Chicano! Introduction

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INTRODUCTION

Today many of my students, Mexican Americans included, know little about or have neverheard of the Chicano Movement (e/ movimiento,as it became known to its thousands of participants). The passing of time has much to do withthis-because the height of this political movement occurred at the end of the 1960s and thebeginning of the 1970s. For an even greater number of young students, the names of movementstalwarts such as Reies Lopez Tijerina, Rodolfo"Corky" Gonzales and Jose Angel Gutierrez meantnothing before they enrolled in my history class.More of them recognize farm-worker union leaderCesar Chavez because the United Farm Workerscontinues to organize workers into the presentday and because his untimely death raised thefarm-worker leader's stature. In addition, the message and goals of the farm-worker movementtranscended those of the other Chicano leaders,whose appeal was widespread mainly within thehistorical context of that period.But the Chicano Movement indeed ushered ina new era. It was a time when young people fromethnic and mainstream groups in various parts ofthe country sought to express their hopes for thecountry. In the history of the U.S., no other eraembodies the rise of youthful self-conscious idealism. The period produced a generation that questioned the premises and values sacred to theirparents. In fact, a guiding axiom, whose etymology is unclear, was "don't trust anyone over thirty."

Young white Americans, usually middle-classand living in large urban concentrations, participated in a counterculture which they expressed inart and in politics. The most visible representativesof the counterculture were known as "hippies."But the counterculture contained more than love-

peace proclaiming "flower children" whosemecca was the Haight Ashbury district of SanFrancisco. For the first time, young Americans feltconfident in themselves and liberated from theideological constraints which had hamstrung freediscourse since the end of World War II, a perioddominated by the Cold War. In their liberation,many turned to a unique brand of American radical politics.

The seeds of this phenomenon were partiallysown by the "beatniks" of the 1950s, such as JackKerouac, Neal Cassidy and Allen Ginsberg. Theseintellectual rebels defined a uniquely Americananti-establishment critique. They had indicted a"silent generation" of Americans whose race forthe "good life" resulted in banality and unquestioning conformity. They believed that Cold Warpolitics silenced free expression and stifledlifestyles which did not conform to all-Americanmodels.

This 1950s phenomenon mushroomed into ahuge movement in the subsequent decade. Oneof the first indications of this movement emergedat the University of California-Berkeley in a tempest called the "Free Speech Movement." Led byMario Savio, an undergraduate student at thetime, this activity questioned the premises of theconventional curriculum in mainstream institutions of higher education. Savio and his associatesattracted hundreds of Berkeley students to teachins designed to raise consciousness and stimulatefree thinking.Indeed, the Cold War mentality of the 1950shad stifled academic learning. Few professors,many of whom were products of the post-warworld, dared or wanted to question the Americansystem. Nonetheless, some academics, such as

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Marxist scholar Herbert Marcuse at the Universityof California-San Diego, welcomed the burgeoning intellectual ferment and served as its mentor.The restless young, however, did not study orapply a strict Marxist prescription to the ills theyprotested against. Rather, they chose an eclecticand vague but strident vision of reform.

The Black civil rights movement also challenged the system. It served as a catalyst to theunrest of young people who wondered how theideals of democracy and equality, for which thenation supposedly stood, could exist alongsidethe repression of racial minorities. In the university environment, the civil rights movementencountered a more comfortable environment inwhich to conduct its work.

Such a heady mix was bound to inspire Mexican American youth, who in high-school and college mall or neighborhood rap sessions excitedlydiscussed the condition of their people, whomthey knew had been repressed. They reflected thenew consciousness in the common language ofthe time: the enemy became the Establishmentand its supposed minions were the older MexicanAmerican political leaders. But for many futureactivists, the path to politicization did not directlyresult from the identification of their own peopleas an oppressed minor ity to the degree that wascurrent among African-American activists. Threereasons accounted for this. One, the media andwhite liberals were not as interested in MexicanAmerican issues as they were in the abhorrenttreatment of Blacks, especially in the South. Two,in the Mexican American era of civil rights struggle, the extent of racism and oppression waseither denied or masked over by an overly optimistic appraisal of access to the U.s. opportunitystructure. Three, a common notion was that Mexican Americans did not suffer from the sameracism to which Black Americans were subjected.

