job related’ and [tended] to screen out lower-income persons.” The suit named the defendants as the Civil Service Board, the chief examiner of the board

Andrew Vanderveen, and Fire Chief Robert Veit. A judge set a trial date for December 4,

1972.68 The trial did not take very long.

Judge Noel P. Fox had good reason to rule in Martínez’s favor. Grand Rapids’ policies were long overdue for a challenge. Various court cases elsewhere in the state demonstrate this. In an examination of the state hiring policies, in 1971 the Michigan

Civil Rights Commission concluded:

In the past there has been a tendency to regard the examination process and merit employment as synonymous. A tendency to attribute the apparent lack of interest and /or lack of success among minorities to the disadvantaged people involved. Recent court decisions, however, have held that an examination process that eliminates a disproportionate number of a protected group is discriminatory and hence unlawful unless each of the steps has been shown to be job required. The courts have also held that an examination must be validated for all groups i.e., it must

68 “City Halts Firemen Hiring” Que Pasa vol. 2, no. 2, November 1972, GRCA, Model Cities Collection, Latin American Council Files.

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accurately predict potential success on the job for Blacks and as well as whites.69

Numerous court cases began to dismantle the civil service examinations starting in

1968.70 In 1971, the state of Michigan changed their sheriff’s hiring policies on the same basis that Al Wilson and Melvin Tardy had proposed. U.S. district court Judge Fox could have drawn on any of those examples to rule in the favor of plaintiffs. And he did.

On January 23, 1973, Judge Fox ordered the city of Grand Rapids to stop discriminating against Blacks and Latinos in the fire department. They were told to disregard criminal records for those applicants jailed less than 90 days, establish a civil service board procedure so applicants denied jobs could appeal, undertake an affirmative action program to integrate the department, set up recruiting stations in minority communities, consult with agencies and groups which have direct contact with minority communities, and provide pretest tutoring to applicants in the event that examination procedures are to be used. Moreover, they were ordered to “scrap all tests which do not accurately predict a fireman’s job performance, and to hire a consultant to pick new tests which do” and “delete educational requirements unless they were an accurate predictor of job success and undertake an affirmative action program to integrate the

69“Employment Studies, State Employment Review 1971”, prepared by Mrs. Alice Kocel, in Summary of Findings Review of Michigan State Government, Civil Rights Commission and Civil service Commission, Summary of Findings, Civil Rights Commission, Compliance Division, May 3, 1971, Record Group 74-90, Box 30, Folder 5, Civil Rights Commission (CRM), Archives of Michigan (AM) 70 The report includes an appendix of court cases that contributed to Michigan’s decision to change the civil service examinations. See Griggs V. Duke Power Company, March 8 1970, USA V. John S Frazer September 1,1970, Julius Arrington Et All, vs. Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, Civil Action, December 22, 1969,, Record Group 74-90, Box 30, Folder 5, CRM, AM

262 department.”71 With this ruling, activists forced their city government to acknowledge that their policies discriminated against some of their residents.

The court victory did not mean automatic success for the plaintiffs, however.

Ragsdale never became a firefighter in Grand Rapids, and it is not clear what happened to him after the case. It took Martínez six years before he applied again out of fear of retaliation. The allies he did have within the fire department warned him to wait some time before he tried to apply again due to the hostile feelings in the department surrounding the court case. Many of the firefighters at the time did not even live in Grand

Rapids. Instead, they drove in from the rural areas on the city’s periphery. Though in

1971 the city had passed an ordinance that required city employees to live in the city, it included so many loopholes that it did not make a difference in many departments, including the fire department.72 After working six years at the John Ball Zoo in Grand

Rapids, Martínez applied again, the GRFD hired him, and he entered into a more tolerable environment than he imagined it would have been in 1972. Martínez later went on to become the first and only Latino fire chief in the city. In a continued showing of unity, the minority coalition used the same action plan to make Daniel Flores the first

Latino policeman in 1974 and to hire more Black officers.

71 “Stop Discriminating in Hiring, Testing Firemen, City Ordered” Grand Rapids Press, January 22, 1973. 72 “City Moves Closer to Hiring Only Residents” The Grand Rapids Press, November 3, 1971. Exceptions included those who were “diligently seeking housing in the city, cannot find suitable housing in the city, or who would suffer unusual hardship by living in Grand Rapids.”

