Hispanic Heritage in Southern Oregon

Hispanic Heritage Month started earlier this week on September 15th and is regularly celebrated across the country and in Oregon with live music, food related festivals, games, and more. This month serves as a time for those with Latino or Hispanic heritage to celebrate their history and culture, and for those that are not Hispanic or Latino to reflect on the positive influence these groups have had on the US, our lives, and our communities. In light of this celebratory season, today I want to share an overview of the history and legacy that Latino communities have created within Southern Oregon communities.  

While Hispanic presence on the land that is now Oregon and the Pacific Northwest began with Spain’s voyages and trading rights established as early as 1513, Hispanic Origins of Oregon, a publication by Western Oregon University, argues that Hispanic presence in Oregon started in earnest in the mid to late 18^th century. During this time, New Spain created Spanish settlements, schools, hospitals, and military and trading outposts along the North American coast as far north as Alaska, sometimes in partnership with local tribes, but more often through force (while I won’t be talking about Indigenous and colonizer interactions today, you can read more about this here). While settlements were relatively few and far between and largely for commerce and military strategy, the central and southern parts of the present-day US coastline was a more heavily-populated territory called Alta California. Alta California’s northern border was sometimes depicted on maps to include the areas around the Klamath River and Crater Lake, but officially moved to the current Oregon-California border after an 1819 treaty relinquished Spanish claims to anything north of the 42^nd parallel. After Mexico’s War of Independence ended in 1821, Mexico would continue to hold the border just south of present-day Ashland until the Mexican-American war ended in 1848, with Hispanic communities traveling north into Oregon Country for work but rarely for settlement. 

The pattern of Mexican seasonal migration into Oregon for work began in the mid-1800s and would largely continue off and on for the next century, interspersed with spikes in deportation efforts. First, Mexican men were hired as cattle drivers and mule packers that supported trade routes and army troops during conflicts like the Rogue River Wars of the 1850s. Later, after a sharp increase in northward migration due to decreased migration restrictions for Mexicans in the late 1800s and early 1900s, local farmers, mines, railroads, and manufacturing jobs began recruiting migrants for spring and summer work. And despite the repatriation of the 1920s and 30s that some sources estimate led to the deportation of as many as 1.8 million people with Hispanic ancestry, as many as 60% of which had US citizenship, Mexican populations in Oregon continued to grow. Just a decade or two later during the 1940s when WWII caused a lack of workers at home, the US began funding the Bracero Program, a seasonal worker partnership with Mexico that brought 15,000 Mexicans to Oregon between 1942 and 1947. While the program ended for Oregon in 1947, the tradition of Mexican labor lived on. Even among record level deportation efforts in the 50s, census data showed a steady growth of Mexican laborers.  

The Oregon Historical Society’s research has found that beginning around the 1960s and 70s, seasonal labor began to transform into year-round demand for greenhouse farming, manufacturing jobs, construction, forestry, and more, which allowed for workers that previously migrated seasonally to lay down roots and bring in families, expanding their involvement in other industries and community efforts. Establishment of settled Mexican-American communities also brought cultural celebrations, restaurants, radio stations, and civil rights organizations such as the United Farm Workers of Oregon. Civil wars and upheaval in many Latin and South American countries also brought large numbers of migrants to Oregon from other Hispanic countries for the first time. And in 1986 when Congress gave legal status to undocumented immigrants as part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act, including almost 24,000 Latinos in Oregon, the number of Hispanic families in Oregon began to skyrocket, including for the first time a large increase in native-born Latino Americans, which as of this 2016 publication, accounts for over 60% of Latino Oregonians. Census records showed the approximately 32,000 Oregonians with Mexican Ancestry in 1970 had almost quadrupled to just under 113,000 by 1990, with migration centralized around towns in Eastern Oregon, rural parts of the Willamette Valley, and small towns in Southern Oregon like Phoenix where studies have shown physical laborers increasingly turned to forestry work, and others turned to a variety of other industries.  

With the increase in Hispanic populations across Oregon in the late 20^th century, the Rogue Valley saw the same increase, with Spanish speaking households growing by 160% from 1990 to 2000. Hispanic community centers, hospitals, churches, and other community services and events were ushered in with new families, creating the Rogue Valley’s vibrant Latino, and largely Mexican, influences that we see today. Hispanic adults increasingly joined workforces in health care and social services, retail, food services, and a variety of other sectors (check out this article for more information about current economic demographics of Latinos in Oregon). In the present day, the Rogue Valley has many thriving Mexican markets, private businesses and nonprofits, restaurants, sports leagues, and so much more. The origins of the incredibly diverse and unique Hispanic community in Southern Oregon that can largely be traced back to the communities that came over the last fifty years, but has expanded as the historically immigrant population transformed into a predominantly native-born population with more varied opportunities for community involvement, and can be expected to continue to grow across Oregon and the US as a whole in the near future.  

If you’d like to celebrate Latino contributions to the Rogue Valley and beyond this Hispanic Heritage Month, consider attending an upcoming event at the library or in the community, or finding out more about Hispanic History in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest from one of the books on this list.