One Generation Away from Extinction

                                                                                 

The day's program: Mexican Presence in Santa Monica

How many of you have those old family photos in albums or tucked away in boxes in the attic? You are probably sitting, not only on rich family history but on cultural history, as well. Maybe it's time to share them with others.

Saturday, September 20, 2025, as part of the Santa Monica Public Library series, “Imagine Santa Monica, 150th Edition: Celebrating the Founding of Santa Monica, an overflow audience of at least 150 attended a photo, video, and panel presentation titled: “Mexican Presence in Santa Monica.”  It was a long time in coming, so little is known or acknowledged about the history of Mexican Santa Monica, or Mexican L.A., for that matter. 

 According to the Santa Monica Public Library’s promotional brochure: “Our new digital collection produced and curated with Santa Monica community members to document the cultural history, genealogy, and influence of Mexican American families. This project, spearheaded by Danny Alonzo, Sharon Reyes, Guadalupe Martinez Castro, and Nina Fresco, collects oral histories and scanned photographs to create a rich collection of never-before-seen primary source for research.” 

 Of course, a few books have been written that cover a general history of Mexicans and their descendants in the U.S. in cities like Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and neighboring communities, but few comprehensive studies have ever been completed, especially when one considers there are more Mexicans in the U.S. and in Los Angeles outside of Mexico itself. 

Maybe our education system hasn’t produced the Chicano journalists, moviemakers, or Ph. D.’s it takes to invest in the research and documentation to tell the many individual stories of our ancestors and families, whose presence in the lands north of Mexico goes back to the 1600s, before the U.S. was even a nation. By the time school children reach the sixth grade, they’ve grown bored of building missions out of paper mâché, as if our history in these lands died right along with the mission system. 

                                                                                      

Artist and moderator Danny Alonzo

Some years back, I gave Sharon Reyes a copy of an interview I conducted with her father Ysidro Reyes, the oldest surviving member of the Marquez-Reyes, Rancho Boca de Santa Monica family. Sharon told me reading the pages brought her father and his stories back to life, stories kept alive by the family with each telling. 

                                                                                 

My mother as a teenager outside her house on 22nd Street

During a sabbatical from my teaching position at Santa Monica College, I interviewed sixteen Westside Chicano family members, children of the WWII generation, some whose ancestors arrived as part of the founding expedition in 1781, but most whose ancestors arrived during the 1910 Mexican Revolution, the largest migration of Mexicans to the U.S., who arrived in time to fill the U.S. insatiable appetite for cheap labor, especially at the outset of WWI. These men and women told me stories about their parents, their childhood, the Depression, their education, WWII, their marriages, work, and family life, a goldmine of cultural information. 

N. Scott Momaday, an award-winning Kiowa American novelist, once said about native cultures, something like, “We are only one generation away from extinction.” 

                               

 What Momaday knew and meant was that many of our cultures survive on oral tradition. Unlike many formally educated historians, educators, and moviemakers who write books and produce movies about their American ancestors, native people and Mexicans in the U.S. tell family stories orally, passing them down from one generation to another. If one generation fails to communicate those stories, an entire culture disappears. 

 In Tom Brokaw’s book, the Greatest Generation, Brokaw profiles the histories of American men who fought in WWII, many Medals of Honor recipients among them. Of the names he mentioned, only one was “Hispanic,” yet Mexican Americans in WWII won more Medals of Honor than any other ethnic group. They participated in every major campaign, from North Africa to the Pacific and Europe. Why do we know so little about them and their contributions to the war effort and to U.S. culture? If it weren't for Raul Morin’s excellent book, Among the Valiant, we might know nothing at all, even though many gave the ultimate sacrifice and their graves dot cemeteries across the country. 

                                                                                       

An inspired audience

So, if America is not documenting the histories of all Americans shouldn’t we document our own, collecting old photos, videos, and stories, going back to the time our ancestors arrived in these lands? It may be late, but thanks to the hard work of the above mentioned, at least in Santa Monica, this history is in the process of being kept alive. 

However, it takes work, a lot of work, and we must educate our sons and daughters and our grandchildren to continue the work, not just in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, San Diego, or San Francisco but in towns and cities across the country, in places like Plasencia, San Bernardino, Tucson, Albuquerque, Denver, San Antonio, into the Midwest, where our roots run deep. 

After all, this isn’t only ethnic history, but it is American history, and if we don’t keep it alive, it is also but one generation away from extinction.