Thus, for many future Chicano activists, theBlack civil rights struggle was crucial in persuad-

ing them to pursue the path that eventually ledthem to the movimiento. Many made the decisionto help Blacks as if Mexican Americans did notneed to engage in a similar struggle. In the early1960s, hallmark years for the African Americancivil rights movement, Marfa Varela, who becamean active Chicano Movement participant in NewMexico during the late 1960s, joined the NationalStudent Association, which worked hand in handwith the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). It was not until she met ReiesLopez Tijerina in 1966 that she started to turn herenergies to Chicano activism. Carlos Munoz, nowa professor at Berkeley and a founder of the1960s United Mexican American Students(UMAS) at California State College Los Angeles,remembers, "When I was at Cal State LA andworking with SNCC and other civil rightsorganizations, all of a sudden in my mind I said,Wait, what am I doing? . . We've got our ownrevolution . . . We don't have civil rights. . . . That'swhen we started organizing."l

The Black civil rights movement served alsoto teach strategies to Mexican Americans activists.Farm-worker leader Cesar Chavez, for example,the Chicano Movement leader who came theclosest to projecting a Martin Luther King image,acknowledges the influence of that monumentalAmerican figure. In an interview taken just beforehe passed away, he was asked how much influence King had on him.

A lot. .. Although he wasn't known around .the mexicanos and strikers. They didn't seehim as a teacher. I learned a lot from him.And I was totally in awe with what he did .... Iwas an organizer, so I know what he wasgoing through ...so I got to know him and webecame friends. And I began to see-I gotinvolved with some of the things he wasdoing and then also looked to himfor ..advice, guidance. Not so much asking,but just seeing what he was doing.As Mexican Americans recognizing the

, Interview with Carlos Munoz by Susanvideotaped and /or transcribed interviews National Latino Communications Center Galan Productions. All subsequent references to theseabbreviated as NLCC-GPInterview with Cesar Chavez by Luis Torres, April 20, 1992, NLCCGP

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oppression of Black Americans looked at theirown condition, they first attended to those whoappeared the most repressed-the poverty-stricken farm workers who had been completelybypassed by the good life of the 1950s and1960s. Lionel Steinberg, a farmer in the Coachella Valley in California, acknowledged this in arecent interview:

In the 1950s and 1960s, farm workers unfortunately were considered just another item inproducing . . . . like fertilizers . . . . most growers didn't treat their workers with any degreeof respect or dignity . . so there was a naturalscenarioJor bittemess. . . . [there] were legiti-mate grievances by workers. 3Moreover, youthful discontent rose with theescalation of American involvement in the Viet

nam conflict. As the U.S. committed resourcesand human lives to the war, which had beenunpopular from the beginning, American youthbecame disenchanted. World War II, and to alesser degree the Korean conflict, had brought outa general patriot ic fervor among Americans; Vietnam did not. Many Chicano youths shared theincreasing antiwar sentiment that permeated thecountry. As it became evident that war casualtiescame from the working class, Chicanos began toview this bias from a nationalistic-racial perspective: Chicanos and minorities carried the burdenof the war. The antiwar effort became a crucialissue that gave the movimiento impetus.Cultural renewal and the search for identitybecame pivotal parts of the overall 1960s ambience. The flower children, young people whocommitted themselves to communal living andsharing everything from food to sex, were themost ardent representatives of this cultural transformation. While a minority, these "hippies" hadan impact on the rest of society. Chicano culturelikewise was becoming transformed, and mainstream Mexican American society was affectedconsciously and unconsciously.

