A legacy, once lost: Part II

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Seeds of discord and settlement

By the turn of the century, agriculture — irrigated by area canals and nourished by year-round sunshine — ruled supreme as the state’s main commerce.

And it was the hands of Mexicans that skillfully brought forth the bountiful harvests of alfalfa, corn, barley, sorghum and later, cotton.

It is impossible to separate the success of Phoenix-area agriculture from Mexican migrant laborers who fueled farm production. However, while Mexican workers were appreciated during good years, many were fired and forced on their own when the local economy experienced hard times.

During the 1930s, migrant Mexican workers in Arizona and elsewhere were deported, with many American Latino citizens among those cast out.

This push-pull cycle was seen as the cotton industry bloomed in the Phoenix area in the 1918. Workers were needed, and the Arizona Cotton Growers Association and railroad interests began recruiting workers from Mexico.

By the 1920 season, the association had recruited 35,000 Mexican farm workers — more than the total population of Phoenix.

However, the 1921 season was a disaster: the price of cotton dropped to 17 cents a pound from $1.27 a pound. Many growers abandoned their fields, leaving crops to rot.

Farmers turned workers loose, despite the fact that migrant Mexicans were hired under contracts. Many Mexican families were without pay or homes, and were literally starving. The Mexican consulate and the growers association hammered out an agreement.

The ACGA promised to pay the workers and send them back to Mexico on trains free of charge. In reality, it did nothing; the Mexican government finally paid to bring the workers back home.

American agriculture sought Mexican laborers during the market’s boom, but demonized and deported these same workers during economic busts. It is a cycle that still is evident today.

During good times, migrant camps flourished. In the 1920s in present-day Sunnyslope, Mexican labor camps for cotton fields existed near 7^th Avenue and Friar Road, and between Northern Avenue and Friar Road.

Families lived in large tents that had hand-swept, hardened dirt floors. Workers bought milk from local farmers for 10 cents a quart. Farmers hired women from the camps to work as domestics in their homes.

The Benitez family came from Mexico to the Tolleson area in 1918. The family cooked on wood-burning stoves, used an outhouse, and showered in a canvas tent. One daughter, Mona Benitez Pina, born in 1932, recalls that she lived an isolated life, and didn’t travel to Phoenix until she was a teenager.

Some of these camps evolved into cities such as El Mirage, Litchfield Park, Tolleson and Avondale.

Longtime Phoenix resident Joe Torres, born in 1928, says history shows the Valley owes a great debt to Mexican workers.

“We, the Mexican laborers built this town…But a lot of these people don’t know that…And all the farms that were here were run by the Mexican people. Tolleson, Buckeye, New River… All those little towns were born because of the Mexican labor in the farms.”

Where Latino settlers
called home

“We didn’t have pavement. Concrete sidewalks, we didn’t have that, it was just gravel. It was a mixture of races. We had Black families, we had Anglo families, and the Hispanics, the Mexicanos … I think we were all more or less in the same type of financial level…I wouldn’t say we were dirt poor, but we were poor,” says Mike Gomez, who grew up in the Grant Park area in the 1920s and ‘30s. Gomez contributed memories of his early Phoenix childhood neighborhood to the Hispanic Historic Property Survey.

From 1900-’39, many newcomers joined the Mexican community thriving since the city’s founding in 1868. Practices by banks and real estate agents, and race-restrictive housing covenants were the legal roadblocks that forced Latinos to live in poorer areas.

Socially, Mexican Americans knew it was taboo to venture north across Van Buren Street unless they had work to do in the mainly White neighborhoods.

Despite enduring prejudice and discrimination, these challenges did not prevent Latinos from making Phoenix home.

The areas where Latinos lived were called barrios (neighborhoods), which grew larger as more people settled there. The bulk of Mexican residents, from the 1920s until the 1960s, were located south of the Southern Pacific railroad tracks. The first neighborhoods there extended from 7^th Avenue to 24^th Street.

Today a tour of Phoenix’s historical barrios would include Garfield, Grant Park, Calle Nueve, Central Park, Cuarto Milpas, El Campito, Eastlake Part, El Mesquital, La Sonorita, Madison Park, and others.

