November 2004 
Editor: Mimi Lozano ©2000-4

Dedicated to Hispanic Heritage and Diversity Issues
 Society of Hispanic Historical and Ancestral Research

A U.S. soldier stationed in Iraq asked his wife to send him dirt, grass  seeds, and fertilizer so he could have the sweet aroma, and feel the grass grow beneath his feet. He is cutting the grass with a pair of a scissors.   Photo sent by Johanna De Soto

Johanna De Soto 
Edna Elizondo 
Daniel Enriquez
Karla Everett
Lorraine Frain
Lydia Garcia Peterson 
George Gause
Rosa Gonzales
Eddie Grijalva 
Juan Pablo Alvarez Guedea
Gabriel Gutierrez
Odell Harwell
Lorraine Hernandez
John Inclan 
David Lewis
Cindy Lobuglio 
Carrie Longoria
Dora Luz Haw 
Eddie Martinez
JV Martinez  
Bobby McDonald 
Barbara Miller
Fernando Muñoz Altea

Rafael Negrete
Michelle Norris
Rodrigo Leon 
Robert Olivares
Daniel Olivas 
Sal Osio
Guillermo Padilla Origel
Nikki Palley
J. Orozco
Angel Custodio Rebollo
Crispin Rendon  
Faus(tino) F. Rios
Viola Sadler
John P. Schmal
Diane A. Sears 
Howard Shorr   
Marianna (de la Torre) Bowers
Phil Valdez, Jr.
Marge Vallazza, 
Carlos B. Vega, Ph.D. 
J.D. Villarreal
Brent Wilkes 
Lucy Wilson     
  

See you soon, Carlos B. Vega, Ph.D.
SPAIN37@worldnet.att.net

Susan C. Sánchez, Ph.D.
Co-author, Chicken Soup for the Latino Soul 
PO Box 247
Clinton, NY  13323
http://www.latinosoul.com

UNITED STATES

Peter Fontanes,

Rueben Martinez
by James Ricci
Los Angeles Times Section: California Metro; Part B; Metro Desk, Sep 28, 2004.  pg. B.1
Sent by Barbara Miller  bmiller@fullerton.edu

All invited to celebrate with Rueben, click for more information.

At the appointed hour, however, there was no Krista Meisel. Instead, the telephone at Libreria Martinez Books & Art Gallery rang, and the man on the other end of the line, Daniel J. Socolow, congratulated Martinez for winning a $500,000, no-strings-attached MacArthur Foundation grant.

"I almost hung up on him, because I thought it was a crank call," Martinez recalled. "About a fourth of the way through the conversation, he said, 'Mr. Martinez, don't hang up, because this is the real stuff.' "
To prove it, Socolow asked Martinez if he had an appointment with a certain Krista Meisel for this hour."  They just wanted to make sure I was here," the bookseller said.

Martinez is one of 23 recipients whose names the foundation formally revealed today. Eight live in California. Martinez is the only one in Southern California and no doubt the only one who cut hair for a living for more than 30 years before opening his bookstore in 1993.

The thought of half a million dollars, to come in quarterly payments of $25,000 for the next five years, has left Martinez a little dazed, he said. Having accustomed himself to the life of a bookseller -- a small, rented apartment in Santa Ana, a 19-year-old Volvo with 342,000 miles -- he's not sure whether he will invest the money in expanding his business, which includes the main store in Santa Ana, a children's bookstore next door and a satellite store in Lynwood, or save some of it for his old age.

"But I'll tell you what, man, the money comes only if I stay alive, so I'm not going to take chances on the road anymore when I ride my bike," he said.

At 64, Martinez is a small, trim, muscular man with perfectly cut gray, swept-back hair and apparently inexhaustible energy. When discussing books and Latino literacy, his dark eyes glow with zeal and his steady stream of words accelerates without warning into a whitewater of exhortation. This he typically delivers bent forward from the waist toward his listeners, his hands churning, a style he has demonstrated from podiums at local grade schools, national booksellers' conventions, as well as Harvard and Oxford universities and the Sorbonne.

"We Latinos are a large population and we're growing fast, but it doesn't do us any good if we don't get educated so we can help the next generation," he said, growing restive on the couch in the bookstore's office. "So, love education," he commands, leaping to his feet. "Work hard. Don't give up. It's all about learning, all about pride, all about life."

The importance of Martinez's mission was underscored by two recent studies showing that about 50% of Latinos graduate from high school nationally, roughly 20 percentage points lower than the overall rate. Moreover, of Latinos entering college, only 23% get bachelor's degrees by age 26, compared with 47% of whites, according to another recent study.

Martinez was born in the tough little desert town of Miami, Ariz., where his parents were copper miners. His mother misspelled his first name on his birth certificate, transposing the "e" and "u" and writing "Rueben," his legal name. (Even the MacArthur people got the name wrong, spelling it "Reuben" on their website.)

A peripatetic boy, he nonetheless was an enthusiastic reader who moved from Edgar Allan Poe to Dumas to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Hemingway as he grew older. His reading fed a fascination with distant locales, and at 18 Martinez set out for Long Beach, a place he had read about. Once he laid eyes on the Pacific Ocean, he knew he would never return to Arizona to live.

Eventually, he built a prosperous life as a hairstylist. He put his three children through college (his son runs a home-remodeling business in Fresno, and his two daughters own an office machine- leasing business in Orange County). With business flourishing, Martinez had money to spare. "I was a Cadillac guy," he said. "I had a Corvette, rings galore -- phony stuff, man."

His metamorphosis into a bookman has been decidedly less pecuniary. "Nowadays," he said, "I don't even own a watch." The life change had its origins in two volumes he kept in his barbershop among the usual sporting magazines. As customers paid increasing attention to the books, Martinez slowly added to the collection.

When the number of books reached 100, Martinez had no choice but to build a bookcase for them. But buying books and lending them out in such numbers began to become financially untenable, and in 1993, when his collection had grown to about 200 volumes, he began selling.

Even as a barber, Martinez had been a community and political activist who often spoke to schoolchildren about the value of reading and education in general. "But I started getting more attention to what I was saying because now I was a bookseller."

For the first three years, his barbering paid the bookshop's expenses, but gradually rising book sales began to contribute more to the pot, and Martinez found himself with a new career, one that "just gave me a deeper pleasure in my heart."

By 1998, when he opened for business at his current location, his barbering had declined from as many as 30 appointments a day to a handful a week. He became a full-time and very noisy apostle of literacy and book-loving among the burgeoning Latino population of Santa Ana.

Eventually, he carried the gospel nationwide, helping alert publishers to the growing market for Spanish-language books in this country. He co-founded the Latino Book Festival, which now tours nationally, serves on the board of directors of Critica, a Publishers Weekly guide to Spanish-language titles, and speaks regularly at national conventions of publishers, librarians and teachers.

Each Thursday morning, he rises at 4 to drive to Univision studios in Los Angeles, where he has a live, five-minute program called "El Club de Libritos" ("The Little Books Club"). On the program, which is broadcast nationwide at 6:30 a.m., he reads to young children and urges parents, and fathers in particular, to read to their children.

At present, Martinez says, he sells about 125,000 books a year, the great majority in Spanish. The 7,000-square-foot Santa Ana store is a colorful, sunlight-filled place where books by eminent Spanish- language authors mingle with English-language classics translated into Spanish and with books in English.

On entering the store, a customer comes upon a table bearing bestsellers. Bill Clinton's "My Life" and its Spanish-language version, "Mi Vida," are stacked side by side. Clinton, Martinez said, was to have done a signing at the store but was hospitalized for heart bypass surgery.

Other famous authors, including Mexican literary giant Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, Sandra Cisneros and Univision newscaster and author Jorge Ramos, have drawn throngs to the store for signings.

Martinez said he will have to expand his business to survive and, accordingly, is considering establishing stores in other densely populated, working-class Latino communities. His original store's reputation as bookshop, community center and artistic and literary hotspot has drawn the interest of numerous mayors who have asked him to open a business in their cities.

Expansion should be easier since Libreria Martinez incorporated in January. Martinez believes the publicity surrounding the MacArthur Foundation announcement will increase investors' interest in the business. His ultimate goal, he said, is to become "the Barnes & Noble of Spanish-language books."

Even before today's announcement, word of Martinez's selection leaked out in Santa Ana. At the weekly story hour at his children's bookstore, an event that typically draws a score or so of youngsters, nearly 300 turned out last Saturday to congratulate him.

On Sunday, however, it was business as usual. Martinez spent the day washing the front windows of his shop and sweeping the long stretch of sidewalk. "Clean windows and a clean sidewalk -- what they say is, 'We're open for business,' " he said.

[[Editor:  I've known Rueben since he was a full-time barber.  The books  he loaned were in a single bookcase in the front section of the barber shop. When Rueben opened his first bookstore, it included a large hall which community groups frequently used for free. His second bookstore has a separate children's bookstore, next to it.  Rueben schedules children's activities with the many volunteers who support his vision.  It is a joy to see that Rueben has received national recognition. Congratulations Ruben. We are all proud of you!! ]] 

My mom wanted to know if the people we are both seeing right now since they do not get along would effect how my sister and are. I think she is scared that our relationship will suffer but it is impossibility. I love my sister with all of my heart and there is no force in this world including death that would change that. 

Department of Defense Aims to Attract More Hispanics to Its Work Force
By Donna Miles, American Forces Press Service
Sent by Brent Wilkes bwilkes@lulac.org

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12, 2004 - The Defense Department is increasingly reaching out to Hispanic organizations to get the word out about the broad range of military and civil service opportunities open to Hispanics, the Pentagon's top personnel officer told the American Forces Press Service today.

Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness David S.C. Chu said Hispanic representation in the armed forces has grown steadily during the past 10 years, and that DoD is continuing to make a concerted effort to attract more Hispanics to its work force.

Hispanics represent 9.9 percent of the active-duty enlisted force and 4.7 percent of the active-duty officer corps. In the reserve components, Hispanics make up 9.1 percent of enlisted service members and 4.3 percent of officers.  In contrast, Hispanics make up 16 percent of the 18-to-24-year-olds in the U.S. population.

Chu said Hispanic representation isn't shared equally by the military services. The Marine Corps is doing the best job of attracting Hispanics, he said, with Hispanics making up 14.5 percent of its enlisted force and 6.4 percent of its officer corps. The Army follows closely behind, trailed by
the Navy. But with Hispanics making up just 6 percent of its enlisted force and 3.6 percent of its officers, the Air Force faces "the biggest challenge," Chu said. Hispanics make up 6.2 percent of DoD's civil service work force, officials reported.

Chu said DoD is working with several Hispanic organizations to help overcome roadblocks in attracting Hispanics into military and civilian jobs in the department. One problem, he said, is that the Hispanic community doesn't tend to put as much emphasis as some other groups on finishing high school -- a virtual prerequisite to enlisting in the military.

Chu said the military's requirement that enlistees receive a high school diploma "isn't about smarts," but rather, provides an indicator of the person's ability to function in a structured environment.