In essence, challenges to racial conformity

Introduction

thrived. African-American civil right leaders andtheir white liberal allies softened much of theAmerican public to a tolerant position, encouraging a more aggressive stance on the part ofthose who wanted to protest everything fromracism to the war. But the youth movement alsoinfluenced the cultural direction Americans weretaking. Full-time professionals, college studentsand even working-class adults who continued tolead conformist lives sported longer hair, mustaches, beards and an exuberant flower-laden"mod" dress.This does not mean there was no resistanceto change. As happened in the American Southwhen Blacks escalated their demands for desegregation and voting rights, government officialsresorted to repression when antiestablishmentactivities seemed to threaten the status quo. In theinitial years of protest, police, the national guard,the FBI and other enforcers were employed tosuppress manifestations of discontent. They oftenacted violently. Chicano activists, especially inLos Angeles, where the heart of the classical manifestations of the movimiento resided, were treated likewise.

The white counterculture was suppressed aswell-albeit not as violently. It was undoubtedlymore difficult to use violence on middle-classwhite youngsters than on brown and blackprotesters. Still, as was seen at Berkeley and atKent State, whites met with fierce repression attimes. Throughout the sixties and in the early seventies, denouncement of youthful radicals wasconstant, and even President Nixon overreactedto the perceived threat. In 1968 Congressman JoePool, a member of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, spoke for many Americanswho disapproved of the underground newspapersthat had mushroomed among dissident youth:

These smut sheets are today's Molotovcocktails thrown at respectability and decency in our nation . . . . They encourage depravity and irresponsibility, and they nurture a

, Interview with Lionel Steinberg by Sylvia Morales, December 7, 1994, NLCC-GP'

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breakdown in the continued capacity of thegovernment to conduct an orderly and constitutional society. 4How white and African-American protest fitsinto this era of social unrest is well-known tomost Americans because it has been documentedtime and time again in both the print and electronic media. However, the story of the MexicanAmerican civil rights struggle in the 1960s andthe 1970s is practically untold. That the ChicanoMovement did not leave the same legacy as theBlack civil rights movement and its PrometheanMartin Luther King is not because of its relativelack of importance. Perhaps the Chicano Movement was not as central to American consciousness because the plight of Mexican Americanswas not as recognized as the sin of slavery. Per-haps it was too fragmented and did not coalescearound the figure of a dynamic religious leader.Perhaps it was not as well covered by the mediabecause so much of its ideas and grassroots organizing was expressed in the Spanish language. Orperhaps it was because Mexican Americans werestill viewed as foreigners.In the throes of movimiento activity, whileparticipants agreed on the need for militancy (themain unifying variable), they were in constant disagreement on ideology, long-term strategy and

choice of representative movement symbols. Inmany ways this internal intellectual struggle iswhat made the movement attractive and exciting.Just as e/ movimiento did not follow a strategic plan, a coherent ideology, it did not have designated leaders. In fact, Cesar Chavez, who ledthe United Farm Workers (UFW); Reies LopezTijerina, founder of the movement to reclaim landgrants, the Alianza Federal de las Mercedes; andRodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, leader of the Crusadefor Justice, did not have the slightest premonitionthey would become leading symbols of the Chicano Movement.The issues addressed by the movimiento werenot as broadly defined as the integration strugglefor Blacks. For example, even though activists

'The Chicano Student, June 12, 1968.

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used walkouts to bring attention to educationalinequities, the underlying nature of these problems differed from region to region as did thesolutions that were sought. In the inner cityschools of East Los Angeles, where de facto segregation created an almost exclusive MexicanAmerican student body, grievances arose whenactivists compared the poorly funded barrioschools with educational institutions in affluentareas of the city and its suburban communities.The walkouts in Crystal City, Texas, where all students regardless of race, attended the same highschool, stemmed from blatant unequal treatmentof Anglos and Mexicans within the school itself.There, Mexican American participation inextracurricular symbols of success, such as cheerleading, was limited through quotas. In Phoenix,students walked out of Phoenix Union HighSchool to protest de facto segregation and inadequate funding. But here the constant racial tension between Mexican Americans and Black students had provided the impetus for action.Besides a lamentable educational system, theChicano Movement was stimulated by manyother issues such as racism, economic deprivationand police brutality. A crucial part of mobilizationrevolved around the issue of identity and racialpride. These had been important in Mexico,where European racial asthetics had predominated among a population where the majority was ofIndian ancestry. After the Mexican Revolution of1910, official policy tended to mollify racialdenial. Class affiliation and cultural homogeneity,regardless of race, somewhat softened racismalthough it is still a significant problem in thatcountry.Mexicans in the U.S., however, have had todeal with a more acute sense of what is raciallyacceptable than in Mexico because of moreintense and qualitatively different Anglo-Americanracism. Additionally, extreme ethnic differencesseparating Mexicans from Anglo-Americans exacerbated prejudice. The Chicano Movement confronted racism and racial self-hate head on, using


