Robert Navarro interview
Item
Title
Robert Navarro interview
Description
Microsoft Word document, 15 pages
Creator
Navarro, Robert
Phillips, Carolyn
Relation
StoryCorps Interviews
Coverage
California State University, Fresno
Date
4/16/2016
Identifier
SCMS_stcp_00007
extracted text
>> Carolyn Phillips: Hello. Carolyn Phillips. I'm 63 years old, and today's date is April 16, 2016. I’m at
Fresno State University, Fresno California and I’m here with, Bob Navarro, my partner in law, my partner
in life.
>> Robert Navarro: And I'm Bob Navarro, age 69, also April 16th. Wonderful, God help me, Fresno,
California, with my partner and love and work and all things. And here we are to do a story core.
>> Carolyn Phillips: So Bob, where'd you grow up?
>> Robert Navarro: I grew up in east LA. I was born in east LA, grew up there, in and around east LA. At
some point, we moved slightly out of east LA, maybe literally a five minute drive, but it was kind of like
a, slightly a world apart because that neighborhood, Rosewood Park, was mixed, it wasn't all as Latino as
east LA was. Of course I was pretty small. I started school there, and went through kindergarten through
seventh grade out of that house, so.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Who I—
>> Robert Navarro: --And my parents—
>> Carolyn Phillips: --Sorry.
>> Robert Navarro: --they, so I'm second generation American. My parents were first generation
Americans. All my grandparents were born in Mexico, and I don't know a whole lot about most of my
great grandparents, but they were all born in Mexico, except for Mary Collins [assumed spelling], who is
Irish and came, immigrated from Ireland to Mexico of all places, and is known in the family as "the
Scourge", through no fault of her own particularly. She had Huntington's chorea, which then was part of
the family life and the, how should I say, it was the cloud over the family this, to where it would spread,
because it would skip around, and my grandfather died from it. An aunt and two uncles, fortunately it
skipped my father and it skipped me, so it was quite a thing, but she was the one who was the carrier
and brought it into the family. I never knew her. She was quite a while ago, so.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Well, in Rosewood Park, you lived with your grandmother, is that right?
>> Robert Navarro: My maternal grandmother, yes. So my parents moved out from Bisbee, Arizona,
after the war, World War II. My dad had been in all of World War II, but he was pretty young when he
got out, I don't know, 22 maybe? And they came to LA as many Arizonian Latinos did, to, Bisbee was a
copper mining town, it was a company town owned by Phelps-Dodge. It was a very racist little town, and
there was no work after the war, so, because the mine, the need for copper had gone down, and my dad
didn't want to work in the mines anyway. So he came out, and set themselves up. But it was a struggle
and so I think we lived separately for a while. I know we did, because I can remember living with my
parents in a little place in east LA on our own, but then my maternal grandfather died, and so my
grandmother bought a house and we all moved into that house. So, it was me, my parents, my
grandmother, and my uncle, who is like 10 years older than me. We lived in a two room house. I slept in
my parents' bedroom until I was eight years old, or something like that.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Oh boy, I bet your parents loved that.
>> Robert Navarro: Ah, I'm sure it cramped their style a bit, yeah. There's no problem there.
>> Carolyn Phillips: I wanted to get back to Bisbee, you said it was a very racist town. Did your parents
ever talk to you about their experiences?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, no I mean, they talked about it quite a bit. I mean, they loved the place. It's
high desert, it's, you've been there, it's beautiful, but it was a company town. It was run by, you know,
Anglos. All the labor was done by Mexican-Americans or Mexicans, and they didn't, they weren't treated
well. You had to do everything through the company. I remember my Aunt Bertha was railing in her later
years about, she'd found a letter that she'd received from the Phelps-Dodge, they owned the
department store in town, so basically everything, they paid you, and then you paid them back because
everything you bought went back to the company. And she'd gotten a letter from the department store
saying that they had noticed that she was shopping elsewhere, and this was not considered good
etiquette.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Was she going to get punished in some way?
>> Robert Navarro: Sure, yeah. The idea was that somebody in the family would lose their job, you
know, and so, yeah my dad and my mother, yeah, they all didn't like that aspect of it. And you couldn't
go to certain places. I remember the best hotel, which is still there, in Bisbee, the Copper Queen, you—
Mexicans couldn't stay there. In fact, I don't' think they were allowed in the hotel. So it was a Jim Crowe
situation, except there, and the other thing to was my grandfather, my maternal grandfather, and my
grandmother, they worked in the late 30s up until the beginning of the war at Fort Wachuco [assumed
spelling], which is out of town there a little bit, and they loved it. They thought it was great. Before
Wachuco was a segregated army fort for African American soldiers, and so you had this situation where
the fort was for blacks only, behind the fort was and Indian reservation for Aztecs, and most of the
workers on the base were Latino. And I remember my mother telling me, because she would be there a
lot, right, that the theater was segregated, so that there was a night, there was like three nights for
whites, a night for Latinos, and then a night for the black service people who lived there. So, everything
was done by race.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Was it true in terms of a hierarchy who was in control of the base and who was
giving the orders, were they usually white?
>> Robert Navarro: Oh yeah, yeah. Blacks, there were very few black officers, if there were any at all, so.
>> Carolyn Phillips: So did any of your immediate family, meaning your father or your father's siblings,
actually work in the mine? Were they—their parents did?
>> Robert Navarro: No, a couple of my uncles worked in the mine, yeah, definitely, and my Uncle Eddie,
he worked in the mine quite a bit. And he was, he died from Huntington's chorea, but the mine was just
dirty, dangerous work, and nobody really liked it.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Do you know what the schooling was like in Bisbee, so where your father went to
elementary school, or your mother?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, they went to school there. My dad only went to eighth grade and then he left
to work because it was a big family. He's from a family of 10, and my mother was in such a big family.
She went to high school in Tombstone, Arizona, of all places, where she was voted Campus cutie at
some point. But, yeah, I think my, I don't know if my mother attended a Catholic school. She may have, I
don't even remember. So, they were all church going people.
>> Carolyn Phillips: But in terms of the community there, you're—the Latino community in Bisbee, was
there to your knowledge or have your parents talked about, what kind of a community it was? Was it a
tight-knit community? Do people speak Spanish?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, I think it was pretty tight-knit. It was a small town, so everybody knew
everybody, and like I say, after the war, my family came out, and a lot of their friends came out. So, like
half of, it seems like, half of Bisbee came out to LA to find work and to get some independence and
distance from that sort of Jim Crowe situation that they had down there. And they tried to get jobs. I
remember my dad telling me that they moved out, he tried to get, he couldn't get work, which really
pissed him off because, you know, he'd already been through the war, and he tried to get work in LA,
and he was turned down from work because he was Hispanic. I remember him saying that he was in
line, long line for some job, and he came up to it and was going to make an application, and the guy said,
"No, we're not taking Mexicans." So, at one point he had to go back to Bisbee, and I, I was already born.
We went back, I was six months old, and we lived there for a year, and then he came back and tried
again, and that's when he was able to get work. And then he worked; after that it was okay. He had a lot
of work. He didn't—that was no problem.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Did any of the family remain behind in Bisbee, or did everyone actually move?
>> Robert Navarro: There was some people who left behind, but not many because I remember we
would go back for vacation every year during the summer, almost every year, and see people, but there
weren't very many people there that we saw. Most of them were already in LA, in various parts, and at
first everything was close-knit You know, I had a lot, I had a couple dozen cousins, it seemed to me,
because I had all these aunts and uncles, and we would visit all the time. But as the years went on, and
by the time I was in high school, people had prospered and moved away from the city center. We were
all in and around east LA to begin with and then slowly you moved out to the suburbs and stuff like that.
So, it became more atomized, people went to other cities and stuff, so it was a less cohesive group later.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Your dad was quite a music lover, and also had danced?
>> Robert Navarro: My dad?
>> Carolyn Phillips: Yes.
>> Robert Navarro: He was a music lover. I mean part of the thing about my identity, I suppose, is that
my dad was dark and very Mexican looking. My mother was very fair, and not necessarily Hispanic
looking, and my mother was the one who insisted that I not learn Spanish. So, I grew up in a house
where everybody spoke Spanish, except I was not taught, I wasn't brought along, you know, and made
to learn everything in both Spanish and English. My mother didn't want, I think her belief was that it
would hold me back in school to be bilingual, and I think there was a lot of controversy at the time - this
is the 50s - whether bilingual education was good or bad, and there were experiences in Arizona as, and
in my reading in California history it occurred here too, where you weren't allowed to speak your native
language, if it was Spanish or Chinese or American Indian, in the school. You would be punished for it,
and I remember them telling me about that experience in Arizona. So, I think my mother saw that as a
big negative, and so I was taught to read early. I was reading by the time I went into school, and so that
separated me out. But in my family, my father retained what we had of Hispanic culture and tradition,
and my mother would emphasize, so for instance, my dad would be listening to mariachi music or to
boleros. My mother would be listening to Frank Sinatra, and, you know, listening to those types of
programs on the radio, so. But they, you know, both things were in the house the whole time, and it
was, I enjoyed both of it.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Was there a prohibition? Did your mother set down a prohibition for your family to
speak to you in Spanish or to encourage you to speak Spanish?
>> Robert Navarro: I don't know how it was done. I was sort of oblivious to it, I just was—spoke English
and I could understand, you know, a lot of Spanish that was going on in the house. My grandmother
would sometimes talk to me in Spanish, and I would usually, you know, I would understand what she
was saying, but it's different to understand a language than to be able to speak it. I didn't know enough
about Spanish to put a sentence together, or anything complicated, or to make up a sentence. So, I
knew when it was time to come eat, or to go take a bath, or take out the garbage, or do those simple
things but I never picked it up as my language, and to this day I don't speak Spanish.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Is there any focus of your family in terms of the extended family in the Los Angeles
area? Are the things that you do together or did you go to the same church together or?
>> Robert Navarro: No, not necessarily. I mean, we, you know, all we did was what all families do,
wherever you are. We visited with one another, we would help each other if, I remember people coming
over and working on the house with my dad or stuff like that, but there were no, I don't recall anything
that seemed like a traditional Mexican thing that we did. You know, we did the regular, we did
Thanksgiving and Christmas and Fourth of July and stuff like that, and that was it.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Special Foods that your grandmother would make?
>> Robert Navarro: Well, my grandmother was the main cook in the family, and so we had plenty of
good Mexican, oh, well okay, the one tradition I can think of would be Christmas, and we had tamales
for Christmas. That was our tradition, and other people would be having ham or something. We had
tamales, and I remember sitting around with her helping make the tamales. I'm an only child so it was
another big difference I think between my parents' generation and my generation. I was an only child.
My closest cousin, he was almost an only child, but his mother, they had an accidental pregnancy about,
like, ten years later—
>> Unidentified speaker: Hopefully they’re not listening.
>> Robert Navarro: --and so he has a much younger sibling. But the families got a lot smaller.
>> Carolyn Phillips: For instance, your dad came from a large family of how many siblings?
>> Robert Navarro: Ten, I believe, yeah.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Same father, same mother?
>> Robert Navarro: Oh yeah.
>> Carolyn Phillips: And your mother?
>> Robert Navarro: My mother came from a family of four, so it wasn't huge, and yeah, so. The families
got smaller for sure.
>> Carolyn Phillips: And also, the core of the family, as you say, as a family, the longer they were in the
Los Angeles area, the family members started to spread out into different suburban areas, and the
relationships became a little less tight, right?
>> Robert Navarro: They became less tight, and certainly for, in terms of myself, by the time, and I think
this is true of all high school students, your friends become more important to you than going to see
your family every weekend, which was kind of the way that it had been, and I got very involved in
school, and doing this, that, and the other thing and clubs and theater and field trips and just doing
stuff. And so, that was when I started to separate myself from the family, as most adolescents do. And
then, so I graduated in 1964, and that was about the time when the Vietnam War was beginning to
develop, and it came on my radar because, at 18 I had to register for the draft, and excuse me. I was
always aware, I kept up with current events, you know, I read the newspaper. My parents read the
newspaper. They were good readers. They didn't have a whole lot of education, but they were readers
and they kept up with politics and there was a lot of political discussion in the house. So, I was, when I
saw the thing about Vietnam beginning to develop, I became very concerned, and I kept my eye on that,
because I knew it was going to affect me. And so that became my sort of focus at that point, and you
know, it really became a huge factor in my life.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Did you and your father have differing viewpoints on the war at some point? On
Vietnam?
>> Robert Navarro: Oh yeah. Yeah, my dad, who had of course gone through all of World War II, had two
bronze stars, Purple Heart, the whole thing, you know? He was never a big flag-waving kind of guy, you
know, and he was a Democrat and he was more a liberal. My mother was the only Republican in the
entire family. She actually voted for Nixon in 1960. I was surprised she didn't get kicked out. My dad's
what they call a yellow dog Democrat, he'd vote for any Democrat as long you put him up there. But
yeah we differed on the war, and when that time came I to make a decision as to whether I was, I knew I
was going to get drafted. I was in a draft board that was out of Orange County, for some reason. We
were close to Orange County at that time, and that draft board got shut down later because it was, they
were drafting the deaf, dumb, and blind, you know? It didn't matter to them. They weren't accepting
any deferments, and everybody in the college, the junior college, I was going to, was getting drafted,
and so I said, "I'm going to lose my student deferment. I'm going to get drafted. I'm against the war." I
was already against the war at the age of 18, 17, 18, and was, I had written some letters to the editor
against the war, and all that kind of stuff. But I knew I wasn't going to avoid it, and I was really kind of, I
very kind of pissed off that the government was able to reach in and tell me that they needed me for a
job to go to some place I'd never heard of before to fight people I didn't know, and really didn't an
argument with. But the only thing to do was either to submit to the draft, enlist, or go away. Now, I had
some friends who actually left for Canada. They didn't come back until the amnesty that what's his
name, Carter, finally issued an amnesty. They were able to come back from Canada at that point. So, I
decided I would enlist because I wanted to stay out of combat. You know, I wasn't really gung ho to
carry a rifle into the, into combat for Uncle Sam in that war, and so I enlisted for three years, and during
my basic training I got selected out to be part of Army Security Agency, which was, still is I guess, the
intelligence, part of the intelligence outfit of the United States Army, a sort of electronic surveillance.