Similarly, Chu said, Hispanics are less likely than some other groups to go on to college, possibly because they don't know about programs such as ROTC available to help them. Because all military officers must have a four-year degree under their belt, Chu said this means fewer Hispanics qualify to earn commissions.

At the same time, Chu said, Hispanic youth are facing the same phenomenon he said young people in other cultural groups are experiencing: their parents, teachers and other role models aren't necessarily supporting their interest in military service.

In response, the Defense Department is using a far-reaching strategy to attract Hispanics, from partnering with Hispanic groups to running ads directed at young people as well as adults in a position to influence their decisions, to sponsoring stay-in-school campaigns directed at Hispanic youth.

For the first time this year, DoD and all the military services participated in the League of United Latin American Citizen's annual training conference and convention, held in July in San Antonio.

During the session, DoD entered into a memorandum of understanding with the league supporting efforts to recruit and employ more Hispanics, showcased Hispanic military heroes from the past as well as on the battlefield today in Afghanistan and Iraq, and sponsored a career fair luncheon.

The Army also has a "You Soy El Army" advertising campaign, the Spanish-language counterpart to the "Army of One" program, which airs nationally on the Univision and Telemundo cable networks as well as on radio stations in key Hispanic markets.

"We must appeal to the full cross-section of young Americans with sufficient encouragement so they are interested in considering a tour of military duty or perhaps a career," he said.

The National Archives will award contracts of greater than $20 million to begin building the Electronic Records Archives (ERA). ERA will be a comprehensive, systematic and dynamic means for preserving virtually any kind of electronic record, free from dependence on any specific hardware or software. The project, encompassing several petabytes (one million gigabytes) of data, is scheduled to open by 2007, and is expected to be completed by 2011.

Los Angeles Times, October 10, 2004
Sent by Howard Shorr  howardshorr@msn.com

Last week, The Times reported that California demographers had scaled back their state population projections for 2040, citing a sharp decline in the Latino birthrate. They had overestimated population growth in part because their assumptions incorporated a 1970s nostalgia that treated culture the same way that Americans have always regarded race.

As a result, the demographers didn't properly take into account assimilation and its effect on fertility across generations of immigrants. As with previous newcomers, today's second generation tends to have fewer children than the first, and the third fewer still.

Americans traditionally considered race as unchangeable and biologically determined. Culture and ethnicity, by contrast, were seen as less innate and more malleable; they changed and adapted over time. Though it was scandalous for a black man to "pass" for white, it was always more acceptable for a Jew to pass for a WASP (think Ralph Lauren) or a Mexican to identify herself as Italian or Spanish (think New Mexico).

Incorporating this idea into its questions, the Census Bureau asked Americans about their parents' place of birth. This allowed analysts to sort the data across at least three generations. The first generation reported being foreign-born, the second native-born to foreign-born parents and the third and beyond were native-born to native-born parents.

In 1970, ancestry replaced parent's place of birth in the bureau's decennial questionnaire. This shift was a product of the times. Only 5% of the U.S. population was foreign-born then, the lowest percentage in American history.

Many latter-generation Americans felt alienated from their ethnic roots; others reacted to the emergence of black nationalism. The new ideology of multiculturalism attracted them. Though many of its adherents were thoroughly assimilated, an increasing number of Americans of all backgrounds came to see the U.S. as less of a melting pot and more of a confederation of permanently separate races, ethnicities and cultures.

Multiculturalism emphasized and celebrated cultural continuity across generations. It preached that a third-generation Japanese American had more in common with his foreign-born grandmother than with his fifth-generation Polish American neighbor.

Assimilation was a dirty word in such a scheme. It was viewed as necessarily coercive rather than as a process by which people of diverse origins gradually achieved a "cultural solidarity sufficient at least to sustain a national existence," as sociologist Robert E. Park wrote in the 1930s. Because assimilation was said to promote ethnic self-hatred and homogenization, it was assumed that if immigrants were not forced to assimilate, they wouldn't.

For African Americans, railing against assimilation was another way to reject a mainstream culture that had long rejected them. But for many whites and Mexican Americans — there was no such thing as a Latino in 1970 — the driving force behind their rebuff of assimilation was nostalgia.

The typical white American was several generations removed from the immigrant experience. The majority of Mexican Americans were at least third generation. Multiculturalism and its sentimental emphasis on cultural continuity allowed these latter-generation Americans to reclaim a culture, and sometimes an identity, they felt had slipped through their fingers. Highly assimilated, English-dominant Mexican Americans could reclaim a strong Mexican identity. A sixth-generation white suburbanite of mixed European ancestry could call herself Irish and thus enjoy a sense of intimacy that whiteness never bestowed.

Ironically, just as the U.S. was about to receive one of the largest immigrant waves in its history, Americans began to view ethnicity and culture in terms of preservation rather than change.

Multiculturalism did allow contemporary immigrants the space to retain and adapt new and old behaviors and styles as they wished. One result was that the nation became more comfortable with cultural differences. Gone were the days when the children of immigrants were punished for uttering a foreign language in school. The sometimes humiliating Americanization programs of the 1910s and 1920s were no more than bad memories.

But over time, multiculturalism also kept us from understanding how the United States was changing. The celebration of difference hasn't allow us to see how immigrant and the majority cultures so often influence each other and converge.

The cult of cultural preservation encouraged us to believe that contemporary immigrant ethnicity and culture are constant, if not static, over time. New immigrants and their children were expected to continue playing their assigned roles. We're astonished and disappointed when a third-generation Mexican American politician speaks poor Spanish, yet we'd never think of scolding Rudy Giuliani for his poor Italian skills or Barbara Boxer for her nonexistent Yiddish. Some post-ethnic Americans even romanticize new immigrants, particularly Latinos, as symbols of resistance to the anomie and cold commercialism of contemporary American life.

But like it or not, assimilation happens.

In a 2002 study by the Public Policy Institute of California, demographers Laura Hill and Hans Johnson discovered that higher educational achievement, lower rates of marriage and less poverty accounted for the decline in fertility among second-generation Latinas. In fact, it is the fast growth of the second generation of Latinos that has state demographers lowering their estimates of Latino population growth.

Even as government, business and organizations strive to better reach the first-generation immigrant by crafting new messages and speaking their languages, they may soon have to reconsider their approaches because the number of American-born children of immigrants is exploding. Korean immigrant churches must offer services in English to hold on to their second-generation parishioners. Marketing firms are studying the eclectic consumer and entertainment tastes of the children of immigrants.

The question of whether we view ethnicity as fluid or rigid is not merely academic. State population projections, for instance, help planners determine the long-term needs for schools and other public services. There is serious money at stake. The assumption that immigrant cultures remain static over time is a quaint relic from another era. We cannot properly plan for the future if we don't understand that culture is as ever-changing and dynamic as it has always been

Con la Misma Gallardía/With the Same Elegance

By Viola Rodriguez Sadler
Interview, September 21, 2004

Percent of People 5 Years and Over 

Who Speak Spanish at Home 

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2003 American Community Survey

The table above shows the margin of error, represented by the lower and upper bounds of the 90-percent confidence interval. The confidence interval gives a range of values likely to include the population true value.  The smaller the confidence interval the more precise the estimate of the characteristic of interest.  

Brownsville / McAllen / Laredo (etc.) NOT found.
Cameron / Hidalgo Counties (etc.) found under "county level" link to right.
Sent by George Gause   ggause@panam.edu

New job website for Spanish-speaking professionals,  thousands of job opportunities posted by  leading companies who are searching for Spanish-speaking individuals. Job seekers can register, upload a resume and apply for a job totally free. Every job seeker who uploads their resume will get an opportunity to be featured on the home page. Currently all companies can also post job openings for free and search the resume database for job seekers.

Hispanic-Jobs.com was founded by a Human Resources professional in 2004 in Los Angeles, California and is the career site for employers who want to reach Spanish speaking professionals.  Hispanic-Jobs.com provides one central place to do all of your online recruiting to find Spanish speaking individuals from all over the world. Employers/Recruiters can post jobs for free and randomly become a featured employer. Each job that is posted with us becomes a featured job on the home page until the next job is posted. This gives  maximum exposure to reach a large talent pool.   Hispanic-Jobs.com enables employers to search the database at any time.

Employers/recruiters will be able to: · Post, update, delete any amount of jobs for free · upload a company logo · Search the database for candidates · Advertise to candidates with company profile · Contact specific candidates for interviews · Be notified about candidates that register · See how many people viewed your job posting.            Sent by Cindy LoBuglio

The 50 Most Important Hispanics in Technology & Business
Pushing to the Top in American Industry
Hispanic Engineer & Information Technology Online
http://www.hispanicengineer.com/Editorial/Power%20Hitters.shtml
Sent by Johanna De Soto

As might be expected, many of the "50 Most Important Hispanics in Technology and Business" are engineers, many of whom repeat here from last year. Engineers, modern wizards whose scientific mastery drives American industrial progress, are the people who create America's wealth. But not all of the "50 Most" are engineers. Many are savvy executives, managers who understand how technology is to be used and sold, marketers whose sophistication in meeting customer needs undergirds the success of entire enterprises. Some started as engineers and learned business skills while mastering the difficult art of turning ideas into products.  Little bios and photos.

"In a stunning departure from the social realism of his previous collection, Daniel A. Olivas takes readers into a disarming other-world of the surreal and the supernatural with his second book of stories, "Devil Talk" (Bilingual Press, $13 paperback). The quick succession of 26 narratives covers a wide territory of moods, from the strangely elliptical to the whimsical. But in each case, just as the storyline begins to settle into its alternative universe, Olivas discombobulates the reader with plot twists and unexpected endings skillfully engineered into his unusual premises."  Yet far from mere gimmicks, the plot devices function as unique portholes that capture perspective on human thought and folly from a slightly different angle.

The pleasure of "Devil Talk" is that no story repeats its surprise element, so there is no guessing what happens next. And because many of these stories are touching as well as entertaining, it is clear Olivas doesn't compromise characterization to narrative design. 

At the end of the book, readers will have stretched the imagination to exhaustion. But by then even the improbable is no longer unreachable. One character considers the idea of a flying rhinoceros and then calmly asks, "What's so strange about that?" Nothing. Not after reading "Devil Talk," that is.

Review by Rigoberto González, award-winning writer based in New York City. His Web site address is http://www.rigobertogonzalez.com   and he may be reached at Rigoberto70@aol.com

Proposition 187 aroused a great deal of passion among Latino voters throughout California and led to flurry of naturalizations and voter registrations. More than 2.7 million illegal aliens, many from Mexico and Central America, had been awarded lawful permanent residence as a result of the amnesties granted in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. During the mid-1990s, the leading edge of these undocumented immigrants had fulfilled their citizenship requirements and became eligible to vote for the first time in 1996.