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the slogan "brown is beautiful" and promoting anallegiance and affection to Indian-mestizo physical features. A virulent cultural nationalism' cameto be an integral part of the movimiento althoughits expression differed depending on region.Spurring the Chicano Movement was a perception that Mexicans living in the United Statesencountered repressive conditions that neededrectification. Indeed, the raison d'etre of themovement was the conviction that mainstreamsociety was prejudiced against Mexicans becauseof cultural antipathy and because they wereracially different. This notion paralleled the posture of the contemporary Black civil rights movement, which in large part movement activistsemulated. While the analysis was correct thatMexicans suffered from racist oppression, thecauses and manifestations of this unfortunate condition differed from those of Blacks in manyrespects. The legal and moral justification fordemanding an end to unequal treatment residedin the founding principles of the United States. Inessence, while both Blacks and Chicanos chargedthese guarantees were violated or hypocriticallynever meant to include them, the specifics of theviolations were disparate.THE FOUNDATION FOR EQUAL RIGHTS

In 1776 Thomas jefferson wrote one of themost quoted passages ever set on paper when heauthored the document which declared independence for the thirteen colonies from Great Britain.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, thatall men are created equal, that they are allendowed by their Creator with certainunalienable Rights, that among these areLife, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.These words became the foundation of a revolution which resulted in removing the yoke of

colonization by a European power from anemerging European enclave in the Americas. Inthe 1788 Constitution, the document which chartered the new course of government that is still in

Introduction

existence today, the spirit of equality was institutionalized. The Bill of Rights, ten amendmentsadded after the Constitution's ratification, furtherprovided basic freedoms such as the right to ajury trial, protection from illegal search andseizure and the right to form militias and beararms. As inspiring as these initial guaranteeswere, the equality they established was for aselect group: white males of property. Women, forexample, were still not allowed to vote or ownproperty while married. The situation was worsefor African Americans, who at the time these documents were created, were enslaved as privateproperty and had no rights under the Constitutionwhatsoever. These constitutional rights were alsodenied to Native Americans, whose tribes weretreated as separate nations while living within theborders of the emerging United States. Mexicanswho lived in what became part of the UnitedStates were still subjects of Spain in the earlyyears of independence. The questions of whatrights they would merit under equal ity guaranteeswould have to wait until the U.S. takeover of theSouthwest or what was Mexico's extreme north.

But even if the Founding Fathers had notwanted to include nonwhite males in this supposed democratic Eden, the very structure of theConstitution and its Bill of Rights provided themechanisms to include other groups. After theconclusion of the Civil War, the thirteenth (1865)and fourteenth (1868) amendments were addedto the Bill of Rights. These constitutional changesmade slavery illegal and provided citizenship tohundreds of thousands of former slaves. Similarly,women were given broader freedoms in 1920with the nineteenth amendment, which forbadethe preventing of voting based on sex. In 1964Congress added the Equal Rights Amendment tothe Constitution. This was the latest far-reachingattempt to protect the rights of citizens. Thisamendment, in essence, provided all citizenswith the right to vote, disallowing obstacles suchas the poll taxes designed to discourage minorities and the poor from voting.

Constructing group o r national identity based on a set of shared cultural and, in this case, racial traits.

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.. - - - - - : : : = = = = = = = = = = = = : : : : - : : : : - : : : : - ~ ............................ ............................................. ..

