Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine
1: Background to a Movement
What’s a Chicano? Depends.
No one ever owned existentialism. It has always meant different things to different people. It was never a single doctrine that was laid down definitively by one person or group. Each piece of writing about it is different, each bears an individual stamp. There was no single voice of authority, so its definition has always had blurry edges. ...It could be seen as a historical necessity or inevitability, an effort to adapt to a new confluence of cultural and historical forces. —David Cogswell, Existentialism for Beginners
Odd as this may seem, if you remove “existentialism” from the above quote and replace it with “Chicano” you get a pretty good understanding of the term and its complicated place in Mexican American history. Armando Rendón, in his landmark 1970 book, Chicano Manifesto, wrote, “I am Chicano. What it means to me may be different than what it means to you.” More than two decades later, the Chicano poet and novelist Benjamin Alire Sáenz wrote, “There is no such thing as the Chicano voice: there are only Chicano and Chicana voices.” To this day, the term “Chicano” maintains its blurry edges, but it continues to reflect a meaningful way of thinking about the confluence of cultural and historical forces—in short, about life.
Many activists in the Chicano Movement pointed to an etymology of the word “Chicano” rooted in the clash between Spain and Mesoamerica, specifically the Spanish conquest of the Valle de Mexica and its people, the Mexicas (more commonly known as the Aztecs), in the 16th century. Mexica was pronounced Meshica, but lacking a letter equivalent, the Spaniards changed the “sh” to an “x”—hence Mexica, or México, or Mexicanos. Shicano was simply short for Meshicanos. For these early activists, then, the term Chicano served two purposes: it made a connection not only to their Mexican roots, but also to their indigenous past. Compare that to the term “Hispanic,” which many Chicanos rejected because it references only the connection to Spain, basically negating half an identity and history.
Historically, however, most Mexican Americans knew the word Chicano through its common usage, mainly as a derogatory label for Mexicans who had become “gringofied,” linguistically and culturally, when they immigrated to the United States. Pocho, literally meaning rotten fruit, was another common label. These terms indicated a people stuck in between, who were neither American nor Mexican, who could speak neither proper English nor proper Spanish, who had forgotten their Mexican culture as they adopted the values and attitudes of North American society—in essence, a lost people. Never to be truly American, lapsed as Mexicans, they were a people without a country.
But Mexican Americans also used the term Chicano to describe themselves, and usually in a lighthearted way, or as a term of endearment, maybe even as self-effacement. Doing so expressed awareness that they had not just departed from or forgotten their Mexican origins, but that they had actually become a unique community. When Mexican Americans began identifying as Chicanos, it was a form of self-affirmation; it reflected the consciousness that their experience living in between nations, histories, cultures, and languages was uniquely and wholly theirs. This is what gave birth to a sense of community, a people: los Chicanos.
Lastly, and maybe most importantly, civil rights activists who called themselves Chicanos emphasized the fact that it was a name not given to them or placed on them by an outsider, but a name that they had chosen themselves. That choice reflected the Movimiento’s greater goal of self-determination, standing up against and rejecting the Mexican American community’s long-suffering history of racism, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and economic exploitation in the United States (more on that soon).
Dinner Party for El Movimiento
Let’s say this is not a book but a dinner party where you invite all the key figures from the Chicano Movement to discuss their role in this tumultuous period. Unfortunately, the evening would already be off to a bad start. Why? Well, you couldn’t possibly invite everyone, but you’d be expected to. One of the main currents of the Movimiento was to bring attention to all the struggles of the Mexican American community—whether those of a soldier in the Vietnam War, a fieldworker in California, or a university student—and seeing them as one. And what is a dinner party if not an affair that includes a chosen few and excludes others?But we get past that. Your dinner party must proceed, space is limited, and a guest list is in order. You definitely want to invite César Chávez, a national hero on par with other inspirational leaders whose faces have graced the cover of Time magazine, stamps, and countless posters in grade-school classrooms. Dinner with César alone would be intimidating, so you attempt to balance his saintly demeanor with that of his sister in nonviolence, the rabble-rouser Dolores Huerta.
The duo is first to arrive, and your dinner party and history lesson are solidly underway. Dolores leads the conversation, and soon you have a thorough understanding of the United Farm Workers (UFW) and their struggle against powerful and exploitative California growers. But you’re surprised to learn that César never considered himself a Chicano leader; nor did most of his fellow farmworkers consider themselves Chicanos. But before you can ask him to explain, in walks a man who effusively announces that he is the cricket in the lion’s ear, none other than Reies López Tijerina from New Mexico.
