The San Diego Reader
January 13, 1983
Going Back
Ruth Canard
Traditionally, social scientists recoil at the notion of "contaminating" a research project by taking an active part in it, but Robert Alvarez used his own involvement as a central
aspect of his doctoral work in anthropology. Alvarez examined the history of Mexican immigration to the United States by tracking down relatives in his own extended family and retracing his family's immigration from Baja California to the San Diego area. His family is an exemplary choice, and the steps he took in following their history are the basis of "The Trail North," a
half-hour television documentary that will be aired next week on Channel 15.
Robert Alvarez's journey begins with visits to the Castellanos family in Lemon Grove his paternal relatives; and to his great-aunt Martina Mesa in Logan Heights, who shows him a photograph of her grandfather, Antonio Smith. This grandfather, Alvarez's great-great-great-uncle, was the son of Maria Mesa and Thomas Smith, a Yankee sailor who in
1808 jumped ship en route from New York to the Orient and became the first American to settle permanently in Baja California.
Alvarez and his ten year old son Luis travel through Baja, meeting more relatives, filling in the facts of other relatives lives, going into an old gold mine where many of his family worked and in whose mining camp his grandparents met. Driving and camping along 800 miles of Baja roads, he imagines the footsteps of his ancestors and the warmth of their campfires.
We don't, unfortunately, get to see or hear enough of the details of Robert Alvarez's experience, or know how much he learned about the personalities and the motivations of these people. That the program makes us want to understand more is its strength; that it does not satisfy that want is its weakness. We can believe that the experience was illuminating for Alvarez, but this account doesn't bring us over the threshold and into the light, although it opens the door.
Alvarez and Paul Espinosa, who wrote and produced the documentary for KPBS, have plans for three more programs, all centered on Alvarez's family. These would deal with the early years of settlement in the U.S., about 1910 to 1930; the massive deportation of approximately half a million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the 1930s, and a 1931 school desegregation suit against the city of Lemon Grove brought and won by the local Mexican-American community, with Robert Alvarez's father major plaintiff; and, finally, the current situation regarding new migration and immigration.