SALINAS, Calif. — Early evening in the "Salad Bowl of the World" and the City Council meeting is standing room only. The murmur of the crowd drips with anticipation. The bickering has been building for weeks.
"I want to remind everyone," warned the mayor, opening the floor to public comment, "this is not a blood sport. Be respectful when people speak."
He was promptly ignored.
The mayor, less than 100 days in office, was presented with a recall petition. His chief antagonist — a council member who also serves on a school board that recently named an elementary campus after a 19th century bandit and convicted killer — was accused of violating state conflict of interest laws.
Emotional, angry, conspiratorial, the night was marked with the racial and class tensions that have simmered for generations in this agricultural town.
It's a tension now in full view over the actions of two men: a young, defiant Latino politician who has irritated Salinas' power brokers, and a man he admires who has been dead for 138 years.
In most ways, Tiburcio Vasquez and newly elected City Councilman Jose Castaneda have nothing in common. But the two men's stories have improbably come together like gasoline and a match to create a fiery political brawl that has divided Salinas for months.
Vasquez is among the most complicated and divisive figures in California history. A descendant of California's Spanish settlers, he turned to crime after the Mexican-American War, which ceded California to the United States.
Educated, handsome and a charismatic ladies' man who wrote poetry, Vasquez the bandit became a celebrity during an era of social and economic upheaval in California.
His exploits — robberies, shootouts, eluding authorities — spawned countless newspaper articles, tell-all books, even a play during his life, which ended in 1875 when Vasquez was convicted of murder by an all-white jury and hanged.
"To the whites, he was an evil Mexican. To Latinos, he was a Robin Hood," said John Boessenecker, a San Francisco lawyer and historian who wrote a biography of Vasquez. "He was a symbol of hope and resistance."
He still is to some. In December the board of the Alisal Union School District voted to name a new campus Tiburcio Vasquez Elementary. It opened last month to serve Salinas' east side, an impoverished, gang-plagued area home to Latino laborers and farmworkers.
"I don't know if he was a thief," said Castaneda, who, as an Alisal trustee, championed naming the school for Vasquez. "I know he was someone who stood up for his rights, stood up for his people."
The decision outraged people outside the Alisal, as east Salinas is known locally. Mayor Joe Gunter, a former police homicide investigator, said he was shocked. The Salinas Police Officers Assn. expressed "extreme disappointment." Local media editorials condemned the decision.
"It is difficult to understand why a school would be named for someone hanged for murder," one reader wrote to the Salinas Californian. "Even more so since our weekly headlines sound so much like Tiburcio Vasquez's life."
Like Vasquez, Castaneda is complicated and divisive. The 36-year-old landscaper is seen in the Alisal as a fierce advocate on issues as varied as bilingual education and allegations of police harassment.
Outside the Alisal, Castaneda is a polarizing figure whose more than a decade on the school board has included meetings that required police intervention and a two-year state takeover of the then underperforming elementary school district. The takeover, Castaneda maintains, was unconstitutional because it usurped the voters' will.
Last November, Castaneda surprised civic leaders by beating two establishment-backed opponents for a City Council seat without raising a dime or campaigning publicly.
Castaneda didn't need money. He grew up in the Alisal, where outsiders are treated with suspicion. That two non-Spanish-speaking candidates would lose in a neighborhood where one can walk the streets for an entire day and not hear English spoken seems head-slappingly preordained.
Seven months later, Castaneda has arguably become the most high-profile member of the City Council. Not for what he has done but for what he defiantly refuses to do: give up his school board seat.
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