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Conclusion

Though the process of change was not easy, life for Latinos and Blacks improved in the early 1970s. From their efforts and that of their allies, they won the over five-year battle against the city’s hiring practices. From reports, demands, proposing their own programs, and finally filing suit, they tried a multitude of strategies to meet their needs.

Their tactics fit the political and social climate in West Michigan. Though key leaders could not employ the radical tactics and militant politics popular in larger metropolises, they found ways to make their voices heard.

In focusing on gaining representation, African Americans and Latinos desired remedies to the previous years of discrimination they faced. They couched their demands in the rhetoric of community control. Attempts to inform white officers of minority issues would not suffice. The racial divide and tension among minorities and whites was too wide for white officers to learn how to engage with minority communities. Moreover, hiring Black and Latino police officers, firefighters, and other city employees was the only way for the local government to acknowledge it had failed Black and brown people for generations.

This public battle cemented Latinos as a racial and ethnic minority in the city.

Though some Black leaders assigned Latinos a secondary position in the proposals for change, others saw Latinos as an equal minority. This interracial organizing did not erase

Latino needs for Spanish-speaking representation or African American requests for better treatment in their racially segregated neighborhoods. These two groups recognized that in working together they did not have anything to lose. In the early 1970s, the legacies of

264 the Civil Rights Movements helped to reaffirm Latino ethnic identity and a minority consciousness.

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Epilogue: Latinos in Grand Rapids, 1974-2014: Fighting With “Pride and Hope”

Figure 14: Jim Mercanelli and Rex D. Larson in front of Untitled Mural, 1986 Source: “A Story of Pride and Hope” The Grand Rapids Press, July 27, 1986.

Figure 15: Untitled Mural, 2015 Source: Google Earth

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On the side of a building at 912 Grandville Avenue sits a piece of Grand Rapids’

Latino history. The Latin American Council commissioned the vibrant mural in the

1970s. The Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Cuban flags were once prominently displayed to passersby. After the 1970s, much like the mural, Grandville Avenue faded. After the city moved to a revenue sharing federal funding model, the area and its residents struggled to maintain cultural programming and other services that the Latin American Council provided. Despite the setback in securing stable funding, Latino residents continued and still continue to fight for better lives in West Michigan. As Jim Mercanelli stated in his

1986 exposé on the community, theirs is a “story of pride and hope.”73

This dissertation began by tracing Mexicans’ and Puerto Ricans’ early history in the area. They arrived through step, chain, and circular migration, but most importantly theirs was a labor migration. Railroads, agriculture, and eventually industry pulled migrants as economic and political instability pushed them away from their places of origin. By analyzing their shared recreational, leisure, and religious practices once in

Grand Rapids, this work showed that these spaces allowed them to cultivate kinship networks across ethnic lines. I used these interactions as evidence of the intimate sociality of Latino panethnic identifications. Utilizing a small, urban, Midwestern city as a site of study allowed me this level on analysis. Looking at the Midwest and at Mexicans and

Puerto Ricans departed from the traditional sites of historical literature on Latinos.

73 Jim Meranelli, “A Story of Pride and Hope” The Grand Rapids Press, July 27, 1986.

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Mexican and Puerto Rican relationships in the 1950s in Grand Rapids illustrate that they cultivated panethnic affinities much earlier that scholars have argued in the past.

Relationships between the two populations often formed out of the simple desire to talk to someone at work, to dance with someone at a local baile, or to add a player to a baseball roster. Their shared political activism in later years, which emerged out of common experiences with discrimination and resulted in participation in the Model Cities program, clearly revealed the maintenance of that panethnic identity required both public and private negotiations. With an influx of federal funds, their grassroots organization, the Latin American Council, became a site of contestation. As they decided if and how the Council would proceed with federal funds, these activists grappled with differences in class, ethnicity, and gender. They also contemplated the role “insiders” and “outsiders” played in determining who would be recognized as a leader. Evidence of their cooperation despite these varying tensions, proved that those two concepts are not mutually exclusive elements of Latinidad. Moreover, addressing the inherent tensions among Latinos in Grand Rapids allowed this dissertation to recognize this groups’ heterogeneity as well as the issues that united them.

