America Dreaming

by Laban Carrick Hill

  In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud historical heritage, but also of the brutal “Gringo” invasion of our territories, we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlán, from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare that the call of our blood is our power, or responsibility, and our inevitable destiny…. We are Bronze People of a Bronze Culture…. We are Aztlán.

  A month after the Denver conference the Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education held a conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The goal of this conference was to find ways to implement El Plan. Out of the meeting came a new organization that brought together all the individual campus organizations, called El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (The Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán). This new group’s acronym was MEChA, or “matchstick.” Their intention was to light a fire in communities and on campuses to promote Chicano culture and rights. In a sense, these two conferences were a huge success. They brought together Chicanos from across the Southwest and West and united them in a single goal for the first time. Carlos Muñoz Jr., one of the original L.A. Thirteen and a participant in the conference, said:

  The strategy called for students to be organized around social and cultural events that were designed to expose university indoctrination and propaganda based on the Protestant “ethic of profit and competition, of greed and intolerance.” MEChA would advocate replacing that ethic with the values associated with the “ancestral communalism” of the ancient Mexican peoples. MEChA would appeal to the sense of obligation to family and community….

  ANCESTRAL COMMUNALISM

  In short, the Santa Barbara conference resolved to promote values, which were in direct opposition to America’s mass market culture. In the conference attendees’ minds, nothing short of this achievement would free them from American cultural colonization.

  THE CHICANO MORATORIUM

  In the streets of the barrio, the Brown Berets became a tremendous influence. Taking their cue from the Black Panther Party, they were a paramilitary organization whose goal was to protect the community from police abuses. As in the Native-American and African-American communities, the police often used excessive force and brutality to enforce laws, some of which were on the books, some of which were not. The Brown Berets placed themselves as protectors of Chicano rights while authorities viewed them as terrorists and made a concerted effort to infiltrate and disrupt the Berets. What made the Berets different from MEChA was that its rank and file members were primarily street youth, not students. Many of their members came from the ranks of pintos, those who had juvenile records. As such, they were also more representative of their working-class community, but were also eager to change the system. Student organizations fought for their rights within the system—at universities and within political organizations. The Brown Berets placed themselves in opposition to authority and promoted a goal of destruction of the system. From the perspective of those in power, this kind of direct threat had to be met with overwhelming force. Inevitably, this meant the two sides were destined for confrontation.

  Finally, the explosion happened on August 29, 1970, in Los Angeles. Both MEChA and the Brown Berets had joined together to protest the Vietnam War with a demonstration called Chicano Moratorium. The Moratorium was the first major Mexican-American display of unity. Nearly 20,000 people gathered in East Los Angeles in Laguna Park to peacefully voice their resistance to the draft and the war. The police, however, quickly advanced on the demonstrators to break up the protest and ignited a riot. Hundreds of participants were injured and three were killed. Many more were arrested, but not before the crowd turned into a mob. Along Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles, thousands of protesters expressed their outrage by burning businesses and cars. This seemed to shock not only the police but the demonstrators as well. Both sides seemed to retreat from their aggressive tactics, just as the same seemed to be happening all over the country. Mass demonstrations appeared to be at their end.

  Chicano Moratorium protest

  Painting created by Salvador Torres for a Chicano protest against the San Diego Gas and Electric Co. in 1969

  Later, as students began to graduate from their colleges, the student movement itself shifted its focus from the politics of confrontation to the implementation of Chicano Studies programs. As graduates students became part of the system they opposed, their investment in its destruction changed to a desire to expand its scope to include Chicano culture and Chicano Studies.

  LA RAZA UNIDA (THE UNITED RACE)

  While California seemed to be the center of the Chicano Power Movement, Mexican Americans in other parts of the Southwest were also involved in promoting their rights and culture. Out of the school strike in Crystal City, Texas, arose a political party called El Partido de la Raza Unida (The Party of the United Race). For a couple of years Chicano activists had discussed the idea of a Mexican-American political party, but it had not gone much beyond talk. The Denver conference had concluded that there was a real need for the “creation of an independent, local, regional, and national political party” because neither the Republican nor the Democratic parties were concerned with Mexican-American needs.

  Two months after the Denver conference in May of 1969, organizers focused their attention on an area of south Texas called Winter Garden, which was more than 80 percent Mexican American. Their goal was to take control of the community institutions in this area through the political process. Their first target was the Crystal City school system. Crystal City was a community of approximately 10,000. Although the community was 80 percent Mexican, the power structure was white. In 1963, Mexican Americans, with the support of the Teamsters, were able to win seats on the city council, but that victory was short-lived. Two years later, they were voted off because they had not developed a grassroots political organization to support them. White domination of the economy and overt racism made it impossible for Mexicans Americans to wrest control of the municipal government.