According to INS statistics, a record 879,000 immigrant adults had been naturalized in California between 1994 and 1997. These new citizens led to significant demographic changes. In 1992, foreign-born Latino voters made up only 19% of Latino voters; by 1996, this had increased dramatically to 32.9% in 1996 and 35.6% in 2000. During an eight-year period in the 1990s, 441,000 Hispanics in California had become citizens.

http://www.svrep.org/aboutsvrep/fact_sheet.html  [SVREP - "Important Facts About SVREP"].

http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/voting.html  [U.S. Census Bureau: "Voting and Registration"].

http://www.wcvi.org/latino_voter_research/latino_voter_statistics.html
[William C. Velásquez Institute, "Latino Voter Statistics"]

http://www.fec.gov/pages/raceto.htm

[Federal Election Commission, "Voter Registration and Turnout in Federal Elections by Race/Ethnicity 1972-1996"]

SURNAME:  CHAPA

• Born 1631 in Arbisola, a small village outside Genoa, Italy. Parents, Bartolome Schiapapria and Batestina Badi. Very literate middle class family, owned a vineyard.
• Studied for the priesthood in Spain for two years.
• At 18 years old Chapa emigrated to New Spain.
  
• Meets Captain Alonso De Leon, who chronicled 50 years of colonization activities of Nuevo Leon, starting date 1577. He found no governmental interest in publishing.
• Chapa served in a clerical position under De Leon and also performed ranch and administrative work. .
  
• Appointed as Secretary to the State of Nuevo Leon in 1662 by Governor Zavala.
• Chapa served an uninterrupted forty years under nine governors.
  He held the office of second-in-command in governmental and war matters.
• Chapa rode out on all expeditions. He made detailed maps and pinpointed major land features with observed longitude and latitude. He kept meticulous records. Adding to 60 years to the work of Alonso De Leon.
• He did not identify himself in any way. ." and if I remain unknown, they will not have a target to shoot at."
  
• 219 years later in 1909 his manuscript, Historia del Nuevo Reino de León, is published in    1909, credit is given to an Unknown Author.
• 1961 Chapa identified through the work of Israel Cavazos Garza, Historian for the State Nuevo Leon.
• 1990 Cavazos Garza prepared a more exhaustive study of the autor anónimo.
  in which he stresses the value of Chapa's work which covers about forty Texas counties.
  

Juan Bautista Chapa/ Beatriz Olivares de Trevino, 1653
        Jose Maria Chapa/Josepha Gallardo Sanchez
                Augustin Javier Chapa/Antonia Margarita Guajardo
                        Joseph Javier Chapa/Josepha Garza
                               Jose Antonio Chapa/Maria Encarnacion Barrera
                                       Jose Dionicio Chapa/Prima Feliciana Flores
                                              Jose Anestacio Chapa/Teodora Sanchez
                                                            Alberto Chapa is my maternal grandfather

Alberto and Petra Chapa, 1915
Sabinas Hidalgo, Mexico

Grandfather Alberto served as a Congressman/Diputado with some auditing responsibility directly under the president.  Mom said at one point when a town would not open its records to him, he stormed the city hall with military force and had all of records loaded onto a train. The records were sent to Mexico City and examined carefully.  After that, he had no problem getting municipal cooperation. 

The family of nine immigrated legally to San Antonio through Laredo in three waves between 1924 and 1925. Grandfather and the three older girls first, the middle group, and lastly Grandmother with the last baby in arm and toddler. A fee was paid per person, proof also had to be given that the family had sufficient fund to maintain themselves.

By the early 1930s some of the family had moved to Los Angeles.  Grandma and Grandpa lived in a Bunker Hills.  Older homes built in the 1870 were being made into apartments and room rentals. 

By the late 1930s homes could be purchased by Mexicans in the Jewish areas of Boyle Heights.  In the 1940, Grandfather and Tia Deya, the older daughter and her husband, Rudy Amparan  bought homes next to each other on Evergreen Street.  Then my Dad and Mom bought a home across the street from them, their first.  I was in the 3rd grade when we moved there.  Lots of fun memories sliding down the mustard hills behind our house, and playing at the Wabash Playground.  

Two vivid family memories:  When Uncle Albert entered the Marines, grandma and all my aunts and Mom were crying and crying and crying. He was the infant that Grandma carried into the U.S..  Gratefully he came home after serving throughout the war in the South Pacific.  I remember him laughing when I hesitantly touched the top of a medal which he had received.  My Uncle Oscar, in the center of the photo, served in the Army Air Force, Sergeant Major of a crew of mechanics.  

I remember Grandfather receiving a letter from the president of Mexico.  The letter was imploring Grandfather Alberto to return to Mexico and accept an important position in the government.  After much emotional family discussion, the family decided to remain in the U.S.

After the second world war, most of the family moved to Stockton, California, bought homes and settled.  Some of the descendants are still living in Stockton. The summer between my Freshman and Sophomore years, I lived with my grandparents and attended University of Pacific.  I was impressed with my grandfather's knowledge.  I could ask him for a definition to any English word that I could not understand and he always knew the answer. However, he would explain in Spanish because he did not like his own pronunciations of English words.  

The compilation of this information is in response to those who claim that Mexicans are not assimilating fast enough into the dominant culture.  The information is presented in two forms for two different Chapa Clans. The first, my family, the older Chapa family includes the percentages of marriage with non-Hispanics, surnames that are now part of my family, occupations, and dominant language.  Only one in the photo is still living, Uncle Oscar in the middle. The second Chapa clan information is presented visually. 

Chapa Family I, (c) 1935 Los Angeles
Mexico >    Texas >   California

Alberto and Petra Chapa in the middle, 
Oldest daughter, Deya to the left of Grandma,
Second oldest daughter, Adelpha, to the right of Grandpa    
Standing from the left to the right
Albert, Jr., my mom Aurora, Dora, Oscar, Elia, Dora, Alba  

Analysis of Marriages of Alberto Chapa Family 
who immigrated from Mexico to the U.S. in 1924-1925
Evidence of Rapid Assimilation
Language spoken refers to those of direct blood lineage

SURNAMES ENTERING INTO THE CHAPA FAMILY CLAN

Chapa Family II  (c) 1958 Texas
Children of Christobal Chapa and Esperanza Jimenez Chapa 

These families start in Alice, Texas and now live in  
Missouri, Colorado, Texas, Arizona, Illinois 

Ruben Chapa parents burying her first born, Aliberio 1934
    

We all  had to wear head scarves  and keep our heads covered in church.  I  sure can remember  going to Catholic school throughout  grade school and high school.  Then  they said we could  wear the lace chapel cap . And now nothing on our heads. What a change,  we couldn't even wear sleeveless tops or slacks.

Reynaldo and Modesta (Jimenez )Chapa
The 50th Anniversary of Ruben (Bill) Chapa's Aunt and Uncle.  
His mother Esperanza was also a Jimenez married to a Chapa.

1: Aliberio Chapa (b.1934/d.1934) Pneumonia
2: Ruben "Bill" Chapa (b.1935)= Bonnie McNabb 
          Dave Chapa =
                    Jessica
                    Christine 
          Steve Chapa
                    Steven 
          Margurite Chapa = Jay Rex Spent
                    Alexander C. Spent 
3: Virginia Chapa (b.1938) =Guadeloupe Villarreal VillarreChristina = Pena
                   Ronnie  Pena
                   Brian Pena
          Nora = Albert Salas
                   Melanie Montez
                   Megan Montez 
          Norma Jean = Northcutt
                   Priscilla Northcutt
                   Cito Jr Northcutt
         Mary Helen =
                   Crystal
                   Anthony
                   Guadeloupe
         Hilda =
                   Anthony
                   Davis Lee
                   Amanda
         Danny = Mary
                   Naomi
         Lupe Jr.
                   Vanessa 
4: Alfredo "Sonny" Chapa (b.1942)
          Alfonso 
          David 
          Alfredo Jr
          Tammy 
          Estella 
          Yvette 
5:   Esperanza Jimenez still born 1943

This is a picture of  the first grandchild 
Steven M. Chapa born Oct 29 1985.  

                   Baby's shirt reads 
                "Grandpas little co- pilot" 

Steve is a single father of his son Steven who just graduated from High school this  year. Steven is in college studying  for real-estate license to join his father's companies. 

Danny lives in Austin.  As a child he frequently went up with his Tio Ruben  "Bill" Chapa.  He is currently working on his private pilot's license.   

Albert Chapa Jr.  flies jets, planes, and helicopters out of Lubbock, TX.  He is a commercial chief pilot  for Seven Bar, AeroCare Aviation Company.  

Albert flies a medical crew in emergencies, saving  lives with  flight  for life.   He says he is greatly rewarded when his  passengers whose lives he has flown in emergencies return to find him  to shake his hand  and thank him.

He is the son Albert  and Heladia Loy Chapa of Plainview TX . Albert is married to Doris Chapa.  They have  2 children,Josh and Kristen Chapa .

Albert's fascination with planes was started as a young boy. He sits in the cockpit of a King 200 getting ready  to take off from Denver Colorado to Lubbock Texas. Albert is the nephew of Ruben (Bill) Chapa who frequently took him flying with him.

Their son Chris Chapa III standing and his daughter Brittany of Amarillo, Texas. 

Chris and Flora had another son who passed away in an auto Accident Joey Chapa born Aug 27 1973 to July 18, 1995. 
 
Christobal Chapa Jr is retiring from the carpet business. Wife Flora is a Bilingual Service Consultant for SBC.  Son Chris  is an electrician  for Auto-Chlor of  Amarillo  Texas. 

Jay and Brittany

They have 2 brothers Danny Villarreal and Lupe Villarreal Jr.

Benito  and Mary Lou opened a real estate business in Aurora Illinois, 1957.  In 1970, another Chapa Realty office was opened in Chicago, Il. Son Fernando and Rep. Chapa LaVia joined the family business. Fernando's wife Zaida is secretary. Their other children are Benito Jr. and   Esmeralda Gorski, children, Christopher  and Lauren  Gorski

Benito and Mary Lou Family 


llinois State Representative, 
Linda Chapa-La-Via

Linda Chap-La Via began to make a name for herself in the same way as her mother did, as a business women and real estate agent. Little by little, the idea of running in an election had begun to cross her mind. " My intention was to announce my candidacy for the city council of Auora, but another Latino David Marquez had beat me to it, and I didn't want to split the Hispanic vote.

Eventually Chapa-LaVia was elected Representative of District 83 with 54% of the vote. The rest, as they say is history. In November Linda will celebrate her second anniversary as state representative and will begin her second term. She was elected to the position without opposition.  

It is complicated to be the first Latina elected outside of Cook County.  She arrived in Aurora in a period when Latinos couldn't enter certain restaurants and she made it in spite of the obstacles. My mother came from a family of fruit-pickers, but she inspired us to love learning. She achieved her dream of sending us to college."

In La Raza, she is quoted: "Many people from all over the world come to the United States for a better life", said Chapa LaVia. "We need to assure those immigrants that it is possible to achieve the American dream for these families", she added.  The initiative for this program was proposed last month by the Governor and gives $3,000,000 to neighborhood organizations, religious groups, community colleges and immigration counselors. These groups utilize the funds to support the immigrants that are eligible for naturalization, helping them to become citizens.

