Eddie Grijalva Restores His Family Name

Eddie Grijalva is always having to prove himself.

He’s a high school dropout who worked 16 years as a custodian for a middle school in Santa Ana, where he was born and raised. He always arrived before dawn to make sure his campus looked sharp for its mostly Mexican students. He didn’t want outsiders looking down on them, so he made sure the graffiti left by the bad apples was gone before the good kids arrived.

Eddie raised two children of his own but divorced--and started drinking heavily--after almost a quarter century of marriage. He says he’s now recovered from the alcoholism that nearly killed him, causing blackouts and fender-benders he barely remembered the morning after.

He now lives clean, and alone, in a cramped trailer home, his entire life contained on Space 121 of his RV park in Orange. Inside his narrow abode, there’s barely room for more than one person.

“I have a full-size refrigerator,” says Eddie, who turns 57 on Monday. “I have a full-size shower. Que mas quiero? (What else do I want?)”

Well, respect, for one thing.

Edward Trinidad Grijalva has spent years seeking recognition for his family name and his heritage. The walls and shelves of his tiny place are plastered with the knickknacks of his obsession--the rightful place of the Grijalva name in Orange County history.

“I might not be rich in material things, but boy, I wouldn’t trade my heritage for anything,” says Eddie, who is one-quarter Gabrielino Indian. “And I’m proud to share it with anyone who wants to listen.”

The Grijalva family tree has deep roots in our county, reaching back 200 years to one of its pioneers, a Spanish soldier and explorer named Juan Pablo Grijalva. Ironically, Eddie’s intense search for those roots was set in motion by his father’s inability to prove precisely who he was.

Eddie was the fourth of six children born to Louis Philip Grijalva, whose own mother died in childbirth. The elder Grijalva was delivered by midwives on an old Indian settlement named Prado, a site now marked by the dam of the same name visible from the Riverside Freeway.

Eddie’s father joined the Army at 16, then worked as a ranch hand on the farmlands around El Toro. His second son always had a strong curiosity about the family’s history. (“I wanted to know real bad,” Eddie says.) But every time he’d ask about it, his father was evasive.

“Ah, no te apures,” the old man would say. “Don’t worry about it.”

Eddie said his father felt stung by the prejudice against Native Americans he had experienced. Perhaps that’s why he hid his roots; he didn’t want his children to get hurt too. Yet his Indian identity turned out to be the key that unleashed his son’s passion for the past.

When it came time to file for Social Security, Eddie says, his father had no record of his birth. Since there was no documentation of his Indian delivery, his application for old-age benefits stalled.

One day, the Grijalvas were urged to seek help from the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs in Riverside. The elder Grijalva told an attendant there that his father was named Guillermo, husband of Angelita Romero, a full-blooded Gabrielino Indian.

The attendant eventually emerged with six documents detailing the degree of Indian blood of various Grijalva family members.

“When I saw this document, Agustin, hijole! My eyes bugged out and my chest . . . “

Eddie takes a big breath to show how he swelled with pride.

“It proved something. Pues si somos importantes (Then we are important!) That changed my whole way of thinking of myself and my family.”

Eddie is eager to show me a special source of pride--a historical plaque placed at the site of the Grijalva Adobe, the county’s first adobe residence erected outside the walls of Mission San Juan Capistrano. We climbed into his Ford Escort, with personalized plates INDIAN 1, and headed east on Katella from his trailer park.

The street turns into Villa Park Road and the scenery quickly turns pastoral. We turn right on Hewes, then left on Rancho Santiago Boulevard, which retains the feel and charm of a country road with no sidewalks. He pulls over and we walk along the side of the road at the foot of what is now called Hoyt Hill.

Embedded in the hillside, surrounded by yellow wildflowers, is a bronze plaque placed by the Orange County Historical Commission in 1996. Eddie says it took him almost five years to convince county historians that the site deserved a marker, which he spruces up and clears of weeds.

There’s no doubt the original adobe was built atop this hill around 1800 by Juan Pablo Grijalva, a sergeant who had come with the famous Anza Expedition exploring Alta California some 25 years earlier. But there was no proof the local pioneer had ever lived in his adobe, skeptical local historians told Eddie.

The adobe is no longer there, but lava rock from its foundation was used for walls on the grounds around the existing residence, a three-story Victorian built in 1887 by William W. Hoyt. The stately white house, called Buena Vista Mansion, now lords over the location.

Eddie has befriended the current owners and they have allowed him to visit freely. He often would come to this spot, resting on the lovely lawns under tall weeping willows. He’d bring his lunch and his papers and puzzle over the problem of authenticating his heritage, of validating his own claim to history.

Eddie felt discouraged. How could he be expected to establish the dwelling place of a man who lived 200 years ago? He had no formal training as a historian. He even suspected he was being forced to jump historical hoops because he’s Latino, but he had no proof of that either.

“I was really upset,” he recalled. “I thought they were picking on me.”

He expected sympathy when he complained to his friend, Paul Apodaca, formerly with the Bowers Museum as curator of Native American art and custodian of the California history collection. Instead, he got a kick in his historical behind.

“Eddie, the proof is out there,” said Apodaca, professor of American studies at Chapman University. “You go look for it.”

Four and a half years later, Eddie found the hidden clue he had been seeking. It was on a Wednesday, his third straight day reviewing the stored records of California’s roots at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.

There it was, an official entry in a state surveyor’s report on the Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana: “petitioned and occupied on Dec. 8, 1801.”

Eureka! That’s all the proof he needed.

“So, man, I could hardly wait to get home with my copies,” he said. “The commissioners had forced me to prove that fact, and I thanked them for pissing me off.”

Not all historians agree with Eddie’s passionate interpretations of local history. But many admire his self-taught labors.

“At some point, Eddie’s persuasiveness and personality and dedication and hard work influence you along with the facts,” says Rob Selway, the county’s chief of historical parks and programs.

Eddie and the owner of the property have begun planning a bicentennial celebration for next year, marking the filing of the petition for Rancho Santiago by Juan Pablo Grijalva, a nephew of Eddie’s great-great-great-grandfather. The huge expanse of territory encompassed 63,500 acres, extending from the Santa Ana Mountains to the Pacific Ocean and from the Santa Ana River to Red Hill.

On a clear day from the top of the hill, Eddie tells me, you can take in the full sweep of his ancestor’s holdings. So we climbed behind the mansion, past a garage where the adobe once stood, and up to a small, open plateau with a view over the treetops.

The day was hazy, but we could clearly see clusters of office buildings marking the center of Santa Ana, where Eddie had sent his two kids to Catholic schools on his blue-collar wages. For a moment from this high perch, however, he assumed the stance of landed gentry. He shaded his eyes against the afternoon sun with one hand, and extended the other arm toward the horizon, one finger pointing in a commanding arc from north to south. “This is why Grijalva built his adobe up here,” said Eddie, dressed in a yellow guayabera. “As a soldier, he can see forever. He can see his domain.”

Later, we returned to the the cramped domain of his trailer, a world away with no views. Without my asking, Eddie confided his past problems with drinking and smoking too much. And I wondered if his passion for his heritage had helped him recover.

“I think it was a therapy,” he conceded. “And it was good for me. I saw I could be a better person.”

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