The War on Poverty era also ushered in changes that motivated Latinos to renegotiate their identity. Through the Latin American Council, they provided social services to the entire community and chose cultural programming that represented both

Mexican and Puerto Rican heritage, thus reaffirming their panethnicity. Their organizing efforts also led them to embrace a minority identity along with African Americans in

Grand Rapids. These chapters have shown that identities and alliance are not permanent

268 and unchanging but rather they are dynamic interactions and engagements that require renegotiation over time as the social and political context changes. As the

War on Poverty funds waned, the relationships in Grand Rapids among Latinos continued to change.

Revenue Sharing and the Decline of the Latin American Council

In moving to revenue sharing, taking care of the poor became a private issue instead of a public concern. The shift from direct funding from the federal government for poverty programs ushered in a new era of battles between Latinos and the City of

Grand Rapids. It also caused internal conflict at the LAC. Despite the LAC’s many successes, as soon as the responsibility for social programming moved from a federal one to a local one, the LAC’s future was threatened. In 1974, when discussing how the city would use its federal revenue sharing funds, 2nd ward Commissioner Abe Draisin remarked “general revenue sharing…was never intended to take care of human needs programs.”74 His attitude reflected the city’s thoughts on social service agencies. By

1974, there were at least seventeen organizations in need of funds, most of whom operated on War on Poverty allocations in year’s prior, including the Kent County Action

Program (KCAP) and the Model Neighborhood Citizens Committee (MNCC). Unlike the

Latin American Council or the InterTribal Council, which had been in existence before they received federal funding, the WOP created KCAP and the MNCC. Revenue sharing, however, did not make these organizations a priority. For its part, the City of Grand

74 Brian Malone, “Latin, Black Programs Still Kept In City Limbo” The GRP February 20, 1974.

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Rapids weighed a number of issues that required their funds, including settling a lawsuit with the city’s unionized employees. With that in mind, commissioners encouraged social service organizations to seek out funds from private, non-profit organizations like the

United Way.

Martin Morales, the LAC’s director, resorted to his controversial political tactics in an attempt to secure funds for the LAC. When the seventeen social service agencies agreed to only ask for financial support as a coalition and not as individual organizations,

Morales attempted to ask for money for the LAC anyways. Once this request became public knowledge, he recanted and apologized. Though this action could be interpreted as underhanded or selfish, Morales worried about the LAC’s future. Despite the public outcry at Morales’ request, seven other organizations similarly sought monies on their own and received them, leaving the LAC with limited resources. He told reporters he felt

“double-crossed.” 75 Even so, the city’s fiscal grants to these other organizations seemed to confirm Morales’s assumptions about the city. In 1973, he stated, “we don’t feel [the city] want[s] to see the Latin Americans go forward.”76 A year later, facing continuous budget cuts, the city suggested Morales pare down his staff and, thus, the services the

LAC offered. Instead, he told the city’s commissioners “I will not take away from the

Latins what is theirs. If the Latin American Council has grown, that is what it was intended to do.” 77 The $30,944 the city offered was less than half the $70,000 the LAC had requested. Instead of cutting back services, Morales made a decision to forego

75 “City Funds Seven Social Agencies, Latin-American Director Protests” October GRP, October 23, 1974. 76 “Latin-Americans Carry Budget Fight Into City Hall” GRP, January 3, 1973. 77 Steve Veiregg, “City Will Pay Latins’ Debt, but Angers Morales” GRP, January 29, 1975.

270 payments on the LAC’s federal payroll taxes in 1973 and 1974. He went on to brazenly argue that the city should pay their tax debt of $12,000. Not surprisingly, the city rejected that idea. Instead, city commissioners required the LAC to set up a payment plan to pay off the debt, to submit to audits, and to employ city-appointed accountants in order to continue receiving operating funds.

Morales’ failure to pay the payroll taxes spurred the decline of the Latin

American Council and the animosity between the organization and city administrators.

