I lost my mom to COVID in February 2021. She died alone, after spending 10 excruciating days in the hospital. A year after her death, a white envelope with no return address arrived in my Pomona College mailbox. Inside was a photo of my mom from the early 1970s.

In the photo, she is standing between two corridors of Sparks Middle School’s brick campus in La Puente, where she taught until she retired in 2008. She smiles gently, with her arms by her side. Her hair is long and straight, and she is wearing a sleeveless dress. She looks so young.

She was gone, and there were so many things I couldn’t ask her. For years, as a researcher and resident, I wrote about La Puente’s Mexican community and its fight for educational justice. My mom’s death—and that precious photo—made me consider new questions about the past. I began wondering about Greenberry, East San Gabriel Valley’s first Black suburban neighborhood, sometimes called “Little Watts.” Some of my mom’s early students lived there. I first heard about this neighborhood from her, but still knew next to nothing about it.

I wanted to be near my mom, and I wanted to learn Greenberry’s history. I began reaching out to some of the students she taught in the 1970s, and digging through yearbooks, newspaper articles, church records, and city council and school board minutes. I learned that Black residents in La Puente, so often forgotten, challenged multiple forms of racism. At times, they found common cause with Mexican Americans and other allies, including my Sicilian American mom. Indeed, Greenberry and its now-hidden history of activism helped forge today’s multi-racial San Gabriel Valley.

My family’s history, and specifically my mom’s early years at Sparks, intersected with Greenberry’s growth and its residents’ fight for equality. First-generation college graduates committed to social justice, my parents returned to La Puente—the multi-racial blue-collar city where their Sicilian and Nicaraguan immigrant parents lived—to become junior high school teachers. In the early 1970s, they rented a house on Evanwood Avenue, less than a mile south of Greenberry.

Pushed out of South Central Los Angeles by urban renewal, eminent domain, and the 1965 Watts uprising, Black families, some originally from the South and Midwest, moved to Greenberry in the 1960s. Newly suburbanized La Puente had relatively affordable homes, so Black families bought there and created a thriving community. White real estate agents, however, sought to preserve all-white neighborhoods. Fueled by racist beliefs that Black residents would lower home values, they steered Black families south of Francisquito Avenue into an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County just outside the then-white middle-class city of West Covina. Greenberry Drive led to the enclave’s three main blocks—Greenberry, Glenshaw, and Evanwood.

Former residents fondly describe late midcentury Greenberry as a “village.” Black families integrated existing churches, and Black pastors established new ones. Black women hosted parties and games of bid whist and dominos. The community discussed issues that impacted the village and in 1964, frustrated with ongoing discrimination, established the La Puente-West Covina branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). They fought segregated housing in West Covina, and curriculum tracking and IQ testing in schools.

Children who grew up in Greenberry went to Sparks, where my mom taught Spanish and language arts to the area’s Black, Mexican, white, and few Asian American students. She wanted students to leave feeling better about themselves than when they entered. During Mom’s Zoom memorial, former student and Greenberry resident Keith Williams recalled, “The thing I valued most from Ms. Francesca Ochoa is the way she always finished her Spanish class, ‘Que tengas un buen día. Have a nice day.’ She showed us that she cared.”

Living in the school district where my parents taught, the lines between work and home often blurred. My mom’s 1970s students told me they occasionally dropped by our home to make the 10-minute walk to school with Ms. Ochoa. Some even remembered hearing toddler-me crying in the background.

Shortly after Mom arrived at Sparks, the local NAACP allied with the La Puente-area Organization of Mexican American Communities and La Raza Unida Party to fight police brutality and to increase the number of Black and Chicana/o educators. They pushed for Chicano and Black Studies classes, and in 1972, demanded that the school district make one year of Chicano and Black Studies a graduation requirement for all high school students. My mother taught Chicano studies for several years.

As I learned more about Greenberry and its history of Black activism, I found my mother in the historical record. Lionel J. Brown came up often in my research: a president of the area NAACP, an organizer against police violence, and a teacher who advocated for, and then chaired, a council to address racial discrimination in the school district. Through school board minutes, I discovered that my mom and Mr. Brown participated together in a multi-day workshop in 1974 titled “Different Aspects of Mexican Culture.”

I was eager to find Mr. Brown, and I looked for him at his old address. The owner told me Mr. Brown lost his home to foreclosure in the early 1980s; he stored some of Mr. Brown’s items for a few years, but never saw him again. This was the closest I came to finding Lionel Brown. I was overcome with sadness—a sense of loss thinking about how he was pushed out of his home and community, and a sense of loss reflecting on how his labor to improve our area is unknown to too many.

Almost none of the Black families in Greenberry remain today. In the late 1970s, many of the neighborhood youth left for the military, college, or work. Priced out of the area and able to purchase newer and larger homes further east, young families went to the Inland Empire; their parents, like mine, passed away. I spoke with 65-year-old Ethel Smith, who lived in Greenberry from 1969 to 1976, and recently visited the neighborhood, hoping to reconnect with old memories. “It’s sad,” she grieved, “I went through Greenberry to reminisce, and I can’t remember people whose houses I’ve been to. I can’t remember where they lived.”

