La Conferencia de Mujeres Por La Raza:

Chicana Activism and Identity in Houston

By Jaime Puente

The Civil Rights movement that swept the nation in the 1950s and 1960s took on many

different identities. The most prominent became the African American Civil Rights movement

led by people such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcom X, but looking beneath the black and

white dichotomy of American racial politics there is another civil rights movement to take notice

of. The Chican@ movement rose from the ashes of the Mexican American movement of the

1930s and 1940s, and during the late 1960s it became a growing force in American politics.

Unfortunately not civil rights movements are made equal. Just as their African American

brethren the Chican@s suffered from rampant sexism within their ranks. In public arenas and

speeches, women were denigrated to maids and cooks for the movement, but in the streets and

schools las mujeres occupied a much larger role. As the decade of the 1970s began, and the

Chican@ movement looked forward to dreams of national recognition in the upcoming

presidential election, Chicanas took it upon themselves to educate each other about their roles in

the movement, and in society.

La Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza in the spring of 1971 suffered from factional

differences, but the meeting of over six hundred Chicana women from across the nation served

as a foundational moment in the future of Mexican American politics because it asserted the

importance of issues such as women’s reproductive health, political involvement, and education

to the core ideologies of the emerging Chican@ movement. To understand the origins of 1

Chicana/o political thought and activism it is helpful to understand some of the conditions both

men and women in the movement grew up around. Houston serves, as a prime example of the

racist, sexist, and economic oppression the emerging Chicana/o movement would try to address.

Mexican American political action in Houston, and around the United States, began as a

response to the discrimination and disenfranchisement caused by the dictums of racism. In

Houston the influence of the Jim Crow ordinances and laws is as significant as any other major

city in the Deep South. Historian and scholar Arnoldo De Leon describes the bigotry Mexican

Americans faced at the time because “Jim Crow codes applicable to black people extended to

Mexicans.”1 Barred from services and establishments specified for Anglos, the Mexican

American community suffered deplorable conditions in their neighborhoods. Terrible violence

marked the first three decades of the 1900s in Houston for both citizens and non-citizens because

as an insignificant sector of the city to local Anglo leaders; the barrios were not eligible for

police protection. In fact the police perpetrated many of the most devastating acts of savagery,

such as the murder of Elepidio Cortez in 1936.2 By that time the leadership of the Houston

colonia, along with others in the state, began to move to different methods of resistance against

the mounting oppression from the Anglo community, one that focused on assimilation and

ultimately on citizenship.

1 Arnoldo De León, Ethnicity in the Sunbelt: Mexican Americans in Houston (College

Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), 26.

2 F. Arturo Rosales, “Shifting Self Perceptions and Ethnic Consciousness Among

Mexicans in Houston, 1908- 1946,” Atzlan 16, nos. 1-2 (1987): 87.2

The Mexican American Generation, as they labeled themselves, rose out of these

conditions that plagued the community over the course of American history, and in the 1930s

leaders began to emerge from the colonias and barrios to resist further subjugation.3 In February

of 1929 the organizing members of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) met

in Corpus Christi, Texas, to formalize the first chapter of the group and produce a constitution

that would promote the goals of Mexican American people. Those who represented their

respective communities were some of the first major contributors to the efforts of mobilizing

eligible Mexican American people to vote. In fact LULAC’s founding constitution outlined the

importance of using their “vote and influence… to place in public office men who show by their

deeds, respect and consideration for our people.”4 The efforts of the group to urge every United

States citizen of Mexican descent to exercise their political power as a collective voting bloc was

one of the most important resolutions of the meeting. The successes of LULAC began to mount

as the decade of the 1930s progressed because through the efforts of leaders such as Houston’s

Felix Tijerina, John J. Herrera, and the great Texas educator George I. Sanchez who asserted the

whiteness of Mexican Americans, more access to equal rights had been secured.5

The leaders of the Mexican American community in the 1930s, especially in Texas and

California, stressed their proximity to whiteness as opposed to blackness. The supremacy of Jim

Crow and racial oppression determined the path of least resistance for acquiring more equal civil

rights for the people of the Mexican American Generation. However, by assuming a racialized

basis for their argument, LULAC leadership disenfranchised many of their own would be

supporters. The most troubling clauses written into the first constitution included highly

