As we ended the 20th century with many gains in this largo camino, there are still ways to go if the goals are equity and inclusion.
The years since 2000 have more stories to tell. Salvadorian refugees settled near Mendota and then were threatened by a presence of MS-13 and expiration of their refugee status after 17 years. New community leaders have emerged, rancher Joe del Bosque and CSUF Presidents Joseph Castro and Saúl Jiménez Sandoval, Hispanic Chamber CEO Dora Westerlund, and a new crop of political successes. Now we begin losing those who led us through earlier time, like Judge Armando Rodriguez and veterans of the Chicano movement. Shedding older labels like Hispanic, Mexican American, Chicano and Latino, some of the new century generation prefer “Latinx” as the encompassing term. They are more educated, more prosperous and still organizing—now in groups like Latino Rotary and the Latino giving Circle, intent on honing personal leadership skills and gaining clout. We still have poverty, prejudice and inequity when we examine the camino, but most admit we have come a long way.
Are We There Yet? Statistics gathered at the end of the creation of Caminos in 2019 and using data from the 2015 Census Report, has the Latino population in almost every city of the Central Valley area above 50%, with a notable exception of Clovis. Overall, the identified Latino population grew to over 56% and now not the minority, but the majority group. In almost all areas of business, education and public service the statistics keep growing. Note the Chicano graduation in 2024 topped 1,100 and there are more and more of these graduations, even down to the high school level. Lagging indicators seem to be political clout, wealth, philanthropy, health and wealth. More is wanted.
In education, one important focus we saw as our goal in the 1960s is being partially realized with an increasing number of dual language immersions programs throughout the Valley, even some in languages other than Spanish. It was an idea whose time is finally coming.
Border Wall and Vanishing Frontiers. In politics, the story began and continued with immigration. Immigration is still the story in politics. The emphasis on the border wall in 2016-2017 led us to present a slide show in a simplified and sometimes comical or creative “History of the Border Wall.” From the first exhibit in 2019 to the last version in 2023 we saw a similar emphasis on the contemporary issues of naming and legacy, from schools to statues to parks to streets like Cesar Chavez Blvd. That last effort took 20 years and “political clout” to accomplish.
At the same time, the Latinization of California and the nation’s culture continues, the interconnectedness demonstrated in Vanishing Frontiers shows that path. We have not seen a solution to the immigration debate, nor a way to solve the problems for the DACA population, or even a Latino Governor or President. It’s down the road.
La Cosecha. In what we termed “La Cosecha (harvest),” we celebrated with local art from the various sites: Lety, La Catrina de Visalia, Richard Arenas’s bronze statues of farmworkers, original drawings and paintings of the 1930s by John Sierra, and the colorful depictions of tomatoes in the field by Rubén Sánchez of Merced, along with photography and murals throughout the Valley. La Cosecha represents the current harvest of Arte Americas’ original agriculture-suggested mission: To make the valley a flourishing place for Latino arts and culture. But we mean more—the achievements in business, in politics, in community involvement are what we are reaping. An inspiring representative of COSECHA is the Woodlake Botanical Gardens of Olga and Manuel Jiménez Sr, who calls himself its curator. Their lives as migrants, his expertise in his profession of botany, their mixed native and Hispanic heritage, their work with youth, and their social events in support of community, represent a COSECHA.
Braided Cultures, our DNA. We also began the camino story with the encounter of native and European cultures and genetics. Now over 250 years later, the mestizaje (mixture of groups) is also growing and some Latino based populations are melding into the American pot. At the end of the exhibit, we created a chart with geographical samples of those on the camino who shared with us their DNA results. “Braided cultures” is the term we picked up from Valley author and historian Gerald Haslam, braids that almost resemble DNA. In an increasing fusion of cultures and the popularity of exploring roots through ancestry, out-marriages reached 47% in 2003 when Vida en el Valle described our “emerging majority.” So, our last point in Caminos: IF LATINO IS NOT PART OF YOUR PAST, IS IT PART OF YOUR FUTURE?