Paicines/Hollister, CA.

By kiki

Paicines/Hollister, CA: (San Benito County) 

Paicines: a tiny hamlet 13 miles south of Hollister, CA. was where many Mexican-American migrant farmworkers from through the southwest and their families would head to during the1940's and 1950s to harvest the crops that were in abundance in that rich agricultural land that sits in the upper central part of California. 

In the days before Cesar Chavez, the whole family, from the youngest to the oldest, would hit the fields in the early dawn to pick whatever fruit was in season.  My family and I first went to Hollister in 1947 to pick plums. Then in the 1950s, we went to Paicines to do the same.

Hollister, CA.

Hollister: I remember Hollister as a one-stoplight town and a very segregated place back in the late '40s and early '50s. Back in those years, Hollister was run by old Italian families, and the Mexican people knew that they had to know their place. The Hollister of the '40s and '50s was an open town; much illegal stuff would go on in the bars (e.g., teens able to buy beer and drink openly, gambling in dark backrooms). I remember the local teens were in awe of us Los Angeles teens. The local Chicana girls would melt right in front of us when we would tell them we were from East Los Angeles, and even if some of us were not from ELA, it was best to say to them, with an ELA swagger, of course, that we were from the Eastside if we wanted to score...Even though Hollister was segregated back then, my buddies and I had lots of fun in that backwater town.

Paicines General Store

Paicines: A tiny hamlet? That's debatable because even though you'll find Paicines on the map (State Route 25), there is no such town or village. Instead, all you'll find in Paicines is a general store with a post office. Behind the general store was where the Paicines Ranch Campesinos houses were located.

Some of the Paicines girls

Looking back to those years I spent working the piscas' in Paicines (1952-54), I have to say that those years were some of the most memorable years of my life. But to some, I would think it was like the tail end of hell's half-acre….Life-long memories were made among the young and old people. Memories are now coming alive again, thanks in part to today's high-tech social media. Thanks to Facebook and other social media sites, we have reconnected with some of the people we made friends with back in those years of yore….I recently reconnected on Facebook with a girl I met in Paicines in 1954 (she is now an adult lady who shall remain anonymous) and took to the Hollister Drive-In in my 1940 Chevy. Leaving the drive-in, we were pulled over by a local cop who proceeded to write me up for loud pipes on my Chevy. Cost my parents $20.00 to make the local judge happy. Another memory that will always stick in my mind happened in 1952. Some of us Chicano teens went to the local Friday night high school dance (San Benito High School, the town had one high school). To say the least, we were not welcome by the young "Eye-Talian" teens, a fight broke out between them and us, and we were quickly thrown out on our asses, but hey! Us short Mexicans gave them big football players a good fight…The next day that fight, (in a town that didn't have much excitement) was the talk of the town, and in such a small town, that fight could lead the topics of conversation for months if not for years to come. In Paicines, all the adult men were asking us teens about the big fight. "Not much of a fight it was," we would tell them "we got our asses kicked."

I didn't go back to Paicines to work again (I married in late' 54), but my family did. I don't remember if it was in '56 or '57 when Connie and I drove up to visit the family for the weekend. My sisters, Mary Ellen and Cecilia's boyfriends, Danny and Georgie, made the drive north with us. We got there in time to help the family pick plums on Saturday. Connie, Danny, and Georgie had never seen anything like that before. Connie loved it! After bathing in the common showers, we all dressed up to the nines that Saturday night to hit the town, the girls in long dresses, the guys in suits and ties. We had one problem, though, Hollister didn't have many places to go, all dressed up. So we wound up going to a dance hall where all the tomato cannery workers showed up in their work clothes after getting off the night shift. Talk about stinking up the joint!!  Plus, dressed as we were, we stood out like sore thumbs among the cannery workers. As the band started playing some rock and roll, we hit the dance floor with all the latest dance steps, some of which the cannery workers had never seen before, soon we had the dance floor to ourselves…I called Hollister a backwater town, and it was; the town was about five years behind times….In later years, we visited Hollister and Paicines just to reminisce and to rekindle old memories. The plum orchards and the Campesinos houses are all now gone; in their place now stands hundreds of acres of vineyard.

A young teenage Campesino standing in the Paicines camp