We haven’t demanded any radical changes here, only that the United States Government live up to its own laws. It is precedent-setting that a group of ‘radicals,’ who in the minds of some are acting outside the law, are just in turn asking the law to live up to its own. We’re not asking for any radical changes. We’re just asking for the law to be equitably applied—to all.”
SOMOS LATINOS
EMPOWERING MEXICAN AMERICANS AND PUERTO RICANS
I Am Joaquín
I am Joaquín
lost in a world of confusion,
caught up in the whirl of a gringo society,
confused by the rules,
scorned by attitudes,
suppressed by manipulation,
and destroyed by modern society.
When Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzáles put these words to the page in 1967, it seemed as if for the first time someone was writing of all the frustration and hurt young Mexican Americans had been feeling for some time. America was a country that was defined along the racial lines of black and white. “Joaquín” spoke of a people who did not fit in this archetype, but existed somewhere in between…in a place that was brown.
My fathers have lost the economic battle and won the struggle of cultural survival.
And now! I must choose between the paradox of Victory of the spirit, despite physical hunger
Or
to exist in the grasp of American social neurosis,
sterilization of the soul, and a full stomach.
YES,
I have come a long way to nowhere, Unwillingly dragged by that
monstrous, technical industrial giant called
Progress and Anglo success…
I look at myself. I watch my brothers.
I shed tears of sorrow.
I sow seeds of hate.
I withdraw to the safety within the
Circle of life…
MY OWN PEOPLE
In his groundbreaking poem “I Am Joaquín,” Gonzáles struck a deep, emotional chord by defining a culture that had never been explicitly defined until then. The poem was quickly mimeographed and circulated among the Mexican-American community. It spread like a virus among the nascent Mexican-American student organizations on campuses across the Southwest and West.
It was only a few years earlier that these student organizations had begun to form. Mexican Americans had participated in civil rights protests. Most notably, Maria Varela became a key SNCC organizer in Alabama, where she established an adult literacy project. She was a cofounder of SDS at the University of Michigan. Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez, a civil rights activist of Mexican descent, became director of the New York City SNCC office in 1964 and also worked in Mississippi. Others participated in the march on Washington organized by King and the SCLC in 1963, while a few Latinos joined a campus protest when a black student was denied admission at San José State College. Still, the relationship between the Civil Rights Movement and Latino rights seemed remote, not just for Mexican Americans but for the country as a whole. President Johnson’s War on Poverty initially did not address poverty in the barrios.
In response, Mexican-American student organizations began to form to speak out explicitly about Latin issues. Two of the first were MAYO, Mexican American Youth Organization, at St. Mary’s College in San Antonio, Texas, and MASO, Mexican American Student Organization, at the University of Texas at Austin. Quickly, chapters of UMAS, United Mexican American Students, were formed at UCLA, California State College, Loyola University, USC, California State College at Long Beach, and San Fernando State College. Then MASA, Mexican American Student Association, came together at East Los Angeles Community College.
Mexican Americans needed to lay claim to their cultural identity in order to have the pride to demand their civil rights.
In 1965, they found a collective voice. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzáles, a retired boxer, organized the Crusade for Justice, the first Mexican-American civil rights organization in Denver, Colorado. It was out of this work that he was inspired to write “I Am Joaquín.” He believed that Mexican Americans needed to lay claim to their cultural identity in order to have the pride to demand their civil rights.
* * *
I am the Eagle and Serpent of the Aztec civilization.
I owned the land as far as the eye could see under the crown of Spain,
and I toiled on my earth and gave my Indian sweat and blood for the Spanish master,
Who ruled with tyranny over man and beast and all that he could trample
But…
THE GROUND WAS MINE.
* * *
I was both tyrant and slave.
“I Am Joaquín” did not offer a well-defined radical ideology, but it did provide a framework for the developing student movement through its portrayal of the quest for identity and its critique of racism.
LA HUELGA AND TIERRA AMARILLA
Two other events conspired to bring Mexican-American youth together. First came “La Huelga,” the strike. In 1965, a five-foot-six shy but determined Mexican American led his small fledgling union on a strike against the grape growers in Delano, California. César Chávez had worked for years to start a union for migrant workers. By the mid-’60s he had enlisted around 1,700 families to join his United Farm Workers of America and persuaded two growers to raise wages moderately, but he knew the workers were too weak for a strike. There were more than 100,000 migrant workers in California; if his small group went on strike, growers easily would be able to find other migrants to replace them.
Corky Gonzáles
1968 HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUT RATES
According to the 1960 census, Mexican Americans made up only 2.3 percent of the U.S. population but 12 percent of the populations of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and California—almost 3.5 million people.
* * *
from the book Brown
by Richard Rodriguez
Brown as impurity.
I write of a color that is not a singular color, not a strict recipe, not an expected result, but a color produced by careless desire, even by accident; by two or several. I write of blood that is blended. I write of brown as complete freedom of substance and narrative. I extol impurity….
