Monthly Archives: March 2026

Mexican Heritage Plaza: A Symbol of Resilience and Perseverance – Chapter 5

Miscellaneous Posts

L-R Clockwise: Spanish Language Radio Announcers, State Assembly Candidate Ernest F. Abeytia, Market Street Shopping, Las Hermanas Montoya and Pérez Prado at the Palomar Ballroom (photos courtesy of El Excéntrico Magazine, MLK/SJSU Library, and La Raza Historical Society of Silicon Valley)

Chapter 5

The Rise and Fall of Los Excéntricos

We aim to improve with every edition so that it is a dignified reflection of our community.

~First edition of El Excéntrico, April 1949

***

The Palomar Ballroom. San José, California. Circa early-1950s. Dámaso Pérez Prado and his Orchestra were belting out Mambo #5, the famous smash hit that took the United States by storm. The Cuban-born bandleader from México City, who popularized the mambo dance craze, loved playing the Palomar Ballroom when he swung through San José.

His three singers, Las Hermanas Montoya, were San José natives. The club’s management treated him like royalty, and San José’s Mexican community and Mexicans from throughout the Bay Area packed the house and the dance floor.

The city built The Palomar Ballroom in 1946 on the northeast corner of Notre Dame Avenue and Carlysle Street in downtown San José, two blocks west of the present-day San Pedro Square. It was the first significant building constructed in the city after World War II.

Built for the Big Band Era, the ballroom hosted major musical acts like Ray Charles and Fats Domino. Ethnic Mexican promoters also attracted acts from México and Latin America, including Dámaso Pérez Prado and the brightest Mexican mariachi stars of the day. Historians consider it the first integrated dance hall in San José.

The building changed with the times, hosting rock and roll and rock acts, and a discotheque, from the 1960s through the late 1990s. Eventually, the last occupant of the original Palomar Ballroom building closed for good in 2002.

According to a city report, the structure was eligible for the California Register of Historic Resources and the National Register of Historic Places in part for “the building’s role in the preservation of the diverse social and cultural traditions of the Latino community in Santa Clara Valley for approximately 50 years.”

Despite the historic value of the original Palomar, the grand ballroom building was demolished in 2005 to make way for a high-rise residential development. As a consolation, the city required the developer to incorporate visual displays of the building’s history. It recommended that the Historic Landmarks Commission obtain information “from conducting oral histories with members of the Chicano community.”

The high-rise development, however, was some 50 years into the unknown future for the revelers dancing to Dámaso Pérez Prado and his Orchestra in the Palomar Ballroom. The orchestra included up to 14 musicians playing trumpets, saxophones, trombones, a drum set, timbales, congas, and a stand-up bass.

The energetic music filled the high-ceilinged, cavernous room. Women dressed in evening gowns, cocktail dresses, high-heeled shoes, and white or cream-colored elbow-length gloves. Men wore neatly pressed dark suits, crisp white dress shirts, colorful ties, and shoes polished until they could see their reflections when looking down.

Couples danced the mambo cheek to cheek as they stepped back and forth, and side to side, while sensually swiveling their hips to intoxicating rhythms. Gentlemen flipped open shiny lighters to light cigarettes for themselves and their dates. Cigarette smoke hovered just slightly above the dance floor. With cocktails in hand, those not dancing chatted, laughed, and enjoyed a lovely evening out on the town.

San José’s Mexican American middle class had arrived.

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Most ethnic Mexicans still labored in backbreaking agricultural work. Although shunned from front-office work and government jobs, Mexican Americans began to find employment opportunities in the fast-growing valley. As La Colonia expanded and its residents remained unwelcome in other parts of town, ethnic Mexican entrepreneurs emerged to provide daily services.

The community included doctors, lawyers, hair salons, barbers, photo studios, grocers, auto shops, tax preparers, clothing shops, and much more. When Ford Motor Company opened an assembly plant in the neighboring town of Milpitas in 1955, ethnic Mexicans sought out those potentially well-paying union jobs.