Many of these neighborhoods originally were outside Phoenix city limits, but came within legal boundaries when the areas were annexed in the 1940s and ‘50s.

From 1910-’20, these communities blossomed, developing their own social life and small businesses. Generally, most working class Mexicans could afford only poor housing.

In a study focusing on Chicano youth in Phoenix, ancianos (seniors) described the early barrios: “Their appearance was basically rural Mexican in nature…small houses lying in open fields, in former sembrados (fields), or adjacent to growing fields. More elaborate houses, some of adobe, were gradually built, many in stages as the economics of the people would allow…”

In the 1920s Cuatro Milpas barrio was farmland owned by four Mexican families who had planted corn in fields (cuatro milpas means “four fields”). This barrio was first formed between Buckeye Road and Mohave, from 12^th street to 13^th Place. To the west, from 7^th to 11^th streets, was a racially restricted area that allowed only Anglos. The area eventually expanded as far south as Durango, and became integrated.

Golden Gate barrio, one of the area’s oldest, was a magnet for Mexican families seeking a better life. It spread out from 16^th to 24^th streets on both sides of Buckeye Road. The Golden Gate neighborhood had 6,000 residents by 1935.

Sadly, Golden Gate barrio no longer exists; the entire community was relocated by city government to make way for the Phoenix airport.

Rosalia Soto Burriel moved to Golden Gate in 1944 when she was six. Her great-grandmother was born in Tucson when it was still part of Mexico. Burriel and her husband were the first couple to be married in Golden Gates’ Sacred Heart Church. She says the loss of Gate created an irreplaceable gap in the community’s cultural history.

“At first I was okay (with relocation) because I was looking for a new house, but afterwards it was kind of sad because it is gone and you can’t even tell where you were.”

A new middle class:
entrepreneurs and
blue-collar workers 

Just after the turn of the 20^th Century, Latino settlers arriving from Mexico and other southwestern areas saw economic opportunity in Phoenix: agriculture, railroad work, and providing goods and services to the city’s growing population.

The wave of Hispanic settlers from 1900-’39 was mostly working class people. However, many managed to rise to middle-class status by starting businesses catering to Latinos and non-Latinos.

Settlers like Ignacio Espinosa, an early Phoenix merchant; Joaquin Ferrá, who owned a grocery store, and drugstore owner Vincente Canalez proved successful entrepreneurs.

Other Latinos prospered by opening bakeries, butcher shops, furniture stores, restaurants and other businesses.

Hispanic-owned businesses were spread across two areas: downtown (located between Washington and Jefferson, from 2^nd to 7^th streets) and in the barrios.

In 1926, Natalio Velasquez opened Union Cleaners at 1017 E. Jefferson. He came to Phoenix in 1921. A friend loaned him money to start a hat shop, which grew into the dry cleaners. He was active in local organizations such as Alianza Hispano Americana, and in 1930, the Mexican Chamber of Commerce. His business lasted into the 1950s.

Vincente Canalez co-owned (with future Arizona Gov. Bob Jones) the Ramona Drug Store in the 1930s, on Washington and 3^rd Street. Hispanic customers came to Ramona Drug Store seeking medical advice and to buy folk remedies such as chichupate tea for stomachaches and salco to soothe a baby’s colic.

Canalez later would become a Democratic precinct committeeman, serve on the Phoenix planning commission and become mayor of Buckeye when he relocated there in the 1960s.

Other families started small businesses in the Hispanic neighborhoods. These businesses included La Estrella Tortilla Shop on Yavapai Street and 3^rd Avenue (which ground corn for masa), and Freddy Garcia’s barber shop next door.

Parks, picnics and
motion pictures

Latinos who settled in Phoenix expressed a love of music, dance and outdoor activities that led them to take advantage of the desert city’s natural and manmade recreation sites.

Natural formations like the Hole-in-the Rock at Papago Buttes, the Salt River and local canals provided places for swimming and picnicking.

Empty dirt lots served as the first parks. In other parts of Phoenix, private owners opened parks with swimming pools and amusements. In 1889, housing developers created Eastlake Park and University Park in central Phoenix.

