The “Americanization” Program at Fullerton Union High School

The following is from a work-in-progress about the history of Fullerton. You can support my ongoing research and writing on Patreon.

In his book A History of the Fullerton Union High School and Fullerton Junior College 1893-1943, former superintendent Louis Plummer includes a section entitled “Americanizaton.”

What was “Americanization”? Basically, it was a statewide program to send teachers into the segregated Mexican immigrant work camps to teach them how to be “American.”

Under The Home Teacher Act of 1915, the home teacher was “to work in the homes of the pupils, instructing children and adults in matters relating to school attendance and preparation, sanitation, in the English language, in household duties such as purchase, preparation and use of food and of clothing and in the fundamental principles of the American system of government and the rights and duties of citizenship.”

In his book Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden, historian Douglas Caxaux Sackman writes, “The California Commission of Immigration and Housing…believed that the key to creating harmonious labor relations lay in managing the bodies and special experiences of workers. Appealing to economics rather than humanitarianism, [the commission] reasoned that ‘to make a citrus camp pay—to make it produce the desired workers—it is necessary to create an atmosphere that will attract and hold such workers…Housing policy was at bottom a form of social control designed to enhance profits.’”

At this time, most Mexican American workers in Orange County (including Fullerton) lived in segregated housing and attended segregated schools. 

In his book Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County: 1900-1950 Gilbert G. Gonzalez writes, “Mexicans in citrus towns were invariably the pickers and packers; and consequently they were poor, segregated into colonies or villages, and socially ostracized, even though they were economically indispensable to the larger society,” Gonzalez writes.

On the Bastanchury Ranch, six small villages of some 30 families each were scattered about the property. One of the six settlements, called “Tiajuanita” by residents, was built with “scraps of sheet iron, discarded fence posts and sign-boards, and served by one lone water faucet and a few makeshift privies.”

“Segregated schooling assumed a pedagogical norm that was to endure into the fifties and parallels in remarkable ways the segregation of African Americans across the United States,” Gonzalez writes. “Whereas the Americanization programs in the local villages appear unique, in reality they reflected a generalized expression for the eradication of national cultural differentiation across the United States.”

“Americanization” Program in Fullerton

In his history of the high school, Plummer includes a narrative written by Druzilla Mackey, the first of the teachers in the “Americanization” program. I will include here some excerpts from her story:

In the town of Fullerton itself the Placentia Orange Growers’ Association had just completed twenty-four homes for its Mexican employees. This was indeed a ‘model’ colony, beautifully located in a walnut grove, four room houses each with a flush toilet, community showers and wash house with automatic hot water, a large community hall and a home for the teacher. Despite these carefully planned conveniences the Americanization work in this center was the least successful in the department. Probably because:

1.) Instead of giving its Fullerton employees the anticipated opportunity of living in this well-equipped camp, the Orange Growers imported laborers from the Pomona district and installed them in this choice spot. This aroused bitter antagonism among the local group who deridingly gave this colony the name of ‘Campo Pomona.’ Even with all its splendid equipment few of the ‘Town Mexicans’ would come to classes in its community hall or cooperate in its community projects.

2.) The Fullerton colony was built right in the town and American neighbors who felt that their property had been devalued by its close proximity to the Mexicans treated them with humiliating scorn.

3.) The teacher of the group was not employed partly by the Orange Growers’ but wholly by the high school. Partly for this reason in the first years of our work she did not receive the hearty support of the Association.

It was through an invitation to a Mexican party that we first discovered several little known Mexican camps far back in the hills of Bastanchury ranch. It was the policy of this ranch company to allow any Mexican who could find sufficient scraps of sheet iron, discarded fence-posts and sign-boards to build a shelter, to establish himself on the ranch. The largest of these camps, called Little Tia Juana, was pronounced by an artist friend the most bewitching bit of primitive art show had ever seen. “Who,” she said, “but a Mexican could contrive a lovely vine covered patio from rusted bed-springs salvaged from the dump?” As an Americanization worker I was not so much impressed by the rare artistry of this community as by the fact that all of its thirty families must be served by one lone water faucet and a few makeshift privies. And this was only one of six similar colonies scattered over the largest orange ranch in the world. Its owners had the old-world feudalistic attitude toward their farm hands. They felt generous in allowing these  squatters to establish homes on their ranch and could not comprehend its danger to the health and morality of the community as a whole.

Americanization teachers were always met with a cordial welcome among the Bastanchury Mexicans and during the several years we worked with the Commission of Immigration and Housing to secure better homes most of our classes were conducted in their own hovels. After seven years and, at the last, principally through the good offices of a local pastor, Dr. Graham C. Hunter, the Bastanchury Company built suitable homes for their laborers, provided with plenty of toilets and running water.

With the construction of better homes and a community hall built and equipped by the high school the work on Bastanchury ranch became a genuine success. Classes were welcomed by both men and women and the community hall was much too small to accommodate the audiences which assembled for entertainments and community meetings. Whenever possible these were held out of doors in front of the hall with most of the audience providing its own seats. A vital part of the work became the Mexican benefit lodge with an enthusiasm for education and social betterment. This lodge part of the expense of a well-baby clinic in the colony. Even after the ranch changed ownership and all employees were required to move elsewhere these Mexicans now living in the Alta Vista camp remained enthusiastically clinic-minded.