To city commissioners, this demonstrated Latino organizations’ inability to handle finances and further evidence of Morales’ ineptitude as a leader. To some Latinos, his actions appeared selfish and proud. Moreover, he essentially brought on one of the community’s biggest fears: city cooptation of the LAC. Just four years prior, Latino leaders had hesitated becoming a part of the Model Cities program because they felt it would amount to city oversight and a loss of control over their community-centered efforts. Eventually it did. These financial issues, among others, haunted the LAC well into the late 1970s and diverted efforts away from community services. By 1977, the city’s human resources department, which had assumed responsibility for administering city funds, recommended stopping LAC funding.78 That same year the LAC lost its funding from the United Way as well, and Martin Morales resigned as director.79 The

Council continued to operate on a limited basis with grants from other non-profit organization for two years. In the late 1970s, a several college-educated Puerto Ricans

78 “Fund Refusal Faces Latin American Council” GRP, July, 23, 1977. 79 “City to Help manage affairs of Latin American Council” GRP, April 28, 1977.

271 arrived in Grand Rapids from the island and from the East Coast. Many of them had no prior connections to West Michigan, but sought administrator positions at the Latin

American Council. After they tried to wrestle away leadership positions from local

Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, the Council erupted in another set of conflicts that eventually led to its dissolution. Though the local press covered this public argument as a factional split among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, it was likely the result of a combination of social class, ethnicity, and unethical leadership practices. By the end of

1978, after a scandal with a diploma mill, efforts to disenfranchise Latino voters in a

LAC election, and a fight at a meeting, the LAC finally dissolved.

Community Services in the 1980s: The Hispanic Center of West Michigan and Latin

American Services

Between 1970 and 1980, the Latino population doubled and thus Latinos needed to renegotiate their panethnic relationships with one another. With an influx of people it was hardly possible that one organization could meet the needs of all Latinos in the city.

In the LAC’s wake, two other organizations emerged. Latin American Services (LAS) formed in 1978 with a mission to “improve the quality of life for economically disadvantaged Hispanic residents through a bilingual human service delivery system,” while the Hispanic Center of West Michigan (HCWM) would be a broad community- centered organization.80 LAS ran under the administration of the Kent Community Action

Program, a War on Poverty program that survived federal cutbacks. Under KCAP, LAS

80 Tod Roelofs, “Tie Vote Kills Compromise in Fight Over Hispanic Funds” July 21, 1982.

272 provided social services like a bilingual and bicultural senior citizen program and other human services. The HCWM took on a similar structure to the Latin American Council.

It served as a base for cultural and political organizations like the American G.I. Forum, while also providing employment services and referrals to social service agencies. These two groups complimented each other’s work.

Though it had been more than a decade since the Latin American Council began working to improve conditions for Latino in Grand Rapids, by the 1980s the economic and social position of many Latinos in the city still had not changed. The HCWM took great strides to distance itself from the sullied Latin American Council. The major difference between these two grassroots groups rested on their internal organization.

While the LAC looked to the War on Poverty for funds to pay employees, the HCWM quickly learned that such funds would not be available to them. Instead, they had two paid employees and utilized volunteers to carry out many of the functions the LAC did before them. It kept its operating budget to $5,000 a month, which came from Grand

Rapids’ Department of Social Services and from the federal Housing and Community

Development Act. The volunteers referred people to employment opportunities while others took people to “the doctors or dentists and [sat in] on the examination to interpret for the doctors” the same way Daniel Vargas, Cruzita Gómez, and LAC employees did some thirty and forty years earlier.81

Similar to the LAC in year’s prior, LAS and HCWM fought with the City of

Grand Rapids for funding. The city commission, once again, held the purse strings for the

81 Jim Mencarelli, “Volunteer Spirit Helps City’s Latinos” GRP, November 24, 1981.

273 city’s social service agencies. When it was time to divide $410,000 to Grand Rapids’ human service organizations in 1983, the city commissioners struggled with how to allocate funds to LAS and HCWM. Though the HCWM had relied on volunteers for three years since its inception, they saw an opportunity to gain stability for the organization with the city’s financial support. LAS, on the other hand, had always operated with city funds due to its close ties to the Grand Rapids Human Services department. Ultimately, the city commission granted LAS $35,000 while only giving

HCWM $10,000.82 Jose Flores, the HCWM’s volunteer executive director, criticized five city commissioners who also served on KCAP’s board, calling them biased in their decision to give LAS a larger grant. Though there were likely personal and political reasons for granting LAS more money than HCWM, it was clear that the way the city addressed Latino demands for social service had not changed since the late 1960s.

