Challenging School Segregation in Rurban California: The Case of Soria v. Oxnard School Board

• In Event: 69.025 - "Caste Abolished": Competing Visions of Equal Educational Opportunities in the Long Struggle for Civil Rights

Abstract

Background
In 1970, Juan L. Soria organized a class-action lawsuit against the Oxnard School Board of Trustees on behalf of Mexican and Black children, including his nieces, who attended segregated schools in Oxnard, California. This paper examines the emergence of school desegregation as a central site of struggle against racial inequality in Oxnard in 1963—seven years prior to the Soria case. Between 1940 and 1970, Oxnard’s population increased exponentially from 8,519 to 71,255 residents, and although Mexicans accounted for the majority of this growth, in the wake of WWII, the city had also become home to a significant number of Blacks. As new neighbors in a “rurban” city , Mexican Americans and Blacks shared the optimism and expectation of a more just society many across the nation felt after making significant contributions to the “war for democracy.” Most found themselves living in La Colonia—an area east of the railroad tracks featuring muddy, unpaved streets, lack of municipal services, and two overcrowded elementary schools. Many also encountered restricted access to homes, businesses, and restaurants on the west side. These disparate material conditions and treatment fueled racial tension—and collective action.
Methodology
Through an organic process of archival research, I examined school board and city council minutes, policy reports, judicial records, maps, photographs, property deeds, business directories, U.S. Census data, photographs, correspondence, and English- and Spanish-language newspapers. My study is also informed by over sixty oral history interviews with women and men who attended segregated schools in Oxnard in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and with parents, organizers, teachers, and administrators involved in Oxnard schools during the 1960s and 1970s.
Findings
Analyzing defendant school board’s arguments with this historical perspective sheds light on the tactics used to resistance integration, which included feigning ignorance, delaying action, and ultimately reneging on their obligation to Colonia children. Conversely, I consider the common cause of local branches of the NAACP and Community Service Organization in 1963 as it reverberates in the plaintiffs’ case and reflects struggles against inequity taken on by Mexican American and Black organizers well before 1963.
Significance
This research treats “race as a relational concept,” with a focus on “how, when, where, and to what extent groups intersect.” Soria was among the first school desegregation cases in the nation to be filed jointly by Mexican American and Black plaintiffs, and was one of the first de jure segregation cases outside the South. Recovery of parallel and shared struggles for access and opportunity among Mexican Americans and Blacks, which shaped the Soria case, can augment contemporary national discussions on race, segregation, civil rights, and educational policies, and can strengthen our pursuit of justice within and beyond schools.

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

Author

• David G. Garcia, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor