The Chicano Movement

Perspectives from the Twenty-First Century

Mario T. Garcia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415833080
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135053659
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

The largest social movement by people of Mexican descent in the U.S. to date, the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 70s linked civil rights activism with a new, assertive ethnic identity: Chicano Power! Beginning with the farmworkers' struggle led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, the Movement expanded to urban areas throughout the Southwest, Midwest and Pacific Northwest, as a generation of self-proclaimed Chicanos fought to empower their communities. Recently, a new generation of historians has produced an explosion of interesting work on the Movement.

The Chicano Movement: Perspectives from the Twenty-First Century collects the various strands of this research into one readable collection, exploring the contours of the Movement while disputing the idea of it being one monolithic group. Bringing the story up through the 1980s, The Chicano Movement introduces students to the impact of the Movement, and enables them to expand their understanding of what it means to be an activist, a Chicano, and an American.

PART ONE Community Struggles

1 “ALL I WANT IS THAT HE BE PUNISHED” Border Patrol Violence, Women's Voices, and Chicano Activism in Early 1970s San Diego¹

Jimmy Patiño

DOI: 10.4324/9780203489130-2

In the midst of increasing incidences of brutality at the hands of immigration authorities, Martha Elena Parra López, a Tijuana resident, was raped by Border Patrol agent Kenneth Cocke on May 31, 1972.² A few days later, Martha Elena responded by detailing the event to San Ysidro activist Alberto García who, with area Chicano activists, created an uproar about the injustice. San Diego Chicano activists, already incensed by a series of harassment and brutality incidents undertaken by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers against Mexicans and Mexican Americans, called for immediate action from authorities for this atrocious act against who they described as a “young attractive Mexican National” and “mother of two children.”³ For them, this brutality was part of a larger attack on “La Raza”/“our people,” as they called for a broader investigation of the local effects of deportation-oriented immigration policies.⁴ For Martha Elena, telling her story to Chicano activists and to the public was an act of defiance, as she later stated, “All I want is that he (Agent Cocke) be punished.”⁵

The rape occurred after Martha Elena was apprehended with two companions, María Sandoval and Teresa Castellanos, while visiting their friend Vera León's Chula Vista residence in south San Diego County. Martha Elena was a resident of nearby Tijuana and married to a professional basketball player there. She was likely from “central Mexico” as one report noted that her 11-year-old son was living with relatives there. She had moved to Tijuana with her spouse 6 years preceding the incident.⁶ Another report noted that she was a mother of two, suggesting that another child resided with her and her spouse.⁷ She stated that while living in Tijuana she had only crossed the U.S.-Mexico border on two occasions, both times for brief visits. She had been in Chula Vista, only about 15 miles from Tijuana and the border, for a week when she was apprehended.⁸Revealing the level of crisis growing among law enforcement agents concerning “illegal immigration” the Border Patrol was tipped off by Chula Vista police who contacted INS officials after discovering that Martha Elena, María, and Teresa were undocumented.⁹ Agent Cocke apprehended the three women at about 6:30 in the evening and transported them to the San Ysidro Border Patrol office.¹⁰

Demonstrating Cocke's emboldened attitude within his daily work at the Border Patrol, he began sexually harassing Martha Elena at the San Ysidro station where she and her two companions were further interrogated and processed.¹¹ Affirming Agent Cocke's questioning about her marital status, Martha Elena reported that he then used obscenities as he remarked that she “must have many admirers” because she was “good looking.”¹² Cocke then documented routine information including Martha Elena's height and weight and the number of children she had. He then checked her face and arms for any evidence of needle marks from drug use. Martha Elena was then “made to sign a paper” that she apparently did not understand nor was informed of what it was, although Cocke then gave her a copy of it.¹³ The form most likely gave consent for a voluntary departure, an expulsion status where migrants admit to entering the country without documentation and are then immediately sent back to their home countries, particularly utilized to remove Mexican migrants.¹⁴ Martha Elena was then detained in another room while both of her companions, María and Teresa, were also processed.¹⁵

Soon after, Cocke drove the three women to a major crossway, the San Ysidro border entrance, where the officer instructed only María and Teresa to follow the flow of pedestrians into Mexico. Revealing the women's insistence on staying together, María and Teresa reportedly responded to Cocke, “All three of us will leave or all three of us will stay.”¹⁶ The officer became visibly upset with the women's refusal to follow his orders and drove along the international border into an obscure area about 15 to 20 minutes away from the San Ysidro border entrance. Martha Elena recalled, “I became very frightened when he insisted on dropping us off in the dark, out by the airport.”¹⁷ The airport under reference was Brown Field airport, about a mile north of the border in the Otay Mesa community. A barbed-wire fence, in bad repair and easily crossed, separated this part of the San Diego area from Mexico's La Libertad district of Tijuana at this time in the early 1970s.¹⁸

Once in this much darker, remote border site, Cocke again instructed María and Teresa to cross the border through the meager border fence. They again refused. Martha Elena recounted “I wanted to also to go with them but he grabbed me by the arm and threw me in the front seat.”¹⁹ Cocke then threatened the women, asserting that María and Teresa “better get going” or he would “do something” to them or to Martha Elena. As Martha Elena stated, “In other words he threatened us.”²⁰ As María and Teresa had consistently refused Cocke's instructions to separate them, they made what must have been a painstaking decision to leave the scene (and Martha Elena) rather than test an armed law enforcement agent's threat of violence. Indeed, Martha Elena recalled the intimidating character of the officer, “He was a large, blond man. I was afraid of him from the start. He had a uniform and authority.”²¹

