“Strictly in the Capacity of Servant”: The Interconnection Between Residential and School Segregation in Oxnard, California, 1934-1954

“Strictly in the Capacity of Servant”: TheInterconnection Between Residential andSchool Segregation in Oxnard, California,1934–1954

David G.GarciaTara J.Yosso

Introduction

About two years ago, Haydock Grammar School was taken away from theuse of the American children and given bodily over to the use of Mexicans. . . This leaves all of Oxnard, from fourth Street . . . to Hill Street, withouta school for American children; and the children from the south part oftown have to pass the Mexicans coming from the northerly parts of townon their ways to school . . . We resent the implication that the Acre Tractis a Mexican district . . . If there is an urgent need to care for the MexicanChildren, a school should be built in Colonia Gardens, or somewhere elsein close proximity to their homes.1

To introduce our examination of the social production of segre-gated space and power relations in Oxnard, California from 1934 to1954, we utilize portions of a letter written by Alice Shaffer, April

David G. Garcia is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education andInformation Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuseson the educational histories of Mexican Americans, the pedagogy of Hollywood’s ur-ban school genre, and Chicana/o teatro (theater) as public revisionist history. Tara J.Yosso is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies atthe University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research examines educational accessand equity utilizing critical race theory and critical media literacy frameworks. Theythank HEQ editors and anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback, Frank P. Barajas forcollaboratively collecting school board minutes and sharing community networks, LuisH. Moreno and Jose M. Alamillo for providing research sources and insightful feedback,Ruben Donato for constructive remarks on an early draft, and Nichole M. Garcia forresearch assistance.

1Personal correspondence from Oxnard resident Alice Shaffer to Mr. HarlandBurfeind, Clerk of the Oxnard School Board of Trustees, 21 April 1938. The microfilmof this letter is filed along with the Oxnard School Board of Trustees meeting minutes,at the Oxnard Elementary School District archives, Oxnard, California. We hereafterrefer to these microfilm materials as OSBT minutes, date.

History of Education Quarterly Vol. 53 No. 1 February 2013 Copyright C© 2013 by the History of Education Society

The Interconnection Between Residential and School Segregation 65

21, 1938, to the Oxnard School Board of Trustees.2 Shaffer outlinesthe seemingly shared concerns of her neighbors about a disruption ofthe separate social and academic worlds established for Whites andMexicans.3 As she urges the board to endorse residential and schoolsegregation, she demonstrates the inextricable link between these twopervasive and persistent forms of racial discrimination. We analyze thisinterconnection between housing and education in Oxnard from 1934,when the trustees’ minutes first mention school segregation, through1954, after the second U.S. Supreme Court ruling challenging raciallyrestrictive housing covenants and the landmark decision declaring seg-regated schools unconstitutional.4 During this twenty-year period, Ox-nard’s population increased from 6,285 to 21,567 (243 percent), withMexicans comprising over one-third of the city’s residents and at leasttwo-thirds of the elementary school population.5

While scholars and the courts have long recognized residentialsegregation as a contributing factor to racially separate and unequal ed-ucational conditions, most studies focus “exclusively either on schoolsor housing,” emphasizing Black and White, urban and suburban com-munities.6 Our analysis of the education of Mexican children in Oxnard

2For further discussion of space as a social product inscribed with relations ofpower, politics, and ideology, see Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reasser-tion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989).

3We use this term to refer to women and men of Mexican origin or descent,regardless of immigration status, while acknowledging that the majority of the Mexicanchildren who attended Oxnard schools during the decades of the 1930s to 1950s wereborn in the United States. When we discuss the era of the 1940s and especially afterWWII, we use the term most common to that period, Mexican American.

4The U.S. Supreme Court declared federal or state enforcement of racial covenantsunconstitutional in Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948). In Barrows v. Jackson, 346 U.S.249 (1953), the Court ruled that individual homeowners or homeowners associationscould not seek damages from their neighbors for violating racial covenants. Just one yearlater, the Court ruled that segregated schools were inherently unequal and unconstitu-tional, in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

5For city population numbers by decade, see U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S.Census of Population: 1950. Table 6. Population of Counties by Minor Civil Divisions: 1930to 1950 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1953), Section 5, 18; fornumber of Mexicans in Oxnard, see U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of Population:1950. vol. IV, Special Reports, Part 3, Chapter C, Table 7. Citizenship and Country of Birth ofWhite Persons of Spanish Surname, For Counties and Urban Places of 10,000 or More in SelectedSouthwestern States: 1950 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1953),Section 3C, 43; elementary school enrollment estimate noted by Trustee Burfeind, 1938.Correspondence from J. H. Burfeind, Clerk of Oxnard School Board of Trustees to Mrs.Alice Shaffer, OSBT minutes, 25 April 1938.

6For an example of referencing residential segregation as a contributing factor tosegregated schools, see Richard R. Valencia, Martha Menchaca, and Ruben Donato,“Segregation, Desegregation, and Integration of Chicano Students: Old and New Re-alities,” in Chicano School Failure and Success: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Richard R.Valencia (London: Routledge, 2002), 70–113; quote from critical review of researchexamining schools exclusive of housing and vice versa, Paul M. Ong and Jordan Rickles,

66 History of Education Quarterly

shifts this focus to examine the nexus of housing and school segregationin a predominately agricultural, and eventually rurban community.7 Insuch places, as David Montejano explains, “Residential segregation de-marcated, in a highly visible way, the distinct social standing of Angloand Mexican . . . Segregated schools were a straightforward reflectionof the racial divisions of farm towns.”8

Christopher Ramos extends this observation, documenting how inTexas, “[r]acially restrictive covenants forced Mexican-American fami-lies to live in San Antonio’s west-side neighborhoods and to send theirchildren to poorly funded schools.”9 He argues that legal rulings, re-strictive covenants, public policies, and local initiatives contributed toa concentration of poverty and lack of municipal services in these com-munities, which also led to the concentrated attendance of Mexicanchildren in “inferior schools.”10 Ramos asserts, “residential segregationdid not occur by chance, but rather by design.”11

Similarly, in Oxnard, we identify a cycle of residential and schoolsegregation that facilitated disparate treatment of Mexicans in schoolsand fostered housing discrimination. We investigate the trustees’ ef-forts to separate Mexican children from Whites, specifically focusingon multiple references to residence within the school board minutes.12

“The Continued Nexus between School and Residential Segregation.” Berkeley La RazaLaw Journal 15 (2004): 51–66, 53; for some of the few exceptions to this pattern in theliterature, see the papers published from a 1995 forum In Pursuit of A Dream Deferred:Linking Housing and Education Policy by the Institute on Race and Poverty and Uni-versity of Minnesota Law School, University of Minnesota Law Review 80, no. 4 (1996):743–910. See also edited volume with reprints and additional essays, John A. Powell,Gavin Kearney, and Vina Key, eds., In Pursuit of A Dream Deferred: Linking Housingand Education Policy (New York: Peter Lang, 2001); for examples of Black/White, ur-ban/suburban analysis, see Matthew Lassiter’s essay introducing three distinct articlesin a special section of the Journal of Urban History “exploring the interplay betweeneducational policies and housing markets in metropolitan U.S. history during the twen-tieth century” (196). These studies highlight what he determines to be a “disciplinarydivide between the history of education and urban/suburban history,” which he argues,necessitates “a new methodological approach that recognizes the mutually constitutivenature of public education and private housing on the metropolitan landscapes of mod-ern America.” Matthew D. Lassiter, “Schools and Housing in Metropolitan History: AnIntroduction,” Journal of Urban History 38, no. 2 (2012): 195–204, 196.

7Carey McWilliams wrote about Southern California as a rurban region that was“neither city nor country but everywhere a mixture of both” (12). Carey McWilliams,Southern California: An Island on the Land (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith Publisher, 1946),12.

8David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin:University of Texas Press, 1987), 167–68.

9Christopher Ramos, “The Educational Legacy of Racially Restrictive Covenants:Their Long Term Impact on Mexican Americans,” The Scholar 4 (2002): 149–84, 169.

