From Fruit Picker to Political Trailblazer: The 92-Year-Old 'Madrina' of East San José

She was San José’s first Latina city council member, and the first Latina on the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors. Today, she goes by many honorifics, but Blanca Alvarado’s favorite is “La Madrina” — the godmother.

At 92 years old, her body has slowed down, and her hair has gone gray, but she remembers with absolute clarity the way her life tracked the rise of Chicana power in what we now call Silicon Valley. Born in Colorado, Alvarado came to San José with her family in 1948, when she was just 16 years old.

“San José had a population of 70,000 people,” she recalled. “So it was a small burg, you know?”

During that time, the region was called the Valley of Heart’s Delight, famous across the country for its stone fruit and vegetables. People from all over North America arrived in successive waves to pick and process the crops.

“The fragrance that wafted in the air — to this day, I will never, never forget it,” said Alvarado. “The valley was just replete with blossoms. All of the orchards were fruit orchards primarily.”

She remembers her father telling her that she was the best fruit picker in the family, but it was an incredibly difficult job. “Being on your knees, on clods of dirt. It was very uncomfortable, to say the least,” she said.

Alvarado’s life closely parallels the South Bay’s most famous Chicano export. César Chávez also moved here with his family in 1948. At one point, as a young man, he would work in an apricot orchard like Alvarado, making less than a dollar an hour.

“We lived in tents for two years. We lived in tin shacks for two years. Until finally, we were able to rent a house up in the foothills of Evergreen,” she said, referring to the neighborhood in East San José.

Successive waves of migration

Given the name, it’s obvious San José was founded by Latinos; on Nov. 29, 1777, as the Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, to be specific. But it wasn’t until after the Civil War, when railroads crisscrossed North America, linking farmers and ranchers to millions of hungry consumers, that Mexicans began traveling north of the border to work on farms and ranches in the Western U.S.

“The railroads are definitely a sign of industrialization, and they’re used not only to bring fruit out to markets, but bring labor in,” said Dr. Margo McBane, history professor and co-director of an extensive oral history project based at San José State called Before Silicon Valley: A History of Mexican Agricultural and Cannery Workers of Santa Clara County, 1920–1960.

“Mexican workers were referred to as traqueros,” said co-director Suzanne Guerra. For Guerra, like many on her team, this history is personal. “My grandfather was one of those who came in [to the Western U.S.] at 14 years old on a railroad car all the way up to Chicago to work,” Guerra said.

From the beginning, Guerra says, the people like her grandfather who picked the crops were at the bottom of the economic and social hierarchy.

“They were subject to the whims of the weather, just as the farmers were. So if the crop got wiped out, you didn’t have a job. And also, you were subject to the seasonality of things,” Guerra said.

But as the decades wore on, many Mexican Americans moved into better-paying cannery jobs, and into the middle class. Blanca Alvarado’s generation — born in the 1930s — was poised to flex its political muscle and advocate for change.

A golden age for culture and politics

Alvarado met her first husband, local radio host and activist Jose Alvarado, when she was a senior at San José High. Jose was decades older than her. He owned a record shop and a broadcasting studio for his show on the local radio station KLOK on Post Street in downtown San José. She would come in after school to listen to the jukebox and play games like ping pong and Chinese checkers.

“He had a huge following on KLOK. He was the most prominent bilingual radio broadcaster in Northern California,” she recalled.

They married in 1953. Five children soon followed. The marriage provided Blanca Alvarado with a golden ticket of sorts, access to the backstages of San José’s music scene. Thanks to her husband, Alvarado even got to host her own bilingual radio talk show at KLOK called “Merienda Musical.”

However, there’s little recorded evidence left from the Alvarados’ radio days.

“I’ve searched high and low for any sort of Spanish language jingles, clips. There’s nothing there,” said Juan Antonio Cuellar, curator of the Frontera Collection for the Arhoolie Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to preserving American roots music.

“[The Mexican American community in East San José] was such a huge community. Such a huge pool of talent,” Cuellar added. “You’re rubbing shoulders with people with the same experience. You’re listening to the same music. You’re going to work in the canneries with the same people you just spent the weekend dancing with.”

The 1950s and 1960s were, by all accounts, a golden age for both Mexican music and cinema. Fortunately, we can still hear some recordings of the really big acts from San José, like the Montoya Sisters. They recorded some of their music, like this song, “Bomboncito” in Mexico City.

Las Hermanas Montoya were one of a few homegrown acts that made it big. They toured in the 1950s with a steady stream of hits, like the million-selling single, “Mucho Mucho Mucho.”

“I remember them well,” Alvarado said of the glamorous singers. “They needed a larger audience, and where could they get it but in Mexico? Then they hit it big in Mexico City. And so they never came back until years later.”