I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America….
Brown is the color most people in the United States associate with Latin America.
Apart from stool sample, there is no browner smear in the American imagination than the Rio Grande. No adjective has attracted itself more often to the Mexican in America than “dirty”—which I assume gropes toward the simile “dirt-like,” indicating dense concentrations of melanin.
I am dirty all right. In Latin America, what makes me brown is that I am made of the conquistador and the Indian. My brown is a reminder of conflict.
And of reconciliation.
* * *
The decision to strike was made for him, however. An even smaller union, the AFL-CIO Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, with about 800 members, struck against grape growers in Delano. Chávez’s members immediately wanted to join the strike. Reluctantly, Chávez agreed, afraid that they would be crushed and his union destroyed. Nevertheless, he led his union into the fight.
Like Martin Luther King Jr., Chávez was a follower of Gandhi and nonviolence. He had witnessed what it had done for the moral authority of the Civil Rights Movement. As he and his small labor union stood in defiance of the all-powerful grape growers, the union seemed like David taking on the Goliath that was agriculture. He inspired nuns and priests, union leaders, and students to join him in Delano. In 1967, he was the first Mexican-American leader to appear on the cover of Time. In 1968, Chávez began his most successful campaign, urging consumers not to buy grapes grown in the San Joaquin Valley until the growers agreed to union contracts. The boycott proved a huge success when more than 17 million Americans stopped buying grapes because of the boycott. On July 30, 1970, after losing millions of dollar
s, growers agreed to sign a contract. It was probably the high point in the union’s history.
Chávez, however, considered himself a labor leader, not a leader in the fight for Mexican-American rights. His interest was in improving the lives of migrant workers of all national origins, including Filipino, Japanese, Mexican American, and Native American, among others. To student activists like Armando Valdez, this was a clear disappointment. Valdez graduated from San José State College, where he was one of the founders of a Mexican-American student organization. After college, he traveled to Cuba, where he found inspiration in Castro’s revolution. Next he joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe and participated in its brand of political theater, but when the grape strike began in 1965, Valdez moved to Delano and founded the Teatro Campesino, a political theater group that promoted not so much a new idea but an old idea in a fresh and provocative way—Chicano identity. By the mid-’60s, Mexican-American youths were beginning to call themselves Chicanos to distinguish themselves from their elders and to emphasize their cultural identity, much like African-American youths who began to refer to themselves as black instead of Negro. Teatro Campesino’s first performance was on the picket line of the grape strike in Delano. The play performed was “Las Dos Carnas del Patroncito,” which dramatized the rejection of the assimilation of Mexican-American identity and the emergence of Chicano identity. Chávez’s lack of interest in the Chicano Rights Movement, however, led to Teatro Campesino’s disaffection. By 1968, it moved to the barrios of Los Angeles, where Chicano rights activities would soon boil over.
This inspiration for action did not come just from the fields of the San Joaquin Valley. More dramatically, the June 5, 1967, armed takeover of the county courthouse in San Amarilla, Arizona, by the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants) got the attention of young Chicanos even more. Led by Reies López Tijerina, forty or more members of the Alianza took twenty hostages and demanded the return of lands—millions of acres in central and northern New Mexico—that had been stolen from the Hispano people (Spanish-Americans who were direct descendants of the original Spanish colonizers of New Mexico). Though the occupation lasted only one hour, a jailer and a state police officer were wounded in the melee. Afterward, Alianza participants fled into the mountains.
As was typical, the white-dominated state government overreacted and called out the National Guard to carry out a massive manhunt, complete with tanks. Dozens of innocent Hispanos—including women and children—were arrested and held for forty-eight hours, but more important, the action caught the attention of the entire nation. This was the first militant armed action by Mexican Americans anywhere in the Southwest for more than a hundred years. Though the Alianza was concerned only with the descendants of the original Spanish colonizers and not the general Mexican-American population, their demands resonated with all Latinos. The combination of Chávez’s courage and perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds and the Alianza’s armed occupation of the courthouse inspired young Chicanos to action.
César Chávez
“BLOW OUT!”
That was the cry of more than a thousand students as they exited their classrooms together on the morning of March 3, 1968. The Abraham Lincoln High School in the heart of the East Los Angeles barrio was experiencing a strike. This was not a teacher’s strike but a protest by the majority of Chicano students. Unlike many of the other student protests of the time, however, they were not acting on their own. Their march from the classrooms had been carefully planned with the help of one of the few Latino teachers in the school system, Sal Castro, as well as members of the community and the university student group UMAS.