10Ibid.11Ibid., 155.12For detailed analysis of the early school board minutes, see David G. Garcıa, Tara

J. Yosso, and Frank P. Barajas, “‘A Few of the Brightest, Cleanest Mexican Children’:


To contextualize these notations, we analyze materials from the U.S.Census Bureau, local newspapers, and county archives, including histor-ical maps and property grant deeds. Taken together, these sources shedlight on the systematic structuring of White privilege in housing, labor,and schools.13 We found racially restrictive covenants in the personalproperty holdings of the Ventura County Superintendent of Schools,Oxnard School Board of Trustees, principals, and teachers. We alsodiscuss evidence of these school officials’ partnerships with civic andbusiness leaders, who likewise held a vested interest in housing segre-gation. Our analysis demonstrates that the trustees designed segregatedschools to correspond with the very same racially identifiable residentialspaces they themselves helped create. With this historical case study,we seek to document the ways housing and school segregation becameinterconnected “by design.”14

Roots of Mundane Racism

[P]ublic policy and private actors operate together to create and promoteracially identified space and the racial segregation that accompanies it.15

Being considered White by law did not afford Mexicans in theUnited States the privileged status of Whites.16 Instead, imposed legaldefinitions actually reinforced the previously established relationship ofWhite domination over Mexicans. Specifically, Mexicans often receivedlower wages than Whites, and tended to be limited to menial labor po-sitions.17 Individuals and institutions restricted Mexicans in all aspectsof public life, barring them from serving as jurists, patronizing storesand restaurants, utilizing public facilities (e.g., restrooms, swimmingpools, hospitals, cemeteries), and purchasing or occupying property

School Segregation as a Form of Mundane Racism in Oxnard, California, 1900–1940,”Harvard Educational Review 82, no. 1 (2012): 1–25.

13For more on labor in Oxnard, see Louie Herrera Moreno, “Labor, Migration,and Activism: A History of Mexican Workers on the Oxnard Plain, 1930–1980” (PhDdissertation, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University, 2012); Frank P. Barajas,Curious Unions: Mexican American Workers and Resistance in Oxnard, California, 1898–1961 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012).

14Ramos, “The Educational Legacy of Racially Restrictive Covenants,” 155.15Richard Thompson Ford, “The Boundaries of Race: Political Geography in Legal

Analysis,” Harvard Law Review 107, no. 8 (1994): 1841–1921, 1845.16See Ian Haney Lopez, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New

York University Press, 1996); George A. Martinez, “The Legal Construction of Race:Mexican-Americans and Whiteness,” Harvard Latino Law Review 2, no. 1 (1997): 321–47.

17See Juan Gomez-Quinones, Mexican American Labor, 1790–1990 (Albuquerque:University of New Mexico Press, 1994).


designated for Whites only.18 Schools offered Mexican children a sep-arate and unequal education.19 Gilbert Gonzalez explains, “The segre-gation of Mexican children . . . reflected and recreated social divisionswithin the larger society formed by residential segregation, labor andwage differentials, political inequality, socioeconomic disparities, andracial oppression.”20 Such institutionalized racial discrimination againstMexicans denied them basic civil rights, regardless of their citizenshipstatus, even as the U.S. economy became more dependent on their labor.Julian Samora notes, “while desiring, and inducing, and even welcom-ing a certain class of people to perform the cheap labor, [U.S.] policiesreflect that this type of person is more than welcome as a laborer, butnot necessarily desirable as a resident and citizen.”21

Since the law did not permit racial segregation of Mexicans, manyschools segregated them under the auspices of culture or language, andsubsequently emphasized vocational and Americanization curricula.22

In Oxnard, the trustees’ minutes do not mention any academic or so-cial rationale for racial segregation. Despite this omission, the city’selementary schools functioned effectively to push out the majority ofMexican children before high school and prime an available pool ofmanual laborers for the demanding agricultural industry. We arguethat the trustees’ segregation efforts demonstrate their endorsement ofa tacit agreement, or “racial contract,” which held that Mexicans andother People of Color belong on the margins of society, subordinate to

18For early 1900s example, see Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in California: A History ofMexican Americans in California (San Francisco, CA: Boyd & Fraser Publishing Company,1984), 31–46; for examples from the 1930s, see Paul S. Taylor, Mexican Labor in the UnitedStates, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1930), 86–89. For examples fromthe 1940s, see Juan Gomez-Quinones, Chicano Politics: Reality and Promise, 1940–1990(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), 42–43. See also Clemente E.Vose, Caucasians Only: The Supreme Court, the NAACP, and the Restrictive Covenant Cases(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959).

19Charles M. Wollenberg, With All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion inCalifornia Schools, 1855–1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Valen-cia, Menchaca, and Donato, “Segregation, Desegregation, and Integration of ChicanoStudents.”

20Gilbert Gonzalez, Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation (Philadelphia, PA:Balch Institute Press, 1990), 21.

21Julian Samora, “Mexican Immigration,” in Mexican-Americans Tomorrow: Educa-tional and Economic Perspectives, ed. Gus Tylor (Albuquerque: University of New MexicoPress, 1975), 60–80, 62.

22See Gilbert G. Gonzalez, “Segregation of Mexican Children in a Southern Cal-ifornia City: The Legacy of Expansionism and the American Southwest,” The WesternHistorical Quarterly 16, no. 1 (1985): 55–76; Martha Menchaca and Richard R. Valencia,“Anglo-Saxon Ideologies in the 1920s-1930s: Their Impact on the Segregation of Mexi-can Students in California,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 21, no. 3 (1990): 222–49;Guadalupe San Miguel and Richard R. Valencia, “From the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgoto Hopwood: The Educational Plight and Struggle for Equity for Mexican Americansin the Southwest,” Harvard Educational Review 68, no. 3 (1998): 353–412.


Whites.23 This shared understanding led to the implementation of seg-regation as a form of mundane racism in Oxnard’s elementary schools.We have defined mundane racism as the systematic subordination ofMexicans, which occurred as a commonplace, ordinary way of con-ducting business within and beyond schools.24 The process of racismbecoming an everyday, taken-for-granted part of schooling that helpedreproduce a stratified workforce did not happen naturally, but rather asa result of purposeful manipulation.

The Evolution of Housing and School Segregation in Oxnard

Located approximately 65 miles north from the City of Los Angeles,the coastal City of Oxnard began as a racially segregated, companytown, with a spur line from the Southern Pacific Rail Road and OxnardBoulevard becoming the main demarcations between east and west.25

The founding of the American Beet Sugar Company (ABSC) in 1898,by Henry T. Oxnard and his brother James, created an ongoing needfor laborers.26 National immigration policies facilitated the recruit-ment of mainly Mexican and Japanese seasonal workers, and eventuallyan established, predominately Mexican workforce.27 Incorporated as acity in 1903, Oxnard developed rapidly as an agricultural town. To ac-commodate the sugar beet workers and their families, the ABSC builtmultifamily adobe residential units close to the factory.28 These housingunits contrasted those of the White factory supervisors, which featured

23Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,1997); for more on this argument in relation to schools and labor, see Garcıa, Yosso,and Barajas, “A Few of the Brightest, Cleanest Mexican Children,” 3.

24Ibid., 2. Our definition expands on scholarly analysis of racism in U.S. society,see Derrick A. Bell, And We Will Not Be Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (NewYork: Basic Books, 1987); Derrick A. Bell, Faces At the Bottom of the Well: The Permanenceof Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Manning Marable, Black America (Westfield,NJ: Open Media, 1992).

25In earlier historical periods, the lands that became incorporated into the City ofOxnard were home to indigenous Chumash communities and Mexican rancho owners(Californios).

26The ABSC became the American Crystal Sugar Company in 1934 and remainedin operation until 1958.

27The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 restricted the recruitment of Chinese workers,and in 1907, the Gentlemen’s Agreement barred Japanese immigration, resulting inMexicans being the largest group of workers in Oxnard.

28“Major Driffil [sic] Meets End,” The Oxnard Daily Courier, 19 March 1917;“Adobe Houses for Mexican Laborers,” The Oxnard Daily Courier, 13 December 1917;the ABSC also encouraged the construction of adobe dwellings on the ranches ofSpringville, Hendry, and Round Mountain, “Homes for Workers Solve Labor Need,”The Oxnard Daily Courier, 1 February 1918; “Free Houses Bring Mexican Families,” TheOxnard Daily Courier, 13 February 1918; “Sugar Beet Outlook Is Hopeful,” The OxnardDaily Courier, 9 March 1918; “Citrus Heights Company Will Built [sic] Houses,” TheOxnard Daily Courier, 2 January 1920.


large, bungalow-style single-family wooden structures with wide, pavedsidewalks and roads.29 Tomas Almaguer documented the early emer-gence of “[t]wo very different social worlds” in Oxnard, divided by raceand class, east and west.30 He describes, “The most obvious feature ofthis hierarchy was the residential segregation of the community and theorganization of the local labor market in racial terms.”31

The Colonia Improvement Company (CIC) profited from sellinghomes east of the railroad tracks in the neighborhood called ColoniaGardens—La Colonia—and in southern parts of Oxnard. Incorporatedby Henry Oxnard and Aranetta Hill, and led by a manager at the beetsugar factory, James Driffill, the CIC promoted the company’s inter-ests with real estate business including constructing houses, buildingroads, and extending utilities to serve the factory needs.32 Evidenceindicates that providing infrastructure to La Colonia was not deemedto be in the interest of the CIC or the City of Oxnard. La Coloniaresidents did not gain access to basic municipal services, such as pavedroads, running water, electricity, or gas until the end of WWII.33 Fromthe start, civic leaders structured La Colonia and other areas southeastof the railroad tracks as substandard neighborhoods.34 Mexicans whohad been recruited to work in Ventura County’s burgeoning agricul-tural industry were consistently relegated to these parts of town byindividuals and corporations who utilized racial covenants to restrictproperties west of the tracks and throughout the northernmost parts ofthe city to Whites only.35 The Federal Housing Administration, realestate agents, and lending institutions all contributed to this housing

29“Factory Brings Many Families Here From Chino,” The Oxnard Daily Courier, 30April 1918; “A.B.S. Company Will Build Twenty Houses for Employees,” The OxnardDaily Courier, 10 May 1918; “New Street For New A.B.S. Houses,” The Oxnard DailyCourier, 29 May 1918; “Big Whistle Sounds Sugar Making Season,” The Oxnard DailyCourier, 24 August 1918; “Will Build 6 Bungalows At Once,” The Oxnard Daily Courier,23 January 1920.