Admittedly, the ways in which federal and municipal governments distributed aid to the poor differed from earlier years, but the city still continued to hold all of the power in deciding how to help poor Latinos. Leaders of HWCM and LAS, however, continued to negotiate with city officials for their share of funding. Due to the efforts of committed activists, these two organizations have been operating for over thirty years.

Leadership in Community Organizing

Martin Morales implemented a variety of strategies to navigate Grand Rapids’ racial and class hierarchies. Before he arrived in 1968, many community organizers

82 Vaessa Waters, “City Human Services Grants are Criticized by Hispanic Leader” GRP, June 23, 1983.

274 operated within the city’s status quo. Some adhered to the same respectability politics that middle-class African Americans practiced, believing it was the only way to make city leaders see them as equal and deserving Grand Rapidians. Morales’ measures seemed extreme and risky to Latino community members and the white politicians alike.

His tactics also had the potential to alienate allies. His calls for parity with African

Americans disrupted a delicate balance between the two minority groups, but in the end, they garnered more funds for Latinos. Though he called on Puerto Ricans to submit to his leadership, this did not stop them from taking active roles in the community and continuing to participate with Mexicans in the LAC. Morales publicly questioned Al

Wilson’s capability to run a Latino organization, only to watch the LAC become the leading Latino organization in Grand Rapids under Wilson’s tenure. Trying to undercut

Wilson’s leadership did not help Latinos advance, but instead, supporting Wilson would have been more effective. It is clear that some of his strategies worked to further the community’s quest for equality while others did not.

Morales’s legacy as a leader remains controversial. His economic position and political ambitions set him apart from other leaders. While others feared the repercussions of organizing, Morales did not—largely because of his own economic position. Many other activists held working class jobs and feared the consequences of being outspoken. Morales held a middle class job as director of the Catholic Diocese’s

Human Relations Commission and eventually opened his own restaurant, “Little

Mexico,” in the early 1970s. His job and business helped to shield him from the economic consequences of upsetting local city leaders. It was his restaurant, however,

275 that made his legacy so controversial. Morales’ had several issues with the Internal

Revenue Service due to his questionable business practices. This cast further doubts on his leadership capabilities. Moreover, his restaurant did not necessarily cater to the community he claimed to represent, but rather served the politicians and businessmen he often fought against. His restaurant had a reputation for hosting politicians and their families. By the early 1980s, Morales maintained very public friendships with local city commissioners and state representatives. Despite this, Morales still advocated, in his own flamboyant way, for what he perceived were the community’s needs. He ran unsuccessfully for mayor and once rode a horse into City Hall to protest the educational inequalities facing the city’s Latino children.83 Many Latino onlookers, however, questioned his motives for all of these actions. Was he really being a voice for the community or was he simply using the community to raise his own political profile? It is very possible that he was, in fact, doing both.

In the present, Morales’ legacy is still uncertain. As an 85-year-old man, when asked about his time as LAC director, Morales responded in the third person, “Martin

Morales did what he had to do for his people.”84 Morales’ “people” have never really been clearly defined. In the late 1960s, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans alike questioned whom he claimed to represent. In 2014, when asked about how they felt about him, multiple oral history participants responded with a variety of answers. At the very least, he was controversial and self-aggrandizing. His supporters, however, recognized that he

83 Lewis, Norma, and Jay de Vries. Legendary Locals of Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Legendary Locals. Charleston, S.C: Arcadia Pub, 2012), 112. 84 Martin Morales, interview with author, 2014.

276 used every political tool available to make gains for the Latino community—whether they wanted his leadership or not.

Leadership, Historical Memory, and the Role of the Press

The press plays a complicated role in preserving the historical memory of Latino organizing in Grand Rapids. Morales would not have been able to maintain a public profile were it not for the constant press coverage he received throughout the 1970s and

1980s. Yet, admittedly, this study would not have been possible without the numerous articles on Morales and the Latin American Council. Nonetheless, other stories of leadership were not told in the pages of the Press.

Multiple leaders came before and after Morales, but the local paper contributed to constructing a history of Latino organizing as primarily male and Mexican. Besides

Morales, the only other Latino leader to garner similar attention was Daniel Vargas, the pioneering Mexican American man who settled in Grand Rapids in 1941. After helping to establish the Latino community and serving as a representative for the Human Relations

Commission in Grand Rapids, Vargas devoted his time to working with Mexican migrant workers. Mr. Vargas’ obituary stated that Michigan Governor George Romney appointed him to the state’s commission on migrant labor in 1964 and twenty years later, Pope John

Paul II honored him for his dedication to Michigan’s migrant workers.85 With recognition on the state and international scale, both Vargas and Morales have well-documented histories of their efforts.

