Agricultural and Urban: Latinx Entrepreneurs in Salinas, California

Scholars of race and ethnicity have analyzed urban environments with majority Latino populations and increasingly emphasize their powerful and positive contributions to local economies. In 2017, Llana Barbara studied Lawrence, Massachusetts and how the new population of Latino residents who arrived beginning in the 1960s revitalized a city suffering from de-industrialization and population loss to suburbs. Latinos were nonetheless targeted by whites who blamed them for any economic downturns that ensued, culminating in the riots in 1984. Andrew Sandoval-Strausz showed how Latinos created a thriving economy based on transnational capitalism in Little Village in Chicago in his analysis, Barrio America, Latino immigrants reshaped and revived Chicago also beset by postwar deindustrialization and middle-class white resettlement in the suburbs. Pierrette Hondagneu- Sotelo and Manuel Pastor detailed the multiple ways Latinos transformed South Central Los Angeles, creating community and reinvigorating the economy there with small retail business enterprises. This paper analyzes how Latino families worked in alliance with whites and multiple Asian communities to create a dynamic economy in the agricultural city of Salinas throughout the twentieth century. Many came from the ranks of organizers in the United Farm Workers movement of the 1970s, but others were new to Salinas, inspired by the challenges and opportunities of development and expansion in the city since the 1990s. Mexican American business and professional women and men dominated Salinas’s economy by the 2000s and changed the make-up of city organizations, including the Chamber of Commerce. Mexican American owned businesses are currently the most important economic driver for the city, which reflects the vibrancy of Latino culture in everything from its urban landscape to celebrations and festivals to the traditional Big Week or Rodeo.