Skies as deep and blue as the ocean, white puffs of clouds on the horizon, and forested hillsides cradling manicured vineyards with rows and rows of grapevines greet Napa Valley visitors and residents who travel along the asphalt ribbon called Highway 29. Robert Mondavi, Louis Martini, Charles Krug, Beringer Vineyards and other wineries beckon wine lovers to stop, sip, and sample the fruit of the vine.

But, while much is known about the history and lore of the wine culture imported by these early European immigrants, very little has been said or written of the Hispanics who, with each changing season, tend the vines upon which the valley's international reputation rests. From the planting of rootstocks and picking the ripened fruit during harvest to fermenting the juice into wine and producing the "bottled poetry" that has made the Napa Valley a world-renowned wine region, Hispanics are engaged in every aspect of wine production.

Far from being limited to tirelessly toiling in vineyards and wineries, Hispanics are also active throughout the community as bilingual counselors such as Napa Valley College's Gerard Perez, politicians such as Yountville's Mayor Mary Lou Holt, graphic artists like René Pulido and José Charles, banking officers such as Napa National Bank's Carmen Garcia, and health care professionals like Calistoga physician Adalberto Rentería and Napa physical therapist Fred Valenzuela. Other Hispanics of note include Dr. Roberto Juan Gonzalez, Napa Valley College Music Director; Cathy Valenzuela, community activist and former legislative representative to Assemblywoman Valerie Brown; the Villaseñor family, owners of Villa Corona Restaurant; Jesus Solis, Vintage High School instructor and founder of El Amanecer Boxing Club; Leon García, Nursing Coordinator for Napa State Hospital and Chairman of the Commission on Children, Youth, and Family, to name but a few.

The term "Hispanic" describes people and countries as diverse as the varietals which grace the valley floor, but the first Hispanics to colonize California (then known as Alta California) were Spanish missionaries, who set out to convert the indigenous tribes. They were following on the heels of the rampaging conquistadores who cried "Gold, Glory, and God" as they exploited central and south America following Colombus' apocryphal discovery. Father Junipero Serra, the Franciscan apostle of Alta California, established missions throughout much of the California coastline beginning in 1769.

Dismayed with the poor conditions of Mission San Francisco de Asis, Father José Altimira, a zealous, energetic Catalan, explored beyond Las Petalumas into "the place called Sonoma" to what is now the Carneros region and beyond to the Napa Valley, noting in his diary that the valley was "quite proper for the cultivation of the vine." Eventually, control of the missions was conferred to the military after Mexican Independence from Spain in 1821, and the order was given to disburse the lands surrounding each mission.

Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, a young lieutenant, made one of the first land grants from Mission Sonoma to his friend George C. Yount, a Missouri farmer, hunter and trapper, who received 11,814.52 acres –– today worth about $236 million. Rancho Caymus extended from what is now the Town of Yountville to the steep slopes of the Oakville Grade. Other land grants were made, carving the Napa Valley into great ranchos spanning thousands of wooded acres filled with deer and grizzly bears.

The Rancho Days were, however, short-lived, lasting only from 1850 to 1870. Many of the place names that are so commonplace today hearken back to this colorful period of Napa Valley history, and the memories of Rancho Nacional Suscol and Rincon de los Carneros live on in Suscol Avenue and the Carneros Appellation District.

Only one Spanish family was able to withstand the coming of the American settlers, who pushed the Native Americans aside and claimed the land as their own –– the family of Cayetano Juarez. He survived the transition by becoming somewhat of a philanthropist, donating small fractions of his 8,865 acres of property to establish Tulocay cemetery and a state mental asylum. Six generations of the Juarez family have been born and raised in the valley, and, up until the Great Depression, still owned parts of the original land grant property.

The Napa Valley Museum strives to keep memories of that pastoral era fresh and alive in the minds of the locals and tourists. Dedicated to preserving and celebrating the history and culture of the Napa Valley, the museum will soon break ground on a new facility which will house exhibits and programs on land that was once part of Rancho Caymus.

The museum also sports portable, travelling "trunks" which provide a peak into significant periods of Napa Valley History. The newest addition to the museum's trunk repertoire is La Maleta Mexicana (the Mexican Trunk), which contains written information, photographs, and artifacts that describe the Napa Valley Hispanic culture to middle school students. Docents for this trunk are provided by Napa Valley Bank which is giving four of their Hispanic employees release time to visit the schools and present La Maleta Mexicana.

Rene Austin, Education Coordinator for the Napa Valley Museum, has put together the first significant historical documentation of the Napa Valley's Hispanic community. She has interviewed some of the valley's most influential and recognized Hispanics in an effort to gain insights into their issues, concerns, and personal life-stories.