And I was, so, when basic training was over, there were three of us in my company who were asked to
be part of, we actually got invited in and asked to be a part of Army Security, and I said, "Sure, why
not?" It’s sounded like something that wouldn't involve fighting—
>> Carolyn Phillips: Yeah, safer.
>> Robert Navarro: --yeah safer, and they said, and you probably, you're almost assured to be shipped
overseas somewhere. I said, "Oh, good." You know, as long as I have to be in the army, I might as well go
overseas. I had never been out of California and Arizona, you know? So, I got shipped, at first, we got
orders to go to Thailand, and I thought that was— that wasn't good.
>> Carolyn Phillips: It’s not far enough away. Yeah.
>> Robert Navarro: I knew where Thailand was. The two other guys didn't, never heard of Thailand,
didn't know where it was. I said, "It's Vietnam. We get shipped to Thailand, we're going to be in Vietnam
in a month." Then, for whatever reason, orders came back a couple of days later, said cancel those
orders, you're going to Turkey. And so, "Turkey! This sounds great!" You know? The Middle East,
romantic Istanbul, stuff like that. So I got to Turkey, and I spent two years there, and it was an amazing
experience.
>> Carolyn Phillips: So, this is your first time out of the country?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, absolutely. It was like one of the first times on an airplane. So I go to Turkey,
and it was an enlightening experience. One, just for the exposure to a different culture, but it was also, I
realized what it meant to be an American, in 1966. Here I was, just some snot-nosed kid from east LA. I
end up in Turkey. I get married while I'm in the service, to a high school sweetheart, you know? We have
a baby. She's in California, but when the baby's two months old, she gets to come, and she came over to
Turkey to live with me. And so we start our married life together in Turkey, and I'm making, I don't
know, something like 70 dollars a month. She gets a job with an American company there in Ankara, so
she's making some money, and we're living at the level of somebody who is a middle class Turk, and
we're just kids, and we have a kid. We rented an apartment in this nice little apartment building, and
across the hall from us was the chief of police of Ankara. And I said, "There's something wrong with
this." The privilege, the entitlement, the advantages, were just enormous. The disparities were
enormous, and because we got to know a lot of Turks, it was a lot of fun. I got to know a lot of different
people there.
>> Carolyn Phillips: When you returned then to, before your time with the Army was over, you returned
to Colorado?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, I came back to Colorado for my last six months, and so I had to do six months
remaining. I tried to get to California, but I got sent to Fort Carson, which was a huge base, and it was a
hub during the war. A lot of soldiers came in and out from Vietnam at Fort Carson, so I got sent there, in
I don't' know, July of 1968. And when I went into the Army, I joined the Students for Democratic Society,
and I was a card member of the SDS when I was in the service, and we actually did a lot. We had a lot of
arguments about the war when I was in Turkey. And there was a core group of us who were in Turkey,
who were all anti-war guys, and we all talked about how we were going to negotiate our position while
we were in the military. So, when I got back to Colorado, I said that well, now that I'm back in the States,
I can actually go see an SDS, you know? And there was an SDS chapter right there in Colorado Springs, so
I went and talked to them, and they happened to be saying that they wanted to organize an anti-war
march. And I said, "Well, this is great! I'm stationed here." And they didn't have any soldiers who were
with them, and I said, "Yeah, I'll do this." So, I helped them plan the anti-war march. I worked in an
office there at the base, in the security outfit, and so I printed out about 4000 leaflets, which they
rented an airplane and they dropped these leaflets over Fort Carson, encouraging as many soldiers to
come and join the anti-war march as possible. So, and then we had the march. It was hugely successful.
It was just amazing. We had bands and all this kind of stuff. And I remember leading, holding the banner
at the front of the parade, marching I don't know, we went six blocks or something like that. People
taking my photograph, all of our, all of us in the front, and so when I got back to base on Monday, I get
called into the security office and they showed me a picture of myself, and they said, "Is this you?" I said,
"Yeah, that's me."
>> Carolyn Phillips: At the demonstration?
>> Robert Navarro: At the demonstration, of course, so the army security guys were out there taking a
picture of whoever was involved in their, that was part of the military. And so to be in army security, I
had to have a top secret security clearance with crypto [assumed spelling] access, and so I lost that
immediately and never got it back, which was fine with me. I had it long enough to do one job though. I
had to type up the mission report for our little outfit there, and so I'm typing it up. It said that the, I'm
reading that the mission for our tiny little outfit inside this huge army base was to listen in to civilian
radio traffic within the United States—
>> Carolyn Phillips: Really?
>> Robert Navarro: --and to pick up any Mexican radio traffic that they could that was of some military
nature. So, I thought this was an invasion of constitutional dimensions, so I leaked that information to
the Los Angeles Times.
[Laughter]
>> Carolyn Phillips: Did they go after it?
>> Robert Navarro: They did. I remember there was a report on it, you know, it was never a big deal, but
yeah they did. And so, that was pretty interesting.
>> Carolyn Phillips: After your service ended with the army, you ended up back in Los Angeles?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, then I went there. We started life again as a civilian. Things didn't go well after
that. The, when I got to Fort Carson, I started using a lot of drugs, took a whole lot of purple Owsley
acid. Okay, and so anyway, that avalanched later when my first wife and I and our kid, and then we had
another kid, and it went downhill from there. By the time I was 25, I felt that I had completely failed at
everything, and I had, essentially. I wasn't going anywhere. I was working, but we were both using drugs
and alcohol on a daily basis. I was stoned for, solid, for three years, and so we got to the point where we
said, "We have to do something about this," because we had, I had children, and we needed, I couldn't
see a way forward that I could be a responsible parent for these kids. And I had a young, my youngest
son, Michael, had a very rare skin condition that just was all over his face, and it looked like he was
burned almost. It was fatty tissue that just sort of exposed instead of underneath the skin. So, I said, "I
have him to worry about," and that's when we learned about Synanon. Our older kid was going to,
Darren [assumed spelling] was going to a little preschool at Whittier College. We lived right across the
street from Whittier College, and so we used a connection there to be able to see a counselor at
Whittier College. And we said, "You know, here's our situation. We're addicted. We have a family. What
do we do?" He said, "The only thing I know about drug addiction is it has, the only cure is residential."
This is 1971, and then he said, "There's this place called Synanon," and so we researched it. I found a
book on it. It also happened that as we're reading the book, the movie "Synanon" came on television,
and we watched the movie about it, which was made in 1965 or something. And the thing that was
attractive about Synanon is that it was the most famous and considered to be effective and most
difficult rehab program in the country, but it was also a community, and it had a school, and it had kids.
And we said, "This is what we need to do. We need to go here, because we can put the kids in here." So,
I felt that there was a path forward for someone at age 25 made a complete mess of it, and then I
realized, I was a failure even as a drug addict, because when went down for the interview, which was
right before Christmas of '71, what would happen at Synanon is they would put you in a circle, and it
sort of a game, but it was an interview game. And they talk you and you run your story, and we did that,
and afterwards they accepted Peggy, my wife, as a drug addict, but they told me that wasn't, I wasn't
quite addict enough, and I would have to join the game club, which was another way to get into
Synanon, but not as, not to the Dophine door [assumed spelling], but what they call the square door.
And I did that for nine months solid. I just came down as often as I could because I had to get into, my
wife was in Synanon. And
>> Carolyn Phillips: Why did they call it the square door?
>> Robert Navarro: I'm sorry?
>> Carolyn Phillips: Why did they call it the square door?
>> Robert Navarro: Because it was for people who supposedly didn't have an addiction problem, or as
we called it, character disorder.
>> Carolyn Phillips: It was a lifestyle choice.
>> Robert Navarro: It was a lifestyle choice. For me, it was the only choice. I was desperate to get there.
>> Carolyn Phillips: And that resulted in your eventual bringing your sons, eventually into Synanon?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah. Well, I had to farm my kids out, you know?
>> Carolyn Phillips: Which was difficult.
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah. So anyway, so I did that, and I, so I farmed the kids out to grandparents who
wonderfully accepted our situation, didn't know anything about our—our—never said anything about
our you know, about our addiction problems. And I was able to bring my kids into Synanon after a while,
and they grew up there, and I grew up there. I learned responsibility.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Became a lawyer.
>> Robert Navarro: I became a lawyer there. We developed our own, I had a series of different odd jobs
and then because, you know, to people who were in the law office, they could see that I had some
ability. They brought me in; I became a private investigator. Then I became a paralegal and I did a lot of
writing, and analyzing of stuff, and then we started our, because we're so litigious in a not very good
way, I got accepted into our law school, and I became a lawyer.
>> Carolyn Phillips: And?
>> Robert Navarro: And then, Synanon crashed and burned in the '80s.
>> Carolyn Phillips: But then you went on with your law practice, and eventually ended up in Fresno.
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, when I met my best friend in Synanon, Tom Quinn, who's here in Fresno, and
he was, he went into the law office with me. He didn't want to go to law school. He was certainly far
smarter than me, but he was into his own thing, and didn't want to do that. But he was an excellent
investigator, and so after Synanon, with my wife at that point, we moved to San Francisco. Tom moved
out. He started working as a private investigator. He got, he met a woman, who is an attorney in San
Francisco, named Catherine Campbell, who is one of the finest civil rights attorneys in California. So, we
started working together, and doing, she invited me in with Tom, and then I met you, because you were
with a firm here working on a case with regard to Corcoran State Prison, which is out here in the valley,
which is just one of the most God-awful places.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right. Gladiator fights on the shoe yards that were set up by the guards.
>> Robert Navarro: That's right.
>> Carolyn Phillips: That’s right. The Tate [assumed spelling] case.
>> Robert Navarro: So, we get in there, and I think what we did, or I think the most important thing,
accomplishment out of those years, one of the most important accomplishments, was Catherine and
Tom and you and me, was to go against the Department of Corrections here in California and force them
into the position to stop shooting at people. Also, with the reporting of Mark Arax, another, at that time
writing for the LA Times, but he's a Fresno guy, still here. That assault of bad publicity and lawsuits that
they lost forced them to change their use of force policies, and cause people were getting killed every
year by the guards, just shot down.
>> Carolyn Phillips: But was that only just the policy, the shooting policy, that was huge, but it was also
then how the system was treating the mentally ill, those who had medical needs that were being
shunted away and not being taken care of. The last case that we had all together was the Singh
[assumed spelling] case.
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, the Singh case was just phenomenal, and it just speaks to the, which is just I
must say still the prevalent attitude of the Department of Corrections to this day, of disregard of basic
civil rights. This was a man who was 71 years old. He was a Sikh from up around Modesto, California. He
comes into the courtroom SATF, Corcoran 2. He doesn't speak any English. He has a lame leg, and--
>> Carolyn Phillips: He’s a vegetarian.
>> Robert Navarro: --he's a vegetarian, and so, all he wanted was to do two things; to be able to practice
his faith in his cell, which he meant that he had to wear a turban, but he wasn't allowed to wear a
turban. So he would take his towel and strip it and wrap it around his head, and this was right after
9/11, and so the guards would come along and call him Osama bin Laden—
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right.
>> Robert Navarro: -- you know, who was Saudi Arabian, and rip it off his head, and said, "You can't do
that." And so, and they wouldn't let him keep his holy books—
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right.
>> Robert Navarro: --in his cell, and then when he tried to eat a vegetarian diet, they would always mess
it up for him. They'd throw some meat on there, or—
>> Carolyn Phillips: They would defile it.
>> Robert Navarro: stuff like that so he ended up, they would defile it for him. So he went, he just
stopped going to eat, and he died of starvation.
>> Carolyn Phillips: He—that’s right. He starved to death.
>> Robert Navarro: And they watched him for 110 days, they would go by his cell, and they'd look at
him. "Has he eaten anything today?" "No."
>> Carolyn Phillips: Well, actually the question was, "Is he dead yet?"
>> Robert Navarro: "Is he dead yet?" Yeah. They kept a log. He's still alive, you know, no, not dead yet,
until he died.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right. Until he died.
>> Robert Navarro: I mean, he lost something, he's a little guy to begin with, but I think he was like 87
pounds when he died. It was disgusting, and that's still going on today there, and.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Do you have any last words?
>> Robert Navarro: Last words?
>> Carolyn Phillips: To this conversation?
>> Robert Navarro: No, I just give a shout out to Fresno. It has really just a fine assortment of activists in
this city, people in homelessness, immigration, criminal justice, you know, seeking to reform the prison
system.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Law enforcement.
>> Robert Navarro: All of that stuff. If it wasn't for that Fresno wouldn't, in my book, be worth a hoot,
but it's the people who are out there every day, the people, the Occupy Fresno kids. I mean, I was so
proud to, that we could represent them because they were stalwarts. A hundred and ten arrests in that
little group. It was just ridiculous.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right. Some repeatedly, how many times some people were arrested many times.
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, some people got arrested six times for just sitting in the park after midnight.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right. So being in the middle of Central Valley, away from most everything, that’s—
that's the gift?
>> Robert Navarro: The gift is, yes.
>> Carolyn Phillips: The community of activists then. Of others.
>> Robert Navarro: Of activists, because there are so many wrongs that need to be righted here—
>> Carolyn Phillips: That’s right.
>> Robert Navarro: --and fortunately there are people out there who give up a lot to fight that battle.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Would you like to add anything about what you would like to see in the future,
things that you'd like to see continue or grow?
>> Robert Navarro: Well, aside from what we've just talked about, I'd like to see the, you know, the
efforts that people are putting into the problems that plague the central valley, poverty, racism.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Clean air.
>> Robert Navarro: Clean air.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Clean water.
>> Robert Navarro: Environment. Yes—
>> Carolyn Phillips: Water.
>> Robert Navarro: I'd like to see that progress. And on a personal level, I just want to see, of a future
with my darling Carolyn.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Thanks Bob. Thanks.
Fresno State University, Fresno California and I’m here with, Bob Navarro, my partner in law, my partner
in life.
>> Robert Navarro: And I'm Bob Navarro, age 69, also April 16th. Wonderful, God help me, Fresno,
California, with my partner and love and work and all things. And here we are to do a story core.
>> Carolyn Phillips: So Bob, where'd you grow up?
>> Robert Navarro: I grew up in east LA. I was born in east LA, grew up there, in and around east LA. At
some point, we moved slightly out of east LA, maybe literally a five minute drive, but it was kind of like
a, slightly a world apart because that neighborhood, Rosewood Park, was mixed, it wasn't all as Latino as
east LA was. Of course I was pretty small. I started school there, and went through kindergarten through
seventh grade out of that house, so.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Who I—
>> Robert Navarro: --And my parents—
>> Carolyn Phillips: --Sorry.
>> Robert Navarro: --they, so I'm second generation American. My parents were first generation
Americans. All my grandparents were born in Mexico, and I don't know a whole lot about most of my
great grandparents, but they were all born in Mexico, except for Mary Collins [assumed spelling], who is
Irish and came, immigrated from Ireland to Mexico of all places, and is known in the family as "the
Scourge", through no fault of her own particularly. She had Huntington's chorea, which then was part of
the family life and the, how should I say, it was the cloud over the family this, to where it would spread,
because it would skip around, and my grandfather died from it. An aunt and two uncles, fortunately it
skipped my father and it skipped me, so it was quite a thing, but she was the one who was the carrier
and brought it into the family. I never knew her. She was quite a while ago, so.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Well, in Rosewood Park, you lived with your grandmother, is that right?
>> Robert Navarro: My maternal grandmother, yes. So my parents moved out from Bisbee, Arizona,
after the war, World War II. My dad had been in all of World War II, but he was pretty young when he
got out, I don't know, 22 maybe? And they came to LA as many Arizonian Latinos did, to, Bisbee was a
copper mining town, it was a company town owned by Phelps-Dodge. It was a very racist little town, and
there was no work after the war, so, because the mine, the need for copper had gone down, and my dad
didn't want to work in the mines anyway. So he came out, and set themselves up. But it was a struggle
and so I think we lived separately for a while. I know we did, because I can remember living with my
parents in a little place in east LA on our own, but then my maternal grandfather died, and so my
grandmother bought a house and we all moved into that house. So, it was me, my parents, my
grandmother, and my uncle, who is like 10 years older than me. We lived in a two room house. I slept in
my parents' bedroom until I was eight years old, or something like that.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Oh boy, I bet your parents loved that.
>> Robert Navarro: Ah, I'm sure it cramped their style a bit, yeah. There's no problem there.
>> Carolyn Phillips: I wanted to get back to Bisbee, you said it was a very racist town. Did your parents
ever talk to you about their experiences?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, no I mean, they talked about it quite a bit. I mean, they loved the place. It's
high desert, it's, you've been there, it's beautiful, but it was a company town. It was run by, you know,
Anglos. All the labor was done by Mexican-Americans or Mexicans, and they didn't, they weren't treated
well. You had to do everything through the company. I remember my Aunt Bertha was railing in her later
years about, she'd found a letter that she'd received from the Phelps-Dodge, they owned the
department store in town, so basically everything, they paid you, and then you paid them back because
everything you bought went back to the company. And she'd gotten a letter from the department store
saying that they had noticed that she was shopping elsewhere, and this was not considered good
etiquette.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Was she going to get punished in some way?
>> Robert Navarro: Sure, yeah. The idea was that somebody in the family would lose their job, you
know, and so, yeah my dad and my mother, yeah, they all didn't like that aspect of it. And you couldn't
go to certain places. I remember the best hotel, which is still there, in Bisbee, the Copper Queen, you—
Mexicans couldn't stay there. In fact, I don't' think they were allowed in the hotel. So it was a Jim Crowe
situation, except there, and the other thing to was my grandfather, my maternal grandfather, and my
grandmother, they worked in the late 30s up until the beginning of the war at Fort Wachuco [assumed
spelling], which is out of town there a little bit, and they loved it. They thought it was great. Before
Wachuco was a segregated army fort for African American soldiers, and so you had this situation where
the fort was for blacks only, behind the fort was and Indian reservation for Aztecs, and most of the
workers on the base were Latino. And I remember my mother telling me, because she would be there a
lot, right, that the theater was segregated, so that there was a night, there was like three nights for
whites, a night for Latinos, and then a night for the black service people who lived there. So, everything
was done by race.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Was it true in terms of a hierarchy who was in control of the base and who was
giving the orders, were they usually white?
>> Robert Navarro: Oh yeah, yeah. Blacks, there were very few black officers, if there were any at all, so.
>> Carolyn Phillips: So did any of your immediate family, meaning your father or your father's siblings,
actually work in the mine? Were they—their parents did?
>> Robert Navarro: No, a couple of my uncles worked in the mine, yeah, definitely, and my Uncle Eddie,
he worked in the mine quite a bit. And he was, he died from Huntington's chorea, but the mine was just
dirty, dangerous work, and nobody really liked it.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Do you know what the schooling was like in Bisbee, so where your father went to
elementary school, or your mother?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, they went to school there. My dad only went to eighth grade and then he left
to work because it was a big family. He's from a family of 10, and my mother was in such a big family.
She went to high school in Tombstone, Arizona, of all places, where she was voted Campus cutie at
some point. But, yeah, I think my, I don't know if my mother attended a Catholic school. She may have, I
don't even remember. So, they were all church going people.
>> Carolyn Phillips: But in terms of the community there, you're—the Latino community in Bisbee, was
there to your knowledge or have your parents talked about, what kind of a community it was? Was it a
tight-knit community? Do people speak Spanish?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, I think it was pretty tight-knit. It was a small town, so everybody knew
everybody, and like I say, after the war, my family came out, and a lot of their friends came out. So, like
half of, it seems like, half of Bisbee came out to LA to find work and to get some independence and
distance from that sort of Jim Crowe situation that they had down there. And they tried to get jobs. I
remember my dad telling me that they moved out, he tried to get, he couldn't get work, which really
pissed him off because, you know, he'd already been through the war, and he tried to get work in LA,
and he was turned down from work because he was Hispanic. I remember him saying that he was in
line, long line for some job, and he came up to it and was going to make an application, and the guy said,
"No, we're not taking Mexicans." So, at one point he had to go back to Bisbee, and I, I was already born.
We went back, I was six months old, and we lived there for a year, and then he came back and tried
again, and that's when he was able to get work. And then he worked; after that it was okay. He had a lot
of work. He didn't—that was no problem.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Did any of the family remain behind in Bisbee, or did everyone actually move?
>> Robert Navarro: There was some people who left behind, but not many because I remember we
would go back for vacation every year during the summer, almost every year, and see people, but there
weren't very many people there that we saw. Most of them were already in LA, in various parts, and at
first everything was close-knit You know, I had a lot, I had a couple dozen cousins, it seemed to me,
because I had all these aunts and uncles, and we would visit all the time. But as the years went on, and
by the time I was in high school, people had prospered and moved away from the city center. We were
all in and around east LA to begin with and then slowly you moved out to the suburbs and stuff like that.
So, it became more atomized, people went to other cities and stuff, so it was a less cohesive group later.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Your dad was quite a music lover, and also had danced?
>> Robert Navarro: My dad?
>> Carolyn Phillips: Yes.
>> Robert Navarro: He was a music lover. I mean part of the thing about my identity, I suppose, is that
my dad was dark and very Mexican looking. My mother was very fair, and not necessarily Hispanic
looking, and my mother was the one who insisted that I not learn Spanish. So, I grew up in a house
where everybody spoke Spanish, except I was not taught, I wasn't brought along, you know, and made
to learn everything in both Spanish and English. My mother didn't want, I think her belief was that it
would hold me back in school to be bilingual, and I think there was a lot of controversy at the time - this
is the 50s - whether bilingual education was good or bad, and there were experiences in Arizona as, and
in my reading in California history it occurred here too, where you weren't allowed to speak your native
language, if it was Spanish or Chinese or American Indian, in the school. You would be punished for it,
and I remember them telling me about that experience in Arizona. So, I think my mother saw that as a
big negative, and so I was taught to read early. I was reading by the time I went into school, and so that
separated me out. But in my family, my father retained what we had of Hispanic culture and tradition,
and my mother would emphasize, so for instance, my dad would be listening to mariachi music or to
boleros. My mother would be listening to Frank Sinatra, and, you know, listening to those types of
programs on the radio, so. But they, you know, both things were in the house the whole time, and it
was, I enjoyed both of it.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Was there a prohibition? Did your mother set down a prohibition for your family to
speak to you in Spanish or to encourage you to speak Spanish?
>> Robert Navarro: I don't know how it was done. I was sort of oblivious to it, I just was—spoke English
and I could understand, you know, a lot of Spanish that was going on in the house. My grandmother
would sometimes talk to me in Spanish, and I would usually, you know, I would understand what she
was saying, but it's different to understand a language than to be able to speak it. I didn't know enough
about Spanish to put a sentence together, or anything complicated, or to make up a sentence. So, I
knew when it was time to come eat, or to go take a bath, or take out the garbage, or do those simple
things but I never picked it up as my language, and to this day I don't speak Spanish.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Is there any focus of your family in terms of the extended family in the Los Angeles
area? Are the things that you do together or did you go to the same church together or?
>> Robert Navarro: No, not necessarily. I mean, we, you know, all we did was what all families do,
wherever you are. We visited with one another, we would help each other if, I remember people coming
over and working on the house with my dad or stuff like that, but there were no, I don't recall anything
that seemed like a traditional Mexican thing that we did. You know, we did the regular, we did
Thanksgiving and Christmas and Fourth of July and stuff like that, and that was it.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Special Foods that your grandmother would make?
>> Robert Navarro: Well, my grandmother was the main cook in the family, and so we had plenty of
good Mexican, oh, well okay, the one tradition I can think of would be Christmas, and we had tamales
for Christmas. That was our tradition, and other people would be having ham or something. We had
tamales, and I remember sitting around with her helping make the tamales. I'm an only child so it was
another big difference I think between my parents' generation and my generation. I was an only child.
My closest cousin, he was almost an only child, but his mother, they had an accidental pregnancy about,
like, ten years later—
>> Unidentified speaker: Hopefully they’re not listening.
>> Robert Navarro: --and so he has a much younger sibling. But the families got a lot smaller.
>> Carolyn Phillips: For instance, your dad came from a large family of how many siblings?
>> Robert Navarro: Ten, I believe, yeah.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Same father, same mother?
>> Robert Navarro: Oh yeah.
>> Carolyn Phillips: And your mother?
>> Robert Navarro: My mother came from a family of four, so it wasn't huge, and yeah, so. The families
got smaller for sure.
>> Carolyn Phillips: And also, the core of the family, as you say, as a family, the longer they were in the
Los Angeles area, the family members started to spread out into different suburban areas, and the
relationships became a little less tight, right?
>> Robert Navarro: They became less tight, and certainly for, in terms of myself, by the time, and I think
this is true of all high school students, your friends become more important to you than going to see
your family every weekend, which was kind of the way that it had been, and I got very involved in
school, and doing this, that, and the other thing and clubs and theater and field trips and just doing
stuff. And so, that was when I started to separate myself from the family, as most adolescents do. And
then, so I graduated in 1964, and that was about the time when the Vietnam War was beginning to
develop, and it came on my radar because, at 18 I had to register for the draft, and excuse me. I was
always aware, I kept up with current events, you know, I read the newspaper. My parents read the
newspaper. They were good readers. They didn't have a whole lot of education, but they were readers
and they kept up with politics and there was a lot of political discussion in the house. So, I was, when I
saw the thing about Vietnam beginning to develop, I became very concerned, and I kept my eye on that,
because I knew it was going to affect me. And so that became my sort of focus at that point, and you
know, it really became a huge factor in my life.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Did you and your father have differing viewpoints on the war at some point? On
Vietnam?
>> Robert Navarro: Oh yeah. Yeah, my dad, who had of course gone through all of World War II, had two
bronze stars, Purple Heart, the whole thing, you know? He was never a big flag-waving kind of guy, you
know, and he was a Democrat and he was more a liberal. My mother was the only Republican in the
entire family. She actually voted for Nixon in 1960. I was surprised she didn't get kicked out. My dad's
what they call a yellow dog Democrat, he'd vote for any Democrat as long you put him up there. But
yeah we differed on the war, and when that time came I to make a decision as to whether I was, I knew I
was going to get drafted. I was in a draft board that was out of Orange County, for some reason. We
were close to Orange County at that time, and that draft board got shut down later because it was, they
were drafting the deaf, dumb, and blind, you know? It didn't matter to them. They weren't accepting
any deferments, and everybody in the college, the junior college, I was going to, was getting drafted,
and so I said, "I'm going to lose my student deferment. I'm going to get drafted. I'm against the war." I
was already against the war at the age of 18, 17, 18, and was, I had written some letters to the editor
against the war, and all that kind of stuff. But I knew I wasn't going to avoid it, and I was really kind of, I
very kind of pissed off that the government was able to reach in and tell me that they needed me for a
job to go to some place I'd never heard of before to fight people I didn't know, and really didn't an
argument with. But the only thing to do was either to submit to the draft, enlist, or go away. Now, I had
some friends who actually left for Canada. They didn't come back until the amnesty that what's his
name, Carter, finally issued an amnesty. They were able to come back from Canada at that point. So, I
decided I would enlist because I wanted to stay out of combat. You know, I wasn't really gung ho to
carry a rifle into the, into combat for Uncle Sam in that war, and so I enlisted for three years, and during
my basic training I got selected out to be part of Army Security Agency, which was, still is I guess, the
intelligence, part of the intelligence outfit of the United States Army, a sort of electronic surveillance.
