Garage Door Company in Atwood, CA

In 1887, the town was formerly named Richfield after the oil wells that pervaded the area. The town name was eventually changed to Atwood, after W. J. Atwood, an oil company executive, and was formerly an unincorporated town within Orange County before being annexed by the city of Placentia in the early 1970s.

At the turn of the 20th century, as described by the scholar Jody Vallejo, “Mexicans who did not live in East Los Angeles were segregated in suburbs in the Los Angeles metropolitan region, often referred to as ‘company towns’ that revolved around industry and manufacturing colonias, which, in Southern California, were typically segregated citrus-worker villages.” Orange County was divided into eighteen small towns organized around the citrus industry which included the segregated company towns of predominantly Mexican-Americans, who “were isolated from the white population (often across railroad tracks or fenced in) in terms of housing, schools, entertainment, and even baseball teams”. This legacy of segregation is the reason why Atwood, as well as other “distinct multi-generational Mexican American-concentrated neighborhoods that are working class and remain segregated, separated from affluent gated communities only blocks away” such as Casa Blanca, Riverside and La Jolla, Placentia, exist today.

The Orange County Citrus Strike of 1936, which protested poor working conditions and pay, included citrus workers from Atwood. In response to the strike, attacks on the participating barrios were launched, sometimes using tear gas, after the sheriff issued a “shoot to kill” order against the strikers, “implicitly giving license to vigilante activity”. White women intentionally broke the strike by going to the orchards to pick oranges as the workers were striking, while white college students from Los Angeles came to “staff the roadside barricades” against the strikers.