by Ray Suarez
Robert Kennedy news conference in California. With Dolores Huerta at his side, RFK speaks to the national press. The New York senator and presidential candidate brought national attention to the struggle in the fields. CREDIT: WALTER P. REUTHER LIBRARY, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY
Kennedy had taken a long personal journey from his days as a hard-hitting counsel on the Senate Labor Rackets Committee. The bitterness and conflict of 1960s America, the killing of his brother, the corrosive effect of the Vietnam War, his tours through intense concentrations of poverty in Brooklyn and the Appalachian Mountains, and his journey to apartheid South Africa had pushed the senator to a new idea of American politics and the struggle for justice.
RFK’s friend and biographer, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., said of the unlikely relationship between Chavez and Kennedy, “For all their differences in background the two men were rather alike: both short, shy, familial, devout, opponents of violence, with strong veins of melancholy and fatalism.”
This stretch of weeks in early 1968 can only be remembered as a shock to America’s system. In a few short months, the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong guerrilla allies in the south launched the stunning Tet Offensive, a series of surprise attacks on the U.S. military and its South Vietnamese allies. In the same period, the incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, withdrew from the Democratic primaries and RFK announced he would run for president; Cesar Chavez launched his hunger strike; student strikes against the Vietnam War escalated in size and intensity, and both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were murdered on the front edge of what would become a summer of urban riots, fires, and destruction on a breathtaking scale.
As Chavez grew in stature and renown as the public face of the UFW, Huerta was the organizer and negotiator who took the boycotts nationwide and hashed out contracts with the growers. Dolores Huerta was also religious, and revered the place of the Church in Mexican-American culture. It turned out even the Church was not entirely ready for Huerta’s expansive view of the role of women in the farmworkers’ movement. “This priest I had worked very closely with when we were organizing the Agriculture Workers Association told me, ‘You know what? You just need to stay home and take care of your children.’ And I was so devastated. This is a person I had been working with very closely. I had a lot of faith. I was in my mother’s house at that time and we had a meeting at my mother’s house, and after [the priest] walked out the door my mother handed me a glass of tequila because I started crying. And she said, ‘Don’t listen to him.’ And we both had a shot of tequila.
“But the farmworkers themselves, I never got that from them, ever. They knew what we were doing was so important and it was our only way to change things. So they really respected me a lot.”
The success of the boycotts gave power to the last push for recognition. The struggles, the sacrifice, the violence endured, ending with a union that bargained with the growers. Not long after came a series of historic contracts and a state law making the fertile soil of California, into, in effect, a closed shop. The growers had to negotiate with the union.
Huerta, Chavez, and the workers had won. They had done it without resorting to the tactics others had used to stop them. A prayer from Cesar Chavez shows that for him, staying true to oneself was a victory. “It is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are. I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness, is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally nonviolent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us be men.”
NOT EVERY LATINO struggle took the same road. Black Americans won major legal and constitutional victories in the 1950s and 1960s using the courts and nonviolent civil disobedience. Latinos had to fight many of the same battles, even as they benefited from the new civil rights laws. It did not matter whether it was an aging building in a teeming urban neighborhood in the Northeast, or a one-story frame “Mexican school” next to a dusty play lot in the Southwest: Latinos went to terrible schools.
It did not matter whether a substandard house stood in sight of the U.S.-Mexican border or in view of the Manhattan skyline, a lot of Latinos lived in aging and unhealthy homes. It did not make much difference whether they were farmworkers, city or county employees, or were crowded into vast urban barrios; Latinos were not heavily represented in city and county councils, state legislatures, or the Congress of the United States.
From Crystal City, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley this time of breathtaking change had not changed much about daily life. In 1968, José Ángel Gutiérrez was twenty-four, bilingual, and restless. “At the end of the day, the Anglos went to their side of town and the Mexicans went to their side of town, across the railroad tracks. The gringos owned almost everything and controlled everybody. Anglos worked Mexicans, but no Anglo worked for a Mexican.”
José Ángel’s father died when José was a young teenager. The elder Gutiérrez, a physician, had fought alongside Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution. José Ángel Gutiérrez explained it this way: “My world had three spheres—a parental Mexican world, an Anglo school world, and my Chicano [U.S.-born Mexican] peer world. Every day I had to make choices: Do I eat in the school cafeteria with most of the Anglos but few of the Mexican kids?
“And if I bring lunch to school to be with my Chicano kind, will it be a white-bread sandwich or tortilla tacos? Which kind of tortillas—corn or white flour, that is, real Mexican or Chicano tortillas?” The duality—or, in young Gutiérrez’s case, a three-part identity: American, Mexican, and Mexican-American—is one many Latinos will recognize. For this Rio Grande Valley kid the questions went much deeper than the mundane details of today’s lunch to core notions of identity. “My feelings were all jumbled with regard to who could be my friends, who should be my friends, and who were my friends. My Chicano friends started calling me ‘agachado’—trying to be white.”