  "America is a land of promise and opportunity, but citizenship is a prerequisite to receive the majority of these opportunities", said Chapa LaVia. "Supporting people to become citizens, we hope that more people can have access to the state services and can become active citizens", she added. Linda Chapa has said that she will actively work to assure that this program be maintained within this year’s relative budget.  For more information about this program you can call the office of Representative Linda Chapa LaVia at (630) 264 6855. © La Raza

Illinois State Rep. Linda Chapa LaVia  
Website: http://www.lindachapalavia.com
http://www.ift-aft.org/PAC/Candidates/House/chapalavia.htm

Another national figure >  Milwaukee Brewers: Jon Michael ( Chapa ) Adams  

Finished 3-7 with a 3.15 ERA and a team-leading 14 saves for the Double A Huntsville Stars of the Southern League, striking out 83 in 74.1 innings ... named to the Southern League All-Star team ... held opposing batters to a .208 average, allowing just 58 hits ... threw 5.1 innings of hitless relief while striking out six in a 5-3 loss June 23 vs West Tennessee ... posted a sterling 1.10 ERA in eight June appearances going 1-0 with a pair of saves ... in his first career start July 3 at Birmingham, allowed three earned runs in four innings ... in 20 appearances from May 30-August 11, had six saves and an ERA of 1.72. 

Also received an email from Dr. Chapa who is a forensic epidemiologist for New York City and  teaches health courses for the College of New Rochelle.  His father had grown up in the same town as my mother's family, Sabinas Hidalgo, Nuevo Leon.  

His father Luis Chapa Garza  moved to Chicago around 1955,  and married Bertha Morales Arenas from Anahuac NL.  Dr. Chapa was born in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, but completed doctoral work at the medical school at Yale in epidemiology, a fine example of rapid assimilation.

  Galvez Patriots

California Spanish Genealogy
Don Juan Pablo Grijalva 

The Texas Connection 
to the American Revolution

California Spanish Genealogy

Don Juan Pablo Grijalva 
by 
Eddie Grijalva

The Texas Connection 
to the 
American Revolution

ORANGE COUNTY, CA

Dear Friends and Family of Libreria Martinez,

We are extremely excited to announce today (September 28) that Rueben Martinez, Owner and Founder of Libreria Martinez Books and Art Gallery, has been named a MacArthur Fellow for 2004 by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Each MacArthur Fellow will receive support by a fellowship grant that extends over the next five years.

The MacArthur Fellows Program underscores the importance of the creative individual in society. Fellows are selected for their originality, creativity, and the potential to do more in the future. Candidates are nominated, evaluated, and selected through a rigorous and confidential process. No one may apply for the awards, nor are any interviews conducted.

Daniel J. Socolow, the director of the MacArthur Fellows Program, noted that "it is exciting, especially in these times, to see such a collection of decidedly bold and risk-taking people who are changing our landscape and advancing our possibilities. Included among the new MacArthur Fellows are such people as a farmer, a microbiologist, a poet, a ragtime pianist, a marine roboticist, an inventor, a high school teacher, and so many other fascinating people in vastly different fields. What they share in common is that each is highly focused, tenacious, and creative. As in past years, these Fellows are not only very good at what they do, their work is also important and distinctively original."

Typically, between 20 and 25 Fellows are selected each year. As the only Southern California MacArthur Fellow recipient in the class of 2004, Mr. Martinez is very grateful and honored to receive this prestigious fellowship. Mr. Martinez said, "I would like to thank all of you who have helped me, throughout the years, make my dream a reality. Coming from a small Arizona mining town and receiving this award today, along with the rest of the MacArthur Fellows, is truly overwhelming. It just goes to show that with hard work, dedication and support from your community and friends, you can make miracles happen. Just look at what we have accomplished together over the years in Santa Ana and what we are starting in Lynwood."

Mr. Martinez’ vision has been recognized by the MacArthur Foundation’s selection committee as unique and a benefit to our community and society as a whole. We hope that you will join Mr. Martinez in sharing this exclusive national award when we host an open house celebration soon at Libreria Martinez Books & Art Gallery in Santa Ana. Look for your email invitation.

Sinceramente,

Libreria Martinez Staff, Volunteers and Friends

A press release and the biography below of Mr. Martinez will be released to the national media by the MacArthur Foundation today, so be sure to look for the exciting news in your favorite newspaper and news related television programs or visit the MacArthur Foundation at http://www.macfound.org/.

About Rueben Martinez: Rueben Martinez has elevated bookselling from a business to a campaign in support of underserved populations in California and throughout America. His Santa Ana bookstore, Libreria Martinez Books and Art Gallery, was originally a barbershop and is now among the largest commercial sellers of Spanish-language books in the country, serving as the cornerstone of cultural events and community activities that promote the benefits of reading to Hispanic-Americans and Spanish-speaking immigrants. A co-founder of the Latino Book Festival (which now tours nationally), Martinez motivates Spanish-speaking people to value literature, to read for themselves, and to read to their children. The record number of enthusiastic adults and children drawn to Libreria Martinez makes the store a destination for leading bilingual and Latino authors. Acclaimed by educators and librarians throughout the country, Martinez’ unique brand of entrepreneurship and advocacy is an important complement to institutional and program efforts to enrich and anchor the lives of a large and growing population in America.

Rueben Martinez has been a professional barber and entrepreneur for more than forty years. In 1993, he founded Libreria Martinez Books and Art Gallery, a small business operating out of his barbershop. By 1999, the bookstore had expanded and moved into its own location, and, in 2001, he launched a second venue dedicated to children’s literature. Martinez is a founding member of Santa Ana’s Reading City Committee. In 1997, he helped develop the multi-city Latino Book Festival.

About Libreria Martinez Books and Art Gallery

Bookstore, art gallery, children’s books center, community center, and ground zero for the campaign to get entire communities reading - Libreria Martinez Books & Art Gallery has emerged from its humble origins as a barbershop with books into a national phenomenon. It is rather, to develop a community of readers thereby improving the performance of children in schools, enriching families, instilling pride in the cultural roots and traditions of Latinos, and celebrating the successes of learners. Writers value the invitation from Libreria Martinez to appear for book signings. Carlos Fuentes, Mexico’s leading intellectual, appeared for his only book signing ever in the US. Other well-known writers who frequent the bookstore include Isabele Allende, Sandra Cisneros, Rudolfo Anaya, Jorge Ramos, Gary Soto and Victor Villasenor, and so many, many others. Libreria Martinez currently has three locations with two in Santa Ana, California and a one in Lynwood, California. Lastly its books (and ganas) are available via the Internet at latinobooks.com.

Visit Libreria Martinez on-line http://latinobooks.com

LATINO BLOOD, AMERICAN HEARTS

My thoughts then turned to the absent members of The Eugene A. Obregon Congressional Medal of Honor Memorial Foundation. I could feel the presence of the co-founder Al Flores, and dedicated fund-raiser Pete Valdez, Sr. My mind began to drift back, remembering how I became involved with the monument project.

William Douglas Lansford and I have spent countless hours through the years of our friendship discussing movies, art, history, books, life, politics, and of course our two favorite subjects, Mesoamerican culture and Latino history. During one of those conversations, Bill shared with me his vision for a monument dedicated to the Latino Congressional Medal of Honor recipients. The more we talked, the more convinced we were about building a Latino monument. Soon our plans became a defiant si se puede project. It didn’t take long for Lansford and I to have enough written material and color renderings to package The Eugene A. Obregon Congressional Medal of Honor Monument presentation.

 With those fine words, Lansford stood hugging Virginia, Eugene's sister, and the dignified 96-year-old mother, Henrietta Obregon. Bill graciously presented the Obregon family with a memorial plaque from the Memorial Foundation organization. The event host, Councilmember Antonio Villaraigosa spoke warmly throughout the ceremony about growing up in the community and his pride for Los Angeles' Hispanic history. He also spoke of the value of having the Obregon Monument in the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument site. Afterwards, we all moved to the area below the four flags of our Country, State, City and the POW/MIA. Council member Villaraigosa removed the colorful sarape revealing the bronze marker on polished granite stone and then read aloud the inscription:

Unveiling the Marker - Pictured from left to right; 
Eddie Martinez, Designer, Roger I. Brautigan, Undersecretary of Veterans Affairs, Bill Lansford, Foundation Founder, and City Councilman, Antonio Villaraigosa reading from Bronze Marker

LATINO BLOOD, AMERICAN HEARTS

This site is dedicated to the Latino-American heroes who received the
Congressional Medal of Honor, our nation's highest award for bravery.
For love of country, they performed above the call of duty.

TO ALL MEDAL OF HONOR RECIPIENTS
Courage and Gallantry graced their deeds and their guide was Honor.
Erected by the
Eugene Obregon/Congressional Medal of Honor Memorial Foundation
October 2, 2004

Throughout the entire Eugene A. Obregon Flag Raising Ceremony "there wasn't a dry eye in the house." Afterwards there was a lot of hugging, picture taking, and congratulations. When Jessie and I were leaving Olvera Street, I couldn't help but think of our next biggest challenge, the challenge of raising the needed funds to build Obregon Monument through to its completion.  

To contact Eddie Martinez:  e.martinez@adelphia.net
 

The two hour luncheon included Mexican cuisine, a wonderful Mexican dance troop "Grupo Folklorico," and myself as guest speaker.  Over one hundred were present and all enjoyed the wonderful celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month. 

On Oct. 12th, 2004 I presented twice on behalf of SHHAR, First was the "The de Ribera Family an Hispanic - American Family Experience 1599 to Present". Secondly, discussed the Galvez Project and his contributions to the Founding of The United States.  The venue was Los Angeles City College, held in Los Angeles, California.

The celebration included lunch for student attendees and myself as guest speaker.  Many students attended and all enjoyed the wonderful celebration of the Second Annual Genealogical Conference Celebrating African - American, Chicana, and Latina Genealogy. 

If your organization would like a speaker for an upcoming event:  
Please contact Michael Perez   msphistory@aol.com  or mimilozano@aol.com

SHHAR Board members involved with the Buscando Nuestras Raices Conference  included your editor, Michael Perez, and from left to right, seated with Yolanda Magdaleno, speakers

                                  Yolanda Ochoa,            John Schmal,                   Steve Hernandez.

Dr. Francisco Balderrama

Nacimientos Workshop
Artist and educator Daniel F. Martinez leads a historical lecture and hands-on workshop on a Spanish tradition brought to Mexico in the late 1500s. Martinez will teach participants to create their own Nativity, or Nacimientos, from an array of various materials such as wood, fiber, cardboard and paint. Cost is $35 per person and includes all materials, appetizers and wine; reservations required.  

Eliza Boné, Public Relations Coordinator
Rancho Los Cerritos Historic Site
4600 Virginia Road, Long Beach, CA 90807
(562) 570-1755  http://www.rancholoscerritos.org

Please RSVP to Nikki Palley: nikkiict@earthlink.net  or 562-495-4595, ext 17. Please tell all your friends or pass this e-mail on.  The more the merrier.  The series has been called "a gift" and "a treasure" and some audience members drive up to two hours each way to attend.

