Serrano, Cahuilla, Luiseño, Chemehuevi, Mojave, Quechan, Kumeyaay, Cocopah, Tongva & Cupeño homelands

Collective Memory of Organizing and Resistance
in the Inland Empire, Imperial Valley and Coachella Valley

San Bernardino, Riverside & Imperial Counties

The Inland Empire, the Imperial Valley and the Coachella Valley are not conservative terrain that resistance visits, they are where California's farmworker, borderlands, Indigenous-sovereignty and prison-abolition lineages have some of their deepest roots, and this timeline tells that story.

The timeline, 1769–2026 · 124 entries

Every entry in the record, placed by year; each mark links to its entry. Gold circles are solidarity, resistance, and resilience; steel squares are oppression and dominance; violet diamonds are contested.

Solidarity / Resistance / Resilience48

Oppression / Dominance44

Contested / Both32

12organizing lineages

18entries with evidence of human-collateral economies

Ten eras

1Sovereignty & the Yuma Crossingpre-1769 – 18213 2Mexican Era, Ranchos & Refuge1821–18481 3Colony, Militia & Reservation1848–188917 4Citrus Empire, Exclusion & the Irrigated Desert1889–192913 5Depression, Strike Wave & Vigilante Valley1929–19415 6War, Steel, Braceros & the Color Line1941–19647 7Farmworker Insurgency, Black & Chicano Power, Prison Movement Rise1965–197912 8Prison Boom, Border Militarization & Movement Under Siege1980–199913 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence2000–201521 10Present Struggle2016–202632

How to read an entry card

Each entry carries its year and date, title, category, place and homeland, a summary, its actors, its sources with links, and, in the footer, its ID, verification tier, county, organizing lineage threads (L1 to L12), and connected entries. The colored edge is the era; the shape at top right is the classification.

Lineage threads, L1 to L12

L1Indigenous Sovereignty & Resistance35 L2Black Freedom Struggle in the Inland Empire & Imperial Valley20 L3Prison Movement, Black August & the Inside-Outside Line21 L4Farmworker & Warehouse Worker Power (the long line of the irrigated and logistics empire)15 L5Anti-Asian Exclusion & Asian American Resistance7 L6Mexican, Chicano & Immigrant Justice beyond the fields26 L7Guard Power, Police Politics & Paramilitary Infiltration29 L8Prison-Town & Detention Political Economy and the Fights Against Expansion12 L9Environmental Justice as Desert & Inland Resistance16 L10Cross-Racial Solidarity Moments20 L11Queer Inland Empire & Desert Organizing4 L12Borderlands & Binational Struggle30

Verification tiers, 1 to 3

Tier 1two or more independent sources, at least one primary or contemporaneous.

Tier 2one primary source, or scholarship built on primaries.

Tier 3named community memory, not yet documented (none at present). Each entry shows its tier.

Evidence of human-collateral economies

⚑ Entries where a person, or a person’s labor, wages, body or estate, was treated as an asset or security. The gold label on the card names how: for example, a labor auction, withheld wages, or a per-diem bed.

This timeline is set on the homelands of the Maara'yam and Marringayam (Serrano), Iviatim (Cahuilla), Payómkawichum (Luiseño), Nüwü (Chemehuevi), Pipa Aha Macav (Mojave), Kwatsáan (Quechan), Kumeyaay, Cocopah, Tongva and Cupeño peoples, which were never ceded by ratified treaty. It is a living community document, a work in progress that welcomes correction, addition, and challenge from the communities whose memory it carries.

Before the timeline

A desert Spain never held

Spain's recorded entries into this region were the Anza road of 1774–76, Garcés's 1776 journey across the Mojave and Fages's punitive campaigns of 1781–82; it settled only at its western edge, in San Gabriel's outposts of the San Bernardino Valley (named 'San Bernardino' 1810; rancho from 1819; asistencia buildings c. 1830; mission control ended 1834) (IEIV-0123); on the Colorado River the Quechan nation under Palma destroyed the two Spanish settlements at the Yuma crossing in July 1781, killing Fr. Garcés and Capt. Rivera y Moncada, and Spain never re-established control of the crossing (IEIV-0002). The interior deserts, the San Bernardino Mountains and the Coachella and Imperial basins remained sovereign ground through the Mexican period (IEIV-0003); effective colonization came only with the American period — the Mormon colony of 1851, which brought twenty-six enslaved Black people with it (IEIV-0004); the mountain campaign against the Serrano, remembered by the Yuhaaviatam as a state-sanctioned militia's 32-day campaign of 1866 and recorded in the San Bernardino Guardian of February–March 1867 (IEIV-0007); the sheriff's eviction of the Luiseño from Temecula (1875, IEIV-0008); executive-order reservations (1876–84, IEIV-0009, IEIV-0010); and the railroads and canals that turned desert into 'empire' (IEIV-0124).

Before the timeline

Empire in the name, twice

The region carries empire in its name twice: 'Imperial,' the name promoted by George Chaffey and the California Development Company for the Salton Sink (c. 1900–01, IEIV-0124), and the booster term 'Inland Empire' (earliest documented use reported as April 1914 in the Riverside press; not yet verified on this timeline). The older name is a saint's, which a Franciscan party is recorded as giving on May 20, 1810 ('San Bernardino,' IEIV-0123).

pre-1769 – 1821

Sovereignty & the Yuma Crossing

3 entries201

1769Sovereign desert and mountain nations hold the homelands
1774Spain reaches the region's edge: Anza's crossings and the San Gabriel outposts
1781Quechan uprising destroys the Spanish settlements at the Yuma crossing

Era 1Sovereignty & the Yuma Crossing

Resistance / Resilience

1769

Pre-1769 (living homelands)

Sovereign desert and mountain nations hold the homelands

Community & Cultural Forces

San Bernardino, Riverside and Imperial counties (all)

Homeland: Maara'yam/Marringayam (Serrano); Iviatim (Cahuilla); Payómkawichum (Luiseño); Nüwü (Chemehuevi); Pipa Aha Macav (Mojave); Kwatsáan (Quechan); Kumeyaay; Cocopah; Tongva

Before Spanish entry, the territory now divided into San Bernardino, Riverside and Imperial counties was held by self-governing nations: Serrano clans in the San Bernardino Mountains and high desert, Cahuilla in the Coachella basin and passes, Luiseño in the Temecula valleys, Chemehuevi and Mojave along the Colorado, Quechan at the Yuma crossing, Kumeyaay and Cocopah in the southern desert. The Chuckwalla National Monument proclamation of 2025 names these peoples by their own names - Iviatim, Nüwü, Pipa Aha Macav, Kwatsáan, Maara'yam and Marringayam, 'and other Indigenous peoples' - and directs the Secretary to seek 'opportunities for co-stewardship' (signed January 14, 2025; its status is noted at IEIV-0099). The Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation's published history places the clan in Big Bear Valley within a Serrano territory spanning the San Bernardino highlands, passes and valleys. This is the baseline against which every later dispossession on the timeline is measured.

ActorsSerrano, Cahuilla, Luiseño, Chemehuevi, Mojave, Quechan, Kumeyaay, Cocopah and Tongva nations

1Proclamation 10881, Establishment of the Chuckwalla National Monument, 90 Fed. Reg. 6715 (Jan. 17, 2025) - names Iviatim, Nüwü, Pipa Aha Macav, Kwatsáan, Maara'yam and Marringayam peoples

2Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation, 'Our History' (sanmanuel-nsn.gov)

Presidential proclamation (primary); tribal government history

IEIV-0001Tier 2Multi-countyLineageL1

ConnectedIEIV-0002 IEIV-0099 IEIV-0117

Era 1Sovereignty & the Yuma Crossing

Contested / Both

1774

1774-1834

Spain reaches the region's edge: Anza's crossings and the San Gabriel outposts

Colonization, Conquest & Political Violence

Yuma crossing; Yuha Well and San Sebastian marsh (Imperial Co.); Coyote Canyon and Puerto de San Carlos (Riverside Co.); Guachama / Redlands (San Bernardino Co.)

Homeland: Kwatsáan (Quechan); Iviatim (Cahuilla); Maara'yam (Serrano)

Spain's road into the region ran on Quechan consent. On February 9, 1774 Fr. Francisco Garcés 'crossed the Colorado River in the arms of Indians'; Anza reached San Gabriel March 22. The 1775–76 expedition crossed 'with the help of the Yuma people and their chief, Salvador Palma' (NPS), camped at the 'Village of Captain Palma' on December 3, 1775, at Puerto de San Carlos on December 26 and at Cañada de San Patricio December 27-28, reaching San Gabriel January 4, 1776. In the San Bernardino Valley, Guachama was 'renamed San Bernardino on May 20, 1810 by Francisco Dumetz,' became San Gabriel's rancho in 1819, and 'Franciscan fathers engineered, and Indians dug' the Mill Creek Zanja in 1819–20; the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation record that 'many Maara'yam (Serrano) were involuntarily marched to the Asistencia in Redlands... to build the Mill Creek Zanja'; Palma's alliance ended in 1781 (IEIV-0002).

DatesGarcés crosses the Colorado Feb. 9, 1774; Anza at San Gabriel Mar. 22, 1774; colonizing expedition at 'Village of Captain Palma' Dec. 3, 1775, camp at Puerto de San Carlos Dec. 26, camp beyond the pass at Cañada de San Patricio Dec. 27-28, San Gabriel Jan. 4, 1776; Guachama renamed San Bernardino May 20, 1810; San Gabriel's rancho/estancia 1819; Mill Creek Zanja 1819-20; asistencia buildings c. 1830 (CHL 42); mission control ended 1834 (CHL 95)

ActorsJuan Bautista de Anza; Fr. Francisco Garcés; Salvador Palma (Quechan); Fr. Francisco Dumetz; Maara'yam (Serrano) people of Guachama and Yukaipa't

1Web de Anza (University of Oregon): Garcés 1774 diary, Feb. 7-13, 1774 entries (g74diary_pg2); 'Historical Context' (Mar. 22, 1774 arrival; 'Salvador Palma'); 1775-76 campsite table; NPS, 'Anza Trail Historic Sites in Arizona' ('with the help of the Yuma people and their chief, Salvador Palma'; 'the aid of the Quechan people') and 'Juan Bautista de Anza' (Jan. 4, 1776)

2California Office of Historic Preservation, Historical Landmarks No. 95 (Guachama Rancheria), No. 43 (Zanja), No. 42 (San Bernardino Asistencia), No. 103 (De Anza camp, March 1774); Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation, 'About Us' and 'History'

Expedition diaries (primary, digitized); state landmark records; tribal government statements

IEIV-0123Tier 1Multi-countyLineageL1

ConnectedIEIV-0001 IEIV-0002 IEIV-0007 IEIV-0110

Era 1Sovereignty & the Yuma Crossing

Resistance / Resilience

1781

July 17-19, 1781

Quechan uprising destroys the Spanish settlements at the Yuma crossing

Colonization, Conquest & Political Violence

Yuma crossing of the Colorado River, near present Bard/Winterhaven (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Kwatsáan (Quechan)

Spain planted two mission-settlements at the Colorado crossing - La Purísima Concepción and San Pedro y San Pablo de Bicuñer (founded January 7, 1781). On July 17, 1781 Quechan forces - with Mojave allies, per the California Military Museum - rose in the revolt associated with Palma; over the following days both settlements were destroyed, Captain Fernando Rivera y Moncada and Fr. Francisco Garcés were killed along with the other friars, and Spanish captives were taken. Spain never re-established control of the crossing; Pedro Fages's expeditions of 1781–82 ransomed captives and recovered the dead but did not restore the settlements. The California State Military Museum puts the Spanish dead at 131 (National Catholic Register: the same 'within four days'); Zappia gives 105. The uprising closed the Sonora road and kept the Colorado desert sovereign ground for the rest of the Spanish period.

DatesJuly 17-19, 1781 (killing continued over several days; Bicuñer founded Jan. 7, 1781)

ActorsPalma (Quechan leader); Quechan nation; Capt. Fernando Rivera y Moncada; Fr. Francisco Garcés

1California Office of Historic Preservation, listed resource: 'Site of Mission San Pedro y San Pablo de Bicuñer' (Imperial County; registered 6/30/1978)

2Natale Zappia, '"The One Who Wheezes": Salvador Palma, the Colorado River, and the Emerging World Economy' (UC Santa Cruz-hosted PDF); Mark Santiago, Massacre at the Yuma Crossing: Spanish Relations with the Quechans, 1779-1782 (Univ. of Arizona Press, 1998; pbk. 2010); Pedro Fages, The Colorado River Campaign, 1781-1782: Diary of Pedro Fages (H. I. Priestley, ed., 1913)

State landmark record (primary-derived); archival scholarship

IEIV-0002Tier 1ImperialLineageL1 L12

ConnectedIEIV-0001 IEIV-0010

1821–1848

Mexican Era, Ranchos & Refuge

1 entry010

1848Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transfers the region to U.S. rule

Era 2Mexican Era, Ranchos & Refuge

Oppression / Dominance

1848

Feb. 2, 1848

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transfers the region to U.S. rule

Policies & Systems

Statewide; region's rancho and Indigenous land base

Homeland: All regional nations; Californio grantees

The treaty ending the U.S.-Mexico War transferred Alta California, including the San Bernardino rancho country, the Cahuilla and Luiseño interior and the Colorado desert, to the United States. It nominally guaranteed Mexican-era property and citizenship rights while Indigenous title went unaddressed, the legal frame within which the treaties of 1852 would be negotiated and secretly rejected, and within which rancho land was converted to American holdings. Milanovich's UC Riverside dissertation traces the treaty-to-statehood sequence for the Temecula region from 1846 to 1905. Entered here as the hinge between the Mexican era and the American colonization that effectively reached the interior only in the 1850s-1870s.

ActorsUnited States; Mexico; Cahuilla, Luiseño, Serrano nations; Californio grantees

1Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), National Archives Milestone Documents

2Sean C. Milanovich, 'The Treaty of Temecula: A Story of Invasion, Deceit, Stolen Land, and the Persistence of Power, 1846-1905' (Ph.D. diss., UC Riverside, 2021)

Treaty text (primary); dissertation

IEIV-0003Tier 1Multi-countyLineageL1 L6

ConnectedIEIV-0005 CV-0005

1848–1889

Colony, Militia & Reservation

17 entries2114

1850The Indian Act: Native people auctioned 'to the best bidder'
1851The Mormon colony brings 26 enslaved Black people to San Bernardino
1851Enslaved San Bernardino labor is tithed; a Utah sale is proposed
1851The Garra uprising: Cupeño revolt against the tax and labor regime
1851Burnett's 'war of extermination' message and the state war fund
1852Treaty of Temecula signed - and secretly rejected by the Senate
1852The Monday auction: Los Angeles sells Native convicts' labor by the week
1853Cave Couts binds Luiseño workers by debt, custody, indenture and the lash
1856Biddy Mason and Hannah win freedom from a San Bernardino slaveholder
1859'Wipe out the Mojave!': the 1859 Army campaign on the Colorado
1863Smallpox winter kills Juan Antonio; Saahatpa is abandoned
1866Mountain campaign against the Serrano: tribal account and 1867 record
1875Sheriff's posse evicts the Luiseño from Temecula; Pechanga rebuilds
1876Executive orders set apart Cahuilla reservations at Agua Caliente and Torres-Martinez
1877Southern Pacific bridges the Colorado at Yuma; the Imperial Canal follows
1884Fort Yuma Reservation set apart; the 1893 'agreement' takes 25,000 acres
1885Riverside pushes its Chinese residents into a new Chinatown

Era 3Colony, Militia & Reservation

Oppression / Dominance

1850

Act of Apr. 22, 1850

The Indian Act: Native people auctioned 'to the best bidder'

Policies & Systems

Statewide; enforced by county courts of sessions and justices of the peace in Los Angeles, San Bernardino (from 1853) and San Diego counties

Homeland: All regional nations

The Act for the Government and Protection of Indians (April 22, 1850) built a market in Native labor. Section 20 provided that an Indian found 'loitering and strolling about' could be arrested 'on the complaint of any resident citizen' and, if judged a vagrant, hired out 'within twenty-four hours to the best bidder... for any term not exceeding four months'; Section 6 provided that 'in no case [could] a white man be convicted of any offen[s]e upon the testimony of an Indian, or Indians' (Johnston-Dodds's rendering). The 1860 amendment allowed indenture of 'any Indian or Indians, whether children or grown persons,' including 'prisoners of war,' to age 25 (males) or 21 (females) for children under fourteen, 30 or 25 for those fourteen to twenty, and ten years for adults. Madley counts 'at least 20,000 California Indians' in bondage; indenture was repealed in 1863; convict leasing survived until 1937.

DatesAct of Apr. 22, 1850 (Cal. Stats. 1850 ch. 133); witness amendment 1855; indenture amendment 1860; indenture repealed 1863; remaining sections repealed 1937

ActorsCalifornia Legislature; county courts of sessions and justices of the peace; white 'masters' and employers; Native people of the region

⚑ Human-collateral: labor auction / indenture

1Cal. Stats. 1850, ch. 133, 'An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians' (Apr. 22, 1850), provisions quoted in Kimberly Johnston-Dodds, Early California Laws and Policies Related to California Indians (California Research Bureau, 2002)

2Benjamin Madley, '"Unholy Traffic in Human Blood and Souls": Systems of California Indian Servitude under U.S. Rule,' Pacific Historical Review 83:4 (Nov. 2014): 626-667 (open-access PDF, eScholarship qt3dp144qd)

Statute text (primary) via state research bureau; peer-reviewed scholarship

IEIV-0106Tier 1Multi-countyLineageL1 L7

ConnectedIEIV-0107 IEIV-0108 CV-0006 IEIV-0116

Era 3Colony, Militia & Reservation

Oppression / Dominance

1851

1851-1855 (colony founded 1851)

The Mormon colony brings 26 enslaved Black people to San Bernardino

Colonization, Conquest & Political Violence

San Bernardino (Rancho San Bernardino)

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano); Tongva

The National Park Service records that more than 400 Mormon pioneers made the trek to San Bernardino - in 1851, per San Bernardino County - 'twenty-six of whom were enslaved African Americans,' among them Elizabeth 'Lizzy' Flake, born enslaved in North Carolina, who later received freedom papers, married Charles Rowan and lived at 361 D Street until her death on March 29, 1908. San Bernardino County's own history column repeats the figure of 26. Robert Smith, who arrived with the colony in 1851, broke with its leaders in 1855 and was later excommunicated from the church (LAist), held Biddy Mason, Hannah and their children until the 1856 habeas case (IEIV-0006). Slavery was thus present in free-state California at the founding of the San Bernardino colony. The National Park Service gives Lizzy Flake's birth year as 1833.

ActorsMormon colony (Amasa Lyman, Charles Rich); Lizzy Flake Rowan; Robert Smith; enslaved Black families

⚑ Human-collateral: persons

1National Park Service, 'Elizabeth "Lizzy" Flake, the Mormon Pioneer Trail'

2San Bernardino County, 'San Bernardino County history' (Nov. 21, 2024); City of San Bernardino, 'Lizzy Flake Rowan - Slave'; LAist, 'Free Forever' (see IEIV-0006) - Robert Smith

Federal agency history; county and city histories

IEIV-0004Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL2

ConnectedIEIV-0006

Era 3Colony, Militia & Reservation

Oppression / Dominance

1851

1851 to Jan. 1856

Enslaved San Bernardino labor is tithed; a Utah sale is proposed

Land, Labor & Agricultural Empire

San Bernardino (Mormon colony)

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano); Tongva

The only documents located pricing enslaved labor in San Bernardino are church tithing receipts, which Amy Tanner Thiriot's Slavery in Zion attributes to named people: 'Agnes Flake, $29.50, labor of Green (hired out) and Elizabeth'; 'Robert M. Smith, $91.82, labor of Biddy Mason and Hannah Smiley and their children'; and the Crosby family's $1,641.66, including a $250 IOU from Thomas S. Williams to Sytha Crosby Lay, credited to Toby Embers, Grief Embers, eight other named people and Mary Crosby Bankhead's children (Thiriot's attributions, not the receipts' wording). In Utah, after James Flake died in 1850, Agnes Flake had Amasa Lyman write Brigham Young about selling Green, who never came to California; 'no sale took place' (NPS). The 1856 habeas petition (IEIV-0006) warned they 'may be sold into slavery'; no California deed, tax roll or probate record lists them as property.

DatesTithing receipts from 1851; Agnes Flake's request that Lyman write Young about selling Green, Utah, after James Flake's death in 1850 (secondary); habeas petition Dec. 1855-Jan. 1856

ActorsAgnes Flake; Green Flake; Elizabeth (Lizzy) Flake; Robert M. Smith; Biddy Mason; Hannah; Toby and Grief Embers; Crosby family; Amasa Lyman

⚑ Human-collateral: persons

1Amy Tanner Thiriot, Slavery in Zion: A Documentary and Genealogical History of Black Lives and Black Servitude in Utah Territory, 1847-1862 (University of Utah Press, 2022), 22-25, tithing and consecration records, as excerpted at bhroberts.org

2National Park Service, 'Green Flake, the Mormon Pioneer Trail' ('Green Flake, for reasons unknown, did not make the move to California'; 'No sale took place') and 'Elizabeth "Lizzy" Flake, the Mormon Pioneer Trail'; habeas record transcription (UNL)

Documentary history of church financial records (primary-derived); federal agency history; court record

IEIV-0105Tier 2San BernardinoLineageL2

ConnectedIEIV-0004 IEIV-0006

Era 3Colony, Militia & Reservation

Resistance / Resilience

1851

Nov. 1851-Jan. 1852

The Garra uprising: Cupeño revolt against the tax and labor regime

Colonization, Conquest & Political Violence

Warner's Ranch and Cupeño/Cahuilla country (then San Diego County; now northern San Diego County and the Riverside County line)

Homeland: Kuupangaxwichem (Cupeño); Iviatim (Cahuilla)

In November 1851 Antonio Garra, a Cupeño leader, raised a revolt against a state tax the San Diego County sheriff was collecting from Native people, attacking Warner's Ranch and seeking Cahuilla and Quechan allies. The Cahuilla leader Juan Antonio - the Lugos' ally at Rancho San Bernardino - and José María Lugo captured Garra; a Coachella Valley Independent column says Juan Antonio 'regretted capturing Garra.' The uprising is the region's armed refusal of the settler order the Indian Act (IEIV-0106) was constructing; the Cahuilla split - alliance versus revolt - is part of the record of Indigenous political choice. Garra was tried by a militia court-martial under Gen. Joshua Bean and shot in San Diego on January 10, 1852 (Evans 1966); Pourade dates the guilty verdict to January 17 and the CLU page the execution; Evans identifies that as the day the San Diego Herald printed the court's opinion.

DatesUprising Nov. 1851-Jan. 1852 (Warner's Ranch attacked Nov. 22, 1851, Evans); executions Dec. 13, 1851 (Bill Marshall and Juan Verdugo, whose name The Silver Dons gives variously, at San Diego) and at Los Coyotes after the Dec. 23 war council (Evans: 'immediately'; Pourade and Madley: Dec. 25); Garra tried by militia court-martial and shot in Old Town San Diego Jan. 10, 1852 (Evans 1966; The Silver Dons dates the verdict Jan. 17 and CLU the execution; Evans: the Herald's publication date)

ActorsAntonio Garra (Cupeño); Juan Antonio (Cahuilla); José María Lugo; San Diego County authorities

1California Lutheran University, 'Indians: Accommodation and Resistance' (civil-liberties history pages) - Garra uprising and execution

2Coachella Valley Independent, 'CV History: Cahuilla chief Juan Antonio welcomed settlers - and eventually regretted it' (Dec. 16, 2023); Richard Carrico, 'San Diego Indians and the Federal Government: Years of Neglect, 1850-1865,' Journal of San Diego History 26:3 (1980); William E. Evans, 'The Garra Uprising: Conflict between San Diego Indians and Settlers in 1851,' California Historical Society Quarterly 45:4 (1966), 339-349, PDF via California State Military Museum; Richard F. Pourade, The Silver Dons, 1833-1865, ch. 10 (San Diego History Center online)

University history pages; regional press history; scholarship as cited

IEIV-0109Tier 2Connected groundLineageL1

ConnectedIEIV-0005 IEIV-0107 IEIV-0004 IEIV-0116 IEIV-0118

Era 3Colony, Militia & Reservation

Oppression / Dominance

1851

Governor's message Jan. 7, 1851

Burnett's 'war of extermination' message and the state war fund

Colonization, Conquest & Political Violence

Sacramento (statute) applied to the southern counties; Los Coyotes (Garra reprisal), San Bernardino Expedition 1855

Homeland: All nations of the region

On Jan. 7, 1851 Governor Peter Burnett told the Legislature: 'That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races, until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected.' The same Legislature authorized a $500,000 War Fund loan (Statutes 1851, p. 520) and in 1852 $600,000 in bonds (Statutes 1852, p. 59) to pay volunteer 'expeditions'; claims under 27 war-expense laws totalled $1,293,179.20; the Comptroller's 1850–52 recapitulation ($843,573.48) lists 'Los Angeles and Utah,' San Diego 'Fitzgerald Volunteers' ($22,581.00) and Gila 'Colorado Volunteers' ($113,482.25), and the 1854–59 table a 'San Bernardino Expedition 1855.' Madley's tabulation records four Native people killed at Los Coyotes on Dec. 25, 1851 in the Garra reprisals, cited to Bean's report in the Indian War Papers (F3753:144). The entry fixes the state policy frame within which the region's 1850s-60s killings, the Indian Act and the reservation orders were carried out.

DatesGovernor's message Jan. 7, 1851; war-fund loan act 1851 ($500,000) and bond act 1852 ($600,000); 'San Bernardino Expedition 1855' on Comptroller roster

ActorsGov. Peter Burnett; California Legislature; State Comptroller; Gen. Joshua Bean; volunteer expeditions

1Kimberly Johnston-Dodds, Early California Laws and Policies Related to California Indians (California Research Bureau, California State Library, Sept. 2002) - message quoted and cited to Journals of the Senate and Assembly, 2d Sess., 1851-52, p. 15; Table 3 (statutes, by page); Tables 1-2 (Comptroller's claims)

2California Native American Heritage Commission, High Desert timeline (Madley App. II row I0172, Dec. 25, 1851, Los Coyotes: 'Bean to McDougal, January 1, 1852, IWP, F3753:144')

State library research bureau transcription of legislative journal; state commission tabulation of archival record

IEIV-0116Tier 2Connected groundLineageL1 L7

ConnectedIEIV-0106 IEIV-0109 IEIV-0007

Era 3Colony, Militia & Reservation

Oppression / Dominance

1852

Signed Jan. 5, 1852; rejected July 8, 1852

Treaty of Temecula signed - and secretly rejected by the Senate

Policies & Systems

Village of Temecula (Riverside Co.)

Homeland: Payómkawichum (Luiseño); Iviatim (Cahuilla); Maara'yam (Serrano)

At the village of Temecula on January 5, 1852, commissioner O. M. Wozencraft signed the treaty later catalogued as 'Treaty K' with the San Luis Rey (Luiseño), Cahuilla and Serrano peoples; signers included Juan Antonio (Coos-woot-na) and Pedro (Ka-wa-wish). The treaty was one of eighteen negotiated across California in 1851–52. Submitted to the U.S. Senate on June 1, 1852 (NMAI), all eighteen were rejected in executive session on July 8, 1852 and filed under an injunction of secrecy not removed until January 18, 1905 (Heizer). The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian exhibited the original in 2016 on loan from the National Archives. The treaty was never ratified, and the lands it reserved were not secured to its signers; reservations came later by executive order and the Act of 1891 (IEIV-0012).

DatesSigned Jan. 5, 1852; submitted to the Senate June 1, 1852; rejected in executive session July 8, 1852

ActorsO. M. Wozencraft; Juan Antonio (Cahuilla); Pedro (Luiseño); U.S. Senate

1'Treaty with the San Louis Rey, etc., 1852' (unratified), Kappler text via Oklahoma State University Tribal Treaties Database

2Smithsonian NMAI, press release on the unveiling of Treaty K (Sept. 15, 2016); Robert F. Heizer, The Eighteen Unratified Treaties of 1851-1852 (1972), reprint at SCVHistory; Pechanga Band, 'California Treaties'

Treaty text (primary); museum documentation; tribal history

IEIV-0005Tier 1RiversideLineageL1

ConnectedIEIV-0003 IEIV-0008 CV-0009

Era 3Colony, Militia & Reservation

Oppression / Dominance

1852

1850-1869

The Monday auction: Los Angeles sells Native convicts' labor by the week

Land, Labor & Agricultural Empire

Los Angeles (connected ground: the labor market that supplied the ranchos of the interior)

Homeland: Tongva

Every Monday in the 1850s Los Angeles sold the labor of Native people jailed that weekend. Horace Bell's memoir (1881; 'a colorful but sometimes unreliable chronicler,' KCET notes): 'the slave at Los Angeles was sold fifty-two times a year as long as he lived... bought up by the vineyard men and others at prices ranging from one to three dollars, one-third of which was to be paid to the peon at the end of the week.' Corroboration: J. Ross Browne (Harper's, August 1861) - Indians 'bailed out on Monday to work out the fine... This system still prevails in Los Angeles'; the Los Angeles Daily News (1869); an 1852 Rancho Los Alamitos letter (as quoted by KCET): 'deputize someone to attend the auction that usually takes place at the prison on Mondays, and buy me five or six Indians.' No San Bernardino buyer has been named.

DatesOrdinance 1850 (per secondary); Rancho Los Alamitos letter 1852; Browne 1861; Los Angeles Daily News Feb. 11, 1869

ActorsCity of Los Angeles Common Council and jailer; 'vineyard men' and rancheros as buyers; Native people of Los Angeles and the interior

⚑ Human-collateral: labor auction

1Benjamin Madley, '"Unholy Traffic in Human Blood and Souls",' Pacific Historical Review 83:4 (Nov. 2014): 626-667 (eScholarship open-access PDF) - quoting Bell (1881) 48-49, Browne (Harper's, Aug. 1861), Los Angeles Daily News (Feb. 11, 1869) and Phillips (PHR 49, 1980) on population

2KQED/KCET (Robert Petersen), 'Los Angeles' 1850s Slave Market Is Now the Site of a Federal Courthouse' (Dec. 6, 2019) - 1850 ordinance paraphrase and the 1852 Los Alamitos letter

Scholarship quoting contemporaneous press and memoir; public-media history

IEIV-0108Tier 1Connected groundLineageL1 L7

ConnectedIEIV-0106 IEIV-0107 IEIV-0004

Era 3Colony, Militia & Reservation

Oppression / Dominance

1853

Sept. 1853

Cave Couts binds Luiseño workers by debt, custody, indenture and the lash

Land, Labor & Agricultural Empire

Rancho Guajome and Warner's Ranch, San Diego County (which then included present Riverside and Imperial territory)

Homeland: Payómkawichum (Luiseño); Kuupangaxwichem (Cupeño)

Michael Magliari's study of rancher Cave Johnson Couts is the closest documented case of the Indian Act's machinery in the region's county (then including Temecula and the Imperial desert). Elected justice of the peace in 1853, Couts obtained legal custody of Native children (granted to his wife), after 1860 had workers bound to him as indentured servants, and took convicts arrested for 'vagrancy'; over half of Guajome's 32 permanent employees were Luiseño. Magliari: 'all Indian workers were held in place by the constant threat of legally sanctioned violence, a threat made real by Couts's frequent resort to the lash.' In 1855 the grand jury twice indicted him (Journal of San Diego History) 'on charges of whipping two Indians with a rawhide reata - one of whom died as the result of his injuries'; he was acquitted 'on grounds that one of the jurors was not an American citizen.'

DatesCouts elected justice of the peace, San Luis Rey township, Sept. 1853; grand-jury indictments 1855; indentures after the 1860 amendment

ActorsCave Johnson Couts; Luiseño and Cupeño workers at Guajome and Warner's Ranch; San Diego County Grand Jury (1855)

⚑ Human-collateral: persons / debt / indenture

1Michael F. Magliari, 'Free Soil, Unfree Labor: Cave Johnson Couts and the Binding of Indian Workers in California, 1850-1867,' Pacific Historical Review 73:3 (Aug. 2004): 349-389

2Iris Wilson Engstrand and Thomas L. Scharf, 'Rancho Guajome: A California Legacy Preserved,' Journal of San Diego History 20:1 (Winter 1974) - 1855 grand-jury indictments and acquittal; Magliari as quoted in Chico News & Review; Madley, PHR 83:4 (2014), citing Magliari 371-373

Peer-reviewed scholarship on the Couts Papers; historical-journal article; scholarship

IEIV-0107Tier 1Connected groundLineageL1 L7

ConnectedIEIV-0106 IEIV-0008 IEIV-0109

Era 3Colony, Militia & Reservation

Resistance / Resilience

1856

Dec. 31, 1855 – Jan. 21, 1856

Biddy Mason and Hannah win freedom from a San Bernardino slaveholder

Policies & Systems

Los Angeles District Court (connected: San Bernardino colony household)

Homeland: Tongva (Los Angeles); Serrano/Tongva (San Bernardino)

Robert Smith, who had come to the San Bernardino Mormon colony in 1851, camped in the Santa Monica hills in December 1855 intending to move the people he held to Texas, a slave state. A habeas petition brought Hannah, Biddy and their children - fourteen persons named in the order - before Judge Benjamin Hayes of the Los Angeles District Court. His order, in the transcribed record of 'In the Matter of Hannah and Biddy and their children', found 'good reason to apprehend and believe that they may be sold into slavery or involuntary servitude' and declared that 'all the said persons of color are entitled to their freedom and are free and cannot be held in slavery or involuntary servitude,' with Smith to pay costs. Biddy Mason became a founder of Black Los Angeles. The household had come from San Bernardino.

DatesWrit sought Dec. 31, 1855 (LAist); hearing and order Jan. 19, 1856 (record); costs motion taken under advisement Jan. 19; cause continued Jan. 21

ActorsBiddy Mason; Hannah; Judge Benjamin Hayes; Robert Smith

⚑ Human-collateral: persons

1'In the Matter of Hannah and Biddy and their children on Petition for Habeas Corpus' (Dist. Ct., 1st Jud. Dist., Los Angeles Co., 1856), transcription, UNL U.S. Law & Race Initiative (record: UCLA Special Collections, Golden State Mutual records)

2LAist, 'Free Forever: The Contentious Hearing That Made Biddy Mason a Legend' (cites Beasley 1919; Hayden)

Court record (primary, transcribed); documented journalism

IEIV-0006Tier 1Connected groundLineageL2

ConnectedIEIV-0004

Era 3Colony, Militia & Reservation

Oppression / Dominance

1859

1858-1859

'Wipe out the Mojave!': the 1859 Army campaign on the Colorado

Colonization, Conquest & Political Violence

Colorado River at Beale's Crossing / Fort Mojave (Mojave homeland incl. Needles area; fort on the Arizona bank)

Homeland: Pipa Aha Macav (Mojave)

After an August 1858 attack on an emigrant wagon train at the Colorado crossing - which 'the Mojaves insisted... was instigated by the Hualapais' (NPS) - the Army answered what the NPS calls 'public clamor to "Wipe out the Mojave!"' by sending '700 Indian fighters' under Lt. Col. William Hoffman in 1859. Hoffman's spring column met no resistance (NPS); in fighting later that year under Maj. Lewis Armistead, Casebier's 1975 account, as reproduced online, records some fifty soldiers against hundreds of Mojave, three soldiers wounded and, per Armistead's report, '23 dead Mojave bodies found on the battlefield, and there were probably more'; the hostage leader Cairook 'gave his life,' per NPS, holding a guard while younger hostages escaped. Fort Mojave was garrisoned on the eastern bank, within a Mojave homeland that spans Needles in San Bernardino County. The campaign precedes the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe's stand at Ward Valley (IEIV-0058).