And I was, so, when basic training was over, there were three of us in my company who were asked to
be part of, we actually got invited in and asked to be a part of Army Security, and I said, "Sure, why
not?" It’s sounded like something that wouldn't involve fighting—
>> Carolyn Phillips: Yeah, safer.
>> Robert Navarro: --yeah safer, and they said, and you probably, you're almost assured to be shipped
overseas somewhere. I said, "Oh, good." You know, as long as I have to be in the army, I might as well go
overseas. I had never been out of California and Arizona, you know? So, I got shipped, at first, we got
orders to go to Thailand, and I thought that was— that wasn't good.
>> Carolyn Phillips: It’s not far enough away. Yeah.
>> Robert Navarro: I knew where Thailand was. The two other guys didn't, never heard of Thailand,
didn't know where it was. I said, "It's Vietnam. We get shipped to Thailand, we're going to be in Vietnam
in a month." Then, for whatever reason, orders came back a couple of days later, said cancel those
orders, you're going to Turkey. And so, "Turkey! This sounds great!" You know? The Middle East,
romantic Istanbul, stuff like that. So I got to Turkey, and I spent two years there, and it was an amazing
experience.
>> Carolyn Phillips: So, this is your first time out of the country?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, absolutely. It was like one of the first times on an airplane. So I go to Turkey,
and it was an enlightening experience. One, just for the exposure to a different culture, but it was also, I
realized what it meant to be an American, in 1966. Here I was, just some snot-nosed kid from east LA. I
end up in Turkey. I get married while I'm in the service, to a high school sweetheart, you know? We have
a baby. She's in California, but when the baby's two months old, she gets to come, and she came over to
Turkey to live with me. And so we start our married life together in Turkey, and I'm making, I don't
know, something like 70 dollars a month. She gets a job with an American company there in Ankara, so
she's making some money, and we're living at the level of somebody who is a middle class Turk, and
we're just kids, and we have a kid. We rented an apartment in this nice little apartment building, and
across the hall from us was the chief of police of Ankara. And I said, "There's something wrong with
this." The privilege, the entitlement, the advantages, were just enormous. The disparities were
enormous, and because we got to know a lot of Turks, it was a lot of fun. I got to know a lot of different
people there.
>> Carolyn Phillips: When you returned then to, before your time with the Army was over, you returned
to Colorado?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, I came back to Colorado for my last six months, and so I had to do six months
remaining. I tried to get to California, but I got sent to Fort Carson, which was a huge base, and it was a
hub during the war. A lot of soldiers came in and out from Vietnam at Fort Carson, so I got sent there, in
I don't' know, July of 1968. And when I went into the Army, I joined the Students for Democratic Society,
and I was a card member of the SDS when I was in the service, and we actually did a lot. We had a lot of
arguments about the war when I was in Turkey. And there was a core group of us who were in Turkey,
who were all anti-war guys, and we all talked about how we were going to negotiate our position while
we were in the military. So, when I got back to Colorado, I said that well, now that I'm back in the States,
I can actually go see an SDS, you know? And there was an SDS chapter right there in Colorado Springs, so
I went and talked to them, and they happened to be saying that they wanted to organize an anti-war
march. And I said, "Well, this is great! I'm stationed here." And they didn't have any soldiers who were
with them, and I said, "Yeah, I'll do this." So, I helped them plan the anti-war march. I worked in an
office there at the base, in the security outfit, and so I printed out about 4000 leaflets, which they
rented an airplane and they dropped these leaflets over Fort Carson, encouraging as many soldiers to
come and join the anti-war march as possible. So, and then we had the march. It was hugely successful.
It was just amazing. We had bands and all this kind of stuff. And I remember leading, holding the banner
at the front of the parade, marching I don't know, we went six blocks or something like that. People
taking my photograph, all of our, all of us in the front, and so when I got back to base on Monday, I get
called into the security office and they showed me a picture of myself, and they said, "Is this you?" I said,
"Yeah, that's me."
>> Carolyn Phillips: At the demonstration?
>> Robert Navarro: At the demonstration, of course, so the army security guys were out there taking a
picture of whoever was involved in their, that was part of the military. And so to be in army security, I
had to have a top secret security clearance with crypto [assumed spelling] access, and so I lost that
immediately and never got it back, which was fine with me. I had it long enough to do one job though. I
had to type up the mission report for our little outfit there, and so I'm typing it up. It said that the, I'm
reading that the mission for our tiny little outfit inside this huge army base was to listen in to civilian
radio traffic within the United States—
>> Carolyn Phillips: Really?
>> Robert Navarro: --and to pick up any Mexican radio traffic that they could that was of some military
nature. So, I thought this was an invasion of constitutional dimensions, so I leaked that information to
the Los Angeles Times.
[Laughter]
>> Carolyn Phillips: Did they go after it?
>> Robert Navarro: They did. I remember there was a report on it, you know, it was never a big deal, but
yeah they did. And so, that was pretty interesting.
>> Carolyn Phillips: After your service ended with the army, you ended up back in Los Angeles?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, then I went there. We started life again as a civilian. Things didn't go well after
that. The, when I got to Fort Carson, I started using a lot of drugs, took a whole lot of purple Owsley
acid. Okay, and so anyway, that avalanched later when my first wife and I and our kid, and then we had
another kid, and it went downhill from there. By the time I was 25, I felt that I had completely failed at
everything, and I had, essentially. I wasn't going anywhere. I was working, but we were both using drugs
and alcohol on a daily basis. I was stoned for, solid, for three years, and so we got to the point where we
said, "We have to do something about this," because we had, I had children, and we needed, I couldn't
see a way forward that I could be a responsible parent for these kids. And I had a young, my youngest
son, Michael, had a very rare skin condition that just was all over his face, and it looked like he was
burned almost. It was fatty tissue that just sort of exposed instead of underneath the skin. So, I said, "I
have him to worry about," and that's when we learned about Synanon. Our older kid was going to,
Darren [assumed spelling] was going to a little preschool at Whittier College. We lived right across the
street from Whittier College, and so we used a connection there to be able to see a counselor at
Whittier College. And we said, "You know, here's our situation. We're addicted. We have a family. What
do we do?" He said, "The only thing I know about drug addiction is it has, the only cure is residential."
This is 1971, and then he said, "There's this place called Synanon," and so we researched it. I found a
book on it. It also happened that as we're reading the book, the movie "Synanon" came on television,
and we watched the movie about it, which was made in 1965 or something. And the thing that was
attractive about Synanon is that it was the most famous and considered to be effective and most
difficult rehab program in the country, but it was also a community, and it had a school, and it had kids.
And we said, "This is what we need to do. We need to go here, because we can put the kids in here." So,
I felt that there was a path forward for someone at age 25 made a complete mess of it, and then I
realized, I was a failure even as a drug addict, because when went down for the interview, which was
right before Christmas of '71, what would happen at Synanon is they would put you in a circle, and it
sort of a game, but it was an interview game. And they talk you and you run your story, and we did that,
and afterwards they accepted Peggy, my wife, as a drug addict, but they told me that wasn't, I wasn't
quite addict enough, and I would have to join the game club, which was another way to get into
Synanon, but not as, not to the Dophine door [assumed spelling], but what they call the square door.
And I did that for nine months solid. I just came down as often as I could because I had to get into, my
wife was in Synanon. And
>> Carolyn Phillips: Why did they call it the square door?
>> Robert Navarro: I'm sorry?
>> Carolyn Phillips: Why did they call it the square door?
>> Robert Navarro: Because it was for people who supposedly didn't have an addiction problem, or as
we called it, character disorder.
>> Carolyn Phillips: It was a lifestyle choice.
>> Robert Navarro: It was a lifestyle choice. For me, it was the only choice. I was desperate to get there.
>> Carolyn Phillips: And that resulted in your eventual bringing your sons, eventually into Synanon?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah. Well, I had to farm my kids out, you know?
>> Carolyn Phillips: Which was difficult.
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah. So anyway, so I did that, and I, so I farmed the kids out to grandparents who
wonderfully accepted our situation, didn't know anything about our—our—never said anything about
our you know, about our addiction problems. And I was able to bring my kids into Synanon after a while,
and they grew up there, and I grew up there. I learned responsibility.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Became a lawyer.
>> Robert Navarro: I became a lawyer there. We developed our own, I had a series of different odd jobs
and then because, you know, to people who were in the law office, they could see that I had some
ability. They brought me in; I became a private investigator. Then I became a paralegal and I did a lot of
writing, and analyzing of stuff, and then we started our, because we're so litigious in a not very good
way, I got accepted into our law school, and I became a lawyer.
>> Carolyn Phillips: And?
>> Robert Navarro: And then, Synanon crashed and burned in the '80s.
>> Carolyn Phillips: But then you went on with your law practice, and eventually ended up in Fresno.
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, when I met my best friend in Synanon, Tom Quinn, who's here in Fresno, and
he was, he went into the law office with me. He didn't want to go to law school. He was certainly far
smarter than me, but he was into his own thing, and didn't want to do that. But he was an excellent
investigator, and so after Synanon, with my wife at that point, we moved to San Francisco. Tom moved
out. He started working as a private investigator. He got, he met a woman, who is an attorney in San
Francisco, named Catherine Campbell, who is one of the finest civil rights attorneys in California. So, we
started working together, and doing, she invited me in with Tom, and then I met you, because you were
with a firm here working on a case with regard to Corcoran State Prison, which is out here in the valley,
which is just one of the most God-awful places.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right. Gladiator fights on the shoe yards that were set up by the guards.
>> Robert Navarro: That's right.
>> Carolyn Phillips: That’s right. The Tate [assumed spelling] case.
>> Robert Navarro: So, we get in there, and I think what we did, or I think the most important thing,
accomplishment out of those years, one of the most important accomplishments, was Catherine and
Tom and you and me, was to go against the Department of Corrections here in California and force them
into the position to stop shooting at people. Also, with the reporting of Mark Arax, another, at that time
writing for the LA Times, but he's a Fresno guy, still here. That assault of bad publicity and lawsuits that
they lost forced them to change their use of force policies, and cause people were getting killed every
year by the guards, just shot down.
>> Carolyn Phillips: But was that only just the policy, the shooting policy, that was huge, but it was also
then how the system was treating the mentally ill, those who had medical needs that were being
shunted away and not being taken care of. The last case that we had all together was the Singh
[assumed spelling] case.
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, the Singh case was just phenomenal, and it just speaks to the, which is just I
must say still the prevalent attitude of the Department of Corrections to this day, of disregard of basic
civil rights. This was a man who was 71 years old. He was a Sikh from up around Modesto, California. He
comes into the courtroom SATF, Corcoran 2. He doesn't speak any English. He has a lame leg, and--
>> Carolyn Phillips: He’s a vegetarian.
>> Robert Navarro: --he's a vegetarian, and so, all he wanted was to do two things; to be able to practice
his faith in his cell, which he meant that he had to wear a turban, but he wasn't allowed to wear a
turban. So he would take his towel and strip it and wrap it around his head, and this was right after
9/11, and so the guards would come along and call him Osama bin Laden—
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right.
>> Robert Navarro: -- you know, who was Saudi Arabian, and rip it off his head, and said, "You can't do
that." And so, and they wouldn't let him keep his holy books—
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right.
>> Robert Navarro: --in his cell, and then when he tried to eat a vegetarian diet, they would always mess
it up for him. They'd throw some meat on there, or—
>> Carolyn Phillips: They would defile it.
>> Robert Navarro: stuff like that so he ended up, they would defile it for him. So he went, he just
stopped going to eat, and he died of starvation.
>> Carolyn Phillips: He—that’s right. He starved to death.
>> Robert Navarro: And they watched him for 110 days, they would go by his cell, and they'd look at
him. "Has he eaten anything today?" "No."
>> Carolyn Phillips: Well, actually the question was, "Is he dead yet?"
>> Robert Navarro: "Is he dead yet?" Yeah. They kept a log. He's still alive, you know, no, not dead yet,
until he died.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right. Until he died.
>> Robert Navarro: I mean, he lost something, he's a little guy to begin with, but I think he was like 87
pounds when he died. It was disgusting, and that's still going on today there, and.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Do you have any last words?
>> Robert Navarro: Last words?
>> Carolyn Phillips: To this conversation?
>> Robert Navarro: No, I just give a shout out to Fresno. It has really just a fine assortment of activists in
this city, people in homelessness, immigration, criminal justice, you know, seeking to reform the prison
system.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Law enforcement.
>> Robert Navarro: All of that stuff. If it wasn't for that Fresno wouldn't, in my book, be worth a hoot,
but it's the people who are out there every day, the people, the Occupy Fresno kids. I mean, I was so
proud to, that we could represent them because they were stalwarts. A hundred and ten arrests in that
little group. It was just ridiculous.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right. Some repeatedly, how many times some people were arrested many times.
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, some people got arrested six times for just sitting in the park after midnight.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right. So being in the middle of Central Valley, away from most everything, that’s—
that's the gift?
>> Robert Navarro: The gift is, yes.
>> Carolyn Phillips: The community of activists then. Of others.
>> Robert Navarro: Of activists, because there are so many wrongs that need to be righted here—
>> Carolyn Phillips: That’s right.
>> Robert Navarro: --and fortunately there are people out there who give up a lot to fight that battle.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Would you like to add anything about what you would like to see in the future,
things that you'd like to see continue or grow?
>> Robert Navarro: Well, aside from what we've just talked about, I'd like to see the, you know, the
efforts that people are putting into the problems that plague the central valley, poverty, racism.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Clean air.
>> Robert Navarro: Clean air.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Clean water.
>> Robert Navarro: Environment. Yes—
>> Carolyn Phillips: Water.