Gutiérrez made a fateful step across the boundary line between accepting the way things always were and demanding they be different by making speeches at Chicano voter-registration rallies. One day he was hustled into a car by a man with a gun and brought to a private home filled with local police, the Texas Rangers, and representatives of the Anglo power structure in town. “I’d heard stories about how the sheriff and the Ranger captain had shot Mexicans in the back. This wasn’t an urban legend—both of them had made frequent declarations to the press about how many men they’d killed, not counting Mexicans. I was convinced I was to join that list—of Mexicans not counted.”
The men tried to muscle Gutiérrez into renouncing his public speeches, interrogating him for hours at gunpoint. He did not give in. “I began to realize the extent to which these men would go to keep things in cristal, as they were, to keep Mexicans in their place. It was a transformational moment in my life. I went from naive Chicano to militant Chicano. Fear of gringos in me was replaced by rage.”
Gutiérrez turned his rage into political action. In 1967, in San Antonio, he and some friends founded MAYO, the Mexican American Youth Organization. The group took off, with more than forty chapters in Texas alone after just two years. The young political party devoted its attention to one arena where it was badly needed: schools. MAYO brought the mass walkouts called “blowouts” in East Los Angeles to small-town Texas, starting in Gutiérrez’s hometown of Crystal City. While sixty percent of the students were Mexican-Americans, almost all the teachers were Anglos. “The only Chicano teachers were an assistant football coach and the Spanish teacher,” Gutiérrez recalled. “The whites dominated the faculty, school board, and the curriculum too. They taught us that Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie and the other illegal aliens at the Alamo were heroes, and the Mexicans were bloodthirsty and brutal.
“The students couldn’t even vote for their own student representatives. It was strictly prohibited to speak Spanish at school. The cafeteria serviced only Anglo food. All but one of the cheerleaders were Anglo. All this in a town that was ei
ghty-five percent Chicano.”
Gutiérrez and MAYO were learning by doing. They organized students from the ground up, and learned to talk to those in authority, pressing their grievances. “The superintendent said, ‘Take the demands to the school board.’ The school board said, ‘Take the demands to the superintendent.’ So a student leader printed up the list of grievances and passed it out at school. For which she was suspended.”
The walkout began in the high school, and spread to the junior high and grammar schools, keeping some seventeen hundred students away. Three student leaders took their first airplane trip, to Washington, D.C., to meet with three U.S. senators. Before long, the U.S. Department of Justice pressured the Crystal City school board to negotiate. On January 9, 1970, the school board approved most of the demands of the striking students. Gutiérrez liked the taste of victory. It would encourage him to push the reluctant American Southwest even harder, as one of the activists who began attracting followers, imitators, admirers . . . and enemies.
The fight for Latino self-determination began to take many forms in many places. The crusaders had to decide for themselves how they would frame their demands, whom they would be willing to take on, and whether they would fight from inside or outside the established order.
In New Mexico, a former preacher named Reies López Tijerina insisted the Southwest had been taken illegally from Mexico in the nineteenth century, and should be returned to the Mexican-Americans of the region. In 1967, López Tijerina went as far as to lead an armed raid on a New Mexico courthouse. He was captured and sent to prison.
In Colorado in 1969, another preacher, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzáles, hosted a youth conference in Denver that produced a document still used as ammunition by nativists and anti-immigration forces: “The Plan of Aztlán.” The name is Aztec, for “a place in the north,” and the document advocated the creation of a new Latino nation on the Mexican lands that became part of the United States after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. What is now California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, and Oklahoma was Aztlán, a country for Chicanos. The manifesto said, in part, “We are a Nation. We are a Union of free pueblos. We are Aztlán. Por la Raza todo, Fuera de la Raza, nada. [For la raza, the race, everything. Outside of la raza, nothing.]
“Something stolen can never be made legal property,” said José Ángel Gutiérrez. “We did not want to assimilate with Anglos; over one hundred years of assimilation had not brought justice or anything like equality.” Gutiérrez’s words reflect a new lack of apology for simply being who you were. Other activist groups were starting to arrive at a similar idea.
“Even the idea of assimilation was offensive. Hey, we were here first. How come the Anglos didn’t assimilate with us? We wanted our own homeland back. An independent Chicano homeland.” Read a quote like that in the twenty-first century, and it seems a little far-fetched. It might sound different when placed in the context of Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael demanding a black homeland, the American Indian Movement reviving ideas of Indian national sovereignty, and Puerto Rican activists demanding American withdrawal and an independent nation. Aztlán is rooted in its time.
Gutiérrez committed to playing an inside and an outside game. In south Texas, he tried to use the ballot box to capture political power, but he rejected the Republican and Democratic parties. La Raza Unida, the United Race, registered voters, ran petition drives, and got on the ballot for a range of offices in the counties bordering Mexico. In 1970, “La Raza Unida captured majorities in two school boards and two city councils, and elected two new mayors,” said Gutiérrez, but he was not finished. “The next year we won more local elections. I was elected head of the Crystal City school board.”
