O.C. Immigrant Exhibit in UCI Langson Library

The UCI Langson Library hosts a myriad of exhibits in the main lobby through out the year.  Recently, they have a display called Immigrant Lives in "The OC" and Beyond; the display consist of photographs of immigrants' experience, articles that discusses the changes of immigrants through out the past century, and also memorabilia that represent movements that occurred in the 1900s.  When individuals think of immigrants in Orange County, the face of a Latino first comes to mind.  While the prominent immigrant experience is that of Latinos in Southern California, other ethnic minorities also share the same experience.  The exhibit portrays the various aspects of the immigrant experience in California besides that of Latinos, specifically in regards to Middle Eastern and Asian immigrants.  By understanding the commonalities between the immigrant experience, we are better able to understand the issues the lead to immigration in Southern California.

As you drive around in Irvine and Tustin, you will notice the fields of crops that still remain, and the Strawberry Farm on University Dr. and Michelson reminds us of how UCI was once surrounded by farms.  However, the idea of farm workers seems at time that the lifestyle existed in an archaic era that has vanished in such a metropolitan area.  However, the exhibit has articles and books that bring to light the Bracero Program, in which 70,000 Mexican, Filipino, Jamaican and Japanese came to work in the O.C. fields in 1943 and 1964.  As the Bracero Program flourished, O.C. areas began to notice an increase in urban communities that comprised of the farm workers.  Hence, Santa Ana now has an overwhelming population of Latinos, and Garden Grove sees an influx of Asian communities.  The reminiscence of the farm working community is noticeable through the youths that attend O.C. schools, even colleges and universities.  The exhibit also shows the development of the immigrant communities in that not all immigrants were farm workers.  Current immigrants hold a myriad variety of labor jobs in O.C.; one book of photography that caught my attention was a compilation of photographs of house cleaners in Orange County.  Typically, house cleaners in O.C. are Latina women, that tend to work on more than one house and provide cleaning services usually to upper middle-class owners of homes.  The labor is intense and the amount of tasks to perform vary; however, all money earned for the hard work goes to pay the bills and support their families.  

The immigration culture is close to me since I myself am a 1.5 generation immigrant--that is, I was born in Mexico but came to the United States when I was a year old.  Furthermore, my mother was also a house cleaner in Dana Point, a harbor city in Southern California; she too dealt with the struggle of not only completing laborious work, but also coming home to raise a family.  The hard work that my parents endured, and still go through, contributed to the development of the immigrant experience of Orange County.  Now, there is a rise in children of immigrants that are ascertaining a higher education and promoting awareness of the histories of their rudiments.  The exhibit promotes the idea of progress, in that the immigrant experience seeks progress for oneself and for the families.  The rise in educated children of immigrants correlates with the necessity to educate one's community of issues that arise not only in Orange County, but also in the national and global context.  The voice of the farm workers that cultivated the lands of Irvine and Tustin are still echo through out metropolitan areas through exhibits such as the one presented at UCI.