>> Robert Navarro: I'd like to see that progress. And on a personal level, I just want to see, of a future
with my darling Carolyn.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Thanks Bob. Thanks.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Hello. Carolyn Phillips. I'm 63 years old, and today's date is April 16, 2016. I’m at
Fresno State University, Fresno California and I’m here with, Bob Navarro, my partner in law, my partner
in life.
>> Robert Navarro: And I'm Bob Navarro, age 69, also April 16th. Wonderful, God help me, Fresno,
California, with my partner and love and work and all things. And here we are to do a story core.
>> Carolyn Phillips: So Bob, where'd you grow up?
>> Robert Navarro: I grew up in east LA. I was born in east LA, grew up there, in and around east LA. At
some point, we moved slightly out of east LA, maybe literally a five minute drive, but it was kind of like
a, slightly a world apart because that neighborhood, Rosewood Park, was mixed, it wasn't all as Latino as
east LA was. Of course I was pretty small. I started school there, and went through kindergarten through
seventh grade out of that house, so.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Who I—
>> Robert Navarro: --And my parents—
>> Carolyn Phillips: --Sorry.
>> Robert Navarro: --they, so I'm second generation American. My parents were first generation
Americans. All my grandparents were born in Mexico, and I don't know a whole lot about most of my
great grandparents, but they were all born in Mexico, except for Mary Collins [assumed spelling], who is
Irish and came, immigrated from Ireland to Mexico of all places, and is known in the family as "the
Scourge", through no fault of her own particularly. She had Huntington's chorea, which then was part of
the family life and the, how should I say, it was the cloud over the family this, to where it would spread,
because it would skip around, and my grandfather died from it. An aunt and two uncles, fortunately it
skipped my father and it skipped me, so it was quite a thing, but she was the one who was the carrier
and brought it into the family. I never knew her. She was quite a while ago, so.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Well, in Rosewood Park, you lived with your grandmother, is that right?
>> Robert Navarro: My maternal grandmother, yes. So my parents moved out from Bisbee, Arizona,
after the war, World War II. My dad had been in all of World War II, but he was pretty young when he
got out, I don't know, 22 maybe? And they came to LA as many Arizonian Latinos did, to, Bisbee was a
copper mining town, it was a company town owned by Phelps-Dodge. It was a very racist little town, and
there was no work after the war, so, because the mine, the need for copper had gone down, and my dad
didn't want to work in the mines anyway. So he came out, and set themselves up. But it was a struggle
and so I think we lived separately for a while. I know we did, because I can remember living with my
parents in a little place in east LA on our own, but then my maternal grandfather died, and so my
grandmother bought a house and we all moved into that house. So, it was me, my parents, my
grandmother, and my uncle, who is like 10 years older than me. We lived in a two room house. I slept in
my parents' bedroom until I was eight years old, or something like that.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Oh boy, I bet your parents loved that.
>> Robert Navarro: Ah, I'm sure it cramped their style a bit, yeah. There's no problem there.
>> Carolyn Phillips: I wanted to get back to Bisbee, you said it was a very racist town. Did your parents
ever talk to you about their experiences?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, no I mean, they talked about it quite a bit. I mean, they loved the place. It's
high desert, it's, you've been there, it's beautiful, but it was a company town. It was run by, you know,
Anglos. All the labor was done by Mexican-Americans or Mexicans, and they didn't, they weren't treated
well. You had to do everything through the company. I remember my Aunt Bertha was railing in her later
years about, she'd found a letter that she'd received from the Phelps-Dodge, they owned the
department store in town, so basically everything, they paid you, and then you paid them back because
everything you bought went back to the company. And she'd gotten a letter from the department store
saying that they had noticed that she was shopping elsewhere, and this was not considered good
etiquette.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Was she going to get punished in some way?
>> Robert Navarro: Sure, yeah. The idea was that somebody in the family would lose their job, you
know, and so, yeah my dad and my mother, yeah, they all didn't like that aspect of it. And you couldn't
go to certain places. I remember the best hotel, which is still there, in Bisbee, the Copper Queen, you—
Mexicans couldn't stay there. In fact, I don't' think they were allowed in the hotel. So it was a Jim Crowe
situation, except there, and the other thing to was my grandfather, my maternal grandfather, and my
grandmother, they worked in the late 30s up until the beginning of the war at Fort Wachuco [assumed
spelling], which is out of town there a little bit, and they loved it. They thought it was great. Before
Wachuco was a segregated army fort for African American soldiers, and so you had this situation where
the fort was for blacks only, behind the fort was and Indian reservation for Aztecs, and most of the
workers on the base were Latino. And I remember my mother telling me, because she would be there a
lot, right, that the theater was segregated, so that there was a night, there was like three nights for
whites, a night for Latinos, and then a night for the black service people who lived there. So, everything
was done by race.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Was it true in terms of a hierarchy who was in control of the base and who was
giving the orders, were they usually white?
>> Robert Navarro: Oh yeah, yeah. Blacks, there were very few black officers, if there were any at all, so.
>> Carolyn Phillips: So did any of your immediate family, meaning your father or your father's siblings,
actually work in the mine? Were they—their parents did?
>> Robert Navarro: No, a couple of my uncles worked in the mine, yeah, definitely, and my Uncle Eddie,
he worked in the mine quite a bit. And he was, he died from Huntington's chorea, but the mine was just
dirty, dangerous work, and nobody really liked it.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Do you know what the schooling was like in Bisbee, so where your father went to
elementary school, or your mother?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, they went to school there. My dad only went to eighth grade and then he left
to work because it was a big family. He's from a family of 10, and my mother was in such a big family.
She went to high school in Tombstone, Arizona, of all places, where she was voted Campus cutie at
some point. But, yeah, I think my, I don't know if my mother attended a Catholic school. She may have, I
don't even remember. So, they were all church going people.
>> Carolyn Phillips: But in terms of the community there, you're—the Latino community in Bisbee, was
there to your knowledge or have your parents talked about, what kind of a community it was? Was it a
tight-knit community? Do people speak Spanish?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, I think it was pretty tight-knit. It was a small town, so everybody knew
everybody, and like I say, after the war, my family came out, and a lot of their friends came out. So, like
half of, it seems like, half of Bisbee came out to LA to find work and to get some independence and
distance from that sort of Jim Crowe situation that they had down there. And they tried to get jobs. I
remember my dad telling me that they moved out, he tried to get, he couldn't get work, which really
pissed him off because, you know, he'd already been through the war, and he tried to get work in LA,
and he was turned down from work because he was Hispanic. I remember him saying that he was in
line, long line for some job, and he came up to it and was going to make an application, and the guy said,
"No, we're not taking Mexicans." So, at one point he had to go back to Bisbee, and I, I was already born.
We went back, I was six months old, and we lived there for a year, and then he came back and tried
again, and that's when he was able to get work. And then he worked; after that it was okay. He had a lot
of work. He didn't—that was no problem.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Did any of the family remain behind in Bisbee, or did everyone actually move?
>> Robert Navarro: There was some people who left behind, but not many because I remember we
would go back for vacation every year during the summer, almost every year, and see people, but there
weren't very many people there that we saw. Most of them were already in LA, in various parts, and at
first everything was close-knit You know, I had a lot, I had a couple dozen cousins, it seemed to me,
because I had all these aunts and uncles, and we would visit all the time. But as the years went on, and
by the time I was in high school, people had prospered and moved away from the city center. We were
all in and around east LA to begin with and then slowly you moved out to the suburbs and stuff like that.
So, it became more atomized, people went to other cities and stuff, so it was a less cohesive group later.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Your dad was quite a music lover, and also had danced?
>> Robert Navarro: My dad?
>> Carolyn Phillips: Yes.
>> Robert Navarro: He was a music lover. I mean part of the thing about my identity, I suppose, is that
my dad was dark and very Mexican looking. My mother was very fair, and not necessarily Hispanic
looking, and my mother was the one who insisted that I not learn Spanish. So, I grew up in a house
where everybody spoke Spanish, except I was not taught, I wasn't brought along, you know, and made
to learn everything in both Spanish and English. My mother didn't want, I think her belief was that it
would hold me back in school to be bilingual, and I think there was a lot of controversy at the time - this
is the 50s - whether bilingual education was good or bad, and there were experiences in Arizona as, and
in my reading in California history it occurred here too, where you weren't allowed to speak your native
language, if it was Spanish or Chinese or American Indian, in the school. You would be punished for it,
and I remember them telling me about that experience in Arizona. So, I think my mother saw that as a
big negative, and so I was taught to read early. I was reading by the time I went into school, and so that
separated me out. But in my family, my father retained what we had of Hispanic culture and tradition,
and my mother would emphasize, so for instance, my dad would be listening to mariachi music or to
boleros. My mother would be listening to Frank Sinatra, and, you know, listening to those types of
programs on the radio, so. But they, you know, both things were in the house the whole time, and it
was, I enjoyed both of it.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Was there a prohibition? Did your mother set down a prohibition for your family to
speak to you in Spanish or to encourage you to speak Spanish?
>> Robert Navarro: I don't know how it was done. I was sort of oblivious to it, I just was—spoke English
and I could understand, you know, a lot of Spanish that was going on in the house. My grandmother
would sometimes talk to me in Spanish, and I would usually, you know, I would understand what she
was saying, but it's different to understand a language than to be able to speak it. I didn't know enough
about Spanish to put a sentence together, or anything complicated, or to make up a sentence. So, I
knew when it was time to come eat, or to go take a bath, or take out the garbage, or do those simple
things but I never picked it up as my language, and to this day I don't speak Spanish.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Is there any focus of your family in terms of the extended family in the Los Angeles
area? Are the things that you do together or did you go to the same church together or?
>> Robert Navarro: No, not necessarily. I mean, we, you know, all we did was what all families do,
wherever you are. We visited with one another, we would help each other if, I remember people coming
over and working on the house with my dad or stuff like that, but there were no, I don't recall anything
that seemed like a traditional Mexican thing that we did. You know, we did the regular, we did
Thanksgiving and Christmas and Fourth of July and stuff like that, and that was it.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Special Foods that your grandmother would make?
>> Robert Navarro: Well, my grandmother was the main cook in the family, and so we had plenty of
good Mexican, oh, well okay, the one tradition I can think of would be Christmas, and we had tamales
for Christmas. That was our tradition, and other people would be having ham or something. We had
tamales, and I remember sitting around with her helping make the tamales. I'm an only child so it was
another big difference I think between my parents' generation and my generation. I was an only child.
My closest cousin, he was almost an only child, but his mother, they had an accidental pregnancy about,
like, ten years later—
>> Unidentified speaker: Hopefully they’re not listening.
>> Robert Navarro: --and so he has a much younger sibling. But the families got a lot smaller.
>> Carolyn Phillips: For instance, your dad came from a large family of how many siblings?
>> Robert Navarro: Ten, I believe, yeah.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Same father, same mother?
>> Robert Navarro: Oh yeah.
>> Carolyn Phillips: And your mother?
>> Robert Navarro: My mother came from a family of four, so it wasn't huge, and yeah, so. The families
got smaller for sure.
>> Carolyn Phillips: And also, the core of the family, as you say, as a family, the longer they were in the
Los Angeles area, the family members started to spread out into different suburban areas, and the
relationships became a little less tight, right?
>> Robert Navarro: They became less tight, and certainly for, in terms of myself, by the time, and I think
this is true of all high school students, your friends become more important to you than going to see
your family every weekend, which was kind of the way that it had been, and I got very involved in
school, and doing this, that, and the other thing and clubs and theater and field trips and just doing
stuff. And so, that was when I started to separate myself from the family, as most adolescents do. And
then, so I graduated in 1964, and that was about the time when the Vietnam War was beginning to
develop, and it came on my radar because, at 18 I had to register for the draft, and excuse me. I was
always aware, I kept up with current events, you know, I read the newspaper. My parents read the
newspaper. They were good readers. They didn't have a whole lot of education, but they were readers
and they kept up with politics and there was a lot of political discussion in the house. So, I was, when I
saw the thing about Vietnam beginning to develop, I became very concerned, and I kept my eye on that,
because I knew it was going to affect me. And so that became my sort of focus at that point, and you
know, it really became a huge factor in my life.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Did you and your father have differing viewpoints on the war at some point? On
Vietnam?
>> Robert Navarro: Oh yeah. Yeah, my dad, who had of course gone through all of World War II, had two
bronze stars, Purple Heart, the whole thing, you know? He was never a big flag-waving kind of guy, you
know, and he was a Democrat and he was more a liberal. My mother was the only Republican in the
entire family. She actually voted for Nixon in 1960. I was surprised she didn't get kicked out. My dad's
what they call a yellow dog Democrat, he'd vote for any Democrat as long you put him up there. But
yeah we differed on the war, and when that time came I to make a decision as to whether I was, I knew I
was going to get drafted. I was in a draft board that was out of Orange County, for some reason. We
were close to Orange County at that time, and that draft board got shut down later because it was, they
were drafting the deaf, dumb, and blind, you know? It didn't matter to them. They weren't accepting
any deferments, and everybody in the college, the junior college, I was going to, was getting drafted,
and so I said, "I'm going to lose my student deferment. I'm going to get drafted. I'm against the war." I
was already against the war at the age of 18, 17, 18, and was, I had written some letters to the editor
against the war, and all that kind of stuff. But I knew I wasn't going to avoid it, and I was really kind of, I
very kind of pissed off that the government was able to reach in and tell me that they needed me for a
job to go to some place I'd never heard of before to fight people I didn't know, and really didn't an
argument with. But the only thing to do was either to submit to the draft, enlist, or go away. Now, I had
some friends who actually left for Canada. They didn't come back until the amnesty that what's his
name, Carter, finally issued an amnesty. They were able to come back from Canada at that point. So, I
decided I would enlist because I wanted to stay out of combat. You know, I wasn't really gung ho to
carry a rifle into the, into combat for Uncle Sam in that war, and so I enlisted for three years, and during
my basic training I got selected out to be part of Army Security Agency, which was, still is I guess, the
intelligence, part of the intelligence outfit of the United States Army, a sort of electronic surveillance.