Mexican Americans frequented Central Park near 1^st and Hadley streets, one of the first four Phoenix parks built by city government.

Other parks where Latinos took their social activities were Grant Park, Harmon Park, Verde Park, Madison Park, Lewis Park and South Mountain Park when it was established in 1924. Here, Latinos held family celebrations like birthdays, and enjoyed holidays like the Fourth of July and Fiestas Patrias.

Encarnacion “Chon” Hernandez was born in 1927 at 1838 E. Adams. He remembers “swimming in the Grand Canal, the Arizona Canal, and canals on the ranches.” He and other kids would play shuffleboard and in baseball tournaments at Eastlake Park. “After we grew up, we used to go to the dances at Eastlake Park,” he says in the Hispanic Historic Property Survey.

Adult Latinos frequented dance halls and ballrooms built between 1900 and 1930.

Early music and dance venues included the Cinderella Ballroom, which was upstairs in a hotel near 3^rd and Washington streets; Willow Breeze on 35^th Avenue; Plantation Ballroom at 24^th Street; Maravilla Gardens, at 13^th Avenue and Grant, and others.

Two of the most popular dance salons were the Riverside Ballroom, built in 1919 at Central Avenue and the Salt River, and Joy Land, near 35^th Avenue and Van Buren.

The Riverside held up to 3,000 guests, and featured national headliner bands in jazz, popular and Mexican music. Joy Land had a pool, beer garden, burlesque shows and a ballroom in which dance marathons were sometimes held.

As the Hollywood film industry expanded from 1910-1930, movie theaters sprouted in downtown Phoenix.

A string of movie theaters included plush theaters such as the Rialto, Orpheum and Fox theaters. The Rex Theater’s first showing of a Mexican film in the 1930s attracted more than 3,000 eager patrons.

The Ramona Theater, on 3^rd and Washington streets, owned by Martin Gold, was built in 1929 and catered to Mexican Americans. The posh amenities included air conditioning, seating for 1,000 and movies in Spanish and English.

The Ramona offered Friday amateur nights, in which local residents displayed their musical and dancing talents.

“We used to go to the Spanish movies at the Rex,” Hernandez recounts in the survey. “Then they closed that, and we went to the Azteca. The English movies, we used to go to Phoenix Theatre. At the Rialto we had to sit in the balcony…you got a lot of popcorn for 10 cents and candy was five cents.”

A place of their own in which
to pray: Immaculate Heart

The year was 1915. Joaquin Ferra, along with other Hispanic Catholics who attended St. Mary’s Church, was confused and angry at a new policy.

Mexican residents had built St. Mary’s in 1896, donating money, construction materials and furnishings from their homes.

When the original building was demolished in 1903, Latino parishioners again pitched in and by 1915 had constructed a beautiful new church at Monroe and 3^rd streets.

But when the doors to the new St. Mary’s opened, the Rev. Novatus Benzing declared that Mexican parishioners would be relegated to the basement for services.

Children of Mexican descent (Adam Diaz, then 6, among them) held their first Holy Communion in the basement, separate from the Anglo children.

Ninety years later, Diaz would vividly recall in a news article the pain of that day’s discrimination. “We could hear music, singing and everything upstairs,” he said in an ASU Cronkite School Web article. “The Anglo boys were having a good time. There we were in the basement, where it was dark and cold.”

Ferra (one of the founders of the political group La Liga Protectora Latina), and other leaders began to revolt against this discriminatory policy by White church officials.

He joined with other parishioners to form the Mexican Catholic Society in 1915 to protest segregation at St. Mary’s.

A Society delegation met Benzing with a petition signed by 1,500 people. When Benzing didn’t change his policy, Society members decided to go directly to Bishop Henry Granjon in Tucson.

The delegation consisted of Ferra, Dr. Lorenzo Boido, a prominent Phoenix doctor, A.R. Redondo, L. Bracamonte, J. Mancillas, Sara Serrano and Refugia Soto. A sympathetic Granjon granted permission for the “Spanish-speaking people of Phoenix” to erect a church of their own.

