San Fernando Comes of Age : Railroad Tracks No Longer Segregate Latinos, Anglos

Gabe Rodriguez has lived in San Fernando all of his 65 years, enough time not only to raise four children and seven grandchildren, but also to witness the collapse of the barriers that once made San Fernando a divided, racially segregated city.

In 1950 Rodriguez was 26 years old. Like almost all Latino residents of San Fernando, he lived south of the Southern Pacific railroad tracks, which cut through the city. Home was in the Spanish-speaking streets of “the barrio.”

Buying or renting a house on the north side, the “good side of the tracks,” was impossible for most Latinos. According to the U. S. Census, only 10 Mexican immigrants were among the 7,229 north-side residents in 1950. Anglo and Latino children sometimes attended the same schools but always went home to separate worlds. Young Latino men did not walk north-side streets at night.

“We were a forgotten people,” Rodriguez said. “It wasn’t that we couldn’t go in to the north side, it was that we weren’t welcome. When people ask me what the north side was like then, I tell them I don’t know because I never went there.”

Latino Majority on Council

Today San Fernando is an integrated city. In 1986, the growth of the Latino community on both sides of the tracks led to the election of the first Latino majority on the City Council. The political and social changes in the 2.4-square-mile city reflect in microcosm the coming of age of Southern California’s Latino community.

“It’s been a fight, but I think we’re winning,” said Rodriguez, who in 1945 began his own efforts for political change by registering south-side Latinos to vote. “What we started 40 years ago, it’s starting to pay off.”

But the changes in San Fernando are also the product of “white flight” and the clash of cultures in the quiet, tree-lined neighborhoods on the north side. Rodriguez now owns a home on 8th Street, about 15 blocks north of the railroad tracks. With each passing day, he says, more and more Latinos become his neighbors.

Indeed, in Rodriguez’s lifetime, north San Fernando has undergone a demographic flip-flop. As late as 1960, Latinos made up only 7% of the north-side population. But if the trend of the past three decades continues, Latinos will constitute about 70% of north San Fernando’s population in the 1990 census and 90% by the end of the century.

Many Anglo residents have left San Fernando in the past decade, moving to more affluent and less racially integrated suburbs. Real estate transactions listed in a local newspaper show that north San Fernando homes are often sold by owners with Anglo surnames to buyers with Latino surnames. And last week, six houses were for sale on a six-block stretch of a single north-side street.

“You’re seeing white flight in its truest form,” said Rick Klein, a lifelong resident of the north side and the owner of a Victorian house built on Orange Grove Avenue in 1890. Klein said that in one week this year, three Anglo families on his block moved out. “We lost the Lees, the Reeds and the Ramseys,” he said.

Strong Attachment to Community

Despite the changes, Klein, a Southern California Gas Co. employee, said he still is strongly attached to the community. His wife, Patty, said she loves the small-town flavor of San Fernando, a city where “you call a cop and he’s here before you hang up.” But, she said, the arrival of Spanish-speaking families in her neighborhood, and in the house next door, sometimes makes her uncomfortable.

“The neighbors are nice, lovely people, but I don’t know what they’re saying about me when I hear them talking,” she said. “I don’t have much in common with a lot of my neighbors.”

Before the 1960s, a variety of barriers kept Latinos from buying or renting north-side houses. According to several longtime San Fernando residents, some real estate agents directed Latino buyers only to south-side houses.

Even if Latinos found a real estate agent willing to show them a north-side house, they may have been prevented from buying it by a restrictive covenant in the property deed prohibiting the house’s sale to “persons of Mexican, Chinese, Japanese and Ethiopian descent.” Such covenants were common in Southern California until the Rumford Fair Housing Act of 1963 outlawed them.

“Laws were passed, and San Fernando had to respect the laws of the nation,” said Carolyn Riggs, 81, a volunteer at the Lopez Adobe museum in San Fernando who has lived in the city since 1925. “You couldn’t stay by yourself. You had to let people in.”

The north side’s new Latino residents are themselves a demographic mix. In some north-side neighborhoods, impoverished immigrant families from Mexico and Central America crowd into dilapidated homes. A few years ago, San Fernando city officials noticed the phenomenon of entire families moving into converted garages.

In other, more affluent neighborhoods, the new Latino residents are middle-class professionals--second-, third- and fourth-generation Mexican-Americans who have deep roots in the south-side barrio and other Latino communities in the San Fernando Valley.

Prof. Everto Ruiz, chairman of the Chicano studies department at Cal State Northridge, grew up on Kewen Street on the south side, where his grandparents first settled in the 1920s. Ruiz lives in an attractive house on a north-side cul-de-sac, where family station wagons, vans and new cars occupy the driveways and every available parking space.

Ruiz’s grandparents met in San Fernando, but both emigrated from the same small town in the northern Mexico state of Sonora. Back then, most of San Fernando’s Latino residents were laborers who toiled in the Valley’s packinghouses and citrus and olive orchards. Among them was a large Sonoran community, Ruiz said, similar to one that once flourished in downtown Los Angeles.

Then, as now, San Fernando was a refuge, a place where newly arrived immigrants found relatives and friends who would help them adjust to a strange and different culture.

