The neighborhood was laid out by the Colonia Land Improvement Company in close proximity of the sugar factory and beet fields to house workers just east of the city's downtown business district.

Long a Latino barrio, it is home to lower-income families, former resident César Chávez once lived there, also known worldwide as Boxnard because of La Colonia Youth Boxing Club, which has produced notable fighters such as Fernando Vargas, Robert Garcia, Miguel Angel Garcia, Victor Ortíz, Brandon Rios and Mia St. John.

The area was part of the Chumash region, which extended from Point Conception to Santa Monica and back into the foothills as far as the Coast Range.

It was laid out by the Colonia Land Improvement Company just east of the city's downtown business district and in close proximity of the sugar factory and beet fields to house workers.

[2] The area, once known as Colonia Gardens, boasted half the agricultural city's farm labor force and grew to a population of 8,000 people by 1948.

The suspicious death of two Mexican immigrants in 1900 in an Oxnard jail that mysteriously caught fire brought tensions to a high between the labor force and the authorities.

After a few years of police brutality and several demonstrations, the JMLA won concessions from the American Beet Sugar Company growers of Oxnard and fell apart afterwards.

By founding the Homeowners Organization, they hoped to entice workers into ending the strike by guaranteeing them status as true Oxnard citizens.

After this meeting failed to bring peace, leaders of the strike held a public discussion of the police force as a tool of the ranchers and politicians.

In 1942, a group of men and women listening to outdoor music were tear gassed and brutally arrested, leading to greater apprehension within the community to deal with the authorities.

Crime began skyrocketing as drugs, and then resulting gangs, created a mentality in the community against the police, who had historically never patrolled within the neighborhood and only entered on occasional emergency calls.

Some political activists lobbied against the injunction arguing that it amounted to racial discrimination, that it unconstitutionally banned assembly and expression through wearing Dallas Cowboys affiliated clothing, and that it was being used as a tool for the slow gentrification of La Colonia (this includes speculation that the gang injunction was instituted simply to allow for the economic viability of the downtown area).

Anti-injunction proponents cited the Oxnard Police Department in their argument that since 1992, crime had dropped to half of what it once was and that of the 39 homicides charged against the Chiques since 1993 they had only actually committed four.