3

nationalistic wording that eventually created a divide between the first wave of Mexican

American civil rights efforts and the rising tide of Chican@ activism. The efforts to claim

whiteness precipitated clauses that accepted “the acquisition of the English language,” rejected

“radical and violent demonstration which may tend to create conflicts and disturb the peace and

tranquility of our country,” and most of all to “develop within the members of our race the best,

purest, and most perfect type of a true and loyal citizen of the United States of America.”6 One of

the key attributes of LULAC and the Mexican American Generation’s success was their

willingness to submit their people to the racial dichotomy of white versus black that ruled the

country. This first wave of political activism needed to project its Americanism through

whiteness. These tactics worked for the already established Mexican American middle-class who

were trying to find their way into a conversation that completely disregarded their presence. As

the decades progressed the initial gains made by those working with LULAC gave way into a

3 Historian Mario T. Garcia defines the “Mexican American Generation” in Mexican

Americans: Leadership, Ideology, & Identity, 1930- 1960 as the era between 1930 and 1950.

4 “Article II: LULAC Constitution,” Mexican Americans in the Southwest (Claremont,

CA: Ocelot Press, 1970), 116.

5 Hernandez v. Texas, 347 U.S. 475 (1954); Neil Foley, “Mexican Americans and the

Color Line,” American Dreaming, Global Realities: Rethinking U.S. Immigration History.

Donna R. Gabaccia and Vicki L. Ruiz, eds. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 361-

378.4

larger Civil Rights movement that spearheaded the equality of African Americans and changed

the way people across the country would pursue equal rights.

The post World War II baby boom combined with the increased access to education for

many returning soldiers spurred a large influx of politically aware and educated people into the

American population. Mexican American soldiers returning from the war made themselves more

aware of the racial inequalities that permeated their lives, and organized their own groups to

address issues of continuing discrimination. The American GI forum became one of the more

influential Mexican American political machines during the 1950s because the war seasoned

veterans who made up the organization supported active participation in the electoral process by

endorsing candidates and organizing get out the vote campaigns.7 By the mid-1950s the Mexican

American population in the United States had shed most of its nationalistic ties to Mexico, and

began planting their roots here by deepening their commitment to their future as Americans.

One of the most successful and well known Mexican American political activists that

came from this tradition is Cesar Chavez who used his philosophy of non-violent protest and

collective action to secure the rights of thousands of farm workers across the United States.8

Boycotts, hunger strikes, and grape picker strikes, that Chavez organized, energized young

Mexican American kids from around the United States to acquire a new consciousness of their

6 “Article II: LULAC Constitution,” Mexican Americans in the Southwest (Claremont,

CA: Ocelot Press, 1970), 116

7 Richard Griswald del Castillo, World War II and Mexican American Civil Rights

(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 20; Rosales 158.5

participation in the discrimination of their own people. By the late 1960s bilingual underground

newspapers such as Papel Chican@ and Compass in Houston began to express more radical

support for those fighting in the California farm worker’s union.9 The organization of a national

labor union for farm workers and the solidarity expressed in the urban centers by teenage

Mexican Americans led to a surge in group consciousness that reached across the United States.

The East L.A Walkouts in the spring of 1968 marked a momentous change in the political

activism of Mexican Americans because it was no longer something that only the established

middle class businessmen and educated elite could participate in.

Across the country students were awakening to the reality of their position in American

society. The walkouts that happened in East Los Angeles occurred in nearly every city that had a

large population of Mexican American students. Citing issues that affected both male and female

students the walkouts ignited a fury of adolescent rage that had been brewing over the last

decade. In Houston, Crystal City, San Antonio and other cities in Texas, the anger of being

brutally discriminated against found an ideological basis in the emerging radicalism of the

Chican@ movement. The disenfranchisement experienced by many young Mexican Americans

8 César Chávez, “The Organizer’s Tale,” reprinted in Renato rosaldo, Robert A. Calvert,

and Gustav L. Seligmann, eds. Chican@: The Evolution of a People (Minneapolis: Winston

Press, 1973), 197-302.

