In the shadow of Disneyland and conservative Orange County politics: Latinx resistance in Anaheim and Santa Ana, 1942-2012
Creators: name: Rael, Carie
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2023

description: From 1942 to 2012, Latinx activists from Orange County, California repeatedly mobilized against the threat of displacement and criminalization. Rapid suburban development and the struggle to control (and contain) Latinx labor coincided with the rise of mass incarceration and mass expulsions. Law enforcement, immigration authorities, and local leaders tried to thwart the growing Latinx populations in ways that made their labor readily available, while limiting their ability to build community in desirable areas marked for development. By focusing on the two cities with the largest Latinx and Black populations in Orange County, I trace how Santa Ana emerged as a hotbed of radical activism, while Anaheim’s Latinx residents combated displacement from the Disney corporation and Republican establishment. Through the examination of oral histories, archival documents, and newspaper articles I have unearthed a rich oppositional political culture that directly challenged the conservative governance of Orange County. In order to reframe the political history of Orange County from the perspective of Latinx and Black residents, I utilized over sixty oral histories from the Lawrence de Graaf Center at California State University, Fullerton. In addition, I have also conducted nine oral histories myself which will be deposited at the De Graaf Center which was funded by the John Whiteclay Chambers Oral History Fellowship at Rutgers University. The activism coming out of Anaheim and Santa Ana in the postwar period is extremely important for understanding Latinx community formation in the context of a conservative political climate. Shifting the gaze away from white residents’ grassroots mobilization to their effects on Latinx residents, my dissertation seeks to excavate long-term survival strategies against settler-colonialism in the Southwest borderlands of Orange County. By providing a grassroots urban history of the two largest Latinx communities in Orange County, this dissertation reconceptualizes the racial geography of the region. It disrupts the dominant historiography on suburbanization which too often eclipses Latinx residents’ contributions to Orange County’s political culture. In addition, it builds on the growing mass incarceration historiography by exploring the role that Latinx political leaders and large corporations played in displacing and criminalizing Latinx and Black communities. Finally, “In the Shadow of Orange County” expands upon Latinx historiography by analyzing the complicated inter- and intra-ethnic politics of grassroots organizing in which demographic transformation led a segment of the population to assume positions of power, while consigning others to new forms of criminalization and control. Today, with the expansion of the radical right, xenophobia, white supremacy, housing crises, and mass incarceration, Latinx and Black activism in conservative Orange County provides important historical insight into how vulnerable populations have organized against these forces in the past.