  “Mexican Americans…are reminding us all of the very powerful role of our personality, of the very wide extension of our cultural image and of the community action that is required if that identity is to become something more than a passing reference in celebrations.”

  —Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes

  Despite the earlier failure at Crystal City, the strategy of La Raza Unida organizers was to begin with building the grassroots support first. Then they would attempt to gain control of city and county governments throughout south Texas. Their first step was again the Crystal City school system because the overwhelming Mexican-American population made it the most likely place to start. Their strategy to build support was to organize a student strike at the end of the year. Their goals were to promote support for education change by speaking to parents and families. La Raza Unida had instant success and gained control of both the school board and the city council. Party leader José Angel Gutiérrez summed up their aim:

  We sought to expose, confront, and eliminate the gringo. We felt it was necessary to polarize the community over issues into Chicano versus gringos.

  Despite Gutiérrez’s confrontational language, La Raza Unida evolved into a party that sought to work within the political and economic structure of capitalism, unlike the Brown Berets. During a subsequent party convention in 1971, the Texas Unida Party crafted a platform that was decidedly not separatist or nationalist. The platform’s four objectives were in fact quite mainstream:

  Replace the existing system with a humanistic alternative which shall maintain equal representation of all people.

  Create a government which serves the needs of individual communities, yet is beneficial to the general populace.

  Create a political movement dedicated to ending the causes of poverty, misery, and injustice so that future generations can live a life free of exploitation.

  Abolish racist
practices within the existing social, educational, economic, and political system so that physical and cultural genocidal practices against minorities will be discontinued.

  As the party spread throughout the Southwest and West, however, it became difficult to sustain the initial grassroots success. By 1973, the party went into decline. Like most third parties in the American political system, it was difficult to maintain over time. In addition to the winner-take-all nature of U.S. politics and the ability of the two major parties to co-opt the alternative party’s issues, third parties find it almost impossible to succeed beyond one election cycle. La Raza Unida’s success can best be measured in how much the Democratic and Republican parties have adopted not just Chicano issues but broader policies that address concerns of different ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds. In short, how much these parties have embraced pluralism can be traced back to the work done by groups like this.

  “They get one pat on the back here, and when they go outside they get ten slaps in the face.”

  —Antonio Rodriguez, Principal, Bilingual Bicultural Art School, District 4, New York City

  YOUNG LORDS

  Palante! Right on!

  Shouts were followed by fists punching the air. Garbage cans trailing rotting trash arced high and smashed in the streets. It was the long, hot summer of 1969. Garbage had been left to decay in East Harlem, El Barrio, even though the sanitation department was nearby. They just weren’t picking up. For weeks a group of youths calling themselves the New York City Young Lords Organization organized a street cleanup, but the city garbage trucks never came. Instead, the garbage rotted and a rank smell wafted across the neighborhood.

  Eventually, the frustration boiled over, and the neighborhood, led by the Young Lords, began to drag the garbage into the middle of the street. They built a four-foot-high barrier on Third Avenue and shut down traffic. To ensure traffic remained stalled, they set the garbage on fire. Only then did the city respond, but they didn’t send the sanitation department. They sent the NYPD and the fire department. Angry citizens met them with rocks, bottles, and trash.

  The East Harlem Garbage Offensive became the unifying moment in New York’s Puerto Rican population, and the moment when the Young Lords became the community’s leading advocate. The New York City Young Lords Organization (later the Young Lords Party) was inspired by the Chicago gangs-turned-activists, the Young Lords Organization, and the Black Panther Party. Composed of mostly Puerto Rican students from SUNY-Old Westbury, Queens College, and Columbia University, many of its members had been involved in the student and anti-war movements. At first they formed “La Sociedad de Albizu Campos” in honor of Puerto Rican Nationalist Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos. This group was primarily a study group. When they decided action was necessary, they took on the Chicago gang’s name and made it their mission to change the day-to-day conditions of the people in their community.

  After massive migrations from Puerto Rico to the United States between 1948 and 1958, Puerto Ricans lived primarily in barrios in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. They had come to the States as people looking for decent jobs and housing, but found very little of either. Instead, they were pushed into manual labor and ghettos like East Harlem.

  The Young Lords made it their project to change the lives of their families in concrete ways. After the garbage revolt, they went door-to-door and polled the community to find out what was important to them. In addition to cleaning streets, they developed a series of successful community projects, including breakfast and day care programs. In their desire to help their community, they targeted a local church as an ideal location in which to run many of their programs. The church, The First Spanish Methodist Church, was open only on Sundays and was unused the rest of the week. When the church elders refused to grant use to the Young Lords, the group commandeered the facility. They renamed the church La Iglesia de la Gente (The Church of the People) and turned it into a vibrant community center. They held the church for eleven days, during which more than 100,000 people came through the church’s doors to participate in numerous community programs and events.