30Tomas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy inCalifornia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 188.

31Ibid.32Driffill served as the CIC President and went on to establish the Oxnard Light

and Water Company, and the Oxnard Publishing Company.33See description of La Colonia in the early 1940s as a “mud wallow” without paved

streets until 1945, and without electricity and gas in many homes until after WWII. DonW. Martin, “Long-Time Colonia Resident Is Bitter,” The Press Courier, Saturday, 20July 1963, 4.

34William Tim Dagodag, “A Social Geography of La Colonia: A Mexican-American Settlement in the City of Oxnard, California” (master’s thesis, San FernandoValley State College, 1967).

35In 1930, Ventura County included the cities of Camarillo, Fillmore, Hueneme,Ojai, Oxnard, Piru, Santa Paula, Simi, and Ventura. See U.S. Census, Population, Cal-ifornia Table 4. Population of Counties by Minor Civil Divisions: 1930, 1920, and 1910(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1930), 140; similar to Oxnard,racial demarcation along railroad tracks occurred across California and the Southwest.


discrimination.36 In his extensive research on Mexican labor in theSouthwest, Paul S. Taylor observed, “refusal to sell or rent to Mexi-cans, irrespective of the existence or non-existence of legal restrictions. . . is done by both real estate companies and individuals. . . . The usualexplanation is ‘protection of property values against depreciation,’ a re-statement in economic terms of the fact that Mexicans are not wantedas neighbors in the American community.”37

Until fall 1939, all children in Oxnard attended one of three el-ementary schools located west of Oxnard Boulevard and the railroadtracks: Richard B. Haydock School, Theodore Roosevelt School, orWoodrow Wilson School.38 School board minutes in the 1920s de-scribe a problem of “overcrowding” within these three schools.39 Thecrescendo of these concerns in the 1930s coincided with the steadyincrease of Mexicans in the city and county. The 1930 U.S. Censusreported 54,976 residents in Ventura County, which included 13,839Mexicans.40 Within the decade, Mexican children outnumbered Whites

See description of towns in the Imperial Valley, California in Taylor, Mexican Laborin the United States, 83; for an example of restrictive covenants on the northwest side,see indenture between Oxnard Land Company and Caroline Durr, 6 December 1912,Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book 134, 547. Oxnard Land Company PresidentThomas M. Hill also co-owned a racially restricted subdivision in southwest Oxnard,referred to in the record as the Wolff, Hill, Laubacher Addition to the City of Oxnard,see n60, n65. See also “Restrictions, Covenants and Conditions Imposed Upon OxnardDevelopment Company, Unit No. 2,” 22 November 1943, Ventura County Clerk andRecorder, Book 696, 469, specifying racial covenants for this subdivision would bindthe land until 1 January 1970 and would extend automatically for periods of ten yearsunless of a majority of then owners terminated them. Oxnard Development Companyco-partner Walter H. Lathrop also owned and co-owned additional racially restrictedsubdivisions in Oxnard, see n60, n69, n74, n77.

36The FHA was created in 1934, and continued to officially encourage racial dis-crimination until the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court Shelley v. Kraemer decision; see, forexample, Federal Housing Administration Underwriting Manual, Washington, DC,1947, sections 1320 (1) and 1320 (2); see also Charles Abrams, Forbidden Neighbors: AStudy of Prejudice and Housing (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955).

37Taylor, Mexican Labor in the United States, 81.38Haydock School bore the name of the first mayor of Oxnard, who served as

the Principal-Superintendent of Oxnard Grammar School since 1911 and continued asDistrict Superintendent from 1921 to 1939; Oxnard Grammar School was constructed in1908, and became Theodore Roosevelt School in 1924, after a fire destroyed the originalbuilding. The Roosevelt School mainly enrolled lower primary grades, and functioneduntil 1949, when the Trustees sold the property to the city. Helen Frost, “Oxnard SchoolDistrict, 1875–1975” (pamphlet, Oxnard Elementary School District Archives, 1975);Wilson School was built in 1924 and remained in use until 1961. Wilson mainly enrolledstudents in upper primary grades 5–8, segregated into all-Mexican classes with selectMexican students enrolled in otherwise exclusively White classes.

39See, for example, OSBT minutes, 16 January 1926; 6 September 1927; 3 January1928; 1 May 1928.

40U.S. Bureau of the Census. U.S. Census of the Population: 1930, Population,California Table 17. Indians, Chinese and Japanese 1910 to 1930 and Mexicans, 1930 forcounties and for cities of 25,000 or more (Washington, DC: U.S. Government PrintingOffice, 1930), 266.


2:1 in Oxnard elementary schools.41 These demographic shifts droveschool officials’ systematic implementation of racial segregation.

Indeed, California’s state educational codes made no specific al-lowances for the segregation of Mexican students.42 Oxnard schoolofficials were not alone in their refusal to accept the legal definition ofMexicans as White. By the 1920s, Mexicans accounted for the most seg-regated group of students in California.43 A 1930 survey of thirty-oneschool systems in four Southwestern states found 84.6 percent of Cali-fornia schools reporting segregation of “the Mexican children entirelyor in part from the whites for educational purposes.”44 Ventura CountySuperintendent of Schools, Blanche T. Reynolds endorsed segregationwithin and beyond the classroom. The deed to her Ventura residencespecified, “said property shall not, nor share any interest therein, atany time be leased, sold, devised or conveyed to, or inherited by, orbe otherwise acquired by or become the property of any person whoseblood is not entirely that of the Caucasian Race.”45 Reynolds’ racialcovenant further noted that, “if persons not of the Caucasian Race bekept thereon by a Caucasian occupant, strictly in the capacity of servantof such occupant, such circumstance shall not constitute a violation ofthis condition.”46 Furthermore, in her role as the top education officialfor the county, she also espoused anti-Mexican sentiments.

The Oxnard Daily Courier published some of Reynolds’ perceptionsof Mexicans expressed in her 1928 presentation to the Oxnard RotaryClub and Club President Richard B. Haydock, who was the OxnardSchool District Superintendent.47 The reporter captured her ominous

41See correspondence from Burfeind to Shaffer, OSBT minutes, 25 April 1938.42Likewise, the educational codes made no allowances for segregating Blacks. For

example, in 1927, Political Code section 1662 of the California Constitution read, “thegoverning power of the school district shall have power to exclude children of filthyor vicious habits, or children suffering from contagious or infectious diseases, and alsoto establish separate schools for Indian children and for children of Chinese, Japaneseor Mongolian parentage” (308). Statutes of California 1927 (Sacramento, CA: CaliforniaState Printing Office, 1927). See same language in Elementary School section of theSchool Law of California 1927 (Sacramento, CA: Office of Superintendent of PublicInstruction W. M. John Cooper, 1927), 132.

43See Wollenberg, With All Deliberate Speed, 118; see also Gonzalez, Chicano Edu-cation in the Era of Segregation.

44Ward A. Leis, “The Status of Education for Mexican Children in Four BorderStates” (master’s thesis, Los Angeles: University of Southern California, 1931), 27, 29,65.

45Grant deed from F. H. Adamson and Lulu E. Adamson to James E. Reynolds andBlanche T. Reynolds, 23 September 1926, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book127, 1, “Subject to certain conditions, restrictions, and provisions” in the deed fromGilpin W. Chrisman and Jennie M. Chrisman to B. Frank Barr and Homer P. Barr, 14February 1925, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book 34, 467.