In the oral histories Guerra and her colleagues collected over more than 15 years, local elders speak of a time when San José drew Mexican Americans from farming regions far and wide, looking for fun and community on the weekends. “When you went to the big city, you know, you didn’t go to San Francisco,” said Guerra. “You went to San José.”

“Because San José had everything. It had the shops. It had the movie theaters. It had the dances, the ballrooms, the clubs, the bookstores. It had all these Spanish-speaking services,” she said. If you couldn’t find it in Gilroy or you couldn’t find it in Alviso, then you would come to the city, and the city was San José.

From ‘Sal si puede’ to ‘Sí se puede’

The 1950s and 60s were also ripe for political organizing. Guerra says many of Alvarado’s neighbors in East San José — including César Chávez — were Mexican American veterans of World War II, angry and frustrated by all sorts of systemic inequities in housing, infrastructure and schools.

“They had sacrificed so much, and contributed to the American, the Allied victory. And what obligations [did] the country [fulfill] to its citizens? These were things that, by law, we’re entitled to!” Guerra said.

Even as the rest of the region boomed with new suburban development in the decades following World War II, East San José struggled.

“There were no sidewalks. There were no streetlights,” Alvarado recalled. Things were so bad back then, locals nicknamed their neighborhood “Sal si puede,” or “Get out if you can.” Alvarado said the nickname stuck.

“During the rainy season, the storms would be so bad and the mud would be so thick that it was difficult to get out,” she said. “So from ‘Sal si puede,’ we went to ‘Sí se puede.’”

“Si se puede” translates to “Yes, we can,” and it’s a slogan credited to Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (later called the United Farm Workers union) with César Chávez. In the decades since, the slogan has been adopted by activists all over the United States.

Alvarado remembers meetings Chávez held in her garage. “We saw our movement beginning to pick up steam and presence with César Chávez, CSO and the farmworker call for action as well. So today, when we talk about César Chávez, I think we do it with nostalgia for the man. But [also]for the time that we experienced with him. There was so much excitement. There was so much energy. There was so much goodwill.”

“Chávez didn’t come out of nowhere,” said Margo McBane of San José State. “He came out of the shoulders of all these other people working for labor and community civil rights.”

“In San José, in Los Angeles, and in other urban communities, we, the Mexican American people, were dominated by a majority that was Anglo,” Chávez said in a Commonwealth Club address in 1984. “I began to realize that the only answer, the only hope, was in organizing.”

As the 1970s wore on, the Chicano Movement made steady gains: improving conditions for migrant farmworkers, establishing Chicano studies in California schools and universities, and getting Mexican Americans elected.

But Alvarado said it was slow going “because we were not allowed to be part of the establishment, of the rulers of the time. We had to form our own institutions and we had to form our own protest organizations.”

Alvarado became the president of the Santa Clara County chapter of the Mexican American Political Association. She got into commission and committee work where she and other members learned the rules about how to confront, petition, and be a voice in government.

Alvarado helped push for San José to switch from at-large to district elections, making it much easier for political newcomers to win elections, especially in under-represented areas. In 1980, she ran to represent her district, and won. That’s when she became the first Latina member of the San José City Council.

Over her roughly 30-year political career, Alvarado focused on health insurance and literacy programs for children; expanding access to public green space; and starting the fight to close down a small airport in East San José because of the noise and air pollution. She played a key role in launching the Mexican Heritage Plaza, and getting San José’s premier downtown park, known for hosting parties and protests, renamed the Plaza de César Chávez.

But these are the kinds of battles against systemic racism that take years to wage, the kinds of wins that typically fade fast from public view.

“She’s saying, ‘My community deserves a seat at the table. I deserve a seat at the table,’” Santa Clara County Supervisor Cindy Chavez said of Alvarado. Chavez got involved with local politics in the late 1980s, in large part, she says, because of Alvarado’s example.

Generations of Latinas in the South Bay have sought public office in Alvarado’s wake, often seeking her endorsement. Chavez says she feels a sense of responsibility to finish what Alvarado started, on behalf of a community that has long felt unseen and unheard.

Historian Suzanne Guerra says understanding the impact of Mexican Americans on this region deepens our connection to history.

“You know, when I was a kid, I learned my American history, my California history like everybody else, but folks like me and my family, we disappeared,” she said.

Google it. This history is hard to find unless you already know what you’re looking for. And even then, “We’re still considered ‘other history,’ not American history. When the truth is, American history is everyone’s history,” Guerra said.

A few years ago, Alvarado got a special thrill when a local elementary school was named after her: the Alpha Blanca Alvarado School in East San José. There’s also a community health center named after her.

Alvarado says she hopes younger generations of Latino activists take strength from her example. Many of the issues she fought for including health care, representation and housing are still fights today in San José. She says it’s time for the youngsters to start making their mark.