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Volume 142, Number 32 — Locally-owned since 1884
The hometown paper of Craig McNamara
Winters, Yolo County, California, Wednesday, September 10, 2025
Spanish immigrant stories are focus at museum, conference New exhibit Museum showcases a century of Spanish immigrant’s impact on the community By Sonora Slater Express staff writer
to take too much time to dwell on the details of the plan. Otherwise, a lot of it’s the same.” The presented plan features a variety of housing types, grouping roughly 800 units throughout the development. Portions of the back housing parcels incorporate the existing almond orchard into residents’ backyards, preserving Winters’ agricultural heritage — a request originally made in 2022.
Gloria Lopez’s 11th exhibit for the Winters Museum is one that’s been on her mind for quite a while — but she wanted to wait for the right moment to put it all together. “The board kept asking me, ‘When are you going to do an exhibit about the Spaniards in Winters?’’” Lopez said. “I kept putting it off, because this one is very near and near to me. I felt a lot of pressure, because I wanted to do it right.” The exhibit, titled “The Journey from Spain to Winters: Stories of Hard Work, Strong Families, and Good Food,” is open now and includes stories and photos from the many Spanish immigrants and descendants who have called Winters home over the past 100 years. Many of these third, fourth and fifth generation Spaniards are now pillars of the Winters community and business landscape, from the Martinez family’s Berryessa Gap Winery, to the Lorenzo family’s grocery store, to Lopez herself. So what made this the right moment for the exhibit to finally come to life? In part, it was the Spanish Hawaiian Heritage Association’s Inaugural International Academic and Cultural Conference, held the weekend of Sept. 6-7 on the UC Davis campus. More than 300 people attended, all descendants of the 8,000 Spaniards who left their country between the year of 1907 and 1913 on ships to Hawaii, seeking work on sugar cane plantations. When work there dried up, many of these immigrants left behind their lives again to travel to San Francisco, and eventually dispersed across California, including many who found employment in the fertile hills of Vacaville and Winters. Of course, not all of the Spaniards in California came through Hawaii — others came later through Ellis Island, or took other paths. But the history of Spanish Hawaiian immigrants is a little more niche, and part of the goal of the conference was to gather stories that have been passed down through generations to fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge of who those people were and what their experience was like. “Winters really is small, and it’s my whole world,” Lopez said during a panel discussion at the conference. “Doing all this research, I’ve found there’s a whole other world outside Winters, and a whole lot of Spaniards who are part of all these connections and threads. We all have a piece of that mosaic, and we’re filling in these pictures now.” The Winters Museum’s newest exhibit, timed to coincide with the conference, in-
See PROJECT, Page 5
See SPAIN, Page 4
Crystal Apilado/Winters Express
The revised site plan concept shows the update to include the future Main Street loops and a central park space.
Community voices concerns over updates to North Winters Specific Plan concept By Crystal Apilado Editor-in-Chief
EXPRESS
About 70 community members gathered at the Winters Community Center to review potential updates to the North Winters Specific Plan, also known as the “Winters 183 Project,” following a previous open house in November 2022. With multiple design concepts and a revised site plan on display, many residents voiced frustration. Representatives from DAHLIN Architecture led the main presentation, using the original slides from 2022 with a few updates. Justin Doull, a senior planner at DAHLIN, said the team reviewed the original boards and notes and met with city officials to identify feedback that could be incorporated after the project’s pause. Doull highlighted one major suggestion from the city’s transportation plan:
Crystal Apilado/Winters Express
The revised Product Allocation Plan shows the groupings of proposed housing types. incorporating curves to make Main Street a continuous loop throughout town. “It’s the idea that Main Street creates a continuous loop and it’s been extended as part of the Highlands on the west side of town and it is planned to come up in the Farmstead on the west side of town,” Doull said. “And that was one thing that we haven’t really baked into our concepts previously. We’ve taken some of the positive feedback from
elements that we’ve heard, like a single central park was more functional and had more usability for not just this neighborhood but this city as a whole.” “We looked at a way that a main axis could kind of continue through the site and tie back into the loop on both sides and really complete that part of the vision that the city has had for decades to actually create this idea of a Main Street loop through town and not
Index
We at he r
Features ........................ B-1
Date
Rain
High
Low
Sept. 03
.00
105˚
60˚
Sept. 04
.00
99˚
59˚
Sept. 05
.00
96˚
56˚
Sept. 06
.00
91˚
57˚
Eventos hispanos ....... A-6
Sept. 07
.00
91˚
56˚
Sept. 08
.00
91˚
66˚
Opinion ......................... B-3
Sept. 09
.00
87˚
61˚
Classifieds ................... B-4 Community .................. A-2
Real Estate ................... B-2 Sports ........................... B-6
Rain for week: 0.00 in. Season’s total: 0.01 in. Last sn. to date: TRACE Winters rainfall season began 7/1/25. Weather readings are taken at 9 a.m. daily by local weatherman Joe Bristow.
Aerial survey of Putah Creek produces ‘virtual reality’ data By Todd R. Hansen McNaughton Media A fixed-wing Cessna Cargomaster, for five days in January, flew over the full 32-mile stretch of Putah Creek, capturing Lidar images and data that Streamkeeper Max Stevenson said is like having a “virtual reality simulation” of the stream channel. So vivid are the images, tread marks from tractor tires can be seen in the neighboring farmlands,
also captured by the aerial survey. The purpose of the $120,000 project, however, was to map out the channel floor and slope — from the Monticello Dam to the toe drain in West Sacramento – something the older lidar technology could not do because it did not adequately penetrate the water surface. Lidar, or Light Detection and Ranging, uses pulsed laser light “to measure distances and create
See CREEK, Page 5
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