Grace Arceneaux

Grace Palacio Arceneaux, a Mexican-American resident of Watsonville, California, was interviewed in 1977 by Meri Knaster, an editor at the Regional History Project, as part of a series of oral histories documenting local agricultural and ethnic history. Arceneaux was born in San Martin de Bolaños, Jalisco, Mexico, in March 1920. She came with her family to San Juan Bautista, California, in 1923 during the havoc of the Mexican Revolution. The family lived on a little ranch and eked out a living farming and doing field work. Her mother died in childbirth when she was a young girl, and shortly thereafter her father died, leaving Arceneaux to care for her nine brothers and sisters. As she said, she always had a child to carry on her hip, wherever she went. Her spirit of grit and determination shines through her descriptions of chronic hard times and poverty as she worked unremittingly to raise her siblings and to make a life for herself. Her life story shows how she made the transition from illegal immigrant farmworker to middle-class social activist. Knaster characterized Arceneaux as a wonderfully warm, sharing, open person, and extremely informative as well. Despite the hardships in her life, her narration is not bitter or resentful. As her conversation reveals, she has a realistic understanding of ethnic and gender discrimination as it is manifest in the Mexican, Anglo, and Filipino communities, having experienced them herself as a single woman, a Mexican, and later as the wife of a Filipino with a Filipino/Mexican child. Her observations of ethnic and class distinctions in the agricultural communities of San Juan Bautista and Watsonville are a real contribution to the social history of this region.