Mexican American Literature

The Politics of Identity

Elizabeth Jacobs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415364904
• eBook ISBN: 9781134218226
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Presenting an up-to-date critical perspective as well as a cultural, political and historical context, this book is an excellent introduction to Mexican American literature, affording readers the major novels, drama and poetry. This volume presents fresh and original readings of major works, and with its historiographic and cultural analyses, impressively delivers key information to the reader.

1 The Chicano movement

DOI: 10.4324/9780203015933-2

As the Chicano movement influenced and created a catalyst for the development of Chicano/a writing, this chapter’s purpose is to provide an historical and ideological base for the later analysis of Chicano/a literary texts. Before considering these issues further, my main objective should be stated at the outset, as I don’t intend to provide an exhaustive interpretation of the activities associated with the Chicano movement. Its highly complex trajectory and character preclude the possibility of giving such an account here. Instead, for the sake of clarity, this analysis aims to provide a synopsis of what were the seemingly diverse civil-rights and nationalistic activities of Chicano groups during the protest decades, and as such focuses on selected phases and leaders in the development of movement activism.

For this reason I have based my initial analysis on a ‘four-phase framework’ similar to that suggested by Ignacio M. García (1997) in his study of the Chicano movement. This kind of framework, he states, enables an understanding of the movement ‘as a process by which Mexican Americans came to debate their place in American history’ (I. M. García 1997: 16). Following this interpretation, I characterise the first phase of the movement by the role played by Reies Lopez Tijerina and the Alianza de los Pueblos Libres (Alliance of Free City States), which advocated the reclamation of Chicano lands in New Mexico. The second stage follows the activism of César Chávez and the UFW in California. The third phase follows the organisation of the Crusade for Justice and student groups and the political programme put forward at the Denver Youth Conference in 1969. The fourth and final stage marks the decline of movement activism.

The development of Mexican American political activism

The Chicano movement grew out of an alliance of diverse groups including farm workers in California and Texas, land-grant owners in New Mexico, the urban working classes of the south-west and mid-west, and the growing radicalisation of student groups across the country. The politics of these diverse groups initially coalesced around a consensus of socio-political and cultural concerns. These included arguing for such basic rights as just representation in government and the courts, fair treatment from the police and the military, a decent standard of living, and bilingual and bicultural education (Chávez 1984, Chávez 2002). Organisations such as the UFW, the Alianza Federal de Mercedes, MAYO, UMAS, MALDEF, MEChA, CPLC and LRUP were established in order to press the existing authorities and achieve these aims.1 To this end, several plans were also drawn up including the ground-breaking El Plan de Delano (1965) a stated proclamation of rights by the UFW; El Plan de Santa Bárbara (1969) MEChA’s educational programme and El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán (1969), arguably the movement’s most radical statement concerning issues of Chicano identity and land rights.

Most interpretations of these organisations and manifestos indicate that they were an extension of previous acts of Mexican American political activism. In this sense the events of the 1960s did not necessarily mark a new direction for Chicano political activity since it was only ‘quantitatively rather than qualitatively’ different from their previous acts of struggle (Sánchez 1994: 24). Many Chicana/o critics and historians in fact trace the political impetus behind the movement as far back as the Mexican revolution (1910–20). For instance, according to Alfred Arteaga (1997) the concept of the ‘plan’, which dominated the movement’s rhetoric, owed much to the Mexican revolutionary tradition (Arteaga 1997: 12). The Chicana historian Emma Pérez (1999a) concurs with this view and writes that leaders actively sought to establish this kind of connection in order to reassert both an organisational structure and a specific discourse based on prior revolutionary rhetoric. She states that during the movement, ‘Posters of Emiliano Zapata … decorated the homes of college Mechistas and “Tierra y Libertad” [land and liberty] … also the slogan of Zapata … was now imaged for contemporary leaders’ (Pérez 1999a: 72). Zapatista-Indianist philosophy, historical confrontation and land-rights claims were the three dominant philosophies of revolutionary Mexico. According to Pérez, the ‘doubling’ of its rhetoric in movement discourse was a deliberate strategy designed to connect to earlier forms of political activism and to instil a revolutionary consciousness (Pérez 1999a: 72). Historian Rodolfo Acuña (1988) also shares this view and concurs with Pérez by noting that the organisation and caudillismo (leadership by personality) of the movement, ‘closely resembled the pattern of the Mexican Revolution, where revolutionary juntas and local leaders emerged’ (Acuña 1988: 360).