And I was, so, when basic training was over, there were three of us in my company who were asked to
be part of, we actually got invited in and asked to be a part of Army Security, and I said, "Sure, why
not?" It’s sounded like something that wouldn't involve fighting—
>> Carolyn Phillips: Yeah, safer.
>> Robert Navarro: --yeah safer, and they said, and you probably, you're almost assured to be shipped
overseas somewhere. I said, "Oh, good." You know, as long as I have to be in the army, I might as well go
overseas. I had never been out of California and Arizona, you know? So, I got shipped, at first, we got
orders to go to Thailand, and I thought that was— that wasn't good.
>> Carolyn Phillips: It’s not far enough away. Yeah.
>> Robert Navarro: I knew where Thailand was. The two other guys didn't, never heard of Thailand,
didn't know where it was. I said, "It's Vietnam. We get shipped to Thailand, we're going to be in Vietnam
in a month." Then, for whatever reason, orders came back a couple of days later, said cancel those
orders, you're going to Turkey. And so, "Turkey! This sounds great!" You know? The Middle East,
romantic Istanbul, stuff like that. So I got to Turkey, and I spent two years there, and it was an amazing
experience.
>> Carolyn Phillips: So, this is your first time out of the country?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, absolutely. It was like one of the first times on an airplane. So I go to Turkey,
and it was an enlightening experience. One, just for the exposure to a different culture, but it was also, I
realized what it meant to be an American, in 1966. Here I was, just some snot-nosed kid from east LA. I
end up in Turkey. I get married while I'm in the service, to a high school sweetheart, you know? We have
a baby. She's in California, but when the baby's two months old, she gets to come, and she came over to
Turkey to live with me. And so we start our married life together in Turkey, and I'm making, I don't
know, something like 70 dollars a month. She gets a job with an American company there in Ankara, so
she's making some money, and we're living at the level of somebody who is a middle class Turk, and
we're just kids, and we have a kid. We rented an apartment in this nice little apartment building, and
across the hall from us was the chief of police of Ankara. And I said, "There's something wrong with
this." The privilege, the entitlement, the advantages, were just enormous. The disparities were
enormous, and because we got to know a lot of Turks, it was a lot of fun. I got to know a lot of different
people there.
>> Carolyn Phillips: When you returned then to, before your time with the Army was over, you returned
to Colorado?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, I came back to Colorado for my last six months, and so I had to do six months
remaining. I tried to get to California, but I got sent to Fort Carson, which was a huge base, and it was a
hub during the war. A lot of soldiers came in and out from Vietnam at Fort Carson, so I got sent there, in
I don't' know, July of 1968. And when I went into the Army, I joined the Students for Democratic Society,
and I was a card member of the SDS when I was in the service, and we actually did a lot. We had a lot of
arguments about the war when I was in Turkey. And there was a core group of us who were in Turkey,
who were all anti-war guys, and we all talked about how we were going to negotiate our position while
we were in the military. So, when I got back to Colorado, I said that well, now that I'm back in the States,
I can actually go see an SDS, you know? And there was an SDS chapter right there in Colorado Springs, so
I went and talked to them, and they happened to be saying that they wanted to organize an anti-war
march. And I said, "Well, this is great! I'm stationed here." And they didn't have any soldiers who were
with them, and I said, "Yeah, I'll do this." So, I helped them plan the anti-war march. I worked in an
office there at the base, in the security outfit, and so I printed out about 4000 leaflets, which they
rented an airplane and they dropped these leaflets over Fort Carson, encouraging as many soldiers to
come and join the anti-war march as possible. So, and then we had the march. It was hugely successful.
It was just amazing. We had bands and all this kind of stuff. And I remember leading, holding the banner
at the front of the parade, marching I don't know, we went six blocks or something like that. People
taking my photograph, all of our, all of us in the front, and so when I got back to base on Monday, I get
called into the security office and they showed me a picture of myself, and they said, "Is this you?" I said,
"Yeah, that's me."
>> Carolyn Phillips: At the demonstration?
>> Robert Navarro: At the demonstration, of course, so the army security guys were out there taking a
picture of whoever was involved in their, that was part of the military. And so to be in army security, I
had to have a top secret security clearance with crypto [assumed spelling] access, and so I lost that
immediately and never got it back, which was fine with me. I had it long enough to do one job though. I
had to type up the mission report for our little outfit there, and so I'm typing it up. It said that the, I'm
reading that the mission for our tiny little outfit inside this huge army base was to listen in to civilian
radio traffic within the United States—
>> Carolyn Phillips: Really?
>> Robert Navarro: --and to pick up any Mexican radio traffic that they could that was of some military
nature. So, I thought this was an invasion of constitutional dimensions, so I leaked that information to
the Los Angeles Times.
[Laughter]
>> Carolyn Phillips: Did they go after it?
>> Robert Navarro: They did. I remember there was a report on it, you know, it was never a big deal, but
yeah they did. And so, that was pretty interesting.
>> Carolyn Phillips: After your service ended with the army, you ended up back in Los Angeles?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, then I went there. We started life again as a civilian. Things didn't go well after
that. The, when I got to Fort Carson, I started using a lot of drugs, took a whole lot of purple Owsley
acid. Okay, and so anyway, that avalanched later when my first wife and I and our kid, and then we had
another kid, and it went downhill from there. By the time I was 25, I felt that I had completely failed at
everything, and I had, essentially. I wasn't going anywhere. I was working, but we were both using drugs
and alcohol on a daily basis. I was stoned for, solid, for three years, and so we got to the point where we
said, "We have to do something about this," because we had, I had children, and we needed, I couldn't
see a way forward that I could be a responsible parent for these kids. And I had a young, my youngest
son, Michael, had a very rare skin condition that just was all over his face, and it looked like he was
burned almost. It was fatty tissue that just sort of exposed instead of underneath the skin. So, I said, "I
have him to worry about," and that's when we learned about Synanon. Our older kid was going to,
Darren [assumed spelling] was going to a little preschool at Whittier College. We lived right across the
street from Whittier College, and so we used a connection there to be able to see a counselor at
Whittier College. And we said, "You know, here's our situation. We're addicted. We have a family. What
do we do?" He said, "The only thing I know about drug addiction is it has, the only cure is residential."
This is 1971, and then he said, "There's this place called Synanon," and so we researched it. I found a
book on it. It also happened that as we're reading the book, the movie "Synanon" came on television,
and we watched the movie about it, which was made in 1965 or something. And the thing that was
attractive about Synanon is that it was the most famous and considered to be effective and most
difficult rehab program in the country, but it was also a community, and it had a school, and it had kids.
And we said, "This is what we need to do. We need to go here, because we can put the kids in here." So,
I felt that there was a path forward for someone at age 25 made a complete mess of it, and then I
realized, I was a failure even as a drug addict, because when went down for the interview, which was
right before Christmas of '71, what would happen at Synanon is they would put you in a circle, and it
sort of a game, but it was an interview game. And they talk you and you run your story, and we did that,
and afterwards they accepted Peggy, my wife, as a drug addict, but they told me that wasn't, I wasn't
quite addict enough, and I would have to join the game club, which was another way to get into
Synanon, but not as, not to the Dophine door [assumed spelling], but what they call the square door.
And I did that for nine months solid. I just came down as often as I could because I had to get into, my
wife was in Synanon. And
>> Carolyn Phillips: Why did they call it the square door?
>> Robert Navarro: I'm sorry?
>> Carolyn Phillips: Why did they call it the square door?
>> Robert Navarro: Because it was for people who supposedly didn't have an addiction problem, or as
we called it, character disorder.
>> Carolyn Phillips: It was a lifestyle choice.
>> Robert Navarro: It was a lifestyle choice. For me, it was the only choice. I was desperate to get there.
>> Carolyn Phillips: And that resulted in your eventual bringing your sons, eventually into Synanon?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah. Well, I had to farm my kids out, you know?
>> Carolyn Phillips: Which was difficult.
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah. So anyway, so I did that, and I, so I farmed the kids out to grandparents who
wonderfully accepted our situation, didn't know anything about our—our—never said anything about
our you know, about our addiction problems. And I was able to bring my kids into Synanon after a while,
and they grew up there, and I grew up there. I learned responsibility.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Became a lawyer.
>> Robert Navarro: I became a lawyer there. We developed our own, I had a series of different odd jobs
and then because, you know, to people who were in the law office, they could see that I had some
ability. They brought me in; I became a private investigator. Then I became a paralegal and I did a lot of
writing, and analyzing of stuff, and then we started our, because we're so litigious in a not very good
way, I got accepted into our law school, and I became a lawyer.
>> Carolyn Phillips: And?
>> Robert Navarro: And then, Synanon crashed and burned in the '80s.
>> Carolyn Phillips: But then you went on with your law practice, and eventually ended up in Fresno.
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, when I met my best friend in Synanon, Tom Quinn, who's here in Fresno, and
he was, he went into the law office with me. He didn't want to go to law school. He was certainly far
smarter than me, but he was into his own thing, and didn't want to do that. But he was an excellent
investigator, and so after Synanon, with my wife at that point, we moved to San Francisco. Tom moved
out. He started working as a private investigator. He got, he met a woman, who is an attorney in San
Francisco, named Catherine Campbell, who is one of the finest civil rights attorneys in California. So, we
started working together, and doing, she invited me in with Tom, and then I met you, because you were
with a firm here working on a case with regard to Corcoran State Prison, which is out here in the valley,
which is just one of the most God-awful places.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right. Gladiator fights on the shoe yards that were set up by the guards.
>> Robert Navarro: That's right.
>> Carolyn Phillips: That’s right. The Tate [assumed spelling] case.
>> Robert Navarro: So, we get in there, and I think what we did, or I think the most important thing,
accomplishment out of those years, one of the most important accomplishments, was Catherine and
Tom and you and me, was to go against the Department of Corrections here in California and force them
into the position to stop shooting at people. Also, with the reporting of Mark Arax, another, at that time
writing for the LA Times, but he's a Fresno guy, still here. That assault of bad publicity and lawsuits that
they lost forced them to change their use of force policies, and cause people were getting killed every
year by the guards, just shot down.
>> Carolyn Phillips: But was that only just the policy, the shooting policy, that was huge, but it was also
then how the system was treating the mentally ill, those who had medical needs that were being
shunted away and not being taken care of. The last case that we had all together was the Singh
[assumed spelling] case.
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, the Singh case was just phenomenal, and it just speaks to the, which is just I
must say still the prevalent attitude of the Department of Corrections to this day, of disregard of basic
civil rights. This was a man who was 71 years old. He was a Sikh from up around Modesto, California. He
comes into the courtroom SATF, Corcoran 2. He doesn't speak any English. He has a lame leg, and--
>> Carolyn Phillips: He’s a vegetarian.
>> Robert Navarro: --he's a vegetarian, and so, all he wanted was to do two things; to be able to practice
his faith in his cell, which he meant that he had to wear a turban, but he wasn't allowed to wear a
turban. So he would take his towel and strip it and wrap it around his head, and this was right after
9/11, and so the guards would come along and call him Osama bin Laden—
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right.
>> Robert Navarro: -- you know, who was Saudi Arabian, and rip it off his head, and said, "You can't do
that." And so, and they wouldn't let him keep his holy books—
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right.
>> Robert Navarro: --in his cell, and then when he tried to eat a vegetarian diet, they would always mess
it up for him. They'd throw some meat on there, or—
>> Carolyn Phillips: They would defile it.
>> Robert Navarro: stuff like that so he ended up, they would defile it for him. So he went, he just
stopped going to eat, and he died of starvation.
>> Carolyn Phillips: He—that’s right. He starved to death.
>> Robert Navarro: And they watched him for 110 days, they would go by his cell, and they'd look at
him. "Has he eaten anything today?" "No."
>> Carolyn Phillips: Well, actually the question was, "Is he dead yet?"
>> Robert Navarro: "Is he dead yet?" Yeah. They kept a log. He's still alive, you know, no, not dead yet,
until he died.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right. Until he died.
>> Robert Navarro: I mean, he lost something, he's a little guy to begin with, but I think he was like 87
pounds when he died. It was disgusting, and that's still going on today there, and.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Do you have any last words?
>> Robert Navarro: Last words?
>> Carolyn Phillips: To this conversation?
>> Robert Navarro: No, I just give a shout out to Fresno. It has really just a fine assortment of activists in
this city, people in homelessness, immigration, criminal justice, you know, seeking to reform the prison
system.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Law enforcement.
>> Robert Navarro: All of that stuff. If it wasn't for that Fresno wouldn't, in my book, be worth a hoot,
but it's the people who are out there every day, the people, the Occupy Fresno kids. I mean, I was so
proud to, that we could represent them because they were stalwarts. A hundred and ten arrests in that
little group. It was just ridiculous.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right. Some repeatedly, how many times some people were arrested many times.
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, some people got arrested six times for just sitting in the park after midnight.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right. So being in the middle of Central Valley, away from most everything, that’s—
that's the gift?
>> Robert Navarro: The gift is, yes.
>> Carolyn Phillips: The community of activists then. Of others.
>> Robert Navarro: Of activists, because there are so many wrongs that need to be righted here—
>> Carolyn Phillips: That’s right.
>> Robert Navarro: --and fortunately there are people out there who give up a lot to fight that battle.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Would you like to add anything about what you would like to see in the future,
things that you'd like to see continue or grow?
>> Robert Navarro: Well, aside from what we've just talked about, I'd like to see the, you know, the
efforts that people are putting into the problems that plague the central valley, poverty, racism.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Clean air.
>> Robert Navarro: Clean air.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Clean water.
>> Robert Navarro: Environment. Yes—
>> Carolyn Phillips: Water.
