For some, life in north Los Alamitos...

By DALLAS M. JACKSON

March 29, 1991 12 AM PT

For some, life in north Los Alamitos was sweet.

In 1896, a former senator from Montana had a vision for a business venture that would affect the lives of people all over the world. William Clark’s idea involved the purchase 8,139 acres of rancho land, the planting of a fat, red, bulbous vegetable and the building of a refining plant. It was an entrepreneurial adventure on which hundreds of livelihoods would hang.

The Los Alamitos Sugar Co. was no simple business. It was an all-encompassing factory complex that included the plant and fields, plus company-built housing for its workers on Serpentine Drive and a community center on Los Alamitos Boulevard.

The success of the sugar plant skyrocketed. By 1911, the factory had processed 180 million pounds of sugar beets and employed more than 400 people, some of whom were French, Flemish and Dutch. The vast majority of the workers, though, were Mexican immigrants who had fled their country during the bloody 15-year Mexican Revolution that had begun in 1910.

“Obviously, a revolution is going to have refugees,” said Joseph Platt, a professor of Chicano studies at Cal State Fullerton. “There was a dual need. Mexicans were needed to work in the Southwest, and at the same time they wanted to escape the chaos and bloodshed in Mexico.”

According to Platt, the Mexicans who immigrated during their civil war were working-class people looking for employment on the railroads, factories or in the fields. And wherever they went, a labor camp would develop. In some cases, an employer would build a row of shanty houses and rent them to workers.

“That was actually the birth of the barrios,” Platt said. “Barrios did not have the negative connotation they do today. A barrio was simply an enclave--a Mexican neighborhood with a cultural identity, festivities and a sense of community.”

The Mexican laborers became such a strong part of north Los Alamitos that they asked the landowners for a parcel on which to build a church. In 1922, St. Isadore Catholic Church, on the corner of Katella Avenue and Reagan Street, was completed. And if the factory was the focal point of the Mexican community’s economic survival, the church was the cornerstone of its spiritual and social stability.

The church is still in its original location and continues to celebrate Mass in Spanish every Sunday at 9 a.m. In evidence, too, is the barrio, and the shanty housing, which still exists today on Catalina, Florista and Reagan streets. In its heyday, contrasted with life in Mexico, it was a sweet deal. And Jimmy Lopez, a soft-spoken octogenarian with a face full of character and life, is a flesh-and-blood example of how that system worked.

Lopez was born in 1905 in Mexico City and in 1921 migrated with his parents, who came to work on the railroad. He lived in company-owned housing until he was able to buy a small home for himself. He met his wife, Maria, also a worker at the factory, and they were married at St. Isadore.

“When my parents came to this country, I came with them. They worked on the railroads, and I worked at the sugar plant as general help,” Lopez recalled.

The sugar beet crop is gone, the victim of a devastating insect infestation in 1921. The factory closed four years later and then was leased to the company that manufactured Dr. Ross Dog and Cat Food. A 1933 earthquake did considerable damage to the building, though, and the property changed hands frequently until it was finally sold to developers in 1960.

Development in north Los Alamitos, whether by design or convenience, is a mix of business and residence. Today the neighborhood sports two high schools, a junior high, an elementary school, a community center, several strip malls, mom-and-pop eateries, a lumber company, St. Isadore (which also operates the federal food bank), Los Alamitos Medical Center, and the John Douglas French Center for Alzheimer’s disease--the country’s only facility devoted exclusively to the long-term care of patients with dementia disorders.

But in a quirk of suburban non-planning, some of the residential pockets are an eclectic hodgepodge of architecture. On one single block, for example, there can be a brand-new townhouse project, a vacant lot, an old tar-paper shanty and a Victorian home.

In fact, Lopez’s modest wooden home is sandwiched between two stucco condominium projects. Developers have offered him several hundred thousand dollars for his property, but he always turns the offers down.

“Where am I going? Why should I go?” he asks and shrugs.

Lopez then smiles and says that in the mid-1920s he paid only $125 for his home and all the land surrounding it.

“All this land used to be cheap around here,” he says. “For $12.50, you could buy a 25-by-50-foot lot. So why should I sell? Where do I have to go? I like it here.”

Lopez walks across his meticulously kempt, bright green lawn bordered by delicate red and white perennials and surveys the freshly turned earth around his rosebushes. As he returns to digging in his vegetable garden with a trowel, the cool winter sun at his back, one is reminded that life for some in north Los Alamitos is still sweet.

Population

Total: (1990 est.) 2,915

1980-89 change: +11.0% Median Age: 32.8

Racial/ethnic mix:

White:

(non-Latino): 59%

Latino: 27%

Black: 1%

Other: 13%

By sex and age: In hundreds

MALES

Median age: 32.2 years