The Bastanchury group was always the poorest of our Mexicans, the most friendly and also the most idealistic. Their warm friendship was greatly fostered by Mr. and Mrs. Plummer who were not afraid to frequently entertain and be entertained by these most poverty-stricken of our people.

The Mexicans cleaned this out, the high school provided chars and blackboards and with the volunteer assistance of Mrs. Clemence Allec Melton we dispensed English across the restaurant lunch counter three evenings a week to a full house.  During the following year, with the assistance of Mr. C.C. Chapman, three local citrus association and the Mexicans themselves, a large community hall was built.

“At the end of ten years’ work our department had five teachers and six active centers of work—then Old Man Depression struck us a knock-down blow.

“In this time of stress and strain the American community no longer spoke of “Our” Mexicans.  They no longer considered that no “whiteman” could pick oranges.  Instead they felt that the jobs done so patiently by Mexicans for so many years should now be give to them.  “Those” Mexicans instead of “Our” Mexicans should “all be shipped right back to Mexico where they belong.”  The Americanization centers in which these people had been taught how to buy and make themselves a part of the American community were now used for calling together assemblages in which county welfare workers explained to bewildered audiences that their small jobs would now be taken over by the white men, that they were no longer needed or wanted in the United States.  They explained that the Welfare Department no longer had any money to aid them during times of unemployment, but would furnish them a free trip back to Mexico.  And so—one morning we saw nine train-loads of our dear friends roll away back to the windowless, dirt-floored homes we had taught them to despise.

“With depression-frightened tax-payers at their heels the high-school authorities were forced to cut the Americanization department to the bone.  We kept it going as best we could in the fond hope that prosperity might be hiding around the corner, but evidently it wasn’t and after four years of such low wages as to permit not even a Mexican to support a family they organized a county wide strike among the fruit pickers.  Latent antagonisms between the two nation-allies came to fever heat.  Deafness prevented my being of any real service at this time so I gave up my work and the high school decided to close the department.

What were its lasting values? Quien sabe.

During the Great Depression, hostilities against the Mexican workers rose to clamors for deportation.

What she is referring to is a mass deportation of nearly all of the Mexican workers on the Bastanchury Ranch in the early 1930s. This deportation was part of a much larger deportation effort across the United States, which is described at length in the book Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s.

“Outside of the community, the Mexican became the scapegoat,” Gonzalez writes. “In 1931 and 1932, local and county governments caught up in the drive across the Untied States to deport Mexicans sought to cut budgets through repatriating Mexicans. Induced through threats of relief cutoff sweetened with an offer of free transportation, about 2,000 left Orange County.” Many were actually American citizens. 

A few years ago, I had the privilege of interviewing Fullerton resident Manuel Rivas Maturino, who was born on the Bastanchury Ranch, and remembers the experience of “repatriation.”

Local author Gustavo Arellano describes this situation in his 2013 OC Weekly article “The Lost Mexicans of Bastanchury Ranch.”

Another teacher in the FUHS Americanization program was Arletta Kelly (born Arletta Klahn). She was interviewed in 1971 for the California State University, Fullerton Oral History Program. Her recollections give tremendous insight into the social context of race relations in Fullerton during this time period. Kelly attended Fullerton Union High School and graduated from Fullerton College, and later worked as a teacher for FUHS for 34 years, from 1921-1954. 

She met her husband, Frank Kelly (a Mexican man with an Anglo last name), while working as a teacher on the Pomona Camp, located on South Balcom in Fullerton, near the railroad tracks.  “I lived there in the teacher’s house,” she recalled, “I used to teach, of course, mainly Mexican men, but I did have a few Japanese men that would come.  I had a few Basque people from Bastanchury Ranch.”

In addition to teaching at the Pomona Camp, Kelly also taught at the Escondido Camp on the Bastanchury Ranch, near the present-day St. Jude Hospital. “Those classes were mainly for women,” she said, “In the daytime, I would go out there maybe twice a week and we’d have a class in English.  It was mainly simple English, like things that they would want to buy at the store.”

Kelly also taught children at a public school on the Bastanchury Ranch.  “It was a branch of the elementary schools of Fullerton, and it was built down just about where the golf course is now,” she said.  Although it served the workers of their groves and packing plants, “there was never any real cooperation with the Bastanchury Company for furnishing schools,” Kelly recalled, “the Placentia Orange Growers Association furnished the building…but the teachers salary was paid by the high school district.”

A common misconception among Anglo society (including teachers) during this time period was that Mexicans were intellectually inferior to whites.  Kelly blames prejudice and unfair IQ tests for this misconception.  “Our IQ tests were never fair to Mexican students,” she recalled, “It’s like you ask the question, ‘Why type of sweets is mostly favored by our people?…Well the Anglo would probably say apple pie, and the Mexican would say pan dulce.”  Kelly describes her struggle to convince fellow colleagues that Mexican students had the same potential as whites.  “Some of my colleagues here would laugh at me and say, “Are you a wetback?”  she remembered.

In his book Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden, Douglas Caxaux Sackman writes: “Several historians have presented especially illuminating examinations of the Americanization process as negotiated by Mexicanos in the Southwest. What emerges from this new interrogation of Americanization is not a simple top-down program that was either accepted or rejected by those who would be Americanized, but a multi-faceted and constantly evolving struggle over the meaning of immigration, identity, and citizenship. Americanizaton was a contested concept, which is not surprising: after all, the term raised core issues about who and what counted as American.”