85 “A Minister to the Migrants: Daniel Vargas dies at 85” GRP, December 9, 1992.s

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In contrast, Latina women and Puerto Ricans have been all but erased in the public record of Latino community formation. Vargas’ wife, Guadalupe, played a prominent role in aiding the community in the 1940s and 1950s but received no such public recognition upon her death. Irene Alba’s story also went unwritten. Alba’s persistence and perseverance in the face of backlash ensured that Latinos participated in the Model Cities program in the late 1960s. Her work in fighting for the Model Cities program went overlooked in the press as articles concentrated on Martin Morales’ opposition to her and the program. Her earlier experiences as the first and only Latina on the Human Relations Commission also went unnoticed. Several couples also played important roles in creating and maintaining a Latino community. Pete and Cruzita

Gómez, one of the first Puerto Rican-Mexican couples in Grand Rapids, helped to bring the city’s Spanish-speaking population together throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Cruzita specifically acted as an interlocutor between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in matters at the Latin American Council. The couple and their children took active roles in the Model

Cities program; they organized voter registration drives and continued to welcome

Latinos to the area well in the 1970s. Simon and Irma Aguilar, like the Gómez family, held long ties to the community as well. Simon’s family served as the caretakers for the

Our Lady of Guadalupe chapel in the late 1940s. Together the Aguilar’s served as integral members of the LAC—Irene as the Que Pasa editor and Simon as the Council’s treasurer. These two understood the challenges associated with maintaining Latinidad, but still strongly advocated for unity among Latinos in Grand Rapids.

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In examining the topics of the newspaper stories that were covered and those that were ignored, it is clear that the press played a divisive role in the Latino community. The previous chapters have shown that the press seemed to have a preconceived idea of the internal negotiations among Latinos in the 1960s and 1970s. They constantly pitted

Mexicans and Puerto Ricans against each other in their coverage. Numerous articles reiterated that these groups were different and incompatible, even though the community’s actions showed otherwise. These newspaper articles disrupted Latino efforts to maintain unity. In addition, for their white readers, the stories served to delegitimize Latino organizing. They made panethnic cooperation seem futile or impossible. By the 1980s, however, Grand Rapids Press reporters could no longer ignore the reality of panethnic Latinidad. Their 1986 profile on Grand Rapids’ Spanish-speaking population illustrated this recognition.

Latinidad in the Post-Civil Rights Era

In the 1980s, due to the influence of the census, national committees, and the media, nationwide panethnic identity appeared to be a natural occurrence among Latinos.

These external and top-down forces encouraged Latinos to identify panethnically. Since

1960, the United States federal census began asking U.S. born Latinos to start identifying panethnically. People could still indicate their country of origin or whether they had

Mexico, Puerto Rico, or Cuba ancestry, for example, but they could also elect to identify as having Spanish ancestry in 1960; in 1970 and 1980, as Spanish origin; and in 1990, as

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Hispanic.86 Through the inclusion of panethnic categories, the federal government, intentionally or not, helped to encourage a broader panethnic identification among

Latinos. Moreover, as G. Christina Mora’s work describes in detail, Univision and other media outlets that served the needs of the United States and Latin America’s Spanish- speaking people has also shaped the way people think about their identity. The shift from

Lyndon B. Johnson’s Interagency Committee on Mexican American Affairs to Richard

Nixon’s Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for the Spanish-Speaking reflected a shift in the way that the federal government understood people of Latin American descent in the United States.

These national influences were also met with local advocacy for Latinidad at a time when the population of Latinos was diversifying. From 1970 to 1990, the non-

Mexican Latino population grew from 22% to 41%.87 Just as Mexicans and Puerto Ricans did decades earlier upon arriving in Grand Rapids, Central Americans and Dominicans have likely contemplated the significance of their individual ethnic identity in a diverse

Latino community. The number of Latinos in Grand Rapids has grown, though it remains proportionally small compared to whites. This has likely encouraged Spanish-speaking newcomers to identify panethnically with older Latino residents.