While the Bill of Rights provided formerslaves freedom and the rights of citizens, manywhite Americans balked at the idea of these mandates being fulfilled. In an experiment known asReconstruction, the federal government established the Freedman's Bureau to assure that former slaves would be accorded the freedomsdesigned by the amended Constitution after 1868.However, within a few short years, Congress andthe president lost their desire to continue overseeing the complex transition which liberated slaveshad to make in a free society. By 1877, the Freed-man's Bureau was dismantled and Reconstructioncame to an end. Fierce opposition from Southernpoliticians combined with poor administration ofReconstruction brought an end to the program.After this, former slaves were at the mercy ofwhite-dominated state and local governmentswhich lost no time in dismantling the gainsAfrican Americans had made during Reconstruction. A series of Jim Crow laws were establishedto assure severe segregation of Blacks in publicfacilities, transportation and schools. These samelaws also prevented African Americans from voting. Poll taxes, intimidation and grandfatherclauses-to vote, a person had to have had agrandfather who voted-kept former slaves fromthe polls. To assure social compliance, a reign ofterror was unleashed on Blacks, in which violence became a favorite tactic. The infamous KluKlux Klan spread throughout the South as themain enforcer. Thousands of Blacks were maimedor lynched for violating the social contractexpected by whites.

Black leaders were aware that the constitutional guarantees were being abrogated, so theyresisted as best they could. African Americansknew that the nation's courts could decide if theguarantees in the u.s. Constitution were beinghonored; so in 1896 a man named Plessy challenged through the court the segregation ofAfrican-Americans in the New Orleans train sys-tem. He won the case in a lower court butappealed the decision to the highest court. The

Supreme Court in a critical decision decided seg-regation was legal-as long as "separate butequal" facilities were provided for Blacks. Thisprovided the foundation for a system of apartheid,and while facilities provided Blacks were separate, they were far from being equal.African Americans adapted to this system ofapartheid, protesting periodically. In the twentiethcentury, however, as modernization and urbanization provoked a massive migration of Blacks fromthe rural South to the North, the African-American aspirations rose, provoking an intense civilrights movement that challenged and eventuallyended "Jim Crow" legal codes. In 1954 AfricanAmericans won a landmark decision whenlawyers working for the National Association forthe Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)won a favorable decision from the Supreme Courtin a case where a Topeka, Kansas, student namedLinda Brown sued the Board of Education of thatcity's school system to desegregate the schools.

This milestone decision reversed the Plessy vsFurgeson case that had served for more than halfa century to ensure legal segregation and discrimination. The court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, ruled that "in the field of public educationthe doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place.Separate educational facilities are inherentlyunequal." Individual states were then called uponby the court to integrate the schools "with deliberate speed.""This achievement provoked an intense movement by Black to demand an end to the nowunconstitutional segregation and previously sanctioned denial of equal rights. This movement produced great historical figures, such as MartinLuther King Jr., who because of their sacrificeshave properly earned heroic status.

Mexican Americans and other minorities inthis country-"new immigrants" (eastern andsouthern Europeans), Native Americans, PuertoRicans and women have also had to struggleto obtain the lofty ideals of equality that were so

$ Quoted in Edwin C. Rozwenc and Thomas Bender, The Making of American SOCiety (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978). p. 512.

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eloquently put forth by the Constitution's framers. As will be seen in thebeginning chapters of this text, Mexican Americans have struggled forcivil rights in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century. Inrecent years, Mexican Americans have joined in the struggle to achievethe promises evident in the documents discussed above: the Declaration of Independence, the founding Constitution and the ensuing Billof Rights. But as indicated, the particulars of denying Mexican Americans these rights differed from those of the Black experience. As shallbe seen in the following pages, the conditions that led to the inequalityof Mexican Americans are steeped first in a legacy of conquest and thenin labor exploitation with little regard to their welfare.RACE AND MEXICANS

Historians have pointed to numerous examples in which Mexicanswere cast as undesirable because of their Indian features. It is also truethat eastern and southern Europeans and even the Irish were treatedwith a similar hostility when they first arrived in the U.S. The image ofextreme poverty, exacerbated by cultural differences, was what AngloAmericans found most objectionable in the case of the white "newimmigrants."

