Mexican Americans were not allowed to swim on Carpinteria Beach at Linden Avenue all the way up into the 1950s, according to UCSB historian Dr. Mario Garcia.
Garcia, one of the founders of the Chicano Studies department at UCSB, shared some local history of the Mexican American civil rights movement, in a podcast interview with Santa Barbara Talks with Josh Molina.
The conversation comes ahead of this weekend’s 6th Bi-Annual Sal Castro Memorial Conference to discuss the Chicano Movement and history of Mexican American civil rights struggles.
The conference is from 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Feb. 17-18, at the McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB.
The second day of the conference features a special symposium on the work and legacy of Garcia.
“”Latino history is U.S. history,” Garcia says.
Garcia retired last year after more than 40 years as a professor. He still teaches a class.
The thrust of Garcia’s message in the podcast is that Latino history is U.S. history. While higher education does a good job of teaching about the contributions of Latinos, it has not significantly trickled down to K-12 education.
Garcia also shares information about Mexican Americans who won medals of honor during the Vietnam War. Mexican Americans, he said, were drafted at disproportionately high numbers for their population.
He noted that during the Vietnam War era “there were more military recruiters on high school campuses than counselors.”
Garcia has authored several books, and has expertise in mass immigration from Mexico; the development of immigrant communities such as El Paso; the “Mexican-American Generation” from the 1930s to the early 1960s; emergence of new leadership among the U.S. born generation; as well as the Chicano Movement Generation of the late 1960s and early 1970s, according to his biography.
His research involves generational approaches, civil rights struggles, oral history, and even more recently, Chicano Catholic history.
Joshua Molina is journalist who currently writes for Noozhawk and teaches journalism at Santa Barbara City College and Cal State University, Northridge. He formerly covered politics and land use for the San Jose Mercury News. Santa Barbara Talks is an independently owned podcast where Molina looks to bring together voices from all perspectives to discuss and provide solutions to the challenges related to housing, education, transportation and other community issues. Subscribe to his podcast here and consider a contribution here.