46Ibid.47“Mexican costs are too high says Co. Head,” The Oxnard Daily Courier, 31 January

1928, 1.


message in the headline, “Mexican costs are too high says Co. Head.”Reynolds claimed that the county spent one-third of its schooling bud-get on Mexican children, and directed these funds toward fixing their“handicap” in English and compensating for the delays in the migrantstudents’ promotion to the next grade. She generalized that “the av-erage Mexican child,” took two years to complete one grade, and thisdelayed advancement could “drag down the average for the Ameri-can child.”48 She warned that increased Mexican immigration wouldcontribute to “the lowering by the Mexicans of the moral and healthtone of our children, and of the general community.”49 While framingher ideological beliefs as fact, Reynolds exposed an underlying ratio-nale for the disparate treatment of Mexican children in Ventura Countyschools—a rationale not mentioned in the public record of the OxnardSchool Board of Trustees.

Residential Segregation As a Spatial Guide for SchoolSegregation

From their first documented discussion of segregation in 1934 throughthe 1939 approval of a school to be built east of the tracks in LaColonia, the Board of Trustees, Dr. Everett C. Beach, Dr. RayErwin Dockstader, John H. Burfeind, and Elmer W. Power remainedpublicly silent about their rationale for separating White and Mexicanchildren. With the support of leaders such as Reynolds, who openly en-dorsed the “racial contract” in word and deed, the trustees may have feltthey did not need to explain why they sought to establish and maintainWhite privilege in schools. However, the record does offer evidencedemonstrating they consciously used residential segregation as a spatialguide for racially segregating children.

School board minutes suggest White parents instigated school seg-regation plans, but the trustees’ prompt responses to these petitionsdemonstrate a ready willingness to segregate. For example, the boardminutes discuss demands by three White parents for the separation ofMexican children in November 1936, which led to almost immediate,significant enrollment shifts.50 Most of the Mexican students were re-moved from Roosevelt and Wilson schools, and sent to the HaydockSchool, while White children were simultaneously transferred out ofHaydock and placed at either Roosevelt or Wilson School. It remainsunclear whether the trustees also accommodated the White parents

48Ibid.49Ibid.50OSBT minutes, 4 November 1936.


request to stagger recess and release times for Whites and the remain-ing Mexicans at Roosevelt and Wilson schools.51

By September 22, 1937, the trustees sought to adopt “some definiteplan,” for dealing with overcrowded White classes—an unanticipatedoutcome of the previous year’s enrollment shifts.52 As they discussed theurgency of this situation, they contemplated “a. enrollment by schools,b. by nationality; white, Oriental, Mexican, [and] c. by residence, northor south of Fifth Street.”53

Such references to geographic locations permeate the board min-utes. Plans to shuffle students between schools appear largely basedon shared knowledge of racially identifiable residential spaces. At thatSeptember 22, 1937 meeting, they considered “possibilities of handlingthe situation in two different ways: a. The return of white children livingin the south part of town to the Haydock School. [or] b. The completesegregation of Mexican children.”54 They pragmatically developed acompromise that took into account the fact that they had already trans-ferred the White children out of Haydock School and did not have thefacilities to accomplish complete segregation of the Mexican students.Five days later, on September 27, 1937, Trustee Burfeind outlined thisplan,

[C]alling for all “Mexican” children living south of Fifth Street to attendthe Haydock School, leaving all white and oriental children living south ofFifth Street in the Roosevelt and Wilson schools. The moving of Orientalchildren living south of Fifth Street to the Haydock School will be takeninto consideration in case of future emergency, and no further shifting ofpupils is intended.55

Though Superintendent Haydock questioned whether all compo-nents of this plan could be adopted, three days later, on September 30,1937, the board concurred that he and the teachers “could meet thesituation in the way that seemed best as pupils return from the harvestseason. The one point to be carried out as soon as convenient and withas little ‘fuss’ as possible was the transferring of Mexican pupils who livesouth of Fifth Street to the Haydock School.”56 These plans to designateHaydock School as the “Mexican school” reveal the trustees’ awarenessof the racial dimensions of the local labor economy and the racialized

51OSBT minutes, 20 November 1936.52OSBT minutes, 22 September 1937.53Ibid.54Ibid.55Quotes and capitals/lowercase inconsistencies in original, OSBT minutes, 27

September 1937.56OSBT minutes, 30 September 1937.


layout of housing in Oxnard. Though some enrollment changes oc-curred immediately after the September 1937 meetings, three monthsinto the school year, in November 1937, Superintendent Haydock re-ported that Mexican enrollments had increased at all the schools, dueto “the return of children from the walnut, prune, grape harvests etc.”57

Four classes at Roosevelt School counted over fifty students each. Thetrustees seemed frustrated at the ways these shifts undermined theirefforts to segregate students.

White Parents Confirm Link Between Residential and SchoolSegregation

The above excerpt of Alice Shaffer’s letter to the school board in Spring1938 highlights the common understanding shared among Whitesabout the nexus of residential and school segregation. She requestedan explanation about the removal of White children from HaydockSchool, positioning herself as a sort of representative for a group ofconcerned neighbors.58 Her remarks resonate with the previous groupof White parents who had initiated the very change she protested. Bothgroups shared the same goal of academic and social separation fromMexicans.

Shaffer’s letter also demonstrates how White privilege affordedsome Oxnard residents the right to make very deliberate decisions aboutwhere to purchase property. She wrote:

We resent the implication that the Acre Tract is a Mexican district, inasmuchas there is not a single Mexican family living in the Acre Tract. Wolff Streetis one of the finest streets in Oxnard, and there are good homes throughoutthis whole district. The fact that the Haydock School was close was oneattraction to those who bought property and built homes in this locality, andwe object to having to provide means to convey our children to a distantschool, when there is a good one close at hand.59

These street references and her grant deeds confirm she did infact own properties in racially restricted neighborhoods, including theWolff, Hill, Laubacher subdivision.60 The resentment she expresses

57OSBT minutes, 8 November 1937.58Personal correspondence, Shaffer to Burfeind, OSBT minutes, 21 April 1938.59Ibid.60Shaffer owned at least three parcels of land in Oxnard, two that lay in the Wolff,

Hill, Laubacher subdivision and one located in the Walter H. Lathrop Subdivision. Seeindenture between W. H. Gray and Alice Hoey Gray; and Ruth Tash, 16 May 1934,Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book 418, 107. See also indenture between RuthTash; and W. H. Gray and Alice Hoey Gray, 16 May 1934, Ventura County Clerk andRecorder, Book 418, 110. The racially restrictive covenants in the Lathrop parcel are


exposes a belief that the trustees violated the tacit “racial contract” sheand her neighbors bought into: an agreement that schools should serveWhites, not Mexicans. The White parents who complained to the boardin 1936 and Shaffer and her neighbors in 1938 seemed determined torestrict Mexicans to La Colonia, east of Oxnard Boulevard and parallelto the railroad tracks. The first group suggested that a school bondelection be planned to pay for the cost of building “a school east ofOxnard Boulevard for the convenience of the Mexican population.”61

Likewise, Shaffer recommended, “If there is an urgent need to care forthe Mexican Children, a school should be built in Colonia Gardens,or somewhere else in close proximity to their homes.”62 The boardeventually accommodated these requests with the approval to beginconstruction of a new school east of the tracks in June 1939.

In the meantime, consistent with their expedient responsiveness toWhite parents, four days later, in a letter dated April 25, 1938, TrusteeBurfeind responded to Shaffer, explaining, “The present School Boardis not responsible for the schools being located where they are andthe change that was made two years ago was at the request of a largegroup of parents living in your part of Town.”63 His justification for theenrollment shifts included a carefully worded note about the constraintsunder which the trustees functioned, trying to maintain a dual schoolsystem given the demographics. He wrote:

At that time there were about three foreign children to one American in theHaydock School. This condition was what we attempted to overcome. Abouttwo-thirds of the youngsters going to our Schools today are of Mexicanparentage. However, of this total there are only about sixty who are notAmerican born and are legally entitled to all of the advantages of any otherAmerican citizen. Too, there are not enough American youngsters to fill anyone of our Schools . . . 64

specified in the indenture between Walter H. Lathrop and Edna Lathrop; and JohnA. Madison, 24 May 1913, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book 138, 272, andreferenced in the indenture between John A. Madison and Edith Madison; and Alice A.Hoey, 28 October 1924, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book 29, 420. Evidencestrongly indicates that her Hill Street parcels also included racial covenants. See n35 onT. M. Hill, co-owner of Oxnard Land Company. See also indenture between the WolffCo. and T. M. Hill referring to two lots in Block 1 within the Wolff, Hill, Laubachersubdivision and specifying, “No part of the said premises shall never be sold to Negroes,Japanese, Chinese, Mexicans, or Indians,” 29 April 1912, Ventura County Clerk andRecorder, Book 133, 144. Such racial restrictions were again specified on the indenturebetween the Wolff Co. and Hill referring to four lots in their co-owned subdivision’sBlock 2, 18 May 1917, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book 155, 466.

61OSBT minutes, 9 November 1936.62Personal correspondence, Shaffer to Burfeind, OSBT minutes, 21 April 1938.63Correspondence, Burfeind to Shaffer, 25 April 1938.64Ibid.