“I don’t look at the barrio in a negative sense,” Ruiz said. “The new immigrant sees something positive there, something he can identify with. The barrio exists for the survival of the family, its cultural identity and economic survival.”

Although Ruiz left the barrio, the barrio in a sense has followed him to his north-side neighborhood. Only a few blocks from Ruiz’s home, at St. Simon’s Episcopal Church, about half of the parishioners of the once-predominantly Anglo congregation are now Spanish-speaking immigrants. Most of them live on the north side, said Quentin Galloway, 67, church treasurer and a St. Simon’s parishioner for 15 years.

In addition to its two English-language masses, St. Simon’s has two Spanish-language masses that are “full house, standing room only,” Galloway said.

Galloway said the nonstop activity at the church sharply contrasts with the time before St. Simon’s hired the Rev. Jose Carlo as the church’s first Latino priest in 1980. Because so many Anglo parishioners had left the neighborhood, the congregation had dwindled drastically.

“Poor old St. Simon’s was dying on the vine,” Galloway said. “A lot of Sundays, there were more people in the choir than in the pews.”

For the Latino community, Carlo and the congregation have organized English classes for the immigration amnesty program and a weekly food distribution for the neighborhood’s impoverished residents. “The church is here to serve the neighborhood, and the neighborhood has gone Spanish,” Galloway said.

Unfortunately, Galloway said, the changes were not welcomed by all of the parishioners. “We did lose two . . . families. They wanted to keep St. Simon’s an Anglican country club,” he said. “They didn’t want to go to church with Mexicans.”

Galloway believes that the Latino parishioners have brought new life to the church. He has even learned a few words of Spanish to get along in the Spanish-speaking environment.

Other longtime north-side residents are not as enthusiastic about the new San Fernando. For them, the city’s demographic changes have ended the small-town atmosphere where people knew their neighbors and most of the local merchants on a first-name basis.

“All the people were nice on the block,” said Roberta Philpy, a 67-year-old retired secretary who moved to Orange Grove Avenue in 1952. “Your kids played together. It was lovely. . . . It used to be.”

Philpy owns a well-kept, freshly painted home with a brick facade on a street lined with tall maple trees. The neighborhood seems quiet and serene, but Philpy said appearances are deceiving.

She complains about graffiti, men loitering and an increase in crime and traffic, problems once confined to the rough-and-tumble streets of the south side, a place where, not too long ago, a red-light district existed along Kalisher Street.

But if the remaining white north-side residents were to venture into the city’s south side, they would discover a community also undergoing a transformation. City officials are trying to remake the south side in the image of the more affluent north side.

Shortly after the Latino majority was reelected to the City Council in 1988, the city created a redevelopment zone on the south side that gives the city the power to condemn dilapidated buildings, which were providing a haven for criminals.

“This was an area that was totally ignored and one where there seemed there was little or no concern for what was happening,” Mayor Daniel Acuna said during a recent tour of the south side.

New houses are going up on the south side, some on property acquired by the city through the redevelopment zone, Acuna said. “We’re a small enough city that if we have the will to solve a problem, we can do it.”

The new council has already won over a few skeptics, including Ralph Harper, a former mayor and city councilman in the 1960s. Harper moved to San Fernando in the mid-1940s. He remembers that a group of north-side residents even then were mounting a successful recall effort against two Latino councilmen.

Harper said that at first he didn’t expect the council’s plans to renovate the city’s commercial and industrial areas to go very far. “Obviously, they have been successful beyond anything I thought at the time,” he said. “Frankly, I didn’t think it would fly, but it did.”

Gabe Rodriguez is optimistic that the new council can accomplish even more. “We’re going to make San Fernando a model town,” he said.

And Rodriguez said he hopes that his remaining Anglo neighbors stick around to see the changes.

“I hate to see the white flight,” he said. “I hate that because they really didn’t give us a chance to get acquainted. We never got to be friends. I’ve always thought we could live together.”

A DIVIDED CITY

The Census Bureau divided the city of San Fernando into two census tracts in 1950, separated by the Southern Pacific railroad right of way. In the 1960 Census, the bureau divided the one tract north of the railroad into two tracts.

LATINOS IN SAN FERNANDO

Latinos* in city of San Fernando

1950 1960 1970 1980 North side Latino residents less than 250 629 3,192 6,438 Total residents 7,229 9,736 10,441 11,422 South side Latino residents 4,039 4,437 4,912 5,781 Total residents 5,763 6,357 6,130 6,309

Mexican-born residents of San Fernando

1950 1960 1970 1980 North side Mexican-born 10 374 1,396 2,982 residents Total residents 7,229 9,736 10,441 11,422 South side Mexican-born 931 2,663 3,348 2,901 residents Total residents 5,763 6,357 6,130 6,309

Percentage of Mexican-born residents in each area

1950 1960 1970 1980 North side 0.1% 3.8% 13.4% 26.1% South side 16.2% 41.9% 54.6% 46.0% Citywide 7.2% 18.7% 28.6% 33.2%

* Latino is defined as “Spanish surname” in the 1950 and 1960 Census, as “Spanish language or Spanish surname” in the 1970 Census and “Hispanic origin” in the 1980 Census.

includes other foreign-born residents of Spanish origin.