9 For more examples of local awareness of the California struggles see issues of El Papel

Chican@ and Compass as well as various clippings organized by Leonel J. Castillo at Houston

Metropolitan Resource Center. 6

led them to form several organizations that laid the foundation for more substantial political

gains in the following decades. The most influential of these was La Raza Unida Party that began

to form in the early 1970s. Working from the momentum gained from the national attention of

César Chávez’s UFW movement and the walkouts of the late 1960s, local Chican@ political

efforts took their chance at national recognition. Unfortunately, the nascent Chican@ Movement

would be plagued by much of the same problems that affected the Black Nationalist Movement

because amidst the fight against racism there was an equally taxing battle just starting to rage

against sexism.

The Chican@ Movement that rose out of the walkouts became a promising force that

tried to spread social consciousness throughout their respective communities. Chican@ leaders

tried to raise awareness of their people to the racial inequalities that exist and actively work to

resist oppression through political newspapers such as Houston’s Papel Chicano and Los

Angeles’s La Raza. Across the country students began to write manifestos that rang the bell of

Marxist and post-colonial thought in the sincere effort to educate what they perceived to be a

complacent Mexican American community.10 In Houston the efforts to educate each other on the

problems of Mexican American people in relation to their historical, sociological, and economic

context became the focus of many young people, especially Chicana women. As the local

movements grew into more interconnected national partnerships, the need to delineate a solid

10 El Papel Chican@ and Compass, HRMC; F. Arturo Rosales, Chican@. (Houston: Arté

Público Press, 1996), 97; José Ángel Gutiérrez, interviewed by Jesús Treviño, January 27, 1992,

NLCC, pp 10-11; 7

identity for the movement became a top priority and the leaders from each locale began vying for

their spot as the figurehead of a national La Raza Unida Party.

The radicalism of the 1960s witnessed the rise of several prominent leaders in the

Chican@ movement, all of them men who represented varying levels of political dogmatism.

Reis Lopez Tijerina gained his fame and allure as the leader of La Alianza Federal de los

Mercedes in New Mexico in the early 1960s when he and a group of others began occupying

national parks and attempted to arrest and try a county district attorney. Rodolfo “Corky”

Gonzalez made his name as the leader of the Denver student walkouts. One of the most

outspoken people in the Chican@ movement, Gonzalez felt his position in a national movement

could only be the leadership. From Texas the most prominent and successful Chican@ activist at

the time was José Ángel Gutiérrez who led the Mexican American activists to their first electoral

victories in Crystal City, Texas, in 1969.11 These men all worked from their own political

agendas and dogmas. Some had more formal education than the others and that was expressed

usually in terms of more flowery use of various philosophical references, especially that of Karl

Marx. In the reality of the day-to-day movement work, the ideological rhetoric didn’t register

with many people in the communities.

Chicanas were by far the most disenfranchised members of the Mexican American civil

rights movement because they suffered not only the racial discrimination that plagued the entire

community, but the internal domination of men. Marta Cotera, a founding member and key

organizer of La Raza Unida Party reflects on the status women had among their male

11 Rosales, Chican@, 238-241.8

counterparts saying, “what happens is that very often the women are very willing to do the work

and they don’t mind having a secondary role; they don’t mind not having the elected and

appointed positions.”12 Cotera is describing a subjugated position of women in the Chican@

movement that reflects a deeper submission to the patriarchal domination of men on women in

the Mexican American community. Scholar Maylei Blackwell discusses the relationship of

Chicanas to their identities as women amidst the growing feminist movement and she says that

the “contested and contestatory nature of Chican@ feminism” in the movement represented the

struggle to articulate “a new kind of Chicana political subject within the confines of masculinist

nationalism.”13 The women of the Chican@ movement understood the need to fight for the equal

rights of Mexican American people, and that fight included advancing their rights as women

within the movement. Still, some Chican@ activists refused to accept the terms of the larger,

Anglo led, Feminist movement.

The awareness of Mexican American women to their status as subjugated people came to

a hilt at La Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza that met in Houston in May of 1971. Organized

by Houstonians Elma Barrera and other Chicana staff members of the Magnolia YWCA, the

12 Marta Cotera, Profile on the Mexican American Woman (Austin: national Laboratory

Publishers, 1976), 232-236.

