Extract from Making Aztlán: Ideology and Culture of the Chicana and Chicano Movement, 1966-1977: authors, Juan Gomez-Quiñones and Irene Vásquez
Juan Gomez-Quiñones and Irene Vásquez provide a long-needed overview of the Chicana and Chicano movement's social history as it grew, flourished, and then slowly fragmented. The authors examine the movement's origins in the 1960s and 1970s, showing how it evolved from a variety of organizations and activities united in their quest for basic equities for Mexican Americans in U.S. society. Within this matrix of agendas, objectives, strategies, approaches, ideologies, and identities, numerous electrifying moments stitched together the struggle for civil and human rights. Gómez-Quiñones and Vásquez show how these convergences underscored tensions among diverse individuals and organizations at every level. Their narrative offers an assessment of U.S. society and the Mexican American community at a critical time, offering a unique understanding of its civic progress toward a more equitable social order.
Chapter 39 Analysis
The Practices of Coyountura
Community activists and organizations did come together sometimes. Given heterogeneous community needs and the priorities expressed organizationally by activists in the movement, the struggle for social change manifested itself in the following areas: civic participation, cultural rights, educational rights, educational reforms, women's rights, democratization of institutions, and political solidarity through participation on behalf of national, class, and international struggles. Formally, these issues were divided into economic, cultural, and political demands and included political domestic and international struggles.
Potentially, in dialectical practice and conceptualization, these were interrelated for the activist. However, for these to be synthesized into civic class, gender, and cultural demands in practice, a synthesis required continuous effort. Depending on the civic class stand and forms of struggle they become heightened political objectives, which is why the movement was from the first a potential or actual political-practices reform movement, though some members sometimes did not understand this.
When the synthesis occurred, there existed a direct interdependent and inter-developing link to the broad struggle of the Mexican people and the international struggle for human and civil rights. This synthesis encompassed the progressive resolution of internal struggle and shaped future practices.
Within the years I967-I977, the CCM blossomed into one of the dynamic and positive sectors of the evolving United States. Its faults and shortcomings were arguably clear, but also clear were the actual impacts and potential future gains. From the west to the east, thousands of young and old Chicanas and Chicanos had an impact within the community and the larger society for which there was no precedent. The acceleration and development of programmatic and political maturation were relatively striking as expressed by organizations.
The organizations maintained two general foci: community and the culture. Organizations sponsored programs, sparked cultural events, announced colloquiums and conferences, and pressured for larger participation by Mexicans. Additionally, they inspired and fought for major changes, including the establishment of local centers, agencies, and more programs, and the hiring of staff and administrators.
In the community, activists directed voter registration and voter education drives, worked in social rehabilitation, opened centers for community action, organized barrio schools, engaged in community politics, participated in mass protests, and faced serious confrontations with the authorities. Since its beginning, the CC effort made major contributions to the political process undergone by the community as a whole.
From a small group of activists with some vague idea of service to their compatriots, the movement grew to include multiple organizations with detailed and ambitious programs in the community. Activists progressed from modest objectives to serious dedication, to the building of a movement that was not only educational and political but also possessed cultural, social, and economic components. In effect, what had been expanded and established were resources and political bases that had not existed previously or had done so only slightly.
Hundreds of activists were involved, and tens of thousands felt the impact. Many individuals paid a price, both personal and economic. On occasion activity left bitter personal marks. In addition, many suffered arrests and surveillance by police. Other activists joined the enterprise of uneasy accommodation within the corporate sector. Others maintained their values, but used a new vocabulary and different modes to advance community interests.
A few activists began and continued a long career of militancy; others dropped out of sight. Some maintained political consciousness in their professional activity, while others sacrificed previous communitarian values for corporatist values and institutional advancement. In any case, all were a part of a particular time.
A summary review of the history of the movement leads to a number of observations. The movement developed as a part of the broad social and political movement of the Mexican people in the United States. Activists played a key role; they drew strength from this. Mexican activists were an integral sector of a community, which was under domination and conditioned by ethnic, gender, and class oppression. This provided focus.