According to Burfeind, the number of Mexican students rational-ized the trustees’ actions in 1936. Still, he also pointed out, the boardhad a legal obligation to educate Mexican children, regardless of citizen-ship. Burfeind went on to explain that in terms of the structure of thefacilities, neither Roosevelt nor Wilson School could enroll studentskindergarten through eighth grade, so Haydock School representedtheir only option for enrolling all grades of Mexican children. Perhapsunsatisfied with the board’s response, Shaffer began to sell her HillStreet properties in 1940.65

Racial Covenants Intact: School Officials’ Vested Interest inResidential Segregation

There is no such thing as a racially discriminatory motive in setting housingpolicies that is discrete from a racially discriminatory motive in educationdecision-making. Racism is a pervasive concept.66

Though Burfeind’s letter denied it, the records show that someof the trustees, and certainly Superintendent Haydock did have someinput into the location of the schools. As early as 1905, in his roleas the president of the Oxnard City Board of Trustees (i.e., the firstmayor of Oxnard), Haydock oversaw all aspects of city planning andschool construction.67 Burfeind’s positioning of the trustees as neutraladministrators also failed to note that their specific geographical plansfor segregating students developed from their shared concern and vestedinterest in racial segregation. Ventura County records show that theytoo sought to maintain separation from Mexicans as their neighbors.Indeed, all of the trustees owned properties bound by racial covenants.

65Grant deed from Alice H. G. Shaffer, formerly Alice Hoey Gray, to WilliamM. Carrington and Christina Carrington, 26 August 1940, Ventura County Clerk andRecorder, Book 620, 653. This deed indicates that by August 1940, Shaffer had estab-lished a new permanent address in Ventura. Ten years later, she sold her remainingWolff, Hill, Laubacher subdivision property, including 416 Hill Street, where Burfeindhad addressed his response letter. See grant deed from Alice H. G. Shaffer to RaymondF. Gisler and Marion Gisler, 27 December 1950, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder,Book 974, 306. The house at 416 Hill Street was sold again in 1957, still “Subject toall covenants, conditions, restrictions, reservations, rights of way, and all easements ofrecord.” See grant deed from Raymond F. Gisler and Marion Gisler to James Cannon, Jr.and Siporah Louise Cannon, 24 September 1957, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder,Book 1552, 539.

66Emphasis in original, Michael H. Sussman, “Discrimination: A Pervasive Con-cept” in Powell, Kearney, and Key, In Pursuit of a Dream Deferred, 209–28, 209.

67Madeline Miedema, “A Giant Step Forward: A History of the Oxnard PublicLibrary, 1907–1992” The Ventura County Historical Society Quarterly 37, no. 2 (1992):3–46, 3.


For example, Trustee Dockstader bought property specifying that, “saidpremises shall not, at any time, be sold or conveyed to any person ofthe Negro, Japanese, or Chinese race, nor to any Mexican or Indian. . . the premises hereby conveyed are part of a subdivision intended tobe used exclusively as a first class residence property.”68 Trustee Powerbought and sold properties barring sale to “Negroes, Japanese, Chinese,Mexicans, or Indians,” and properties that restricted the rental, use, oroccupancy “by any person not of the White or Caucasian race, exceptsuch as are in the employ of the owners or tenants of said lots residingthereon.”69

In addition to his personal residence, Trustee Beach purchasedlarge parcels of land from two businessmen, Eugene H. Agee andAdolph J. Carty, who integrated racial restrictions into individual deedgrants within their tracts, and filed long-term reservations, restric-tions, and protective covenants to bind their entire subdivisions intothe 1960s.70 Agee’s “protective covenant” exemplifies how U.S. citi-zenship did not necessarily ensure civil rights benefits for Mexicans.

No persons of any race other than the White or Caucasian race, nor anyMexican, Indian, or East Indian, nor any person who is a lineal descendantof the first or second degree of a person born in the Republic of Mexico,shall use or occupy any building, or any lot, except that this covenant shall

68Indenture between Hickey Brothers Company and Ray Erwin Dockstader andNora Belle Dockstader, 16 January 1928, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book151, 408. This deed was “Subject to conditions, restrictions and provisions" as containedin the deed from Oxnard Land Company to T. J. Childs, specifying “said premises shallnot, at any time, be sold or conveyed to any person of the Negro, Japanese, or Chineserace, nor to any Mexican or Indian,” 1 February 1912, Ventura County Clerk andRecorder, Book 134, 85. When Dockstader sold this property in 1966, his grant deedspecified that the property remained “subject to covenants, conditions, restrictions, andeasements of record.” See grant deed from Ray E. Dockstader to Oliver A. Folcke andVirginia F. Folcke, 7 March 1966, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book 2974,161.

69For an example of racial conditions restricting sale of property, see indenturebetween Walter H. Lathrop and Edna Lathrop; and E. W. Power, 28 April 1913,Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book 137, 366; for rental, use, or occupancyrestrictions, see grant deed from Security-First National Bank of Los Angeles to ElmerW. Power, 2 September 1931, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book 360, 454.

70Grant deed from E. H. Agee and Annie Boyden Agee to Everett C. Beach, 8 July1930, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book 322, 112. Grant deed from Adolph J.Carty to Everett C. Beach, 17 November 1930, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder,Book 333, 245. The deed specifies the property is part of Edwin L. Carty’s Subdivision.The record shows Adolph J. Carty co-owned Carty Tract No. 1 with Edwin L. Carty andhis wife Doris C. Carty, see Miscellaneous Record specifying that if breach of conditionsand restrictions occurred, property owners would not render mortgage or deed of trustinvalid, 12 June 1939, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book 592, 544. See alsorestrictions for Edwin L. Carty and Doris C. Carty Tract No. 2, 5 October 1939, VenturaCounty Clerk and Recorder, Book 601, 139, and Book 600, 366. Both documents bindentire blocks in Carty Tract until 1965. See extended Carty tract restrictions, n80–n81.


not prevent occupancy by domestic servants of a different race domiciledwith an owner or tenant.71

Agee’s covenant also underscores the “racial contract” at play inOxnard, where Whites tolerated Mexicans as servants, and plannedfor future generations to remain in these roles. Such mundane racismextended well beyond Oxnard city limits. For example, Gonzalez’s re-search on Santa Ana, California exemplifies that “[w]hether U.S.-bornor naturalized,” Mexicans “were looked on as aliens and cultural outcastswhose principal function was to labor in the lowest-paid occupations.”72

Similarly, Ruben Donato finds that in Fort Collins, Colorado, “Mex-icans were perceived as a necessary evil; they were tolerated so longas they worked in the sugar beet fields . . . [and] if social and somegeographical distance was maintained.”73

Oxnard school officials’ partnerships with land developers and civicleaders who structured and profited from the city’s residential segre-gation confirm their active promotion of the “racial contract.” Forinstance, meeting minutes from 1937 and 1938 note school insurancepolicies with Herbert H. Eastwood, Eugene H. Agee, and John Treher,who each bought, lived in, and sold properties with racially restric-tive covenants intact.74 The property deeds of City Council membersin 1939, such as Eastwood (who also served as mayor) and the 1939Chief of Police, George Pryor, further demonstrate that relegating

71“Reservations, Restrictions, and Protective Covenants Applicable to the EugeneH. Agee Subdivision,” 16 January 1946, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book736, 239. This document specifies covenants “run with the land” until 1 January 1966,and would automatically extend for successive periods of ten years unless a majority ofthen owners agreed to change them. See also “Reservations, Restrictions, and Protec-tive Covenants Applicable to the Eugene H. Agee Subdivision,” 18 June 1951, VenturaCounty Clerk and Recorder, Book 1005, 35, which bound another part of Agee’s sub-division until 1 January 1972 with the same racial covenant language and successiveten-year extension periods.

72Gonzalez, “Segregation of Mexican Children in a Southern California City,” 57.73Ruben Donato, “Sugar Beets, Segregation, and Schools: Mexican Americans in

a Northern Colorado Community, 1920–1960” Journal of Latinos and Education 2, no. 2(2003): 69–88, 84.

74For instance, the OSBT minutes on 30 September 1937 note, “Insurance policiesexpiring October 1 were renewed with E. W. Power, successor to Henry Levy, H. H.Eastwood, E. H. Agee, and John Treher.” Again on 8 September 1938, the minutesstate, “It was voted to have school insurance policies changed in accordance with thefive-year plan proposed and submitted by Mr. E. H. Agee”; Eastwood included racialcovenants on his properties, and co-owned the racially restricted Eastwood LathropSubdivision, see for example, indenture between H. H. Eastwood and Irma I. Eastwood;and Walter H. Lathrop and Edna Lathrop to John Cooluris, 12 January 1926, VenturaCounty Clerk and Recorder, Book 31, 63; see n71 for Agee’s long-term covenants; seealso grant deed from Leon Lehmann to John D. Treher, 17 December 1930, VenturaCounty Clerk and Recorder, Book 319, 271.