13 Maylei Blackwell, “Contested Histories: La Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, Chicana Feminisms,

and Print Culture in the Chican@ Movement, 1968- 1973,” Chicana Feminisms: A Critical

Reader, Gabriela F. Arredondo, Aida Hurtado, Norma Klahn, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, and Patricia

Zavella, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 74.9

conference sought to promote the social consciousness of Mexican American women and began

the discussion of their influence on the Chican@ movement from a national perspective.14

Representatives of women from twenty-three states scraped together their meager earnings,

allowances, and savings to attend the weekend meeting.15 Delegates to the conference included

Mexican American women who already established their organizing credentials such as Marta

Cotera from Crystal City, Grace Gil Olivarez from Pheonix, and professor Gracia Molina de

Peck from the University of California, who could share their knowledge and experience with

the other delegates. Cotera discusses her involvement in the La Conferencia as being driven by a

desire to communicate the lessons she learned to younger generations and inspire more direct

political action by Mexican American women. Despite their importance as organizers, the

women in the movement were not seeking political office and not allowed to hold active

leadership roles. Cotera says more women were needed “because very often they had jobs that

weren’t threatened or they had no jobs…They weren’t [economically] vulnerable.”16 Chicana

women had proven their importance to the day-to-day operations of el Movemiento, and yet they

remained in a subordinate position to their male counterparts. The women who organized La

14 La Conferencia de Mujeres Por La Raza Program, The Leonel J. Castillo Papers,

Houston Metropolitan Resource Center;

15 Carmen Hernandez, “Carmen Speaks Out,” El Papel Chican@, June 1971, Leonel J.

Castillo Papers, Houston Metropolitan Resource Center.

16 Cotera, 232.10

Conferencia made a strategic move to meet and discuss the issues that were important to them

and their constituencies at the first national meeting of Chicana women.

Many of the discussion panels held during the three day meeting were run by the veterans

of the movement who represented Houston, Crystal City, Los Angeles, Denver, and Santa Fe,

because they had several years of organizing experience and college educations. Like the broader

Chican@ movement las Mujeres depended upon those who could teach others the political craft

as well as raise their consciousness to the institutional ills facing their community.17 Panels and

lectures included “The Mexican American Women Public and Self-Image” by Julie Ruiz and

“Women in Politics-Is Anyone There?” which was moderated by Mary Lou de La Cerda.18 The

question of Chicana identity in the Mexican American community and so too the larger

American community became an overwhelming issue because as more and more women became

politically active they questioned the roles dictated by prominent Chican@ leaders such as

“Corky” Gonzalez. The firebrand leader of the Denver and California Chicanismo movement

had famously demanded, “a woman [should] influence her old man only under the covers or

when they are talking over the table.”19 The resistance to Chicana influence in the direction of

local movements made it clear to some women participating that their ability to communicate

17 DeLeon, 197.

18 Official Program: La Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza, HRMC.

19 Antonio Carmejo, ed. “Why a Chican@ Party? Why Chican@ Studies?” (pamphlet)

(New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 10; Vicki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women

in Twentieth-Century America, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 108-109.11

and share ideas hinged on raising the awareness of inequality within the movement at the

conference.

The May 1971 meeting of Mujeres por la Raza precipitated the first meeting of the

National La Raza Unida Party that was scheduled to meet the next summer during the 1972

election season. The efforts of women to organize ahead of time and prepare to do the hard work

of debating issues that influenced all Chican@ people gave La Conferencia the gravitas it needed

to be a hotbed of social, political, and economic thought for Mexican American women. In fact

the events of the conference can even be said to foreshadow the events of the national party

meeting because they both became separated along ideological boundaries.20 More than six

hundred women met at the Magnolia YWCA from all across the United States, and some, more

organized than others, brought newspapers to show what they had been working on in their

cities. The women from Los Angeles, for example, brought La Hijas de Cuauhtéhmoc, a self-

published account of the California meeting that detailed the problems Chicana’s had to contend

with in the movimiento, and as Sandra Ugarte writes, “We must start with the oppression of the

Chicana woman and develop it to see how it ties into the Chican@ movement. We must, also,

realize how the Chicano movement ties into the struggle of all oppressed people.”21 The women

20 Rosales discusses in detail the divisions at the NLRU that fell largely along the fault

lines created by “Corky” Gonzalez of Denver and José Ángel Gutíerrez of Crystal City in his

work Chican@! (1996).