LOS ANGELES CITY COUNCIL:

THE STRUGGLE FOR CHICANO REPRESENTATION

By John P. Schmal

Cristobal Aguilar also had the distinction of serving as the last Mexican-American Mayor of Los Angeles (from 1866 to 1868 and 1871 to 1872). In 1870, the former Mexican city of Los Angeles still had a Latino voting registration of 22%. However, with a large influx of Anglos in the decades to come, this percentage steadily dropped. The enactment of a literacy requirement in 1894 further reduced the number of Spanish-speaking voters. After the 1886 reelection of M.V. Biscailuz to the Common Council, no person of Hispanic heritage was elected to serve on the Los Angeles City Council until the very end of the first half of the Twentieth Century.

Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Edward R. Roybal came to Boyle Heights in 1922 with his parents, when his unemployed father sought new employment. Roybal graduated from Roosevelt High School and attended UCLA before going to World War II. After the war had ended, he returned to Los Angeles and became the Director of Health Education for the Los Angeles County Tuberculosis and Health Association.

In 1947, 30-year-old Roybal decided to run for councilman of the 9^th Council District, which included Boyle Heights, Bunker Hill, Civic Center, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, and the Central Avenue District. The racial makeup of the district’s 185,033 residents was: 45% White, 34% Latino, 15% African American, and 6% "other." Even Roybal’s political base, Boyle Heights, was just 43% Hispanic at the time, while 34% of the inhabitants were native-born Whites.

Professor Katherine Underwood has analyzed Roybal’s run for office and noted that Roybal’s first campaign lacked endorsements and neglected voter outreach. In the primary election on April 1, 1947, Edward Roybal and three other candidates ran against the incumbent councilman, Parley Parker Christensen. On Election Day, Christensen won 8,948 votes, while Roybal came in third with 3,350 votes (15% of the total ballots cast). Seventy-five percent of Roybal’s support had come from Boyle Heights. (Katherine Underwood, "Pioneering Minority Representation: Edward Roybal and the Los Angeles City Council, 1949-1962," Pacific Historical Review – 1997).

Following this loss, Roybal became involved with several of his campaign supporters to create the CPO (Community Political Organization) in September 1947. The organization, which was later renamed CSO (Community Service Organization), became the first broad-based organization within the Mexican-American community, representing veterans, businessmen, and workers. The primary goal of the CSO was to register Mexican Americans to vote. For this purpose, the organization recruited 1,000 members and registered 15,000 new voters in the Latino sections of Boyle Heights, Belvedere, and East Los Angeles.

By 1949, Roybal believed that he had enough support to run for the Ninth District seat once again. In the April 5 primary election, Roybal knocked Daniel Sullivan and Julia Sheehan out of the council race by capturing 37% of the total votes cast. This forced a runoff with Christensen in the May general election. In the general election held on May 31, 1949, Edward Roybal soundly defeated six-term Councilman Christensen by a vote of 20,472 to 11,956, winning by a 2-to-1 margin. With this victory, Ed Roybal became the first Mexican American since 1887 to win a seat on the Los Angeles City Council. In the years to come, Roybal would continue to win reelection and would serve as Council member of the 9^th District from July 1, 1949 to Dec. 31, 1962, before moving on to the U.S. Congress in 1963.

In the meantime, a second Hispanic, Charles Navarro, ran for the City Council. In the April 3 election, five candidates ran for the Council seat, representing District 10. In this primary election, left-wing Assemblyman Vernon Kilpatrick received 5,301 votes, while Navarro received the second largest number of votes with 5,077. Navarro and Kilpatrick thus advanced to a showdown in the general election, to be held in June.

The Los Angeles Times reported that this election represented "one of the bitterest Council fights in years," pitting the Conservative income property owner and "champion of free enterprise" Charles Navarro "on a strong anti-Communist platform" against the left-wing Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick had already served for twelve years as an Assemblyman but, according to the Times, "had a long record of left-wing activities and associations."

Once the complete returns had been tallied, Navarro had defeated Kilpatrick 9,075 votes to 7,382 on June 29, 1951 at the general election. Navarro took office as Councilman on July 1, 1951.

According to the 1960 census, Latinos made up 9.6% of the population of Los Angeles, slightly above the African-American population of 7.6%. By this time, both Roybal and Navarro had been reelected by their respective constituencies during the 1950s and still sat on the City Council at the beginning of the new decade. However, in 1961, Councilman Charles Navarro decided to run for the office of City Controller, challenging the incumbent City Controller, Don O. Hoye, who had served in that capacity since 1957.

In the May 31, 1961 General Election, Navarro coasted to an easy victory of the incumbent Hoye, winning 331,340 votes, well above Hoye’s 161,690 votes. Charles Navarro took office on July 1^st as City Controller, thus vacating his council position. Upon his victory, he stated, "I’ll miss the debates and personality clashes of the City Council, but I’m looking forward to my new responsibilities as controller." An Anglo, Joe E. Hollingsworth, was appointed on August 25, 1961 to Charles Navarro’s unexpired term on the 10^th District seat. Hollingsworth would be succeeded by Thomas Bradley, who was elected at the April 2, 1963 primaries to replace Hollingsworth on June 30, 1963. Bradley served the 10^th District until July 1, 1973, when he became Mayor of Los Angeles.

On November 6, 1962, Edward Roybal was elected as a Representative of the 30^th Congressional District to the United States Congress. In preparation for this move, he had resigned from his City Council seat on July 31, 1962. Roybal urged the Council to hold an election to pick his successor in the 9^th District since several Chicanos had expressed an interest in succeeding him.

However, the Council vetoed Roybal’s suggestion and instead appointed an African-American, Gilbert W. Lindsay, to replace Roybal on January 28, 1963, even though the 9^th District had a large concentration of Latinos. Lindsay would serve in this capacity to Dec. 28, 1990, when he died in office. In three years, African Americans went from having no representation on the Los Angeles City Council in 1960 to having three representatives in 1963. At the same time, Latino representation went from two council members to zero.

Although the African-American community was finally seeing the beginning of true representation on the Los Angeles City Council, the Eastside Chicano community watched as its voting power became diminished by fracturing and gerrymandering. The City Council apportionment of 1962 had split the East Los Angeles community into seven councilmanic districts. Most of these districts were combined with neighboring Anglo communities so that Hispanics rarely made up more than 20% of any one district's population.  This district manipulation was effective in depriving the Latino community of power and influence in the City of Los Angeles for the next two decades.

The Council District with the most significant population of Latinos during the next two decades was the 14^th District, which included significant parts of East Los Angeles. On July 1, 1967, Arthur K. Snyder succeeded his mentor, Councilman John Holland, as representative of this district. However, in 1972, the 14^th District was redrawn by court order with a 67% Latino majority population. Initially, Snyder – who was of German and Irish heritage – complained. However, he soon adjusted and became a tenacious fighter for his newly configured district, which included Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, El Sereno and Highland Park.

From 1972 to 1985, Arthur K. Snyder represented his constituents, mainly drawing support from older Hispanic voters and from conservative Anglos living in the Eagle Rock section of his district. Although many Latinos ran against him at election time, Snyder was able to maintain the support of his district’s voters. With great enthusiasm, he attended church and civic festivals and spoke Spanish at public gatherings. He paid scrupulous attention to the needs of his constituents’ communities, and was able to survive two recall efforts.

A graduate of USC and a resident of Eagle Rock, Snyder also navigated several controversies, including a state conflict of interest fine, accidents in city vehicles, drunk driving charges, and a messy divorce. Through all Snyder's personal and political controversy, his constituency remained loyal and he served in office for eighteen years. However, on January 2, 1985, Arthur K. Snyder announced that he would resign as Councilman for the 14^th District of Los Angeles later in the year so that he might pursue a career in law and spend more time with his family.

By the time of his resignation, Arthur Snyder’s 14^th District contained 200,000 residents, 75% of whom were Latinos. However, only about half of its 60,000 registered voters were Chicano, and a great deal of the district’s voter strength was still based in its mostly Anglo, conservative Eagle Rock neighborhood.

With Snyder’s impending resignation, several well-known Chicano politicians were considered for the council seat, including Larry Gonzalez (a member of the Los Angeles Board of Education), Assemblywoman Gloria Molina, and Assemblyman Richard Alatorre. With Snyder’s backing, Assemblyman Richard Alatorre, formally announced on October 3, 1985 that he would begin his campaign for Snyder’s Council seat that would be vacated by Councilman Snyder the next day.

The competition for the 14^th District seat became fierce as many Latino activists accused Alatorre and his supporters of trying to secure an appointment to the position. Such a designation would have put Alatorre in office for the rest of Snyder's term, which would not end until 1987. Because Alatorre’s Assembly district roughly coincided with the 14^th Council District, many people thought that Alatorre was the logical successor for Snyder. However, on October 4, when Snyder stepped down, his Council colleagues approved a December 10 special election to decide who would represent the Eastside’s 14th Council District.

In the special election held on Tuesday, Dec. 10, 1985, Assemblyman Richard Alatorre won 60% of the vote in the Eastside special election held to replace former Councilman Arthur K. Snyder. Alatorre's closest competition was city planner Steve Rodriguez, who obtained only 16% of the votes. Richard Alatorre thus became the first Latino in 23 years to be elected to the Los Angeles City Council. He took office on December 20, 1985.

Ironically, two weeks earlier, on November 26, 1985, the United States Justice Department had filed a lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles, charging "a history of official discrimination" against Latinos. With this suit, the Justice Department sought to invalidate the City's 1982 redistricting plan as a violation of the Chicano community’s rights as a minority. The civil complaint, filed in federal court in Los Angeles, named Mayor Tom Bradley, thirteen current City Council members and City Clerk Elias Martinez as defendants.

The suit accused the City of Los Angeles of deliberately drawing political boundaries in such a way as to disperse Latinos over several council districts to intentionally splinter their political power. The Justice Department contended that the redistricting plan – approved unanimously by the City Council in September 1982 – violated Section 2 by dividing an expanding core concentration of Latinos surrounding the downtown area among seven of the 15 council districts.

As a result of this fracturing, only one council district contained a majority of Latinos and strength of the Chicano voting community was diluted. This violated their rights under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and the voting rights provisions of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution. The suit concluded that this redistricting plan was "... effectuated for the purpose, and with the result, of avoiding the higher Hispanic percentages in certain districts that would be the logical result of drawing district boundaries on a non-racial basis." It alleged that their reapportionment plan – approved at a time when no Chicanos served on the Council – violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which bars any practice or procedure that abridges a person's voting rights.

Between 1970 and 1980, the Latino population of Los Angeles had risen from 18% to 27%. But, until Alatorre took office on December 20^th, 1985, that 27% of Los Angeles’ population was essentially without the representation of an elected Chicano official on the Council. In contrast, three African-American Councilmen – Gilbert W. Lindsay, Robert Farrell and David Cunningham – sat on the Council, while Mayor Tom Bradley served as Mayor of the entire city.

