In The Mexican Outsiders, an ethnographic history of Santa Paula, California, Martha Menchaca seeks "to advance historiographic information about people of Mexican descent in the United States and to examine how past social injustices have influenced the perceptions of self-worth among inhabitants of this community” (p. xv). She argues that the dominant discourse of anthropologists and historians has systematically downplayed the impact of discrimination, segregation, and related everyday racist practices in this rural Ventura County community, and has cast Anglo capitalists as the founders of the community and the citrus industry while rendering Mexicans and Native Americans largely invisible.
Using the tools of historians and anthropologists, Menchaca begins her study with an examination of the local Native American and Mexican residents before the arrival of Europeans. She demonstrates that Santa Paula and many smaller cities in the region, not only the better-known missions and pueblos, were founded by Native Americans and Mexicans, that Mexicans planted the first local citrus groves, and that Mexicans have performed the bulk of menial labor in the industry since its onset. The Anglo-American conquest marked a precipitous decline in the status of both Mexicans and Indians. Mexican landowners were quickly dispossessed, while Anglo lemon growers established holdings, including the Limoneira Ranch in 1893, which became the largest citrus producer in the state.
Menchaca is also concerned with how the past has affected contemporary social relations in the city. She argues that hegemonic writings have portrayed Anglos as heroes who serve as role models for their descendants to continue to dominate economic, political, and social life, while Mexicans have been excluded from that written historical memory, consequently suffering negative images of themselves. As employers, the citrus growers cemented conditions of inequality through laws, practices, and supremacist ideologies that restricted the employment of Mexicans to low-wage citrus work, and subordinated and segregated them in settings ranging from housing and education to churches.
The Mexicans have challenged inequality throughout the twentieth century, particularly through unionization drives, desegregation efforts in the 1940s and 1950s, and struggles for influence in local government and schools during the Chicano movement. They achieved a degree of success in breaking down the rigid lines of demarcation between Anglos and Mexicans. As Menchaca found during her ethnographic work in the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, although Mexicans successfully broke down formal segregation, Anglos maintained “a system of social control in which Mexican-origin people are expected to interact with Anglo-Americans only on Anglo-American terms” (p. xvi). They sustained a segmented farm labor market via immigration, and they continue to dominate local politics, schools, and other arenas of contract. A new system of “social apartness” has permitted them to “determine the social space” in which Anglo-Mexican relations take place (p. 169).
Menchaca demonstrates an impressive methodological rigor and an intimate understanding of rural community relations that would have been difficult to gain without having resided in Santa Paula for many years. She offers a very important contribution to the rich community studies tradition in Chicano studies.