With resilience and perseverance, ethnic Mexicans responded to the stinging rejection of the powers that be by developing La Colonia into a self-sufficient community that thrived with businesses of their own. The establishments lining Market Street sold American goods and Mexican imports. The Balconades, the Rainbow Ballroom, and the Majestic competed with the Palomar to host local talent and major musical acts from México.

Radio programs featured personalities that read the news in Spanish and played the latest popular Latin music, and three theaters showed first-run movies from México. Ethnic Mexicans from throughout the Bay Area went to La Colonia for shopping and entertainment. The Market Street corridor was a vibrant and bustling example of ethnic Mexican entrepreneurship, work ethic, and family-centered community.

The community also had its own press outlets. Perhaps the most influential of these was El Excéntrico, a small 5 ½ by 8 ¾-inch magazine that published 30 to 40 pages each month. The magazine’s employees distributed it to businesses in La Colonia, east San José, and, ultimately, across the greater Bay Area. The magazine shared local news, culture, fashion trends, politics, and society gossip in English and Spanish.

Beginning in the early 1950s, Mexican Americans had sought to participate in politics to ensure that local government met community needs and addressed concerns. The Community Services Organization, a grassroots advocacy group based in Los Angeles, organized in Sal Si Puedes and La Colonia to register voters. The organization sought to replicate its success in electing the first Mexican American to the Los Angeles City Council in 1947.

Three years later, a grocery store owner named Charles Esparza and attorney Manny Gomez filed their intent to run for the San José City Council. On the East Side, reports indicated that Republican poll watchers harassed voters by questioning their citizenship and legal voter registration cards. Mainstream candidates soundly defeated Esparza and Gomez in the April primary election.

Despite the efforts of the Mexican American middle class to gain access to the public decision-making table, subsequent public policy actions by the San José City Council during the 1960s and 1970s would literally cause the “demolition” of La Colonia and its dynamic business district.

Hundreds of ethnic Mexican families were displaced to make room for San José’s first urban renewal project. The Park Center Plaza, 3.8 million square feet of commercial and office space (directly across the street from the present-day Plaza de César Chávez), broke ground in July 1968.

 Other buildings quickly followed. The main library on San Carlos Street in 1970 and the Center for Performing Arts in 1972. Major San José cultural venues like the Tech Museum of Innovation and the Children’s Discovery Museum, both valuable community assets, sit on the ashes of a once-thriving ethnic Mexican community.

Through it all, Mexican Americans endured like the ever-present avena barbata swaying in the howling winds of a winter storm. When the wind and rain stopped, San José’s ethnic Mexican community stood tall like the slender wild oak that covered the east foothills, ready to face the last two decades of the 20th century.

***

Note: Mexican Heritage Plaza: A Symbol of Resilience and Perseverance is coming SOON!

                                   

Mexican Heritage Plaza: A Symbol of Resilience and Perseverance – Chapter 4

Miscellaneous Posts, , , ,

Photos L-R Clockwise: Avena Barbata, Eastern Santa Clara Valley Hills, Book Cover, New Almaden Mines ca. 1863 (image courtesy of westernmininghistory.com)

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Chapter 4

Avena Barbata

This period of trial led to what may have been the earliest ethnic Mexican-organized labor activities in U.S. history.

~ Stephen J. Pitti, Author, The Devil in Silicon Valley

***

During the rainy season, avena barbata, also known as slender wild oat, is one of the natural grasses that blanket the green hillsides on the eastern slope of Santa Clara Valley. Before industrialization and the growth of Silicon Valley, this species of tall grasses swayed in the wind on hillsides and the valley floor as well.

During the dry season, the plant’s seeds fall to the ground, disappear into the soil, and become dormant. Some seeds can remain underground for three years before sprouting after the rains, growing to a height of up to four feet.

Slender wild oats are not native to the Santa Clara Valley or California. They originate from Asia and the Mediterranean Basin. According to botanists, the strain found in the Santa Clara Valley has the same genetic makeup as avena barbata, native to southwestern Spain.