The bishop chose Reverend Antimo G. Nebreda, a Spanish priest who had ministered in Jerome, to lead the new parish. He found the land for the church, rectory and parochial school on Washington Street in late 1926. Since 1915, Society members had been selling homemade tamales and holding “a series of fairs, dances, socials, dinners and similar types of fundraising events,” according to an era historian. The diocese then authorized a loan to pay for the construction of the buildings.

On Dec. 13, 1928, thousands of Latinos dedicated Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, on Washington and 9th streets. Built in the Second Renaissance Revival Style, its stained-glass windows were donated by parishioners

The altar was donated by St. Augustin Cathedral in Tucson. Bishops from Tucson, the Mexican cities of Hermosillo and Culiacán, and San Gabriel, Calif., officiated at the dedication.

Immaculate Heart’s founding is a tribute to the Mexican community’s determination to create a place of faith where their language, traditions and cultural self esteem were validated. It also was the beginning of a string of Catholic churches in Latino barrios: St. Anthony’s in Grant Park, Sacred Heart in Golden Gate and St. Catherine’s in south Phoenix. These churches not only saw to the spiritual needs of Latinos, but served as community and social centers as well.

Later, Protestant congregations would establish churches for Spanish-speaking Latinos in Phoenix.

Immaculate Heart — a testament to Phoenix Latinos’ sense of ownership of their places of worship — represents the spiritual foundation of a community inspired to fight injustice at every turn.

The Hispanic hand
in Phoenix politics

Early Phoenix Latino history tells of Mexicans who became strangers in their own land after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 suddenly made them American citizens.

When Phoenix officially incorporated as a city in 1867, Latino community leaders such as Trinidad Escalante Swilling (the “mother of Phoenix”) and Enrique “Henry” Garfias played prominent roles in community organizing and political life.

The story of Hispanics in the later years between 1900-’39 reveals that despite increasing political domination by Anglo city leaders, Latinos were determined to continue participating in Phoenix’s political development.

In this period, more people arrived from Mexico to escape political violence there. Work in the Valley’s network of farms and commerce also drew Mexican settlers from other southwestern states. However, Phoenix citizens of Mexican descent (as well as other minorities) experienced increasing prejudice as the White community grew in numbers and power.

In 1913, Phoenix city government changed from a ward systemto a city manager-commission system,which virtually squashed the political input of its poorer citizens. Most of the new officials were Anglos elected from White parts of town.

Taking a different political approach, Hispanics formed organizations concerned with politics and social issues.

In 1914, Phoenix businessmen Pedro G. de la Lama, Ignacio Espinoza, Jesus Melendrez and others met to form La Liga Protectora Latina, a civil rights organization. De la Lama, its president and spokesman, was well educated and a former Mexican Army officer. Under his guidance the group soon had lodges throughout the state, with a sizable chapter in Tucson.

La Liga supported organized forums and supported political candidates who promised to listen to Mexican American concerns. Its members published a newspaper, La Justicia, and took on issues such as bilingual education in schools. Members also fought state legislation that discriminated against Latinos.

By the 1920s La Liga in Phoenix had more than 300 members, with more than 4,000 across the Southwest. However, due to internal strife, its membership declined during the 1920s.

Mexican American community leader Luis Cordova formed the Latino American Club in 1932, another important civil rights group that became a statewide organization. Its mission was to increase Latino voting power by organizing drives and rallies, and to end segregation in schools.

Cordova, a boilermaker for the Southern Pacific Railroad, was born in Phoenix in 1898. He married in 1918 and raised eight children in a home near Grant Street and Central Avenue.

In 1935, Pedro G. de la Lama launched another civil rights group in 1935 named the Spanish American People’s Organization, which mainly endorsed political candidates. However, this group never reached the influence of its predecessor, La Liga.

Businessmen Luis Lugo, Joaquin Ferra, John Lewis and Manuel Segarra formed the Southside Improvement Association in 1935, which met at the Friendly House in the Grant Park neighborhood. This group advocated for better police protection, more parks, and street maintenance that had suffered neglect from city government.

Although none of these organizations exist today, their political legacy would inspire Latinos for decades to come, through the trying years of the Great Depression, with the return of WWII veteranos, and rise of the Chicano Movimiento.