Compiled through the exhaustive process of historical interviews of the Hispanic community over the course of a year, the trunk is also supplemented with newspaper articles.

"Some of the topics we cover in La Maleta Mexicana are cultural differences between Mexicanos, Mexican Americans, and Anglos, the problems that exist between cultural groups and prejudice, and achievements and accomplishments," says Austin as she sifts through the elements that comprise La Maleta Mexicana including the hundreds of pages of interviews.

Little is known about the intervening years following the Rancho Days, but Austin has determined that in 1925 there were only a few Mexican families living in the Napa –– the Gonzalez, Torres, and Avila families, who were presumably ranch hands. Other families gradually followed looking for work in the valley's growing agriculture industry.

The Depression, which devastated this country, also took its toll on the Mexican workers who were beginning to grow in number. Poverty was widespread, and for Mexican families that were unable to pay for the funeral of a loved one, the dear departed were unceremoniously taken away to be buried in unmarked graves.

In 1936, a Mexican named Don Lucio Perez founded El Comite Mexicano De Beneficiencia to remedy this tragic situation and provide burial insurance for the Mexican families. His organization is still going strong, and has chapters throughout the state. His descendants have continued his tradition of community service, but more on that later.

World War II not only pulled the country out of the Depression but it also created a shortage agricultural workers as most Americans became part of the war effort. In response to this lack of labor, the U. S. government created the Bracero Program in cooperation with the government of Mexico. More than five million workers were employed as field workers and laborers. The Bracero Program literally changed the face of California's agricultural work force from white to brown.

Conditions in Mexico were much the same then as they are now –– politically and economically unstable with a corrupt government and massive unemployment. Not exactly a recipe for success. Farmers and peasants tied to Mexico's feudal economic system flocked by the thousands for a chance to travel to El Norte where work and a new life could be found.

"I decided to go to El Estadio Nacíonal and see what was going on. It was incredible! Thousands of men waiting in line to be selected by the Gringos to be in the Bracero Program," recalls Rafael Rodriguez, who was then a 20-year old textile worker. The plant where his father also worked finally closed, bowing to the stark economy, and convinced Rafael to try his luck with the gringos.There was only one problem. Rafael had no callouses on his hands, and he knew the Americans would be looking for field workers.

"What callouses could I have? City guy. Some friends gave me a kind of rough dough, and I used to work it continually. Within a month I grew callouses on my hands," he says ruefully. Ready at last, it took him three days to get through the line of prospective Bracero workers.

"The next morning they piled us into box cars for a train ride to the frontera, the U.S. border. I felt very sad, very bad. In every station there was nothing to eat. They fed us nothing for five days," says Rafael of this jarring memory.

"When I came here to the Napa Valley it took me about a year to figure out that this was heaven. Prejudice was less noticeable than in other places. In this valley, you found 80 percent friendship, 20 percent segregation." Rafael and others like him somehow managed to find their own place in their adopted home. Today, Rafael is the Senior Vineyard Manager with Niebaum-Coppola Winery, and has been with the estate since it was purchased by local resident and film mogul Francis Ford Coppola in 1976.

Another Bracero worker, Aurelio Hurtado, came to the valley without any prospects for work. He spent a week waiting for something to turn up while he lived with his brothers at the Charles Krug ranch. Finally, the vineyard foreman needed someone to help out in the fields, and he took Aurelio on as a field hand. In Aurelio's second year on the job, the winery foreman offered him work in the winery even though he didn't believe Aurelio could handle the heavy work. After shoveling grapes all day and all night to the amazement of the foreman, Aurelio confided to him that "there was a lot of will in this skinny body of mine."

He continued for twelve years at Charles Krug. In 1968, he was hired to his current job of Program Manager for the California Human Development Corporation (CHDC). Funded by monies from President Kennedy's (and later Johnson's) War On Poverty, the CHDC's continuing mission is to serve low-income people by responding to their needs for job training and education.

The War On Poverty Program spawned other organizations dedicated to serving low-income families and individuals such as the Napa County Council for Economic Opportunity (NCCEO). This agency is headed by a woman who has become an icon of the community –– Hope Lugo.

Searching for work in 1958, Hope and her husband moved to the Napa Valley where prunes, pears, grapes, and a wide variety of crops were grown. "The old-time families were already here. There were so few of us that you could count them on one hand," reminisces Hope. "The wine and grapes really took off around 1965, and the Hispanic community began to increase a few years later."

As a concerned parent of five children, Hope became very involved with Headstart, and was eventually elected to the board of directors.