Interlacing official inspection procedures with sexual harassment, Cocke stood in front of Martha Elena, who was trapped in the front seat, and asked her to remove her clothing. She refused, after which he insisted. Agent Cocke then took out a flashlight and instructed, “Take your brassiere off, I want to see if they are real and also take your panties off so that I can see if you have concealed money or documents.”²² Martha Elena then claimed, “After a long struggle with this officer until my strength was out, he stripped me completely and violated me, he made a statement and said ‘I hope you do not have any disease,’ he then told me to get dressed and to get out of the patrol car and go to my country.”²³

The next day she contacted Vera León, whose home she had been visiting in Chula Vista when she was apprehended, to inform her about what had happened. Vera contacted San Ysidro activist and notary Alberto García who, a few days later on June 7, listened to Martha Elena's report of the incident and notarized an affidavit.²⁴ She also visited a San Diego area hospital where she was treated for bleeding due to the sexual assault, an injury she also reported in the affidavit.²⁵

While Martha Elena Parra López was not a frequent border crosser, and the actions of Agent Cocke were seemingly isolated and extreme, her voice is instructive in revealing how the increasing number of Mexican migrants entering the United States in the early 1970s were subject to arbitrary acts of harassment and violence through the official questioning and search procedures mandated by U.S. immigration policy.²⁶ U.S. border agents consistently subjected migrants and other border crossers to procedural inspections that aimed to identify drug-users, drug-smugglers, economic burdens, illegal aliens, and others that were perceived as potential hazards to the well-being of U.S. society. In 1966, Border Patrol apprehensions peaked back up to more than 100,000—a level they had not reached since 1954. By 1970 the rate was at half a million, on its way to reaching just under one million by 1977.²⁷ Through reports of official Border Patrol procedures emerged cases of abuse, including physical assault, unwarranted strip searches, and as in the case of Martha Elena Parra López, sexual harassment and rape.

Martha Elena's testimony is of particular significance because not only was the migrant stream from Mexico growing to unprecedented levels, but it was also becoming increasingly female as employers recruited Mexican women to work in maquiladoras (assembly plants) proliferating on the Mexican side of the border and domestic labor demands in the U.S. increased. When coupled with dozens if not hundreds of complaints by Mexican-immigrant, Mexican American, and other border crossing women from 1970 to 1972 concerning humiliating experiences of being strip searched, Martha Elena's voice helps unmask the ways that male dominance and gender inequality were part of the systematic acts of racial and class subjugation unfolding at the border.²⁸ These women's voices revealed that invasive and humiliating violations of their self-possession were occurring within the everyday procedures of border patrolling alongside physical beatings, verbal intimidation and racial profiling.

The association between “illegal aliens” and the historic racialized image of “Mexicans” led to racial profiling in which Mexican Americans were also subject to many of these intimidating and invasive experiences at the San Diego border region in the early 1970s. Historically many Mexican American civil rights organizations had sought to differentiate themselves from undocumented migrants up to the 1970s. Yet groups in San Diego such as a local chapter of the statewide Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), the Center for Autonomous Social Action (CASA), and the Chicano Movement third party front La Raza Unida, alongside homegrown organizations such as the United California Mexican American Association and the coalitional Ad Hoc Committee on Chicano Rights, reacted by asserting that the collective abuses experienced by Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans at the hands of border agents were systematic attacks against “our people,” suggesting an evolving cross-border notion of Chicano or Chicano/Mexicano identity. Martha Elena's act of holding accountable Agent Cocke, alongside the many border women who came forward with complaints that border officials had unduly strip-searched them, revealed the participation of Mexican immigrant and Mexican American women within this immigrant rights contingent of the Chicano Movement, which was officially led by mostly Mexican American men. Women border crossers participated in these campaigns by telling stories that influenced, contested and informed Chicano activist calls for social justice within immigration politics. The refusal of these women and other victims of border official violence to remain silent created a context in which an important number of Chicano Movement and Mexican American civil rights organizations began to pay closer attention to the immigration issue, advocate undocumented migrants and Mexican American victims of Border Patrol harassment, and critique what they saw as adverse effects of border patrolling on what they began to define as their mixed-legal status, transnational ethnic community.

Demographic Shifts and the (Re) Emerging Immigration Debate

Rising incidents of Border Patrol violence and engagement by Chicano Movement activists in immigrant rights in the early 1970s were indicative of an unprecedented demographic revolution of the ethnic Mexican population in the U.S. The total Mexican immigrant population in the U.S. grew from 454,000 in 1950, hit 760,000 in 1970, and by 1980 would reach about 2.2 million.²⁹ The number of Mexican-origin people in the U.S. grew almost ten-fold between 1960 and 1980 from 1.7 million to 8.7 million, in large part due to this migration.³⁰ This rise followed a brief hiatus of migration from Mexico in the mid-1960s after the Bracero Program, a binational guest worker agreement, was abolished in 1964.³¹ The mid-1960s also witnessed an improving economy in Mexico called the “Mexican Miracle” that was credited in large part to U.S. investments. By 1967 this rapid development in Mexico had created a widening gap between rich and poor as job creation failed to keep up with the needs of an increasing population.³² In this way, the late 1960s/early 1970s surge in Mexican immigration to the U.S. demonstrated sociologist Saskia Sassen's contention that migration is exacerbated, rather than curbed, by the general policy of an emergent globalized economic syste...

Table of contents

• cover
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword: The Chicano Movement: Does Anyone Care about What Happened 45 Years Ago?
• Introduction: The Chicano Movement and Chicano Historiography
• Part One: Community Struggles
• Part Two: The Student Movement
• Part Three: Geographic Diversity and the Chicano Movement
• Contributor Biographies
• Index