DatesAug. 1858 wagon-train attack at the Colorado; 1859 expedition under Lt. Col. William Hoffman, 6th U.S. Infantry (NPS: 'Col.'); Fort Mojave established

ActorsMojave nation (Cairook); U.S. Army under Lt. Col. William Hoffman; Maj. Lewis Armistead; emigrant parties

1National Park Service, Mojave National Preserve, 'Mojave Tribe: History to 1860'

2mojavedesert.net, 'Hoffman Establishes Fort Mojave' and 'William Hoffman' pages, citing Dennis Casebier (1975) and Kroeber & Kroeber, A Mohave War Reminiscence, 1854-1880 (1973)

Federal agency history; regional history site citing scholarship

IEIV-0117Tier 2Connected groundLineageL1 L7

ConnectedIEIV-0001 IEIV-0058 IEIV-0007

Era 3Colony, Militia & Reservation

Oppression / Dominance

1863

Winter 1862-63

Smallpox winter kills Juan Antonio; Saahatpa is abandoned

Disasters & Major Events

Saahatpa, near San Timoteo Canyon / Brookside Rest Area (I-10), Riverside Co.

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla)

State Registered Landmark 749 records that 'during the winter of 1862–63, a smallpox epidemic swept through Southern California killing many Native Americans, including Juan Antonio,' the Cahuilla leader who had allied with the Lugos, captured Garra (IEIV-0109) and settled his people at Saahatpa in San Timoteo Canyon; the village was abandoned after the epidemic. The Los Angeles Star of Feb. 28, 1863, as summarized in a Coachella Valley Independent history, reported that Juan Antonio's body and four others 'were not buried immediately, but shamefully left to the animals.' The plaque itself records that 'Cahuilla tradition asserts that the U.S. Government sent Army blankets that were contaminated with smallpox'; the research passes found no documentary corroboration, and the tradition is entered here as tradition. The epidemic closed the generation of Cahuilla leadership that had tried alliance as a strategy of survival.

DatesWinter 1862-63 epidemic; Los Angeles Star report Feb. 28, 1863

ActorsJuan Antonio (Cahuilla); Cahuilla of Saahatpa; Los Angeles Star

1California Registered Historical Landmark No. 749, Saahatpa - Office of Historic Preservation listing (plaque text incl. the Cahuilla blanket tradition; Brookside Rest Area, I-10 westbound, Beaumont)

2Coachella Valley Independent, 'CV History: Cahuilla chief Juan Antonio welcomed settlers - and eventually regretted it' (Dec. 2023), summarizing Los Angeles Star, Feb. 28, 1863

State landmark text; regional press history summarizing contemporaneous newspaper

IEIV-0118Tier 2RiversideLineageL1

ConnectedIEIV-0109 IEIV-0009 IEIV-0005

Era 3Colony, Militia & Reservation

Oppression / Dominance

1866

Mar. 25, 1866; Feb.-Mar. 1867

Mountain campaign against the Serrano: tribal account and 1867 record

Colonization, Conquest & Political Violence

Big Bear Valley, San Bernardino Mountains; Summit Valley; Rabbit Springs; Chimney Rock; Mission Canyon

Homeland: Yuhaaviatam clan of the Maara'yam (Serrano); 'Piute Indians' named on a 1969 marker

Two accounts stand side by side. The Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation states that the clan 'was attacked by a California state government-sanctioned militia in our homeland of Big Bear Valley during a 32-day campaign in 1866,' that 'most of our people were mercilessly killed' and 'less than 30 members of our clan survived'; Santos Manuel led the survivors to the valley. The documentary record Benjamin Madley tabulates from the San Bernardino Guardian of Feb. 23 and Mar. 9, 1867, logs four killed at Rabbit Springs on Feb. 18, 1867 and two in Mission Canyon about Mar. 1; the state plaque (Landmark 737) says 'white settlers' and dates Chimney Rock to Feb. 16, 1867, and a second, non-state marker at the site (per californiahistoricallandmarks.com) says 'a posse.' A 1969 E Clampus Vitus marker at Las Flores Ranch attributes the March 25, 1866 killings there to 'Piute Indians.'

DatesMar. 25, 1866 Las Flores Ranch killings (date per a 1969 marker); posse killings Feb.-Mar. 1867 (San Bernardino Guardian via Madley App. II); tribal account dates the '32-day campaign' to 1866

ActorsYuhaaviatam (Serrano) under Santos Manuel; San Bernardino posse/militia volunteers; San Bernardino Guardian

1Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation, 'About Us' (tribal statement, quoted verbatim) and 'History' (Santos Manuel; 20-30 survivors; 'a San Bernardino militia')

2California Native American Heritage Commission, 'Timeline of Genocide Incidents in the High Desert Region' (Madley 2016 App. II rows I0625, I0626 citing San Bernardino Guardian Feb. 23 and Mar. 9, 1867, Hayes Scraps vols. 39, 94); 'Las Flores Ranch' marker, Billy Holcomb Chapter, E Clampus Vitus (1969), via HMDB; California Historical Landmark 737 (Chimney Rock) plaques, via californiahistoricallandmarks.com

Tribal government statement; state commission tabulation of contemporaneous newspaper record; historical markers

IEIV-0007Tier 2San BernardinoLineageL1 L7

ConnectedIEIV-0001 IEIV-0009 IEIV-0116

Era 3Colony, Militia & Reservation

Contested / Both

1875

Sept. 20-23, 1875

Sheriff's posse evicts the Luiseño from Temecula; Pechanga rebuilds

Colonization, Conquest & Political Violence

Temecula (Riverside Co.)

Homeland: Payómkawichum (Luiseño)

Under a writ of ejectment from the District Court in San Francisco, Sheriff Nicholas Hunsaker of San Diego County and roughly twenty armed men evicted the Temecula Indians between September 20 and 23, 1875, acting for landowners Domingo Pujol, Francisco Sanjurjo and Juan Murrieta; Hunsaker was paid $300. Some families were sheltered by John Magee; others moved into Pechanga Canyon. President Arthur's executive order of June 27, 1882 established the Pechanga Reservation. Helen Hunt Jackson and Abbot Kinney's 1883 Report on the Condition and Needs of the Mission Indians of California, a federal document now on archive.org, found that at Pachanga 'the Indians sunk a well, built new houses, and went to work again.' The Pechanga Band's history is the entry's primary narrative source.

DatesSept. 20-23, 1875 (eviction); Pechanga EO June 27, 1882; Jackson-Kinney report 1883

ActorsTemecula Luiseño families; Sheriff Nicholas Hunsaker; Pujol, Sanjurjo, Murrieta; Helen Hunt Jackson; Abbot Kinney

1Pechanga Band of Indians, 'Temecula Eviction' (pechanga-nsn.gov history)

2Helen Hunt Jackson and Abbot Kinney, Report on the Condition and Needs of the Mission Indians of California (GPO, 1883), archive.org

Tribal history; federal report (primary)

IEIV-0008Tier 1RiversideLineageL1

ConnectedIEIV-0005 IEIV-0012

Era 3Colony, Militia & Reservation

Contested / Both

1876

1876-1877

Executive orders set apart Cahuilla reservations at Agua Caliente and Torres-Martinez

Policies & Systems

Coachella Valley and San Gorgonio Pass (Riverside Co.)

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla)

Grant's executive order of May 15, 1876 reserved lands at Agua Caliente (Palm Springs) 'for the permanent use and occupancy of the Mission Indians,' and Hayes's order of September 29, 1877 added lands 'for Indian purposes,' as the Ninth Circuit recited in 2017 when it held those orders carried groundwater rights. The findings of the Torres-Martinez Settlement Act record a single 640-acre section reserved in 1876 and roughly 12,000 acres added in 1891; the Southern California Tribal Chairmen's Association dates the Torres and Martinez orders to May 1876 under President Grant. Reservation was confinement within what the Ninth Circuit calls a 'checkerboard pattern' of Indian and non-Indian sections, but it became the land base from which the Cahuilla bands built the governments that litigated water, gaming and land through the next century.

DatesExecutive orders 1876-1877 (Agua Caliente; Torres and Martinez May 1876); Morongo patent Dec. 14, 1908

ActorsAgua Caliente, Torres-Martinez and Morongo Cahuilla bands; Presidents Grant and Hayes

1Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians v. Coachella Valley Water District, No. 15-55896 (9th Cir. Mar. 7, 2017) - recital of the 1876 and 1877 executive orders

225 U.S.C. §1778 (Torres-Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians Claims Settlement Act findings); SCTCA, 'Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians'

Federal appellate opinion; U.S. Code findings (primary)

IEIV-0009Tier 1RiversideLineageL1

ConnectedIEIV-0007 IEIV-0016 IEIV-0081

Era 3Colony, Militia & Reservation

Oppression / Dominance

1877

June-Sept. 1877

Southern Pacific bridges the Colorado at Yuma; the Imperial Canal follows

Land, Labor & Agricultural Empire

Colton (San Bernardino Co.); Yuma crossing / Fort Yuma (Imperial Co. bank); Imperial Canal headgate and the town of Imperial (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano); Iviatim (Cahuilla); Kwatsáan (Quechan); Kumeyaay and Cocopah

Southern Pacific laid out Colton in 1875 and in 1877 reached the Yuma crossing, where work stopped while it 'negotiated right-of-way across Fort Yuma' (YCNHA); the Yuma Crossing National Heritage Area records that 'in defiance of an order by the Secretary of War, under the cover of night,' the company built 'the first bridge across the Colorado River' (HAER) and ran the first locomotive into Yuma on September 29-30, 1877. A generation later George Chaffey, contracted by the California Development Company, built its canal: 'on May 14, 1901, the first water was turned into the canal,' 'the first water was being delivered to the... community of Imperial on June 20, 1901' (Rep. Duncan Hunter, Congressional Record, June 14, 2001), and 'it was largely through Chaffey's efforts that the name of the area was changed from the Salton Sink to Imperial Valley.' The 1905 floods followed (IEIV-0016).

DatesSP lays out Colton 1875; reaches the California bank at the Yuma crossing in June 1877 (YCNHA; some secondary accounts give earlier spring dates); bridges the river in defiance of the Secretary of War and runs the first locomotive into Yuma Sept. 29 (USGS Bull. 845) or Sept. 30 (YCNHA), 1877; Imperial Canal: first water May 14, 1901; water at Imperial June 20, 1901

ActorsSouthern Pacific Railroad; Fort Yuma garrison / Secretary of War; California Development Company; George Chaffey; Imperial Land Company

1Yuma Crossing National Heritage Area, 2017 Management Plan Update (pp. 4-5); USGS Bulletin 845, Guidebook of the Western United States, Part F: Southern Pacific Lines (Yuma reached Sept. 29, 1877); Library of Congress HAER AZ-63 (first Colorado bridge, 1877)

2Journal of San Diego History 21:1 (Winter 1975): 'Imperial images' photo section and Robert L. Sperry, 'When the Imperial Valley Fought for its Life'; Congressional Record, June 14, 2001 (water at Imperial June 20, 1901); City of Colton, 'History of Colton'

Heritage-area management plan and federal survey guidebook (institutional); regional history journal; Congressional Record; municipal history

IEIV-0124Tier 1Multi-countyLineageL4 L9 L12

ConnectedIEIV-0010 IEIV-0016 IEIV-0002 IEIV-0057

Era 3Colony, Militia & Reservation

Contested / Both

1884

Jan. 9, 1884

Fort Yuma Reservation set apart; the 1893 'agreement' takes 25,000 acres

Policies & Systems

Fort Yuma Reservation, Winterhaven/Bard (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Kwatsáan (Quechan)

President Arthur's executive order of January 9, 1884 revoked an 1883 Arizona order and set apart California lands along the Colorado, transferring the abandoned Fort Yuma 'to be used for Indian purposes.' On December 4, 1893 federal commissioners obtained an agreement under which each Quechan member would select five acres and the tribe would cede roughly 25,000 acres, and Congress's 1894 ratifying act required that an irrigation canal be started within three years - a condition the tribe later argued was never met. A 1936 Interior Solicitor's opinion held the lands had vested in the United States in 1893, treating the unmet canal condition as not 'material'; the Supreme Court in Arizona v. California (2000) recounted the dispute and the Secretarial Order of December 20, 1978 that confirmed the 1884 boundaries. Reservation, disputed cession, century-long recovery: the Quechan land story in the federal record.

DatesEO Jan. 9, 1884; agreement Dec. 4, 1893, ratified by Act of Aug. 15, 1894 (28 Stat. 286, 332-33)

ActorsQuechan (Yuma) nation; President Chester A. Arthur; commissioners W. J. Houston, John A. Gorman, Peter R. Brady

1Executive Order, Jan. 9, 1884 (Arthur), via The American Presidency Project

2'Agreement with the Yuma, 1893' (Dec. 4, 1893), ratified by Act of Aug. 15, 1894, 28 Stat. 286, 332-33 (OSU Tribal Treaties Database; text reproduced in the U.S. brief in Arizona v. California, No. 8 Orig.); Arizona v. California, 530 U.S. 392 (2000)

Executive order; ratified agreement; Supreme Court opinion (primary)

IEIV-0010Tier 1ImperialLineageL1 L12

ConnectedIEIV-0002 IEIV-0045

Era 3Colony, Militia & Reservation

Contested / Both

1885

c. 1885 relocation; first anti-Chinese committee 1889

Riverside pushes its Chinese residents into a new Chinatown

Diaspora, Migration & Displacement

Riverside Chinatown (Brockton/Tequesquite), Riverside

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla); Tongva

After editorial campaigns against the downtown Chinese quarter, Riverside's Chinese community relocated around 1885 to a new Chinatown on the Brockton/Tequesquite side of town, where merchants Wong Nim, Wong Gee and Gin (Chen) Duey leased six to seven acres (6.3 per the National Register nomination) from John Cottrell in 1885 and held title by 1888. The city's 'first known anti-Chinese committee was formed in 1889,' according to the Save Our Chinatown Committee's documentation, and the population reached 400-500 permanent residents (KVCR) in the 1890s while Chinese workers picked and packed Riverside's citrus. George Wong (Wong Ho Leun), who arrived in Riverside as a youth c. 1914–16 and bought the site in 1941, was its last resident until his death in 1974. The site became a county landmark in 1968, a city landmark in 1976 and a National Register listing in 1990; its later defense is entered at IEIV-0074.

ActorsRiverside Chinese community; Wong Nim, Wong Gee, Gin (Chen) Duey; George Wong (Wong Ho Leun)

1Priya Chhaya (National Trust for Historic Preservation) and M. Rosalind Sagara (Save Our Chinatown Committee), 'Riverside's Chinatown,' Google Arts & Culture story; Save Our Chinatown Committee, 'Discover Riverside's Hidden Heritage'

2KVCR, 'Whatever happened to Riverside's (and other Inland communities') Chinatowns?' (Mar. 21, 2019); PBS SoCal, 'The Last Resident of Riverside's Chinatown'

Preservation-organization documentation; public-media history

IEIV-0011Tier 2RiversideLineageL5

ConnectedIEIV-0013 IEIV-0074 CV-0017

1889–1929

Citrus Empire, Exclusion & the Irrigated Desert

13 entries445

1891Act for the Relief of the Mission Indians creates the Smiley Commission
1893Mobs drive Chinese workers from Redlands; the National Guard is called out
1902Sherman Institute opens: a federal boarding school on Magnolia Avenue
1905Pachappa Camp: Korean citrus workers build a self-governed settlement
1905The Colorado breaks its banks: the Salton Sea drowns Torres-Martinez lands
1909The outing system: Sherman hires out Native children and holds their wages
1911Magonistas take Mexicali from an IWW hall in Holtville
1913El Centro formally segregates its schools as a Black community takes root
1918People v. Harada: first Alien Land Law test; children keep the house
1919Mission Indian Federation founded at Riverside: 'Human Rights and Home Rule'
1921A Klan council organizes in San Bernardino - in secret
1923El Centro refuses a Black student, builds a separate school: Douglass High
1928Mexican cantaloupe workers strike the Imperial Valley

Era 4Citrus Empire, Exclusion & the Irrigated Desert

Contested / Both

1891

Act of Jan. 12, 1891

Act for the Relief of the Mission Indians creates the Smiley Commission

Policies & Systems

Southern California reservations; commission including Albert K. Smiley of Redlands

Homeland: Cahuilla, Serrano, Luiseño and other 'Mission Indian' nations

Congress's 'Act for the relief of the Mission Indians in the State of California' (January 12, 1891) directed the Secretary of the Interior to appoint 'three disinterested persons as commissioners' to select reservations including 'lands and villages which have been in the actual occupation and possession of said Indians,' to be held in trust for twenty-five years. Albert K. Smiley of Redlands served with Charles C. Painter and Joseph B. Moore on the commission (1891 Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs), whose selections underlie patents such as Morongo's of December 14, 1908, recited in Wilson's 1913 proclamation. The Act fixed the boundaries - and the losses - Southern California bands would live within. President Harrison approved the commission's report by special message of January 25, 1892, approving its proposed land purchases only subject to congressional authorization.

DatesAct of Jan. 12, 1891 (26 Stat. 712); commission report transmitted to Congress Jan. 1892

ActorsCongress; Mission Indian Commission (Charles C. Painter, Albert K. Smiley, Joseph B. Moore); Southern California bands

1Act of Jan. 12, 1891, ch. 65, 26 Stat. 712 (govinfo Statutes at Large)

2Proclamation 1257 (Nov. 12, 1913) reciting the Morongo selection and 1908 patent; Benjamin Harrison, Special Message to Congress, Jan. 25, 1892 (American Presidency Project); California Indian water-rights history (water.calindian.org)

Statute and proclamation (primary)

IEIV-0012Tier 1Multi-countyLineageL1

ConnectedIEIV-0008 IEIV-0009 CV-0010

Era 4Citrus Empire, Exclusion & the Irrigated Desert

Oppression / Dominance

1893

Late Aug.-early Sept. 1893 (dates conflict)

Mobs drive Chinese workers from Redlands; the National Guard is called out

Colonization, Conquest & Political Violence

Redlands and San Bernardino (San Bernardino Co.)

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano)

In the depression summer of 1893 white mobs raided Chinese labor camps around Redlands and threatened Chinatown; the Adjutant General's report records 'quite serious disturbances and threats of personal violence to the Chinese,' with Companies E (San Bernardino), F (Riverside) and G (Redlands) of the Ninth Infantry ordered to their armories 'to hold themselves in readiness' so that 'the threatened violence was prevented.' A later account citing Carey McWilliams dates raids to September 1 and an assault on Redlands Chinatown to September 3, with eleven arrests and no convictions, as Geary Act registration drives emptied the fields of Chinese labor. The episode is the Inland installment of the statewide 1893 'driving out' (see CV-0017).

ActorsRedlands and San Bernardino mobs; Chinese farmworkers; Ninth Infantry companies E, F, G; county deputies

1California Military Museum, 'The Redlands Emergency, August 1893' (excerpting the Adjutant General's report, 1893-94)

2'IE 1893: anti-Chinese riots in Redlands' (Harvard blog, Nov. 11, 2009, citing McWilliams 1946, p. 90); Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out (2007)

State military report (primary excerpt); scholarship-derived account

IEIV-0013Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL5 L7

ConnectedIEIV-0011 CV-0017

Era 4Citrus Empire, Exclusion & the Irrigated Desert

Contested / Both

1902

Cornerstone July 1901; in use by May 1902

Sherman Institute opens: a federal boarding school on Magnolia Avenue

Policies & Systems

Sherman Institute, Magnolia Avenue, Riverside

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla); Tongva

The Perris Indian School, which the Sherman Indian Museum calls 'the first off reservation Indian Boarding School in the state of California,' opened in 1892; Superintendent Harwood Hall sought relocation for lack of water, the Riverside cornerstone was laid July 18, 1901 (July 19, per the museum), and nine buildings were in use by May 1902. Sherman Institute drew Native students from across the West into a regime of assimilation and an 'outing' labor system from the early 1900s that placed students with Riverside households and citrus employers. The school became Sherman Indian High School in 1971 and its museum a Riverside landmark in 1974. Keller's Empty Beds documents student health and death 1902-1922; The Indian School on Magnolia Avenue (2012) collects Native-centered scholarship including on the outing system and the cemetery.

DatesPerris school 1892; cornerstone July 18, 1901 (July 19 per the Sherman Indian Museum); nine buildings in use by May 1902; renamed 1971

ActorsOffice of Indian Affairs; Supt. Harwood Hall; Native students from across the West

⚑ Human-collateral: outing labor

1Sherman Indian Museum, 'Perris Indian School' and 'Sherman Institute History'; Sherman Indian High School (BIE), 'Our History'

2Jean A. Keller, Empty Beds: Indian Student Health at Sherman Institute, 1902-1922 (Michigan State UP, 2002); Trafzer, Sisquoc & Gilbert, eds., The Indian School on Magnolia Avenue (Oregon State UP, 2012)

Museum institutional history; scholarship on school records

IEIV-0014Tier 1RiversideLineageL1

ConnectedIEIV-0012 IEIV-0020

Era 4Citrus Empire, Exclusion & the Irrigated Desert

Resistance / Resilience

1905

c. 1905

Pachappa Camp: Korean citrus workers build a self-governed settlement

Community & Cultural Forces

Pachappa Camp, Pachappa Avenue (site now 3096 Cottage St.), Riverside

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla); Tongva

Ahn Chang Ho arrived in Riverside on March 23, 1904 and, with a $1,500 loan from Cornelius E. Rumsey, organized a Korean Labor Bureau and a settlement of citrus workers at Pachappa Camp, founded in 1905 (possibly late 1904). At its peak around 300 Koreans (UCR; NBC News reported about 100) lived in some twenty buildings with a community hall, and the camp doubled as a base of Korean independence organizing in exile. The 1913 citrus freeze decimated it and by 1918 only a few families remained. UC Riverside's Pachappa Camp project, built on the Sinhan Minbo newspaper, a 1908 Sanborn map and Mary Paik Lee's memoir, documents the site; in December 2016 the Riverside City Council voted unanimously to make it the city's first Point of Cultural Interest, dedicated March 23, 2017.

DatesAhn Chang Ho arrives Mar. 23, 1904; camp c. 1905; declines after 1913 freeze; recognized Dec. 2016

ActorsAhn Chang Ho (Dosan); Korean citrus workers; Cornelius E. Rumsey; UCR Young Oak Kim Center (Edward T. Chang)

1UC Riverside, Pachappa Camp project, 'History Timeline'

2NBC News, 'California City Honors First Korean Settlement in U.S.' (2017)

University documentation project; press

IEIV-0015Tier 2RiversideLineageL5 L10

ConnectedIEIV-0011 IEIV-0019

Era 4Citrus Empire, Exclusion & the Irrigated Desert

Oppression / Dominance

1905

1905-1907

The Colorado breaks its banks: the Salton Sea drowns Torres-Martinez lands

Environmental Violence & Environmental Justice

Torres-Martinez Reservation, Salton Sea (Riverside/Imperial Cos.)

Homeland: Desert Cahuilla (Torres-Martinez)

Between 1905 and 1907 Colorado River floodwaters pouring through a failed irrigation cut created the Salton Sea and inundated roughly 2,000 acres of the Torres-Martinez reservation; a 1909 Secretarial order then added a second tract of about 12,000 acres (after the 1891 addition, IEIV-0009) of which some 9,000 were already under water. The statute's findings record a 1992 federal judgment against the Coachella Valley Water District ($212,908.41) and the Imperial Irrigation District ($2,795,694.33), and Congress enacted the Torres-Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians Claims Settlement Act on December 27, 2000 (Pub. L. 106-568). The flood that followed the Imperial Valley's irrigation works began by submerging a Native land base - an early environmental injustice in the region, and part of the background to the lake's present-day dust and lithium politics.

DatesFloods 1905-1907; Secretarial order 1909; judgment 1992; Settlement Act Dec. 27, 2000

ActorsTorres-Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians; California Development Company; CVWD; IID; Congress

125 U.S.C. §1778 - Torres-Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians Claims Settlement Act findings (Pub. L. 106-568, 114 Stat. 2906)

2Southern California Tribal Chairmen's Association, 'Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians' (tribal profile; background on the 1876 executive-order reservations and 1891 consolidation only); U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, 'A Salton Sea Chronology' (Jan. 2016) - 1901 Alamo Canal (California Development Company), 1905 breach, 1907 closure, 1909 addition

U.S. Code findings (primary); federal agency chronology; intertribal association history

IEIV-0016Tier 1Multi-countyLineageL1 L9

ConnectedIEIV-0009 IEIV-0091

Era 4Citrus Empire, Exclusion & the Irrigated Desert

Oppression / Dominance

1909

1902-1930

The outing system: Sherman hires out Native children and holds their wages

Land, Labor & Agricultural Empire

Sherman Institute, Riverside; Riverside households and citrus firms; Inland Empire and Imperial Valley ranches; Fontana Farms

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla); Tongva; students from many nations

Kevin Whalen's study of Sherman's 'outing' program documents a labor system run through the school; Superintendent Harwood Hall treated student labor as patronage: 'those who supported Sherman Institute could expect to receive remuneration in the form of discount-rate student labor,' and Frank Miller of the Mission Inn got 'a steady flow of student-laborers.' Girls, usually ten to thirteen, were hired 'for as little as one dollar a month'; Hall wrote, 'You can take the young man and pay him whatever he is worth'; boys went to 'ranches and farms of the Inland Empire and the Imperial Valley.' Two-thirds of wages went to school-controlled accounts; students got a third on site. Whalen counts 210 boys placed in 1915 and 272 boys and 264 girls in 1924, when Sherman 'placed 536 student-laborers across Southern California.' He records 'the first line of defense against the outing program involved a simple refusal to participate.'

DatesSystem described 1902-1930 (Whalen); 210 boys placed in 1915; 272 boys and 264 girls in 1924 (Whalen)

ActorsSherman Institute (Supt. Harwood Hall); Native students; Frank Miller (Mission Inn)

⚑ Human-collateral: withheld wages

1Kevin Whalen, 'Labored Learning: The Outing System at Sherman Institute, 1902-1930,' American Indian Culture and Research Journal 36:1 (2012) (eScholarship)

2Kevin Whalen, Native Students at Work: American Indian Labor and Sherman Institute's Outing Program, 1900-1945 (Univ. of Washington Press, 2016)

Peer-reviewed scholarship on school records; monograph

IEIV-0110Tier 1Multi-countyLineageL1 L4 L7

ConnectedIEIV-0014 IEIV-0020

Era 4Citrus Empire, Exclusion & the Irrigated Desert

Resistance / Resilience

1911

Mexicali captured Jan. 29, 1911

Magonistas take Mexicali from an IWW hall in Holtville

Colonization, Conquest & Political Violence

Mexicali, Baja California; staged from Holtville and Calexico (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Cocopah

Before dawn on January 29, 1911 a small Partido Liberal Mexicano force - about thirty men, per Blaisdell - led by José María Leyva seized Mexicali, the jailer the only casualty; planned at the IWW hall in Holtville, it grew to around 150 with Cocopah scouts, IWW volunteers and soldiers of fortune (Jim Miller). Gen. Louis E. Torres, Mexican zone commander, telegraphed Governor Hiram Johnson that neutrality laws were 'openly and publicly broken at Calexico, near Mexicali,' where rebels under 'Leyba and an American named Simon Bertholdt' were 'coming freely to Calexico for supplies and cartridges' - a complaint Johnson forwarded to the President on February 13, 1911 (FRUS 1911, Doc. 545); the Army's commander at Calexico replied that 'no arms or supplies are reaching insurgents from United States unless they are smuggling over border' (Doc. 546). The border was porous to revolution before it was fortified against people.

ActorsPartido Liberal Mexicano (Ricardo Flores Magón); José María Leyva; Simón Berthold; IWW members at Holtville

1Foreign Relations of the United States, 1911, Document 545 (Office of the Historian, U.S. Dept. of State)

2Jim Miller, 'The Magonista Revolt in Tijuana: A Prelude to the San Diego Free Speech Fight,' from Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See (New Press, 2003), reproduced at libcom.org and The Anarchist Library (cites Lowell Blaisdell, The Desert Revolution, 1962)

Diplomatic correspondence (primary); secondary citing Blaisdell

IEIV-0017Tier 1Connected groundLineageL12 L6 L10

ConnectedIEIV-0024

Era 4Citrus Empire, Exclusion & the Irrigated Desert

Contested / Both

1913

1913-14 school year

El Centro formally segregates its schools as a Black community takes root

Policies & Systems

El Centro Eastside; Imperial; Brawley (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan

Black families reached the Imperial Valley as early as 1902 - the Goodwins from Texas, one of whom, Odie Goodwin, is pictured in San Diego's Black pioneer photographs as an employee of the Calexico Cotton Compress Company. A 1916 photograph records a Church of God in Christ waterside baptism in the valley. The El Centro Elementary School District formally adopted segregation during the 1913–14 school year (Five Views); the Eastside school burned in 1920, and students' chosen name, Booker T. Washington, was not formally adopted until 1936. Four African American principals served in turn between 1920 and 1966 (Imperial Valley Press), among them William Payne, co-founder of Allensworth (CV-0021). El Centro's segregated Douglass High School closed in 1954 (IEIV-0022).

DatesSegregation adopted 1913-14 school year; Douglass High closed 1954

ActorsEl Centro Elementary School District; William Payne; Imperial Valley Black families (Goodwin family); Church of God in Christ

1Julio Morales, 'Washington School's history is local black history,' Imperial Valley Press, Mar. 6, 2020

2'San Diego's Black Pioneers: A Statement of Who We Are' (photo essay), Journal of San Diego History 27:2 (Spring 1981); Marlene Thomas & Gretchen Laue, Holtville Tribune, Mar. 1, 2023

Local press history; historical-journal photographs

IEIV-0018Tier 2ImperialLineageL2

ConnectedIEIV-0022 CV-0021

Era 4Citrus Empire, Exclusion & the Irrigated Desert

Resistance / Resilience

1918

Filed Oct. 1916; decision 1918

People v. Harada: first Alien Land Law test; children keep the house

Policies & Systems

Harada House, Lemon Street, Riverside

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla); Tongva

Jukichi and Ken Harada bought a house on Lemon Street in 1915 in the names of their American-born children, and in October 1916 the State of California sued to take it under the 1913 Alien Land Law. In 1918 Judge Hugh Craig of the Riverside County Superior Court upheld the law but held for the children, who - in the NHL nomination's summary - 'if American-born, were entitled to all the constitutional guarantees of American citizenship, including land tenure' - the first test of an alien land law's constitutionality, per the NHL nomination. The house became a National Historic Landmark on December 14, 1990; the City of Riverside announced California Historical Landmark #1060 on January 5, 2022. NPS sources give the decision as September 14 (place page) and December 17, 1918 (brochure); the Riverside Daily Press headline of December 17, 1918 cited in the NHL nomination favors December.

DatesComplaint filed Oct. 1916; decision 1918 (Sept. 14 vs. Dec. 17 conflict); NHL Dec. 14, 1990

ActorsJukichi, Ken, Mine, Sumi and Yoshizo Harada; Judge Hugh Craig; State of California

1National Park Service, 'Harada House' (place page); NRHP/NHL registration form, Harada House (May 30, 1990), NPGallery ref. 77000325

2City of Riverside, 'Harada House in Riverside Secures State Landmark Status,' press release, Jan. 5, 2022

Federal landmark documentation; municipal release

IEIV-0019Tier 1RiversideLineageL5

ConnectedIEIV-0015 CV-0026

Era 4Citrus Empire, Exclusion & the Irrigated Desert

Resistance / Resilience

1919

Late 1919

Mission Indian Federation founded at Riverside: 'Human Rights and Home Rule'

Community & Cultural Forces

Riverside (Jonathan Tibbet's home, Prospect Ave.); reservations across Southern California

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla); Payómkawichum; Maara'yam

The Mission Indian Federation held its first official meeting in late 1919, shortly after October talks, at the Riverside home of Jonathan Tibbet, organizing reservation delegates under the motto 'Human Rights and Home Rule' against Bureau of Indian Affairs control; Adam Castillo, a Cahuilla of Soboba, later served as its president (NPS; Aranda). On April 22, 1921 a federal indictment named 54 members, charging Tibbet, Joe Pete, B. H. Jones and F. U. S. Hughes for 'conspiring to oppress the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution'; all charges were dismissed except Tibbet's, which ended in 1924 (dropped, per the Pechanga history; an acquittal, per Aranda). The Pechanga Band's history and Aranda's 2026 biography of Tibbet document the organization; the National Archives' 'Documented Rights' exhibit records 'Mission Indian Federation President Adam Castillo'.

DatesFounded late 1919 (first meeting at Tibbet's Riverside home after October 1919 talks); indictment Apr. 22, 1921; Tibbet's charge ended 1924

ActorsMission Indian Federation; Adam Castillo (Cahuilla, president); Jonathan Tibbet; Joe Pete; federal prosecutors

1Pechanga Band of Indians, 'Mission Indian Federation' (history page)

2Rosy Aranda, 'Buffalo Heart: a short biography of Jonathan Tibbet,' Raincross Gazette, May 20, 2026; National Archives, 'Documented Rights' exhibit, sec. 3, 'Late in Coming' (Mission Indian Federation; 'President Adam Castillo'); National Park Service, 'Adam Castillo' ('a Cahuilla Indian... president of the Mission Indian Federation')

Tribal history; local press biography; National Archives exhibit; National Park Service biography

IEIV-0020Tier 2RiversideLineageL1 L7

ConnectedIEIV-0012 IEIV-0036

Era 4Citrus Empire, Exclusion & the Irrigated Desert

Oppression / Dominance

1921

July 28, 1921; Aug. 1924

A Klan council organizes in San Bernardino - in secret

Colonization, Conquest & Political Violence

San Bernardino; San Bernardino County politics

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano); Tongva

On July 28, 1921 the Riverside Daily Press reported under the headline 'San Bernardino to Have Klux Klan Club' that 'a council is now being organized at San Bernardino, according to advices today, the preliminary steps having been closely guarded by secrecy,' adding that one fraternal association had been told its members would not be enrolled. Three years later the San Bernardino Sun's front page of August 25, 1924 reported, on the eve of the county election, that 'Entrance of the Ku Klux Klan into the campaign furnished the last-minute thrill,' in a story that also covered Fred W. Seccombe's effort to build 'a strong county machine'; 'Klan politics are so new here nobody knows much about them,' it added. These items record a Klan council being organized at San Bernardino in 1921 and the Sun's report of the Klan's entry into the 1924 county campaign.