"I soon found myself appearing before the Napa City Council and Napa County Board of Supervisors to fight for the issues that poor people were dealing with ... it was an opportunity for self-determination," Lugo says as her eyes begin to glow with the activist's spirit that dominates her life. "We wanted to control the decisions that were being made for us, and we needed to become politically active in order to realize our own dreams."

Hope was hired as the Executive Director of NCCEO in 1971. The programs she currently administers include the operation of two Homeless Shelters, Meals On Wheels, Meals For Seniors, Napa Valley Food Bank, Napa Valley Headstart, Napa Valley Childcare, Napa Valley Infant Center, and a Weatherization Program.

A local legend in her own right and a contemporary of Lugo's, Tala de Wynter immigrated from Peru to the U.S. in 1949. Tala arrived in Napa in 1965. Three years later she was serving as the director of El Centro de Informacíon, a very controversial organization which provided information services exclusively to Spanish-speaking people. Why was this controversial? Well, some felt very strongly that this Spanish-only information center would perpetuate segregation and defeat the basic philosophy of integration.

Tala's signature accomplishment, though, is unquestionably the founding of La Clinica Olé, which opened its doors in 1972 to provide medical services to people of low-income who didn't have medical coverage. Several doctors in the medical community opposed La Clinica, fearing that it would provide sub-standard care. A meeting was held at the Veteran's Home in Yountville to discuss these concerns. Dressed in field workers clothes, an articulate, young, university-educated Hispanic activist, who worked with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union, gave an impassioned plea for their support and convinced the naysayers that La Clinica could become a reality. Today, Clinica Olé has offices in Napa, Yountville, and St. Helena and receives funding from the Napa Valley Wine Auction, the valley's most spectacular charity event which raises more than 1.4 million dollars for health care providers in the Napa Valley.

Education was also a major concern for the Hispanic community as a means of providing Hispanic children with greater employment and career opportunities. Recognizing the need to support advanced education for young Hispanics, Lugo, de Wynter, and Roberto Garcia (a counselor with Migrant Education) formed the Napa County Hispanic Network in 1984 to provide scholarships to Hispanic youth. More than $55,000 has been awarded to college-bound students since those early years.

Remember Don Lucio Perez, who founded El Comite Mexicano De Beneficiencia? His grandson Cio Perez attended Stanford University and UC Davis, graduating with a degree in viticulture. With his father, Cio owns 80 acres of vineyards and produced Chardonnay wine under the label "L. Perez & Sons". He is the President of the Napa County Farm Bureau, and is joined by a small but growing cadre of Hispanic grape growers and wine-makers including Manuel Gomez, Armando Ceja, Piña Cellars, and Mike Trujillo.

Anthony Perez, another of Don Lucio's grandson's, graduated from UC Davis with a degree in English Literature and later from the McGeorge Law School in Sacramento in 1982. A brief stint in private practice gave way to work as a Public Defender, and, once Anthony got a taste for Criminal Law, he was hooked. The District Attorney's office offered him a position in 1985, which he, of course, couldn't resist. Elected to the St. Helena City Council in 1988, his meteoric rise to public office continued with his election as Napa County's District Attorney in 1990. Re-elected in 1994, Anthony is proud of the preparedness of his staff and the changes he has brought about in his department.

His mentor, attorney Lou Flores, is in Anthony's words "a groundbreaker, one of the strongest leaders I've ever known. He took three appeal cases and made a new law in each one. He's truly brilliant." Flores was a major driving force in the political activity of the 60s from which NCCEO, the Mexican-American Political Association (MAPA), and others arose. "He was always fighting against injustice to the farmworkers," recalls Anthony.

The majority of those Hispanic farmworkers come from the same general regions in Mexico ––Michoacan, Jalisco, Zacatecas–– and have served as the backbone of the valley's wine industry. Many of these field and winery workers return to Mexico during the off-season where they are seen as celebrities from El Norte, coming and going with the seasons. And, even though immigration border patrols and Proposition 187 have caused major strife among the illegal immigrants who still come looking for opportunity, there are still coyotes (unscrupulous smugglers for hire) who are more than willing to ferry them across the border to employers willing to take the legal repercussions in order to reap the financial gains.

What brings the workers (legal and illegal) back despite all of the backbreaking work, hardships and risks involved? Besides the obvious economic incentives, there is this –– the Napa Valley is truly blessed place to live.

As Hope Lugo says, "I really love Napa. I can't imagine living anywhere else. I've seen such a great deal of change. Many of us have put a lot of sweat and tears into making this the best community possible. We've got roots in this valley, and I, for one, am here to stay." She's in good company.

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