Rethinking the Chicano Movement

Marc Simon Rodriguez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136175367
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Hispanic American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the 1960s and 1970s, an energetic new social movement emerged among Mexican Americans. Fighting for civil rights and celebrating a distinct ethnic identity, the Chicano Movement had a lasting impact on the United States, from desegregation to bilingual education.

Rethinking the Chicano Movement provides an astute and accessible introduction to this vital grassroots movement. Bringing together different fields of research, this comprehensive yet concise narrative considers the Chicano Movement as a national, not just regional, phenomenon, and places it alongside the other important social movements of the era. Rodriguez details the many different facets of the Chicano movement, including college campuses, third-party politics, media, and art, and traces the development and impact of one of the most important post-WWII social movements in the United States.

1
A Growing Militancy

The Farm Workers in California and Political Activism in Texas

Introduction

To grasp the long history of the Chicano Movement this chapter will explore the Mexican American civil rights organizations of the twentieth century. First, the chapter introduces several influential groups established by Mexican-ancestry people in the United States. In the early decades of the twentieth century, and increasingly in the post-1945 period, Mexican Americans organized to protect their civil rights and meet community needs. The chapter also briefly explores Cold War hysteria, which limited the activist terrain for all civil rights organizations in the United States, in order to set the context for this important era. To detail the important legacy of practical activism prior to the emergence of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s, the chapter considers influential predecessor civil rights organizations in some detail, as well as some of the smaller groups that had an impact on the community. ¹

To demonstrate this evolution in political activism, this chapter also considers two cases of 1960s militant activism to highlight the shift in political tone and praxis that eventually gave rise to the Chicano Movement. The first example took place in Crystal City, Texas, where Mexican Americans organized an electoral campaign with the assistance of political and labor activists from nearby San Antonio. Rejecting the moderate politics of the recent past, this militant working-class movement, which flowered in 1963, embraced ethnic politics and ‘Latin’ pride, as grassroots leaders spoke openly of past Anglo discrimination. This struggle for political rights served as a training ground for many youth activists who became key Chicano Movement leaders in Texas and challenged the color-blind ‘Caucasian’ political strategy (rejection of minority status and continued whiteness claims) and moderate politics of many organizations established during the Cold War. The second example emerged out of the formation of the United Farm Workers (UFW) after 1962, led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta from headquarters in Delano, California. In 1965 the UFW began the largest boycott in US history, introduced the plight of Mexican American farm workers to the nation, and trained a generation of Mexican American youth activists nationwide. The grape boycott led by these California labor organizers in many ways became the foundation upon which participants built a national infrastructure for the Chicano Movement. In these two important episodes of Mexican American social movement activity in Texas and California, movements peopled by youth activists rejected Cold War moderation in favor of militancy, direct action, and ethnic pride. ²

While the Chicano Movement often characterized itself as a radical break from the past, many of the claims were amplifications of long-standing civil rights claims. For much of the twentieth century, Mexican-ancestry people sought inclusion, equality, and human rights in the United States. Many of the immigrant-led organizations maintained a focus on Mexican pride, while calling for humane treatment in their new home. Likewise, Mexican American groups, though they limited their membership to US citizens, also proudly sought to maintain personal and public connections to their language and culture while demanding their rights as citizens within an increasingly hardening regime of borders and exclusionary rights for the immigrant and undocumented population. The long history of activism on the part of Mexican-ancestry people is an evolutionary tale.

Mutual Benefit Organizations and Mexican Consulate-Supported Groups

In the tradition of other immigrant and ethnic groups, Mexican workers and long-term residents established mutual benefit societies, or mutualistas. These organizations aided Mexican-ancestry people by sponsoring social events and festivals as well as providing small insurance programs and death benefits, and they sometimes rose to defend the collective labor, civil, and political rights of Mexican-ancestry people in the United States. Some mutualistas involved themselves in Mexican politics and tried to maintain a Mexicanist orientation by encouraging Mexican citizens to reject acculturation and naturalization in favor of the preservation of Mexican cultural practices, language, and citizenship. ³ Such a hard line toward acculturation and naturalization makes sense considering the often prominent role played by Mexican consular officials in these organizations before and after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Other mutualistas were primarily workers’ organizations, and these often became centers for labor organizing as they sporadically emerged to defend workers’ rights before receding to focus again on the provision of services to local communities of Mexican-ancestry people.