DatesRiverside Daily Press report July 28, 1921; Klan 'enters' county campaign Aug. 1924

ActorsKu Klux Klan (San Bernardino council); San Bernardino County political factions

1Riverside Daily Press, Vol. XXXVI, No. 178, July 28, 1921, 'San Bernardino to Have Klux Klan Club' (CDNC, RDP19210728.2.80)

2San Bernardino Sun, Aug. 25, 1924, p. 1, 'Campaign Is Over, Voting on Tomorrow' (CDNC, SBS19240825.1.1)

Contemporaneous newspapers (primary)

IEIV-0021Tier 2San BernardinoLineageL7

ConnectedIEIV-0013 IEIV-0047 CV-0034

Era 4Citrus Empire, Exclusion & the Irrigated Desert

Contested / Both

1923

1913-1954

El Centro refuses a Black student, builds a separate school: Douglass High

Community & Cultural Forces

El Centro Eastside (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan

In 1923 William Payne - principal of the all-Black Dunbar Elementary, who had helped found Allensworth (CV-0021) - went to El Centro High School (Central Union High School District) to register his eldest daughter Octavia and was refused. Rather than admit her, the district voted in 1927 for a separate school. Black parents organized the El Centro Parents Association. On December 11, 1929 the Central Union High School District approved a $15,334.69 expenditure for a building first named Eastside High School, renamed Douglass High School on September 9, 1936 and serving the Eastside until it closed in 1954. Segregation on Imperial County's own terms produced, as at Allensworth, Black-run institutions and a parents' organization.

Dates1913-14 elementary segregation; 1923 enrollment refused; 1927 board vote for a separate school; $15,334.69 approved Dec. 11, 1929 (Eastside High); renamed Douglass 1936; closed 1954

ActorsWilliam Payne; Octavia Payne; El Centro Parents Association; Central Union High School District

1National Park Service, Five Views: An Ethnic Historic Site Survey for California - 'Douglass High School, Imperial County' (1988)

2Julio Morales, 'Washington School's history is local black history,' Imperial Valley Press (Mar. 6, 2020); Holtville Tribune (Mar. 1, 2023)

Documented reference entry; local press

IEIV-0022Tier 2ImperialLineageL2

ConnectedIEIV-0018 CV-0021

Era 4Citrus Empire, Exclusion & the Irrigated Desert

Contested / Both

1928

Apr.-May 1928

Mexican cantaloupe workers strike the Imperial Valley

Land, Labor & Agricultural Empire

Imperial Valley cantaloupe fields (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan

In late April 1928 Mexican farmworkers organized La Unión de Trabajadores del Valle Imperial (incorporated in May as the Mexican Mutual Aid Society), claiming 1,200 members by May 4, and in early May struck the cantaloupe harvest over a holdback of 'often 25 per cent' of wages, defaulting contractors and housing. Sheriff Charles L. Gillett's office arrested some forty-four workers May 7-10 for disturbing the peace, as 'vagrants' and for 'resisting an officer'; the state report records suspended sentences for guilty pleas, dismissal of charges against thirty-three, and a Standard Picking Agreement approved December 28, 1928 ending the holdback; the union 'was not done away with' and had Brawley offices in April 1929. Documented in the state's Mexican Fact-Finding Committee report (1930) and Paul S. Taylor's study (1928), it is the earliest organized Mexican farm-labor strike in these counties on this timeline.

DatesUnion organized late Apr. 1928 (board selected Apr. 22); strike first week of May; arrests May 7-10; pleas May 16; Standard Picking Agreement approved Dec. 28, 1928

ActorsLa Unión de Trabajadores del Valle Imperial / Mexican Mutual Aid Society of Imperial Valley; Sheriff Charles L. Gillett; Imperial Valley growers

1California Mexican Fact-Finding Committee, Mexicans in California (Sacramento, 1930), ch. VII, 'The Strike of Mexican Cantaloupe Pickers,' pp. 135-150 - full text at archive.org/details/mexicansincalifo00cali

2Paul S. Taylor, Mexican Labor in the United States: Imperial Valley (UC Press, 1928); Charles Wollenberg, 'Huelga, 1928 Style: The Imperial Valley Cantaloupe Workers' Strike,' Pacific Historical Review 38:1 (1969)

State fact-finding report; contemporaneous scholarship

IEIV-0023Tier 2ImperialLineageL4 L6

ConnectedIEIV-0024 IEIV-0017

1929–1941

Depression, Strike Wave & Vigilante Valley

5 entries041

1930Brawley lettuce strike; the 'Imperial Valley Eight' sentenced for criminal syndicalism
1931'Repatriation' trains leave Colton: 450 people on one November day
1934Tear gas at Azteca Hall; vigilantes kidnap ACLU attorney A. L. Wirin
1934Federal conciliator Glassford accuses 'a group of growers' of 'mob rule'
1940Parker Dam drowns the Chemehuevi Valley: 7,776 acres for $108,104.95

Era 5Depression, Strike Wave & Vigilante Valley

Oppression / Dominance

1930

From Jan. 1, 1930; raid Apr. 14, 1930

Brawley lettuce strike; the 'Imperial Valley Eight' sentenced for criminal syndicalism

Land, Labor & Agricultural Empire

Brawley and El Centro (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan

On January 1, 1930 several hundred Mexican and Filipino lettuce workers in Brawley walked off the job in a strike joined by the Mexican Mutual Aid Society (Spector: 'Association') and the Communist-led Agricultural Workers Industrial League - the multiracial coalition of Elizabeth Sine's 'Grassroots Multiracialism' (2016). On the night of April 14, 1930 Sheriff Gillett raided a workers' meeting in El Centro and arrested 108. Of thirteen indicted, nine were tried and, after a 21-day trial that opened June 26, convicted under the Criminal Syndicalism Act (Spector); eight were sentenced - Carl Sklar, Tetsuji Horiuchi, Oscar Erickson, Lawrence Emery, Frank Spector, Danny Roxas (3-42 years) and Eduardo Herera [sic] and Braulio Orosco (2-28 years). On May 27, 1931 the Court of Appeal reversed Spector's conviction on every count and the others' on two of three (People v. Horiuchi, 114 Cal.App. 415). Spector's 1931 pamphlet is the movement's own record.

DatesStrike from Jan. 1, 1930; raid Apr. 14, 1930; trial opened June 26, 1930 (Spector); convictions summer 1930; Spector's conviction reversed May 27, 1931 (People v. Horiuchi, 114 Cal.App. 415)

ActorsAgricultural Workers Industrial League; Mexican Mutual Aid Society; Sheriff Charles L. Gillett (Spector: 'Gillette'); the Imperial Valley Eight; International Labor Defense

1Frank Spector, The Story of the Imperial Valley (International Labor Defense Pamphlet No. 3, 1931), transcription

2People v. Horiuchi, 114 Cal.App. 415, 300 P. 457 (Cal. Ct. App. May 27, 1931); Kate Bronfenbrenner, 'Imperial Valley, California, Farmworkers' Strike of 1930' (Cornell ILR eCommons); Elizabeth Sine, 'Grassroots Multiracialism,' Pacific Historical Review 85:2 (2016)

Contemporaneous movement pamphlet (primary); scholarship citing Daniel, Bitter Harvest

IEIV-0024Tier 1ImperialLineageL4 L7 L10

ConnectedIEIV-0023 IEIV-0026 CV-0032

Era 5Depression, Strike Wave & Vigilante Valley

Oppression / Dominance

1931

From Apr. 1931; Nov. 3, 1931 train

'Repatriation' trains leave Colton: 450 people on one November day

Diaspora, Migration & Displacement

Colton Southern Pacific station; South Colton (San Bernardino Co.)

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano); Tongva

From April 1931 the repatriation trains leaving Los Angeles stopped at Colton's Southern Pacific station to take on Inland families; local welfare agencies and the Mexican consul assisted the departures, and by 1932 welfare officials were helping arrange property exchanges for departing families, the San Bernardino Sun and Colton Daily Courier reported. On November 3, 1931 about fifty South Colton families - more than 450 people - waited for a special train bound for Mexico. A 2025 Latino Studies article (Adriana Darielle Mejía Briscoe) reconstructs the departures from La Opinión, the Sun and the Colton Daily Courier and from 'Despedida,' a corrido composed c. 1932 by Luis G. Hernández, the author's great-great-grandfather. Colton's departures were the Inland installment of the statewide expulsion of Mexicans and U.S.-citizen Mexican Americans (see CV-0037), for which the state apologized in 2005.

ActorsSan Bernardino County welfare officials; South Colton families; Southern Pacific

1'Despedida: My great great grandfather's corrido about the Mexican repatriation,' Latino Studies (2025) - cites San Bernardino Sun and Colton Daily Courier 1931-32

2San Bernardino Sun, Jan. 16, 1932, p. 16 ('Repatriation has Taken 84 Families Out'); Feb. 24, 1932, p. 13; July 7, 1932, p. 6; Colton Daily Courier, May 13, 1931, p. 1 ('Second Trainload of Mexicans Will Leave Here May 25'); Jan. 26 and Apr. 13, 1932, p. 1 (all as cited in Mejía Briscoe 2025); La Opinión, Nov. 5, 1931; Balderrama & Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal (rev. 2006); Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program, Cal. Gov. Code §§8720-8723 (Stats. 2005, ch. 663)

Peer-reviewed article on contemporaneous press; statute

IEIV-0025Tier 2San BernardinoLineageL6

ConnectedIEIV-0030 CV-0037

Era 5Depression, Strike Wave & Vigilante Valley

Oppression / Dominance

1934

Jan. 8-23, 1934

Tear gas at Azteca Hall; vigilantes kidnap ACLU attorney A. L. Wirin

Colonization, Conquest & Political Violence

Brawley, El Centro, Calipatria (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan

When the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union called a lettuce strike for January 8, 1934, police and American Legionnaires tear-gassed several hundred strikers marching from Holtville on January 9, and on January 10-12 officers raided and tear-gassed Azteca Hall in Brawley, making 150, then 350 arrests (New Masses). Dorothy Healey, interviewed in 1972, recalled that 'they barricaded the doors, the cops did, both the state highway and the city police, and these vigilante gangs,' and 'lobbed tear gas through those little tiny windows.' She put the strikers at '7,000, 8,000' and recalled that 'a baby was killed the first week of the strike from tear gas' and a '$10,000 reward' on the organizers. On January 23 ACLU attorney A. L. Wirin was seized from a Brawley hotel, beaten and abandoned in the desert; he sued state and local officials and 25 'John Doe vigilantes'. The Glassford report followed (IEIV-0027).

DatesStrike called Jan. 8, 1934; Holtville march gassed Jan. 9; Azteca Hall raids Jan. 10-12; Wirin kidnapped Jan. 23, 1934

ActorsCAWIU (Dorothy Ray Healey, Stanley Hancock, Pat Chambers); Imperial County and Brawley police; state highway patrol; American Legion members and 'vigilante committees' (per Quin); A. L. Wirin (ACLU)

1Michael Quin, 'Blood on the Lettuce,' New Masses 10:4 (Jan. 23, 1934), transcription at revolutionsnewsstand.com - Jan. 8 walkout, Jan. 9 Holtville meeting and march, raids 'on the tenth, eleventh and twelfth of January'; Kathryn S. Olmsted, 'The 1930s Origins of California's Farmworker-Church Alliance,' Pacific Historical Review 88:2 (2019) - Wirin kidnapping; ACLU of Southern California, 'From 1923 to 1940' (history page) - Wirin's suit

2Carey McWilliams, 'The Farmers Get Tough,' American Mercury 33:130 (Oct. 1934), 241-245 - Wirin kidnapped Jan. 23; organizers Dorothy Ray and Stanley Hancock jailed; Dorothy Healey oral history, Tradition's Chains Have Bound Us (UCLA Oral History Program), Tape II, Side Two (Oct. 10, 1972) - Azteca Hall raid

Contemporaneous magazine reporting (New Masses; American Mercury); participant oral history (primary); scholarship; organizational history

IEIV-0026Tier 1ImperialLineageL4 L7

ConnectedIEIV-0024 IEIV-0027 CV-0041

Era 5Depression, Strike Wave & Vigilante Valley

Contested / Both

1934

Late Mar. – June 26, 1934

Federal conciliator Glassford accuses 'a group of growers' of 'mob rule'

Policies & Systems

Imperial County

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan

General Pelham D. Glassford, sent to the Imperial Valley as federal conciliator in late March 1934, 'sympathized at first with the growers,' Chris Lehmann writes, before his report turned on them. His report to the Imperial County Board of Supervisors, released June 26, 1934 (McWilliams), concluded that 'a group of growers have exploited a communist hysteria for advancement of their own interests' and 'have welcomed labor agitation which they could brand as "red" as a means of sustaining supremacy by mob rule' (as quoted by Lehmann, drawing on historian Kathryn Olmsted; McWilliams's 1934 text reads 'for the advancement of their own interests'). A federal official's own words thus charge organized grower-vigilante power in the valley; his papers (UCLA Coll. 679, Boxes 24-26) cover the dispute. Glassford's report was reprinted in the La Follette Committee hearings (Part 55, per Olmsted).

DatesGlassford named conciliator late Mar. 1934; report to the Board of Supervisors released June 26, 1934 (McWilliams)

ActorsGen. Pelham D. Glassford; Imperial County Board of Supervisors; Imperial Valley growers' associations; National Labor Board special commission

1Report of Pelham D. Glassford, federal conciliator, to the Imperial County Board of Supervisors (June 1934), as quoted in Chris Lehmann, 'The Right's Roots in 1930s Farmworker Unionbusting and Redbaiting,' In These Times (Oct. 6, 2015), and in Carey McWilliams, 'The Farmers Get Tough,' American Mercury (Oct. 1934)

2Pelham Davis Glassford Papers (Collection 679), UCLA Library Special Collections, finding aid (Imperial Valley labor disputes, Boxes 24-26); Kathryn Olmsted, 'Bleeding Edge: New Deal Farm Labor Mediation in California and the Conservative Reaction,' Journal of Policy History 26:1 (2014)

Federal conciliator's report (as quoted in press and scholarship); archival finding aid; scholarship

IEIV-0027Tier 1ImperialLineageL7 L4

ConnectedIEIV-0026 CV-0041

Era 5Depression, Strike Wave & Vigilante Valley

Oppression / Dominance

1940

Act of July 8, 1940

Parker Dam drowns the Chemehuevi Valley: 7,776 acres for $108,104.95

Environmental Violence & Environmental Justice

Chemehuevi Valley / Lake Havasu (San Bernardino Co.)

Homeland: Nüwü (Chemehuevi)

The Chemehuevi Valley reservation of 1907 held some 36,000 acres along the Colorado; when Parker Dam closed in 1940 Lake Havasu rose over the valley floor. The Federal Circuit, reciting the tribe's uncontested allegations in a 2024 opinion that affirmed dismissal of all its claims for lack of jurisdiction (vacating only an alternative merits ruling on one count), records that 'in 1940, the Tribe was awarded $108,104.95... for the 7,776.14 acres of reservation land taken.' A Partnership With Native Americans profile records the taking for the Parker Dam project and recognition approved June 5, 1970; in 1974 Interior recognized the tribe's equitable title, subject to a flowage easement, to 18 miles of shoreline Ickes had designated in 1941 as reservoir 'freeboard'; the reservation today is about 30,650 acres with thirty miles of river frontage. Acreage figures vary (High Country News: about 7,000); the court's 7,776.14 is used here.

DatesReservation 1907; Parker Dam contracted 1930s; floodgates closed 1940; Act of July 8, 1940 (54 Stat. 744); recognition approved June 5, 1970; shoreline title decision Aug. 19, 1974

ActorsChemehuevi Indian Tribe; Bureau of Reclamation; Metropolitan Water District (Parker Dam); Congress

1Chemehuevi Indian Tribe v. United States, No. 21-1366 (Fed. Cir. June 18, 2024) (affirmed; alternative merits dismissal of one count vacated) - figures recited from the tribe's complaint

2Bureau of Indian Affairs, press release, Aug. 19, 1974 ('Decision Results in Chemehuevi Tribe Ownership of Shoreline Section'); Partnership With Native Americans, 'California - Chemehuevi' (30,650 acres; 30 miles of frontage; June 5, 1970); Anna V. Smith, Mark Olalde and Umar Farooq, High Country News / ProPublica, 'Decades after the Colorado River flooded the Chemehuevi's land...' (July 5, 2023)

Federal appellate opinion (primary); federal release; nonprofit profile; press

IEIV-0028Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL1 L9

ConnectedIEIV-0016 IEIV-0058

1941–1964

War, Steel, Braceros & the Color Line

7 entries322

1942Kaiser Steel rises at Fontana
1942The braceros' 10 percent: wages withheld, banked, and mostly never returned
1944Lopez v. Seccombe opens San Bernardino's pool to Mexican Americans
1945The O'Day Short family is burned out of Fontana
1946Unity Leagues: Casa Blanca's votes help unseat a councilman
1947Punjabi-Mexican families and the El Centro gurdwara in a bought Buddhist church
1954Operation Wetback opens in California and Arizona

Era 6War, Steel, Braceros & the Color Line

Contested / Both

1942

1942-83

Kaiser Steel rises at Fontana

Land, Labor & Agricultural Empire

Kaiser Steel, Fontana (San Bernardino Co.)

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano); Tongva

Henry Kaiser established the Fontana mill in 1942 (San Bernardino County history page); the EPA's Superfund narrative records that the Fontana plant operated from 1942 to 1983, with Kaiser Steel filing for Chapter 11 in February 1987. The mill drew Black workers to Fontana; the 'Live from the Frontline' public-history project (Tilton, Gudis and Maier, 2026) traces three generations of a Black family at Kaiser, and Cornell's Kheel Center holds a 1958 grievance file of United Steelworkers Local 2869 (Grievance No. 57224). The wartime migration to the mill is the background to the 1945 fire that killed the Short family (IEIV-0031).

DatesMill established 1942; plant operated 1942-83; Chapter 11 Feb. 1987

ActorsKaiser Steel Corporation; United Steelworkers Local 2869; Black steelworkers

1U.S. EPA, NPL Site Narrative, Kaiser Steel Corp. (Fontana Plant)

2Jennifer Tilton, Cathy Gudis & Audrey Maier, 'Live from the Frontline: 8 Neighborhoods Linked by the Long History of Logistics in the Inland Empire,' ArcGIS StoryMaps (Jan. 12, 2026), 'Fontana' section; San Bernardino County, 'San Bernardino County history: Kaiser Steel' (July 10, 2025); Kheel Center, Cornell, USW Local 2869 grievance file (Box 5, Folder 2)

Federal agency record (primary); public-history project; county history; archival record

IEIV-0029Tier 2San BernardinoLineageL2 L4

ConnectedIEIV-0031 IEIV-0047

Era 6War, Steel, Braceros & the Color Line

Contested / Both

1942

1942-46, or to 1948 (conflict)

The braceros' 10 percent: wages withheld, banked, and mostly never returned

Land, Labor & Agricultural Empire

Bracero camps of the Imperial and Coachella valleys; El Centro reception center; N.D. Cal. courtroom

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan; Iviatim (Cahuilla)

Assembly Joint Resolution 2, as introduced in 2009, states, 'between 1942 and 1946, 10 percent of the braceros' wages were deducted from each paycheck and set aside for a "savings fund"... most braceros never received the savings.' Counsel in Cruz v. United States (N.D. Cal.) describe the mechanism: employers held back ten percent 'to be transferred via United States and Mexican banks to savings accounts for each Bracero.' Judge Charles Breyer approved a settlement on February 23, 2009 under which the Mexican government paid about $3,500 to each eligible bracero or heir (about $14.5 million expected in all at preliminary approval, per press); the court had dismissed the claims against Wells Fargo on August 23, 2002, calling the bank 'merely a conduit to facilitate the transfer of funds from the United States to Mexico' (219 F. Supp. 2d 1027). Earnings held by employer and state: labor as a withheld asset.

DatesWithholding 1942-46 (AJR 2) or to 1948 (conflict); Cruz v. U.S. filed 2001; settlement approved Feb. 23, 2009

ActorsBraceros of the Imperial and Coachella valleys; U.S. and Mexican governments; Wells Fargo (dismissed defendant); Judge Charles Breyer; Lieff Cabraser (plaintiffs' counsel)

⚑ Human-collateral: withheld wages

1Assembly Joint Resolution 2 (California Legislature, 2009-10), introduced Jan. 22, 2009 - legislative findings on the bracero savings fund

2Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, Cruz v. United States case summary (settlement approved Feb. 23, 2009; about $3,500 each); Arizona Daily Star (tucson.com) on the expected $14.5M total at preliminary approval; Barbara Driscoll de Alvarado, 'The 10% Solution,' ReVista (Harvard DRCLAS), Fall 2003; Cruz v. United States, 219 F. Supp. 2d 1027 (N.D. Cal. Aug. 23, 2002)

Legislative resolution (primary); counsel's case record; press; scholarship

IEIV-0111Tier 1Multi-countyLineageL4 L12 L6

ConnectedIEIV-0034 IEIV-0048 CV-0048

Era 6War, Steel, Braceros & the Color Line

Resistance / Resilience

1944

Demand Aug.-Sept. 1943; decision Feb. 5, 1944

Lopez v. Seccombe opens San Bernardino's pool to Mexican Americans

Policies & Systems

Perris Hill Plunge, San Bernardino

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano); Tongva

Ignacio López, publisher of El Espectador, Rev. R. N. Nuñez, Eugenio Nogueroa, Virginia Prado and Rafael Muñoz petitioned the federal court on behalf of approximately 8,000 others of Mexican or Latin descent excluded from San Bernardino's municipal swimming pool, plunge and bathhouse. On February 5, 1944 Judge Leon Yankwich of the Southern District of California held the city's conduct illegal and in violation of petitioners' rights under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments and issued a permanent injunction against Mayor W. C. Seccombe, the council, the police chief and the park superintendent. Organized by the city's Mexican American Defense Committee, which met at San Jose Hall on August 1, 1943 and wrote to Mayor Seccombe on August 19 (Ocegueda), the case preceded Mendez v. Westminster by two years and is the earliest federal desegregation decision located for the Inland Empire.

ActorsIgnacio López; Rev. R. N. Nuñez; Eugenio Nogueroa; attorney David C. Marcus; Mexican American Defense Committee; Judge Leon Yankwich; Mayor W. C. Seccombe

1Lopez v. Seccombe, 71 F. Supp. 769 (S.D. Cal. 1944)

2Mark Ocegueda, 'Lopez v. Seccombe: The City of San Bernardino's Mexican American Defense Committee...,' History in the Making 3:1 (CSUSB, 2010); Ocegueda, Sol y Sombra (Ph.D. diss., UC Irvine, 2017)

Federal opinion (primary); scholarship

IEIV-0030Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL6

ConnectedIEIV-0032 IEIV-0025

Era 6War, Steel, Braceros & the Color Line

Oppression / Dominance

1945

Dec. 16, 1945

The O'Day Short family is burned out of Fontana

Colonization, Conquest & Political Violence

Randall Ave. and Pepper St., Fontana (San Bernardino Co.)

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano); Tongva

O'Day Short, a Los Angeles refrigeration engineer, paid $1,000 down on a five-acre Fontana lot; a sheriff's deputy warned him he was 'out of bounds,' the Chamber of Commerce offered to buy it back, and the seller warned of a 'vigilante committee.' Short told the Los Angeles Sentinel, 'I recognize the old Texas technique when I see it.' On December 16, 1945 the home exploded; the children Barry, 9, and Carol Ann, 7, died that night, Helen Short the next morning, and O'Day on January 22, 1946, per Fontana USD. The NAACP called the fire incendiary; an independent arson investigator it retained testified the fire had 'clearly been intentionally set' (EJI), but proof of threats was barred from the inquest, which closed the case as an accident; no prosecution followed. In September 2024 Fontana's school board renamed Randall Pepper Elementary for the family; it was dedicated August 5, 2025 (IEIV-0114).

DatesExplosion Dec. 16, 1945; O'Day Short dies Jan. 22, 1946 (Fontana USD); school renamed by board vote Sept. 4, 2024, dedicated Aug. 5, 2025

ActorsO'Day, Helen, Barry and Carol Ann Short; NAACP; San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies and DA; Fontana Chamber of Commerce

1Los Angeles Sentinel, Jan. 3, Jan. 10, Jan. 24, Feb. 14 and Apr. 25, 1946 (via Black Quotidian, 'February 14, 1946')

2Equal Justice Initiative, 'A History of Racial Injustice,' Dec. 16; Fontana USD, 'Learn more about the O'Day Short family'

Contemporaneous Black press (primary, via scholarly digital project); documented calendar; district record

IEIV-0031Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL2 L7

ConnectedIEIV-0029 IEIV-0047 CV-0050

Era 6War, Steel, Braceros & the Color Line

Resistance / Resilience

1946

Unity Leagues: Casa Blanca's votes help unseat a councilman

Community & Cultural Forces

Casa Blanca barrio, Riverside; citrus belt Unity Leagues

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla); Tongva

In 1946 Fred Ross, working for the American Council on Race Relations, organized 'eight Hispanic Unity Leagues' that 'fought segregation in schools and elsewhere' (guide to his papers at Stanford) - among them a campaign in Riverside's Casa Blanca. Randy Shaw's review of Gabriel Thompson's biography recounts how Ross, with 'voter registration, door to door outreach, house meetings' and 'a map of every home in Casa Blanca,' set out to unseat a council member 'unresponsive to Latino concerns'; the incumbent 'ended up losing his seat by 63 votes, with 47 of that margin coming from Casa Blanca.' Shaw writes that 'Casa Blanca led to Ross's campaign to elect Edward Roybal' in Los Angeles - the road to the Community Service Organization and, through Ross, the farmworker movement (CV-0056).

Dates1946 (Riverside and Casa Blanca campaigns, per Shaw's review of Thompson)

ActorsFred Ross; Casa Blanca residents; Riverside city council; American Council on Race Relations

1Guide to the Fred Ross Papers, M0812, Stanford University (OAC finding aid) - 'The eight Hispanic Unity Leagues Ross organized...'

2Randy Shaw, 'New Book Profiles Legendary Organizer Fred Ross,' Beyond Chron (May 26, 2016) - review of Gabriel Thompson, America's Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century (UC Press, 2016)

Archival finding aid (primary); book review of a biography built on Ross's papers

IEIV-0032Tier 2RiversideLineageL6 L10

ConnectedIEIV-0030 CV-0056

Era 6War, Steel, Braceros & the Color Line

Resistance / Resilience

1947

Punjabi-Mexican families and the El Centro gurdwara in a bought Buddhist church

Community & Cultural Forces

El Centro (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan

Punjabi Sikh farmers came to the Imperial Valley in the early twentieth century and, barred by exclusion and anti-miscegenation practice from the marriages they wanted, married Mexican and Mexican American women; Karen Leonard found 'two, three hundred marriage, death and birth records for these Punjabi Mexican couples' in the valley, the core of her Making Ethnic Choices. After the Second World War, Leonard recounts, 'in El Centro, the Sikhs... bought the Japanese Buddhist church - temple because the Japanese were incarcerated,' and the El Centro Sikh Temple opened in 1947, described in curriculum materials as 'the second Sikh Temple in the United States' (the first being Stockton, CV-0024). One excluded community's house of worship became another's: the valley's cross-racial record carries that irony.

DatesTemple opened 1947 (post-war purchase of the former Japanese Buddhist church)

ActorsPunjabi Sikh farmers; Mexican and Mexican American wives; El Centro Sikh Temple; incarcerated Japanese American congregation

1Sikh Archive Podcast, interview with Karen Leonard on the Punjabi Mexican community (archived by SAADA, item 20200318-6043); Karen Isaksen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi Mexican Americans (Temple UP, 1992)

2Asian American Education Project, 'Sikhs in the Borderlands' (lesson)

Scholar oral history; curriculum resource; monograph on county records

IEIV-0033Tier 2ImperialLineageL5 L10

ConnectedCV-0030 CV-0024

Era 6War, Steel, Braceros & the Color Line

Oppression / Dominance

1954

June 9-17, 1954

Operation Wetback opens in California and Arizona

Diaspora, Migration & Displacement

California and Arizona border and agricultural districts (Imperial Valley; Yuma corridor)

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan

The Border Patrol's 1954 mass-deportation drive began in California and Arizona: a June 9, 1954 announcement by Commissioner Swing and a June 10 launch in California, with those apprehended put on buses; accounts put the force at roughly 750 officers (Texas Tribune) or about 800 agents (historian Juan R. García). Kelly Lytle Hernández, whose study follows the campaign from 1943 to 1954, told the Texas Tribune the operation was 'more propaganda than it was a change in immigration law enforcement tactics or intensity.' On June 17 the task force 'shifted its operation to agricultural areas in California and Arizona' (Juan R. García); the sources read for this entry do not name the Imperial Valley, whose El Centro camp would hold Salvadorans in the 1980s (IEIV-0048).

DatesAnnounced June 9, 1954; launched in California June 10; task force moved to agricultural areas June 17 (Juan R. García)

ActorsINS Commissioner Joseph Swing; Border Patrol; deported workers and families

1Immigration History (UT Austin), 'Operation Wetback'; Juan R. García, 'Operation Wetback,' Encyclopedia of Race and Racism (via Encyclopedia.com)

2Uriel J. García, Texas Tribune (Feb. 12, 2025) - interview with historian Kelly Lytle Hernández

Documented reference entries; press

IEIV-0034Tier 2ImperialLineageL6 L12

ConnectedIEIV-0048 CV-0055

1965–1979

Farmworker Insurgency, Black & Chicano Power, Prison Movement Rise

12 entries741

1965Malki Museum: the first Native-founded museum on a California reservation
1965State report: the John Birch Society's California coordinator lives in Rialto
1965Filipino grape workers strike Coachella - the spark for Delano
1965After the Lowell School arson, Riverside desegregates without a court order
1965Precinct Reporter founded: a Black newspaper of record for the Inland Empire
1966Section 14: Palm Springs removes its Black and Mexican American residents
1968Press-Enterprise wins the Pulitzer for exposing Agua Caliente guardianship corruption
1972UC Riverside students found Black Voice News
1973The Battle of Coachella: UFW, Teamsters and 'Fighting for Our Lives'
1978Glen Avon's mothers organize against the Stringfellow Acid Pits
1978Interior restores 25,000 acres to the Quechan
1979Rufino Contreras is shot dead in a struck lettuce field

Era 7Farmworker Insurgency, Black & Chicano Power, Prison Movement Rise

Resistance / Resilience

1965

Founding group 1964; museum opened Feb. 1965

Malki Museum: the first Native-founded museum on a California reservation

Community & Cultural Forces

Morongo (Malki) Reservation, Banning (Riverside Co.)

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla)

In February 1965 Jane Pablo Penn (Wanikik Cahuilla) and Katherine Siva Saubel (Cahuilla), who became its first president, with the young ethnographer Lowell Bean, opened the Malki Museum on the Morongo Reservation; Penn had set out in 1964 'to found the first non-profit Indian museum on a California reservation.' The museum's own history and the National Women's Hall of Fame (which inducted Saubel in 1993 and calls Malki 'the first Native American museum created and managed by Native Americans') document the founding. Saubel's lifelong Cahuilla-language and ethnobotanical work and the museum's press made Morongo a center of Cahuilla cultural sovereignty a century after the reservation orders. The 1964/1965 variance is noted; the museum's own date is used.

ActorsJane Pablo Penn; Katherine Siva Saubel; Lowell Bean; Morongo Band of Mission Indians

1Malki Museum, 'Museum History'

2National Women's Hall of Fame, 'Katherine Siva Saubel'

Institutional history; biographical record

IEIV-0035Tier 1RiversideLineageL1

ConnectedIEIV-0009 IEIV-0012

Era 7Farmworker Insurgency, Black & Chicano Power, Prison Movement Rise

Oppression / Dominance

1965

State report: the John Birch Society's California coordinator lives in Rialto

Policies & Systems

Rialto; San Bernardino and Riverside counties

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano); Tongva

The California Senate Factfinding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities' 1965 report on the John Birch Society states that 'Richard Pine is now the Major California Coordinator, and resides in Rialto, near San Bernardino,' and lists among the Society's Area Coordinators 'one for San Bernardino and Riverside Counties.' The report describes chapters averaging 'fifteen to thirty members,' a regional office in San Marino, fifteen Society book stores in California, 'twenty per cent' of a 1964 budget of about $2,500,000 'earmarked for California,' and a British street-fighting booklet bearing a Minutemen sticker that the subcommittee's agents found at a book store, not one of the Society's, that carried its literature; the subcommittee repeated that it 'did not find the society subversive.' Entered as conduct of record from a state legislative investigation, it places the Society's state coordinator in the San Bernardino Valley in the mid-1960s.

DatesReport published 1965 (Thirteenth Report; the subcommittee's main Birch study was its 1963 Twelfth Report)

ActorsJohn Birch Society (Richard Pine, Rialto; SB-Riverside area coordinator); California Senate Factfinding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities

1California Legislature, Senate Factfinding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities, Thirteenth Report (1965), 'The John Birch Society,' pp. 171-175

2JTA, 'California Senate Body Reports Birch Society Is Not Anti-semitic' (June 14, 1963) - the subcommittee's 1963 report

State legislative investigative report (primary); contemporaneous wire report

IEIV-0036Tier 2San BernardinoLineageL7

ConnectedIEIV-0021 IEIV-0047

Era 7Farmworker Insurgency, Black & Chicano Power, Prison Movement Rise

Resistance / Resilience

1965

Strike May 1965 (May 3 per Rodel Rodis, Inquirer.net)

Filipino grape workers strike Coachella - the spark for Delano

Land, Labor & Agricultural Empire

Coachella Valley vineyards (Riverside Co.)

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla)

In the spring of 1965 Filipino members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee - the aging manongs - struck Coachella Valley grape growers and won a raise to $1.40 an hour (from $1.10, per Yes! Magazine; 'they make a stand against the farmers in Coachella and they win,' historian Dawn Mabalon told KQED). The National Park Service's account of the Delano strike records that AWOC 'had won similar concessions... in the Coachella Valley, which gave the Delano strike added urgency' when growers there refused the same rate; Larry Itliong, Philip Vera Cruz and Pete Velasco moved north with the harvest and on September 8, 1965 struck Delano (CV-0064). The Delano strike thus had its opening act in Riverside County. The size of the raise varies across sources (ten cents in the Welga archive; $1.25 to $1.40 per the National Park Service).

ActorsAWOC Filipino members; Larry Itliong; Philip Vera Cruz; Pete Velasco; Coachella grape growers

1National Park Service, 'Workers United: The Delano Grape Strike and Boycott'

2KQED (Lisa Morehouse), 'The Forgotten Filipino-Americans Who Led the '65 Delano Grape Strike' (Sept. 7, 2015); Welga Digital Archive (Bulosan Center), 'Interracial Labor' exhibit, 'Delano '65: AWOC and NFWA'; Yes! Magazine on the $1.10-to-$1.40 raise; Rodel Rodis column, Inquirer.net (Global Nation) - 1,000 Filipino grape pickers 'to go on strike on May 3, 1965'

Federal interpretive history; public media; digital archive

IEIV-0037Tier 1RiversideLineageL4 L5 L10

ConnectedIEIV-0043 CV-0064 CV-0060

Era 7Farmworker Insurgency, Black & Chicano Power, Prison Movement Rise

Resistance / Resilience

1965

Sept. 7 – Oct. 25, 1965

After the Lowell School arson, Riverside desegregates without a court order

Policies & Systems

Lowell School, Eastside, Riverside

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla); Tongva

Early on September 7, 1965 an arson fire destroyed six classrooms and the auditorium of Lowell Elementary on Riverside's Eastside, displacing 143 pupils (Hendrick); about 264 Lowell and Irving children were then moved to ten schools. On September 13 Black and Mexican American parents, organized as Parents Boycott for Better Education, ran a one-day boycott that cut Lowell and Irving attendance in half; 200 to 250 children attended Freedom Schools at five churches and halls (Hendrick). The board under president Arthur L. Littleworth received Superintendent Miller's master plan on October 18 and adopted it unanimously on October 25, 1965 (Hendrick); Ray Berry designed it with Littleworth, and Eastside activist Dell Roberts stood by him at tense meetings (Raincross Gazette). Busing began in September 1966. Raincross calls Riverside 'America's first large district to voluntarily desegregate without court order.' Hendrick's 1968 UCR study is the near-contemporaneous record; the arsonist was never caught.

