Second Thoughts on the Importance of Being First

We tend to remember those who came first.

The first man on the moon. The first president of the United States. The first European to set foot in the New World.

People don’t always agree, however, on who should get the honor. Was it Christopher Columbus, for example, or Leif Ericson?

Even recent history can spark passionate debate, as I quickly learned when I identified the first Latino elected to public office in Orange County.

It was Alfred Aguirre of Placentia, I wrote in a column earlier this month. Aguirre, a World War II veteran, won a seat in 1958 on the City Council of his hometown.

Quite an honor, being the original Latino officeholder in a county that barely now, half a century later, is starting to see improved political representation for minorities.

An honor indeed--that belongs to someone else. For I was quite wrong, a reader reported.

My effort to get to the facts, however, led me to discover the honorable work of a whole generation of Latino leaders whose merits are being obscured by intense but irrelevant disagreements.

Although Aguirre, a stone and brick mason, was Placentia’s first Latino councilman, he was not the county’s first. That Latino landmark was set by Victor Zuniga, the first mayor of Stanton, elected in 1956, the reader revealed in a letter.

Stanton officials confirmed it: The late Mr. Zuniga had beat Aguirre by two years. So that settles it, right?

Well, not exactly. We all forgot to mention Henry Mendez.

Mendez was also elected to the Stanton City Council in 1956, the year the fledgling city incorporated with just 1,500 residents.

So, as far as I can tell, it was a tie.

Yet, the more I thought about splitting historical hairs, the more meaningless seemed the exercise. All of these men deserve credit as pioneers of Mexican American politics in Orange County.

They were from a generation that carved out a tenuous hold on the lowest rungs of American society, earned their stripes and their self-assurance in war, and asserted their rightful place as citizens back home.

Does it really matter who was first?

Men like Aguirre and Zuniga have too much in common to be pitted as rivals in some arcane debate over dates.

Both hail from small working-class barrios with segregated schools, both served in the Armed Forces and were active in the League of United Latin American Citizens, the old civil rights group.

Both men dropped out of school, but as parents both pushed for their children to attend the white schools in their communities.

Zuniga, a lifelong resident of Stanton’s Benedict barrio, worked as a migrant farm worker from an early age. He later took a correspondence course in radio repair and opened a shop at his home. He lived in Stanton until his death from cancer in 1984.

“He was self-educated and very well-read,” said his son, Victor Jr., 64, a teacher in Tustin. “He had a keen mind and loved the idea of the American Dream, that anybody could be whatever they wanted to be.”

He taught his kids: “You’re Americans and nobody can put you down.”

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That philosophy could also be attributed to Aguirre, who remembers meeting Zuniga at LULAC meetings.

Alfred Aguirre was born at home in Placentia in 1920, fourth in a family of nine. He attended the shoddy, makeshift school reserved for Mexicans, like several such segregated schools in Orange County’s old barrios. After the war, he returned to the realization that his oldest son, Rick, now a Santa Ana attorney, would also be barred from his hometown’s whites-only school.

“I said ‘No,’ ” the elder Aguirre remembers. “My oldest son is going to go to school where everybody goes to school.”

By the way, I wasn’t the first to make the mistake about Aguirre being the county’s first elected Latino. The error has appeared in earlier news stories in recent years.

The man who corrected my story, as it turns out, has made it his business to correct the misinformation whenever he finds it. But it’s not who you would expect. The persistent corrector is not a relative or friend of the overlooked political pioneers.

It’s someone who is also named Aguirre. Someone who also lives on Aguirre Lane. Who lives right next door, in fact, to the subject of his dispute.

The man who insists on setting the record straight is Alfred Aguirre’s nephew, Joseph V. Aguirre.

Joseph wants the world to know that his uncle was not the first Latino officeholder. That he did not organize the desegregation drive in Placentia, as previous accounts stated.

And one more thing, the nephew insists. Aguirre Lane was not named after his uncle in honor of the successful desegregation campaign, since the street-naming preceded desegregation.

Obviously, there’s more to this public dispute than a quest for historical accuracy. Otherwise, the Aguirres would get their story straight before mistakes made the papers.

The problem is, some of the Aguirres aren’t talking to each other. As in all families, my own included, private conflicts can harden over time. And big families have more to fight about.

These guys even argue over how many Aguirres served in the Second World War. Was it 12 or 25? I wish all family fights were over the degree of our civic contributions.

The death of Martina V. Aguirre, the family matriarch, made matters worse for the Placentia clan. This hearty immigrant who fled the Mexican Revolution was 99 when she passed away in 1994.

She had been widowed for 60 years and she left behind a huge family and four small rental units. She asked that her modest estate be divided equally among her five surviving children, including Alfred and Joe Sr., father of my letter-writer.

A couple of years ago, Joe Sr. questioned the way the estate had been handled. Over the objections of his four siblings, he moved to reopen probate. The case is still in court.

It’s a long way from the family’s close-knit origins.

After the war, Alfred and Joe Sr. built their houses side by side on the little unpaved alley that now bears their family name. The city called it Aguirre Lane because . . . well, they argue about that, too.

Five of the houses are still occupied by Aguirres, now divided by their animosities that prevent them from even waving at each other. Joe Sr. long ago moved to another part of town. But he too fires off letters when he thinks his brother is getting too much credit for community accomplishments.

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The sad thing is that these emotional disputes are preventing the family from proclaiming their legacy from the rooftops, as they should. They deserve to take credit as a group, instead of bickering over individual merit.

And they have the responsibility of documenting the history of their barrio, often overlooked by professional historians. People like Alfred and Joe Aguirre are forced to tell their stories by memory, and slug out their differences like oral historians of Orange County’s Latino communities.

Our own library at The Times has a history of Placentia--subtitled “A Pleasant Place”--that doesn’t even mention the desegregation of schools around 1950.

Sure, it’s pleasant if you ignore the problems.

The fact is, our barrios are filled with large families that started poor, stuck together, fought the good fights then fanned out to become productive citizens.

Joe, to substantiate his version of who led the school fight, even produced a list of the surviving members of the Veterans and Citizens of Placentia. This is the group of about 25 men who had the guts to go to war, first against the fascists overseas, then against racism at home.

Alfred Aguirre has an old black-and-white photo of these men, many dressed in the wide-lapeled suits of the 1940s. Their faces project dignity and determination.

Does it matter who started the group? Does it matter who led it? These are all heroes in my book.

You can see both brothers in the picture. Alfred and Joe were together on a mission at the time. A mission to improve their neighborhood and make this country practice the ideals it proclaimed.

Maybe one brother did more, one did less.

But they both stood up and were counted. That’s what matters.

And you heard it here first.

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.