Mutualistas reflected the class and national-origin complexities of the Mexican-ancestry communities that gave them life. While some mutualistas were clearly working class in origin and orientation, others were led by Mexican nationalist elites, and class divisions played a role in the life of community activities. Not surprisingly, many of the mutualistas closely affiliated with the Mexican consulate maintained a focus on defending the civil rights of Mexican nationals and the preservation of Mexican citizenship. Others were clearly working-class or indigenous in character and organization, for example, La Sociedad Mutualista Cuauhtémoc, which organized chapters in Texas and the Midwest. Some have separately considered the role of elites in both mutualistas and Mexican Americanist organizations and have placed these groups in class-based opposition to one another. A more nuanced examination reveals that mutual benefit organizations, like later developing Mexican Americanist organizations, were often middle class in orientation, goals, and programming. While Mexican Americanist organizations disliked any comparison to the often negatively portrayed Mexican immigrant, however, many mutual benefit organizations also explicitly challenged the Anglo-held stereotypes of ‘Mexicans’ as shiftless impoverished people by sponsoring events that featured Mexicans’ positive middle-class values. Mexican Americanist organizations and mutualistas publicly highlighted the Christianity and pride (albeit American or Mexican national pride) of Mexican people and emphatically characterized the community as hard workers. Class divisions existed in the broader Mexican-ancestry community, and these divisions were often a part of organizational life no matter the citizenship orientation of the group. Mutualistas and the Mexican Americanist organizations that followed both sought to portray Mexican-ancestry people in a positive light to the larger society in the United States. ⁴

In 1894 residents in Tucson, Arizona, established the Alianza Hispano-Americana, to protect the rights of Mexican residents and organize politically. While not formally a political group, the Alianza served as a cross-class community organizing center that focused on organizing Mexican American opposition to discriminatory policies and politicians at the local level. The organization focused on the legal rights of immigrants and long-term residents and expanded to serve the Mexican-ancestry communities throughout Arizona and in California. This organization was typical of the mutual benefit organizations established in Los Angeles, San Antonio, Chicago, and the many other places where Mexican migrants found themselves working. Divisions existed between US citizens and Mexican nationals, elites and workers, and mutualistas were either independent or relied to varying degrees on support from consular officials, but the organizational model tended to be similar across Mexicanist organizations. ⁵ Many of these organizations continue to exist in the twenty-first century, providing burial insurance programs and halls for weddings, funerals, and community events.

The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)

The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) established itself in the early twentieth century and became one of the most influential civil rights organizations in the Mexican American community. Mexican American community leaders established LULAC in 1929 by the merger of a number of Mexican American organizations at Corpus Christi, Texas. At this meeting held at a mutual-ista hall, the Salón Obreros y Obreras, the organizers decided that LULAC should clearly represent the interests of, and limit its membership to, US citizens of Mexican ancestry. This decision, central to the group’s founding, led some noncitizen members of predecessor organizations to walk out of the founding meeting in protest. Established just a little over a decade after the most recent violent border conflicts between Mexican-ancestry residents of the Texas–Mexico border and the Texas Rangers, there were clear reasons to press for the rights of citizens and to model the organization along the lines of other ‘hyphenated’ American organizations founded by immigrants. ⁶ To this end, LULAC selected English as the official language of the organization, even though it supported bilingualism and most of those important to the group’s establishment were Spanish speakers. Though considered ‘integrationist,’ LULAC pressed for an end to discrimination against Mexican Americans in employment, education, housing, and voting rights. LULAC was far from a rich person’s organization; at most local levels it represented a diverse mix of middle-class and working-class members, although national and statewide representatives for the group tended to be from the minority professional class, as was often true for ethnic organizations generally. While LULAC is often defined as a ‘middle-class’ organization and while professionals, academics, and other professionals often won leadership positions, it is noteworthy that the Mexican Americans who formed LULAC held meetings in a mutual benefit workers’ hall, and it recruited members from all levels of Mexican American society. Less antagonistic in practice to the working class and immigrants than perhaps assumed, LULAC’s racial-and immigration-focused rhetoric, offensive by twenty-first-century standards, fit the contours of political life in Texas, a former Confederate state, where a conservative Anglo community dominated social and political life and used violence to maintain social control over African Americans and Mexican Americans alike. In Texas, with its history of racial oppression and lynch law, the hyperbolic public whiteness and patriotism claims of LULAC essay-ists was a way to enmesh Mexican Americans within the civic fabric of the state and the nation during a time of limited possibilities for the sort of equal protection reforms that materialized following the Brown and Hernandez decisions. ⁷