DatesArson Sept. 7, 1965; boycott Sept. 13; plan adopted Oct. 25, 1965; implemented Sept. 1966

ActorsParents Boycott for Better Education; Arthur L. Littleworth; Ray Berry; Dell Roberts; Riverside USD board (Evelyn Kendrick, Margaret Heers)

1Irving G. Hendrick, The Development of a School Integration Plan in Riverside, California (RUSD/UC Riverside, Sept. 1968), ERIC ED028210

2Arthur L. Littleworth, No Easy Way: Integrating Riverside Schools - A Victory for Community (Inlandia Books, 2014); Raincross Gazette (Ken Crawford), 'Sixty years later, Lowell School arson remains unsolved as Eastside gets first new school' (Sept. 5, 2025; updated Oct. 14, 2025)

Contemporaneous district/university report (primary); memoir; press

IEIV-0038Tier 1RiversideLineageL2 L6 L10

ConnectedIEIV-0039 IEIV-0032

Era 7Farmworker Insurgency, Black & Chicano Power, Prison Movement Rise

Resistance / Resilience

1965

Precinct Reporter founded: a Black newspaper of record for the Inland Empire

Community & Cultural Forces

San Bernardino

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano); Tongva

Art Townsend founded the Precinct Reporter in San Bernardino in 1965 - CSU San Bernardino's archive dates it to July 1965 and names Sam Martin as co-founder, while the paper's own 2021 tribute says Townsend started it 'following the 1965 Watts Riots' of August; CSU San Bernardino's 'Bridges That Carried Us Over' archive records that the paper reported weekly on the Community League of Mothers' campaign to desegregate San Bernardino's schools. Still publishing (its 60th anniversary fell in July 2025) and run, as of its 2021 tribute, by Art Townsend's son Brian Townsend, it is one of the two Black papers - with Riverside's Black Voice News (IEIV-0042) - whose runs are the primary record of Black Inland Empire organizing for the following six decades.

DatesFounded 1965 (CSUSB: July; the paper: after the August Watts rebellion)

ActorsArt Townsend; Sam Martin; Community League of Mothers (Frances Grice)

1CSU San Bernardino, 'Bridges That Carried Us Over' archive, item 66 (Precinct Reporter / Community League of Mothers)

2Precinct Reporter, 'Precinct Reporter Published 56 Years: Tribute to Art Townsend' (July 29, 2021)

University archive; the paper's own history

IEIV-0039Tier 2San BernardinoLineageL2

ConnectedIEIV-0038 IEIV-0042

Era 7Farmworker Insurgency, Black & Chicano Power, Prison Movement Rise

Oppression / Dominance

1966

Sept. 1965-June 1967

Section 14: Palm Springs removes its Black and Mexican American residents

Diaspora, Migration & Displacement

Section 14, Palm Springs (Agua Caliente allotted land)

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla - Agua Caliente)

On Agua Caliente allotted land leased through court-supervised conservators, Palm Springs demolished and burned Black and Mexican American residents' homes in Section 14; city records released in 2023 list 235 buildings torn down in 1965–67 and 68 burning permits; the city's 2024 presentation counts 145 'abandoned properties' removed in 1965-1968 (Palm Springs Post: 'no more than 145 houses,' per the city attorney). Deputy Attorney General Loren Miller Jr. reported on May 31, 1968 that 'the minority residents of Section 14 did not receive such aid when their homes were destroyed by a city-engineered holocaust,' finding 'unusual cooperation between developers, the Indian conservators, and the city of Palm Springs' though 'no evidence that any crimes were committed.' The Desert Sun reported in 2024 that city documents contradicted several of the report's conclusions; the city's presentation says City Manager Frank Aleshire reported that Miller 'only visited for one day' (settlement: IEIV-0097).

DatesCity-documented demolitions Sept. 1965-June 1967 (235 structures); AG memorandum May 31, 1968 (HRC report); Desert Sun editorial June 5, 1968

ActorsCity of Palm Springs; Agua Caliente allottees and court-appointed conservators; Section 14 residents; Deputy AG Loren Miller Jr.

⚑ Human-collateral: estate control

1Loren Miller Jr., 'Palm Springs Section 14 Demolition,' Cal. Dept. of Justice, Office of the Attorney General, May 31, 1968, as quoted in City of Palm Springs Human Rights Commission, 'Frank Bogert: Palm Springs' Civic Leadership, Institutionalized Segregation, and Racial Bias 1958-1966' (final draft, Apr. 28, 2021), fns. 68, 137, 139

2Tracy Conrad, Desert Sun, Apr. 7, 2024; Paul Albani-Burgio, Desert Sun, Apr. 14, 2024 ('contradicted several of the report's conclusions'); Palm Springs Post, 'City documents show historical concerns over Section 14' (Mar. 15, 2023) and Apr. 12, 2024; City of Palm Springs, 'Council Presentation - Section 14' (May 2024; abatement counts; June 5, 1968 Desert Sun editorial); KQED on the 1959 leasing change

State DOJ memorandum (as quoted in the city's HRC report and press); press history

IEIV-0040Tier 1RiversideLineageL2 L6 L1

ConnectedIEIV-0041 IEIV-0097 IEIV-0009

Era 7Farmworker Insurgency, Black & Chicano Power, Prison Movement Rise

Contested / Both

1968

Ringwald series 1967; Pulitzer awarded 1968

Press-Enterprise wins the Pulitzer for exposing Agua Caliente guardianship corruption

Policies & Systems

Riverside County courts; Agua Caliente Reservation, Palm Springs

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla - Agua Caliente)

The 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service went to the Riverside Press-Enterprise 'for its expose of corruption in the courts in connection with the handling of the property and estates of an Indian tribe in California, and its successful efforts to punish the culprits.' George Ringwald's 1967 series documented how the guardianship and conservatorship system's judges and attorneys charged 'exorbitant and unwarranted fees' against the estates of Agua Caliente allottees in Palm Springs (Tracy Conrad, Desert Sun, Dec. 11, 2022) - the same conservatorship system the Attorney General's Section 14 memorandum found cooperating with the city (IEIV-0040). Entered as an exposure event: domination documented, and partly checked, by the press.

ActorsGeorge Ringwald; Riverside Press-Enterprise; Riverside County Superior Court conservators; Agua Caliente allottees

⚑ Human-collateral: estate fees

1The Pulitzer Prizes, 1968 Public Service: Riverside (CA) Press-Enterprise

2Tracy Conrad, 'Palm Springs history: George Ringwald...' Desert Sun, Dec. 11, 2022, p. 25A (series and Pulitzer)

Prize citation; press history

IEIV-0041Tier 1RiversideLineageL1 L7

ConnectedIEIV-0040

Era 7Farmworker Insurgency, Black & Chicano Power, Prison Movement Rise

Resistance / Resilience

1972

Founded 1972; acquired by Hardy and Cheryl Brown 1980

UC Riverside students found Black Voice News

Community & Cultural Forces

Riverside

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla); Tongva

Black Voice News was founded in 1972 by students at UC Riverside and taken over in 1980 by Hardy and Cheryl Brown ('became stewards,' in San Bernardino County's 2024 profile), who built it into Riverside County's Black newspaper of record; Paulette Brown-Hinds became publisher in 2012. CSU San Bernardino's ScholarWorks hosts a digitized archive of the paper. With the Precinct Reporter (IEIV-0039), Black Voice News is both a resistance institution and a primary-source repository for this timeline - it carried, for example, 2023–24 reporting on Riverside County jail deaths contemporaneous with the state's civil-rights investigation (IEIV-0095). A circulating claim that the Browns founded the paper in 1972 is incorrect; the county's own profile and the CSUSB archive agree on 1980 acquisition.

ActorsUC Riverside student founders; Hardy Brown; Cheryl Brown; Paulette Brown-Hinds

1San Bernardino County, 'Black Voice News: Creators of Authentic Narratives' (Feb. 15, 2024)

2CSU San Bernardino ScholarWorks, Black Voice News digital archive

County profile; university digital archive

IEIV-0042Tier 1RiversideLineageL2

ConnectedIEIV-0039 IEIV-0095

Era 7Farmworker Insurgency, Black & Chicano Power, Prison Movement Rise

Oppression / Dominance

1973

Contracts expired Apr. 15, 1973 (Rolling Stone); film 1975

The Battle of Coachella: UFW, Teamsters and 'Fighting for Our Lives'

Land, Labor & Agricultural Empire

Coachella Valley vineyards (Riverside Co.)

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla)

When United Farm Workers contracts expired on April 15, 1973, most of the 27 growers who owned the Coachella Valley's 7,100 acres of table grapes signed with the Teamsters; two renewed with the UFW, David Harris reported in Rolling Stone. On April 16 striker Alicia Uribe, 19, was struck with brass knuckles on the Mel-Pak picket line, her cheek and nose broken. The Nation (Juan Ignacio Mora, 2024) counts '58 reported cases of assault and battery' between April and July, 'nearly all' of which 'implicated Teamster organizers.' The two deaths of the 1973 season, at Lamont and Arvin, are CV-0080. Glen Pearcy's documentary Fighting for Our Lives, narrated by Luis Valdez and released in 1975, documented the 1973 grape strike and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

ActorsUnited Farm Workers; Teamsters; Coachella growers; Alicia Uribe (per Rolling Stone); Glen Pearcy (director)

1Juan Ignacio Mora, 'How Unions Are Made,' The Nation (Mar. 19, 2024; review of Christian O. Paiz, Strikers of Coachella) - 58 reported assault-and-battery cases

2David Harris, 'The Battle of Coachella Valley,' Rolling Stone (Sept. 13, 1973); Fighting for Our Lives (dir. Glen Pearcy, 1975) - Ann Arbor District Library film record (Pearcy; Valdez narration; 1973 harvest)

Book review essay; contemporaneous magazine reporting; documentary film record

IEIV-0043Tier 1RiversideLineageL4 L7

ConnectedIEIV-0037 IEIV-0046 CV-0080

Era 7Farmworker Insurgency, Black & Chicano Power, Prison Movement Rise

Resistance / Resilience

1978

Overflows 1969 and 1978

Glen Avon's mothers organize against the Stringfellow Acid Pits

Environmental Violence & Environmental Justice

Stringfellow Acid Pits, Glen Avon / Jurupa Valley (Riverside Co.)

Homeland: Tongva; Iviatim (Cahuilla)

In the rainy winter of 1978 toxic liquid from the Stringfellow Acid Pits, a hazardous-waste dump above Glen Avon operated 1956-1972, overflowed into flood channels past the neighborhood school. Penny Newman joined Concerned Neighbors in Action, the Glen Avon mothers' group of some 20-25 families (per the Center for Health, Environment & Justice), and became its leading voice; the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice says it 'began in the Jurupa Valley community of Glen Avon in 1978' and 'became an official nonprofit organization' in 1993. The site went onto the first Superfund National Priorities List in 1983, and residents' claims produced what CCAEJ calls 'the state awarding over $114 million in reparations for residents' (LAist: 'over $100 million'). CCAEJ traces its roots to this fight, which this timeline treats as the founding event of Inland Empire environmental-justice organizing and the ancestor of the warehouse and air-quality campaigns.

DatesOperated 1956-1972; overflows 1969 and 1978; NPL 1983 (first list); CCAEJ nonprofit 1993

ActorsPenny Newman; Concerned Neighbors in Action; CCAEJ; Stringfellow Quarry Co.; U.S. EPA

1Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, 'Our Roots'

2LAist/KPCC, 'A "hysterical housewife" reflects on 39 years of environmental activism' (Oct. 5, 2017); Center for Health, Environment & Justice, 'From shy young woman to powerful leader: Penny Newman' (Concerned Neighbors in Action); Stringfellow Hazardous Waste Site collection, UC Riverside Special Collections, finding aid (OAC, ark:/13030/kt1r29r9qt) - 1969 and 1978 overflows, 1956-72 operation

Organizational history; press interview

IEIV-0044Tier 2RiversideLineageL9

ConnectedIEIV-0093

Era 7Farmworker Insurgency, Black & Chicano Power, Prison Movement Rise

Resistance / Resilience

1978

Dec. 20 or 21, 1978

Interior restores 25,000 acres to the Quechan

Policies & Systems

Fort Yuma Reservation (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Kwatsáan (Quechan)

On December 20, 1978 the Secretary of the Interior adopted the Krulitz Opinion and ordered restoration to the Quechan Tribe of the roughly 25,000 acres the 1893 'agreement' had purported to cede; the Bureau of Indian Affairs' release of December 21, 1978 was headlined 'Andrus Orders 25,000 Acres Restored To Quechan Indians' Reservation.' The Supreme Court's 2000 decision in Arizona v. California recounts the chain - the conditional language of 1893, the 1936 opinion reading the cession as unconditional, and the 1978 reversal - in holding that the tribe's Colorado River water claims for the restored lands were not precluded and remanding them for decision. Eighty-five years after the taking, the Quechan land base at the Yuma crossing was substantially rebuilt by the government's own re-reading of its record.

DatesSecretarial Order Dec. 20 or 21, 1978 (BIA release of Dec. 21 says 'today'); Arizona v. California, 530 U.S. 392 (June 19, 2000)

ActorsQuechan Tribe; Secretary Cecil Andrus; Solicitor Leo Krulitz

1Bureau of Indian Affairs, press release, 'Andrus Orders 25,000 Acres Restored to Quechan Indians' Reservation' (Dec. 21, 1978)

2Arizona v. California, 530 U.S. 392 (2000)

Agency release; Supreme Court opinion (primary)

IEIV-0045Tier 1ImperialLineageL1 L12

ConnectedIEIV-0010 IEIV-0058

Era 7Farmworker Insurgency, Black & Chicano Power, Prison Movement Rise

Oppression / Dominance

1979

Feb. 10, 1979

Rufino Contreras is shot dead in a struck lettuce field

Colonization, Conquest & Political Violence

Mario Saikhon lettuce fields near Calexico/El Centro (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan

On February 10, 1979, during the United Farm Workers' Imperial Valley vegetable strike, striker Rufino Contreras entered a Mario Saikhon lettuce field and was shot dead; the Washington Post reported that he 'trespassed' and was shot to death, and that charges against three men 'were unexpectedly dismissed' on April 23, 1979. The Agricultural Labor Relations Board's 1981 decision (7 ALRB No. 43, later annulled on other grounds, 154 Cal.App.3d 40) records that he was shot 'apparently by a foreman or foremen' and that 'Criminal charges were filed against certain supervisory employees of that employer, but were later dismissed.' Thousands attended the funeral mass in Calexico on February 14, where Cesar Chavez eulogized him: 'In that sense, Rufino is not dead.' No one was tried. He was 27 (Post; UFW chronology; IV Press), 28 in one UFW retrospective; the judge was William E. Lehnhardt (Post), 'Lenhardt' in UFW materials.

DatesKilled Feb. 10, 1979; three men arrested that day and charged with murder and assault; funeral Feb. 14; charges dismissed Apr. 23, 1979

ActorsRufino Contreras; United Farm Workers; three men arrested and charged, charges dismissed April 1979 (Leonardo Alfredo Barriga, Froilan Perez Mendoza, Anthony Andres San Diego, per the Imperial Valley Press and the Washington Post); Imperial County Superior Court (Judge William E. Lehnhardt); Cesar Chavez

1Washington Post, 'Doubts Raised By Transcript of Dismissed Case,' Sept. 16, 1979

2Agricultural Labor Relations Board, Admiral Packing Co. et al., 7 ALRB No. 43 (Dec. 14, 1981); Imperial Valley Press, 'Crowd memorializes farm worker's death' (Feb. 10, 2019); UFW, 'Cesar Chavez's eulogy for Rufino Contreras, Feb. 14, 1979, Calexico'

Contemporaneous national press; state agency decision (primary); union record

IEIV-0046Tier 1ImperialLineageL4 L7 L12

ConnectedIEIV-0043 CV-0080

1980–1999

Prison Boom, Border Militarization & Movement Under Siege

13 entries841

1980The Klan marches in Fontana; Dovard Howard is shot in the back
1982Orantes-Hernandez: a federal court restrains coerced 'voluntary departure' at El Centro
1984Inland and desert communities build queer institutions in the AIDS years
1984TODEC Legal Center founded in Perris
1985Hunger strike at the El Centro camp
1987Cabazon Band beats Riverside County; tribal gaming law is born
1987Comité Cívico del Valle founded in the Imperial Valley
1988Four prisons land in the desert: two at Blythe, Calipatria, Centinela
1994Operation Gatekeeper pushes crossings - and deaths - into Imperial County
1994Riverside students join the walkouts against Proposition 187
1998The All-American Canal: 'the most dangerous body of water in the U.S.'
1998Five nations hold Ward Valley 113 days and kill a nuclear dump
1998Riverside police kill Tyisha Miller: 'as many as two dozen shots'

Era 8Prison Boom, Border Militarization & Movement Under Siege

Contested / Both

1980

July 1, 1980

The Klan marches in Fontana; Dovard Howard is shot in the back

Colonization, Conquest & Political Violence

Fontana and Rialto (San Bernardino Co.)

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano); Tongva

On July 1, 1980 Dovard Howard, a Black Pacific Bell lineman, was shot in the back at Randall and Locust in Fontana 'by an alleged member of the Ku Klux Klan,' the Fontana Herald News reported, and paralyzed; the city declared Dovard Howard Day on July 1, 2016. Los Angeles Public Library photographs document 'Anti-Klan and Pro-Klan clash in Fontana' (August 10, 1980) and, on September 24, 1980, an anti-Klan group - Larry Culberson, Cyrus Kellog, Armando Navarro, Rev. William Dunston and Augustine Rios, per the caption - leaving the courthouse to protest at Fontana City Hall; UCLA's James Richardson papers (LSC.1818) hold a Press-Enterprise reporter's research files and interviews on a Southern California Klan group of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Intercept reported in 2024 that 'as recently as 1981, men in white hoods marched through downtown Fontana, near the police station.'

DatesShooting July 1, 1980; clashes Aug. 10 and Sept. 24, 1980; hooded march 1981

ActorsDovard Howard; Ku Klux Klan; anti-Klan group (Rev. William Dunston, Armando Navarro, Larry Culberson, Cyrus Kellog, Augustine Rios, per the LAPL caption); Fontana City Council (2016)

1Fontana Herald News, 'Man who survived hateful attack in 1980 is honored by Fontana City Council' (June 29, 2016)

2LAPL/Calisphere photographs: Dean Musgrove, 'Anti-Klan and Pro-Klan clash in Fontana' (Aug. 10, 1980); 'Anti-Klan group, with City Manager, Dr. Armondo Navarro, coming out of court house' (Sept. 24, 1980, Herald-Examiner Collection; photographer not named in the record); James Richardson papers, UCLA Library Special Collections (LSC.1818), finding aid (OAC)

Local press; contemporaneous news photographs (primary); archival finding aid

IEIV-0047Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL7 L2 L10

ConnectedIEIV-0031 IEIV-0021 IEIV-0036

Era 8Prison Boom, Border Militarization & Movement Under Siege

Resistance / Resilience

1982

Apr. 30, 1982

Orantes-Hernandez: a federal court restrains coerced 'voluntary departure' at El Centro

Policies & Systems

El Centro INS detention center (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan

In Orantes-Hernandez v. Smith, a Salvadoran asylum-seekers' class action, Judge David Kenyon found on June 2, 1982 that 'INS agents routinely give incomplete, misleading, and even false advice to Salvadorans regarding their legal rights,' pressuring them to sign voluntary-departure forms; at El Centro a plaintiff described solitary in 'La Loba,' INS guidelines allowed solitary 'without notice or an opportunity to be heard,' and the camp at one time had 'only two public telephones.' The injunction required notice of the right to seek asylum, counsel access and limits on solitary; a permanent injunction followed in 1988 (685 F. Supp. 1488), affirmed by the Ninth Circuit in 1990, modified and consolidated in 2007 (affirmed 2009), and not dissolved as of the Clearinghouse's 2026 record. The decision made El Centro a named site in the national record of Central American refugee defense and the first of the Imperial Valley's detention cases.

DatesPI Apr. 30, 1982 (opinion June 2, 1982); permanent injunction 1988 (685 F. Supp. 1488); affirmed 919 F.2d 549 (9th Cir. 1990)

ActorsSalvadoran asylum-seekers (class); Judge David Kenyon; INS; El Centro detention center

1Orantes-Hernandez v. Smith, 541 F. Supp. 351 (C.D. Cal. 1982)

2Orantes-Hernandez v. Thornburgh, 919 F.2d 549 (9th Cir. 1990); Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, Orantes-Hernandez v. Meese, No. 2:82-cv-01107 (C.D. Cal.) - 2007 modification, 2009 affirmance, status

Federal opinions (primary)

IEIV-0048Tier 1ImperialLineageL12 L3 L6

ConnectedIEIV-0034 IEIV-0051

Era 8Prison Boom, Border Militarization & Movement Under Siege

Resistance / Resilience

1984

1984-1992

Inland and desert communities build queer institutions in the AIDS years

Community & Cultural Forces

Riverside; Palm Springs

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla); Tongva

The Inland AIDS Project was organized in Riverside by the mid-1980s (IRS exemption ruling 1986; automatically revoked in 2019), and the Desert AIDS Project by volunteers in Palm Springs in 1984 (renamed DAP Health in 2021; NBC Palm Springs). Palm Springs Pride's history records its first event, 'Sizzle,' in 1986 under the Desert Business Association and a first parade in 1992 with 35 units. A UC Riverside capstone documents Riverside's 1987 AIDS Anti-Discrimination Ordinance and the Riverside Coalition Against Discrimination. Together these formed the institutional base of queer Inland Empire organizing that later produced TruEvolution and the all-LGBTQ Palm Springs council (IEIV-0088). Founding years vary across sources.

DatesInland AIDS Project by 1986 (IRS exemption); Desert AIDS Project 1984; 'Sizzle' 1986; Riverside ordinance 1987; first parade 1992

ActorsInland AIDS Project; Desert AIDS Project; Desert Business Association; Riverside Coalition Against Discrimination

1NBC Palm Springs, 'Desert AIDS Project rebrands as DAP Health, expands services' (Jan. 24, 2021); Greater Palm Springs Pride, 'History' (pspride.org/history)

2Sierra L. Mitchell, '"An Incredible Project": A History of Grassroots AIDS Activism in Riverside, California' (UCR University Honors capstone, 2024, eScholarship); IRS exempt-organization record, Inland AIDS Project (EIN 33-0141246)

Local press; organizational history; university honors capstone; IRS record

IEIV-0049Tier 2RiversideLineageL11

ConnectedIEIV-0088 CV-0087

Era 8Prison Boom, Border Militarization & Movement Under Siege

Resistance / Resilience

1984

Origins early 1980s; IRS exemption ruling year 1996

TODEC Legal Center founded in Perris

Community & Cultural Forces

Perris (Riverside Co.)

Homeland: Payómkawichum (Luiseño); Iviatim (Cahuilla)

TODEC dates its origins to the early 1980s in Perris (its 2025 Irvine Foundation profile says 'four decades ago'), with an IRS exemption ruling year of 1996; its executive director today is Luz Gallegos, daughter of the founders ('My parents started TODEC as a grassroots organization,' she told the Irvine Foundation in April 2025). Founded before the 1986 IRCA amnesty, it is among the longest-established immigrant-rights organizations in the Inland Empire, a legal-services and organizing anchor in Riverside County's farmworker and warehouse communities and, by 2025, a rapid-response hub (IEIV-0100). The Inland Empire Community Foundation identifies the founders as Luz Maria and Antonio Ayala, immigrants who settled in Perris.

ActorsTODEC Legal Center; Luz Gallegos; Perris immigrant families

1IRS exempt-organization record, TODEC Legal Center (EIN 33-0711527; ruling year 1996)

2Inland Empire Community Foundation, 'Grantee Spotlight: TODEC' (founders Luz Maria and Antonio Ayala; 'Established in the early 1980s'; Luz Gallegos, Executive Director); James Irvine Foundation, profile of TODEC and Luz Gallegos (Apr. 2025)

IRS exempt-organization record; organizational self-statement

IEIV-0050Tier 2RiversideLineageL6

ConnectedIEIV-0064 IEIV-0100

Era 8Prison Boom, Border Militarization & Movement Under Siege

Resistance / Resilience

1985

May 27 – June 3, 1985

Hunger strike at the El Centro camp

Carceral Systems & Prison Struggle

El Centro INS detention center (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan

On May 27, 1985 detained men at the El Centro INS camp began a hunger strike - fifteen at first, in the account Ordaz gave Unsung History; 175 to 300 from the start, in her paper - most of them Central American refugees (Ordaz), over heat reaching 120 degrees, food, medical care and abuse; on May 30 or 31 (Ordaz's sources differ) strikers were 'forcibly relocated... indoors,' and on June 3 Lutheran pastor William (Alex) Koski bailed out the remaining strikers. Historian Jessica Ordaz reconstructs the strike in The Shadow of El Centro (2021) from detainee and advocate records. Three years after Orantes-Hernandez (IEIV-0048), detained people themselves made the camp's conditions a public fight - the largest hunger strike in the camp's history, though not its first (Salvadoran detainees struck in 1981), as Ordaz's work shows - in a lineage that runs through Adelanto (IEIV-0082, IEIV-0103).

DatesStrike began May 27, 1985; strikers moved indoors May 30 or 31 (sources differ); remaining strikers bailed out June 3

ActorsDetained hunger strikers at El Centro; Pastor William Koski; INS

1Jessica Ordaz, The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity (UNC Press, 2021); interview, Unsung History podcast, 'Migrant Incarceration and the 1985 Hunger Strike'

2Los Angeles Times: H. G. Reza, '300 Aliens on Hunger Strike at El Centro INS Detention Center' (May 28, 1985, A8); Leonard Greenwood and Bill Farr, 'Immigrants on Hunger Strike Drop to 7' (June 1, 1985); Edward J. Boyer, '3 Congressmen Seek Investigation of INS' (June 7, 1985) - as cited in Ordaz, 'Making Invisible' (UC Davis Global Migration Center)

Monograph on archival records; scholar interview; press as cited

IEIV-0051Tier 2ImperialLineageL3 L12

ConnectedIEIV-0048 IEIV-0082

Era 8Prison Boom, Border Militarization & Movement Under Siege

Resistance / Resilience

1987

Argued Dec. 9, 1986; decided Feb. 25, 1987

Cabazon Band beats Riverside County; tribal gaming law is born

Policies & Systems

Cabazon and Morongo reservations (Riverside Co.); U.S. Supreme Court

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla)

California and Riverside County sought to apply state bingo and card-room laws on the Cabazon and Morongo reservations. In California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, decided February 25, 1987 by a 6-3 vote (White, J.; Stevens, O'Connor and Scalia dissenting), the Supreme Court held the state's bingo statute was 'civil/regulatory' rather than criminal/prohibitory and therefore unenforceable on reservation under Public Law 280, concluding that 'state and county laws are pre-empted.' The decision, won by two small Cahuilla bands in the Coachella Valley, is the foundation of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 and of the economic and political power Southern California tribes have exercised since - including in the water, land and monument fights later in this timeline.

ActorsCabazon Band of Mission Indians; Morongo Band; State of California; Riverside County; Justice Byron White

1California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, 480 U.S. 202 (1987)

2U.S. Reports vol. 480 (govinfo PDF)

Supreme Court opinion (primary)

IEIV-0052Tier 1RiversideLineageL1

ConnectedIEIV-0009 IEIV-0084

Era 8Prison Boom, Border Militarization & Movement Under Siege

Resistance / Resilience

1987

Comité Cívico del Valle founded in the Imperial Valley

Community & Cultural Forces

Brawley (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan

Comité Cívico del Valle was founded in 1987 by the father of its later executive director Luis Olmedo; PBS SoCal's 2017 profile records that the group has served the valley 'since 1987, when it was founded by Olmedo's father,' and that Olmedo became involved around 2000 and later executive director. From advocacy for migrant children the Comité grew into the Imperial Valley's environmental-justice anchor, operating community air monitoring and campaigns on the Salton Sea, and a voice in the lithium politics of the 2020s (IEIV-0091). The Alliance Healthcare Foundation's 2015 profile says it was established in 1987 and 'officially determined in 1989.'

DatesFounded 1987 ('officially determined in 1989,' per the Alliance Healthcare Foundation)

ActorsLuis Olmedo; his father (the Comité's founder); Imperial Valley farmworker families

1PBS SoCal, 'Making a More Powerful Movement: Imperial County Activist Luis Olmedo' (Jan. 25, 2017)

2Alliance Healthcare Foundation, 'Comite Civico del Valle' (Mar. 2, 2015) - established 1987, 'officially determined in 1989'

Public-media profile; foundation grantee profile

IEIV-0053Tier 2ImperialLineageL9 L6

ConnectedIEIV-0091 IEIV-0016

Era 8Prison Boom, Border Militarization & Movement Under Siege

Oppression / Dominance

1988

Dec. 1988-1994

Four prisons land in the desert: two at Blythe, Calipatria, Centinela

Carceral Systems & Prison Struggle

Blythe (Riverside Co.); Calipatria and Imperial (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Nüwü (Chemehuevi); Pipa Aha Macav (Mojave); Kumeyaay; Quechan

In six years the state built four prisons on the region's eastern and southern deserts: Chuckawalla Valley State Prison at Blythe (1988), Calipatria State Prison (1992; design capacity 2,308 per CDCR's 2024 capacity assessment), Centinela State Prison at Imperial (1993; design capacity 2,308) and Ironwood State Prison at Blythe (1994; design capacity 2,200). Promoted to desert towns as economic development, the prisons became the Inland Empire and Imperial Valley's share of the statewide boom (CV-0090) - and the yards where the 2011-2013 hunger strikes (IEIV-0073) and the Calipatria ASU victory (IEIV-0076) would be fought. The closure era reached Blythe first: Chuckawalla was deactivated in November 2024 (IEIV-0098).

DatesChuckawalla activated Dec. 1988 (OIG audit, 2009); Calipatria 1992; Centinela 1993; Ironwood 1994 (CDCR Capacity Assessment 2024)

ActorsCalifornia Department of Corrections; cities of Blythe, Calipatria, Imperial

1CDCR, Capacity Assessment 2024, Attachment B (year built and design capacity for CAL, CEN, ISP); CDCR, Chuckawalla Valley State Prison facility page; California Office of the Inspector General, Chuckawalla Valley State Prison warden audit (Dec. 2009) - 'activated in December 1988'

2CDCR, Ironwood State Prison facility page

State agency facility records; Inspector General audit (primary)

IEIV-0054Tier 2Multi-countyLineageL8 L3

ConnectedIEIV-0073 IEIV-0076 IEIV-0098 CV-0090

Era 8Prison Boom, Border Militarization & Movement Under Siege

Oppression / Dominance

1994

Gatekeeper launched Oct. 1, 1994; GAO report Aug. 15, 2006

Operation Gatekeeper pushes crossings - and deaths - into Imperial County

Policies & Systems

El Centro Sector: Imperial County desert and All-American Canal

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan; Cocopah

The Justice Department's Inspector General records that 'on October 1, 1994, the Border Patrol's San Diego Sector introduced a new border control plan at Imperial Beach Station,' rolled out eastward station by station. At a November 14, 2002 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights briefing, Prof. William Aceves said Gatekeeper 'sought to channel the migrants eastward... into the more inhospitable and dangerous terrain in east San Diego County and Imperial County,' and that by his count more than 2,200 had died crossing since 1994. GAO-06-770 (2006) found deaths had 'more than doubled' between 1995 and 2005, that the Border Patrol's count rose from 241 in 1999 to 472 in 2005, and that its data may understate deaths in some regions. The Imperial desert and the All-American Canal became, critics argued, the foreseeable killing ground of a strategy that pushed crossings east; canal drownings peaked at 31 in 1998 (IEIV-0057).

ActorsU.S. Border Patrol (San Diego and El Centro Sectors); INS; migrants crossing the Imperial desert

1U.S. Dept. of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 'Operation Gatekeeper: An Investigation Into Allegations of Fraud and Misconduct' (July 1998)

2GAO-06-770, 'Illegal Immigration: Border-Crossing Deaths Have Doubled Since 1995' (Aug. 15, 2006); U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, San Diego briefing transcript, Nov. 14, 2002 (usccr.gov/pubs/migrant/present/trans.htm)

Federal IG and GAO reports (primary); federal hearing transcript

IEIV-0055Tier 1ImperialLineageL12 L6

ConnectedIEIV-0057 IEIV-0068 IEIV-0070

Era 8Prison Boom, Border Militarization & Movement Under Siege

Resistance / Resilience

1994

Fall 1994 walkouts; Prop 187 passed Nov. 8, 1994

Riverside students join the walkouts against Proposition 187

Community & Cultural Forces

Riverside

Homeland: Multiple

As Proposition 187 moved toward passage, students across Southern California walked out of class; LAist's oral history of the measure records a Riverside participant whose middle school 'participated in the walkouts' and tried to 'join the high school students who were marching in the streets' until 'the school basically locked us in.' The measure was drafted, LAist records, by 'a group of conservative Orange County political activists'; its defeat in court and the generation it politicized belong to the statewide record (CV-0108).

ActorsRiverside students (Irene Sanchez, LAist oral history); Riverside schools

1LAist, 'Prop 187' oral history project (2019)

Retrospective oral history

IEIV-0056Tier 2Multi-countyLineageL6

ConnectedCV-0108 IEIV-0025

Era 8Prison Boom, Border Militarization & Movement Under Siege

Oppression / Dominance

1998

The All-American Canal: 'the most dangerous body of water in the U.S.'

Environmental Violence & Environmental Justice

All-American Canal (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan; Cocopah

Associated Press reporting in January 2011 recorded that 'more than 500 people have drowned in the All-American Canal since the waterway was built in 1942,' that 'the death toll peaked at 31 in 1998 after a Border Patrol crackdown in San Diego pushed migrants to cross in remote areas,' and that the canal had been 'dubbed "the most dangerous body of water in the U.S."' CBS's 60 Minutes described a channel 225 feet across and 20 feet deep 'with few rescue lines or climb-out ladders.' IID approved climb-out ladders along about a quarter of the canal in 2007 (60 Minutes). The lifeline fight that followed is IEIV-0070; the unidentified dead were buried at Holtville (IEIV-0068).