21 Sandra Ugarte, “Chicana Regional Conference: Philosophy Workshop,” La Hijas de

Cuauhtéhmoc, in Leonel J. Castillo Papers, Houston Metropolitan Resource Center.12

who attended the meeting were ready to work on the issues, and problems they and their families

faced, but not all of the attendees were as aware of their position as Chicanas in American

society as some would have hoped.

In an article published in El Papel Chicano after the conference, one Chicana relayed the

experiences of women who felt left out of the proceedings. At a meeting that focused largely on

raising social, political, and economic awareness, there were some who did not want to be

associated with the larger feminist movement. Two factions began to arise during the convention

that split on the issue of “women’s lib” because many Chicana’s either did not know much about

the movement other than what they saw happening nationally, or they did not identify with the

feminist ethos, as they knew it. Carmen Hernandez writes in El Papel Chican@ that “one of the

most common complaints was that the conference was turning into a ‘women’s liberation’

movement, and many of us felt that ‘women’s lib’ is irrelevant to the Chican@ movement.”22

Logistical issues combined with the struggle to assert a new distinct Chican@ identity drove a

wedge between the conference attendees. Shortly after the Sunday morning panels started on

May 30, 1971, a group of anti-women’s lib Chicanas, led by Marta Cotero, staged a walkout in

protest of the meeting’s purpose and organization.23 La Conferencia proved that the efforts to

nationalize the local, regionalized movements were much more difficult because the different

levels of social consciousness that Chican@ people experienced became a barrier to the larger

movement’s efforts.

22 Hernandez, El Papel Chican@, HRMC.

23 De Leon, 197; Cotero, 235; Blackwell, 76.13

The meeting of women from across the country may have ended in controversy, but the

work they accomplished set in motion political, social, and economic, changes that left an

indelible mark on American society. After the meeting of Chicanas, the national party

convention could not escape the needs of women because there were many who attended the

Houston meeting and were prepared to fight for their right to have an opinion in the proceedings.

Not every Chicana felt the need to adopt more radical feminist ideologies. Despite that, the

efforts to educate each other provided more leadership opportunities in the future for Mexican

American women.

Women who attended the Houston meeting in 1971 went on to teach, run for office, and

even gain national recognition as one of the nation’s first Chicana television anchors. The

importance of La Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza reached every member of the community

because the women saw the need to be active not just for themselves but for their families. Vicki

Ruiz remarks that one motive of Chicana women in the struggle for equal rights was that they

did not want “a piece of the “American pie”, they wanted the freedom to bake their own pan

dulce.”24 Chicana’s saw their efforts reflected in each other and became more determined to

assert their own will and objectives for their people. In Houston, the efforts resulted in having

several Chicana’s elected as State Representatives, City Council members, school board

officials, and other positions of power. The legacy built by the conference continues to influence

local Mexican American politics, long after las Mujeres went home.

24 Ruiz 105.14

The first national meeting of Chicana women, La Conferencia de Mujeres por La Raza in

May of 1971, brought together many different women with drastically different ideas about the

problems facing Chicanas. The women who organized, spoke at, and attended the meeting

sought to define more clearly the role they played in the larger Chican@ rights movement and so

too their role in the future of American society. Stressing issues such as women’s reproductive

rights, feminist consciousness, and political organizing, the work done at the YWCA opened the

floodgates for women’s political involvement in the movimiento as well as mainstream politics.

The lack of respect given to female activists by male leaders in the Chican@ movement were

addressed through raising feminist consciousness, but not all women were interested in what they

saw as an Anglo influenced philosophy. In retrospect the conference did extremely important

work of giving Chicana’s a venue to express their beliefs and laid a foundation for others to

follow because as the Chican@ movement began to coalesce it was the women who provided the

strongest ideological support for a new Chican@ political identity, and not the overly zealous

male leaders.

15