On Tuesday, Dec. 17, Richard Alatorre, three days before he was scheduled to take office as Los Angeles' first Latino council member in 23 years, was appointed Chairman of the Council’s Charter and Elections Committee, which would review the city's controversial reapportionment plan. The topic of redistricting took up a great deal of the Council’s time during the first half of 1986. However, on August 12, 1986, Los Angeles City Councilman Howard Finn had died very abruptly of a ruptured aorta. Since 1981, Councilman Finn had represented the 1^st Council District, which ran through the northeast part of the San Fernando Valley, including Shadow Hills, Pacoima, Sun Valley, and Sunland-Tujunga.

Immediately, it was recognized that Finn's death might open the way to the eventual election of the first Latino from the San Fernando Valley to the Council. The council had adopted and scrapped two plans before settling on final boundaries for revised Councilmanic districts. The 1^st District, left vacant by the death of Councilman Finn, was carved from six existing districts and recreated into a new district north and west of Downtown Los Angeles. Now containing a 69% Latino population, the 1^st District included Elysian Park, Elysian Valley, Chinatown, Lincoln Park, Cypress Park, Pico-Union, Temple-Beaudry, Montecito Heights and parts of Highland Park, Echo Park, Glassell Park and Mount Washington. It also had a population that was 25% Caucasian, 14% Asian and 2% black. However, although the district had a majority Latino population, Chicanos represented only 40% of the voters, in large part because of its large immigrant population and the traditionally low voter registration among Hispanics at that time.

Joan Kradin became the Chief Deputy for the newly reconfigured 1^st District, which contained a population of 200,000 residents. On October 2, 1986, the Council announced that a special election would be called for February 3, 1987 to fill the seat. Soon there were four candidates vying for the 1st District seat: state Assemblywoman Gloria Molina, Larry Gonzalez, Leland Wong and Paul D. Y. Moore, a former aide to Mayor Tom Bradley.

On Nov. 6, 1986, Assemblywoman Gloria Molina, backed by significant political support, announced that she would run for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council representing the newly created, largely Latino 1^st District. On February 3, 1987, Assemblywoman Gloria Molina took an early lead and went on to win with 6,526 votes, or 57% of the vote, while Larry Gonzalez placed a distant second with 2,952 votes, or 26%. Gonzalez, who was backed by most of the Eastside political establishment, failed to force a runoff election as many had expected.

On February 27, 1987, Gloria Molina became City Councilperson. She was the fourth woman to serve on the Council and was its first Latina representative in history. Councilwoman Molina would serve as Councilperson for four years. In February 1991, Molina resigned her Council position after winning election to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Her term ended on March 7, 1991.

In June 1991, Cypress Park bail bondsman Mike Hernandez and Chinatown attorney Sharon Mee Yung Lowe both announced that they would take part in the August 1991 runoff election for the City Council seat left vacant by Gloria Molina. Thirty-eight-year-old Hernandez raised nearly $100,000 and had the endorsement of Molina. As a result, he led the six-candidate field in the runoff election, balloting with 42% of the votes cast in the 1st Council District. By this time, Latinos made up nearly 74% of the 223,000 residents in this 13-square-mile district, but only a small part of the 33,000 registered voters, primarily because the Pico-Union, Westlake and Echo Park were inhabited by a large population of immigrant non-citizen Latinos.

On August 13, 1991, Mike Hernandez defeated Sharon Lowe by 64.5% to 35.5% to become the second Latino to sit on the 1st District seat. Taking office on August 27, 1991, Mike Hernandez joined Richard Alatorre as the second Latino to be sitting on the fifteen-member City Council.

During the next year, the rapid growth of the Latino population in the San Fernando Valley led many Latino leaders in that area to press for the City Council to redraw district lines in the Valley. The District that drew the most interest was the 7^th District of Councilman Ernani Bernardi, which included Sylmar, Pacoima, Sun Valley and Van Nuys. The 7^th District had grown so rapidly that it had nearly 40,000 more residents than the optimum population of 232,000 – which represented 1/15th of the city's population. Although 62.3% of the 7th District's residents were Latinos, only 26.2% of its 73,500 registered voters were Latino, according to city demographic data. Some political analysts expressed doubt that a Latino district with less than 40% Latino registration would be able to elect a Hispanic candidate. It was already known that Councilman Bernardi was not planning to run for reelection when his term expired on June 30, 1993.

New redistricting plans were drawn up and approved, but civil rights groups, such as the

Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), believed that proposed district changes only favored the incumbents and violated Latino voting rights. MALDEF noted that while Latinos made up about 40% of the City’s population, only two Latinos served on the 15-member Council. However, some Council members and analysts also pointed out that Latinos made up only 11% of the City’s registered voters, and that the real answer to the problem lay with naturalization and voter registration drives.

In July 1992, the San Fernando Valley’s 7^th District was officially redrawn. The district, reaching from the heavily immigrant, working-class neighborhoods in Pacoima and Van Nuys to the middle-class homes of second- and third-generation Latinos in Sylmar, was 70% Latino. However, Latinos represented only 31% of the district’s 30,000 registered voters, while Anglos made up 48% of the voters. African-American registration in the same district stood at 19%.

In the April 20, 1993 primary election, Richard Alarcon, Mayor Bradley's top Valley aide, and former Los Angeles Fire Captain Lyle Hall faced off for the 7^th District seat. In a June runoff election, Richard Alarcon defeated Hall by a mere 234 votes out of nearly 19,000 votes cast. The election had an unusually high voter turn out with 27% of the district's 50,000 registered voters showing up at the polls.

By defeating Hall, 39-year-old Alarcon became the first Latino to be elected to the Los Angeles City Council from the San Fernando Valley. He joined Richard Alatorre and Mike Hernandez, two Eastsiders, to become the third Chicano on the 15-member Council. Richard Alarcon would serve as Councilman until January 3, 1999, when he resigned to become a California State Senator. The 7^th Council seat would be vacant from January 4, 1999 to July 5, 1999 when a new election was held.

On June 8, 1999, elections to the Los Angeles City Council brought Nick Pacheco and Alex Padilla as two young newcomers to the Council, both representing a new generation of Latino politicians. Twenty-six-year-old Alex Padilla won an overwhelming election victory Tuesday over Corinne Sanchez in the race for the northeast San Fernando Valley's 7th District seat on the Los Angeles City Council. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Padilla captured more than 67% of the vote and credited his strong showing to a combination of labor and youth that rallied behind his candidacy. Padilla had been the legislative aide for and was strongly backed by Assemblyman Tony Cardenas (D-Sylmar). Through his victory, Padilla had inherited the remaining two years of the unexpired term left by Richard Alarcon when he moved up from the 7th District seat to the State Senate in December.

On June 8, 1999, 35-year-old Nick Pacheco won 52% of the votes in the 14^th Council District to succeed Richard Alatorre. His opponent, Victor Griego, had obtained 48% of the vote in this election.

When Mike Hernandez retried from the Council on June 30, 2001, he was succeeded by Ed Reyes, a former council aide and planning department official, who won his seat in the April primary but did not take office until July 1, 2001.

In the 2000 census, the number of persons living within the city limits of Los Angeles reached 3,694,820. Of this group, 1,719,073 individuals of Latino or Hispanic origin represented 46.5% of the total population of the city. With the results of the 2000 census in hand, the issue of redistricting Council Districts once again came onto the agenda. With a Latino population that was quickly approaching half of the City’s population, many community activists believed that more districts should be in the hands of Latino Council members. Latinos represented a plurality in four of the 15 council districts, while African Americans constituted a majority in three districts.

A new redistricting plan endorsed in March 2002 redrew the Council Districts in such a way as to give Latinos a plurality in five districts, compared to the four they currently had. The new Latino District was created from the Councilwoman Ruth Galanter’s 6^th District, which was moved from the Westside to the East Valley. Galanter was scheduled to be forced out of her district on June 30, 2003 by term limits, and could not run for reelection. Portions of Galanter’s Westside district – including Westchester and West Los Angeles – were scheduled to be merged into a reconfigured 11^th Council District, represented by Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski. Under the new plan, the 1st, 7th, 13th, 14th and new 6th districts would all have at least 40% Latino voter registration, giving that ethnic community a plurality of voters.

In the March 4, 2003 election for the Los Angeles City Council, seven Council seats were up for grabs. Former Assemblyman Tony Cardenas faced off against businessman Jose Roy Garcia for Ruth Galanter’s 6^th District. A year earlier, in March 2002, Cardenas had been defeated by Wendy Greuel in the 2^nd District race. Thirty-nine-year-old Cardenas, a resident of Panorama City, had the backing of City Council President Alex Padilla and took office on July 1, 2003.

At the same time, Councilman Nick Pacheco ran for reelection in the 14th District, but was faced with a serious challenge from former state Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa and former Olympic boxer Paul Gonzales. On March 4, 2003, Antonio Villaraigosa defeated Councilman Nick Pacheco in their hard-fought race to represent the Eastside council district. Villaraigosa won 57% of the vote to unseat Councilman Pacheco. With this victory, Villaraigosa now represented the communities of Boyle Heights, Eagle Rock, El Sereno, Hillside Village, University Hills, Hermon, Garvanza, Monterey Hills, and parts of Highland Park, Mount Washington, Glassell Park, and Downtown Los Angeles.

In the election for the 13^th Council District, 30-year-old Eric Garcetti faced off against former Councilman Mike Woo. Garcetti, a professor of political science at Occidental College and son of former District Attorney Gil Garcetti, was a fourth generation Angelino of both Mexican and European heritage. His victory gave him representation over a district that now included Hollywood, Echo Park, Silver Lake and Atwater Village. Garcetti was sworn into office of June 15, 2001 to replace Council member Jackie Goldberg, who had been elected to the State Assembly the year before.

As of October 2004, five majority Latino districts were served by five Councilpersons, Reyes (1^st District), Cardenas (6^th District), Padilla (7^th District), Garcetti (13^th District) and Villaraigosa (14^th District).

Sources:

Jaime Pacheco, Professor Julian Nava, Mimi Lozano, The Outlook, The Eastside Sun, the Los Angeles Times.

Jack Cheevers, "Alarcon Victory Confirmed in 7^th District," Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1993.

Janet Clayton, "Snyder’s Decision Throws Eastside Seat Up for Grabs," Los Angeles Times, January 3, 1985.

Victor Merina, "Districting Hurts Latinos, U.S. Says: Justice Department Suit Accuses L.A. of Diluting Hispanics’ Political Power," Los Angeles Times, November 27, 1985.

CALIFORNIA

POMONA

Death of Mrs. Palomares Recalls the Early Days.

POMONA, June 14. - The death this morning of Mrs. Lugarda Alvarado de Palomares recalls the days of the Mexican possession of California, for she was born in what is now the city of Pomona, long enough ago to have remembered the discovery of gold and the admission of the State into the Union.

When she first gazed upon Mt. San Antonio there were not a hundred Anglo-Saxons on the Pacific Coast.  That was in 1840, the year before the first emigrant train entered the State.  She was the daughter of Ysidro Alvarado, and was subsequently married to Francisco Palomares, a son of Ignacio Palomares, to whom Gov. Alvarado had in 1837 granted the immense San Jose rancho, including a portion of this Valley.  Here and in San Diego county on the Rancho Monurrate she has passed her life, bridging the whole history of the development of the State.