>> Robert Navarro: I'd like to see that progress. And on a personal level, I just want to see, of a future
with my darling Carolyn.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Thanks Bob. Thanks.
Fresno State University, Fresno California and I’m here with, Bob Navarro, my partner in law, my partner
in life.
>> Robert Navarro: And I'm Bob Navarro, age 69, also April 16th. Wonderful, God help me, Fresno,
California, with my partner and love and work and all things. And here we are to do a story core.
>> Carolyn Phillips: So Bob, where'd you grow up?
>> Robert Navarro: I grew up in east LA. I was born in east LA, grew up there, in and around east LA. At
some point, we moved slightly out of east LA, maybe literally a five minute drive, but it was kind of like
a, slightly a world apart because that neighborhood, Rosewood Park, was mixed, it wasn't all as Latino as
east LA was. Of course I was pretty small. I started school there, and went through kindergarten through
seventh grade out of that house, so.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Who I—
>> Robert Navarro: --And my parents—
>> Carolyn Phillips: --Sorry.
>> Robert Navarro: --they, so I'm second generation American. My parents were first generation
Americans. All my grandparents were born in Mexico, and I don't know a whole lot about most of my
great grandparents, but they were all born in Mexico, except for Mary Collins [assumed spelling], who is
Irish and came, immigrated from Ireland to Mexico of all places, and is known in the family as "the
Scourge", through no fault of her own particularly. She had Huntington's chorea, which then was part of
the family life and the, how should I say, it was the cloud over the family this, to where it would spread,
because it would skip around, and my grandfather died from it. An aunt and two uncles, fortunately it
skipped my father and it skipped me, so it was quite a thing, but she was the one who was the carrier
and brought it into the family. I never knew her. She was quite a while ago, so.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Well, in Rosewood Park, you lived with your grandmother, is that right?
>> Robert Navarro: My maternal grandmother, yes. So my parents moved out from Bisbee, Arizona,
after the war, World War II. My dad had been in all of World War II, but he was pretty young when he
got out, I don't know, 22 maybe? And they came to LA as many Arizonian Latinos did, to, Bisbee was a
copper mining town, it was a company town owned by Phelps-Dodge. It was a very racist little town, and
there was no work after the war, so, because the mine, the need for copper had gone down, and my dad
didn't want to work in the mines anyway. So he came out, and set themselves up. But it was a struggle
and so I think we lived separately for a while. I know we did, because I can remember living with my
parents in a little place in east LA on our own, but then my maternal grandfather died, and so my
grandmother bought a house and we all moved into that house. So, it was me, my parents, my
grandmother, and my uncle, who is like 10 years older than me. We lived in a two room house. I slept in
my parents' bedroom until I was eight years old, or something like that.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Oh boy, I bet your parents loved that.
>> Robert Navarro: Ah, I'm sure it cramped their style a bit, yeah. There's no problem there.
>> Carolyn Phillips: I wanted to get back to Bisbee, you said it was a very racist town. Did your parents
ever talk to you about their experiences?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, no I mean, they talked about it quite a bit. I mean, they loved the place. It's
high desert, it's, you've been there, it's beautiful, but it was a company town. It was run by, you know,
Anglos. All the labor was done by Mexican-Americans or Mexicans, and they didn't, they weren't treated
well. You had to do everything through the company. I remember my Aunt Bertha was railing in her later
years about, she'd found a letter that she'd received from the Phelps-Dodge, they owned the
department store in town, so basically everything, they paid you, and then you paid them back because
everything you bought went back to the company. And she'd gotten a letter from the department store
saying that they had noticed that she was shopping elsewhere, and this was not considered good
etiquette.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Was she going to get punished in some way?
>> Robert Navarro: Sure, yeah. The idea was that somebody in the family would lose their job, you
know, and so, yeah my dad and my mother, yeah, they all didn't like that aspect of it. And you couldn't
go to certain places. I remember the best hotel, which is still there, in Bisbee, the Copper Queen, you—
Mexicans couldn't stay there. In fact, I don't' think they were allowed in the hotel. So it was a Jim Crowe
situation, except there, and the other thing to was my grandfather, my maternal grandfather, and my
grandmother, they worked in the late 30s up until the beginning of the war at Fort Wachuco [assumed
spelling], which is out of town there a little bit, and they loved it. They thought it was great. Before
Wachuco was a segregated army fort for African American soldiers, and so you had this situation where
the fort was for blacks only, behind the fort was and Indian reservation for Aztecs, and most of the
workers on the base were Latino. And I remember my mother telling me, because she would be there a
lot, right, that the theater was segregated, so that there was a night, there was like three nights for
whites, a night for Latinos, and then a night for the black service people who lived there. So, everything
was done by race.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Was it true in terms of a hierarchy who was in control of the base and who was
giving the orders, were they usually white?
>> Robert Navarro: Oh yeah, yeah. Blacks, there were very few black officers, if there were any at all, so.
>> Carolyn Phillips: So did any of your immediate family, meaning your father or your father's siblings,
actually work in the mine? Were they—their parents did?
>> Robert Navarro: No, a couple of my uncles worked in the mine, yeah, definitely, and my Uncle Eddie,
he worked in the mine quite a bit. And he was, he died from Huntington's chorea, but the mine was just
dirty, dangerous work, and nobody really liked it.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Do you know what the schooling was like in Bisbee, so where your father went to
elementary school, or your mother?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, they went to school there. My dad only went to eighth grade and then he left
to work because it was a big family. He's from a family of 10, and my mother was in such a big family.
She went to high school in Tombstone, Arizona, of all places, where she was voted Campus cutie at
some point. But, yeah, I think my, I don't know if my mother attended a Catholic school. She may have, I
don't even remember. So, they were all church going people.
>> Carolyn Phillips: But in terms of the community there, you're—the Latino community in Bisbee, was
there to your knowledge or have your parents talked about, what kind of a community it was? Was it a
tight-knit community? Do people speak Spanish?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, I think it was pretty tight-knit. It was a small town, so everybody knew
everybody, and like I say, after the war, my family came out, and a lot of their friends came out. So, like
half of, it seems like, half of Bisbee came out to LA to find work and to get some independence and
distance from that sort of Jim Crowe situation that they had down there. And they tried to get jobs. I
remember my dad telling me that they moved out, he tried to get, he couldn't get work, which really
pissed him off because, you know, he'd already been through the war, and he tried to get work in LA,
and he was turned down from work because he was Hispanic. I remember him saying that he was in
line, long line for some job, and he came up to it and was going to make an application, and the guy said,
"No, we're not taking Mexicans." So, at one point he had to go back to Bisbee, and I, I was already born.
We went back, I was six months old, and we lived there for a year, and then he came back and tried
again, and that's when he was able to get work. And then he worked; after that it was okay. He had a lot
of work. He didn't—that was no problem.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Did any of the family remain behind in Bisbee, or did everyone actually move?
>> Robert Navarro: There was some people who left behind, but not many because I remember we
would go back for vacation every year during the summer, almost every year, and see people, but there
weren't very many people there that we saw. Most of them were already in LA, in various parts, and at
first everything was close-knit You know, I had a lot, I had a couple dozen cousins, it seemed to me,
because I had all these aunts and uncles, and we would visit all the time. But as the years went on, and
by the time I was in high school, people had prospered and moved away from the city center. We were
all in and around east LA to begin with and then slowly you moved out to the suburbs and stuff like that.
So, it became more atomized, people went to other cities and stuff, so it was a less cohesive group later.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Your dad was quite a music lover, and also had danced?
>> Robert Navarro: My dad?
>> Carolyn Phillips: Yes.
>> Robert Navarro: He was a music lover. I mean part of the thing about my identity, I suppose, is that
my dad was dark and very Mexican looking. My mother was very fair, and not necessarily Hispanic
looking, and my mother was the one who insisted that I not learn Spanish. So, I grew up in a house
where everybody spoke Spanish, except I was not taught, I wasn't brought along, you know, and made
to learn everything in both Spanish and English. My mother didn't want, I think her belief was that it
would hold me back in school to be bilingual, and I think there was a lot of controversy at the time - this
is the 50s - whether bilingual education was good or bad, and there were experiences in Arizona as, and
in my reading in California history it occurred here too, where you weren't allowed to speak your native
language, if it was Spanish or Chinese or American Indian, in the school. You would be punished for it,
and I remember them telling me about that experience in Arizona. So, I think my mother saw that as a
big negative, and so I was taught to read early. I was reading by the time I went into school, and so that
separated me out. But in my family, my father retained what we had of Hispanic culture and tradition,
and my mother would emphasize, so for instance, my dad would be listening to mariachi music or to
boleros. My mother would be listening to Frank Sinatra, and, you know, listening to those types of
programs on the radio, so. But they, you know, both things were in the house the whole time, and it
was, I enjoyed both of it.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Was there a prohibition? Did your mother set down a prohibition for your family to
speak to you in Spanish or to encourage you to speak Spanish?
>> Robert Navarro: I don't know how it was done. I was sort of oblivious to it, I just was—spoke English
and I could understand, you know, a lot of Spanish that was going on in the house. My grandmother
would sometimes talk to me in Spanish, and I would usually, you know, I would understand what she
was saying, but it's different to understand a language than to be able to speak it. I didn't know enough
about Spanish to put a sentence together, or anything complicated, or to make up a sentence. So, I
knew when it was time to come eat, or to go take a bath, or take out the garbage, or do those simple
things but I never picked it up as my language, and to this day I don't speak Spanish.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Is there any focus of your family in terms of the extended family in the Los Angeles
area? Are the things that you do together or did you go to the same church together or?
>> Robert Navarro: No, not necessarily. I mean, we, you know, all we did was what all families do,
wherever you are. We visited with one another, we would help each other if, I remember people coming
over and working on the house with my dad or stuff like that, but there were no, I don't recall anything
that seemed like a traditional Mexican thing that we did. You know, we did the regular, we did
Thanksgiving and Christmas and Fourth of July and stuff like that, and that was it.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Special Foods that your grandmother would make?
>> Robert Navarro: Well, my grandmother was the main cook in the family, and so we had plenty of
good Mexican, oh, well okay, the one tradition I can think of would be Christmas, and we had tamales
for Christmas. That was our tradition, and other people would be having ham or something. We had
tamales, and I remember sitting around with her helping make the tamales. I'm an only child so it was
another big difference I think between my parents' generation and my generation. I was an only child.
My closest cousin, he was almost an only child, but his mother, they had an accidental pregnancy about,
like, ten years later—
>> Unidentified speaker: Hopefully they’re not listening.
>> Robert Navarro: --and so he has a much younger sibling. But the families got a lot smaller.
>> Carolyn Phillips: For instance, your dad came from a large family of how many siblings?
>> Robert Navarro: Ten, I believe, yeah.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Same father, same mother?
>> Robert Navarro: Oh yeah.
>> Carolyn Phillips: And your mother?
>> Robert Navarro: My mother came from a family of four, so it wasn't huge, and yeah, so. The families
got smaller for sure.
>> Carolyn Phillips: And also, the core of the family, as you say, as a family, the longer they were in the
Los Angeles area, the family members started to spread out into different suburban areas, and the
relationships became a little less tight, right?
>> Robert Navarro: They became less tight, and certainly for, in terms of myself, by the time, and I think
this is true of all high school students, your friends become more important to you than going to see
your family every weekend, which was kind of the way that it had been, and I got very involved in
school, and doing this, that, and the other thing and clubs and theater and field trips and just doing
stuff. And so, that was when I started to separate myself from the family, as most adolescents do. And
then, so I graduated in 1964, and that was about the time when the Vietnam War was beginning to
develop, and it came on my radar because, at 18 I had to register for the draft, and excuse me. I was
always aware, I kept up with current events, you know, I read the newspaper. My parents read the
newspaper. They were good readers. They didn't have a whole lot of education, but they were readers
and they kept up with politics and there was a lot of political discussion in the house. So, I was, when I
saw the thing about Vietnam beginning to develop, I became very concerned, and I kept my eye on that,
because I knew it was going to affect me. And so that became my sort of focus at that point, and you
know, it really became a huge factor in my life.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Did you and your father have differing viewpoints on the war at some point? On
Vietnam?
>> Robert Navarro: Oh yeah. Yeah, my dad, who had of course gone through all of World War II, had two
bronze stars, Purple Heart, the whole thing, you know? He was never a big flag-waving kind of guy, you
know, and he was a Democrat and he was more a liberal. My mother was the only Republican in the
entire family. She actually voted for Nixon in 1960. I was surprised she didn't get kicked out. My dad's
what they call a yellow dog Democrat, he'd vote for any Democrat as long you put him up there. But
yeah we differed on the war, and when that time came I to make a decision as to whether I was, I knew I
was going to get drafted. I was in a draft board that was out of Orange County, for some reason. We
were close to Orange County at that time, and that draft board got shut down later because it was, they
were drafting the deaf, dumb, and blind, you know? It didn't matter to them. They weren't accepting
any deferments, and everybody in the college, the junior college, I was going to, was getting drafted,
and so I said, "I'm going to lose my student deferment. I'm going to get drafted. I'm against the war." I
was already against the war at the age of 18, 17, 18, and was, I had written some letters to the editor
against the war, and all that kind of stuff. But I knew I wasn't going to avoid it, and I was really kind of, I
very kind of pissed off that the government was able to reach in and tell me that they needed me for a
job to go to some place I'd never heard of before to fight people I didn't know, and really didn't an
argument with. But the only thing to do was either to submit to the draft, enlist, or go away. Now, I had
some friends who actually left for Canada. They didn't come back until the amnesty that what's his
name, Carter, finally issued an amnesty. They were able to come back from Canada at that point. So, I
decided I would enlist because I wanted to stay out of combat. You know, I wasn't really gung ho to
carry a rifle into the, into combat for Uncle Sam in that war, and so I enlisted for three years, and during
my basic training I got selected out to be part of Army Security Agency, which was, still is I guess, the
intelligence, part of the intelligence outfit of the United States Army, a sort of electronic surveillance.