DatesPeak year 1998 (31 drownings); 'more than 500' since 1942 (AP, Jan. 2011)

ActorsMigrants crossing at Calexico; Imperial Irrigation District; Border Patrol El Centro Sector

1Associated Press (Calexico dateline), 'Buoys strung on border canal to prevent drownings' (Jan. 4-5, 2011; via CBS Sacramento, NBC News and syndicated copies)

2CBS News, 60 Minutes, 'The Deadly Passage of the All-American Canal' (Apr. 30, 2010)

Wire and broadcast journalism

IEIV-0057Tier 1ImperialLineageL12 L9

ConnectedIEIV-0055 IEIV-0068 IEIV-0070

Era 8Prison Boom, Border Militarization & Movement Under Siege

Resistance / Resilience

1998

Feb. 13, 1998

Five nations hold Ward Valley 113 days and kill a nuclear dump

Environmental Violence & Environmental Justice

Ward Valley, near Needles (San Bernardino Co.)

Homeland: Pipa Aha Macav (Mojave); Nüwü (Chemehuevi)

Against a proposed low-level radioactive waste dump in Ward Valley, the Fort Mojave Tribe kept a protest encampment at the site; in early 1998 BLM ordered the encampment closed, with eviction set for February 13 (High Country News). The Fort Mojave, Chemehuevi, Quechan, Cocopah and Colorado River Indian Tribes - leaders including Nora McDowell, Steve Lopez, David Harper and Llewellyn Barrackman - with allies held the ground; 'after 113 days, the BLM rescinded the eviction order,' High Country News records. In California Dept. of Health Services v. Babbitt the district court ruled for Interior on March 31, 1999, holding that rescinding the 1993 record of decision 'was not arbitrary and capricious' and that the state 'is not entitled to mandamus relief' compelling the sale; the project was abandoned. It is the longest Indigenous-led occupation documented on this timeline.

DatesBLM closure order effective Feb. 13, 1998 (HCN); eviction order rescinded after 113 days; district court ruling Mar. 31, 1999

ActorsFort Mojave Indian Tribe; Chemehuevi; Quechan; Cocopah; Colorado River Indian Tribes; Bureau of Land Management; Secretary Bruce Babbitt

1Anna V. Smith, 'A tribal nation's lasting victory in the Mojave Desert,' High Country News (Mar. 22, 2023) - Feb. 13, 1998 eviction date; 113 days

2California Dept. of Health Services v. Babbitt, 46 F. Supp. 2d 13 (D.D.C. Mar. 31, 1999) (Nos. 97-218, 97-365), Environmental Law Reporter summary

Magazine history; federal opinion (reporter summary)

IEIV-0058Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL1 L9 L10

ConnectedIEIV-0028 IEIV-0045 IEIV-0099

Era 8Prison Boom, Border Militarization & Movement Under Siege

Oppression / Dominance

1998

Dec. 28, 1998

Riverside police kill Tyisha Miller: 'as many as two dozen shots'

Colonization, Conquest & Political Violence

Riverside

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla); Tongva

On December 28, 1998 four Riverside police officers fired 'as many as two dozen shots,' CBS News reported, into a locked car in which Tyisha Miller, 19, lay 'either asleep or unconscious' with a gun in her lap after relatives called for help; five officers - 'four whites and one Hispanic' - were placed on leave. District Attorney Grover Trask declined to file charges in May 1999 and four officers were fired on July 12, 1999 (a court ordered one reinstated in 2003). Sustained protest, including by the Tyisha Miller Steering Committee, preceded the state Attorney General's nearly two-year investigation that produced what the Attorney General's office said 'is believed to be the first court-enforced judgment to reform a police department' obtained by a state attorney general (IEIV-0062). The killing is the hinge of modern Black Riverside's confrontation with police power.

DatesKilled Dec. 28, 1998; DA declines charges May 1999; officers fired July 12, 1999

ActorsTyisha Miller; Riverside Police Department officers; DA Grover Trask; Tyisha Miller Steering Committee

1Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, People v. City of Riverside (case summary citing the 1998 killing and 2001 judgment)

2CBS News, 'Did Tyisha Miller Have To Die?' (Dec. 30, 1998); California Attorney General, release of Mar. 2, 2006 on the end of court-enforced monitoring (oag.ca.gov/node/30232); Rains Lucia Stern (officers' counsel), account of the firings and the 2003 reinstatement order; Amnesty International, 'California: Update on Police Brutality' (Sept. 1999)

Litigation database; contemporaneous national press

IEIV-0059Tier 1RiversideLineageL2 L7

ConnectedIEIV-0062 IEIV-0095

2000–2015

Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

21 entries1047

2000Congress settles the Torres-Martinez flood claims after 93 years
2000Water Station: a volunteer network puts water in the killing desert
2001California's first court-enforced police reform judgment lands on Riverside
2001California's Slavery Era Insurance Registry: the policies on enslaved lives are disclosed
2004Chino guard convicted of racketeering for the Nazi Low Riders
2008A bishop founds the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice
2009Glamis Gold v. United States: the Quechan defense of Indian Pass holds
2009Chino's overcrowded reception center explodes; the Supreme Court takes notice
2009Residents and park advocates beat the 'largest landfill in the United States'
2009Holtville's field of John and Jane Does
2009Duroville: a federal receiver, then closure, for a farmworker park
2010After 60 Minutes, IID strings lifelines across the All-American Canal
2010College students found the Inland Empire Immigrant Youth Collective
2011Adelanto sells its prison to GEO; ICE moves in
2011The 2011 hunger strike reaches Calipatria, Centinela, Ironwood and Norco
2012Save Our Chinatown wins on appeal; the city's approval is set aside
2012Warehouse workers strike Walmart's contractors and march 50 miles to Los Angeles
2013Calipatria's ASU hunger strikers and a disputed negotiated response
2014Murrieta: protesters turn back buses of Central American families
2014West Valley jail abuse draws the FBI and a $2.5 million settlement
2015A helicopter films deputies beating Francis Pusok; the county pays $650,000

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Resistance / Resilience

2000

Pub. L. 106-568, Dec. 27, 2000

Congress settles the Torres-Martinez flood claims after 93 years

Policies & Systems

Torres-Martinez Reservation, Salton Sea (Riverside/Imperial Cos.)

Homeland: Desert Cahuilla (Torres-Martinez)

The Torres-Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians Claims Settlement Act, enacted December 27, 2000, resolved the tribe's claims for reservation lands submerged by the 1905–07 creation of the Salton Sea (IEIV-0016). Its findings recite the sequence - the 640-acre section of 1876, the 1891 addition, the floods, the 1909 Secretarial Order adding land already under water, and the 1992 federal judgment against the water districts - and the Act authorized compensation and the acquisition of replacement lands. The Senate report (S. Rep. 106-474) accompanies it. The settlement is the legal close of the region's first great environmental injustice and the base from which the tribe engages the Salton Sea's 21st-century dust and lithium politics (IEIV-0091).

ActorsTorres-Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians; Congress; CVWD; IID

1Pub. L. 106-568, Title VI, 114 Stat. 2906 (Dec. 27, 2000) - codified findings at 25 U.S.C. §1778

2S. Rep. 106-474 (govinfo)

Statute and committee report (primary)

IEIV-0060Tier 1Multi-countyLineageL1 L9

ConnectedIEIV-0016 IEIV-0091

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Resistance / Resilience

2000

1999-2000 (sources conflict)

Water Station: a volunteer network puts water in the killing desert

Community & Cultural Forces

Imperial County desert, Ocotillo to Yuma

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan; Cocopah

Physicist John Hunter founded Water Station Inc. to place water in the Imperial County desert where crossers were dying after Operation Gatekeeper; KJZZ dates the start to 2000, La Prensa San Diego to 1999. 'In those years we had 340 water stations,' Laura Hunter told KJZZ in 2013; by then the group kept about 150, placed, reporter Adrian Florido wrote, 'in the most dangerous areas measured by where migrants have been found dead,' and roughly 65 by 2019 (La Prensa). John Hunter, whose brother, former Rep. Duncan L. Hunter, championed border fencing in Congress (60 Minutes), lobbied the Imperial Irrigation District for a decade to install canal lifelines (IEIV-0070).

DatesFounded 1999-2000 (sources conflict: La Prensa 1999; KJZZ 2000)

ActorsJohn Hunter; Laura Hunter; Water Station Inc.

1KJZZ (Adrian Florido), 'A Day in the Imperial Valley Helping Migrants Unseen' (Oct. 9, 2013); La Prensa San Diego, 'Project leaves water for migrants in the desert, celebrates 20 years' (June 6, 2019)

2CBS News, 60 Minutes, 'The Deadly Passage of the All-American Canal' (Apr. 30, 2010); Imperial Valley Press (May 13, 2018)

Broadcast and local press (participant statements)

IEIV-0061Tier 2ImperialLineageL12 L10

ConnectedIEIV-0055 IEIV-0070

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Contested / Both

2001

Mar. 5, 2001

California's first court-enforced police reform judgment lands on Riverside

Policies & Systems

Riverside Police Department; Riverside County Superior Court

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla); Tongva

After a civil-rights investigation opened in the wake of the Tyisha Miller killing (IEIV-0059), Attorney General Bill Lockyer filed a stipulated judgment against the City of Riverside on March 5, 2001, placing the police department under a five-year reform program with Joseph Brann as monitor. On March 2, 2006 Judge Sharon Waters dissolved the judgment, and the Attorney General's office described it as 'believed to be the first court-enforced judgment to reform a police department ever obtained by a state attorney general anywhere in the country.' The judgment is a documented check on police power won by sustained community pressure - and the template for the state's later pattern-or-practice investigations, including the one opened against the Riverside County Sheriff in 2023 (IEIV-0095).

DatesStipulated judgment filed Mar. 5, 2001 (Riverside Co. Super. Ct. No. 355410); dissolved Mar. 2, 2006

ActorsAttorney General Bill Lockyer; City of Riverside; monitor Joseph Brann; Judge Sharon Waters; Tyisha Miller Steering Committee

1California Attorney General, press release, Mar. 2, 2006, 'Attorney General Lockyer Announces Conclusion of Five-Year, Court-Enforced State Monitoring of Riverside Police Department'

2Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, People v. City of Riverside

AG release (primary); litigation database

IEIV-0062Tier 1RiversideLineageL7 L2

ConnectedIEIV-0059 IEIV-0095

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Contested / Both

2001

Feb.-Mar. 2001

California's Slavery Era Insurance Registry: the policies on enslaved lives are disclosed

Policies & Systems

Statewide; Los Angeles hearing (connected ground)

Homeland: Multiple

Insurance Code sections 13810-13813 (2000) directed the Commissioner to obtain 'records of slaveholder insurance policies issued by any predecessor corporation during the slavery era' and declared descendants 'entitled to full disclosure.' The Department invited nineteen insurers on February 8, 2001, held hearings in Los Angeles (March 13) and San Francisco (March 16) - the Los Angeles hearing drawing testimony 'regarding the issue of reparations' - reporting in May 2002. New York Life's May 1, 2002 letter disclosed that its predecessor Nautilus collected '$7,485.24' in premiums on enslaved people and paid fifteen death claims totaling '$7,474' (the Department's registry lists the policies by Southern state; none were written in California). It precedes by a quarter century the Truth in Disclosure Act (AB 2599, Bryan), signed September 30, 2026, requiring companies with more than $100 million in annual worldwide sales to file sworn disclosures of slavery-related transactions from January 15, 2029.

DatesSB 2199 (Hayden) 2000; CDI letters to 19 insurers Feb. 8, 2001; hearings Los Angeles Mar. 13 and San Francisco Mar. 16, 2001; report May 2002; AB 2599 signed Sept. 30, 2026

ActorsCalifornia Department of Insurance; Sen. Tom Hayden; New York Life, Aetna, AIG and other insurers; descendants of the insured; Asm. Isaac Bryan (AB 2599)

⚑ Human-collateral: persons (insured lives)

1California Department of Insurance, Slavery Era Insurance Registry: Report to the California Legislature (May 2002) and registry page

2New York Life Insurance Co., letter to the Department of Insurance, May 1, 2002 (insurance.ca.gov PDF); Ballotpedia News, 'California passes bill requiring large companies to disclose historical ties to slavery' (Oct. 13, 2026); CalMatters (Oct. 2, 2026) on AB 2599

State agency report and corporate disclosure (primary); legislative news

IEIV-0112Tier 1Connected groundLineageL2

ConnectedIEIV-0105 IEIV-0006

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Oppression / Dominance

2004

Indicted 2004

Chino guard convicted of racketeering for the Nazi Low Riders

Carceral Systems & Prison Struggle

California Institution for Men, Chino (San Bernardino Co.); U.S. District Court, Los Angeles

Homeland: Tongva

Shayne Allyn Ziska, a CIM Chino officer from 1984 (placed on leave in 2000) and union shop steward, was convicted at a bench trial before Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr. on February 14, 2006 of racketeering conspiracy, violent crime in aid of racketeering and civil-rights deprivation; the trial evidence, per LA Weekly, included giving a gang shot-caller the incident report naming prisoner Nathan Johnson, stabbed in the eye on July 24, 2000, and aiding the gang's drug trade. The case grew from a 1999 Ontario police investigation and a 2002 indictment of 29 gang members (LA Weekly). Hatter imposed 210 months (17 1/2 years), reimposed after a 2008 remand and affirmed in 2010; Ziska was acquitted on two counts. Ex-officer Linda Diane Sherrow pleaded guilty in 2008 to lying to the grand jury about seeing Ziska 'opening inmates' cell doors and allowing them to roam freely.'

DatesIndicted 2004; convicted Feb. 14, 2006 on three counts (acquitted on two); sentenced June 26, 2006 to 210 months (17 1/2 yrs); sentence vacated Feb. 25, 2008 and 210 months reimposed, affirmed Dec. 28, 2010 (per docket); co-worker's perjury plea announced Jan. 23, 2008

ActorsShayne Allyn Ziska; Nazi Low Riders; Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr.; Linda Diane Sherrow

1U.S. Attorney's Office, C.D. Cal., Release No. 08-004, Jan. 23, 2008 (Sherrow perjury plea; Ziska 'sentenced to 17 1/2 years')

2Christine Pelisek, 'The Prison King,' LA Weekly, Mar. 22, 2006; United States v. Ziska, No. 2:04-cr-01002 (C.D. Cal.) docket (CourtListener); 267 Fed. Appx. 717 (9th Cir. 2008); No. 09-50336 (9th Cir. Dec. 28, 2010)

DOJ release and federal docket (primary); contemporaneous investigative press

IEIV-0063Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL7 L3

ConnectedIEIV-0066 CV-0085 CV-0103

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Resistance / Resilience

2008

A bishop founds the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice

Community & Cultural Forces

Inland Empire (Riverside and San Bernardino Cos.)

Homeland: Multiple

The Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice was 'Founded in 2008 by Roman Catholic Auxiliary Bishop Rutilio del Riego' (Inland Empire Community Foundation, 2023). By 2023 it counted some 35 member organizations (its 2023 profile and executive director Javier Hernandez's 2026 account); Hernandez recalls Klan and neo-Nazi groups rallying and counter-protesting its events in Riverside, Claremont and Pomona around 2009–10. ICIJ went on to work in the Shut Down Adelanto campaign (IEIV-0086) and the 2025 rapid-response network (IEIV-0100).

DatesFounded 2008 (Inland Empire Community Foundation); 15th anniversary 2023

ActorsBishop Rutilio del Riego; Javier Hernandez; member organizations

1Inland Empire Community Foundation, ICIJ 2023 profile ('Founded in 2008 by Roman Catholic Auxiliary Bishop Rutilio del Riego'; 35 organizations)

2Javier Hernandez, UC Berkeley Othering & Belonging Institute, CA Organizing Series (Apr. 2026)

Foundation profile; movement leader's account

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ConnectedIEIV-0050 IEIV-0086 IEIV-0100

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Resistance / Resilience

2009

June 8, 2009

Glamis Gold v. United States: the Quechan defense of Indian Pass holds

Environmental Violence & Environmental Justice

Indian Pass, Imperial County; NAFTA tribunal

Homeland: Kwatsáan (Quechan)

Glamis Gold's Imperial Project, an open-pit gold mine at Indian Pass in the Quechan's sacred landscape along the Colorado, was denied by Interior's January 2001 record of decision (rescinded that November), then, Glamis contended, made uneconomic by California's December 2002 emergency backfilling regulations and SB 22 of April 2003. Glamis claimed some $50 million under NAFTA; the Quechan Indian Nation filed non-party submissions on August 19, 2005 and October 16, 2006 warning that the claim 'could affect the integrity of the sacred area and the Tribe's relation to it.' On June 8, 2009 the tribunal (Young, Caron, Hubbard) dismissed both claims on their merits under NAFTA Articles 1105 and 1110; the award, with the tribe's own filings before it, is the primary international record of the Indian Pass dispute.

DatesNAFTA award June 8, 2009; Interior ROD Jan. 17, 2001 (rescinded Nov. 23, 2001, per High Country News); SMGB regs Dec. 2002; SB 22 Apr. 2003

ActorsQuechan Indian Nation; Glamis Gold Ltd.; U.S. Dept. of the Interior; California State Mining and Geology Board; NAFTA tribunal

1Glamis Gold Ltd. v. United States of America, Award (UNCITRAL/NAFTA, June 8, 2009), italaw

2Quechan Indian Nation, Application for Leave to File a Non-Party Submission and Submission (Aug. 19, 2005) and Supplemental Submission (Oct. 16, 2006), via arbitration.org; italaw case page, Glamis Gold v. United States (case 487); Matt Weiser, 'Gold may bury tribe's path to its past,' High Country News (Dec. 17, 2001) - denial Jan. 17, withdrawal Nov. 23, 2001

Arbitral award and non-party submissions (primary); press

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ConnectedIEIV-0045 IEIV-0058 IEIV-0099

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Contested / Both

2009

Aug. 8, 2009

Chino's overcrowded reception center explodes; the Supreme Court takes notice

Carceral Systems & Prison Struggle

California Institution for Men, Reception Center West, Chino (San Bernardino Co.)

Homeland: Tongva

At about 8:30 p.m. on August 8, 2009 a riot involving more than 1,000 prisoners swept CIM's Reception Center West for some four hours; 232 prisoners required treatment and 54 were taken to hospitals. The Office of the Inspector General's special report found Reception Center West holding 1,335 men against a design capacity of 615 in eight open dormitories with two officers each, and CIM as a whole at 5,867 against 2,976; it concluded the department 'failed to house a suitable inmate population' there. Two years later Brown v. Plata upheld the order capping California's prisons at 137.5 percent of design capacity, describing gymnasiums where 'as many as 200 prisoners may live'; one of the photographs appended to the opinion (Appendix B) is captioned 'California Institution for Men, Aug. 7, 2006.'

DatesRiot Aug. 8, 2009; OIG special report Apr. 2010; Brown v. Plata May 23, 2011

ActorsCIM prisoners; CDCR; Inspector General David R. Shaw; U.S. Supreme Court (Brown v. Plata)

1California Office of the Inspector General, Special Report on the California Institution for Men August 2009 Riot (Apr. 2010)

2Brown v. Plata, 563 U.S. 493 (2011)

State OIG report; Supreme Court opinion (primary)

IEIV-0066Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL3 L8

ConnectedIEIV-0063 IEIV-0073

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Resistance / Resilience

2009

Nov. 10, 2009

Residents and park advocates beat the 'largest landfill in the United States'

Environmental Violence & Environmental Justice

Eagle Mountain, near Joshua Tree National Park (Riverside Co.)

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla); Nüwü (Chemehuevi)

Kaiser first floated in 1987 (exchange application 1989) a plan to turn its Eagle Mountain iron mine, within 1.5 miles of Joshua Tree National Park, into a 20,000-ton-a-day landfill for Los Angeles County's trash. Donna and Laurence Charpied of Desert Center, with the National Parks Conservation Association, fought it for more than two decades; on November 10, 2009 (amended May 19, 2010) the Ninth Circuit held the BLM's land appraisal violated the Federal Land Policy and Management Act's 'highest and best use' standard and that the environmental impact statement's purpose was unreasonably narrow. After the Supreme Court declined review on March 28, 2011, on May 23, 2013 the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts scrapped the project (NPCA). The ruling won by the Charpieds and the National Parks Conservation Association - over a dissent by Judge Trott - stood until the project's sponsors walked away.

DatesFloated 1987; exchange application 1989; 9th Cir. Nov. 10, 2009; cert. denied Mar. 28, 2011; abandoned May 23, 2013

ActorsDonna and Laurence Charpied; National Parks Conservation Association; Kaiser Eagle Mountain / Mine Reclamation Corp.; Bureau of Land Management; LA County Sanitation Districts

1National Parks Conservation Association v. Bureau of Land Management, Nos. 05-56814 et al. (9th Cir. Nov. 10, 2009; amended 606 F.3d 1058, May 19, 2010) (Pregerson, J.; Trott, J., dissenting) - 'Kaiser's ultimate goal is to develop the largest landfill in the United States'

2National Parks Conservation Association, release of Mar. 28, 2011 (Supreme Court will not hear Kaiser's appeal) and David Lamfrom, 'No Trash, Just Treasure' (June 13, 2013)

Federal appellate opinion (primary); movement press

IEIV-0067Tier 1RiversideLineageL9

ConnectedIEIV-0044 IEIV-0099

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Contested / Both

2009

From 1995; Oct. 25, 2009

Holtville's field of John and Jane Does

Disasters & Major Events

Terrace Park Cemetery, Holtville (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan

When El Centro's Evergreen Cemetery plot filled in 1995, Imperial County began burying its unidentified dead - some of them migrants who died crossing the desert (KPBS) - in a dirt field behind Terrace Park Cemetery in Holtville. A 2009 Imperial Valley Press article, read here only as reproduced in a poem by Manuel Paul López, gave 237 unidentified graves; KPBS counted 238 unidentified and 284 identified indigent burials in 2016, and an undated WORLD report puts the field at roughly 520 graves, about half unidentified. Border Angels has led recurring cross-planting visits - about every six weeks, then nearly weekly from early 2017 (Pacific Standard) - and since 2009 the county has cremated unidentified remains rather than burying them there (KPBS, 2016; Pacific Standard, Mar. 31, 2017). The counts differ by date and method.

DatesBurials at Terrace Park from 1995; 237 unidentified graves (Imperial Valley Press, Oct. 25, 2009, as reproduced by Manuel Paul López); 238 unidentified + 284 identified indigent (KPBS, 2016); 240 unidentified (Pacific Standard, 2017)

ActorsImperial County coroner; Terrace Park Cemetery; Border Angels

1Jean Guerrero, KPBS, 'Imperial County may hold answers about missing Mexicans' (June 28, 2016)

2Morgan Baskin, 'Field Notes From a Cemetery for the Nameless,' Pacific Standard (Mar. 31, 2017); Sophia Lee, 'Remembering the lost dead,' WORLD; Silvio J. Panta, 'Undocumented migrants buried in Holtville cemetery,' Imperial Valley Press (Oct. 25, 2009), as reproduced in Manuel Paul López's poem 'The Xoco Letters' (Hudson Valley Writers Guild, Oct. 2013)

Public media; national press; local press as reproduced in a literary work

IEIV-0068Tier 1ImperialLineageL12 L10

ConnectedIEIV-0055 IEIV-0057

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Contested / Both

2009

Order Apr. 30, 2009; park closed June 30, 2013

Duroville: a federal receiver, then closure, for a farmworker park

Environmental Violence & Environmental Justice

Desert Mobile Home Park ('Duroville'), Torres-Martinez Reservation, Thermal (Riverside Co.)

Homeland: Desert Cahuilla (Torres-Martinez)

In United States v. Harvey Duro, Sr., No. EDCV 07-01309-SGL (C.D. Cal. Apr. 30, 2009), Judge Stephen Larson found the Desert Mobile Home Park on Torres-Martinez allotted land operated 'in violation of federal law requiring a lease approved by the Secretary of Interior' and 'in an illegal, unsafe, and unhealthy manner,' but held that immediate closure 'would create one of the largest forced human migrations in the history of this State'; he appointed Thomas J. Flynn as receiver for two years. The park, home to 'between 2,000 and 6,000 persons' by the U.S. Attorney's 2007 estimate (some 3,000 by 2013, per the Press-Enterprise), closed on June 30, 2013 as residents moved to the new Mountain View Estates. The case sits where tribal land, farmworker housing and environmental health meet, and is entered as contested: a condemnation of conditions and a defense of the people living in them.

ActorsHarvey Duro Sr.; Desert Mobile Home Park residents; Judge Stephen G. Larson; receiver Thomas J. Flynn; Torres-Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians

1United States v. Harvey Duro, Sr., No. EDCV 07-01309-SGL (C.D. Cal. Apr. 30, 2009), via NARF National Indian Law Library (also Turtle Talk, post-trial findings PDF)

2Associated Press, 'Desert trailer park closes after legal battles' (June 2013, via Manteca Bulletin; also SF Examiner); Press-Enterprise via Indianz (May 14, 2013); U.S. Attorney's Office, C.D. Cal., Release No. 07-132 (Oct. 9, 2007) - '300 to 400 trailers inhabited by between 2,000 and 6,000 persons'

Federal opinion (primary); wire press

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ConnectedIEIV-0016 IEIV-0060

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Contested / Both

2010

Apr.-Sept. 2010

After 60 Minutes, IID strings lifelines across the All-American Canal

Policies & Systems

All-American Canal (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan; Cocopah

John Hunter lobbied the Imperial Irrigation District for about ten years, 60 Minutes reported, to install safety lines in the All-American Canal; IID director Stella Mendoza asked 60 Minutes, in a segment broadcast April 30, 2010, 'Is the IID supposed to save every individual that jumps into the canal? Is that my role as a director?' The Associated Press reported that the district 'reversed course in August and has been bolting 105 lines across the 82-mile desert canal at a cost of $1.1 million,' with 1,414 bilingual warning signs, the catalyst appearing to be the broadcast. Additional buoy lines were added at each of the canal's five hydroelectric drops in December 2022 (KYMA). Twelve people had drowned in 2009 alone; the lifelines followed a decade of volunteer pressure and a national broadcast.

Dates60 Minutes Apr. 30, 2010; IID reversal Aug. 2010; 105 lines installed from Sept. 2010; buoy lines at the five hydroelectric drops Dec. 2022

ActorsImperial Irrigation District (Stella Mendoza); John Hunter; CBS 60 Minutes

1Associated Press (Calexico dateline), 'Buoys strung on border canal to prevent drownings' (Jan. 4-5, 2011; via CBS Sacramento, NBC News and syndicated copies)

2KYMA, 'IID adds buoy lines to All-American Canal' (Feb. 2, 2023); Calexico Chronicle (Jan. 6, 2023); CBS News, 60 Minutes (Apr. 30, 2010)

Wire press; local press; broadcast

IEIV-0070Tier 1ImperialLineageL12 L9

ConnectedIEIV-0057 IEIV-0061

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Resistance / Resilience

2010

Founded 2010

College students found the Inland Empire Immigrant Youth Collective

Community & Cultural Forces

Inland Empire (Riverside and San Bernardino Cos.)

Homeland: Multiple

The Inland Empire Immigrant Youth Collective was founded in 2010 (its website; IECF) - 'born from a couple of college students,' Angel Fajardo of the collective told KVCR in 2024. Formed in the years of the DREAM Act fights and DACA, the collective, which describes itself as undocumented youth-led, became a youth-led organizing base in the region and, through Mitzie Perez, a public voice for the Adelanto hunger strikers of 2017 (IEIV-0082).

ActorsInland Empire Immigrant Youth Collective; Mitzie Perez

1Inland Empire Immigrant Youth Collective, 'About'

2KVCR, 'IE Latino Voices' (July 17, 2024) - 'born from a couple of college students'; Inland Empire Community Foundation, grantee spotlight ('Founded in 2010'); Detention Watch Network release (June 13, 2017) - Mitzie Perez statement

Organizational self-statements

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ConnectedIEIV-0064 IEIV-0082

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Oppression / Dominance

2011

May-June 2011

Adelanto sells its prison to GEO; ICE moves in

Carceral Systems & Prison Struggle

Adelanto (San Bernardino Co.)

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano - Vanyume)

In June 2010 the City of Adelanto sold its 650-bed detention facility to the GEO Group for 'approximately $28.0 million,' GEO's own release records; in May 2011 the city signed an intergovernmental service agreement with ICE (ILRC), and GEO announced on June 1, 2011 a contract to run the site as the Adelanto Detention Facility, expanded to 1,300 beds; by 2018 KQED called it the state's largest immigrant detention facility. The sale was a high-desert town's bet on a detention economy - the Inland Empire's version of the prison-town political economy documented in the Central Valley (CV-0090) - and the beginning of a record of deaths, hunger strikes, federal inspections, litigation and campaigns to shut the facility down (IEIV-0082, IEIV-0083, IEIV-0086, IEIV-0089, IEIV-0103).

DatesCity sale to GEO June 2010; city-ICE agreement May 2011 (ILRC timeline); GEO contract announced June 1, 2011

ActorsCity of Adelanto; GEO Group; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

1DHS Office of Inspector General, OIG-18-86 (Sept. 2018) - facility background

2GEO Group release, June 2011, 'The GEO Group wins contract for 1,300-bed detention facility in California' (via FMLink) - June 2010 purchase for ~$28.0 million; Immigrant Legal Resource Center, 'Adelanto Immigration Detention Contract Timeline'; KQED (Oct. 6, 2018)

Federal OIG report; corporate release; advocacy timeline; press

IEIV-0072Tier 2San BernardinoLineageL8 L12

ConnectedIEIV-0086 IEIV-0082 CV-0090 IEIV-0119 IEIV-0120

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Resistance / Resilience

2011

July 2011; resumed Sept. 26, 2011

The 2011 hunger strike reaches Calipatria, Centinela, Ironwood and Norco

Carceral Systems & Prison Struggle

Calipatria and Centinela (Imperial Co.); Ironwood and CRC Norco (Riverside Co.); West Valley Detention Center (San Bernardino Co.)

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan; Nüwü; Tongva

When prisoners in Pelican Bay's SHU launched the July 2011 hunger strike against indefinite solitary confinement, supporters' reports compiled by the Bay View listed Calipatria, Centinela, Ironwood, the California Rehabilitation Center at Norco and San Bernardino County's West Valley Detention Center among participating facilities; the Bay View put the July peak at 'at least 6,660 prisoners in a third of California's prisons' and, when the strike resumed on September 26, 2011, reported the federal receiver's office count of at least 12,000 refusing meals in the first week. More than 100 men in Calipatria's Administrative Segregation Unit, where about 400 were held as validated gang members, took part. The Inland Empire and Imperial Valley prisons were among the listed participants in the movement that produced the Agreement to End Hostilities (CV-0121) and the 2013 strike (IEIV-0076).

ActorsHunger strikers at Calipatria, Centinela, Ironwood, CRC Norco, WVDC; Pelican Bay Short Corridor Collective; CDCR (Scott Kernan)

1San Francisco Bay View, '12,000 California prisoners on hunger strike' (Oct. 2011)

2San Francisco Bay View, 'California prisoners resume hunger strike today' (Sept. 26, 2011) - Calipatria ASU figures

Movement press compiling supporter releases and federal receiver's-office figures

IEIV-0073Tier 2Multi-countyLineageL3 L10

ConnectedIEIV-0076 CV-0119 CV-0121

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Resistance / Resilience

2012

SOCC formed 2008; Court of Appeal ruling Mar. 21, 2012

Save Our Chinatown wins on appeal; the city's approval is set aside

Community & Cultural Forces

Riverside Chinatown site (Riverside)

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla); Tongva

After the 1984–85 Great Basin Foundation excavation recovered 'some three tons of artifacts' from Riverside's Chinatown site (published as Wong Ho Leun), the site was listed as a county, city and National Register landmark. When the city approved a medical office building on the parcel, sold by the county office of education to Jacobs Development, residents formed the Save Our Chinatown Committee in 2008; the trial court voided the sale but upheld the EIR, and on March 21, 2012 the Court of Appeal (Fourth District) held the EIR's alternatives analysis inadequate and directed that the city's certification and approval be set aside - while reversing the trial court on the committee's surplus-property claim; 'SOCC prevailed in overturning the City's approval for the medical office building,' the committee's history records. The ruling stopped that project, 127 years after the relocation of 1885 (IEIV-0011).

ActorsSave Our Chinatown Committee; City of Riverside; Great Basin Foundation (1984-85 excavation)

1Save Our Chinatown Committee / Google Arts & Culture, 'Riverside's Chinatown' story

2Save Our Chinatown Committee v. City of Riverside, Cal. Ct. App., 4th Dist. (Mar. 21, 2012) (Richli, J.), case summary; Asian Connections, 'Save Our Chinatown Committee Celebrates Court Victory' (Mar. 28, 2012)

Preservation-organization documentation; appellate opinion (primary)

IEIV-0074Tier 2RiversideLineageL5

ConnectedIEIV-0011

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Resistance / Resilience

2012

2011-2012

Warehouse workers strike Walmart's contractors and march 50 miles to Los Angeles

Land, Labor & Agricultural Empire

Mira Loma and Ontario warehouses (Riverside/San Bernardino Cos.) to Los Angeles

Homeland: Tongva; Iviatim (Cahuilla)

Warehouse Workers United (2009) organized among the Inland Empire's warehouse workers; in October and November 2011 the Labor Commissioner cited two staffing agencies - Impact Logistics $499,000 and Premier Warehousing Ventures $616,250 for wage-statement and payroll-record violations - and workers filed Carrillo v. Schneider Logistics, in which Judge Christina Snyder issued preliminary injunctions on December 7, 2011 and in January 2012 against pay and record-keeping practices the court found likely unlawful and the mass termination of Premier's workers. In September 2012 workers at the NFI crossdock in Riverside County struck and marched fifty miles from Ontario to downtown Los Angeles - the 'WalMarch.' Schneider agreed in May 2014 to pay $21 million to settle the case, pending final court approval (Transport Topics), covering roughly 1,800 Mira Loma workers, with claims reaching back to 2001. The Warehouse Worker Resource Center carried the fight into AB 701 (2021), regulating warehouse quotas.

DatesWWU established 2009; Labor Commissioner citations Oct. 12 and Nov. 17, 2011; PIs Dec. 7, 2011 and late Jan. 2012 (affirmed 9th Cir. Dec. 28, 2012); WalMarch Sept. 2012; $21M settlement announced May 2014; AB 701 enacted 2021

ActorsWarehouse Workers United; Warehouse Worker Resource Center; Schneider Logistics; NFI; Walmart; Judge Christina Snyder

1Carrillo v. Schneider Logistics, Inc., No. CV 11-8557 CAS (C.D. Cal.), Order Granting Preliminary Injunction, Dkt. 106 (Dec. 7, 2011) (Justia); Ninth Circuit memorandum Nos. 12-55042/12-55386 (Dec. 28, 2012) affirming both injunctions; California DIR releases Oct. 12 and Nov. 17, 2011 (PR Newswire)

2Warehouse Worker Resource Center, 'History'; Transport Topics, on Schneider's $21 million settlement (May 26, 2014)

Federal court order (primary); organizational history; press

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ConnectedIEIV-0093 IEIV-0094

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Resistance / Resilience

2013

July 8 – Sept. 3, 2013

Calipatria's ASU hunger strikers and a disputed negotiated response

Carceral Systems & Prison Struggle

Calipatria State Prison Administrative Segregation Unit (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan

Calipatria prisoners joined the 2013 statewide hunger strike from July 8; statewide, 349 prisoners were on strike on August 8, 193 of them continuously since July 8 (Solitary Watch). On August 15, 2013, by Bay View correspondent Kendra Castaneda's account, Warden Frank X. Chavez negotiated directly with the ASU strikers; she wrote on August 18 that 'CDCR Sacramento and Warden Frank Chavez agreed in writing with ALL of what the men in ASU had asked for' - though her September 29 account describes a verbal agreement, a promise to put it in writing, and a CDCR spokesman's denial that any agreement was reached - and a September 3 memorandum on ASU living conditions, signed by the warden, followed, which she said did not satisfy the five core demands. Calipatria is the Imperial site where supporters documented a negotiated response and a written memorandum on unit conditions.