In 1891 when a cloud was thrown on the land titles of the Rancho San Jose, Mrs. Palomares cheerfully signed quit-claim deeds and was the means of wiping out what might otherwise have been an embarrassing feature of land titles.

Her death was not unexpected, as she has for some time been in poor health. Mrs. Palomares leaves two sons and two daughters to perpetuate the good repute which has always been associated with the family.

Unlike many of the old Spanish families, the deceased was at the time of her death still in possession of great real estate wealth, owning several hundred acres in and near the city and 4000 or 5000 acres in San Diego county.   Source: Karla Everett  EverettKA@bak.rr.com  via CA-SPANISH-L@rootsweb.com

Los Angeles Times, May 12, 1934:

MACHADO DESCENDANTS SUE FOR OIL PROPERTY

Descendants of Augustin Machado, who a century ago was in control of the 14,000-acre Rancho La Ballona by virtue of a grant from the King of Spain, yesterday appeared in Superior Judge Bush's court to do legal battle over an infinitesimal part of the original grant consisting of one and three-tents acres in the Playa Del Rey district.

Names famous in early Californian history, Machado, Figueroa, Valdez, Solano, Olivera, Cota, Carrillo, Lopez and others are among the numerous plaintiffs who claim ownership to the property, which contains valuable oil deposits.

Defendants in the action are the Title Guarantee and Trust Company, Union Oil Company, Del Rey Company and others, who contend the plaintiffs are without legal claim to the land.

Trial of the action is to be resumed Monday.
Karla Everett  EverettKA@bak.rr.com    Via CA-SPANISH-L@rootsweb.com 

Villa de Branciforte Excavation
Sent by Lorraine Frain  lfrain@iopener.net

For historic preservation enthusiasts, please click on the web site for information www.villadebranciforte.org about excavation updates regarding Villa de Branciforte (Santa Cruz, CA).  It is a great educational and interesting web site. Mr. Ed Silveira is the founder and announced plans for this excavation at a meeting of Los Californianos in Monterey not too long ago. I met Ed at that meeting and mentioned to him that our Briones family had resided at the Villa in the late 1700's. 

Founded in 1797, Villa de Branciforte is a unique occurrence in Spanish Colonial history. Unlike the Spanish missions, the Villa was secular, and unlike the other two original secular settlements, the pueblos of Los Angeles and San Jose, Branciforte was a "villa," the only villa to be created during the Spanish Colonial era in California.

The Villa de Branciforte was a hybrid community populated by soldier-settlers and established to colonize and defend Alta California against Russia, England, and France. In 1802, five years after it was founded, the Villa de Branciforte settlers attempted to establish a civil government by electing an alcalde (or mayor), an election that was perhaps the first to be held in Alta California. The settlers were an enterprising and colorful group of people.

We seek recognition and preservation of the unique character and history of the Villa de Branciforte area. This includes the preservation of historical landmarks, the "living history" and diversity of our local architecture with roots in the adobes of the Spanish Colonial period, and significant archaeological features, such as adobe foundations, adobe bricks, roof tiles, burial sites and other archaeological finds pertaining to the early inhabitants of Villa de Branciforte.
---------------------------

A history on the tenure as fifty third Viceroy of New Spain, from 11 July 1794 to 31 May 1798, of Don Miguel de la Grua Talamanca Branciforte, Marques de Branciforte. Paragraph below is an extract from the mini-bio.

The attribute for which he is most criticized was his acquisitiveness. Bancroft asserts that "the main object of the new viceroy was to enrich himself by fair means or foul." (7) When his replacement, Miguel Jose de Azanza, was appointed in the spring of 1798, Branciforte returned to Spain aboard the Monarca with five million pesos in his luggage, three million for the king and two million for himself (Bancroft even questions whether he actually gave three million to the king). The process of collecting this nest egg, including the overt sale of offices, commissions, and other favors, aroused some public criticism. (8)

NORTHWESTERN UNITED STATES

Extract:
Miss Nevada Elizabeth Muto: Portrait of a Winner
http://www.rgj.com/news/stories/html/2004/09/17/80675.php
Sent by Cindy Lobuglio  

The story of how Elizabeth Muto was abandoned as a 10-day old baby at Reno’s airport 24 years ago has made her possibly the most well-known Miss Nevada ever to represent the state in the Miss America Pageant. 

Muto said she isn’t hoping all the media attention might cause her biological parents to reveal themselves and try to contact her. “No. I think now more than ever I know who my mom and dad are. I don’t have any questions. My parents already taught me who I am, and I already had a sense of belonging even though I don’t look like them. I don’t feel any void in my life that would be filled by knowing who my biological parents are.” 

Miss Nevada
Elizabeth Muto 

By Carrie A. Moore, Deseret Morning News, September 16, 2004
Sent by David Lewis dclewis@jps.net

For the third consecutive year, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will host an all-Spanish gathering, this one billed as "a celebration of Hispanic culture."

Luz de las Naciones will be held on Saturday, Nov. 13, at the Conference Center, beginning at 6 p.m. As in past years, the event will feature a religious message in Spanish from one of the church's general authorities as well as Spanish-language music. But this year's event seeks to cast a wider net, with organizers hoping to attract not only Latter-day Saints, but Hispanics of all faiths.

Rather than simply a religious program, as in years past, the event will include artists and performers presenting traditional music, dances and songs in in the Conference Center lobby from 6 to 7 p.m. The formal program of inspirational music, dance and narration begins inside the auditorium at 7:30 p.m.

"We are getting the word out to Hispanic congregations of the church along the Wasatch Front," event spokesman Jorge Becerra said in a press release. "But we want to emphasize that Luz de las Naciones is for everyone in the Hispanic community."

"We are inviting the entire Hispanic community and anyone else interested in becoming better acquainted with the church while enjoying an artistic and inspirational program," according to Elder Merrill J. Bateman, a member of the church's Presidency of the Seventy.

The first local Hispanic fireside service, in 2002, was originally scheduled for the Tabernacle on Temple Square, but was moved to the Conference Center after demand for tickets far exceeded the 6,000-seat Tabernacle. More than 15,000 tickets were distributed and participants filled two of the Conference Center auditorium's three tiers. Last year's event was held in the Marriott Center at Brigham Young University and drew a similarly enthusiastic crowd.

Organizers say participants are free to wear traditional clothing from their native countries to this year's event but are not obligated to do so. The celebration is free, but tickets are required and will be available beginning Sept. 28 either online at www.lds.org/events or by calling the Conference Center ticket office at 801-240-0080 (toll-free at 1-866-537-8457). Spanish-speaking representatives will be available to take calls from 2 to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Tickets are also available from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday at Door 4 of the Conference Center.

SOUTHWESTERN UNITED STATES

The Anza Letters
Article Three 
by 
Phil Valdez, Jr.

The Royal Chapel
of Monterrey

Buena Vista school house, approximately the site where Anza met Sgt.Gongoria. 
 April 14, 1776.    

Santa Margarita where the expedition camped 
on 
April 18, 1776

2

3

Signature of Juan Bautista de Anza

4

Copy of one of Anza's letter written at Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa.
Where Anza writes, Mañana en la tarde salgo para la Mición de San Gabriel.

5

6

Our Lord keeps Your Honor many years. San Gabriel and April 29, 1776

Your most certain servant kisses the hand of Your Honor

7

As always the writing of articles such as this requires the work and input of many. Therefore, I pay gratitude to Californio descendant Gregorio Bernal Smestad Ph.D, Vladamir Guerrero, Ph.D, Donald T. Garate of Mission Tumacacori and the United States National Park Service, the Bancroft Library, where I found the Anza letters, and to the Diario Del Capitan Comandante, Fernando de Rivera y Moncada, translated by Ernest J. Burrus, Ediciones Jose Porrua Turanzas, Madrid, España.  

Web de Anza, Archive of Primary Source Documents
http://anza.uoregon.edu
http://anza.uoregon.edu/archives.html
Sent by Johanna De Soto

Informative site. Well worth searching beyond the documents, maps, artifacts, links, etc.  The Web de Anza Archives contain ten primary source documents. That is, journals, diaries, and letters which are eyewitness accounts from the Spanish Colonial era. These sources are both available in transcriptions from the original Spanish and English translations.

The other sources in the Archive provide background and supporting material helpful in understanding the Colonizing Expedition. Especially important to this is the account by Don Josef Joachin Moraga of the actual founding of the Presido at San Francisco.

Extracts: Chile machines may replace workers
Louie Gilot, Rudy Gutierrez, Mark Lambie / El Paso Times
El Paso Times  9/16/2004
http://www.borderlandnews.com/stories/borderland/20040914-168772.shtml
Sent by JV Martinez Joe.Martinez@science.doe.gov

New Mexico State University develops crop 'thinner' Some workers fear losing work to new machines. The machine's makers say it might be the salvation of the Southwest chile industry.

Louie Gilot may be reached at lgilot@elpasotimes.com, 546-6131.

More online
·  Read more at http://www.chiletaskforce.com and  http://www.chilepepperinstitute.org
·  Watch live videos of chile harvesters at http://www.pikrite.com
Sources: New Mexico Chile Task Force and New Mexico Department of Agriculture.; 
NMSU's Agricultural Experiment Station.

F.C. FELHABER & Company, Inc. is a Customs Brokerage, licensed in the USA, that offers international trade and transportation services to their customers.  Our company conducts business with U.S. Customs on behalf of individual and corporate importers in addition to assisting importers and exporters in meeting any or all requirements regulated by other governmental agencies involved in international trade.

Franz Felhaber was born in Chihuahua and raised in this region, this entire region, from El Paso to Chihuahua. I attended El Paso High School and went to Texas A & M where I obtained a degree in Economics. I just attended the EPHS 20th year reunion for my class and it was great. Parents and Grandparents that attended EPHS and Lamar Elementary were in attendance. I maintain my school ties.

He is married to Lori Hayes of Houston, three children, Nicolette age 10, Franz age 6 and Johann age 3. I am very supportive of the bi-cultural emphasis aspect of living in this region. My parents Aida Carrillo Felhaber and Frank Felhaber have been in El Paso for 60 years and have set the work ethic example. Great grand-father Frank helped German families settle in Chihuahua.

We are familiar with the Mexican culture which is a huge asset in my opinion. Mexico is a neighbor and a consumer. Mexico is open and loves to buy US products. It is location, location, location. Mexico observes the laws. In my opinion there is no comparison.

I have served as President of F.C.FELHABER & CO., Inc. since 1990. I am the example, the role model. To me it is very important that there be respect and fairness within the company. Prior to my current position, I served as a customs broker for another agency in addition to gaining experience in a twin plant Maquila-related import program that offered a wide range of international trade.

In early July the 2004 World Trade Center Logistic Committee presented the Paso Del Norte EJE DEL CAMINO REAL project (Axis of the Royal Highway) at the EXPO-LOGISTICA trade show held in Mexico City. Our purpose was to let everyone know about the advantages of doing business via the Camino Real.