And I was, so, when basic training was over, there were three of us in my company who were asked to
be part of, we actually got invited in and asked to be a part of Army Security, and I said, "Sure, why
not?" It’s sounded like something that wouldn't involve fighting—
>> Carolyn Phillips: Yeah, safer.
>> Robert Navarro: --yeah safer, and they said, and you probably, you're almost assured to be shipped
overseas somewhere. I said, "Oh, good." You know, as long as I have to be in the army, I might as well go
overseas. I had never been out of California and Arizona, you know? So, I got shipped, at first, we got
orders to go to Thailand, and I thought that was— that wasn't good.
>> Carolyn Phillips: It’s not far enough away. Yeah.
>> Robert Navarro: I knew where Thailand was. The two other guys didn't, never heard of Thailand,
didn't know where it was. I said, "It's Vietnam. We get shipped to Thailand, we're going to be in Vietnam
in a month." Then, for whatever reason, orders came back a couple of days later, said cancel those
orders, you're going to Turkey. And so, "Turkey! This sounds great!" You know? The Middle East,
romantic Istanbul, stuff like that. So I got to Turkey, and I spent two years there, and it was an amazing
experience.
>> Carolyn Phillips: So, this is your first time out of the country?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, absolutely. It was like one of the first times on an airplane. So I go to Turkey,
and it was an enlightening experience. One, just for the exposure to a different culture, but it was also, I
realized what it meant to be an American, in 1966. Here I was, just some snot-nosed kid from east LA. I
end up in Turkey. I get married while I'm in the service, to a high school sweetheart, you know? We have
a baby. She's in California, but when the baby's two months old, she gets to come, and she came over to
Turkey to live with me. And so we start our married life together in Turkey, and I'm making, I don't
know, something like 70 dollars a month. She gets a job with an American company there in Ankara, so
she's making some money, and we're living at the level of somebody who is a middle class Turk, and
we're just kids, and we have a kid. We rented an apartment in this nice little apartment building, and
across the hall from us was the chief of police of Ankara. And I said, "There's something wrong with
this." The privilege, the entitlement, the advantages, were just enormous. The disparities were
enormous, and because we got to know a lot of Turks, it was a lot of fun. I got to know a lot of different
people there.
>> Carolyn Phillips: When you returned then to, before your time with the Army was over, you returned
to Colorado?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, I came back to Colorado for my last six months, and so I had to do six months
remaining. I tried to get to California, but I got sent to Fort Carson, which was a huge base, and it was a
hub during the war. A lot of soldiers came in and out from Vietnam at Fort Carson, so I got sent there, in
I don't' know, July of 1968. And when I went into the Army, I joined the Students for Democratic Society,
and I was a card member of the SDS when I was in the service, and we actually did a lot. We had a lot of
arguments about the war when I was in Turkey. And there was a core group of us who were in Turkey,
who were all anti-war guys, and we all talked about how we were going to negotiate our position while
we were in the military. So, when I got back to Colorado, I said that well, now that I'm back in the States,
I can actually go see an SDS, you know? And there was an SDS chapter right there in Colorado Springs, so
I went and talked to them, and they happened to be saying that they wanted to organize an anti-war
march. And I said, "Well, this is great! I'm stationed here." And they didn't have any soldiers who were
with them, and I said, "Yeah, I'll do this." So, I helped them plan the anti-war march. I worked in an
office there at the base, in the security outfit, and so I printed out about 4000 leaflets, which they
rented an airplane and they dropped these leaflets over Fort Carson, encouraging as many soldiers to
come and join the anti-war march as possible. So, and then we had the march. It was hugely successful.
It was just amazing. We had bands and all this kind of stuff. And I remember leading, holding the banner
at the front of the parade, marching I don't know, we went six blocks or something like that. People
taking my photograph, all of our, all of us in the front, and so when I got back to base on Monday, I get
called into the security office and they showed me a picture of myself, and they said, "Is this you?" I said,
"Yeah, that's me."
>> Carolyn Phillips: At the demonstration?
>> Robert Navarro: At the demonstration, of course, so the army security guys were out there taking a
picture of whoever was involved in their, that was part of the military. And so to be in army security, I
had to have a top secret security clearance with crypto [assumed spelling] access, and so I lost that
immediately and never got it back, which was fine with me. I had it long enough to do one job though. I
had to type up the mission report for our little outfit there, and so I'm typing it up. It said that the, I'm
reading that the mission for our tiny little outfit inside this huge army base was to listen in to civilian
radio traffic within the United States—
>> Carolyn Phillips: Really?
>> Robert Navarro: --and to pick up any Mexican radio traffic that they could that was of some military
nature. So, I thought this was an invasion of constitutional dimensions, so I leaked that information to
the Los Angeles Times.
[Laughter]
>> Carolyn Phillips: Did they go after it?
>> Robert Navarro: They did. I remember there was a report on it, you know, it was never a big deal, but
yeah they did. And so, that was pretty interesting.
>> Carolyn Phillips: After your service ended with the army, you ended up back in Los Angeles?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, then I went there. We started life again as a civilian. Things didn't go well after
that. The, when I got to Fort Carson, I started using a lot of drugs, took a whole lot of purple Owsley
acid. Okay, and so anyway, that avalanched later when my first wife and I and our kid, and then we had
another kid, and it went downhill from there. By the time I was 25, I felt that I had completely failed at
everything, and I had, essentially. I wasn't going anywhere. I was working, but we were both using drugs
and alcohol on a daily basis. I was stoned for, solid, for three years, and so we got to the point where we
said, "We have to do something about this," because we had, I had children, and we needed, I couldn't
see a way forward that I could be a responsible parent for these kids. And I had a young, my youngest
son, Michael, had a very rare skin condition that just was all over his face, and it looked like he was
burned almost. It was fatty tissue that just sort of exposed instead of underneath the skin. So, I said, "I
have him to worry about," and that's when we learned about Synanon. Our older kid was going to,
Darren [assumed spelling] was going to a little preschool at Whittier College. We lived right across the
street from Whittier College, and so we used a connection there to be able to see a counselor at
Whittier College. And we said, "You know, here's our situation. We're addicted. We have a family. What
do we do?" He said, "The only thing I know about drug addiction is it has, the only cure is residential."
This is 1971, and then he said, "There's this place called Synanon," and so we researched it. I found a
book on it. It also happened that as we're reading the book, the movie "Synanon" came on television,
and we watched the movie about it, which was made in 1965 or something. And the thing that was
attractive about Synanon is that it was the most famous and considered to be effective and most
difficult rehab program in the country, but it was also a community, and it had a school, and it had kids.
And we said, "This is what we need to do. We need to go here, because we can put the kids in here." So,
I felt that there was a path forward for someone at age 25 made a complete mess of it, and then I
realized, I was a failure even as a drug addict, because when went down for the interview, which was
right before Christmas of '71, what would happen at Synanon is they would put you in a circle, and it
sort of a game, but it was an interview game. And they talk you and you run your story, and we did that,
and afterwards they accepted Peggy, my wife, as a drug addict, but they told me that wasn't, I wasn't
quite addict enough, and I would have to join the game club, which was another way to get into
Synanon, but not as, not to the Dophine door [assumed spelling], but what they call the square door.
And I did that for nine months solid. I just came down as often as I could because I had to get into, my
wife was in Synanon. And
>> Carolyn Phillips: Why did they call it the square door?
>> Robert Navarro: I'm sorry?
>> Carolyn Phillips: Why did they call it the square door?
>> Robert Navarro: Because it was for people who supposedly didn't have an addiction problem, or as
we called it, character disorder.
>> Carolyn Phillips: It was a lifestyle choice.
>> Robert Navarro: It was a lifestyle choice. For me, it was the only choice. I was desperate to get there.
>> Carolyn Phillips: And that resulted in your eventual bringing your sons, eventually into Synanon?
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah. Well, I had to farm my kids out, you know?
>> Carolyn Phillips: Which was difficult.
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah. So anyway, so I did that, and I, so I farmed the kids out to grandparents who
wonderfully accepted our situation, didn't know anything about our—our—never said anything about
our you know, about our addiction problems. And I was able to bring my kids into Synanon after a while,
and they grew up there, and I grew up there. I learned responsibility.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Became a lawyer.
>> Robert Navarro: I became a lawyer there. We developed our own, I had a series of different odd jobs
and then because, you know, to people who were in the law office, they could see that I had some
ability. They brought me in; I became a private investigator. Then I became a paralegal and I did a lot of
writing, and analyzing of stuff, and then we started our, because we're so litigious in a not very good
way, I got accepted into our law school, and I became a lawyer.
>> Carolyn Phillips: And?
>> Robert Navarro: And then, Synanon crashed and burned in the '80s.
>> Carolyn Phillips: But then you went on with your law practice, and eventually ended up in Fresno.
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, when I met my best friend in Synanon, Tom Quinn, who's here in Fresno, and
he was, he went into the law office with me. He didn't want to go to law school. He was certainly far
smarter than me, but he was into his own thing, and didn't want to do that. But he was an excellent
investigator, and so after Synanon, with my wife at that point, we moved to San Francisco. Tom moved
out. He started working as a private investigator. He got, he met a woman, who is an attorney in San
Francisco, named Catherine Campbell, who is one of the finest civil rights attorneys in California. So, we
started working together, and doing, she invited me in with Tom, and then I met you, because you were
with a firm here working on a case with regard to Corcoran State Prison, which is out here in the valley,
which is just one of the most God-awful places.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right. Gladiator fights on the shoe yards that were set up by the guards.
>> Robert Navarro: That's right.
>> Carolyn Phillips: That’s right. The Tate [assumed spelling] case.
>> Robert Navarro: So, we get in there, and I think what we did, or I think the most important thing,
accomplishment out of those years, one of the most important accomplishments, was Catherine and
Tom and you and me, was to go against the Department of Corrections here in California and force them
into the position to stop shooting at people. Also, with the reporting of Mark Arax, another, at that time
writing for the LA Times, but he's a Fresno guy, still here. That assault of bad publicity and lawsuits that
they lost forced them to change their use of force policies, and cause people were getting killed every
year by the guards, just shot down.
>> Carolyn Phillips: But was that only just the policy, the shooting policy, that was huge, but it was also
then how the system was treating the mentally ill, those who had medical needs that were being
shunted away and not being taken care of. The last case that we had all together was the Singh
[assumed spelling] case.
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, the Singh case was just phenomenal, and it just speaks to the, which is just I
must say still the prevalent attitude of the Department of Corrections to this day, of disregard of basic
civil rights. This was a man who was 71 years old. He was a Sikh from up around Modesto, California. He
comes into the courtroom SATF, Corcoran 2. He doesn't speak any English. He has a lame leg, and--
>> Carolyn Phillips: He’s a vegetarian.
>> Robert Navarro: --he's a vegetarian, and so, all he wanted was to do two things; to be able to practice
his faith in his cell, which he meant that he had to wear a turban, but he wasn't allowed to wear a
turban. So he would take his towel and strip it and wrap it around his head, and this was right after
9/11, and so the guards would come along and call him Osama bin Laden—
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right.
>> Robert Navarro: -- you know, who was Saudi Arabian, and rip it off his head, and said, "You can't do
that." And so, and they wouldn't let him keep his holy books—
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right.
>> Robert Navarro: --in his cell, and then when he tried to eat a vegetarian diet, they would always mess
it up for him. They'd throw some meat on there, or—
>> Carolyn Phillips: They would defile it.
>> Robert Navarro: stuff like that so he ended up, they would defile it for him. So he went, he just
stopped going to eat, and he died of starvation.
>> Carolyn Phillips: He—that’s right. He starved to death.
>> Robert Navarro: And they watched him for 110 days, they would go by his cell, and they'd look at
him. "Has he eaten anything today?" "No."
>> Carolyn Phillips: Well, actually the question was, "Is he dead yet?"
>> Robert Navarro: "Is he dead yet?" Yeah. They kept a log. He's still alive, you know, no, not dead yet,
until he died.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right. Until he died.
>> Robert Navarro: I mean, he lost something, he's a little guy to begin with, but I think he was like 87
pounds when he died. It was disgusting, and that's still going on today there, and.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Do you have any last words?
>> Robert Navarro: Last words?
>> Carolyn Phillips: To this conversation?
>> Robert Navarro: No, I just give a shout out to Fresno. It has really just a fine assortment of activists in
this city, people in homelessness, immigration, criminal justice, you know, seeking to reform the prison
system.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Law enforcement.
>> Robert Navarro: All of that stuff. If it wasn't for that Fresno wouldn't, in my book, be worth a hoot,
but it's the people who are out there every day, the people, the Occupy Fresno kids. I mean, I was so
proud to, that we could represent them because they were stalwarts. A hundred and ten arrests in that
little group. It was just ridiculous.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right. Some repeatedly, how many times some people were arrested many times.
>> Robert Navarro: Yeah, some people got arrested six times for just sitting in the park after midnight.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Right. So being in the middle of Central Valley, away from most everything, that’s—
that's the gift?
>> Robert Navarro: The gift is, yes.
>> Carolyn Phillips: The community of activists then. Of others.
>> Robert Navarro: Of activists, because there are so many wrongs that need to be righted here—
>> Carolyn Phillips: That’s right.
>> Robert Navarro: --and fortunately there are people out there who give up a lot to fight that battle.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Would you like to add anything about what you would like to see in the future,
things that you'd like to see continue or grow?
>> Robert Navarro: Well, aside from what we've just talked about, I'd like to see the, you know, the
efforts that people are putting into the problems that plague the central valley, poverty, racism.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Clean air.
>> Robert Navarro: Clean air.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Clean water.
>> Robert Navarro: Environment. Yes—
>> Carolyn Phillips: Water.
>> Robert Navarro: I'd like to see that progress. And on a personal level, I just want to see, of a future
with my darling Carolyn.
>> Carolyn Phillips: Thanks Bob. Thanks.