  Out of this success, the Young Lords embarked on an even more ambitious project. They organized the Health Revolutionary Unity Movement, a mass organization made up of Puerto Rican and black medical workers based in Gouverneur Hospital on the Lower East Side and other hospitals in Harlem. HRUM did door-to-door TB testing and lead poisoning testing. They “liberated” a city TB-testing truck because it never came to Harlem, and they took chest X-rays of hundreds of people in the barrio.

  After a young Puerto Rican woman died from minor surgery, HRUM took over the old Lincoln Hospital on November 10, 1970. Over 600 people joined in occupying the Nurses’ Residence to publicize flagrant disregard for human life in New York hospitals. The occupation was brief, but was supported by most of the hospital staff, and embarrassed the city tremendously.

  Like the Black Panther Party, the Brown Berets, and AIM, the Young Lords quickly gained the attention of the FBI and their COINTELPRO. Agents of the FBI began to infiltrate the Young Lords and disrupt them. When the group was hit by the FBI and NYPD, one of those arrested, Julio Roldan, purportedly committed suicide that night in jail. The suicide was clearly suspicious, since Roldan was an active and vital member of the Young Lords and had anticipated his arrest. In response, the group occupied the People’s Church a second time. This time, however, they were armed. With this action the Young Lords became radicalized in a way that they had never been previously. Their concrete community solutions began to be replaced with extremist ideological stances. They quoted from Mao’s Little Red Book and required all members to be ideologically pure in support of Marx, Lenin, and Mao. By 1971, they had marginalized themselves by beginning the self-destructive process of weeding out anyone who doubted the scientific truth of these leaders.

  “For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception to death. In less than two decades of their use, the synthetic pesticides have been so thoroughly distributed throughout the animate and inanimate world that they occur virtually everywhere.”

  —Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

  EARTH DAY

  THE ORIGINS OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT

  ELIXIRS OF DEATH

  We are poisoning ourselves, and everything we touch. That was the frightening message Rachel Carson voiced in her groundbreaking article in The New Yorker magazine and then in her bestselling book Silent Spring in 1962. Writing the book while she was dying of cancer, perhaps poisoned by the very world she was writing about, Carson redefined the way Americans thought about their environment. She explained how human kind’s relationship with nature was an “intricate web of life whose interwoven strands lead from microbes to man.”

  For the first time, someone was offering a devastating critique of the chemical industry. She revealed the effects that indiscriminate use of inorganic chemicals, such as DDT, had on the world’s ecological system. After World War II, the new and amazing pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides that industry produced seemed like miracles. According to their producers, they “controlled” all kinds of pesky insects, fungi, and weeds. What no one really understood until Carson put all the pieces together was that these new wonder chemicals were also poisoning us and our environment. Her research, supported with more than fifty-five pages of references in the back of her book, exposed cancer-inducing chemicals that remained as residues in virtually everything we ate or drank.

  The book catalogued the many instances where pesticide spraying caused irreparable damage to the entire environment. A gypsy-moth eradication campaign killed fish, crabs, and birds as well as moths. A fire-ant program killed cows and wiped out pheasants, but not fire ants. Pesticides that leaked into the Colorado River annihilated twenty-seven species of fish, while doing little to actually control the pests for which they were intended. DDT, an extremely poisonous chemical that is now
banned, was haphazardly sprayed over entire neighborhoods to control pests.

  “In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs of survival, water has become the victim of his indifference.”

  —Rachel Carson

  The effect of Carson’s message was stunning. Her conclusions seemed to confirm the sense of danger in the world that everyone had been feeling. CBS broadcast an hour-long special on Carson and her ideas. America had just spent the previous decade performing “duck and cover” drills at schools and building bomb shelters to protect themselves from atomic bomb fallout. During this same time, they had spent their leisure time watching Godzilla and other mutant creatures wreaking havoc in movie theaters. The notion that an even more insidious contamination might really exist seemed highly implausible.

  We have met the enemy, and he is us.

  —This popular saying appeared on posters and bumper stickers.

  Suddenly, progress and prosperity had a dark and destructive underside. Not everything industry produced was good for you—some of it in fact was deadly. That marvelous green blanket of grass spreading so uniformly across your yard required pesticides and fertilizers that were poisoning the environment. America’s great icon, the bald eagle, was in danger of extinction because of DDT.