Moorpark Losing Its Latino Roots : Growth: Census data shows that the onetime farming community is gaining white population. Longtime residents mourn the passing of Mexican American celebrations.

There was a time when women in black scarves called rebozos would line Charles Street in Moorpark, following a procession for the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

The tiny farming community used to regularly hold fiestas, its streets coming alive on Mexican Independence Day and Cinco de Mayo. But that was a generation ago.

Moorpark is now one of the few California cities where Latino residents make up a shrinking portion of the overall population.

As the debate heightens over immigrants and their impact on California, old-timers in Moorpark provide a different spin on the issue. It is whites from the San Fernando Valley and other parts of Los Angeles who are flocking to this Ventura County city. And it is people with names such as Castro, Sepulveda, Lopez and Bravo who are lamenting how the newcomers have changed their hometown.

The Mexican American gatherings of the past have all but vanished in a cultural shift that now reflects the complexion of Moorpark’s new hillside neighborhoods.

The city stopped funding a Cinco de Mayo fiesta last year. Now the only real citywide celebration, says lifelong Moorpark resident Ruben Castro, is a Western-themed parade complete with mock gunfights and line dancing.

“Now we have Moorpark Country Days,” said the 65-year-old Castro. “They play a little country and Western music and sell hot dogs.”

Castro and his contemporaries remember Moorpark as a small town where Latinos made up at least half the population, if not more.

When the city’s statistics were first broken out in the 1980 census, they showed that Latinos accounted for about 45% of the population. Ten years later, the figure had dropped to about 20%. Planners say that percentage has fallen lower, and probably will continue its slide as more upper-middle-class families move to the upscale tract homes planned for the hills that surround the town.

“I cannot think of any other city in Southern California where this is happening,” said Leo Estrada, a UCLA professor of urban planning.

Estrada said the only other California cities he knows of with a dropping percentage of Latino residents are San Francisco, Redding and a small town in Sierra County.

“It’s quite interesting because it provides a flip side to what we’re experiencing here in Los Angeles,” he said.

What some of the locals in Moorpark lament most is the loss of the tightly knit and proud community they remember. Some worry that the influx of newcomers will erase their history from the town’s memory.

Moorpark Historical Society President Connie Lawrason, whose husband is Mayor Paul Lawrason, said she does not know of any local tradition of Mexican American celebrations.

“I’ve looked through all of the old photographs and haven’t been able to find any of Mexican fiestas,” said Lawrason, who has lived in Moorpark for 10 years. “I’ve asked a lot of the old-timers, and nobody seems to remember any of those festivals.”

Castro shrugs off such suggestions. “Ask anyone that grew up here,” he said. “They don’t remember either because they weren’t here or because they’re white.”

As a farm town before World War II, Moorpark was largely segregated. Latinos lived on the north side of the railroad tracks that cross the town and shopped mostly at their own businesses, such as Castro’s father’s store, La Mas Barata.

The town’s Latino population had separate celebrations from Moorpark’s whites, Castro said. He and his neighbors attended a segregated elementary school on Charles Street until fourth grade. When they went to the movies, they were allowed to sit only on the right side of the theater.

“Yeah, it was a racist place, but no different from the rest of California,” said resident Henry Bravo, 68.

World War II broke down many barriers. On leave from the Army, Bravo remembers seeing Latinos protesting the segregated seating at the local theater. “They figured if we were good enough to get shot up in the war and die over there, we were good enough to sit anywhere we wanted to,” he said.

Bravo, like other young Latino men, returned from the war in uniform and demanded equal treatment. He was the first Latino to move his family across the railroad tracks to a housing development called Sunshine Acres.

Now that area is mostly Latino. And Latino residents are concentrated in the city’s older downtown area around High Street and along both sides of the railroad tracks. Many of the modest single-story homes have become run-down. Bravo says newly arrived Mexican immigrants crowd as many as four families into a home to save money.

The neighborhood’s character contrasts sharply with that of the bigger tract homes in the hills. Some downtown houses have sloping porches and dirt yards with chickens strutting about inside a fence.

Sitting under a carob tree he planted behind his well-kept home nearly 40 years ago, Bravo reels off the Spanish surnames of the families from his youth.

“That’s old-time Moorpark,” he said. “Some of them are still around, but a lot of them are dead or gone.”

Moorpark was a town of about 1,200 in the 1930s and ‘40s. It grew to about 7,000 people by 1980. That is when things changed the most. The apricot, walnut and citrus groves gave way to housing developments. Since 1983, when it incorporated, the town has grown almost fourfold, to a population of about 28,000.

“I don’t mind the growth,” Bravo said. “What I mind is that they (the newcomers) seem to ignore us. Everything in this town is done for them. They forget we’re still around.”

A group of local women who call themselves the Guadalupanas formed about 10 years ago to keep some of the local Mexican American traditions alive.

Martha Ruiz, 59, said the group’s activities center on Holy Cross Catholic Church and on the annual feast day for Our Lady of Guadalupe, an apparition of the Virgin Mary seen in Mexico in 1531. But since a chapel was built outside of downtown, she said, participation has begun to falter.

“We try to keep it alive, and we still have special Masses,” she said. “But doing something like Cinco de Mayo just takes so many permits and things.”

Jesse Silos, another member of the Guadalupanas, said part of the responsibility for keeping the traditions alive falls on the younger generation of Latinos. Her father, a ranch hand, sponsored the local Mexican Independence Day celebration into the 1950s. She remembers fondly the traditional dancing, music and food that were part of the festivities.

“I guess the younger generation doesn’t want to participate,” she said. “It’s all about remembering your history and where you come from. You have to want to celebrate that.”

But Castro believes the responsibility is the whole community’s. He admits that he has little contact with the “people in the hills,” but wishes that they could work to bring the community together. He also wishes that the hillside dwellers would venture into town and embrace Moorpark’s history.

“We don’t talk to each other,” he said. “But our issues are the same. We want good schools, a secure neighborhood that’s crime-free and an economy with good jobs. We worked hard to get that here, and we want them to remember that.”