DatesStrike from July 8, 2013; warden negotiates Aug. 15; memo Sept. 3, 2013

ActorsCalipatria ASU hunger strikers; Warden Frank X. Chavez; CDCR

1Kendra Castaneda, 'CDCR has negotiated and met Calipatria ASU hunger strikers' humane demands,' San Francisco Bay View (Aug. 18, 2013) - 'agreed in writing' quotation; Castaneda, 'Calipatria shows the way...' (Sept. 29, 2013) - Sept. 3 memo

2Sal Rodriguez, 'Calipatria Hunger Striker: "Putting Everything On The Line For Dignity",' Solitary Watch (Aug. 9, 2013) - 349 on strike Aug. 8, 193 since July 8

Movement press (supporters' accounts)

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ConnectedIEIV-0073 CV-0124 CV-0121

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Contested / Both

2014

July 1, 2014 blockade; July 4 clash and six arrests

Murrieta: protesters turn back buses of Central American families

Colonization, Conquest & Political Violence

Murrieta Border Patrol station (Riverside Co.)

Homeland: Payómkawichum (Luiseño)

On July 1, 2014 three buses carrying 136 migrants, KPBS reported (other outlets said about 140) - 'immigrants and their children' flown by charter to San Diego from the overwhelmed Rio Grande Valley sector for processing - were turned back from the Murrieta Border Patrol station by 100 to 150 protesters with signs reading 'Return to Sender,' and rerouted to Chula Vista; Mayor Alan Long called the transfers 'a failure to enforce federal law at the federal level.' On July 4 crowds on both sides faced off, six were arrested, and no buses came. The blockade made a Riverside County suburb the national image of the protests against the transfers that summer, and the counter-protest the region's answer. Entered as contested: a domination event and a solidarity event on the same street.

ActorsMurrieta protesters; counter-protesters; Mayor Alan Long; U.S. Border Patrol; Central American families

1KPBS, 'Protesters In Murrieta Turn Back Buses With Migrant Families' (July 1, 2014)

2KPBS, 'Murrieta Becomes Immigration Flashpoint; Protesters Gather On Fourth' (July 4, 2014)

Contemporaneous public-media reporting

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ConnectedIEIV-0055 IEIV-0100

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Oppression / Dominance

2014

May 7, 2014

West Valley jail abuse draws the FBI and a $2.5 million settlement

Carceral Systems & Prison Struggle

West Valley Detention Center, Rancho Cucamonga (San Bernardino Co.)

Homeland: Tongva

A federal suit filed May 7, 2014 by attorneys Stan Hodge, Sharon Brunner and James Terrell alleged that San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies at West Valley Detention Center used stun guns, pressed shotguns to prisoners' heads, sprayed pepper spray under doors and sodomized prisoners during 'searches'; the FBI and the department investigated from April 2014, three deputies still in their probationary year - Brock Teyechea, Andrew Cruz and Nicholas Oakley - were fired (Prison Legal News; San Bernardino County Sentinel), and about 35 plaintiffs had joined by mid-2016; a federal grand jury was impaneled in 2015, and the Sentinel reported in July 2017 that no indictments had been returned. In July 2017 the county settled the federal suits by 32 plaintiffs for $2.5 million - five suits per CBS Los Angeles (July 26, 2017), seven per the San Bernardino County Sentinel, which dates the settlement July 11. Cf. IEIV-0073.

DatesSuit filed May 7, 2014 (No. 5:14-cv-00911, C.D. Cal.); FBI probe Apr. 2014; $2.5M settlement July 2017 (Sentinel: July 11; CBS LA report July 26)

ActorsSan Bernardino County Sheriff's Department; deputies Teyechea, Cruz, Oakley (terminated); plaintiffs' counsel Hodge, Brunner, Terrell; FBI

1Prison Legal News, 'San Bernardino County Jail Named in Federal Lawsuit' (June 3, 2016)

2CBS Los Angeles, 'Inmates Reach $2.5M Settlement Over Abuse At Rancho Cucamonga Jail' (July 26, 2017); San Bernardino County Sentinel, 'In One Day, Over $300M In Jail Abuse Cases Settle For A Penny On The Dollar' (July 31, 2017)

Legal press; broadcast press

IEIV-0078Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL7 L3

ConnectedIEIV-0073 IEIV-0079

Era 9Abolitionist, Immigrant-Justice & EJ Convergence

Oppression / Dominance

2015

Beating Apr. 9, 2015; settlement approved Apr. 21, 2015

A helicopter films deputies beating Francis Pusok; the county pays $650,000

Colonization, Conquest & Political Violence

Apple Valley (San Bernardino Co.)

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano - Vanyume)

On April 9, 2015 a television news helicopter filmed San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies kicking and punching Francis Pusok after a pursuit on horseback in Apple Valley; ten deputies were placed on leave, Sheriff John McMahon said he was 'disturbed and troubled,' and the FBI opened a civil-rights probe. On April 21, 2015 the Board of Supervisors approved a $650,000 settlement in closed session that 'acknowledges no wrongdoing.' Twelve days separated the video from the approved settlement. Pusok was charged in May 2015 with 11 felonies and three misdemeanors from the pursuit (KPCC), and three deputies were prosecuted: a jury convicted Charles Foster of assault by a police officer in March 2017, and after it deadlocked on Michael Phelps and Nicholas Downey the two pleaded no contest to disturbing the peace (AP). The jail cases without cameras (IEIV-0078) took three years.

ActorsFrancis Pusok; San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department (Sheriff John McMahon); deputies Charles Foster, Michael Phelps, Nicholas Downey (prosecuted); Board of Supervisors; FBI

1CBS News, 'California county to pay $650,000 to horse-pursuit suspect beaten by deputies on video' (Apr. 2015)

2KPCC/LAist, 'Man who led deputies on horse chase charged with multiple felonies' (May 28, 2015); UPI, 'Deputy found guilty in 2015 Calif. televised beating; mistrial for two others' (Mar. 31, 2017); AP via Fox News, 'Ex-deputies plead to lesser charge in pursuit beating case' (Apr. 3, 2017)

Broadcast press; county record

IEIV-0079Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL7

ConnectedIEIV-0078

2016–2026

Present Struggle

32 entries121010

2016Erika Rocha dies at CIW the day before her youth parole hearing
2017Agua Caliente wins federal reserved rights to Coachella Valley groundwater
2017Three deaths in three months; the Adelanto 9 strike, report pepper spray
2017Palm Springs elects the nation's first all-LGBTQ city council
2017Novoa v. GEO: partial ruling finds Adelanto's $1-a-day pay violated minimum wage
2018DHS inspectors find nooses in about 15 of 20 inspected Adelanto cells
2018ICE sends up to a thousand detainees to the Victorville federal prison
2018Sigma Beta Xi settlement removes probation's Youth Accountability Teams from schools
2019Adelanto exits its ICE agreement; GEO signs a 15-year contract directly
2020Riverside County closes Riverside Juvenile Hall after years of shrinking detention
2020Roman v. Wolf: a federal judge empties most of Adelanto during COVID-19
2020George Floyd protesters are confronted in Yucaipa
2020Lithium Valley: the state convenes a commission over the next extraction
2020Libre by Nexus: the detained body as bond collateral
2021Riverside's sheriff is found on the Oath Keepers' membership rolls
2021Rule 2305: the 'Diesel Death Zones' campaign wins a warehouse emissions rule
2021Juvenile realignment grant priced by projected wards; Riverside's share
2022Amazon air-hub workers walk out in San Bernardino
2022Migrant deaths in California's borderlands nearly triple; the federal count undercounts
2023The Attorney General opens a civil-rights investigation of the Riverside County Sheriff
2023Inland school boards' curriculum and gender-notification policies; the state sues
2023California's reparations report tells the Short family's story in its first chapter
2023Court-school funding follows detained attendance at $16,000-plus per ADA
2024Palm Springs settles with Section 14 survivors, 56 years after the memorandum
2024Chuckawalla closes: the prison-closure era reaches the desert
2025Chuckwalla National Monument: tribes win a 624,000-acre designation
2025Federal raids sweep the Inland Empire and the east Coachella Valley
2025Vasquez Perdomo: a court bars roving stops; the Supreme Court intervenes
2025Ismael Ayala-Uribe dies after detention at Adelanto
2025Truth & Healing Council hears Riverside, San Diego and Imperial counties
2026Adelanto hunger strikers report being put in solitary after meeting Congress members
2026DHS buys the Adelanto detention complex from GEO for $950 million

Era 10Present Struggle

Oppression / Dominance

2016

Apr. 14 and June 1, 2016

Erika Rocha dies at CIW the day before her youth parole hearing

Carceral Systems & Prison Struggle

California Institution for Women, 16756 Chino-Corona Road (Corona mailing address; San Bernardino County, per CDCR)

Homeland: Tongva

Erika Rocha, charged as an adult at 14 and serving 19 years to life after a plea (CCWP), died by suicide at the California Institution for Women on April 14, 2016, the day before her youth parole hearing. Shaylene Graves was found dead in her CIW cell on June 1; an autopsy showed she 'had been beaten and smothered to death,' and the state settled with her family for $3.5 million in 2022 (Prison Legal News). The California Coalition for Women Prisoners put CIW's 2015 suicide rate at eight times the national rate and petitioned for an investigation; the State Auditor found in 2017 that six of the seven suicides by women in state prison in 2014-2016 occurred at CIW; in 2019 the state agreed to pay Rocha's family $1.5 million. CIW was among the prisons in the Auditor's 2014 report on 144 tubal ligations, 39 with consent deficiencies.

DatesErika Rocha died Apr. 14, 2016; Shaylene Graves killed June 1, 2016; auditor reports 2013-120 (June 2014) and 2016-131 (Aug. 2017)

ActorsErika Rocha; Shaylene Graves; California Coalition for Women Prisoners; CDCR; State Auditor

1California Coalition for Women Prisoners, 'Advocates Demand Justice for Erika Rocha'; SF Bay View, 'Suicide crisis in California women's prison...' (June 2016)

2California State Auditor, Report 2013-120, 'Sterilization of Female Inmates' (June 2014) - names CIW among facilities; Report 2016-131 (Aug. 2017); Prison Legal News (Feb. 4, 2020) - Rocha settlement; Prison Legal News, 'California Pays $3.5 Million to Settle Suit Over State Prisoner's Murder' (Nov. 30, 2022) - Graves

Movement organization; state auditor reports (primary)

IEIV-0080Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL3

ConnectedIEIV-0066 CV-0099

Era 10Present Struggle

Resistance / Resilience

2017

9th Cir. Mar. 7, 2017; cert. denied Nov. 27, 2017

Agua Caliente wins federal reserved rights to Coachella Valley groundwater

Policies & Systems

Agua Caliente Reservation, Coachella Valley (Riverside Co.)

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla - Agua Caliente)

In Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians v. Coachella Valley Water District, the Ninth Circuit held on March 7, 2017 that 'the Winters doctrine does not distinguish between surface water and groundwater': the executive orders of 1876 and 1877 that reserved the Agua Caliente Reservation 'for the permanent use and occupancy of the Mission Indians' (IEIV-0009) carried an implied right to the aquifer beneath it. The Supreme Court denied review on November 27, 2017. In a valley whose districts had pumped the aquifer for a century and imported Colorado River water since 1949, a Cahuilla band established a federally reserved right - its quantity left to later phases of the case - through the same orders once used to confine it.

ActorsAgua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians; Coachella Valley Water District; Desert Water Agency; Ninth Circuit (Tallman, J.)

1Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians v. Coachella Valley Water District, No. 15-55896 (9th Cir. Mar. 7, 2017)

2SCOTUSblog case file, Coachella Valley Water District v. Agua Caliente Band (No. 17-40; cert. denied Nov. 27, 2017)

Federal appellate opinion (primary); docket record

IEIV-0081Tier 1RiversideLineageL1 L9

ConnectedIEIV-0009 IEIV-0052

Era 10Present Struggle

Contested / Both

2017

Mar. 28 – June 12, 2017

Three deaths in three months; the Adelanto 9 strike, report pepper spray

Carceral Systems & Prison Struggle

Adelanto Detention Facility (San Bernardino Co.)

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano - Vanyume)

Three men detained at Adelanto died in ICE custody in the spring of 2017: Osmar Epifanio Gonzalez-Gadba, 32, of Nicaragua, on March 28 after a March 22 suicide attempt; Sergio Alonso Lopez, 55, of Mexico, on April 13; and Vicente Caceres-Maradiaga, 46, of Honduras, on May 31, from what ICE listed as a preliminary cause, acute coronary syndrome. On June 12, 2017 nine detained men began a hunger strike - the #Adelanto9 - and, Detention Watch Network alleged, were 'drenched with pepper spray, beaten and transferred into a high security area' by GEO guards - an account ICE disputed, saying no one was injured and procedures were followed, while GEO declined to comment (Capital & Main); Mitzie Perez of the Inland Empire Immigrant Youth Collective spoke for them outside. The deaths and the strike opened the record that the DHS Inspector General's 2018 inspection (IEIV-0083) would extend.

DatesDeaths Mar. 28 (after a Mar. 22 suicide attempt), Apr. 13 and May 31, 2017; hunger strike from June 12, 2017

ActorsOsmar Gonzalez-Gadba; Sergio Alonso Lopez; Vicente Caceres-Maradiaga; the Adelanto 9; GEO Group; ICE; IEIYC (Mitzie Perez); Detention Watch Network

1Detention Watch Network, 'Third Death in Immigration Detention Makes the Adelanto Detention Center the Deadliest Facility in 2017' (June 6, 2017); LAist/KPCC, 'Third Adelanto ICE Detainee Dies In As Many Months' (June 1, 2017) - names, ages, nationalities, preliminary cause; ICE detainee death list (dates)

2Detention Watch Network, 'Hunger Strikers Overcome Brutal Retaliation, Persevering Into Their Second Day' (June 13, 2017)

Press; advocacy release (contemporaneous)

IEIV-0082Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL3 L12 L6

ConnectedIEIV-0072 IEIV-0083 IEIV-0071

Era 10Present Struggle

Resistance / Resilience

2017

Nov. 7, 2017

Palm Springs elects the nation's first all-LGBTQ city council

Community & Cultural Forces

Palm Springs; Riverside

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla); Tongva

On November 7, 2017 Palm Springs voters completed a city council on which every member - Lisa Middleton, Christy Holstege, Geoff Kors, J. R. Roberts and Robert Moon - identified as LGBTQ, the first in the United States, as NBC Out reported. A decade earlier Gabriel Maldonado founded TruEvolution in Riverside (2007, per UC Riverside Magazine). From the AIDS-era institutions of the 1980s (IEIV-0049) to a desert city's council, queer political infrastructure in the region matured in the same years its school boards became battlegrounds (IEIV-0096).

DatesElection Nov. 7, 2017; TruEvolution founded 2007 (UC Riverside Magazine)

ActorsLisa Middleton; Christy Holstege; Geoff Kors; J. R. Roberts; Robert Moon; Gabriel Maldonado (TruEvolution)

1NBC News (NBC Out), 'Meet America's First All-LGBTQ City Council' (Dec. 2017)

2UC Riverside Magazine, '40 Under 40: Gabriel Maldonado' (Spring 2022)

Press; university magazine

IEIV-0088Tier 1RiversideLineageL11

ConnectedIEIV-0049 IEIV-0096

Era 10Present Struggle

Contested / Both

2017

Filed Dec. 19, 2017

Novoa v. GEO: partial ruling finds Adelanto's $1-a-day pay violated minimum wage

Carceral Systems & Prison Struggle

Adelanto ICE Processing Center (San Bernardino Co.); U.S. District Court, Riverside

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano - Vanyume)

Raul Novoa, detained at Adelanto 2012–15, sued GEO Group on Dec. 19, 2017 over its 'Voluntary Work Program' - 'as porters, janitors, kitchen workers, laundry workers, barbers... in exchange for $1 per day.' Judge Jesus Bernal certified Wage (from Dec. 19, 2014) and Forced Labor (from May 1, 2011) classes on Nov. 26, 2019; on Jan. 25, 2022 he held on partial summary judgment that GEO's control of wages, hours and conditions made it the employer and $1 a day violated the state minimum wage; forced-labor and unjust-enrichment claims remain unresolved. GEO counterclaimed for 'all costs and expenses in excess of the $1.00 daily rate' and later dismissed it with prejudice. The case has been stayed since Mar. 31, 2022 pending Nwauzor; GEO's petition (No. 25-828), which the Solicitor General urged granting (Sept. 15, 2026), was relisted on Nov. 9 for the Nov. 13, 2026 conference.

DatesFiled Dec. 19, 2017; classes certified Nov. 26, 2019; partial summary judgment Jan. 25, 2022; stayed Mar. 31, 2022; stay continues pending GEO Group v. Nwauzor, No. 25-828 (distributed for the Nov. 6 conference; redistributed Nov. 9 for the Nov. 13, 2026 conference)

ActorsRaul Novoa and class members; court-appointed class counsel Burns Charest LLP, the Law Office of R. Andrew Free and Ahdoot & Wolfson PC; GEO Group; Judge Jesus G. Bernal (C.D. Cal.); U.S. Solicitor General (amicus brief filed Sept. 15, 2026 at the Court's invitation)

⚑ Human-collateral: withheld wages

1Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, Novoa v. GEO Group, No. 5:17-cv-02514 (C.D. Cal.) - docket summary incl. ECF 223 (Nov. 26, 2019) and Jan. 25, 2022 order (2022 WL 2189626)

2U.S. Supreme Court docket No. 25-828, GEO Group v. Nwauzor (petition Jan. 9, 2026; CVSG May 18; SG brief Sept. 15, 2026; distributed Oct. 7 for the Nov. 6 conference and Nov. 9 for the Nov. 13, 2026 conference); GEO Group, Form 10-K for FY2025 (filed Feb. 25, 2026), Commitments and Contingencies - Immigration Detainee Litigation ('On March 31, 2022, the court entered a stay...'); court-approved class notice, geoadelantoclassaction.com/faq (class definitions verbatim)

Court-docket summary (academic clearinghouse); SEC filing; court-approved class notice; Supreme Court docket

IEIV-0119Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL6 L8 L12

ConnectedIEIV-0072 IEIV-0086 IEIV-0082 IEIV-0113 IEIV-0120

Era 10Present Struggle

Oppression / Dominance

2018

Inspection May 2018; report OIG-18-86 Sept. 2018

DHS inspectors find nooses in about 15 of 20 inspected Adelanto cells

Carceral Systems & Prison Struggle

Adelanto ICE Processing Center (San Bernardino Co.)

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano - Vanyume)

A May 2018 unannounced inspection by the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General found braided-bedsheet nooses hanging in 'about 15 of the approximately 20' cells inspected at Adelanto - where a detainee found hanging in his cell in March 2017 had died six days later in hospital - along with misuse of disciplinary segregation and inadequate medical and dental care. Management Alert OIG-18-86 (September 2018) recommended corrective action by ICE. The inspector general's photographs and findings put conditions at the facility on the federal record - the facility the city had sold to GEO eight years earlier (IEIV-0072) - in the year before the city ended its contract (IEIV-0086).

ActorsDHS Office of Inspector General; ICE; GEO Group

1DHS OIG, 'Management Alert - Issues Requiring Action at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in Adelanto, California,' OIG-18-86 (Sept. 27, 2018)

2ICE detainee death reporting (Gonzalez-Gadba, Mar. 2017) as summarized in LAist (June 1, 2017)

Federal OIG report (primary); press

IEIV-0083Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL8 L12 L3

ConnectedIEIV-0082 IEIV-0086

Era 10Present Struggle

Oppression / Dominance

2018

Arrivals began June 8, 2018; none remaining by Oct. 20, 2018

ICE sends up to a thousand detainees to the Victorville federal prison

Carceral Systems & Prison Struggle

Federal Correctional Complex, Victorville (San Bernardino Co.)

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano - Vanyume)

Beginning June 8, 2018, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees - ICE confirmed a transfer of 1,000 - arrived at the Federal Correctional Complex at Victorville under a plan to send 1,600 people to five federal prisons; the District of Columbia's Corrections Information Council, which monitors DC residents in federal prisons, relayed reports of eleven confirmed scabies cases and a chickenpox diagnosis within the first two weeks. Rep. Ted Lieu reported 'between 400 and 1,000' held at his August visit, and NPR reported on October 20, 2018 that no ICE detainees remained. The use of a high-desert penitentiary to hold asylum-seekers made Victorville, briefly, a national emblem of the family-separation summer. Counts conflict across sources and are given with each.

ActorsICE; Federal Bureau of Prisons; detained asylum-seekers; Rep. Ted Lieu; DC Corrections Information Council

1DC Corrections Information Council, CIC Bulletin (June 29, 2018)

2NPR (via KCUR), 'ICE Appears To End Use Of Federal Prisons For Immigrant Detainees' (Oct. 20, 2018); Rep. Ted Lieu, statement following oversight visit (Aug. 30, 2018); LAist/KPCC, 'Immigrant detainees begin arriving at the federal prison in Victorville' (June 2018)

Government oversight release; press

IEIV-0084Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL8 L12

ConnectedIEIV-0083 IEIV-0072

Era 10Present Struggle

Resistance / Resilience

2018

Filed July 1, 2018

Sigma Beta Xi settlement removes probation's Youth Accountability Teams from schools

Policies & Systems

Riverside County Probation; Riverside County schools

Homeland: Multiple

On July 1, 2018 three Riverside County youth and the mentoring organization Sigma Beta Xi sued the county over the Youth Accountability Team program, created in 2001, under which probation officers stationed in schools placed children on contracts for status offenses. The settlement, signed July 24, 2019, preliminarily approved by Judge Jesus G. Bernal on August 26, 2019 and finally approved June 22, 2020, removed probation officers from schools, ended YAT referrals for §601 status offenses and expunged those files, provided public-defender counsel for youth referred to informal diversion - 'for the first time in the country,' per the ACLU - gave Sigma Beta Xi a seat on the Juvenile Justice Coordinating Council for two years, and committed the county to at least $7 million for community organizations at $1.4 million a year for five years, plus $1 million in fees. Two monitors oversee it for five years.

DatesFiled July 1, 2018; settlement July 24, 2019; preliminary approval Aug. 26, 2019; final approval June 22, 2020; YAT created 2001 (Clearinghouse)

ActorsSigma Beta Xi; ACLU of Southern California; Riverside County Probation; Judge Jesus G. Bernal

1Sigma Beta Xi, Inc. v. County of Riverside, No. 5:18-cv-01399-JGB-JEM (C.D. Cal.), Settlement Agreement (July 24, 2019); order granting preliminary approval, Aug. 26, 2019 (Dkt. 59); order granting final approval, June 22, 2020 (Dkt. 86) (Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, case 16717)

2ACLU of Southern California, 'Sigma Beta Xi v. County of Riverside - Settlement Agreement' summary

Court filings (primary); counsel summaries

IEIV-0085Tier 1RiversideLineageL3 L2 L6

ConnectedIEIV-0087 IEIV-0095

Era 10Present Struggle

Contested / Both

2019

Mar. 27 and Dec. 19, 2019

Adelanto exits its ICE agreement; GEO signs a 15-year contract directly

Policies & Systems

Adelanto (San Bernardino Co.)

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano - Vanyume)

On March 27, 2019 Adelanto's city manager, Jessie Flores, sent notice ending the agreements that made the city the contracting middleman between ICE and GEO Group - taken in closed session (KQED) with no public council discussion or vote (Capital & Main), 'unilaterally' in Freedom for Immigrants' words; Flores said the parties found it 'in the parties' interest to terminate the underlying agreements.' Closure, the #ShutDownAdelanto campaign's goal, did not follow: GEO's release records a 15-year contract signed directly with ICE on December 19, 2019 - five years plus two five-year options - for 1,940 beds. Signed days before AB 32 (enacted Oct. 11, 2019) took effect on January 1, 2020 - later held by the en banc Ninth Circuit to be likely preempted as applied to federal detention contractors (GEO Group v. Newsom, Sept. 26, 2022) - it is the predicate for IEIV-0089.

DatesCity manager's termination notices Mar. 27, 2019 (no council vote); GEO-ICE 15-year contract Dec. 19, 2019

ActorsCity of Adelanto (City Manager Jessie Flores); #ShutDownAdelanto campaign (Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice and Freedom for Immigrants/CIVIC among participants, per CulturalPower, Apr. 2020); GEO Group; ICE

⚑ Human-collateral: per-diem bed

1Freedom for Immigrants, 'BREAKING: City of Adelanto pulls out of agreement with ICE, GEO Group' (Mar. 28, 2019)

2KQED, 'Adelanto Ending Contract for Largest Immigration Detention Facility in California' (Mar. 29, 2019) - Flores letter dated Mar. 27; closed session; Capital & Main, 'Will Adelanto Officials Reform a Brutal Detention Center?' (Apr. 2, 2019) - no council discussion or vote; GEO Group, release of June 9, 2025 (Business Wire) recording the Dec. 19, 2019 ICE contract; ILRC, Adelanto contract timeline (GEO's Mar. 13, 2019 request)

Advocacy release; public-media and nonprofit press; corporate release

IEIV-0086Tier 2San BernardinoLineageL8 L6 L12

ConnectedIEIV-0083 IEIV-0089 IEIV-0064 IEIV-0119 IEIV-0120

Era 10Present Struggle

Contested / Both

2020

Jan. 2020

Riverside County closes Riverside Juvenile Hall after years of shrinking detention

Carceral Systems & Prison Struggle

Riverside County juvenile facilities

Homeland: Multiple

Riverside County Probation's records trace the arc: the 44-bed Van Horn Youth Center was replaced on its site by the Alan M. Crogan Youth Treatment and Education Center (approved 2013); Twin Pines Ranch, which took its first youth on May 12, 1947 (Town Crier) or was 'officially opened' on January 1, 1948 (JJDPC Handbook), closed in 2014; and Riverside Juvenile Hall 'closed in January 2020' (Annual Report 2021), leaving Southwest Juvenile Hall, Indio and Crogan. As the state closed the Division of Juvenile Justice, the county notified the Board of State and Community Corrections on July 12, 2021 that its Secure Youth Treatment Facility would be a 20-bed unit at Crogan, with Indio a possible later option. The BSCC news page lists no unsuitability notice for either Inland county as of November 2026.

DatesVan Horn Youth Center replaced on its site by the Crogan YTEC (approved 2013); Twin Pines Ranch closed 2014; Riverside Juvenile Hall closed Jan. 2020

ActorsRiverside County Probation Department; Board of State and Community Corrections

1Riverside County Probation, JJDPC Commissioner Handbook (Twin Pines 'officially opened' Jan. 1, 1948); Riverside County Probation, Annual Report 2021 ('Riverside Juvenile Hall closed in January 2020'); CEQA SCH 2012121004, Van Horn YTEC Notice of Determination (Mar. 12, 2013)

2Riverside County Probation, SYTF notification to BSCC per WIC §875 (July 12, 2021), via OYCR; BSCC compilation (updated June 8, 2023); Idyllwild Town Crier, '67 years helping young men: Twin Pines Ranch closes' (July 2, 2014)

County agency records; state filing; local press

IEIV-0087Tier 1RiversideLineageL3 L8

ConnectedIEIV-0085 CV-0135 IEIV-0121 IEIV-0122

Era 10Present Struggle

Resistance / Resilience

2020

Filed Apr. 13, 2020

Roman v. Wolf: a federal judge empties most of Adelanto during COVID-19

Policies & Systems

Adelanto ICE Processing Center; U.S. District Court, Central District of California

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano - Vanyume)

Filed April 13, 2020, Roman v. Wolf (No. 5:20-cv-00768) brought Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr. to issue restraining orders on April 16 and, on April 23, provisional class certification and a preliminary injunction barring new admissions and ordering population cuts for distancing. The Ninth Circuit stayed parts of the order on May 5 and affirmed in part, vacated in part and remanded on October 13, 2020; on October 15 the court ordered cuts of at least 50 a day to a maximum of 475. The facility fell to a few hundred and, by the end of 2024, to three people (ACLU); on January 24, 2025, after preliminary approval of a settlement ($2.2 million in fees and costs), the court temporarily lifted the intake ban, and final approval came in early June 2025 (the ACLU dates the order June 2) - after which the population surged (IEIV-0103).

DatesFiled Apr. 13, 2020; PI Apr. 23; 9th Cir. Oct. 13, 2020 (977 F.3d 935); cap 475 Oct. 15, 2020; settlement preliminary approval, intake ban temporarily lifted Jan. 24, 2025; final approval early June 2025 (ACLU case page: June 2)

ActorsDetained plaintiffs (class); ACLU of Southern California; Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr.; ICE; GEO Group

1Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, Roman v. Wolf, No. 5:20-cv-00768 (C.D. Cal.)

2Roman v. Wolf, 977 F.3d 935 (9th Cir. 2020) (No. 20-55436, Oct. 13, 2020); ACLU of Southern California, settlement release (June 2025) - 'three individuals at the end of 2024'

Litigation database; federal appellate opinion (primary)

IEIV-0089Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL3 L12 L6

ConnectedIEIV-0086 IEIV-0103 CV-0138 IEIV-0119

Era 10Present Struggle

Contested / Both

2020

June 1 and Aug. 1, 2020

George Floyd protesters are confronted in Yucaipa

Colonization, Conquest & Political Violence

Yucaipa Blvd., Yucaipa (San Bernardino Co.)

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano)

On June 1, 2020, at a George Floyd protest on Yucaipa Boulevard, 'words were exchanged... several fights ensued' with a group at a nearby business; the sheriff sought two suspects, with a Taser and an expandable baton, for felony battery. On August 1 about 80 protesters at the Stater Bros. met counter-protesters in a crowd of some 280; deputies declared an unlawful assembly, reported a loaded firearm dropped at the scene and arrested eight named adults and a juvenile, per the sheriff's alert: three booked on felony charges including assault on a peace officer with a deadly weapon (on August 19 the District Attorney charged one with assault upon a peace officer, Penal Code 245(c), and all three with possessing a billy club or similar weapon), four for failing to disperse, one with no charge stated (press reported nine arrests).

DatesJune 1, 2020 assaults; Aug. 1, 2020 unlawful assembly, eight arrests

ActorsGeorge Floyd protesters; counter-protesters; San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department

1San Bernardino County Sheriff, Yucaipa Station, Nixle alert, 'Yucaipa Police Department needs help identifying two men involved in a fight that broke out following a protest' (June 10, 2020); KTLA (June 2020)

2San Bernardino County Sheriff, Yucaipa Station, Nixle alert (Aug. 2, 2020); San Bernardino County District Attorney, charging release (Aug. 19, 2020); Yucaipa/Calimesa News Mirror (Aug. 2020)

Contemporaneous local press (sheriff statements as reported)

IEIV-0090Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL2 L7 L10

ConnectedIEIV-0059 CV-0137

Era 10Present Struggle

Contested / Both

2020

Stats. 2020; effective Jan. 1, 2021

Lithium Valley: the state convenes a commission over the next extraction

Land, Labor & Agricultural Empire

Salton Sea geothermal field, 'Lithium Valley' (Imperial Co.)

Homeland: Desert Cahuilla (Torres-Martinez); Kumeyaay; Quechan

Assembly Bill 1657 (Eduardo Garcia; Chapter 271, Statutes of 2020), effective January 1, 2021, created the 14-member Blue Ribbon Commission on Lithium Extraction in California at the Energy Commission; its final report was docketed December 1, 2022. The 2022–23 state budget then enacted a three-tiered per-ton lithium excise tax effective January 1, 2023, requiring Imperial County to pass not less than 30 percent of its share to impacted communities; by statute 80 percent of the tax goes to the county and 20 percent to the Salton Sea Lithium Fund (Rev. & Tax. Code §47100), and the county's Lithium Excise Tax Funding Plan (September 10, 2024) allocates its share. On the shore where the Colorado's floods drowned Torres-Martinez land a century earlier (IEIV-0016), the environmental-justice organizations of the valley (IEIV-0053) now contest who benefits from the next boom.

DatesAB 1657 (Ch. 271, Stats. 2020), effective Jan. 1, 2021; commission report docketed Dec. 1, 2022; excise tax effective Jan. 1, 2023; county plan Sept. 10, 2024

ActorsAssemblymember Eduardo Garcia; California Energy Commission; Lithium Valley Commission; County of Imperial; Comité Cívico del Valle; Torres-Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians

1Report of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Lithium Extraction in California, CEC Docket 20-LITHIUM-01, TN 247861 (Dec. 1, 2022)

2County of Imperial, 'Lithium Excise Tax Funding Plan' (Sept. 10, 2024); Assembly Utilities & Energy Committee hearing background

State commission report; county plan (primary)

IEIV-0091Tier 1ImperialLineageL9 L1

ConnectedIEIV-0016 IEIV-0053 IEIV-0060

Era 10Present Struggle

Contested / Both

2020

July 15, 2020

Libre by Nexus: the detained body as bond collateral

Policies & Systems

Immigration-bond clients statewide incl. Southern California detention (connected ground); W.D. Va. courtroom

Homeland: Multiple

Libre by Nexus sold immigration-bond 'services' under which detained people were released only on agreeing to monthly fees (the CFPB alleged $420 a month for GPS) and an ankle monitor, under contracts the state Department of Insurance found 'provided in English only.' Commissioner Ricardo Lara announced a $5.5 million settlement: Libre agreed to 'cease transacting immigration bonds in the State of California' and 'phase out the use of GPS ankle monitors.' In CFPB v. Nexus Services (W.D. Va. No. 5:21-cv-00016, filed February 22, 2021), the final judgment of April 1, 2024 ordered $230,996,970.84 in consumer redress and $111,135,620 in civil penalties from each of five defendants - about $787 million, and roughly $811 million with $24.39 million in state penalties, local press reported - affirmed October 8, 2025 (amended opinion October 15). No Adelanto-specific clients are documented; the entry stands for the mechanism: a body pledged against a debt.