Mexicans to La Colonia and other southeast neighborhoods was verymuch institutionalized, business-as-usual in Oxnard.75

Berenice W. Curren, who served as the Principal of RooseveltSchool and later became a member of the Ventura County SchoolBoard, also owned racially restricted property.76 Multiple Oxnardschoolteachers also owned properties containing racial covenants.77

This pattern continued beyond the 1930s. For instance, Effie Dun-ning, who served as a trustee during the 1940s, bought and sold prop-erties in the racially restricted Agee subdivision.78 Later in the decade,Trustee Burfeind purchased property in the Edwin L. Carty and DorisC. Carty subdivision, with racial covenants intact until 1972.79 ElliotB. Thomas, the Principal of Wilson School from 1943 to 1952 owned

75See indenture between Edwin L. Carty and Doris C. Carty; and George M. Pryorand Gertrude E. Pryor, 10 June 1938, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book 567,119. Grant deed from George M. Pryor and Gertrude E. Pryor to Hugh B. Robinsonand Oleta Robinson, 10 October 1945, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book 728,445.

76Indenture between Kate J. Dawley and Bernice Curren specified, “that no partof said premises shall ever be sold or rented to Japanese, Chinese, Mexicans, or Indians,and that no part of said premises shall ever be rented to or occupied by Negroes,” 15January 1937, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book 516, 162.

77See for example, “Elementary Schools to Open Sept. 10, New Teachers Due,”Oxnard Press Courier, Thursday, 29 August 1940, Section 2, 6. According to this listand school board minutes, Grace C. Noble was hired for the 1940–1941 school year atHaydock School. Grant deed from Alta E. Diedrich to Lorraine E. Noble and Grace C.Noble, 23 October 1943. Book 683, 63–64. See also Declaration of Restrictions, Bankof Italy National Trust and Savings Association, 9 July 1928, Ventura County Clerkand Recorder, Book 216, 16. These Subdivision Restrictions utilize the same languagefound in Ventura County School Superintendent Reynolds’ Deed (n45), specifying theexception to occupancy only “if persons not of the Caucasian race be employed thereonby a Caucasian occupant strictly in the capacity of servant of such occupant” (17). TheOxnard Press Courier also lists Helen C. Deatherage as a first grade teacher at RooseveltSchool in 1940–1941. See Joint Tenancy Deed granted from John D. Gastl and BerniceD. Gastl to F. K. Deatherage and Helen C. Deatherage, 10 July 1935, Ventura CountyClerk and Recorder, Book 457, 466. See also Deed of Trust for same property, 9 July1935, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book 460, 196. Both documents refer toher property in the Walter H. Lathrop Subdivision of Oxnard, which was “subject toconditions, restrictions, and provisions,” outlined in the indenture between Walter H.Lathrop and Edna Lathrop; and Kate W. Rice, specifying that “no part of the saidpremises shall ever be sold to Negroes, Japanese, Chinese, Mexicans or Indians,” 15May 1913, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book 138, 275.

78Grant deed from Eugene H. Agee and Annie B. Agee to Walter M. Dunning andEffie B. Dunning, 18 October 1950, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book 964,146. Grant deed from Walter M. Dunning and Effie B. Dunning to Daniel M. Tolmachand Jane M. Tolmach, 5 June 1951, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book 1007,90. Both refer back to the Declaration of Restrictions outlined by E. H. Agee, 16 January1946, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book 736, 239 (see n71).

79Grant deed from James E. Weatherall and Dorothy B. Weatherall to John HarlonBurfeind and Mary Elizabeth Burfeind, 2 January 1948, Ventura County Clerk andRecorder, Book 821, 75. Weatherall and his wife had purchased the property in Augustof 1947, with the conditions that the covenants would bind the land until 1 January 1972,see indenture between Edwin L. Carty and Doris C. Carty; and James E. Weatherall and


multiple properties in the restricted Carty tracts.80 In 1949, a year af-ter the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against federal enforcement of racialcovenants in Shelley v. Kraemer, Thomas purchased a Carty lot that pro-hibited “any person whose blood is not that of the white or Caucasianrace,” to use or occupy the residence until 1978, unless “employed asservants by Caucasian owners or tenants actually residing on said lot.”81

When Clarence Brittell relocated from Hollister, California to serve asSuperintendent of Oxnard Schools from 1939 to 1949, Trustee Beachsold him one of his racially restricted Carty tract properties.82 Similarly,Richard M. Clowes, who served as Oxnard Elementary School DistrictSuperintendent from 1949 through 1960 bought and sold racially ex-clusive property in the northwest Oxnard Carty subdivision, “subjectto covenants conditions, restrictions, reservations, rights, rights of wayand easements of record.”83

These property deeds evidence school officials’ personal acts ofdiscrimination against Mexicans and complicity with the ideologicalbelief that Mexicans were inferior to Whites. Their actions enableda permanent pattern of racially segregated housing and schools, whichcontributed to the concentration of poverty and limited education in LaColonia. Indeed, with the official endorsement of the federal govern-ment until 1948, racially restrictive covenants across the United Stateseffectively denied Mexicans and other Communities of Color the ability

Dorothy B. Weatherall, 16 August 1947, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book800, 333.

80Carty bound most of the blocks in his subdivision by racial covenants for twenty-five to thirty years from the indenture date. See for example, indenture between Edwin L.Carty and Doris C. Carty; and Elliot B. Thomas and Olinda H. Thomas, 17 December1945, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder Book 737, 84. On this indenture, the typiststruck out the termination date of racial covenants through 1965, and replaced the datewith 1970.

81Grant deed from Edwin L. Carty and Doris C. Carty to Elliot B. Thomas andOlinda H. Thomas, 20 July 1949, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder Book 883, 390.This deed refers back to the “Declaration of Establishment of Protective Restrictions,Conditions, Covenants, and Reservations Affecting Certain Property in the City ofOxnard, County of Ventura, State of California,” 13 May 1948, Ventura County Clerkand Recorder, Book 828, 300. Carty also filed a modification of the restrictions to assurelending institutions that a breach of the restrictions and conditions would not render themortgage invalid. “Modification of Restrictions,” 1 June 1949, Ventura County Clerkand Recorder, Book 874, 474.

82Grant deed from Everett C. Beach and Theresa C. Beach to Clarence A. Brittelland Eva M. Brittell, 23 August 1939, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book 595,633.

83Grant deed from Paul A. Holmberg and Louise Gallagher Holmberg to RichardM. Clowes and Hannah Z. Clowes, 7 June 1950, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder,Book 953, 509. Grant deed from Richard M. Clowes and Hannah Z. Clowes to Floyd M.Rees and Lorraine A. Rees, 29 May 1961, Ventura County Clerk and Recorder, Book2007, 488.


to accumulate and pass on wealth.84 Exceptions and contradictions tothis pattern existed in Oxnard just as they did in other towns, but themajority of Mexicans did not experience much permeability of the res-idential and schooling “color line.”85 Taylor has explained that “Thedeed restrictions, however, are not so much the means of restrictingresidence of Mexicans, as they are evidence of the social feeling whichenforces the restriction even beyond the limits of the tracts actuallyrestricted.”86 In Oxnard, private deed restrictions provide evidence ofthe anti-Mexican social feeling that the trustees publicly enforced withschool segregation.

Residence as a Strategic Rationale

Reports in The Oxnard Daily Courier indicate that the trustees consid-ered regional and national segregation efforts in the development oftheir residential enrollment strategy. As early as 1926, the newspapercovered a meeting of the Oxnard Parent Teacher’s Association, whereparticipants discussed the possibilities of segregation, noting, “Fortypercent of Oxnard school children are of Spanish extraction, and thequestion here is an important one. Neighboring cities have dealt withthe situation effectively by the separate school system. Santa Paula isa notable example.”87 Located approximately fifteen miles northeastof Oxnard, Santa Paula rationalized segregation of Mexican studentsbased on language and culture.88

84For example, the FHA offered a racial covenants template in their Underwrit-ing Manual. See Abrams, Forbidden Neighbors, 230–37; for extensive discussion on thehistory of housing discrimination as it connects to contemporary racial disparities, seeMelvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: Toward A New Theoryof Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1994). George Lipsitz also explains, “net worth isalmost totally determined by past opportunities for asset accumulation, therefore is theone figure most likely to reflect the history of discrimination” (13–14). George Lip-sitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998).