The construction of Mexicans as a race apart by white Americans,however, was very much different from the prejudices held against theEuropean ethnic groups. While many new immigrants and theirdescendants were looked upon with racist disdain, as John Highampointed out in his classic book on immigration, Strangers in the Land,that designation changed considerably in the post-World War IIperiod. The descendants of the "new immigrants" have largely assimilated and acquired economic parity while Mexicans -along withBlack and Native Americans and most other Latin Americans ofcolor-have not.

According to such scholars as Arnoldo De Leon, David Weber, Ray-mund Paredes and Cecil Robinson, to name but a few, beginning withthe initial contacts with Mexicans on the frontier in the nineteenth century, Anglo-Americans exhibited contempt for the mixed-raceMexicans.7 During the process of annexation and conquest of whatbecame the U.S. Southwest, this initial contempt turned to full-blownracism. David Weber indicates that, when the U.S. acquired Lousiana(1803) and Florida (1821), the Hispanics whom Anglos met there weremainly white. Few Hispanics owned vast tracts of land, and competitionand violence were thus minimal in that area. As a consequence, theAnglos did not vilify the Hispanics of the Southeast. But the Anglos did

Introduction

An editorial in theNew York Sun during1847, indicated that "the[Mexican] race is per-fectly accustomed tobeing conquered, andthe only new lesson weshall teach is that ourvictories will give liberty,safety, and prosperity tothe vanquished, if theyknow enough to profitby the appearances ofour stars." To "liberateand ennoble," the Sunreporter editorialized,"not to enslave anddebase is our mission."Most historiansbelieve the reason all ofMexico was notannexed had to do withthe race question. Forexample, the RichmondWhig editorialized duringthis period, "We have farmore to dread from theacquisition of a debasedpopulation who havebeen so summarilymanufactured intoAmerican citizens thanto hope from the exten-sion of our territorialIimits."B

, David J. Weber, "The Spallish Legacy ill North America and the Historical Imagillatioll," Western Historical Quarterly, 23/1 (February 1992)p. 11.e All quotes from David G. Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: Uiliversity ofCalifomia Press, 1995), pp. 15-16.

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despise the racial mixture of northern Mexicans,deeming it a mongrelization of the lowest order.And by subordinating northern Mexicans as inferior, they built up a case for appropriating theirlands, even through violence. Since then, Angloshave perceived Hispanic society in the Southwestin very negative terms.

As the nineteenth century progressed, however, Anglos and Mexicans learned to live with eachother and, in fact, relations improved, but withthe rise of large-scale immigration at the turn ofthe century and the rise of border violence duringthe Mexican Revolution, acrimony towards Mexicans was revived with a vengeance.The racial animosity that begins early in thenineteenth century, while showing some signs ofabatement as the century came to an end, wasresurrected as more and more Anglos settledalong the long, contiguous border with Mexico.In this century, proximity to Mexico, massiveimmigration of undocumented poor people fromMexico, their continued use as cheap labor, drugsmuggling across the border and constantreminders of corruption in Mexican politicsracialized Mexicans even further.Historian Carl Degler, in Neither B/ack NorWhite, compares the experience of Blacks inBrazil with those in the u.s. He concludes thatlighter-skinned Brazilian Negroes, known asmu/atos, experienced less racism than their darkerbrothers. To protect this advantage, mu/atos distanced themselves from the blacker AfricanBrazilians with the effect of muting a potentialnationwide civil rights movement. In contrast,light-skinned African-Americans in the u.S. didnot achieve such preferential treatment. This factunifies African-Americans to such a degree thatthey have launched one of the most massiveongoing civil rights struggles in the history of theworld.In contrast, prior to the ascendancy of themovimiento, the Mexican American civil rightsmovement had not succeeded in dramatizing orpublicizing the plight of Mexican Americans asracial injustice to the degree that Black activistshad throughout this century. The very weight ofoppression kept Black civi I rights efforts in thenews. It is no coincidence that, even for future