Mexican Americanism and ‘Whiteness’

LULAC, even with its Americanist political ideology, struggled to expand beyond its base in San Antonio and Corpus Christi for much of its early life. The group often faced opposition from ranchers and the Texas Rangers when it sought to establish rural councils (local organizations), yet it expanded in the Southwestern and Midwestern states, becoming a national organization. Even with a commitment to assimilation and public use of English, LULAC struggled to organize across the Southwest, where Mexican-ancestry people, regardless of nativity, were often simply labeled ‘Mexicans’ by Anglos who saw them as inferior. Despite this pervasive racism, LULAC demanded that the rights of Mexican Americans be protected and went to court to defend these rights. ⁸

In its official publications and in comments made by leaders in the 1940s and 1950s LULAC embraced a white racial status for Mexican Americans. The issue of ‘whiteness’ has been a controversial topic in Mexican American identity and history. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), Mexicans were eligible for citizenship, a right reserved to ‘Caucasians’ (and African-ancestry people after 1870) and preserved in In re Ricardo Rodríguez (1897) against the efforts of Anglos to define Mexicans as nonwhite and therefore ineligible for citizenship. ⁹ Following Rodríguez, Mexican Americans had the legal protection of ‘whiteness’ (naturalization, and the right to vote) in a society defined by Jim Crow segregation for African Americans and immigration restriction for nonwhites; however, this de jure (legal) white status did little to end the widescale de facto (actual) segregation of Mexican Americans. Thus, statutory protection, in the guise of racial privilege, in fact worked against Mexican Americans in a practical sense. In this perilous environment defined by racism against nonwhites, LULAC pushed for an end to the segregation of Mexican American children in so-called Mexican schools across the Southwest and called for the integration of these ‘Caucasian’ students at the ‘Anglo’ schools. From Texas to California, Mexican American families played a game of legal cat and mouse as they used their ‘whiteness’ to call for an end to the ‘Mexican’ schools and the integration of their children. ¹⁰

By the late 1950s, LULAC had successfully supported civil rights activism through protest and court cases, as it pursued a politics of active engagement. LULAC, like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), tended to press for change through accepted channels of protest and thus often engaged in moderate political activism and supported civil rights litigation. For example, prominent members wrote letters to elected officials requesting remedy in the area of public accommodation in response to complaints from residents regarding issues of discrimination in public schools, swimming pools, and the court system. At other times, the organization supported grassroots protests, marches, and pickets. When issues were not resolved via negotiation, LULAC often helped families to hire individual Mexican American attorneys or joined with other organizations to support civil rights litigation. By the early 1960s, however, this approach seemed far too moderate to militant members and young activists. A politics that appeared to pander to Anglo sensibilities struck many as weakness rather than wisdom and the result of decades of timid and compromised activism— under the watchful eye of the Texas Rangers. Challenged by the rise of the Chicano Movement, LULAC changed its positions on issues of racial identity, women, and immigrants in the early 1970s, as it came to embrace many of the policies initiated by Chicano militants. LULAC continues today as the longest-operating Latino civil rights organization in the United States. ¹¹

Understanding the Cold War’s Influence on Mexican American Activism

One of the burning questions in Mexican American history has to do with the degree to which Mexican American organizations sought integration within American society versus the degree to which they sought to maintain their Mexican identity. As is true in the case of other ethnic groups in the United States after 1945, adap...