ACTIVIST SHOWCASES HER LATINO HERITAGE

Cora Oviedo is a cultural activist--one of the hundreds of newly emerging volunteer leaders in Orange County who have made the arts their personal cause.

But she is not a leader with one of the county’s high-status mainstream organizations--not, for example, the Philharmonic Society, the Pacific Symphony Assn., or, most prestigious of all, the Performing Arts Center.

Rather, Oviedo, the 50-year-old daughter of Mexican immigrants, finds herself supporting a cause still relatively new in the county, still modestly financed and still regarded as an adjunct to the county’s overall cultural development.

That cause is to chronicle the achievements and showcase the cultures of Orange County’s ethnic minority communities, especially those that played pioneering--but long-obscure--roles in the farming, rail and mercantile developments of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

And Oviedo, as a leader of the Orange County-based Mexican-American Council, has been involved in that cause since 1981, when the Bowers Museum Foundation started the county’s first full-scale program for ethnic cultural and historical councils.

To Oviedo, who grew up in the county’s barrios and who now lives in a middle-class Tustin-area neighborhood, her activism is highly personal.

“Of course, we’re very proud of our heritage. It’s our deepest, truest identity,” said Oviedo, who last year served as president of the Bowers-affiliated Mexican-American Council.

“Our pride, this identity have always been there. We never lost it, we never forgot it. But it hasn’t always been easy to explain to other people.”

Her father, Marcelino Ayala, was an activist but in a far different sort of era.

In 1916, he left his native Michoacan state in Mexico--at the height of the Mexican Revolution--and found work with other Mexican immigrants on railroads in Texas, steel mills in Pittsburgh and farms in Kansas.

In southwestern Kansas--where he met and married another immigrant, Pomposa Madrid--Ayala became a spokesman for the Mexican camp workers and a key organizer of festivals and other Mexican observances.

He continued this kind of activism when the family moved to Southern California in the mid-1930s, settling in the Colonia Independencia barrio in the Anaheim area, then later in Stanton, Huntington Beach and Garden Grove.

“My father was very strong, very outspoken, very proud. He was someone who had a sense of his value, his own worth and where his heritage came from,” Oviedo recalled.

Above all, her father wanted to make sure that the seven Ayala children, all born in the United States, would never abandon their Mexican heritage.

“He had a great love of culture. He loved all kinds of fine music--Mozart, Bizet, Strauss,” Oviedo said. “But he also taught us all about Mexican history and arts, especially the poetry. We all danced or sang or recited the poetry at the festivals. We were very poor, but he still managed to take us every week to L.A. for the (Spanish-language) variety shows.”

“Sure, my father (who died in 1969) wanted us to assimilate,” she added. “But he didn’t want us to forget who we are.”

But growing up in the 1930s and early 1940s was during an era of enormous isolation for Mexican-Americans like the Ayalas.

“That’s the time when things were still segregated for us--schools, housing, jobs, even the movie theaters,” said Oviedo’s brother, Val Ayala, an accountant who now lives in Diamond Bar.

“Like everyone else, we were trying to make it in this society. But to most people, we were looked upon as some kind of subculture.”

By 1981, when Orange County’s first ethnic minority councils’ program was being formed, these educational, economic and social barriers had lowered dramatically for many Mexican-Americans.

In fact, this trend as much as anything reflected new demographic--and political--realities in the treatment of Mexican-Americans.

Santa Ana itself had become a key example. By 1981, the city’s Latino population had reached 45% of the city’s overall population, with no signs of slowing down.

A barrio-based Mexican-American coalition in Santa Ana, as in the case of Los Angeles and other cities with large concentrations of Latinos, was formed to seek improved housing, education and other programs affecting those neighborhoods.

Even the city-run Bowers Museum reflected a national trend when the museum launched its ethnic councils’ program, which sought to document the lives of Orange County’s blacks, American Indians and Asians, as well as Latinos.

A perfect time, Cora Oviedo thought in 1981, to become a cultural activist.

“My sister (Isabel Ruiz) and I had read about it in the paper, that the (Bowers) foundation was looking for people like us to help out,” recalled Cora. “At first it seemed too good to be true. Nothing like that had ever happened to Mexican-Americans here. But we also knew the trends--that this was the right time.”

The Mexican-American Council’s presentations became typical of the Bowers ethnic program. Traditional cultural festivals, including performing troupes and crafts demonstrations, were staged at Bowers. Workshops, lectures and exhibitions centered on Mexican folk art. “Traveling exhibits” were sent to local schools.

The most ambitious move, perhaps, was the council’s oral history project in conjunction with the UC Irvine, and other scholars. Based in large part on interviews of older Mexican immigrants, that project, organizers say, seeks to help lift the curtain of anonymity from that immigrant generation.

There have been, however, recent setbacks to the Bowers program. As in the case of most of the other councils, Bowers officials said, completion of the Mexican-American Council’s oral history project has stalled because of the lack of funds.

And two of the most active groups, the Japanese-American and Chinese-American councils, left Bowers last year to join the Historical and Cultural Foundation of Orange County. The new foundation, based in Irvine, proposes a councils’ program similar to that started at Bowers.

This leaves the Mexican-American Council--which has a budget of about $20,000 a year--the only active ethnic group at the museum, Bowers officials said. (Others of the original Bowers-affiliated councils, such as the black and American Indian groups, are now inactive.)

“We believe our program has already made its mark,” Cora Oviedo said. “It has given our culture much more exposure. It has given us visibility and credibility as an organization. It has helped to give us standing with the (Anglo) community.”

Best of all, she added, the council venture has brought out the Mexican-American community in unabashedly open displays of ethnic pride.

The Oviedos’ extended-family group is an example. Virtually the entire clan--including the Oviedos’ three children and the families of Cora’s sister, Isabel Ruiz, and brother, Val Ayala--have regularly attended the festivals and other Mexican celebrations at Bowers.

To them, the presence of the younger generation at these events is crucial. “This heritage belongs to them, too. We want to pass it on to them, just as it was passed to us,” said Cora Oviedo’s husband, Jess, a carpenter, who is a member of the Mexican-American Council’s board of directors.

Still, the Mexican-American elders are the ones who bring a special poignancy--and symbolism--to these gatherings. Such as the clan matriarch herself, the 84-year-old Pomposa Ayala.

“She represents our heritage, that first generation here that contributed so much to developing this area,” Cora Oviedo said of her mother. “She belongs there (at the Bowers events), maybe more than most people.

“But all those years, no one had written about immigrants like my father and mother . For the longest time, no one seemed to care about them--except us. Now, I think, other people are beginning to understand.”