What does September 16 mean to me?

                                                                                  

Playa del Rey, at sunset

     When I was a kid growing up on L.A.’s westside in the 1950s and ‘60s, September 16 meant absolutely nothing to me. In fact, Cinco de Mayo hadn’t yet been discovered by Coors, Coca-Cola, or any Mexican kids of my generation. Don’t quote me as historically accurate, but I believe it was the Vietnam-era Chicano college students who discovered Cinco de Mayo and turned it into a day of pride, which has now become a day of hedonism to most Americans across the U.S. And, I’ll bet a dime to a dollar, most Americans, today, drinking and partying in bars across the country on May 5th have no idea what the day represents. 

     Don’t blame me! My “greatest generation” Chicano parents never discussed these Mexican holidays, and nobody in our town celebrated them. James Dean, Marlon Brando, Las Hemanas Padilla, Trio los Panchos, Marilyn Monroe, Lola Beltran, Pedro Infante, and Javier Solis were the rage in my Mexican-American community. The USC, UCLA football game drew the biggest crowds of any event. Even, the opening of the Ten Commandments had larger crowds than any Westside 4th of July celebration. That’s because families could buy fireworks and celebrate right in the safety of their own neighborhood, usually in the driveway, setting matches to creepy-crawly fiery snakes, sparklers, and little blasts coming out of cone shaped explosives, lasting about thirty-seconds, if you were lucky. 

     I don’t even know the first time I heard of September 16, as Mexican Independence Day, maybe when I saw the movie Juarez; though, I’m sure nothing historically registered. When I began college, there were no Mexican history classes, and the closest subject to my grandmother’s language was the Spanish department, and it taught mostly about Spain. 

     I read and taught myself about Mexico. I think the first book I discovered was the Discovery and Conquest of Mexico by Spanish conquistador, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, which I later learned was one of the best and most accurate books about the conquest of Tenochtitlan, from a conquistador's perspective. 

     I was an English major and a Spanish minor, so my brain was filled mostly with western lit, the Romans, and Greeks, but mostly the Brits, and English-speaking countries. Byron an Shelly were my literary heroes. Then, in 1977, I received a fellowship to study in Spain, so I switched my major, more out of practicality than desire, to Spanish, since I’d be studying in Granada for close to a year, where I’d earn the units necessary to graduate once I returned home. 

                                                                                              

A life of books, true liberation, artes liberales

     I’d always been an average student in school, just getting by to play sports, keep my parents off my back, and not appear like a moron to my friends, mostly, other B-C students, by choice. However, after my discharge from the military, something clicked. Near-death experiences can do that. Maybe I realized my time here was limited, and I wanted to learn everything I could before my exit, maybe, even learn--gulp, why I was put here in the first place. 

     So, I read, and I travelled, and I talked, and I listened. I began hanging out with the educated and the literate, and, funny thing, I realized some of my childhood friends, with no college education, were just as smart, and even as insightful, in a common-sensical way, as many of my college-educated friends. If I opened my eyes, I was surrounded by knowledge.

     It wasn’t until I was in my fifties that my father told me about his view of September 16. Oh, nothing to do with Mexican Independence, the wars with France and Spain, or liberation. No, he reminisced about his early years, in the 30s and early 40s, and how September 16th, for Mexicans, was the most important holiday on the Westside, Mexican or otherwise. 

     The largest celebration was in Santa Monica, a parade down Olympic boulevard to the beach. There was a queen and her court, decorated cars, food and spirits (even during prohibition), bootleg booze. The Santa Monica streets were packed with people from all over L.A. There were parties and dances at night. 

     He said even when he was in the army, a lot of his friends stationed near home got leaves just to come home and attend the festivities, like Chris Cruz, stationed at Camp Roberts near Paso Robles. Chris couldn’t get a leave. No biggie. He grabbed his gear and hitched a ride to L.A. That he was AWOL didn’t compare with the 16th of September celebration. A few days later, when everything returned to normal, he hitched his way back to Camp Roberts, checked in, took his punishment, and ended up seeing a lot of action in the Pacific. 

     I’ve written before about Fred Machado (RIP), descendent of a Californio family, one of the few families who could trace his roots to the first party of settlers coming into San Gabriel in 1771. When I visited him at his Culver City home, we, along with his cousin Ron Mendez, had talked about Mexican Independence from Spain. The Machado family--granted Rancho La Ballona by Spain’s monarchy--had been in California more than fifty years when Spain finally gave Mexico its independence in 1836. 