The movement represented a continuation and acceleration of the Mexican peoples''historical struggle against U.S. oppression. This provided purpose. As activists they were sometimes politically privileged vis-a-vis their community and, as Mexicans and offspring of a working class community, they stood in an antagonistic relationship to the constituencies and purpose of the civic order as it was. Activists reflected upon these aspects in their particular mobilizations. However, there were realities that, when not resolutely understood and acted upon, led to problems.
The nature of this society, the opposition that formed in relation to it, was beset with positive currents and negative byways. Within the contradictions, influences, and conditions of this reality, institutional setting, and society, as change allowed, activists organized. Without a clear stand on community class, gender, and culture, the activists' movement was vulnerable to the negative byways.
The CCM moved through specific stages, the most important being the transition from an idealistic to a materialistic ideological direction and practice and from a male-centered discourse to one more critical of normative gender ·biases. This was not a break either in form or ideological direction of the most progressive features of the initial phases of the movement, but a progressive continuation.
The unfolding historical phases subsumed and dialectically extended the issues of community class, gender, and culture. Yet the situation was such with regard to four aspects-social status, institutional relations, organizational circumstances, and subjective tendencies of community members-that limitations were continuous.
Mobilization was limited by general conditions involving objective and subjective aspects. Activists formed a sector across classes and were limited by organizational problems. Activists faced difficulties in establishing organizational structure and viable leadership mechanisms. Often, many participants were organizationally transient and mobile. Obviously defined membership, viable continuous structures for carrying out activities, and stable 'accepted leadership was achieved among local groups and in some movement groups for a time. Not surprisingly, when these occurred the potential strength was at its optimum.
When organizationally extremist populism became dominant, shambles and disintegration were the rule. Though activists formed part of an intellectual sector and, as such, were among the best informed in the community and best equipped to deal with ideas and to make contributions to ideological struggle, they were often the most eclectic ideologically. Subjective feelings and insufficient experience characterized activists and organizers. Activists were prey to demagogic agitation. Lack of ideological clarity and consistency were dealt with upon occasion, but not always.
The CCM struggled for reforms and in sum sought to democratize relations between the community and the dominant system, but also to democratize society as a whole. Given the times and the objective and subjective conditions, it could not be otherwise. Some, however, sought reforms wholly within the system, with no linkages to broader issues or the totality of change necessary. These were the reformists.
Other participants, through the struggle for reforms, advanced themselves and the overall political struggle in practice and ideology. In this process, factionalism occurred because of emerging differences as existing political practices were confronted or superseded. There was a division within the reformist camp: some were honest, able people; and there were also the unprincipled accommodationists who, in practice, did not struggle even for reform, but did want reforms.
A division also existed among the progressive elements. Some were able and persistent tacticians, while others were so dogmatic and extreme in their views that they vitiated the political mobilization they were ostensibly part of. Political gains occurred when specific community needs were resolved progressively.
An approach to dealing with these limitations was to first identify and then understand the role of activists, organizations, and community bases in the general movement. To begin with, activists had to understand their base, its nature, and the political process in which they participated. The primary base of activists was the community, a heterogeneous entity. Organization and base were of equal importance, and their combination gave the movement strength.
When these were separated, weaknesses occurred. Similarly there was loss of direction and strength when activists saw themselves as apart from or more advanced than the general political struggle of the Mexican people. When organization and base came together, the movement was part and parcel of the broad struggle for democratic rights in civics, education, economics, politics, and culture across the country.
The struggle for reforms made up an integral part of political practice when, if properly led and theoretically guided, it could go beyond immediate reforms to major institutional, economic, and civic restructuring, as called for by many reformers and which this country greatly needed.
Juan Gόmez-Quiñones is a professor of history at UCLA. His earlier books include Mexican American Labor, 1790–1990, Roots of Chicano Politics, 1600–1940, and Chicano Politics: Reality and Promise, 1940–1990, all published by the University of New Mexico Press. He was featured earlier in Somos en escrito for his book, Indigenous Quotient / Stalking Words.
Irene Vásquez is the director of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of New Mexico. She is co-author of Latino-Latino Americanos, 2000: Things Social Do Not Melt into the Air, and co-editor of The Borders in All of Us: New Approaches to Global Diasporic Studies.