85We draw here on the work of W. E. B. DuBois, who argued in 1903, “the problemof the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” (v). W. E. B. DuBois, The Soulsof Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (New York: Fawcett Publications, 1961). We identifieda few exceptions and contradictions to the color line in Oxnard. For example, we foundJapanese and Spanish surnames on property deeds in racially restricted subdivisions, andwe did not find a racially restrictive covenant on Superintendent Haydock’s residence.

86Taylor, Mexican Labor in the United States, 80–81; Taylor’s observation also helpsexplain some of the exceptions we found to the pattern of residential segregation.

87The group planned to assign a committee to “cooperate with the Oxnard schooltrustees in considering this matter as a constructive issue to be solved at once.” TheOxnard Daily Courier, 29 January 1926, Society Page.

88See Martha Menchaca, The Mexican Outsiders: A Community History of Marginal-ization and Discrimination in California (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994).


In 1927, The Oxnard Daily Courier reported on the PTA’s meetingwith the trustees and Superintendent Haydock, where they discusseda U.S. Supreme Court challenge to segregation from a case in Missis-sippi, and its potential implications for their separation of Mexicans inOxnard.89 Moreover, in 1930, the newspaper covered a story about asegregated Mexican school established in Carpinteria, located on thecoast twenty-six miles north of Oxnard. California Attorney GeneralUlysses S. Webb had weighed in on the matter, asserting school districts“had no right to establish separate schools for children of Spanish-speaking parentage.”90 However, after the Carpinteria School Boardcomplained that California’s educational codes allowed for segregationof Indians, Webb reversed his position and stated that the board couldindeed establish a separate school for Mexican children because, “It iswell known that the greater part of the population of Mexico are In-dians, and when such Indians emigrate to the United States, they aresubject to the laws applicable generally to other Indians.”91 A year later,Carpinteria School Board member and State Assemblyman George R.Bliss introduced legislation to codify Mexicans as Indians with proposedlanguage additions to California’s educational code.92

Though ultimately unsuccessful, the Bliss bill provides further ev-idence of the strong anti-Mexican sentiments and ongoing debatesaround schooling for Mexicans happening while the Oxnard trusteesmade local plans.93 Certainly, the trustees must have known they hadsupport from the highest legal authority in the state for their segregationplans, with The Oxnard Daily Courier’s reporting of the Carpinteria caseunder the large headline announcing “Mexicans can be separated fromwhite pupils—Webb.”94 The published details of the case also likely

89“Supreme Court School Ruling Affects Oxnard,” The Oxnard Daily Courier, 22November 1927.

90“Mexicans Can Be Separated From White Pupils—Webb,” The Oxnard DailyCourier, 25 January 1930.

91Ibid.92According to Francisco Balderrama, Bliss sought to add language stating, “The

governing board of any school district may establish separate schools for Indian children,whether born in the United States or not,” to allow for segregation of Mexican andMexican American children (61). Francisco E. Balderrama, In Defense of La Raza: TheLos Angeles Mexican Consulate and the Mexican Community, 1929–1936 (Tucson: TheUniversity of Arizona Press, 1982), 61. Instead, the 1935 code read, “The governingboard of the school districts shall have power to establish separate schools for Indianchildren, excepting children of Indians who are wards of the United States governmentand children of all other Indians who are descendants of the original American Indiansof the United States, and for children of Chinese, Japanese or Mongolian parentage”(1682). See Section 3.3. “Schools for Indians, etc.” in Supplement of 1935 to Deering’sCodes and General Laws of 1931 and to Treadwell’s Constitution, ed. Curtis Hillyer (SanFrancisco, CA: Bancroft-Whitney Company, 1936), 1682.

93Balderrama, In Defense of La Raza, 61–67.94The Oxnard Daily Courier, 25 January 1930.


confirmed that the trustees needed to proceed with caution. Carpinte-ria resident Frank Montoya kept his three children home from schooland confirmed via his lawyer Emil Van Bever that he would continueto appeal segregation all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary.95

Oxnard school officials may have considered the possibility of whetherthe Mexican community would attempt a similar challenge.96

Parents in Oxnard did question school segregation, with requeststo transfer their children out of Mexican classes, the establishment ofa Mexican Parent Teacher Association, and threatened legal action.97

Rare recorded evidence of these forms of resistance include schoolboard minutes from September 21, 1938, when the trustees met with anattorney who represented Louis Carballo, a parent insisting his childrenstay in the predominately White classes at Roosevelt School.98 Twodays later, as they prepared a response for Carballo, the trustees met arepresentative from the District Attorney’s office and presented, “A mapof the city with school buildings and dividing lines along with minuterecords and tables showing how class changes had been made.”99 Hereagain, the trustees failed to record their justification for segregation,even while demonstrating their conscious use of residential patterns asa spatial guide for setting up race-based school boundaries.

Cultivating Inequality

Notwithstanding their unwillingness to document their rationale, thetrustees’ meticulous plans to segregate students by residence and race inthe 1930s helped establish a separate and unequal schooling system inOxnard. Pressure to maintain racial segregation of children increasedas the population grew. Between 1930 and 1940, the City of Oxnard’s

95Ibid. The article notes that while the case was being appealed, the three Montoyachildren were “not attending any school.” Three days later, the Los Angeles basedLa Opinion Spanish-language newspaper ran the same story in Spanish, with a frontpage headline Ninos Mexicanos Separados en las Escuelas Americanas (Mexican childrenseparated in American schools) La Opinion, Martes, 28 Enero 1930, 1. An oral historyof one of Montoya’s sons, Alfred Montoya, Jr. indicates his father’s name was “Fred”rather than “Frank,” and when his legal efforts failed, he sent his children to a smallschool five miles south of Carpinteria, in La Conchita. He later moved his family toMontebello, California. See John D. McCafferty, Aliso School: ‘For the Mexican Children’(Santa Barbara, CA: McSeas Books, 2003), 50–51.

96A Spanish-language newspaper La Voz de La Colonia, which aimed to representthe interests of the Mexican community in the areas of Ventura County, Santa Barbara,and the San Fernando Valley also reported on the case, “Sigue El Caso Carpinteria” (TheCarpinteria case continues) Jueves, 6 Marzo 1930.

97See Garcıa, Yosso, and Barajas, “A Few of the Brightest, Cleanest Mexican Chil-dren,” 16–17.

98For more on Carballo, see n97.99OSBT minutes, 23 September 1938. Unfortunately, the records did not include

the maps, charts, or tables referred to in the presentation to Mr. Hathaway.


population increased by 36 percent from 6,285 to 8,519 residents.100

On June 27, 1939, just a few days before Superintendent Haydock’s re-tirement became official, the trustees adopted a resolution to constructan elementary school east of the railroad tracks, in La Colonia.101 Themotion explained that a new building would help resolve the geographic“hazard” wherein “so many children must cross a railroad right of wayand two heavily traveled streets in going to and from school.”102 Thetrustees’ further described the need for an additional facility based on,“the increased enrollment in the primary school, known as RooseveltSchool, [which] has caused cramed [sic] conditions to exist therein.”103

Publicly lauded as a safer option for young children, who had beenwalking across the tracks for over two decades with almost no assistance,the creation of Ramona School conveniently relieved some pressurefrom the board members, who had been making pragmatic decisionsto maintain a separation between Mexican and White students withinexisting overcrowded facilities.104 A few weeks before Ramona School’sopening in September 1940, the Oxnard Press Courier’s direction toparents about where to send their children reiterated the significanceof residential segregation to school segregation,

[a]ll children living south of Fifth Street will attend the Haydock Schoolin the first six grades. All children living north of Fifth Street and West ofOxnard Boulevard will attend the Roosevelt School in the first six grades.All children living east of Oxnard Boulevard and north of Fifth Street willattend the Ramona School.105

This outline of geographic boundaries echoed the petitions ofWhite parents in 1936 and 1938, who had sought to preserve Whiteschooling conditions in an increasingly Mexican city. The board’s useof residential segregation as a guide to facilitate attendance divisionsensured that Mexican student enrollments at Ramona School never fellbelow 95 percent.

The boom in Oxnard’s population during the 1940s fueled the needfor additional schools. For example, the Bracero Program, initiated in

100U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of Population: 1950. Table 4. Populationof Urban Places of 10,000 or More from Earliest Census to 1950 (Washington, DC: U.S.Government Printing Office, 1953), Section 5, 10.

101OSBT minutes, 27 June 1939.102Ibid.103Ibid.104“Cobb Asks Protection On Boulevard Crossings For School Children,” The Ox-

nard Daily Courier, 2 May 1939. Within a week, the paper reported the assignment ofextra crossing guards to protect the children, “Mayor W. Roy Guyer Commended ForQuick Action In Safeguarding School Children,” The Oxnard Daily Courier, 9 May 1939.

105“Elementary Schools to Open Sept. 10; New Teachers Due,” Oxnard PressCourier, 29 August 1940, Section 2, 6.