     Fred, a short handsome man, blue eyes, butch haircut, and low raspy voice, found in his research how there were arguments, even bad blood, among the early Californios regarding independence from Spain, the royalists who wanted to keep ties to the monarchy and the liberals who wanted independence. 

     Fred guessed that after a certain time in the 1800s, his great-grandfather Jose Agustin did not want to live under Spain's rule, and probably did not want to adhere to Mexican authority either. 

     Ron said, "California to them was a new frontier," which might explain why they saw themselves as Californios, neither Spanish nor Mexican subjects. The two, who have researched their family’s history thoroughly, speculated that Alta California was thousands of miles and worlds away from both Spain and Mexico City, and the laws and reforms passed by those two governments were more a burden than a help to the culture the Californios had created, so it must have been natural for the rancheros to see the land as their own.

    In some ways, they were mentally and physically ready for a new country, so, it was fateful when the United States entered and promised fair laws to the Californios, which the Americans later shattered, shamelessly. 

     Yet, it is difficult to sympathize, or even empathize, since we know these were the same people who, upon their arrival, tried enslaving the Tongva people. We know to hang, draw, and quarter a disloyal servant, or enemy, among the Spanish and mestizo rulers was a normal punishment.

     Interestingly, during Venezuela's fight for independence, about the same time as Mexico's, its African slaves and Indians chose to remain loyal to the Spanish crown, since they had suffered so much under the yoke of the "pardos," American born Spaniards and mestizos, who used methods of terror perfected during the Inquisition, methods that even made the Aztec sacrifices seem tame, one such technique was to cut off heads, boil them in oil, and post them around a town square as a deterrent to other rebels.

     Ron said, "My gut feeling is that they (his ancestors) would have rather been Americans than Mexicans." Since the family’s lands were in California, for them to return to Mexico would have meant to lose their lands. Besides, at the time, the Californios had created their own culture, not Yankee and certainly not Mexican. For them, to belong to the U.S. was someplace in between. Besides, Mexico was a country the Machados no longer knew. It didn’t sit well with the Californios that Mexico and Spain demanded taxes, furs, and other produce, while offering nothing in return. 

     Fred lived his life as an Anglo, and his name, Machado, was simply an anomaly, but his research resurrected his dormant Mexican spirit. “Yes, back then, in my mind, I was an Anglo,” he said. “All of the older folks always spoke Spanish, except when we kids were around, they’d switch to English.” He said, "My grandfather, Ricardo, who everyone called ‘the Old Man’ was very wealthy at one time. He was a typical [Californio] don and lived on the ranch in what we called the 'Big House' surrounded by acres and acres of land." 

     Fred said, as children, neither he nor his cousins could visit his grandfather unless accompanied by a parent. The Big House was located out near Jefferson and Sepulveda, the heart of the original Machado land grant. (To be clear, a grant was not a gift but a loan. Only Spain’s king could own land.) 

     Fred remembered hanging around outside with his cousins, waiting while their fathers entered first, to greet the old man and talk business. After some time, the fathers exited and escorted the children, one at a time, inside the house. Fred said, “The Old Man would be sitting in a large chair and take us on his lap, one at a time, pat us on the head, and give each of us a dime. Then we would leave.” 

     Fred remembered the time when his grandfather and the grandchildren, thirty-two in all, gathered for a photo in front of the Big House. He said, "Today you might visualize that this was what it was like to belong to one of the big Italian Mafia families." 

     His grandfather died in 1934, as the Depression began to take a firm hold of the country. By this time, most of the land known as Rancho La Ballona had been lost to unpaid back-taxes or sold, and much of Ricardo’s money had been spent. To survive those difficult years, Fred's father farmed the remaining land and his mother began working. 

     “How much land did your father farm?” I asked. 

     Fred said his grandfather, Ricardo, gave his heirs twelve portions of La Ballona. But by that time because of inheritances over the years, the land had been carved into tiny parcels. Fred's father, Federico, received a two hundred-foot portion of land near Playa del Rey, and he also bought another lot from his sister. But as the country slipped deeper into the Depression, Federico sold much of the land, as did the other family members. 

     Fred said his parents moved off the ranch but returned to live a few times in the 1930s. Essentially, that was the end of the Machado family’s physical relationship to the land. Of course, the psychological association, will always remain, independence or not.