DatesCDI settlement announced July 15, 2020; CFPB suit filed Feb. 22, 2021; final judgment Apr. 1, 2024 (order dated Mar. 31 on the docket); affirmed 4th Cir. Oct. 8, 2025, amended opinion Oct. 15, 2025

ActorsLibre by Nexus / Nexus Services; detained immigrants and their families; California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara; Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; attorneys general of Virginia, New York, Massachusetts

⚑ Human-collateral: body as bond

1California Department of Insurance, press release 066-2020 (Libre by Nexus settlement)

2Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, press release, 'CFPB and Virginia, Massachusetts and New York Attorneys General Sue Libre for Predatory Immigrant-Services Scam' (Feb. 22, 2021) - '$420 per month to lease GPS-tracking ankle monitors'; CFPB enforcement action page, Nexus Services, Inc., et al. (final judgment Apr. 1, 2024)

State and federal agency records (primary)

IEIV-0113Tier 1Connected groundLineageL12 L3

ConnectedIEIV-0072 IEIV-0089 IEIV-0102 IEIV-0119

Era 10Present Struggle

Oppression / Dominance

2021

Leak reported Oct. 5-6, 2021 (2014 dues)

Riverside's sheriff is found on the Oath Keepers' membership rolls

Policies & Systems

Riverside County Sheriff's Department

Homeland: Multiple

After Distributed Denial of Secrets published leaked Oath Keepers records in 2021, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco acknowledged, KESQ reported October 5, 2021, that he had paid for a one-year membership in 2014, saying: 'What happened on Jan. 6 by a few people, should have nothing to do with something I did in 2014 with an organization that supports the constitution,' that the Capitol attack 'was completely wrong' (NPR), and told KPCC, as published by LAist, 'I don't even remember joining.' The Anti-Defamation League's September 2022 analysis identified 373 people it believed were then serving in law enforcement, including eleven sheriffs, among the names (AP). Conduct of record in the sheriff's own words - a one-year membership he said he did not recall - it preceded, without being cited in, the state's civil-rights investigation of his department (IEIV-0095).

ActorsSheriff Chad Bianco; Oath Keepers; Distributed Denial of Secrets; Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism

1KESQ, 'Sheriff Chad Bianco paid membership dues to the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia group' (Jake Ingrassia, Oct. 5, 2021)

2NPR, 'Oath Keepers: California Sheriff Chad Bianco...' (Oct. 6, 2021); AP, 'Oath Keepers membership data: police, elected officials' (Sept. 7, 2022) on the ADL analysis; ADL, 'The Oath Keepers Data Leak: Unmasking Extremism in Public Life' (Sept. 6, 2022)

Contemporaneous press with subject's own statements; ADL analysis

IEIV-0092Tier 1RiversideLineageL7

ConnectedIEIV-0036 IEIV-0095 IEIV-0100

Era 10Present Struggle

Resistance / Resilience

2021

Adopted May 7, 2021 (9-4)

Rule 2305: the 'Diesel Death Zones' campaign wins a warehouse emissions rule

Environmental Violence & Environmental Justice

South Coast Air Basin - Inland Empire warehouses

Homeland: Multiple

On May 7, 2021 the South Coast Air Quality Management District board adopted Rule 2305, the Warehouse Indirect Source Rule, by a 9-4 vote, requiring warehouses of 100,000 square feet or more, concentrated in the Inland Empire's logistics corridor, to reduce or offset the truck emissions they attract. CCAEJ executive director Alma Marquez called it a 'victory for communities and organizers... mobilizing against the Diesel Death Zones,'. Forty-three years after Glen Avon's mothers organized over Stringfellow (IEIV-0044), the region's environmental-justice movement had written its demands into the air district's rulebook, alongside the warehouse workers' own fight (IEIV-0075).

ActorsSouth Coast AQMD board; CCAEJ (Alma Marquez); Inland Empire EJ coalition; warehouse operators

1South Coast AQMD, 'South Coast AQMD Governing Board Adopts Warehouse Indirect Source Rule' (May 7, 2021); Rule 2305 (applicability: 100,000 square feet or more)

2CCAEJ, 'CCAEJ commends SCAQMD's adoption of a strong Indirect Sources Rule' (May 2021) - Marquez quotation, 9-4 vote

Agency release and rule text (primary); advocacy-organization statement

IEIV-0093Tier 1Multi-countyLineageL9 L4

ConnectedIEIV-0044 IEIV-0075

Era 10Present Struggle

Oppression / Dominance

2021

FY2021-22 through FY2025-26

Juvenile realignment grant priced by projected wards; Riverside's share

Policies & Systems

Riverside County Probation; Sacramento (statute)

Homeland: Multiple

When California closed the Division of Juvenile Justice, WIC section 1991 funded counties by headcount: $39,949,000 for 2021–22 'based on a projected average daily population of 177.6 wards,' then 526, 853.5 and 928 wards for later years, with the county split weighted '30 percent' on each county's share of DJJ commitments, 50 percent on serious-felony adjudications and 20 percent on youth population. An Assembly budget subcommittee agenda (Apr. 28, 2025) recorded that in 2022–23 'there were 427 youth committed to county SYTFs, of whom 94% were youth of color,' and that 'the Legislature does not receive any reporting on how JJRBG grants are actually spent.' As amended by AB 118 (Stats. 2025, ch. 7), section 1991 drops ADP from 2026–27 for 707(b) adjudications, non-SYTF dispositions, youth population and step-downs. Riverside's plan reports $2.3, $6.6 and $10.7 million for 2021–22 to 2023–24 - five to six percent of each statewide total.

DatesSB 823 realignment; WIC 1991 allocations FY2021-22 ($39,949,000) through FY2025-26 ($208,800,000); new formula from FY2026-27 (WIC 1991 as amended by Stats. 2025, ch. 7, AB 118, eff. June 27, 2025)

ActorsCalifornia Legislature; Assembly Budget Subcommittee No. 6; Riverside County Probation

⚑ Human-collateral: ADP/ADA funding

1Cal. Welf. & Inst. Code s. 1991 (2025 code text)

2Assembly Budget Subcommittee No. 6, hearing agenda Apr. 28, 2025 (JJRBG formula item); Riverside County 2023 and 2024 JJRBG plans (OYCR)

Statute (primary); legislative hearing agenda; county plans filed with state

IEIV-0121Tier 1Multi-countyLineageL3 L8

ConnectedIEIV-0087 IEIV-0085 IEIV-0122 CV-0135

Era 10Present Struggle

Resistance / Resilience

2022

Walkouts Aug. 15 and Oct. 14, 2022; NLRB charge Oct. 2022

Amazon air-hub workers walk out in San Bernardino

Land, Labor & Agricultural Empire

Amazon Air Hub (KSBD), San Bernardino International Airport

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano); Tongva

On August 15, 2022 workers at Amazon's San Bernardino air hub walked off the job demanding a $5 raise (from $17 to $22), heat relief and an end to retaliation - 74 of 'approximately 1,500' by Amazon's count, 160 by the organizers' (Fortune) - under the banner of Inland Empire Amazon Workers United. On October 14 about 100 picketed again and the group filed an unfair-labor-practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board alleging retaliation; Amazon's response, a $1 raise, organizer Rex Evans called 'pitiful.' At what KQED called the company's third-largest U.S. air hub, the warehouse-worker lineage that began with the 2012 WalMarch (IEIV-0075) reached Amazon itself.

ActorsInland Empire Amazon Workers United (Rex Evans); Amazon; National Labor Relations Board

1KQED, 'Amazon Workers Strike at Third-Largest Air Hub in U.S., File Labor Complaint' (Oct. 15, 2022)

2Fortune, 'Amazon air hub workers walk off job in San Bernardino' (Aug. 16, 2022)

Contemporaneous press

IEIV-0094Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL4 L10

ConnectedIEIV-0075 IEIV-0093

Era 10Present Struggle

Oppression / Dominance

2022

FY2018-2023

Migrant deaths in California's borderlands nearly triple; the federal count undercounts

Disasters & Major Events

Imperial County desert and canals; El Centro Sector

Homeland: Kumeyaay; Quechan; Cocopah

A 2025 peer-reviewed study of medicolegal records found that migrant deaths recorded in San Diego and Imperial counties rose from about 30 a year in 2018-2020 to about 88 a year in 2021-2022 before falling to 50 in 2023, that the Imperial County Coroner's Office recorded 157 migrant deaths in fiscal years 2018-2023 with '51.6 percent of migrant deaths in IC... due to drowning,' and that for fiscal years 2018-2022 'CBP reported 25.6 percent fewer migrant deaths than medicolegal authorities in southern California.' KPBS reported the coroner documented 14 canal drownings in 2021, the most since 2015. CBP's Office of Professional Responsibility counted 171 'CBP-related deaths' nationally in FY2022, 'a 13.2 percent increase from FY 2021' (about 151) - a different series from the Border Patrol's border-death tally. Three decades after Gatekeeper (IEIV-0055), the undercount the GAO warned of in 2006 persists; the coroner's records show the fuller toll.

DatesFY2018-2023 coroner data; deaths rose from ~30/yr (2018-20) to ~88/yr (2021-22); 14 canal drownings in 2021

ActorsImperial County Coroner's Office; CBP El Centro Sector; migrants crossing the desert and canals

1LaFleur, On, Ceja and Martínez, 'Migrant Deaths in California's Borderlands, 2018-2023,' Journal on Migration and Human Security 13:2 (2025): 191-210, doi:10.1177/23315024241291825

2KPBS (Gustavo Solis), Feb. 8, 2022 (14 canal drownings in 2021); CBP, 'CBP-Related Deaths Fiscal Year 2022 Report' (Mar. 2024)

Peer-reviewed study of coroner records; public media; CBP report (primary)

IEIV-0104Tier 2ImperialLineageL12

ConnectedIEIV-0055 IEIV-0057 IEIV-0068

Era 10Present Struggle

Contested / Both

2023

Announced Feb. 23, 2023

The Attorney General opens a civil-rights investigation of the Riverside County Sheriff

Policies & Systems

Riverside County Sheriff's Office and jails

Homeland: Multiple

On February 23, 2023 Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a pattern-or-practice investigation under Civil Code section 52.3 into the Riverside County Sheriff's Office, citing jail conditions, deaths and force: eighteen people had died in county jails in 2022 by an advocates' count reported by KESQ (nineteen by state DOJ data, KVCR), the highest in fifteen years by both accounts. Sheriff Chad Bianco called it a 'political stunt' that 'will prove to be a complete waste of time and resources.' Black Voice News's reporting (IEIV-0042) and families' organizing preceded the state's action (cf. IEIV-0062). As of November 2026 the Attorney General ('no determinations at this time') had announced none; a June 2026 grand jury report urged an independent civilian oversight body, which the sheriff rejected as 'ridden with inaccuracies' (KESQ); the Board of Supervisors formed an ad hoc jail committee in July and in September declined several recommendations (NBC Palm Springs).

ActorsAttorney General Rob Bonta; Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco; families of people who died in custody

1California Attorney General, 'Attorney General Bonta Launches Civil Rights Investigation into Riverside County Sheriff's Office' (Feb. 23, 2023)

2AP via Spectrum News 1 (Feb. 23, 2023) - 'political stunt' and 'complete waste of time and resources'; KESQ (Feb. 23, 2023) - 18 deaths per advocates' letter to the BSCC, 'highest... in the last 15 years', AG 'made no determinations at this time'; KVCR (Feb. 24, 2023) - 19 deaths per CA DOJ data; KESQ, 'Riverside County Grand Jury calls for oversight of jail system; Bianco says report full of false statements' (June 16, 2026); NBC Palm Springs, 'Board declines to adopt majority of grand jury's recommendations for jails' (Sept. 16, 2026); Black Voice News (Jan. 9, 2024)

AG release (primary); press

IEIV-0095Tier 1RiversideLineageL7 L3 L2

ConnectedIEIV-0092 IEIV-0062 IEIV-0042

Era 10Present Struggle

Contested / Both

2023

May-Oct. 2023

Inland school boards' curriculum and gender-notification policies; the state sues

Policies & Systems

Chino Valley Unified (San Bernardino Co.); Temecula Valley Unified (Riverside Co.)

Homeland: Tongva; Payómkawichum (Luiseño)

Temecula Valley Unified's board banned 'critical race theory' in 2022 and twice - on May 16 and July 18, 2023 - rejected a K-5 curriculum 3-2 over supplemental material mentioning Harvey Milk, whom its president, Joseph Komrosky, had called a 'pedophile' (EdSource; CBS); after Governor Newsom announced a $1.5 million fine on July 19 it adopted the curriculum July 21 (4-0). Chino Valley Unified's July 2023 policy required staff to tell parents when a student identified as transgender; Attorney General Bonta sued; Judge Michael Sachs preliminarily enjoined it October 19, 2023 as likely sex discrimination, permanently from September 9, 2024; on September 15, 2026, he kept the injunction, finding no duty to volunteer a student's gender identity (EdSource; the district's counsel described its motion as 'granted in part and denied in part,' since parents who ask may be told) - the latest ruling as of November 10, 2026.

DatesTemecula CRT resolution Dec. 2022; curriculum rejected May 16 and July 18, 2023; fine announced July 19; adoption July 21; Chino Valley policy July 2023; AG suit Aug. 2023; PI Oct. 19, 2023; permanent injunction Sept. 9, 2024 (judgment Oct. 3, 2024); motion to dissolve rejected in principal part Sept. 15, 2026

ActorsChino Valley USD board; Temecula Valley USD board (Joseph Komrosky); Attorney General Rob Bonta; Judge Michael Sachs; Governor Gavin Newsom; students and parents

1California Attorney General, 'Attorney General Bonta Announces Lawsuit Challenging Chino Valley Unified School District...' (Aug. 28, 2023); 'applauds Superior Court's oral ruling granting preliminary injunction' (Oct. 19, 2023)

2EdSource, 'Temecula Valley Unified reverses course and adopts controversial social studies curriculum' (July 22, 2023); CBS Los Angeles, 'Gov. Newsom fines Temecula Valley school board $1.5 million for rejecting new curriculum' (July 20, 2023); EdSource/LAist, 'Judge says Chino Valley Unified can disclose students' gender identity to parents' (Sept. 17, 2026); Advocates for Faith & Freedom, release on the Sept. 15, 2026 ruling

AG releases (primary); press

IEIV-0096Tier 1Multi-countyLineageL11 L7

ConnectedIEIV-0088 IEIV-0049

Era 10Present Struggle

Resistance / Resilience

2023

June 29, 2023

California's reparations report tells the Short family's story in its first chapter

Policies & Systems

Fontana (San Bernardino Co.); statewide

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano); Tongva

The California Reparations Task Force, created by AB 3121 (2020), issued its final report on June 29, 2023; the final report's first chapter, in its opening section, 'Why Reparations in California?', tells the Short family's story second, after Basil Campbell's: 'In 1945, Fontana was a white neighborhood'; deputies warned O'Day Short he was 'out of bounds'; the house exploded and burned, killing Helen, Barry and Carol Ann, and O'Day died 'a few days later' (the chapter misdates the explosion to 'December 6'; the record is December 16, 1945, and his death January 22, 1946 - IEIV-0031). In Fontana, after a petition by student Cyrus Moss, the school board voted on September 4, 2024 to rename Randall Pepper Elementary for the family; O'Day Short Elementary was dedicated August 5, 2025, a day before school opened.

DatesAB 3121 (2020); final report June 29, 2023 (ch. 1); school renamed by board vote Sept. 4, 2024; dedicated Aug. 5, 2025

ActorsCalifornia Reparations Task Force; Short family; Fontana Unified School District; Cyrus Moss

1California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans, Final Report (June 29, 2023), Chapter 1 'Introduction' (oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ch1-ca-reparations.pdf)

2Black Voice News, 'Fontana unveils O'Day Short School' (Aug. 12, 2025); Fontana USD news release, 'Student Petition Leads to Fontana Unified Renaming School to Honor O'Day Short Family's Legacy' (Sept. 5, 2024) - board vote Sept. 4; Cyrus Moss; 132 signatures presented Mar. 13, 2024; Fontana USD, O'Day Short Elementary page

State task-force report (primary); district record; local press

IEIV-0114Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL2

ConnectedIEIV-0031 IEIV-0097

Era 10Present Struggle

Oppression / Dominance

2023

From 2023-24

Court-school funding follows detained attendance at $16,000-plus per ADA

Policies & Systems

Riverside County Office of Education, San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools and Imperial County Office of Education court schools

Homeland: Multiple

County offices of education run the schools inside juvenile halls, and the state pays them by average daily attendance. The Department of Education's apportionment rates set the county alternative-education base grant, which funds juvenile court school attendance, at $16,395.36 per ADA for 2023–24 (the 2022–23 grade 9-12 base of $11,391 times 1.33 under SB 114, plus COLA), $16,570.79 for 2024–25 and $16,951.92 for 2025–26, plus a flat $200,000 'Juvenile Court School Grant' per county; because every court-school pupil is deemed unduplicated, the supplemental grant is computed at '100 percent, times 35 percent' and the concentration grant at '100 percent, times 17.50 percent.' Revenue therefore rises and falls with juvenile-hall occupancy. Riverside County Juvenile Court school reported 102 students enrolled in 2024–25 and a cumulative enrollment of 538 for the year (RCOE), 79 in 2025–26 (Ed-Data); Imperial's combined court and community school enrolled 266 in 2025–26.

DatesSB 114 (2023) rebases the alternative-education grant (x1.33) from 2023-24; rates $16,395.36 (2023-24), $16,570.79 (2024-25), $16,951.92 (2025-26) per ADA

ActorsCalifornia Department of Education; Riverside County Office of Education; San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools; Imperial County Office of Education

⚑ Human-collateral: ADP/ADA funding

1California Department of Education, Principal Apportionment funding rates 2024-25 and 2025-26 (County Office of Education LCFF: Alternative Education Grant; Juvenile Court School Grant)

2CDE, Principal Apportionment rates 2023-24 (SB 114 adjustment); Riverside County Office of Education, 2024-25 School Accountability Report Card, Riverside County Juvenile Court (CDS 33-10330-3330123; enrollment 102; cumulative 538); Ed-Data (2025-26 enrollment 79); Imperial COE JCCS LCAP 2025-26 (OYCR)

State education agency rate tables (primary); state education data portal; county LCAP

IEIV-0122Tier 1Multi-countyLineageL3 L8

ConnectedIEIV-0121 IEIV-0087 IEIV-0085

Era 10Present Struggle

Resistance / Resilience

2024

Nov. 14, 2024

Palm Springs settles with Section 14 survivors, 56 years after the memorandum

Policies & Systems

Palm Springs (Section 14)

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla - Agua Caliente)

On Thursday, November 14, 2024 the Palm Springs City Council approved a $5.91 million cash settlement with more than 1,200 former Section 14 residents and descendants whose homes the city demolished in the 1960s (city-documented 1965–67; IEIV-0040); the city stated that its separate $20 million housing and $1 million small-business programs were 'not part of the legal settlement' and rejected a '$27 million' characterization. The Palm Springs Tribune reported on October 7, 2025 that the city had transferred the $5.9 million. The settlement, won by the Section 14 Survivors group's organizing and claim, follows the 1968 Deputy Attorney General's memorandum by fifty-six years and is the first municipal settlement of a racial-displacement claim on this timeline's record; the number on the check is smaller than the number in circulation.

DatesCouncil vote Nov. 14, 2024; $5.9M transferred early Oct. 2025 (city announcement Oct. 7)

ActorsSection 14 Survivors; City of Palm Springs; descendants of displaced residents

1City of Palm Springs, news releases 8135 and 8137 (posted Nov. 13, 2024) on the $5.91 million settlement voted Nov. 14, 2024

2City of Palm Springs announcement of Oct. 7, 2025, as reported by the Palm Springs Tribune (Oct. 7, 2025)

Municipal releases (primary); local press

IEIV-0097Tier 1RiversideLineageL2 L6

ConnectedIEIV-0040 IEIV-0041

Era 10Present Struggle

Resistance / Resilience

2024

Deactivated Nov. 2024

Chuckawalla closes: the prison-closure era reaches the desert

Carceral Systems & Prison Struggle

Chuckawalla Valley State Prison, Blythe (Riverside Co.)

Homeland: Nüwü (Chemehuevi); Pipa Aha Macav (Mojave)

On December 6, 2022 CDCR announced that Chuckawalla Valley State Prison at Blythe, opened in 1988 (IEIV-0054), would close by March 2025; the department's facility page records it 'deactivated in November 2024,' ahead of schedule. It is the first of the region's four desert prisons to close and the first Inland installment of a statewide closure era that shut DVI Tracy in 2021 (CV-0140) and, per CDCR's closures page, the California Rehabilitation Center at Norco on September 30, 2026 - driven, in this timeline's reading, by falling populations after Proposition 47, Proposition 57 and the pandemic releases, and by the budget politics of a system the Supreme Court had ordered reduced (IEIV-0066). Blythe, a town built around two prisons, now holds one.

DatesClosure announced Dec. 6, 2022; deactivated Nov. 2024 (CDCR facility page; CDCR's closures page lists Oct. 2024); CRC Norco closed Sept. 30, 2026

ActorsCDCR; City of Blythe; CURB and statewide closure campaigns

1CDCR, Chuckawalla Valley State Prison facility page ('deactivated in November 2024')

2CDCR news release, Dec. 6, 2022 (planned closure by March 2025)

Agency records (primary)

IEIV-0098Tier 1RiversideLineageL8 L3

ConnectedIEIV-0054 CV-0140

Era 10Present Struggle

Resistance / Resilience

2025

Jan. 14, 2025

Chuckwalla National Monument: tribes win a 624,000-acre designation

Policies & Systems

Chuckwalla National Monument (Riverside and Imperial Cos.)

Homeland: Iviatim; Nüwü; Pipa Aha Macav; Kwatsáan; Maara'yam/Marringayam

Proclamation 10881 of January 14, 2025 established the Chuckwalla National Monument on some 624,270 acres between Joshua Tree and the Colorado, naming the 'Iviatim (Cahuilla), Nüwü (Chemehuevi), Pipa Aha Macav (Mojave), Kwatsáan (Quechan), Maara'yam and Marringayam (Serrano)' peoples and directing the Interior Secretary to engage affiliated Tribal Nations and seek 'opportunities for co-stewardship.' Tribal governments led the campaign (Torres-Martinez, Quechan, CRIT and the Cahuilla Band quoted in the coalition's statement; Chemehuevi, Morongo and Twenty-Nine Palms supporting). The designation is challenged in Torongo v. Burgum, No. 25-11263 (E.D. Mich.; the plaintiffs are a Michigan miner and the BlueRibbon Coalition), in which five tribal governments - Chemehuevi, CRIT, Morongo, Torres Martinez, Quechan - and nine conservation groups were granted intervention on March 3, 2026; the administration signalled in 2025 that it might rescind the monument (CalMatters); no rescission had been reported as of November 10, 2026.

DatesProclamation 10881 signed Jan. 14, 2025; 90 FR 6715 (Jan. 17, 2025)

ActorsTorres-Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians (Joseph D. L. Mirelez); Fort Yuma Quechan Tribal Council; Colorado River Indian Tribes (Amelia Flores); Cahuilla Band (Erica Schenk); Chemehuevi, Morongo, Twenty-Nine Palms bands; President Biden

1Proclamation 10881, Establishment of the Chuckwalla National Monument, 90 Fed. Reg. 6715 (Jan. 17, 2025)

2Protect Chuckwalla coalition, 'Tribal Leaders and Local Communities Celebrate Forthcoming Chuckwalla National Monument Designation' (Jan. 14, 2025); Torongo v. Burgum, No. 25-11263 (E.D. Mich.), Opinion and Order on Motions to Intervene (Behm, J., Mar. 3, 2026) (via NARF NILL); Earthjustice (Mar. 5, 2026); CalMatters (Deborah Brennan), 'Biden made this California spot a national monument. Trump may take it back.' (July 9, 2025)

Presidential proclamation (primary); coalition statement; court order as reported; press

IEIV-0099Tier 1Multi-countyLineageL1 L9 L10

ConnectedIEIV-0001 IEIV-0058 IEIV-0065

Era 10Present Struggle

Oppression / Dominance

2025

June-July 2025

Federal raids sweep the Inland Empire and the east Coachella Valley

Colonization, Conquest & Political Violence

Thermal and Mecca (Coachella Valley, Riverside Co.); Upland, Ontario, Riverside, San Bernardino, Moreno Valley

Homeland: Iviatim (Cahuilla); Tongva; Maara'yam

On June 18, 2025 a DEA-led operation of roughly 500 federal agents and National Guard soldiers raided marijuana grows across some 787 acres near Thermal and, CBS Los Angeles reported, detained 70 to 75 people the agencies described as undocumented - 'collateral arrests,' Rep. Raul Ruiz said (KVCR) - and arrested one U.S. citizen for impeding officers, while Border Patrol confirmed that one of its tactical units had assisted (KVCR). Two days earlier about twenty agents had failed to detain day laborers at an Upland Home Depot after bystanders intervened; July raids at Riverside and San Bernardino Home Depots 'led to more than a dozen arrests' per the Pomona Economic Opportunity Center and the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice, and a man was detained at an Ontario surgery center. Rapid-response networks answered (IEIV-0064); by October Axios reported farmworkers staying home for fear of raids.

DatesUpland June 16, 2025; Thermal June 18, 2025; Riverside/San Bernardino Home Depots July 2025

ActorsDEA; ICE/CBP; National Guard; Rep. Raul Ruiz; Pomona Economic Opportunity Center; Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice; day laborers and farmworkers

1CBS Los Angeles, '500 federal agents and soldiers raid marijuana farms in rural Southern California' (June 18, 2025); KVCR (Anthony Victoria), 'DEA raids illegal marijuana grow in Coachella Valley, 75 Immigrants arrested' (June 19, 2025)

2IE Community News (Anthony Victoria), 'ICE raids target day laborers in Inland Empire' (July 14, 2025); NBC Los Angeles/NBC San Diego on Upland (June 16, 2025); Axios, 'Fear grips Coachella Valley over Trump deportations' (Oct. 26, 2025)

Contemporaneous press

IEIV-0100Tier 1Multi-countyLineageL6 L12 L4

ConnectedIEIV-0101 IEIV-0092 CV-0145

Era 10Present Struggle

Contested / Both

2025

TRO July 11, 2025

Vasquez Perdomo: a court bars roving stops; the Supreme Court intervenes

Policies & Systems

Central District of California (incl. Riverside and San Bernardino Cos.)

Homeland: Multiple

On July 11, 2025 Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong's temporary restraining order in Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem barred immigration stops based solely on apparent race or ethnicity, language or accent, location, or type of work across the Central District, including Riverside and San Bernardino counties. The Ninth Circuit declined a stay on August 1; the Supreme Court stayed it September 8, 2025; on November 13 Judge Frimpong granted a preliminary injunction limited to access to counsel at Los Angeles's B-18 facility. In 2026 (now v. Mullin) the court on September 2 enjoined warrantless immigration arrests lacking a probable-cause finding of likely escape and, in orders unsealed October 29 (stops order dated October 23), barred stops based on racial stereotypes and certified stop classes (Bloomberg Law); the government noticed an appeal, and its appeal of the November 2025 injunction (No. 26-209) was pending as of October 3, 2026 (Clearinghouse).

DatesTRO July 11, 2025; 9th Cir. stay denied Aug. 1; Supreme Court stay Sept. 8, 2025 (No. 25A169); PI Nov. 13, 2025 (access-to-counsel claim only); case renamed Vasquez Perdomo v. Mullin July 22, 2026; PI on warrantless arrests Sept. 2, 2026; stops ruling dated Oct. 23, 2026 (unsealed Oct. 29); appeals pending

ActorsJudge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong; ACLU of Southern California; Public Counsel; DHS; U.S. Supreme Court

1Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem (renamed Vasquez Perdomo v. Mullin, July 22, 2026), No. 2:25-cv-05605 (C.D. Cal.) - summary current to Oct. 3, 2026; Bloomberg Law, 'Agents Barred From Racial Stereotyping Stops in LA, Judge Rules' (Oct. 29, 2026)

2Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, No. 25A169 (U.S. Sept. 8, 2025); ACLU of Southern California, Vasquez Perdomo v. Mullin case page and release of Oct. 29, 2026, 'Federal Court Blocks Unlawful Suspicionless, Racially Discriminatory Immigration Stops in Southern California'

Litigation database; press; counsel case page and release; Supreme Court order

IEIV-0101Tier 1Connected groundLineageL6 L12

ConnectedIEIV-0100 CV-0145

Era 10Present Struggle

Oppression / Dominance

2025

Aug. 17 – Sept. 22, 2025

Ismael Ayala-Uribe dies after detention at Adelanto

Carceral Systems & Prison Struggle

Adelanto ICE Processing Center; Victor Valley Global Medical Center

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano - Vanyume)

Ismael Ayala-Uribe, 39, a former DACA recipient arrested August 17, 2025 and moved to Adelanto August 22, died at an outside hospital on September 22 - 'the 14th detainee to die in ICE custody since President Trump took office in January, and the first-known death in California's immigration detention centers' (CBS News; 'first' refers to 2025 - three people died at Adelanto in 2017, IEIV-0082). Adelanto rose from about 400 to roughly 1,800 at its June 2025 reopening (ICE report via Scripps); the state counted 1,570 there and 517 at Desert View in early July (California DOJ; IEIV-0103). His parents sued GEO and Wellpath for wrongful death on December 31, 2025; an ICE mortality review obtained by Scripps News (Oct. 8, 2026) found his care 'deviated beyond safe limits of practice' (DHS did not respond; GEO referred questions to ICE); Scripps counted four Adelanto deaths by spring 2026.

DatesArrested Aug. 17, 2025; transferred to Adelanto Aug. 22; died Sept. 22, 2025, 2:32 a.m. (complaint); congressional letter Oct. 15, 2025; parents' wrongful-death suit filed Dec. 31, 2025 (No. 2:25-cv-12436, C.D. Cal.); ICE mortality review (Mar. 2026) reported by Scripps News Oct. 8, 2026

ActorsIsmael Ayala-Uribe and his parents; ICE; GEO Group; Wellpath; Rep. Judy Chu and 31 members of Congress

1CBS News, 'Mexican national, former DACA recipient dies in ICE custody after arrest in August' (Sept. 24, 2025) - quoted passage; ABC7 (Sept. 26, 2025); Victor Valley News (Sept. 2025)

2Rep. Judy Chu, 'Rep. Chu Leads 31 Members in Demanding Accountability Following Death of 39-Year-Old Ismael Ayala-Uribe in ICE Custody' (release Oct. 16, 2025; letter dated Oct. 15); Ayala Roman v. The GEO Group, Inc. and Wellpath, LLC, No. 2:25-cv-12436 (C.D. Cal., complaint filed Dec. 31, 2025) (CourtListener); Scripps News (Patrick Terpstra), 'ICE waived rule requiring detainees receive medical checkups within two weeks' (Oct. 8, 2026) - ICE mortality review obtained by Scripps; Scripps News, 'Deaths and medical neglect claims cast scrutiny on California immigration lockup' (May 14, 2026) - four deaths since Sept. 2025; California Department of Justice, Immigration Detention in California: A Review of Conditions of Confinement (May 2026, rev. June 2026); L.A. TACO (Sept. 23, 2025)

Press; congressional release; court complaint; state report

IEIV-0102Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL12 L3

ConnectedIEIV-0089 IEIV-0082 IEIV-0103

Era 10Present Struggle

Resistance / Resilience

2025

Jan. 23, 24 and 31, 2025

Truth & Healing Council hears Riverside, San Diego and Imperial counties

Policies & Systems

Riverside, San Diego and Imperial counties (California Truth & Healing Council regional hearings)

Homeland: Multiple

Governor Newsom's Executive Order N-15-19 of June 2019 - the state's formal apology for genocide (CV-0136) - created the California Truth & Healing Council to document the historical relationship between the state and California Native peoples. The council's own meeting record lists 'January 2025 Regional Hearings - Riverside, San Diego & Imperial Counties, January 23, 24 & 31, 2025,' and a quarterly meeting at CSU San Bernardino opened with San Manuel bird singers. The council was to submit its final report to the Governor's Office 'by 2025' (council website); an authors' convening was held October 10-11, 2025, and the council's website showed no final report as of November 2026. For the nations whose indenture, convict leasing and estate conservatorships this timeline documents (IEIV-0106, IEIV-0107, IEIV-0041), the hearings are the first state redress forum held on regional ground that this timeline records.

DatesEO N-15-19 June 18, 2019; regional hearings Jan. 23, 24 and 31, 2025

ActorsCalifornia Truth & Healing Council; Governor Gavin Newsom; tribal governments of Riverside, San Diego and Imperial counties; Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation

1California Truth & Healing Council, meetings page (Governor's Office of Tribal Affairs)

2CSU San Bernardino, 'CSUSB site of California Truth & Healing Council meeting'; Executive Order N-15-19 (June 18, 2019)

State council record; university release; executive order

IEIV-0115Tier 1Multi-countyLineageL1

ConnectedIEIV-0106 IEIV-0041 CV-0136

Era 10Present Struggle

Resistance / Resilience

2026

May-June 2026

Adelanto hunger strikers report being put in solitary after meeting Congress members

Carceral Systems & Prison Struggle

Adelanto ICE Processing Center (San Bernardino Co.)

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano - Vanyume)

In May and June 2026 some 150 people detained at Adelanto signed a petition over 'inhumane conditions' - water, food and medical neglect, by their accounts (KVCR; Mission Local) and about forty began a hunger strike, joined by some twenty at the neighboring Desert View Annex; after Representatives Judy Chu, Jimmy Gomez and Pete Aguilar visited, the three strikers who had met them were moved to solitary confinement, Truthout reported (two the day after the visit, a third two days later, per other detainees) and advocates told KVCR - GEO said it 'categorically reject[s] these baseless allegations' and DHS denied that any hunger strike occurred (ABC7; KVCR) - with Truthout counting 'at least 13 people' dead at Adelanto since it opened in 2011. Forty-one years after the El Centro camp's hunger strike (IEIV-0051), detained people in the high desert used the same weapon, and reported the same retaliation.

DatesPetition and hunger strike May-June 2026 (~150 detained people); strikers reported moved to solitary after congressional visit (DHS denies)

ActorsAdelanto hunger strikers; Reps. Judy Chu, Jimmy Gomez, Pete Aguilar; GEO Group; ICE; Public Counsel; Disability Rights California

1Mission Local, 'Hunger strike at ICE facility: detainees decry inhumane conditions' (May 20, 2026); KVCR (Anthony Victoria), 'Detained immigrants at Adelanto say they face retaliation, as hunger strike continues' (June 3, 2026) - Chu on food and water; GEO denial; L.A. TACO (June 2026); LA Public Press (June 2026)

2Truthout (Shireen Akram-Boshar), 'Hunger strikers in Adelanto ICE jail moved to solitary after meeting congressmen' (June 9, 2026); ABC7 (June 2, 2026) - DHS denial

Contemporaneous press

IEIV-0103Tier 2San BernardinoLineageL3 L12 L10

ConnectedIEIV-0102 IEIV-0051 IEIV-0089

Era 10Present Struggle

Oppression / Dominance

2026

Oct. 2, 2026

DHS buys the Adelanto detention complex from GEO for $950 million

Policies & Systems

Adelanto West, Adelanto East and Desert View Annex (Adelanto, San Bernardino Co.)

Homeland: Maara'yam (Serrano - Vanyume)

GEO Group's Form 8-K reported that it 'completed the sales of its 1,280-bed Adelanto West ICE Processing Center... 660-bed Adelanto East ICE Processing Center... and 704-bed Desert View Annex... to the United States of America and its assigns, by and through the Department of Homeland Security, for an aggregate gross sales price of $950 million,' anticipating 'approximately $705 million in net proceeds' and raising its share-buyback authorization to $1.25 billion. GEO keeps operating the 2,644 beds under an ICE contract running to December 19, 2029, with a five-year option to 2034. The sale converts a town's 2010 bet on detention (IEIV-0072) into federal ownership of what California Attorney General Rob Bonta called in March 2026 'one of the largest immigration detention centers in the United States,' while the labor litigation (IEIV-0119) and the 2026 conditions class action L.T. v. ICE (under a preliminary injunction since July 16, 2026) continue.