La Raza Unida now brought Gutiérrez into conflict not only with the Texas white power brokers and political establishment, but with one of the leading Mexican-American politicians in America, whose base was also south Texas. Henry B. González was the anti-Gutiérrez in generation, tactics, philosophy, and style. When La Raza Unida was racking up its first victories, “Henry B.” was in his mid-fifties, a veteran member of the U.S. Congress, a legislative tactician, and a political warrior for the Mexicans and Mexican-Americans of Texas. His view of his people’s place in America was the absolute opposite of Gutiérrez’s.
Like many other families in Texas, González could trace his lineage back to sixteenth-century Spanish settlers in Mexico. Henry B.’s family came to the United States fleeing the tumult of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. His father became the editor of La Prensa, a prominent and historic Spanish-language newspaper.
González went to college, then to law school. He became the first Mexican-American in modern history elected to the San Antonio City Council. In 1956, he headed to Austin as a member of the state senate. In his first full year as a senator he tried to head off ten bills that would allow Texas to resegregate its schools, getting around the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against separate-but-equal schooling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.
Congressman Henry B. González of Texas. CREDIT: GONZÁLEZ FAMILY
The stylishly dressed freshman senator took the floor to push back against the tide of anti-integration sentiment across the South. He challenged his fellow Texans to examine their prejudices against the black and brown citizens who had been part of the state’s history from its earliest days. “Why did they name González, González if the name was not honored in Texas at the time? Why did they honor Garza along with Burnet?” Then he burrowed in further, invoking some of the most revered events in Texas history.
“My own forebears in Mexico bore arms against Santa Anna,” González said, reminding his audience of Texas’s battle against the Mexican president. “There were three revolutions against Santa Anna—Texas was only one of its manifestations. Did you know that Negroes helped settle Texas? That a Negro died at the Alamo?”
He spoke, he said, to “register the plaintive cry, the hurt feelings, the silent, the dumb protest of the inarticulate.” He went on for twenty-two hours straight, the longest filibuster in the history of the Texas legislature. To his colleagues in the Texas senate who argued that the bills were necessary, he thundered, “Necessity is the creed of slaves and the argument of tyrants!”
In the early hours of the morning in his second night holding the floor, González’s colleagues were asked whether he would relent and sit down if his opponents agreed to withdraw four of the ten bills. He stopped the filibuster. Eventually, nine of the ten bills were withdrawn or declared unconstitutional.
In 1960, González headed to Washington as a member of the 78th Congress. He came to Washington with President Kennedy, and González’s legislative agenda was very much in tune with the New Frontier. He fought for civil rights and affordable housing, improved education and better wages. The congressman was fighting for an America that would accept him, and his people in Texas, as part of the American whole. The young firebrands like Gutiérrez and López Tijerina had given up on that project, despairing of ever being accepted as full Americans instead of a racial and ethnic “other.”
While activists in the younger generation were talking about Aztlán and a Chicano nation, González voted against including Mexican-Americans in the legislative language of the Voting Rights Act. He opposed the formation of MALDEF, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which spearheads the legal struggle for Latino civil rights. He even refused to become a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, formed by Edward Roybal, a young congressman from Southern California.
He saw the rising militancy in the Southwest as unlikely to advance the fight for equal rights. In a 1968 speech on the House floor, he said, “We see a strange thing in San Antonio today. We have those who play at revolution and those who imitate the militancy of others. We have those who cry, ‘Brown Power,’ only because they have heard, ‘Black Power.’ And we have those who yell ‘oink’ or ‘pig’ at police, o
nly because they have heard others use the term.
“We have those who wear beards and berets, only because they have seen it done elsewhere. But neither fervor nor fashion will bring justice.”
This was, after all, the late 1960s. Fervor, as Henry B. put it, was the background music of American culture. Almost everything shouted across the various divides in our national life seemed to be followed by exclamation points.
José Ángel Gutiérrez set a fire that still smolders more than forty years later when he told a San Antonio news conference, “MAYO will not engage in controversy with fellow Mexicanos regardless of how unfounded and vindictive their accusations may be. We realize that the effects of cultural genocide take many forms—some Mexicanos will become psychologically castrated; others will become demagogues and gringos as well. And others will come together, resist, and eliminate the gringo. We will be the latter.”
A reporter for the San Antonio Express-News, Kemper Diehl, followed up with Gutiérrez immediately after the incendiary statement. His paper printed what Gutiérrez calls “Diehl’s version” of the exchange. “What do you mean by ‘eliminate the gringo’?” Gutiérrez answered, “You can eliminate an individual in various ways. You can certainly kill him but that is not our intent at this moment.
“You can remove the base of support that he operates from, be it economic, political, social. That is what we intend to do.” Diehl recounted, “Gutiérrez was again pressed as to intentions of killing gringos ‘if worst comes to worst.’ Gutiérrez replied, “If worst comes to worst and we have to resort to that means, it would be self-defense.”