How an extended historical past of racism and neglect set the stage for Pajaro flooding | Enterprise

PAJARO, California — Maria Martinez became nauseous as she and her son crossed the Pajaro River Bridge into Watsonville in Santa Cruz County.

Her home in the Monterey County township of Pajaro was flooded after a levee collapsed during a violent storm on March 10. Within hours, streets, homes and businesses in this mainly Spanish-speaking city of 3,000 people were under several feet of water.

As Martinez crossed the street, she saw two National Guard Humvees, a couple of fire engines, a couple of sheriff’s cruisers, and a security truck blocking traffic from entering the flood zone — an area that she and many others have been concerned about didn’t want to evacuate.

“It feels like the limit,” said Martinez, 35. “It’s a terrible feeling.”

She wasn’t the only person who reacted this way.

Residents of Pajaro, who were not allowed to re-enter their homes to collect belongings and supplies, were concerned. The fact that the levees broke on the Monterey County side of the river and not in Watsonville added to their frustration.

It was, they said, like history was repeating itself—again.

There is no indication that the breach was intentional or that the levees were built to make the Monterey County side more vulnerable.

But since the late 1840s when California county lines were drawn, dividing the Pajaro River Valley in half, the unincorporated city of Pajaro has been largely ignored by state and local officials.

The floods have spotlighted decades of injustice in this agricultural region, where migrant farm workers have long been marginalized. Runoff from record storms has left large areas of the low-income and mostly immigrant community several feet under water and faces a long recovery.

Officials had long known the levee could fail, but repair efforts have faced long delays. An official told the Los Angeles Times last week that an improvement project wasn’t completed in part because “it’s a low-income area. Mostly farm workers live there.

Some locals say the rating is part of a larger reality.

Such neglect, said Sandy Lydon, a retired history professor at Cabrillo College, is the legacy of a racist boundary dispute that relegated this small cluster of homes to an unincorporated upstate.

“Pajaro became something like Monterey County’s Siberia” and Watsonville’s “fiefdom,” he said — a place to house farm workers. “Let’s be honest. Cities with a lot of farm workers don’t want them to live downtown.”

Lydon said that current Monterey County officials have made efforts to better involve the city in their decision-making, and that Governor Gavin Newsom pledged his support for a recent tour of the flooded hamlet, “Historically, the Monterey County Board of Directors has never paid some attention to Pajaro. And that was on purpose.”

It’s an assessment that resonates with Monterey County Board of Supervisors President Luis Alejo, who said he is only the third Latino to serve as an elected supervisor.

“Right? In a county where 70% of the population is black?” he said. “There’s a deep history of exclusion.”

It all began, Lydon said, when the state was formed and the county lines were drawn. General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo – former military governor of the “Alta California Free State”, large landowner in the region and member of a prominent Mexican family – headed the California Boundary Committee.

“Well, Vallejo was the guy,” Lydon said. “He probably knew better than anyone the status of what was to become the state of California.”

Part of his role was to draw county lines and select county seats—the place where courts and law enforcement would be based.

Vallejo’s first foray into Monterey County, where he was born, had extended the county south “almost to San Luis Obispo” and then north to “what his map said would be San Francisco,” Lydon said. Inland, the boundary included the entire Salinas and Pajaro valleys.

Monterey, which “was a Mexican city,” was the seat, Lydon said.

But white power brokers in the north, in present-day Santa Cruz County, pushed back.

“They didn’t want to go to court in Monterey because they knew there would be land titles, there was a lot of fighting going on, and they felt more comfortable if they could go to a court where… they would be convicted by a jury of their own kind.” Not, to put it bluntly, by Mexicans,” Lydon said.

Their proposed boundary extended south to Las Lomas, the small hills that line the southern rim of the Pajaro River Valley.

When the Boundary Committee finished its work, the circular line was drawn in the middle of the valley.

Why or how that decision was made is unclear, Lydon said; no minutes were taken. But he suspects there was likely a compromise between white Americans in Santa Cruz and Vallejo, who had family lands — the “Casa Materna” — in the southern Pajaro River Valley.

Vallejo, Lydon said, probably didn’t relish the prospect of fighting for his land claims in a Santa Cruz County court.

On February 18, 1850, the counties were created, bisecting the valley of the Pajaro River. A decision, Lydon said, that has “since led to nothing but trouble”.

He said Watsonville and Pajaro, on the outskirts of their respective counties, had been “orphaned” and “politically treated like colonies.”

“What evolved over time was that the Pajaro side … became where farm workers lived,” he said — beginning in the 1880s, when amidst anti-Chinese sentiment in Santa Cruz, workers living in Watsonville lived, crossed the river.

Soon the community – unencumbered by the laws and sensibilities of Watsonville’s Victorian era and ignored by Monterey County – became a safety valve for Watsonville, offering a mostly male population respite from gambling, opium and prostitution.

Lydon said after the Chinese were driven out of the country under China’s Exclusion Act of 1882 – which imposed a 10-year ban on Chinese immigration – Japanese workers moved in, and then Filipinos.

Alejo, the district manager, pointed to the Watsonville riots of 1930, in which mobs of up to 500 white men roamed Watsonville, Pajaro and other nearby towns and farms, attacking Filipino farm workers and their property after Filipino men danced with white women had a local dance hall.

“We’ve seen our part of history here,” he said.

But it was the Bracero program of the 1940s — an agreement between the United States and Mexico that allowed Mexican workers to come north — that brought a permanent population of workers to the region.

“The whole time, Monterey County didn’t do the roads, didn’t do the plumbing, they didn’t do anything in Pajaro. There was no infrastructure,” he said, noting that a walk around the city is still evidence of that neglect.

Anali Cortez, a Pajaro resident who had to be evacuated, agreed.

She said the past few days have been a nightmare – and her story illustrates the fate of many of her neighbors, who feel forgotten and neglected in a city they say is derided by others and compared to Watsonville, Salinas or Monterey is shabby.

Cortez said she and her neighbors pay their taxes but receive little in return.

She pointed to potholes in the road and lamented the lack of help after the flood. She has been turned away from overcrowded shelters and cannot go to work because she has no change of clothes.

“When you tell people you’re from Pajaro, they say things like, ‘I thought this place was deserted,'” Cortez said.

Martinez said several neighbors recently stood outside their apartment complex and engaged in deep conversations about their community’s mistreatment. Was it because the residents here were mostly migrant workers illegally in the country and afraid to complain to the county, they wondered.

The county has hampered the community’s growth for many decades, they said. Some of the roads haven’t been paved since the 1970s, there’s no street sweeping, and getting the county to allocate funds to Pajaro Park — a 5-acre neighborhood resource built in 2014 — took a tremendous effort, they said.

Some wondered if the county considered Pajaro so poor and run-down that it was okay to ignore the needs of its community. Was that it?

“It’s just discrimination,” said one woman finally. Martinez agreed.