DatesAgreement and closing Oct. 2, 2026 (Form 8-K Item 2.01 event date); press release / Ex. 99.1 dated Oct. 5, 2026

ActorsGEO Group; U.S. Department of Homeland Security / ICE; City of Adelanto

⚑ Human-collateral: per-diem bed

1GEO Group, Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1 (press release dated Oct. 5, 2026), SEC EDGAR CIK 923796

2Bisnow, 'DHS buys detention facilities from the GEO Group' (Oct. 6, 2026); Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, L.T. v. ICE, No. 5:26-cv-00322 (C.D. Cal., filed Jan. 26, 2026; PI July 16, 2026; 9th Cir. No. 26-4902 stay denied Aug. 20 and Oct. 21, 2026); California Attorney General, release of Mar. 19, 2026, 'Attorney General Bonta Sounds Alarm on Inhumane Conditions at Adelanto Detention Center' - 'one of the largest immigration detention centers in the United States'

SEC filing (primary); press; litigation database; state AG release

IEIV-0120Tier 1San BernardinoLineageL8 L12

ConnectedIEIV-0072 IEIV-0086 IEIV-0119 IEIV-0103

Organizing lineage

Indigenous Sovereignty & Resistance

From the Quechan destruction of the Spanish settlements at the Yuma crossing (1781) through the Treaty of Temecula and its secret rejection (1852), the militia campaign against the Serrano (1866), the Temecula eviction (1875), executive-order reservations and the 1891 Act, Sherman Institute, the drowning of Torres-Martinez and Chemehuevi lands by the Salton Sea and Parker Dam, and the Mission Indian Federation's 'Human Rights and Home Rule' (1919–21), to Malki Museum (1965), the Quechan land restoration (1978), Cabazon (1987), Ward Valley (1998), the Torres-Martinez settlement (2000), the Quechan defense of Indian Pass (2009), Agua Caliente's groundwater victory (2017) and the Chuckwalla National Monument (2025, now defended in court): nations on whose ground Spain built no mission of its own and whose lands were never ceded by ratified treaty, governing still.

35 entries carrying L1

1769Sovereign desert and mountain nations hold the homelands
1774Spain reaches the region's edge: Anza's crossings and the San Gabriel outposts
1781Quechan uprising destroys the Spanish settlements at the Yuma crossing
1848Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transfers the region to U.S. rule
1850The Indian Act: Native people auctioned 'to the best bidder'
1851The Garra uprising: Cupeño revolt against the tax and labor regime
1851Burnett's 'war of extermination' message and the state war fund
1852Treaty of Temecula signed - and secretly rejected by the Senate
1852The Monday auction: Los Angeles sells Native convicts' labor by the week
1853Cave Couts binds Luiseño workers by debt, custody, indenture and the lash
1859'Wipe out the Mojave!': the 1859 Army campaign on the Colorado
1863Smallpox winter kills Juan Antonio; Saahatpa is abandoned
1866Mountain campaign against the Serrano: tribal account and 1867 record
1875Sheriff's posse evicts the Luiseño from Temecula; Pechanga rebuilds
1876Executive orders set apart Cahuilla reservations at Agua Caliente and Torres-Martinez
1884Fort Yuma Reservation set apart; the 1893 'agreement' takes 25,000 acres
1891Act for the Relief of the Mission Indians creates the Smiley Commission
1902Sherman Institute opens: a federal boarding school on Magnolia Avenue
1905The Colorado breaks its banks: the Salton Sea drowns Torres-Martinez lands
1909The outing system: Sherman hires out Native children and holds their wages
1919Mission Indian Federation founded at Riverside: 'Human Rights and Home Rule'
1940Parker Dam drowns the Chemehuevi Valley: 7,776 acres for $108,104.95
1965Malki Museum: the first Native-founded museum on a California reservation
1966Section 14: Palm Springs removes its Black and Mexican American residents
1968Press-Enterprise wins the Pulitzer for exposing Agua Caliente guardianship corruption
1978Interior restores 25,000 acres to the Quechan
1987Cabazon Band beats Riverside County; tribal gaming law is born
1998Five nations hold Ward Valley 113 days and kill a nuclear dump
2000Congress settles the Torres-Martinez flood claims after 93 years
2009Glamis Gold v. United States: the Quechan defense of Indian Pass holds
2009Duroville: a federal receiver, then closure, for a farmworker park
2017Agua Caliente wins federal reserved rights to Coachella Valley groundwater
2020Lithium Valley: the state convenes a commission over the next extraction
2025Chuckwalla National Monument: tribes win a 624,000-acre designation
2025Truth & Healing Council hears Riverside, San Diego and Imperial counties

Organizing lineage

Black Freedom Struggle in the Inland Empire & Imperial Valley

From the 26 enslaved people brought to the Mormon colony (1851) and the habeas decision that freed Biddy Mason and Hannah (1856), through the Imperial Valley's Black cotton communities and their segregated-then-self-run schools (1913–54), Kaiser's color line (1942), the firebombing of the Short family (1945), the Section 14 removals (1965–68), Riverside's voluntary desegregation (1965), the founding of the Precinct Reporter (1965) and Black Voice News (1972), the Fontana Klan years (1980–81), Tyisha Miller and the first court-enforced police-reform judgment won by a state attorney general (1998-2006), the Yucaipa confrontations (2020), the state's civil-rights investigation of the Riverside sheriff (2023) and the Section 14 settlement (2024): Black self-determination and defense on Inland ground. The thread is thin for the 1950s-70s, where documentation is still being gathered.

20 entries carrying L2

1851The Mormon colony brings 26 enslaved Black people to San Bernardino
1851Enslaved San Bernardino labor is tithed; a Utah sale is proposed
1856Biddy Mason and Hannah win freedom from a San Bernardino slaveholder
1913El Centro formally segregates its schools as a Black community takes root
1923El Centro refuses a Black student, builds a separate school: Douglass High
1942Kaiser Steel rises at Fontana
1945The O'Day Short family is burned out of Fontana
1965After the Lowell School arson, Riverside desegregates without a court order
1965Precinct Reporter founded: a Black newspaper of record for the Inland Empire
1966Section 14: Palm Springs removes its Black and Mexican American residents
1972UC Riverside students found Black Voice News
1980The Klan marches in Fontana; Dovard Howard is shot in the back
1998Riverside police kill Tyisha Miller: 'as many as two dozen shots'
2001California's first court-enforced police reform judgment lands on Riverside
2001California's Slavery Era Insurance Registry: the policies on enslaved lives are disclosed
2018Sigma Beta Xi settlement removes probation's Youth Accountability Teams from schools
2020George Floyd protesters are confronted in Yucaipa
2023The Attorney General opens a civil-rights investigation of the Riverside County Sheriff
2023California's reparations report tells the Short family's story in its first chapter
2024Palm Springs settles with Section 14 survivors, 56 years after the memorandum

Organizing lineage

Prison Movement, Black August & the Inside-Outside Line

From the El Centro camp's hunger strike (1985) through the desert prison buildout (1988–94), the Ziska case at Chino (2004–06), the Chino riot and Brown v. Plata (2009–11), the 2011 and 2013 hunger strikes at Calipatria, Centinela, Ironwood and Norco - with Calipatria's ASU reporting its demands met in writing (2013) - CIW's suicide crisis and Erika Rocha (2016), the Adelanto strikes (2017; reported 2026), Roman v. Wolf (2020), the Sigma Beta Xi settlement (2018–19), the closure of Riverside Juvenile Hall (2020) and Chuckawalla (2024): the region as both engine of the carceral state and seedbed of its opposition. No Black August entry authored from an Inland/Imperial facility has yet been located.

21 entries carrying L3

1982Orantes-Hernandez: a federal court restrains coerced 'voluntary departure' at El Centro
1985Hunger strike at the El Centro camp
1988Four prisons land in the desert: two at Blythe, Calipatria, Centinela
2004Chino guard convicted of racketeering for the Nazi Low Riders
2009Chino's overcrowded reception center explodes; the Supreme Court takes notice
2011The 2011 hunger strike reaches Calipatria, Centinela, Ironwood and Norco
2013Calipatria's ASU hunger strikers and a disputed negotiated response
2014West Valley jail abuse draws the FBI and a $2.5 million settlement
2016Erika Rocha dies at CIW the day before her youth parole hearing
2017Three deaths in three months; the Adelanto 9 strike, report pepper spray
2018DHS inspectors find nooses in about 15 of 20 inspected Adelanto cells
2018Sigma Beta Xi settlement removes probation's Youth Accountability Teams from schools
2020Riverside County closes Riverside Juvenile Hall after years of shrinking detention
2020Roman v. Wolf: a federal judge empties most of Adelanto during COVID-19
2020Libre by Nexus: the detained body as bond collateral
2021Juvenile realignment grant priced by projected wards; Riverside's share
2023The Attorney General opens a civil-rights investigation of the Riverside County Sheriff
2023Court-school funding follows detained attendance at $16,000-plus per ADA
2024Chuckawalla closes: the prison-closure era reaches the desert
2025Ismael Ayala-Uribe dies after detention at Adelanto
2026Adelanto hunger strikers report being put in solitary after meeting Congress members

Organizing lineage

Farmworker & Warehouse Worker Power (the long line of the irrigated and logistics empire)

From the 1928 cantaloupe strike and the Imperial Valley Eight (1930), through Azteca Hall and Glassford's indictment of 'mob rule' (1934), the Coachella strike that sparked Delano (1965), the Battle of Coachella (1973) and the killing of Rufino Contreras (1979), to the warehouse workers' WalMarch and the Schneider settlement (2012–14), Rule 2305 (2021) and the Amazon air-hub walkouts (2022): the century-long line from the lettuce fields to the fulfillment center.

15 entries carrying L4

1877Southern Pacific bridges the Colorado at Yuma; the Imperial Canal follows
1909The outing system: Sherman hires out Native children and holds their wages
1928Mexican cantaloupe workers strike the Imperial Valley
1930Brawley lettuce strike; the 'Imperial Valley Eight' sentenced for criminal syndicalism
1934Tear gas at Azteca Hall; vigilantes kidnap ACLU attorney A. L. Wirin
1934Federal conciliator Glassford accuses 'a group of growers' of 'mob rule'
1942Kaiser Steel rises at Fontana
1942The braceros' 10 percent: wages withheld, banked, and mostly never returned
1965Filipino grape workers strike Coachella - the spark for Delano
1973The Battle of Coachella: UFW, Teamsters and 'Fighting for Our Lives'
1979Rufino Contreras is shot dead in a struck lettuce field
2012Warehouse workers strike Walmart's contractors and march 50 miles to Los Angeles
2021Rule 2305: the 'Diesel Death Zones' campaign wins a warehouse emissions rule
2022Amazon air-hub workers walk out in San Bernardino
2025Federal raids sweep the Inland Empire and the east Coachella Valley

Organizing lineage

Anti-Asian Exclusion & Asian American Resistance

From Riverside's forced Chinatown relocation (1885) and the Redlands expulsions (1893), through Pachappa Camp's Korean settlement (1905), the Harada family's Alien Land Law victory (1918), the Punjabi-Mexican families of the Imperial Valley and the El Centro gurdwara in a former Japanese Buddhist church, bought while its congregation was incarcerated (1947), to the Save Our Chinatown Committee's 2012 victory: exclusion answered by permanence.

7 entries carrying L5

1885Riverside pushes its Chinese residents into a new Chinatown
1893Mobs drive Chinese workers from Redlands; the National Guard is called out
1905Pachappa Camp: Korean citrus workers build a self-governed settlement
1918People v. Harada: first Alien Land Law test; children keep the house
1947Punjabi-Mexican families and the El Centro gurdwara in a bought Buddhist church
1965Filipino grape workers strike Coachella - the spark for Delano
2012Save Our Chinatown wins on appeal; the city's approval is set aside

Organizing lineage

Mexican, Chicano & Immigrant Justice beyond the fields

From the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and the Colton repatriation trains (1931), through Lopez v. Seccombe (1944), the Unity Leagues (1946), Operation Wetback (1954), Section 14, Riverside's desegregation boycott (1965), the TODEC (1984), Prop 187 walkouts (1994), ICIJ (2008), IEIYC (2010), Duroville (2009–13), the Adelanto campaigns and Roman v. Wolf (2019–20), to the 2025 raids and Vasquez Perdomo: community defense as the region's other farm system. Chicano-movement-era events (walkouts, the Moratorium, Casa Blanca) await documentation.

26 entries carrying L6

1848Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transfers the region to U.S. rule
1911Magonistas take Mexicali from an IWW hall in Holtville
1928Mexican cantaloupe workers strike the Imperial Valley
1931'Repatriation' trains leave Colton: 450 people on one November day
1942The braceros' 10 percent: wages withheld, banked, and mostly never returned
1944Lopez v. Seccombe opens San Bernardino's pool to Mexican Americans
1946Unity Leagues: Casa Blanca's votes help unseat a councilman
1954Operation Wetback opens in California and Arizona
1965After the Lowell School arson, Riverside desegregates without a court order
1966Section 14: Palm Springs removes its Black and Mexican American residents
1982Orantes-Hernandez: a federal court restrains coerced 'voluntary departure' at El Centro
1984TODEC Legal Center founded in Perris
1987Comité Cívico del Valle founded in the Imperial Valley
1994Operation Gatekeeper pushes crossings - and deaths - into Imperial County
1994Riverside students join the walkouts against Proposition 187
2008A bishop founds the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice
2009Duroville: a federal receiver, then closure, for a farmworker park
2010College students found the Inland Empire Immigrant Youth Collective
2017Three deaths in three months; the Adelanto 9 strike, report pepper spray
2017Novoa v. GEO: partial ruling finds Adelanto's $1-a-day pay violated minimum wage
2018Sigma Beta Xi settlement removes probation's Youth Accountability Teams from schools
2019Adelanto exits its ICE agreement; GEO signs a 15-year contract directly
2020Roman v. Wolf: a federal judge empties most of Adelanto during COVID-19
2024Palm Springs settles with Section 14 survivors, 56 years after the memorandum
2025Federal raids sweep the Inland Empire and the east Coachella Valley
2025Vasquez Perdomo: a court bars roving stops; the Supreme Court intervenes

Organizing lineage

Guard Power, Police Politics & Paramilitary Infiltration

From the 1866 militia and the Redlands mobs (1893), through the San Bernardino Klan council (1921) and the Klan's entry into county politics (1924), the Imperial Valley's vigilantes documented by a federal conciliator (1934), the Short firebombing (1945), the John Birch Society's California coordinator in Rialto (1965), the Fontana Klan and the shooting of Dovard Howard (1980), the Tyisha Miller killing and state judgment (1998-2006), a Chino guard convicted on racketeering and civil-rights counts tied to the Nazi Low Riders (2004–06), West Valley Detention Center and Pusok (2014–15), the Oath Keepers membership rolls (2021), the state's investigation of the Riverside sheriff (2023) and the school-board policies a state court enjoined as discrimination (2023): organized supremacist, paramilitary-affiliated, police and guard power inside and beside official institutions, documented only from courts, agencies, legislatures and contemporaneous press - each entry resting on the conduct of record, with no affiliation imputed beyond it.

29 entries carrying L7

1850The Indian Act: Native people auctioned 'to the best bidder'
1851Burnett's 'war of extermination' message and the state war fund
1852The Monday auction: Los Angeles sells Native convicts' labor by the week
1853Cave Couts binds Luiseño workers by debt, custody, indenture and the lash
1859'Wipe out the Mojave!': the 1859 Army campaign on the Colorado
1866Mountain campaign against the Serrano: tribal account and 1867 record
1893Mobs drive Chinese workers from Redlands; the National Guard is called out
1909The outing system: Sherman hires out Native children and holds their wages
1919Mission Indian Federation founded at Riverside: 'Human Rights and Home Rule'
1921A Klan council organizes in San Bernardino - in secret
1930Brawley lettuce strike; the 'Imperial Valley Eight' sentenced for criminal syndicalism
1934Tear gas at Azteca Hall; vigilantes kidnap ACLU attorney A. L. Wirin
1934Federal conciliator Glassford accuses 'a group of growers' of 'mob rule'
1945The O'Day Short family is burned out of Fontana
1965State report: the John Birch Society's California coordinator lives in Rialto
1968Press-Enterprise wins the Pulitzer for exposing Agua Caliente guardianship corruption
1973The Battle of Coachella: UFW, Teamsters and 'Fighting for Our Lives'
1979Rufino Contreras is shot dead in a struck lettuce field
1980The Klan marches in Fontana; Dovard Howard is shot in the back
1998Riverside police kill Tyisha Miller: 'as many as two dozen shots'
2001California's first court-enforced police reform judgment lands on Riverside
2004Chino guard convicted of racketeering for the Nazi Low Riders
2014Murrieta: protesters turn back buses of Central American families
2014West Valley jail abuse draws the FBI and a $2.5 million settlement
2015A helicopter films deputies beating Francis Pusok; the county pays $650,000
2020George Floyd protesters are confronted in Yucaipa
2021Riverside's sheriff is found on the Oath Keepers' membership rolls
2023The Attorney General opens a civil-rights investigation of the Riverside County Sheriff
2023Inland school boards' curriculum and gender-notification policies; the state sues

Organizing lineage

Prison-Town & Detention Political Economy and the Fights Against Expansion

From the desert prison buildout (Chuckawalla 1988, Calipatria 1992, Centinela 1993, Ironwood 1994) and Adelanto's sale of its prison to GEO (2010–11), through the DHS inspection (2018), Victorville's use for ICE (2018), the city's exit and GEO's direct contract (2019), Riverside Juvenile Hall's closure (2020) and Chuckawalla's deactivation (2024), to the federal purchase of the Adelanto complex (2026): the carceral economy as development policy and the campaigns that contest it.

12 entries carrying L8

1988Four prisons land in the desert: two at Blythe, Calipatria, Centinela
2009Chino's overcrowded reception center explodes; the Supreme Court takes notice
2011Adelanto sells its prison to GEO; ICE moves in
2017Novoa v. GEO: partial ruling finds Adelanto's $1-a-day pay violated minimum wage
2018DHS inspectors find nooses in about 15 of 20 inspected Adelanto cells
2018ICE sends up to a thousand detainees to the Victorville federal prison
2019Adelanto exits its ICE agreement; GEO signs a 15-year contract directly
2020Riverside County closes Riverside Juvenile Hall after years of shrinking detention
2021Juvenile realignment grant priced by projected wards; Riverside's share
2023Court-school funding follows detained attendance at $16,000-plus per ADA
2024Chuckawalla closes: the prison-closure era reaches the desert
2026DHS buys the Adelanto detention complex from GEO for $950 million

Organizing lineage

Environmental Justice as Desert & Inland Resistance

From the Salton Sea's drowning of Torres-Martinez land (1905–07) and Parker Dam's drowning of the Chemehuevi Valley (1940), through Glen Avon's mothers at Stringfellow (1978), the Eagle Mountain landfill fight (1987-2013), Ward Valley (1998), Indian Pass (2009), Duroville (2009–13), the canal lifelines (2010), Rule 2305 (2021), Lithium Valley (2020–24) and the Chuckwalla National Monument (2025): the desert defended.

16 entries carrying L9

1877Southern Pacific bridges the Colorado at Yuma; the Imperial Canal follows
1905The Colorado breaks its banks: the Salton Sea drowns Torres-Martinez lands
1940Parker Dam drowns the Chemehuevi Valley: 7,776 acres for $108,104.95
1978Glen Avon's mothers organize against the Stringfellow Acid Pits
1987Comité Cívico del Valle founded in the Imperial Valley
1998The All-American Canal: 'the most dangerous body of water in the U.S.'
1998Five nations hold Ward Valley 113 days and kill a nuclear dump
2000Congress settles the Torres-Martinez flood claims after 93 years
2009Glamis Gold v. United States: the Quechan defense of Indian Pass holds
2009Residents and park advocates beat the 'largest landfill in the United States'
2009Duroville: a federal receiver, then closure, for a farmworker park
2010After 60 Minutes, IID strings lifelines across the All-American Canal
2017Agua Caliente wins federal reserved rights to Coachella Valley groundwater
2020Lithium Valley: the state convenes a commission over the next extraction
2021Rule 2305: the 'Diesel Death Zones' campaign wins a warehouse emissions rule
2025Chuckwalla National Monument: tribes win a 624,000-acre designation

Organizing lineage

L10

Cross-Racial Solidarity Moments

Mexican and Filipino workers at Brawley (1930); Punjabi-Mexican families; Pachappa's Korean workers in a citrus economy; the Riverside parents' boycott (1965); Filipino and Mexican workers at Coachella (1965); the five nations and their allies at the anti-Klan committees of Fontana (1980); Ward Valley (1998); Water Station's volunteers; the Murrieta counter-protest (2014); the warehouse and Amazon workforces (2012–22); hunger strikers at Calipatria (2013) and Adelanto (2026): the deliberate record of lineages touching.

20 entries carrying L10

1905Pachappa Camp: Korean citrus workers build a self-governed settlement
1911Magonistas take Mexicali from an IWW hall in Holtville
1930Brawley lettuce strike; the 'Imperial Valley Eight' sentenced for criminal syndicalism
1946Unity Leagues: Casa Blanca's votes help unseat a councilman
1947Punjabi-Mexican families and the El Centro gurdwara in a bought Buddhist church
1965Filipino grape workers strike Coachella - the spark for Delano
1965After the Lowell School arson, Riverside desegregates without a court order
1980The Klan marches in Fontana; Dovard Howard is shot in the back
1998Five nations hold Ward Valley 113 days and kill a nuclear dump
2000Water Station: a volunteer network puts water in the killing desert
2008A bishop founds the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice
2009Holtville's field of John and Jane Does
2011The 2011 hunger strike reaches Calipatria, Centinela, Ironwood and Norco
2012Warehouse workers strike Walmart's contractors and march 50 miles to Los Angeles
2013Calipatria's ASU hunger strikers and a disputed negotiated response
2014Murrieta: protesters turn back buses of Central American families
2020George Floyd protesters are confronted in Yucaipa
2022Amazon air-hub workers walk out in San Bernardino
2025Chuckwalla National Monument: tribes win a 624,000-acre designation
2026Adelanto hunger strikers report being put in solitary after meeting Congress members

Organizing lineage

L11

Queer Inland Empire & Desert Organizing

From the Inland AIDS Project (early 1980s), the Desert AIDS Project (1984), Palm Springs' 'Sizzle' (1986) and Riverside's AIDS anti-discrimination ordinance (1987), through TruEvolution (2007) and the UndocuQueer founders of IEIYC (2010), to the all-LGBTQ Palm Springs council (2017) and the defense of queer and trans students against the Chino Valley and Temecula boards (2023). The thread is the thinnest on the timeline and the first expansion target.

4 entries carrying L11

1984Inland and desert communities build queer institutions in the AIDS years
2010College students found the Inland Empire Immigrant Youth Collective
2017Palm Springs elects the nation's first all-LGBTQ city council
2023Inland school boards' curriculum and gender-notification policies; the state sues

Organizing lineage

L12

Borderlands & Binational Struggle

From the Quechan uprising at the Yuma crossing (1781) and the Magonista capture of Mexicali from Holtville (1911), through Operation Wetback's El Centro buslift (1954), Orantes-Hernandez and the El Centro hunger strike (1982–85), Operation Gatekeeper's displacement of crossings into the Imperial desert and canal (1994 on), Water Station (2000), the Holtville graves and the canal lifelines (2009–10), Murrieta (2014), Adelanto and Victorville (2011–26), the dead the federal count missed (2018–23), the 2025 raids and Vasquez Perdomo: the line itself as a structure of domination and of defense.

30 entries carrying L12

1781Quechan uprising destroys the Spanish settlements at the Yuma crossing
1877Southern Pacific bridges the Colorado at Yuma; the Imperial Canal follows
1884Fort Yuma Reservation set apart; the 1893 'agreement' takes 25,000 acres
1911Magonistas take Mexicali from an IWW hall in Holtville
1942The braceros' 10 percent: wages withheld, banked, and mostly never returned
1954Operation Wetback opens in California and Arizona
1978Interior restores 25,000 acres to the Quechan
1979Rufino Contreras is shot dead in a struck lettuce field
1982Orantes-Hernandez: a federal court restrains coerced 'voluntary departure' at El Centro
1985Hunger strike at the El Centro camp
1994Operation Gatekeeper pushes crossings - and deaths - into Imperial County
1998The All-American Canal: 'the most dangerous body of water in the U.S.'
2000Water Station: a volunteer network puts water in the killing desert
2009Holtville's field of John and Jane Does
2010After 60 Minutes, IID strings lifelines across the All-American Canal
2011Adelanto sells its prison to GEO; ICE moves in
2014Murrieta: protesters turn back buses of Central American families
2017Three deaths in three months; the Adelanto 9 strike, report pepper spray
2017Novoa v. GEO: partial ruling finds Adelanto's $1-a-day pay violated minimum wage
2018DHS inspectors find nooses in about 15 of 20 inspected Adelanto cells
2018ICE sends up to a thousand detainees to the Victorville federal prison
2019Adelanto exits its ICE agreement; GEO signs a 15-year contract directly
2020Roman v. Wolf: a federal judge empties most of Adelanto during COVID-19
2020Libre by Nexus: the detained body as bond collateral
2022Migrant deaths in California's borderlands nearly triple; the federal count undercounts
2025Federal raids sweep the Inland Empire and the east Coachella Valley
2025Vasquez Perdomo: a court bars roving stops; the Supreme Court intervenes
2025Ismael Ayala-Uribe dies after detention at Adelanto
2026Adelanto hunger strikers report being put in solitary after meeting Congress members
2026DHS buys the Adelanto detention complex from GEO for $950 million

Places

Places & homeland attributions

Homeland attributions used on the timeline and where each comes from. They are general and should be refined with each tribal government.

Yuma crossing / Fort Yuma / Winterhaven / BardIMP

Kwatsáan (Quechan)

Source of attributionProclamation 10881 (Kwatsáan); Fort Yuma EO 1884; Quechan tribal site

NotesCocopah to the south (delta)

El Centro, Brawley, Calexico, Holtville, Imperial, CalipatriaIMP

Kumeyaay; Quechan (general attribution)

Source of attributionKroeber/Smithsonian Handbook vol. 8 general attribution - Tier 2

NotesRefine per site with Kumeyaay and Quechan governments

Salton Sea / Thermal / Mecca / Torres-MartinezRIV/IMP

Desert Cahuilla (Torres-Martinez)

Source of attribution25 U.S.C. §1778; SCTCA

NotesReservation straddles the county line

Palm Springs / Agua CalienteRIV

Iviatim (Cahuilla - Agua Caliente Band)

Source of attribution9th Cir. 2017 (EOs 1876-77); Proclamation 10881 (Iviatim)

Coachella / Indio / Cabazon / Morongo / BanningRIV

Iviatim (Cahuilla)

Source of attributionCabazon (1987); Proclamation 1257 (Morongo); Malki Museum

Temecula / Pechanga / Murrieta / PerrisRIV

Payómkawichum (Luiseño)

Source of attributionPechanga Band history pages (endonym per Pechanga)

NotesPerris area also Cahuilla - refine

Riverside city (Eastside, Casa Blanca, Chinatown, Pachappa, Sherman)RIV

Iviatim (Cahuilla); Tongva (general)

Source of attributionGeneral attribution - Tier 2

NotesRefine with Soboba, Cahuilla and Gabrieleño-Tongva governments

San Bernardino / Rialto / Colton / Fontana / Redlands / YucaipaSB

Maara'yam (Serrano); Tongva (western valley)

Source of attributionSan Manuel Nation site ('We are Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation'; 'a Clan of Maara'yam... or Serrano people'); Maara'yam spelling per the Nation and Proclamation 10881

NotesFontana/Chino west: Tongva

Chino / Ontario / Upland / Montclair / Rancho CucamongaSB

Tongva

Source of attributionGeneral attribution - Tier 2

NotesRefine with Gabrieleño-Tongva governments and Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation (IEIV-0100 lists Tongva and Maara'yam for Upland and Ontario)

Big Bear / Summit Valley / San Bernardino MountainsSB

Yuhaaviatam clan of the Maara'yam (Serrano)

Source of attributionSan Manuel Nation history

Adelanto / Victorville / Apple Valley (high desert)SB

Maara'yam (Serrano - Vanyume/Desert Serrano)

Source of attributionGeneral attribution; Proclamation 10881 (Marringayam)

NotesRefine with San Manuel and Morongo

Blythe / Chuckawalla / Ironwood / Eagle Mountain / Ward Valley / Needles / Chemehuevi ValleyRIV/SB

Nüwü (Chemehuevi); Pipa Aha Macav (Mojave); Iviatim (Cahuilla) at Eagle Mountain

Source of attributionProclamation 10881; Chemehuevi Tribe history; Ward Valley Federal Register notice

Chuckwalla National MonumentRIV/IMP

Iviatim; Nüwü; Pipa Aha Macav; Kwatsáan; Maara'yam/Marringayam

Source of attributionProclamation 10881 (verbatim)

Los Angeles District Court (1856); Central District of California (connected ground)CONNECTED

Tongva (Los Angeles)

Source of attributionGeneral attribution

NotesEntered only where a lineage runs through the region

Warner's Ranch / Cupa / Warner Springs (San Diego Co., south of the Riverside line)CONNECTED

Kuupangaxwichem (Cupeño)

Source of attributionPala Band of Mission Indians, 'History' (palatribe.com); Cupa Cultural Center, history (cupa.palatribe.com); Barker v. Harvey, 181 U.S. 481 (1901); California Historical Landmark No. 311 (Warner's Ranch, San Diego County); NAHC Tribal Atlas, Pala Band; Federal Register, Oct. 9, 2008

NotesAttribution used for IEIV-0107 and IEIV-0109. Cupa (now Warner's Hot Springs) and Wilakal were the home villages; removal to Pala began May 12, 1903 after Barker v. Harvey (May 13, 1901). Two statements on the Pala Band page are not carried over (a 'President Hayes' attribution for a 1903 order; '1848' for statehood). Cupeño territory's relation to the Riverside County line is not described in the sources opened; Cupa and Pala lie in San Diego County, and the attribution is used only where entries 0107 and 0109 run through them.

The record is open

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Every proposal is read, checked against sources, and answered. Entries are added with the verification tier their sources support.

Collective Memory of Organizing and Resistancein the Inland Empire, Imperial Valley and Coachella Valley

A desert Spain never held

Empire in the name, twice

Sovereignty & the Yuma Crossing

Sovereign desert and mountain nations hold the homelands

Spain reaches the region's edge: Anza's crossings and the San Gabriel outposts

Quechan uprising destroys the Spanish settlements at the Yuma crossing

Mexican Era, Ranchos & Refuge

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transfers the region to U.S. rule

Colony, Militia & Reservation

The Indian Act: Native people auctioned 'to the best bidder'

The Mormon colony brings 26 enslaved Black people to San Bernardino

Enslaved San Bernardino labor is tithed; a Utah sale is proposed

The Garra uprising: Cupeño revolt against the tax and labor regime

Burnett's 'war of extermination' message and the state war fund

Treaty of Temecula signed - and secretly rejected by the Senate

The Monday auction: Los Angeles sells Native convicts' labor by the week

Cave Couts binds Luiseño workers by debt, custody, indenture and the lash

Biddy Mason and Hannah win freedom from a San Bernardino slaveholder

'Wipe out the Mojave!': the 1859 Army campaign on the Colorado

Smallpox winter kills Juan Antonio; Saahatpa is abandoned

Mountain campaign against the Serrano: tribal account and 1867 record

Sheriff's posse evicts the Luiseño from Temecula; Pechanga rebuilds

Executive orders set apart Cahuilla reservations at Agua Caliente and Torres-Martinez

Southern Pacific bridges the Colorado at Yuma; the Imperial Canal follows

Fort Yuma Reservation set apart; the 1893 'agreement' takes 25,000 acres

Riverside pushes its Chinese residents into a new Chinatown

Citrus Empire, Exclusion & the Irrigated Desert

Act for the Relief of the Mission Indians creates the Smiley Commission

Mobs drive Chinese workers from Redlands; the National Guard is called out

Sherman Institute opens: a federal boarding school on Magnolia Avenue

Pachappa Camp: Korean citrus workers build a self-governed settlement

The Colorado breaks its banks: the Salton Sea drowns Torres-Martinez lands

The outing system: Sherman hires out Native children and holds their wages

Magonistas take Mexicali from an IWW hall in Holtville

El Centro formally segregates its schools as a Black community takes root

People v. Harada: first Alien Land Law test; children keep the house

Mission Indian Federation founded at Riverside: 'Human Rights and Home Rule'

A Klan council organizes in San Bernardino - in secret

El Centro refuses a Black student, builds a separate school: Douglass High

Mexican cantaloupe workers strike the Imperial Valley

Depression, Strike Wave & Vigilante Valley

Brawley lettuce strike; the 'Imperial Valley Eight' sentenced for criminal syndicalism

'Repatriation' trains leave Colton: 450 people on one November day

Tear gas at Azteca Hall; vigilantes kidnap ACLU attorney A. L. Wirin

Federal conciliator Glassford accuses 'a group of growers' of 'mob rule'

Parker Dam drowns the Chemehuevi Valley: 7,776 acres for $108,104.95

War, Steel, Braceros & the Color Line

Kaiser Steel rises at Fontana

The braceros' 10 percent: wages withheld, banked, and mostly never returned

Lopez v. Seccombe opens San Bernardino's pool to Mexican Americans

The O'Day Short family is burned out of Fontana

Unity Leagues: Casa Blanca's votes help unseat a councilman

Punjabi-Mexican families and the El Centro gurdwara in a bought Buddhist church

Operation Wetback opens in California and Arizona

Farmworker Insurgency, Black & Chicano Power, Prison Movement Rise

Malki Museum: the first Native-founded museum on a California reservation

State report: the John Birch Society's California coordinator lives in Rialto

Filipino grape workers strike Coachella - the spark for Delano

After the Lowell School arson, Riverside desegregates without a court order

Precinct Reporter founded: a Black newspaper of record for the Inland Empire

Section 14: Palm Springs removes its Black and Mexican American residents

Press-Enterprise wins the Pulitzer for exposing Agua Caliente guardianship corruption

UC Riverside students found Black Voice News

The Battle of Coachella: UFW, Teamsters and 'Fighting for Our Lives'

Glen Avon's mothers organize against the Stringfellow Acid Pits

Interior restores 25,000 acres to the Quechan

Rufino Contreras is shot dead in a struck lettuce field

Prison Boom, Border Militarization & Movement Under Siege

The Klan marches in Fontana; Dovard Howard is shot in the back

Orantes-Hernandez: a federal court restrains coerced 'voluntary departure' at El Centro

Inland and desert communities build queer institutions in the AIDS years

TODEC Legal Center founded in Perris

Hunger strike at the El Centro camp

Cabazon Band beats Riverside County; tribal gaming law is born

Comité Cívico del Valle founded in the Imperial Valley

Four prisons land in the desert: two at Blythe, Calipatria, Centinela

Operation Gatekeeper pushes crossings - and deaths - into Imperial County

Riverside students join the walkouts against Proposition 187

The All-American Canal: 'the most dangerous body of water in the U.S.'

Collective Memory of Organizing and Resistance
in the Inland Empire, Imperial Valley and Coachella Valley