86 Census administrators enumerated the number of people with Spanish surnames in the 1960 Census. They, however, did not ask individuals whether they had a Spanish surname. Instead, they created a list of Spanish surnames and counted how many individuals had one of those names. See G. Cristina Mora’s Making Hispanic, 85-88. 87 Mark H López, Ana González-Barrera and Danielle Cuddington, “Diverse Origins: the Nation’s 14 Largest Hispanic-Origin Groups,” Pew Research Center Hispanic Trade Project RSS, Pew Research Center, 19 June 2013. Web. 10 May 2015.

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Latino population growth in Grand Rapids has also produced new spaces and sites for panethnic formation. St. Joseph the Worker and Grandville Avenue, though still considered the main church and neighborhood for Latinos, are no longer the only places for Latino religious practice or settlement. St. Francis of Assisi in the Garfield Park neighborhood on the Southeast side, St. Mary’s on the near Northwest side, and Holy

Name on the border of Wyoming and Grand Rapids all serve as parishes and neighborhoods with Latino residents. Moreover, several Protestant churches have opened their doors in those neighborhoods as well. Baseball leagues expanded to include women’s leagues and teams formed from the newly arrived Dominicans in the 1990s and

2000s. In the first decade of the 2000’s, Rumsey Park converted from a baseball field to a soccer field, reflecting the recreational needs and preferences of Grandville Avenue’s newest residents from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Other Latinos play baseball on fields on the South side of Grand Rapids and in Wyoming. Despite the geographic dispersal in the Latino community, Grandville Avenue is still unmistakably a center for

Latino life. It hosts Latino-owned bakeries, auto repair shops, restaurants, clothiers, barbershops, hair salons, and tax services. In the 1970s, the Latino community urged the city to rename the streets off the corridor to reflect the population who lived, worked, and worshipped there but to no avail.88 In 2000, the City of Grand Rapids gave Grandville

Avenue the commemorative title of Cesar E. Chavez Way to formally recognize Latinos’ presence and contributions in and to this neighborhood.

88 Roy Howard Beck, “Spanish Street Names Sought by Latino Group” GRP, November 29, 1973.

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Preserving Grandville Avenue in Historical Memory

The fight to improve life for Latinos on the Southwest side, and Grandville

Avenue in particular was never an easy battle. From covertly gaining entrance into this area to establishing the Latin American Council, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans clashed with their white neighbors, each other, and their African American counterparts to claim a stake on Grandville and in the city. They also built relationships with some of their white neighbors who stayed after others fled to Wyoming and nearby suburbs. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans played baseball together, helped one another secure jobs, lived next door to one another, and intermarried. They also recognized that they shared struggles with their Black neighbors on the Southwest and Southeast side. They walked out of commission meetings and closed ones, wrote petitions, and relied on each other to get their shared plight recognized.

Despite these battles, memories of Grandville Avenue vary. The Roosevelt Park

Neighborhood Association (RPNA) was founded in 1978 and is still in existence today.

One its founders, Mary Angelo, authored a book entitled, I Remember: a History of

Grandville Avenue, detailing her interpretation of this area’s century long history.

Though the RPNA and Ms. Angelo had helped area Latino residents fight to preserve their neighborhoods in the 1990s, the book and the organization erased the late 1960s and

1970s struggle Latinos launched to gain community control over their social services and policing. Instead, Ms. Angelo focused her observations on the decline of the neighborhood in the 1980s without acknowledging the structural forces that contributed to this. She also ignored the role Latino businesses played in keeping the area an

282 economically vibrant place, despite the economic circumstances of many of its residents.

This depiction of the area and its residents does not do justice to the internal and external negotiations that occurred between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans to ensure that Latinos did not suffer in silence in Grand Rapids.

As this city recovers from the 2008 economic recession, urban renewal threatens to dramatically change Grandville Avenue. Situated on the city’s Southwest side, it is within a mile of Grand Rapids’ downtown center, which has recently seen revitalization.

Local community organizations fear that, in time, gentrification will come for Grandville

Avenue too. It is my aim that present-day Latino residents can use this dissertation to fend off gentrification and preserve the legacy of those who fought with “pride and hope” for themselves, for their neighborhood, and for their voices to be heard.

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