Modesta Ávila

Modesta Ávila (1867 or 1869 – September 1891) was a Californio ranchera and protester, best known for being the first convicted felon and first state prisoner in Orange County, California. Ávila had only received a minor warning in 1889 for placing an obstruction on the tracks to protest against the Santa Fe Railroad being built through her property without adequate compensation, but she continued to taunt the authorities, and was eventually arrested four months later.

Although the jury in her first trial was unable to reach agreement, Ávila was convicted after a second trial at Orange County Supreme Court and was sentenced to three years in San Quentin State Prison. Today Ávila is considered to be a folk heroine of Latino people of the county. It has been suggested that she is the "White Lady", a ghost which is said to have been seen walking along the railroad tracks since the 1930s.

Background Ávila was born in 1867 or 1869 in San Juan Capistrano, in Orange County, California. Little is known about her early life, but by the age of 20 she had inherited land from her mother just to the north of the Capistrano train station and was occupied in chicken rearing. but other reports say she placed a railroad tie across the tracks and erected a fence post between the rails to which she attached a note of protest that read: "This land belongs to me. And if the railroad wants to run here, they will have to pay me ten thousand dollars". She was arrested at the party for disturbing the peace, and annoyed the authorities by boasting at her trial of her victory over the railroad company and government. According to historian Lisbeth Haas in the book Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769–1936, it was her actions after her initial protest rather than the act itself which led to her arrest four months later for "attempted obstruction of a train", and that she was made an example of to demonstrate that protests would be punished under the new state legal system. Ávila's boyfriend at the time was fired from his job for refusing to distance himself from her. although one reporter stated that she died there of pneumonia in September 1891 at the age of 22 or 24 after serving two years and five months of her sentence. Her obituary in the Santa Ana Standard concluded: "Let those who are without sin throw the first stone". An opera entitled Modesta Avila: An American Folk Opera written by an Orange County biomedical engineer was performed in Westminster in 1986 but was dismissed as "neo-imperialist nostalgia" by B. V. Olguín in La Pinta: Chicana/o Prisoner Literature, Culture, and Politics. The Modesta Ávila Coalition, an activist group in the Los Angeles area involved with fighting against firms who transport goods to and from rail yards, named themselves after her in 2005.

Ávila is suggested as a possible identity for the ghost, known as the "White Lady", which has reputedly been seen in San Juan Capistrano's Los Rios Street Historic District. The ghost was first reported walking on the railway tracks in the 1930s, along the stretch that Ávila had walked.