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A Race to the Future

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die aboard were two Filipinos, including his cabin boy. Many more might have been lost had the San Carlos not had the services of Pedro Prat, the ship’s African doctor, who was praised by a Spanish priest for saving lives with medicinal herbs and minerals.

In the following century, another prominent Spanish-speaking black, Pio Pico, played a key role in San Diego’s history. He was the last Mexican governor of California and a San Diego resident. Historians credit him with establishing an early school system in San Diego and other California communities.

Despite the early contributions of many cultures, the 20th century brought on bouts of xenophobia and ethnic discrimination. In May 1903, under presidential orders, the peaceful Cupeño tribe was expelled from the homeland it had occupied for centuries—what is now known as Warner Springs—and taken on a three-day, 40-mile trek west to the Pala Reservation, already occupied by the Luiseño tribe. The descendants of once-California Governor John Downey, who had the deed to the Cupeño land, forced their removal.

“It was a shameful act,” says Karen Vigneault, an SDSU student who has been filming a docudrama, Mulu Wetam (The First Ones), based on the incident. She says not much—apart from the San Diego tribes’ newfound wealth in the casino business—has changed in the past century for Native Americans here and across the country.

“They have taken our land, our image, our spiritual knowledge—and just recently I learned that some guy copyrighted our rock and art symbols,” says Vigneault, a descendent of the Diegueño-Kumeyaay tribe. Seeing a comparison with European Jews in World War II, whose arms were numbered for identification, she adds, “We legally have to have an Indian roll number, without which we can’t get services [such as] health and education. Without that number we don’t exist. Here we are in 2001, and whites are still doing some really weird crap on us.”

In early 1931, the Lemon Grove School Board—prodded by the PTA and chamber of commerce—barred the children of Mexican immigrants from attending the city’s grammar school. Seventy-five Mexican children—most of whom were born in the United States and spoke English— were sent to an adjacent barn-like building, their “new” school. The excuse given parents by the school board: The children needed close attention.

The parents boycotted the move, keeping their children at home, and sued the school board. In a landmark decision, a judge ruled against the board. It was a mixed victory. His ruling maintained that the Mexican children were Caucasian and thus could not be segregated.

San Diego’s Asian community pioneered the region’s fishing industry in the face of racist resentment. In the late 19th century, more than 50 Chinese men fished from junks off the coast of San Diego. But in 1892, anti-Chinese immigration legislation was enacted that specifically forbade them from returning to their U.S. homes once they sailed beyond the 3-mile territorial limits. They were forced out of business.

In the first half of the 20th century, Japanese fishermen helped develop San Diego’s early tuna-fishing industry but also found themselves continually fighting white fears about the “yellow peril.” To stay in business, a prominent local tuna fleet owner, Tokunosuke Abe, waged a fight against a 1933 state law that denied commercial fishing licenses to Japanese immigrants. He went all the way to the state Supreme Court and won.

He and other Asian immigrants managed to overcome other anti-Japanese measures until World War II, when Japanese residents were forced to sell their property. Donald H. Estes, a college professor who helped found the Japanese Historical Society of San Diego, wrote in Mains’l Haul magazine that “although these men had successfully weathered racially motivated attacks by elements of California’s society, they and their families became victims of war-inspired hysteria.”

More than 1,900 Japanese living in San Diego were uprooted and sent to “relocation” camps during World War II. City Club President George Mitrovich recalls wondering in 1942, at age 6 in Ocean Beach, what had happened to the Japanese residents who’d settled near the intersection of Narragansett Avenue and Catalina Boulevard. “We used to go up there and play,” he says. “It was wonderful. There were little fish ponds and bridges and houses. And one day, no one was there.”

African-Americans, most of whom lived in or near downtown up until the 1940s and ’50s—their entertainment spots were in the so-called Stingaree district, now part of the Gaslamp Quarter—were prohibited from entering most white bars, restaurants and hotels, including the U.S. Grant. In some cases, whites openly strove to keep their neighborhoods segregated. Before the 1940s, deeds to property commonly restricted sale of homes to Caucasians only. After World War II, white residents of Golden Hill circulated a petition demanding that “Negroes” be barred from owning homes in their community. According to newspaper accounts, county officials rejected their petition on constitutional grounds.

Former Congressman Lionel Van Deerlin, who worked at the San Diego Journal in the late 1940s, says that during that era, “You would never see a black face in the society pages, and you would only see black faces in the paper when it involved some kind of crime case... Back then, if you were black and applied for a business license north of Market Street, you were rejected by the city.” Today, Van Deerlin adds, race relations are “so different ... so very much improved from what I remember.”