Our objective was/is to reactivate the international-commercial route of our region. We were very happy with the attendance and the exchange of information with more than 14,000 national and international potential buyers and visitors. They learned about the Camino Real Trade Route and the multitude of benefits that derive from utilizing the route. More than 400 years ago, the Camino Real (Royal Highway) was created. It became and continues to be, the ideal route from Mexico City to the West Coast.

We became familiar with the business opportunities afforded in Mexico. The exhibit created to promote the Camino Real was most effective in that it illustrated the logic and profitability of engaging in trade along the Camino Real. We established first contact with local businesses as well as explored opportunities for future partnerships with Mexican firms doing business in our region. All in all, it was well worth the investment in time and money.

The city of Laredo, Texas is a very aggressive city that markets itself very well. They invest highly in the region and they promote themselves as a unified powerful force. Visitors to the EXPO were hard pressed to believe the El Paso - Juarez route was faster, better, cheaper than the Laredo route marketed by the US-Mexican Brokers. 

OUR GOAL IS TO GET THE MARKET FROM LOS ANGELES TO MEXICO CITY ALONG THE CAMINO REAL. We must compete together by using all of our resources to do as well or better.

The expo was the first step in marketing the region. We will be courting, and bringing down here the business we want to get. There will be two more trade shows on the west coast we will attend. Los Angeles is a very important target.

It is worth repeating that our region is described as three states, West Texas, New Mexico and (Cd. Juarez) Chihuahua and that between us, we share a unique geographical juxtaposition that provides the only direct access between the United States and Mexico making free trade more efficient.

Our region, the axis of the Camino Real, is strategically located at the junction of many interstate and international transportation sources making the shipping of products as seamless as possible. I submit that El Paso is a world-class logistics center providing excellent rail, air and truck transportation to global markets.

The Camino Real has had quite an impact on the Felhaber family.  More than four hundred years ago, the Carrillo Family had become cattle traders in this region, before the United States became a country!

It has been well documented that the Carrillo family founded the first cattle union in the state of Chihuahua. They were the quintessential traders. This was my family, creating the Camino Real and now, here I am 400 years later, trying to promote the Camino Real they helped to create.

The Carillos thrived on large, open spaces, from Spain to Chihuahua to the west coast; they were movers and shakers with results that are still felt to this date. As traders they established a working relationship not only with the Indians but with everyone; it was to their benefit to do so. Trade was the key then, trade is the key now.

Various members of the Carrillo family founded different southwestern cities through cattle trading, Tucson, Arizona, San Diego, California and San Francisco, California. As a matter of fact, their respective homes have been turned into national historical monuments.

The Carrillo’s made their way into American life in many ways: some became Spanish interpreters; some taught music or became professional musicians. Many were farmers or ranchers while others became mining engineers, blacksmiths, barbers, mechanics, police officers, prison guards and so on.

Some developed commercial enterprises such a gravel mining, building ocean piers, operating lively stables, travel agencies. Others sought higher educations and became teachers, college professors and judges.

One Carrillo became a newspaper publisher. Some fought for the North in the Civil War as part of a cavalry unit from California. They have fought as Americans in subsequent wars. Julio Carrillo’s grandson was a pilot lost over Europe during World War II. Another grandchild, patriotically named America Tate, lies buried in the Santa Rosa rural cemetery.

Only a very small percentage of Carrillo descendants are recognizable by the Carrillo surname. Most live in Northern California but many reside in Southern California, Mexico and Central America.

The Carrillo and Lopez families were closely connected to every major figure and every major event in California’s history. They are incredibly important in the history of Santa Rosa, Sonoma County, and all of California.

Maria Carrillo’s grandson, Romualdo Pacheco, became the first native-born and only Hispanic Governor of the State of California. His public service career also included positions as County Judge, State Senator, State Treasurer, Lt. Governor, US Congressman, and US Minister to Central America.

The vast lands including and surrounding Hearst Castle were once owned by the Ramon Carrillo de Pacheco family. Hearst acquired the land after Ramona’s death. Governor Pacheco’s daughter Mabel married William Tevis, son of wealthy financier Lloyd Tevis, owner of Wells Fargo. The prestigious "Tevis Cup" awarded annually for a grueling 100 mile horseback ride through the Sierras originated from the Tevis-Carrillo family.

Various members of the Carrillo family founded different southwestern cities through cattle trading, Tucson Arizona, San Diego, California and San Francisco, California. As a matter of fact, their respective homes have been turned into national historical monuments.

Where can more information be obtained via books, internet, etc.?  Try the following: The families of the Presidio de San Diego, Corey Jon Brown
1.) http://www.militarymuseum.org/familie pso.htm
2.) http://www.sonomacountyhistory.org/mariacarrillo
3.) California – The Mexican era (1911)  http://www.oldandsold.com /articles17/California
4.) Alta California: Mexico rules http:// www.vom.com     http://www.bearflag/altacal.htm

There are books available that document the contributions of the family such as; History of San Diego 1542-1908 by William E. Smythe (Part Two: Chapter VI Prominent Spanish Families).

BLACK

By LA MONICA EVERETT-HAYNES, Houston Chronicle, October 15, 2004
Sent by Howard Shorr howardshorr@msn.com

Leaving a university with a Hispanic population of nearly 90 percent, Jessica Garcia opted to attend Texas Southern University because of its pharmacy school.

ON THE SUBJECT OF SPANISH SLAVERY

Pronunciation of Aztec Words

"I was wondering if you could help me break down some Aztec words phonetically so that I can pronounce them correctly.  For example, I was doing some reading about the Aztecs and the article was nice enough to have given an example of how the word Cuauhtemoc was to be pronounced, koo-ow-tay'-mawk but that was the only word done that way.  I listed below some words that I came across in this same article and divided them by consonants first and then phonetically:

Axayacatl =      Ax a ya ca tl       (Ox ah ya caw tal)  
Tizoc =            Tiz oc                 (tees oak)        Is the Z like an s?  
huitzotl =          A hu it zo tl         (Aw ou etz o tal)

Mimi, If you could correctly break down the words listed above and the others listed below I could get an idea of how to pronounce Aztec words:"   

And here I will make an announcement so that perhaps someone who reads this can steer me in the right direction.  The volumes of Cuzcatlan Tipico include the words of what appears to be the first national anthem that was sung in El Salvador, -an anthem that predates the one that is sung now. However the author of the volumes was unable to come across the music for that anthem.

I believe that since El Salvador was once part of a country named the United Provinces of Central America, that it is possible that that music can possibly be found in another Central American country today. Perhaps someone can let me know, -the name of that old anthem is "La Patriotica."

Hi Lucy, Yes, please call me Eddie.

About your October, Hispanic Month in Georgia. I would recommend these 4 children's (and Adult), books. all beautifully illustrated and written in English. They are good educational material that describes the costumes, culture, and architecture of the Aztec, Tenochtitlán civilization. Also included in three of them are Spanish Conquistadores and the conquest.

1) How Would You Survive as an Aztec? Written by Fiona Macdonald and Illustrated by Mark Bergin – Franklin Watts, A Division of Grolier Publishing – New York € London € Hong Kong € Sydney, Danbury, Connecticut 1995 (Fully detailed description of life as an Aztec with Spanish conquerors at the end)

2) The Aztec News Author: Philip Steele, Consultants: Penny Bateman & Norma Rosso – Candlewick Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1997      (This book is part of a series of "Amazing History News Books" that are also available) Candlewick Press, 2067 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge MA 02140 (Aztec daily life and the Spanish conquest)

3) Lost Temple of the Aztecs, What it was like when the Spaniards invaded Mexico By Shelly Tanaka with  Illustrations by Greg Ruhl  and Historical consultation by Eduardo Matos Moctezuma – A Hyperion/Madison Press Book 1998 (Spanish conquest of the Aztecs)

4) Aztec, Inca & Maya, Discover the mysterious world of these ancient peoples – their beliefs, rituals, and fascinating civilization

Written by Elizabeth Baquedano (Eyewitness Books Series) A Dorling Kindersley Book, Alfred A. Knoph € New York 1993 (Beautiful detailed with color photographs and written captions)

2 other children’s books that would be helpful, on the ancient culture of Mexico:

€ Life in ancient Mexico, Coloring Book, by John Green – Dover Publications, Inc., New York 1991 (A well illustrated book with written captions on the Olmecs, Teotihuacáns, Mayas, Toltecs, and Aztecs)

€ The Flame of Peace, A tale of the Aztecs (Ages 5 to 8) By Deborah Nourse Lattimore Harper Trophy, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers 1997 (Deborah has taken some creative license with Aztec Mythology, but I think its fun to read and the illustrations are beautiful)

I hope this will help your children’s education in ancient America. I am always happy to help in promoting "Children & Books."

Sincerely Eddie Martinez,  e.martinez@adelphia.net

Coahuiltecan is the name given to hundreds of small Indian groups who lived in northern Mexico and south Texas. These simple hunter-gatherers found themselves caught in the middle between Spanish colonizers and Apache raiders. Due to these pressures and disease, their population went into a steep decline during the early Spanish period, and little is known of their culture or way of life. A large number of the survivors gathered in Spanish missions for protection from the Apaches. By 1800, most of the remaining Coahuiltecans had merged with other tribes or intermarried with the Hispanic population:  Comanche, Delaware, Hainai, Jumano, Karankawa, Kichai, Kiowa, Kickapoo 

The Kickapoos originated in the Great Lakes region. By the time of the Republic of Texas, a number had migrated to Texas and allied themselves with the Cherokees. As Cherokee allies, they were caught up in the violence of President Lamar’s attempt to expel most Indians from Texas. The Kickapoos fled to Mexico, where they formed an alliance with the Mexican army and conducted continuous harassing raids into South Texas. During the Civil War, Kickapoos from Kansas and Indian Territory (Oklahoma) journeyed across Texas to join their kinsmen in Mexico. On January 8, 1865, three bands of Kickapoos were attacked by Confederate cavalry on Dove Creek, a tributary of the Concho River. The Kickapoos successfully fought off the attack and continued to Mexico, where the Dove Creek battle fueled Kickapoo anger and led to even more aggressive border raiding. In 1873, Colonel Ranald Mackenzie led an expedition against the Kickapoos. Mackenzie captured forty of the tribe’s women, children, and elderly and took them to Fort Gibson in Indian Territory. These people served as hostages to compel the Kickapoo warriors to surrender and begin reservation life. Most refused and continued to live at El Nacimiento in northern Mexico, which remains the home for most Kickapoos today. They are notable for their adherence to their traditional way of life: 
Pakana Muskogee, Potawatomi, Shawnee, Tawakoni, Tigua
 
The Tiguas are descended from refugees from the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, in which the Pueblo tribes of New Mexico united to fight the Spanish. In 1751, the king of Spain granted the Tiguas land near present-day El Paso, a claim that was recognized by the subsequent governments of Mexico, the Republic of Texas, and the Unit