The school grounds quickly crowded with protesters—students, activists, parents—shouting demands and waving placards reading CHICANO POWER!, VIVA LA RAZA (RACE)!, AND VIVA LA REVOLUCIóN! They handed out a sheet with thirty-six demands that had to be met before they returned to school. Their demands seem obvious in today’s culture but were radical at the time. Among the issues were the end to racist school policies, the disciplining of racist teachers, the power of free speech, the inclusion of Mexican-American history and culture. Until then, the only history and culture taught in these predominantly Chicano schools was white European culture. Any other music, literature, and history was denigrated and deemed not worthy of inclusion.
If the strike had been limited to Abraham Lincoln High School, perhaps nothing would have come of it. Within hours, though, more than 10,000 Chicano students had walked out of their classrooms. Word spread throughout the Los Angeles city school system, the largest in the nation, and Mexican-American students responded. By the end of the day, the entire system was brought to a standstill. For a week and a half the schools were shut down, and protesters marched in front of their schools, demanding not simply equal rights but respect for their heritage.
As the strike progressed, its importance extended well beyond its initial intentions of confronting school administrators or calling attention to the educational problems of Mexican-American youth. Instead, the strike was the first major mass protest explicitly against racism toward Mexican Americans in U.S. history. The “Blow Out” became not just a point of pride but the beginning of the Chicano Power Movement. Almost overnight, Chicano student activism on campuses and in schools increased dramatically.
The City of Los Angeles was not going to allow a few Mexican Americans to challenge their authority. Three months after the “Blow Out” and two days before California’s primary elections, thirteen young Mexican-American political activists were indicted by the Los Angeles County grand jury on conspiracy charges for their roles in organizing the strike. The indictments charged that the thirteen activists had conspired to “willfully disturb the peace and quiet” of the city of Los Angeles and disrupt the educational process in the schools. They were also branded as members of communist “subversive organizations” or outside agitators intent on radicalizing Mexican-American students. Each of the thirteen faced up to sixty-six years in prison if found guilty.
None of the thirteen were communists or members of “subversive organizations.” They were, however, Mexican Americans who were very involved in their communities. They included:
Sal Castro, the teacher who helped organize the walkout at Lincoln
Eliezer Risco, the editor of a new community newspaper named La Raza
Patricio Sanchez, a member of the university student organization MAPA
Moctezuma Esparza, a member of UCLA UMAS
David Sanchez, prime minister of the newly formed Brown Berets
Carlos Montes, minister of communications of the Brown Berets
Ralph Ramírez, minister of defense of the Brown Berets
Fred Lopez, founding member of the Brown Berets
Richard Vigil, community activist with the War on Poverty program
Gilberto C. Olmeda, community activist with the War on Poverty program
Joe Razo, community activist with the War on Poverty program
Henry Gómez, community activist with the War on Poverty program
Carlos Muñoz Jr., president of UMAS at California State College, Los Angeles
Rather than snuffing out the burgeoning Brown Power Movement, the indictments of the L.A. Thirteen ignited outrage among Mexican Americans. At the San José State College graduation, approximately 200 Chicano graduating seniors and members of the audience walked out in the middle of the commencement exercises. They said that they could not celebrate an institution that showed an utter lack of commitment to the Mexican-American community. They cited low enrollment of Mexican Americans at the college, inadequate training of professionals, teachers, social workers, police—who would go to work in their communities with no understanding of their culture—and an underlying racism at the college.
Throughout the following year, student strikes erupted at high schools across the Southwest. Most notably, in Denver, Colorado, and Crystal City, Texas, high school strikes led to broader concerns about
Mexican-American rights. In Denver, the strike broke out into violent confrontations with the police. “Corky” Gonzáles took a leading role in the strike with his Crusade for Justice organization and enlisted many more members. Many students and activists were arrested, including Gonzáles.
This eventually led to the Crusade for Justice taking a leading role in the rapidly growing Chicano Power Movement. At the time, Gonzáles described what he wanted to do: “We are an awakening people, an emerging nation, a new breed.” In March 1969, the Crusade organized a week-long National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, in which it was stressed that Mexican Americans could not abandon their responsibility to their people for individualism and Americanization. The conference organizers called this Americanization the psychological “colonization” of Mexican-American youth. In response, they challenged Chicano youth to liberate themselves and suggested the way to do this was to find revolutionary models in their community. One place activists began looking was at street gangs and ex-convicts. Conference speakers proposed that henceforth, a crime committed by a Mexican American was a “revolutionary act.”
This was not a teacher’s strike but a protest by Chicano students.
COLONIZATIONAMERICANIZATION
Aztlán: a mythical origin of the Aztecs
The language and style of vatos locos, or gang members, became the social currency of student life. Carnalismo (the brotherhood code of Mexican-American youth gangs) would inform the nationalist ideology. This new Chicano identity was at the core of the rejection of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture and the embracing of gabacho—traditional Mexican—culture. By the end of the conference, participants had drafted a document called El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán (The Spiritual Plan of Aztlán). El Plan laid out a program to unite Mexican Americans. The preface to this manifesto read:
America Dreaming Page 15