1942, facilitated huge growth for Ventura County and for Oxnard.106

The Buena Vista Labor Camp, located east of the tracks, on Fifth Streetin Oxnard, became the largest labor camp in the United States.107 Fur-ther population growth occurred as a result of Oxnard’s Port Hueneme,the only port between Los Angeles and San Francisco, becoming a navalbase during WWII.108 The Oxnard Elementary School District did notbuild another facility until after WWII, with the 1946 construction ofJames Driffill School, west of the railroad tracks.109 A few weeks beforethe start of the 1948 school year, the Oxnard Press Courier publishedan article outlining school attendance “geographical zones,” includinga new school west of the tracks, Elm School.110 The report also notedongoing consultation between an architect and Superintendent Brittellplanning the replacement of Roosevelt School, which happened in 1949.The board named the new facility Clarence Brittell School.111 Thoughthe trustees’ minutes had not mentioned segregation for a decade, theirgeographical zones enabled the continuity of a dual educational system,with persistent racial boundaries between and within schools.

By 1950, Oxnard’s Spanish surname population (i.e., Mexicans)comprised 7,155 of the city’s 21,567 residents (at least 33 percent).112

106Ventura County counted 114,647 total residents in 1950. U.S. Bureau of theCensus, U.S. Census of Population: 1950. Table 6. Population of Counties by Minor Civil Di-visions: 1930–1950 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1953), Section5, 18; Mexicans, categorized as White persons of Spanish surname, comprised 21,697or almost 19% of Ventura County residents. U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census ofPopulation: 1950. Vol. IV, Special Reports, Part 3, Chapter C, Persons of Spanish Surname.Table 9. Characteristics of White Persons of Spanish Surname, for Selected Counties in SelectedSouthwestern States: 1950 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1953),Section 3C, 61.

107Richard Lyttle, “The Largest Labor Camp in Nation in Oxnard,” Oxnard PressCourier, 6 March 1958.

108Voters approved the bond to establish the port in 1937 and on 9 March 1942, itwas appropriated under wartime powers to establish the Naval Advanced Base Depot.Ventura County hired more than 10,000 civilian workers and 21,000 military personnelduring the 1940s. Downtown Oxnard Historic Resources Survey. Final Report (Santa Paula,CA: San Buena Ventura Research Associates), 15 July 2005.

109“New Elementary School Will Get Name ‘Driffill,’” Oxnard Press-Courier, 10April 1946, 1.

110“School Zones Outlined; Open Sept. 13,” Oxnard Press Courier, 2 September1948. Front Page. A map of the school zones accompanied the story.

111Brittell served as the District Superintendent from 1939 until his death in 1949.112U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of Population: 1950. vol. IV, Special Reports,

Part 3, Chapter C, Table 7. Citizenship and Country of Birth of White Persons of SpanishSurname, For Counties and Urban Places of 10,000 or More in Selected Southwestern States:1950 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1953), Section 3C, 43. The1950 U.S. Census Bureau used the term “Spanish surname” because they believed the1930 census word, “Mexican,” and the 1940 census label “Spanish mother tongue,” ledto underestimations of the Mexican population. U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Censusof Population: 1950. Vol. IV, Special Reports, Part 3, Chapter C, Persons of Spanish Surname(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1953), Section 3C, 5–6.


Though recruited as temporary contract workers, Braceros often es-tablished local relationships and many eventually brought their familiesfrom Mexico to Oxnard. Likewise, Black families, who relocated to Ox-nard as part of the wartime effort, settled permanently in the area. Thisfurther prompted the district to build another school east of the tracks.

In 1951, the trustees oversaw the construction of Juanita School,just one short block from Ramona School. A year later, the patternof building west of the tracks continued with Kamala School, and in1954 the trustees approved three additional west side facilities, BerniceCurren School, Dennis McKinna School, and a replacement HaydockSchool.113 By the time the U.S. Supreme Court decided the Brownv. Board of Education desegregation case, the trustees had strategicallypositioned nine of their eleven elementary schools west of the Boulevardand the tracks, in neighborhoods kept predominately White throughracial covenants. White parents could purchase property in these ex-clusive northwest areas with the tacit assurance that they would nothave Mexican or Black neighbors, and that their children would attendschool with very few Mexican or Black students.

Discussion

Space, as we experience it, is in many ways the product, and not the fixedcontext, of social interactions, ideological conceptions, and of course, legaldoctrine and public policy.114

In his essay on “The Boundaries of Race,” Richard T. Ford ad-dresses the importance of research that acknowledges the simultaneousconstructions of race and space. We have attempted to account forthose acts of private and public discrimination from 1934 to 1954,which institutionalized White privilege in Oxnard by racializing spaceand spatializing race.115 Our historical case study examines the system-atic marginalization of Mexicans that occurred through intentional,interconnected residential and school segregation.

113McKinna served as a trustee in the 1940s. The original Haydock School remainedopened until 1952, with enrollments over time of all primary grades K-8. The nametransferred to the new school constructed in 1954, and has since functioned as a juniorhigh school, enrolling 7–8 grade students.

114Ford, “The Boundaries of Race,” 1859.115Lipsitz critically reflects on the legacy of racial discrimination in housing that has

enabled Whites to accumulate and pass on wealth at the expense of Blacks and otherCommunities of Color, noting “Because of practices that racialize space and spatializerace, whiteness is learned and legitimated, perceived as natural, necessary, and inevitable”(6). George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press,2011).


In analyzing school board minutes and county records, we foundevidence of the trustees’ conscious, strategic use of racially identifiablespaces in Oxnard’s residential neighborhoods. We identified records ofschool officials buying, living in, and selling properties that containedracial covenants while implementing a dual schooling system. In ad-dition to personally profiting from residential segregation, the trusteesextended school contracts to Oxnard developers who bound their entiresubdivisions with racial restrictions. We argue these individual and col-lective actions expose an otherwise tacit ideological rationale for privi-leging Whites and discriminating against Mexicans within and beyondschools. Our findings question how segregated schooling conditionscame to be justified as an inevitable outcome of segregated housing pat-terns, somehow outside of school and city officials’ control and beyondjudicial remedies.

Our focus on the narrative during the twenty-year period priorto the 1954 Brown case confirms that similar to many other cities andtowns across the southwest, the legal distinction between de jure andde facto segregation did not disrupt the continuities of mundane racismin Oxnard. For example, the Mendez v. Westminster case, signed intoCalifornia law in 1947, led to the removal of racial exclusions in thestate education codes, and marked the legal end to racial segregationin California schools, but did not prevent the ongoing segregation ofMexican American students in Oxnard or elsewhere.116 Likewise, resi-dential segregation and housing discrimination did not stop in Oxnardor other cities despite the Shelley v. Kraemer and Barrows v. Jackson U.S.Supreme Court rulings against racial covenants. Successful Californialower court challenges to racial covenants such as the 1943 Doss v. Bernalcase in Fullerton, did not receive coverage in The Oxnard Daily Courier,and did not seem to phase Oxnard city or school officials.117 Instead, thetrustees named schools in honor of educational and civic leaders who

116See Mendez v. Westminster, 64 F. Supp. 544 (S.D. Cal. 1946); Richard R. Valencia,“The Mexican American Struggle for Equal Educational Opportunity in Mendez v.Westminster: Helping Pave the Way for Brown v. Board of Education,” Teachers CollegeRecord 107, no. 3 (2005): 389–423; Chicana/o students today are more segregated thanany racial/ethnic group in the United States. See Valencia, Menchaca, and Donato,“Segregation, Desegregation, and Integration of Chicano Students,” 105.

117Identified as one of the first successful challenges to racial housing covenants inthe United States, the 1943 decision from Judge Albert F. Ross of the Orange CountyCalifornia Superior Court found restrictive covenants against Mexicans Americans tobe unconstitutional. Apparently, the Los Angeles Times also failed to report on the case,though it did make the cover story of Time magazine. See Doss v. Bernal, Superior Courtof the State of California, Orange County, no. 41466 (1943); Robert Chao Romero andLuis Fernando Fernandez, Doss v. Bernal: Ending Mexican Apartheid in Orange County,Research Report No. 14 (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, University of Cali-fornia Los Angeles, February 2012).


endorsed and participated in segregation (e.g., Driffill, Brittell, Cur-ren, Haydock). Regardless of legal statutes and without an educationalrationale, the Oxnard School Board of Trustees discriminated againstMexican American children and their families as a strategic matter ofcourse. This public policy of school segregation sent the same messageracially restrictive covenants expressed privately: Mexicans would betolerated only to the extent that they remained, “strictly in the capacityof servant.”118

118For school officials’ grant deeds featuring this racially restrictive language, seen45, n77.

Documents

“Strictly in the Capacity of Servant”: The Interconnection Between Residential and School Segregation in Oxnard, California, 1934-1954