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movimiento activists, atrocities against the Negroprovided the first pangs of outrage which servedto raise a consciousness that was necessary beforeChicanos took the first steps into activism.One reason that Mexican Americans did notdramatize their plight as effectively as Blacks wasthat they enjoyed an escape hatch like the oneDegler described for Blacks in Brazil. Those Mexicans who were not directly impacted by extremedoses of racial prejudice-because of where theylived, their class or the color of their skin-wereable to ignore the plight of their more subordinated brothers. But as members from the moresubordinated Mexican classes in the U.S.became educated, the quest for civil rightsbecame a grassroots effort known as the ChicanoMovement.This book is designed to accompany a television documentary series also called Chicano! TheHistory of the Mexican American Civi/ RightsMovement, which strives to remind not only students but the nation that, during the turbulent1960s, Chicanos also struggled for justice andequality. A mission of this book, like the documentary, is to reconstruct the classical era of theChicano Movement-the period from about 1965to 1975. But this cannot be done without providing a historical context. The movimiento did notappear in a vacuum. It was intricately anchoredin a history linked to a past of civil rights struggleswaged by Mexican people in the u.s. since themid-nineteenth century. This is little known tomost Americans. In the early movimiento days,young Chicanos made the mistake of assumingthat the effort to end discrimination, prejudiceand subordination began with the Chicano Movement. What the movimiento did was to accelerateconcerns previously articulated by Mexicans inthe U.S., and it intensified a style of confrontational protest that premovement activists werealready employing or had employed in the past.Just as important, it reinvigorated the MexicanAmerican quest to identify and assert a positiveplace in American society.To capture such a history, the book designatesfour episodes of the Mexican civil rights strugglein the United States. Chapter One features efforts

of the "lost-land" generation (Southwest Mexicannatives) to stem property losses, maintain their


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culture and assert civil rights given them by theTreaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo after the U.S.takeover of the Southwest in the mid-nineteenthcentury. The second portion, Chapters Two toFive, studies attempts by Mexican immigrants inthe early part of this century to protect themselvesfrom a hostile American public. In the effort tosafeguard their civil rights, an elaborate MexicoLindo (Pretty Mexico) nationalism emerged thatimmigrants used to rally around issues of repression. This process was aided and abetted by theMexican government.

Chapters Six and Seven look at the optimisticMexican American generation made up primarilyof the first generation of children who did nothave ties to Mexico. Not only did this generationdemand the civil rights to which they were entitled, but they also strove to acculturate to AngloAmerican culture without turning their backs ontheir Mexican heritage. In addition, MexicanAmericans in this era made the greatest attemptsto empower themselves as workers.

The final and most lengthy section of thebook looks at the most important outgrowth of theMexican American generation: the ChicanoMovement. While this generation remained committed to the ideals of the Mexican American era,it realized that the promises which propelled opti-

I ntrod uction

mism in the previous generation had evaporated.The movimiento is assessed within the context ofthe previous manifestations because, in the formation of ideology and identity, it borrowed, sometimes unconsciously, from past ideals while at thesame time reflecting the general discontent thatpermeated contemporary America. It is specifically these chapters, Eight to Fourteen, which relatemost directly to the documentary film series, Chi-cano!In 1992 Peter Torres Jr., a San Antonio-basedMexican American legislator and political organizer who opposed La Raza Unida Party, wasinterviewed by the executive coproducer of theChicano! documentary series, filmmaker jesusTrevino. In the first question Trevino, obviouslyinterested in gaining information on the movement era, asked Torres for his insights on theactivism of the late sixties and to expound onsuch figures as Cesar Chavez and Reies LopezTijerina. Torres immediately shot back, "Yeah.There was certainly a lot of activism that hadbeen going around prior to that," and then citedthe Viva Kennedy campaigns, the formation ofPolitical Association of Spanish-Speaking Organizations (PASO) and the Crystal City Hall takeoverprior to the rise of La Raza Unida Party in 1963.

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Chicano! Introduction

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Transcript of Chicano! Introduction