which is available free
from Adobe Inc.
2003, 200 pp., 13 illus.
You must have Acrobat Reader to read these files. You can
download which is available free
from Adobe Inc.
INTRODUCTION
Grace Palacio Arceneaux, a Mexican-American resident of Watsonville, California,
was interviewed in 1977 by Meri Knaster, an editor at the Regional History Project,
as part of a series of oral histories documenting local agricultural and ethnic
history.
Arceneaux was born in San Martin de Bolaños, Jalisco, Mexico, in March,
1920. She came with her family to San Juan Bautista, California, in 1923 during
the havoc of the Mexican Revolution. The family lived on a little ranch and
eked out a living farming and doing field work. Her mother died in childbirth
when she was a young girl, and shortly thereafter her father died, leaving Arceneaux
to care for her nine brothers and sisters. As she said, she always had a child
to carry on her hip, wherever she went.
Not only did her parents not speak English, they did not want it spoken in the
house; Arceneaux and her siblings translated for their parents, for their father's
business deals and jobs. She attended school through the fifth grade and returned
to school many years later, when she was in her forties, to obtain her high
school diploma at Watsonville night school, and earned a degree at Cabrillo
College. Knaster wrote in her notes of these interviews: “All those years
of no schooling are not manifested in either her manner of speaking or vocabulary-she's
a very articulate woman.”
After her father died, Arceneaux hired out her family as a unit, working in
the fields around San Juan Bautista whenever possible, and doing whatever else
was available, keeping the county from separating her siblings and putting them
in foster homes. Because of serious, recurring bouts of tuberculosis, she spent
several years in sanitariums and was no longer able to do fieldwork due to the
permanent damage to her health.
Her narrative is rich in recollections of local history, of the Mexican and
Filipino communities and their customs and inter-relationships. She was married
at one time to a Filipino farmworker and so became a member of that community
as well. She also discusses the life of field workers, harvesting garlic and
various other crops, and the role of labor contractors in agriculture. The period
she spent among Filipinos is rich with details about a side of Watsonville life
that is not well documented—Chinatown, gambling, and prostitution.
Her spirit of grit and determination shines through her descriptions of chronic
hard times and poverty as she worked unremittingly to raise her siblings and
to make a life for herself. Her life story shows how she made the transition
from illegal immigrant farmworker to middle-class social activist.
She speaks movingly of her marriages, work life, her precarious financial situation,
and the importance of her Catholicism, as she her evolved from an unquestioning
Catholic into her own self-defined understanding of her religion as it embraced
activism and equality.
As a mature woman she returned to school, and discovered the world of books
and ideas, and gained confidence in her abilities to speak and think critically
about the condition of her community, and its political and cultural marginalization.
This in turn led to her involvement in community issues during which she became
one of the first Mexican-American women in the Pajaro Valley to fight for bilingual
education, outreach services for poor women, victims of domestic violence, and
those seeking to gain educations for themselves.
Knaster noted many small, telling details of Arceneaux’s life when she
interviewed her in her home in Watsonville. She wrote: “there is a nice
back yard, where she hung laundry on her clothesline after one interview. We
met in the kitchen, a remodeled expanded, large room, with a view of the yard
through sliding glass doors, a room full of light, spacious. Grace always kept
her hands busy-she’s one of those women whose work is never done because
she does so much and is so industrious, never wasting a moment. She would wash
and dry the dishes, pair socks that she had removed from the dryer or fold cloth
napkins. Another time she worked on a quilt she had gotten from someone who
had died. It was too big for their bed so she removed the trim and sewed as
we talked.”
Knaster noted that in the background of the tape recordings you can often hear
a tea kettle whistling, or water running as she washes dishes, as Grace’s
voice moves back and forth according to the activity she is engaged in. Sometimes
she would get up from the kitchen table to demonstrate something—how she
used to work in the garlic fields, or how she would carry a little brother or
sister on her hip. She would unabashedly let tears flow when relating especially
emotional episodes in her life, lifting up her glasses as she wiped away the
tears.
Knaster characterized Arceneaux as a wonderfully warm, sharing, open person,
and extremely informative as well. Despite the hardships in her life, her narration
is not bitter or resentful. As her conversation reveals, she has a realistic
understanding of ethnic and gender discrimination as it is manifest in the Mexican,
Anglo, and Filipino communities, having experienced them herself as a single
woman, a Mexican, and later as the wife of a Filipino with a Filipino/Mexican
child. Her observations of ethnic and class distinctions in the agricultural
communities of San Juan Bautista and Watsonville are a real contribution to
the social history of this region.