Where Trump’s views resonate
Crossing over the bridge from Bakersfield into Oildale immediately yields a street that most residents warn outsiders to avoid. Beardsley Avenue is where the tweakers roam, residents say, and where one can f ind drunk men wandering the street polishing off a can of beer.
In a community made up of conservative, blue- collar workers, the appeal for Trump is rooted in ideas that he can f ix a system many feel is broken. Residents believe Trump will help the country f inancially by not allowing other countries to take advantage of the U. S. and that he will support the military.
Also on the list of concerns is immigration, which was one of the top issues of Trump’s campaign early on.
Raised in Oildale, Melody Jackson, 54, said she believes Trump’s business savvy will help the country’s economy. She said she agrees with his views when it comes to immigration, including his call to build a giant wall along the Mexican border to stave off illegal immigration.
“I have nothing against the Hispanics. But, like they say, do we have a country if we keep letting everybody come over here if they’re not legal? No,” Jackson said. “He is not a racist. Absolutely not. They want him to appear that he is, but he’s not.”
Race is a sensitive issue in Oildale.
Residents argue that times have changed the town, but some feel bias against nonwhites persists in some corners of the community.
Last year a man, 24, was arrested and charged after he allegedly shouted racial slurs and f ired a sawed- off shotgun at a Latino man while the man and his family were outside their Oildale home, according to the AntiDefamation League. He had the letters WP on his shins, for “white power.”
The Oildale Peckerwoods, a racist skinhead clique, operate in the area and periodically make headlines.
Oildale’s black population is just about 2%, but the Latino community is now 19%; almost three- quarters of the community is white.
Just across a bridge from Oildale, Maria Hernandez, an immigrant from the central Mexican state of Zacatecas, spoke in dismal terms about Oildale. A lot of people resent and blame immigrants for their own struggles, she said.
“They look at us like we’re the trash people,” Hernandez, in her late 60s, said from a Bakersfield bus station. “Like we are the intruders.”
Lynn Hughes, 49, has lived in Oildale with her husband for a year. The Hughes plan to vote for Trump. This leads to constant arguments with Hughes’ best friend and roommate, Letisia Mendez, who is Mexican American.
“She just hates Trump,” Hughes said as she stood on her porch. “Trump is far from racist. What he’s trying to do, people don’t stop and listen far enough to what he’s saying to understand exactly what he’s doing.”
Trump just wants Mexicans coming into the U. S. to “legalize themselves,” she said.
“You know I don’t like that fool!” yelled Mendez, 34.
“Oh, here we go,” Hughes said, with a smirk. “She’s got a whole lot of not nice things to say.”
Mendez said she believes that anyone in the country illegally who commits a serious crime, such as selling drugs, should be deported. But Mendez said Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants and Mexicans has crossed into prejudice. She said her father came from central Mexico and was undocumented for a while and did nothing but work hard.
She said there should be more staffing to provide security along the border and that immigration officials should “do better investigations on people coming in and out.”
But Mendez disagreed with Trump’s idea of building a mega- wall.
Mendez said she’s amazed that Trump has managed to get as far as he has with his campaign, saying: “We have a lot of racist people in this country.”
“One of the greatest presidents we ever had was Ronald Reagan and nobody said he’d get very far, because he was an actor, he wasn’t from political things,” Hughes said.
“Yeah, but he wasn’t racist,” Mendez replied.
Mendez said she feels Trump is bringing racial issues to the surface, making for an uglier climate.
“I think he’s racist and I think he’s sexist,” she said. “I don’t appreciate him one bit.”
Trump support extends into Bakersfield, the county seat and another GOP stronghold. Four of the f ive county supervisors are Republican, as are most members of the Bakersfield City Council, said Dean Haddock, Kern County Republican Party chairman.
Reagan, Haddock notes, is “like a hero” in Kern County.
Support for both Trump and Cruz has been solid in the county, Haddock said.
Trump “brought up immigration and I know he offended a lot of people, but he even said that if he hadn’t brought it up the others would never have talked about it,” Haddock said. “I think a lot of the people here see that kind of a message. They’re looking for someone who has the guts and the backbone, willing to make the changes, or at least try to, and they haven’t seen that happen for a long time.”
Though Bakersfield is more demographically diverse than Oildale, Trump’s message has appealed to a variety of residents there.
Joyce Monaco- Olivas, a Bakersfield resident, said she plans to vote for Trump. She said that “people who have been here illegally and have children here — if they’re upstanding citizens and people who don’t have a lot of problems with the law, allow them to stay.”
That differed from the billionaire businessman’s call for deporting 11 million immigrants who are in the U. S. illegally.
“People are just tired of nobody doing anything,” said Monaco- Olivas, 73. “We need to do something about that or we’re going to be a little Mexico in California.”
Over his morning coffee at Happy Jack’s Pie n’ Burger in downtown Bakersfield, Anthony Tarango called Trump’s call to deport all immigrants in the country illegally a pipe dream. He didn’t give the candidate much of a shot to win the presidency either, he said. But Tarango opposed illegal immigration, saying: “I’m a believer that we should come here legally.”
“That being said,” the Mexican American added, “my father didn’t come here legally.”
‘ If [ Donald Trump is] going to be gaining ground in the Central Valley, it may be more likely in places like Oildale.’
— Jeanine Kraybill,
assistant professor of political science at Cal State Bakersfield