In the manner of a soapbox preacher, Reies launches into a long discourse on his efforts to reclaim the lands stripped away from the Indo-Hispano people of New Mexico following the Mexican-American War and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (which granted the United States about half of Mexico’s territory). Reies recounts in vivid detail his persecution at the hands of New Mexican authorities, but after a half-hour and no signs of stopping, you begin to worry that no one else will be able to get a word in edgewise. Reies is in the middle of his story about the ill-fated Tierra Amarilla courthouse raid of 1967 when he is interrupted by the arrival of Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez, who, by way of introduction, begins reciting his epic poem of Chicano identity, I am Joaquín.
When Corky finishes his fiery recitation, he announces, much to your consternation, that participants of the Chicano National Youth and Liberation Conference have followed him all the way from Denver, Colorado. As if on cue, in walks a group of boisterous young people, many of them with long hair and wearing ponchos and overalls. They quiet down only when you answer their calls for pens and paper so they can work on updating the goals of their so-called “spiritual plan.”
Just as you’re about to make your way back to the dinner table, a young man introducing himself as José Angel Gutiérrez walks through the door accompanied by yet another large group, this one hailing from Crystal City, Texas. Carrying lawn signs and campaign buttons, they identify themselves as members of La Raza Unida Party. When you explain that there are not enough seats at the table, they make their way to the living room, where they find a telephone (the old rotary kind) and take turns calling potential voters.
With all the hubbub, you almost miss the arrival of a quiet, distinguished-looking man, a little older than most in attendance, who appears out of place. He introduces himself as the Los Angeles Times journalist Ruben Salazar. But before you can show him to the table, the front door opens and in walks a cadre of stern-faced young men and women, all dressed in khaki and brown. They stand at attention like soldiers in formation and bark out that they are the Brown Berets, defenders of the Chicano barrio.
The house is ready to burst, and you cringe as more commotion outside draws you to the window. You hear chants.
“What’s going on?” you ask, afraid to open the door.
A participant of the youth conference informs you that the Chicana Caucus has organized a protest against your dinner party on account of the fact that so few women were invited. Soon the protesters make their way inside, and between their chants decrying patriarchy and demanding that their voices be heard, Corky reciting his poem again (upon request), the youth reading one platform after another, the pollsters making phone calls, and the general din of one explanation after another of this and that event, you can hardly hear yourself think. At wit’s end, you cry out that what you wanted was a quiet little dinner party for the leaders and luminaries of the Chicano Movement to fill you in on the important events and ideas, that invitations had been sent out, and that the invitations did not say “plus one” or “plus two” and certainly not “plus fifty” and that you’d appreciate if everyone left at once.
Suddenly there is silence. Someone, you don’t know who, says that if quiet is what you wanted then you’ve missed the point of a movement. You are unswayed. Guests, both invited and uninvited, begin to file out. You avoid César Chávez’s eyes. When everyone has departed, you begin putting the house back together. Just as you’re finally catching your breath, you’re startled to hear the front door swing open.<<<<<<>>>>>
4: Escalation: Youth Mobilization, Militancy, and Conflict
While the emergence of the Chicano Movement certainly owed much to individual leaders and organizations, it’s important to know that this was not a movement of a select few but of many—and most of them were young people. César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, Reies López Tijerina, and Corky Gonzales certainly inspired Mexican Americans across the country, giving visibility to the community’s struggles against poverty, discrimination, and racism, and to its general marginalization in Anglo society. But what made the Chicano Movement a movement was what young Mexican Americans did with that inspiration. Influenced by a multitude of factors—experience working with federal antipoverty programs, exposure to the African American civil rights struggle, protests against the Vietnam War, and awareness of Third World anticolonial and liberation struggles (such as the Cuban Revolution)—young Mexican Americans began to mobilize and form their own organizations on college campuses across the Southwest.
In 1964, Armando Valdez organized the Student Initiative (SI) at San José State College, the first student organization to focus on the needs of Mexican Americans. Two years later, the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) was established at St. Mary’s College in San Antonio, Texas, and the Mexican American Student Organization (MASO) was founded at the University of Texas at Austin. Chapters of United Mexican American Studies (UMAS) were formed on numerous campuses in Los Angeles, and the Mexican American Student Association (MASA) was launched at East Los Angeles Community College. In Northern California, the Student Initiative at San José State College changed its name to the Mexican American Student Confederation (MASC), and subsequent chapters were established at other area colleges and universities, including the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968.
Although organizations such as these continued to proliferate, their goals were in no way uniform. All of them emerged out of a need to give Mexican American students a voice. Far from radical, most of the organizations believed, like the Mexican-American Generation before them, that education was the key to success. They worked for recruitment and retention, sought out Mexican American professionals to fund scholarships, and organized around electoral politics. But as the 1960s civil rights struggle gave way to more militant mass protests (epitomized by the Black Power movement) and as the likes of Tijerina and Gonzales espoused a more confrontational philosophy, some Chicano youth groups began to eschew middle-of-the-road politics and activism.
