Remembering Bryn Mawr: Rural Mexican Community Building, Education, and Resistance in California’s Inland Empire, 1880-1950

At the turn of the twentieth century, white settlers arriving in Inland Southern California’s rich valleys attempted to construct a white utopic rural space. However, this vision ignored the realities of a multiracial space and the racialized capitalism of the growing citrus industry. This dissertation seeks to untangle how a racialized rurality was constructed, reconstructed, and contested in the San Bernardino Valley, and particularly, in the small townsite of Bryn Mawr, California. In my analysis of rurality, I trace the shifting racialized landscape in Bryn Mawr with particular attention to Mexican space and the Mexican community. As I trace the region’s shifts between the 1880s and 1950s, I tease out multiple strands and acts of Mexican American placemaking occurring in Bryn Mawr, California including community building, homeownership, labor activism, print culture, and school desegregation.This dissertation is engaged partially in the reconstruction of historical memory in a region which has continually erased and misrepresented the histories of Mexican American families. My project is not only comprised of intensive archival research but represents my robust and ongoing public history projects including oral history creation, local education initiatives, free public history fairs, as well as the creation of community based, post-custodial digital archives, which combat the systematic erasure found in established archives. Together, robust archival research and innovative public history methodologies allow for the reconstruction of a particular racialized landscape and, most importantly, allow us to “Remember Bryn Mawr.