But relationships endure, even as the community is now physically dispersed. Greenberry’s former residents have met for yearly reunions since 2012. “How many communities from the ’70s—communities not families—get together once a year?” Keith Williams marveled when I visited him as part of my research into the neighborhood. “I don’t know of any communities that have such an interwoven connection with one another,” he reflected. The seeds that the original residents planted, Keith observed, have connected the former Greenberry residents’ kids, grandkids, and great grandkids.

Recovering local histories of placemaking, like Greenberry’s, teaches us about our interrelated and unequal pasts, and about the times that people have united for change. Researching Greenberry’s past has been part of my own remembering—a way to stay connected with my mom, honor the relationships she maintained, and hold onto the love she conveyed. It has exposed interconnected and transgenerational relationships and on-going struggles for justice.

For all of this, I’m grateful to former Greenberry residents. I hope to ensure more people learn about this past, and the community’s work—for them, for my mom, and ultimately for us all.

The post Searching for My Mom, and the History of La Puente’s ‘Little Watts’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Chavez often added text to the mural’s surface, encouraging the campus community to boycott lettuce in support of the United Farm Workers, for example, but the mural itself was quite conceptual. He hoped contemplation of the mural would compel students to look critically at the world around them, to avoid a military-industrial complex that sought to entrap them, and ultimately to reach a kind of self-aware enlightenment. Established curricula, teachers, and departments within institutions of higher education, Chavez believed, did not always function in the best interests of their students.

For five years, The Path to Knowledge was a major cultural landmark. It was the largest mural ever painted in the East L.A. area–and could even be seen while driving east from downtown Los Angeles on the 60 Freeway. It placed East L.A. College within a burgeoning public art movement that would make Los Angeles the mural capital of the world. It legitimatized mural painting within the academic environment. And it connected East L.A. to early 20th century Mexico, when large public murals were part of the country’s revolutionary transformation.

I met Chavez in 1979, when he hired me to be the first female full-time staff member in East L.A. College’s Chicano studies department. It felt like ground zero for Chicano and Latino education in California. There was a palpable sense that we could change the world—that “cultura cura,” culture heals. Our department offered classes on Mexican and Chicano literature, visual art and theater, and put on events such as a newly revived el Dia de los Muertos festival. But the street mural was the most visible and visceral embodiment of Chicano culture on L.A.’s Eastside.

In the early 1970s, América Tropical, a controversial mural painted in 1932 by Mexican artist David Siqueiros to protest American imperialism, began to bleed through the wall of the old Italian Hall downtown at the Placita Olvera. A group of Chicano activists and scholars were inspired to call for its restoration–and inspired murals around the Eastside (and I mean East Los Angeles and Boyle Heights, not Silver Lake or East Hollywood!). Larger-than-life images of Joaquin Murieta, Che Guevara, and Cesar Chavez, and slogans such as “Viva La Raza” and “We Are Not a Minority” began to appear on garage doors, cinderblock walls, and storefronts. Then, gaining respectability, the murals moved to parks, libraries, public housing, and a host of official venues, with government funds providing the paint and (very) small artist stipends. Chavez attempted to harness this energy at East L.A. College by bringing to campus mural painting classes, student murals, and most importantly The Path to Knowledge.

I will never forget walking with my colleagues past the auditorium one day early in the fall of 1979 when someone noticed the mural was gone. It had been whitewashed–literally–by the campus administration. Why had an institution that had supported Chavez, this mural, and the Chicano studies program taken away something many of us felt deeply connected to in one fell swoop?

There was some controversy at the time as to who gave the order to whitewash the mural, but it has become clear that the whitewashing was part of a larger agenda by the new college president and the administration to blunt the progressive, political, and ethnic edge that had developed on campus. The college had recently eliminated its African-American studies program and, as it turned out, the mural’s erasure was the beginning of the end to the Chicano studies department’s crusading spirit. The charismatic Chavez left the department in 1980 and, in 1981, resigned from the college. As the department shifted from activism to a less community-focused curriculum, the False University Chavez had warned us about in his mural hit home sharply and suddenly.

By the new millennium, the city of Los Angeles was rapidly removing street murals, labeling them graffiti and gang-related. When I talked about murals in the early 2000s with my students at East L.A. College, many of them the sons and daughters of immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala, they acknowledged that they and their parents had no connection to the mural renaissance of the 1970s. They told me they saw the murals as more problematic than empowering.

But Chavez has found his way back into the Los Angeles and Chicano art canon. The launching of the Getty initiative, Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, an exhibition showcasing Chicano artists from mid-century Los Angeles. Chavez’s work was eventually featured in The Mexican American Generation exhibition at the Autry National Center in 2012.

The positive reception the exhibition received led me to approach the Vincent Price Art Museum at East L.A. College, the very campus that had erased Chavez’s work, with a proposal to host a retrospective. Enough time had passed that the story no longer carried the energy of the 1979 tragedy. And many artists and a number of community arts organizations had started trying to preserve L.A.’s surviving murals. Karen Rapp, the museum’s director, was curious to hear more about what had happened.

This September, when the exhibition opened, Chavez, 82, got the warm welcome back he deserved. Many former students and community members came to pay homage. As he began his gallery talk, he held up a paintbrush in a raised fist, and said, “I will keep my comments brief as this is my weapon of choice.” This got a big laugh. All of us who had known him were thrilled to see the old Chavez back on campus. But it took his mural and its story becoming history to make an untold narrative worth exploration.

Roberto Chavez and the False University is on display at the Vincent Price Art Museum, East L.A. College, through December 6.

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