At first, student activists played a supportive role. They invited Chávez, Tijerina, and Gonzales to speak on their campuses, they organized caravans to bring food to the striking farmworkers in Delano, and they helped provide much-needed manpower at supermarket picket lines to support the grape boycott. As more students began to identify with Chicanismo—the Chicano worldview and ideology—and as cultural nationalism engendered a more critical view of traditional “Mexican American” identity, they began to coalesce around issues that impacted them directly as students and as urban youth, such as the failures of the educational system, police brutality, and the war in Vietnam. In 1968, with student demonstrations exploding around the world, many Chicano students began to believe that they were not just supporters of the Movement but a driving force.
Student Walkouts and the Brown Berets
On the morning of March 3, 1968, students at Lincoln High School in East Los Angeles walked out of their classes. Later in the day, some 10,000 Chicano students from area high schools joined them, crippling the largest school district in the country and bringing the full weight of law enforcement against them. The students carried signs that read “Chicano Power” and “Viva la Revolución” (Long Live the Revolution), but their demands were hardly radical. Led by Sal Castro, a Lincoln High School teacher, they called for the elimination of discriminatory school policies and racist teachers; they sought a curriculum that addressed Mexican American history and culture; and they wanted more Mexican American faculty members and administrators. With high school dropout rates near 50%, students were calling out a school system that had failed them, rather than that they had failed.
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College students from nearby universities, including members of UMAS, joined the striking students, handing out picket signs and assisting organizers with their list of demands. The Brown Berets, a nascent Chicano self-defense organization, showed up in case police tried to intimidate the students. In all likelihood, their presence only increased police aggression. With the media spotlight on East Los Angeles, law-enforcement officers attempted to disperse students at Roosevelt High School, who claimed their legal right to demonstrate. The situation quickly escalated into outright violence, as officers of the LAPD were captured on film brutally beating student demonstrators. Parents and community members, many of whom had been skeptical of the students’ tactics, were swayed to their side. The police response was clearly incommensurate and incompatible with student demands for better treatment and a more equitable system.
The walkouts, or “blowouts” as they were called, led to the formation of the Educational Issues Coordinating Committee (EICC), composed of parents, community members, high school students, and members of UMAS. Together with the strikers, the EICC pressured the board of education to hold a special session to hear student demands. There were 36 demands in all, ranging from bilingual education and better facilities to community control of the schools. On March 28, some 1,200 people attended a community meeting held at Lincoln High, where board members listened to student and parent grievances and claimed to be sympathetic, but denied any prejudice in the allocation of funding and claimed to have insufficient resources for the proposed changes. Two weeks later, the EICC, frustrated at the lack of response or concrete action on the part of officials, led a group of 800 protesters to occupy school board offices.
Chicanas and Chicanos in Higher Education
The 1960s and the Baby Boom generation saw more Mexican Americans on college campuses than ever before, aided in part by War on Poverty initiatives such as the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP), which actively recruited Mexican Americans, and the GI Bill, which assisted veterans. As Mexican American college students nationwide became politicized and formed student organizations focused on issues impacting the Mexican American community, they also began to seek ways of changing institutions of higher learning themselves. Inspired by the implementation of Black Studies, Chicanos pushed universities to form Chicano Studies departments, which would reflect not just their culture and history but also their ethos of activism and community accountability.
In spring 1968, shortly after the East Los Angeles blowouts, Mexican American students at San José State College staged a walkout during their commencement exercises. It was the first Chicano student protest on a college campus. That fall, students at San Francisco State College organized the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), a mixed-minority organization that called for campus reform and the creation of a Third World College, including a Raza Studies Department. The TWLF also pushed for the admission of more minority students in an open admission process. Using sit-ins, mass-meetings, and a general strike, the TWLF effort was one of the first significant examples of Chicanos uniting with other minority or Third World activists to demand change. Lasting from November 1968 to March 1969, the strike resulted in violent clashes between students and police, but it ultimately succeeded in gaining better minority recruitment and admission policies, as well as the first College of Ethnic Studies.
In January 1969, the TWLF strike spread across San Francisco Bay to UC Berkeley, where this time Mexican American students were at the forefront of the strike, along with African American, Asian American, and Native American classmates. They issued many of the same demands as their peers at San Francisco State, including a Third World College focused on understudied histories, as well as sufficient resources to carry out community-based work. The new college would also be fully controlled by students, faculty, and community representatives. In essence, like Chicano activists across the country, they were calling for community self-determination, but this time within the university context.
Lasting several months, and sparking even more violent confrontations with law enforcement—including National Guard occupation of the campus—the strike led directly to the creation of the first Ethnic Studies Department in the country, at Berkeley.
As Chicano students forged alliances with Third World activists in Northern California, Chicano students in Southern California gathered for a conference at University of California, Santa Barbara that aimed to unify Chicano student activism and formulate a forward-thinking plan for Chicanos in higher education.