The grass is also common in the Mexican states of Sonora and Sinaloa. Scientists speculate that Mexican settlers and ranchers introduced avena barbata to the valley in the 18th and 19th centuries to feed cattle and other livestock.

Green florets hang on the tips of a few branches that hold the seeds of the slim grass. When the wind flows through a field of avena barbata, unharvested seeds of the wild grass fly wide and far, settling into the soil below.

Botanists consider it an invasive species that outcompetes native grasses in the valley. Over the course of nearly 250 years, the slender wild oat has become more common in the Santa Clara Valley than native species.

Today, the eastern hillsides turn a lush green soon after a heavy rain. Although modern-day Silicon Valley is an endless landscape of asphalt, cement, and squat tilt-up buildings that serve the high-tech industry, avena barbata is everywhere.

During the spring, one can see tall grass on median strips, unkempt yards peeking through cyclone fences, and on open lots. Today, hiking trails in the Eastern hills cut through fields of avena barbata, gently undulating in a light springtime breeze.

The Mexicans who founded San José, along with the avena barbata they brought for the journey, laid the foundation for the settlement during its first 73 years. The resilient pobladores (Mexican settlers) and their descendants built a community, governed themselves, and survived floods, drought, and conflicts with Americans who squatted on their land.

Just as slender wild oats disappear from the valley floor every summer, ethnic Mexicans vanished from 20th-century published historical works about San Jose. Much like how slender wild oat seeds nourish the soil, generating tall strands of green grass after the rain, ethnic Mexicans sustained the valley’s development as ranch hands, agricultural workers, and miners.

During the 1820s, Secundino Robles, a Mexican American landowner born in Santa Cruz, was the first non-Ohlone to see cinnabar embedded in the hillside soil. Cinnabar is a bright reddish-orange mineral that the Ohlone used for thousands of years as paint for ceremonial adornments.

During a visit to the Santa Clara Valley in 1845, Captain Andrés Castillero, a military officer from México City and a trained geologist, chemist, and metallurgist, inspected samples of the red rocks at Mission Santa Clara.

His experiments confirmed that the stones were cinnabar, a mercury-based mineral found in quicksilver mines. Quicksilver, another name for mercury, is a chemical used by miners to extract gold from rocks. Castillero formed a mining company named Santa Clara.

Castillero did not benefit from the Gold Rush, which brought riches to mine owners. He returned to México in 1847 to seek funding to expand his operations, and the Mexican government called him to duty during the 1846-48 U.S. War with México.

Castillero ultimately sold the Santa Clara mine. The new owner, the Quicksilver Mining Company, was a Pennsylvania-based organization that dominated the global mercury market. It named the location Cinnabar Hill and renamed the company New Almaden Mines.

Not long after the Quicksilver Mining Company arrived on Cinnabar Hill, structural racism again reared its ugly head in Santa Clara Valley. Company policies ensured that the miners were financially beholden to the Quicksilver Mining Company.

Immediately, the Company began charging residents $5 per month to rent the houses miners had built and occupied. The new owners replaced the general store with a company store that sold food at a 75% markup.

Inspired by the Mexican victory over French invaders in Puebla, Mexico, on May 5, 1862, miners began organizing and sharing ideas to resist the Company’s policies. In late 1864, miners and their families began protesting management.

In his groundbreaking book, A Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans, Yale historian Stephen Pitti wrote, “This period of trial led to what may have been the earliest ethnic Mexican–organized labor activities in U.S. history.”

Even in the face of withering structural racism, the fight on Cinnabar Hill demonstrated the resiliency and perseverance of ethnic Mexicans in San José. Against all odds, the courageous miners stood in solidarity to defend their families and honor, as hardworking contributors to the economy that sustained San José and the surrounding area.

***

Note: La Raza Historical Society Publications anticipates that Mexican Heritage Plaza: A Symbol of Resilience and Perseverance will be available on March 21, 2026.

Stay tuned!