Others see the events of the 1960s as taking root more recently. George Sanchez (1993) argues that many of the political issues associated with the movement were shaped in the decade before the Second World War. Sanchez (1993) states that it was during this time that a distinct cultural identity and sense of self began to emerge among second-generation Mexican Americans in the barrios of Los Angeles. It was also at this point he argues that the first Chicano organisation formed, the Mexican American Movement (MAM), which, like many other groups, promoted advancement through education (Sanchez 1993, Chávez 2002). Other interpretations of the developments in the 1960s set the context for successful protest more firmly in the class-structural changes accompanying the Second World War or the GI Bill of 1947 that enabled a first-generation of working-class Chicanos to enter higher education (Montejano 1999b: 235). Others see the grass-roots activism for voter registration as well as desegregation of schools, housing, public facilities and working conditions in the post-war era as being instrumental in the later formation of Mexican American civil-rights activities (Vargas 2001: 397). Vargas (2001) argues that:

after World War II, hundreds of experienced Mexican American union members worked tirelessly to mobilize their communities for social change. These men and women were a major force in the early Mexican American civil rights movement and also worked in electoral politics.

(Vargas 2001: 399)

Though, arguably, the key factor in the development of Chicana/o political activity lay in the establishment of new political groups in the 1950s and early 1960s. The most important of these groups were the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) founded in California in 1959 and the Political Association of Spanish Speaking Organisations (PASO or PASSO), which was originally founded in Arizona in 1960, but also proved highly influential in Texas where it evolved from the Viva Kennedy Clubs. These organisations spearheaded a significant shift in political strategy by Mexican American groups in that they targeted the electoral process by supporting Mexican American candidature. This kind of tactic also featured significantly throughout the movement when it proved instrumental in laying the foundation for the later unprecedented politicisation of thousands across the country. But as organisations they did not embrace or even articulate the separatist and nationalist position that would later be adopted during the movement decades. Their politics were characterised by an assimilationist perspective to civil-rights protest, such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) in Texas (Gutiérrez 1995, de León 2001). This meant that they advocated a pro-assimilationist stance unlike aspects of the Chicano movement, which largely advocated a militant separatism.

Reies López Tijerina and the Alianza Federal de Mercedes

The first stages of the accelerating social and political activism associated with Chicano civil-rights struggles began as a series of localised protests erupting in New Mexico, Colorado, Texas and California in the early part of the 1960s. It was characterised most strongly by the pioneering efforts of Reies López Tijerina and the Alianza Federal de Mercedes in New Mexico and by César Chávez and the UFW in California. Initially scattered in their activism, by the latter half of the decade their collective protests provided a focus for the later organisation and cohesive structure of the Chicano social movement.

Reies López Tijerina, a former Pentecostal preacher and one of the movement’s more enigmatic leaders, founded and directed New Mexico’s Alianza de los Pueblos Libres (Alliance of Free City States) and the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (later renamed La Confederacion de Pueblos Libres) in the early years of the movement (Tijerina 2000). These organisations were primarily concerned with reinstating Spanish and Mexican land grants and property entitlements dating from the colonial period. Tracing a direct lineage back to these times, many New Mexican residents legitimated their claims to land through their Spanish forebears, thus predating American annexation of Mexican land after the US–Mexican war of 1846–8. In 1966 Tijerina led Alianza members in an attempt to reclaim part of the Kit Carson National Forest in New Mexico. Calling for a stricter adherence to the civil and property rights promised by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and by the constitution of New Mexico, he aimed to reappropriate the Echo Amphitheatre Campground, which was on the site of the 500,000-acre San Joaquin del Cañon de Chama grant dating from the Spanish conquest.

This kind of tactic galvanised Chicano political opinion by focusing attention on the treaty and the various miscarriages of justice associated with its implementation. Originally, the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo formed the international border separating Mexico from America after the US–Mexican war of 1846–8. While annexing most of Mexico’s northern territory onto the USA, it also clearly stated that it was a ‘Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Limits and Settlement between the United States of America and the Mexican Republic’ and, according to the articles of the treaty, the Hispanic residents of the region were also to be granted certain rights. According to Article 8:

Mexicans now established in territories previously belonging to Mexico and which remain for the future within the limits of the United States, as defined by the present treaty, shall be free to continue where they now reside, or to remove at any time to the Mexican Republic … Those who shall prefer to remain in the said territories may either retain the title and rights of Mexican citizens, or acquire those of citizens of the United States. But they shall be under the obligation to make their election within one year from the date of exchange of ratifications of this treaty.

(Meier and Gutiérrez 2000: 277–8)

Article 9 of the treaty also detailed Hispanic rights and issues of citizenship:

The Mexicans who, in the territories aforesaid, shall not preserve the character of citizens of the Mexican Republic, conformably with what is stipulated in the preceding article, shall be incorporated into the Union of the United States, and admitted as soon as possible, according to the principles of the Federal Constitution to the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the United States. In the meantime, they shall be maintained and protected in the enjoyment of their liberty, their property, and the civil rights now vested in them according to the Mexican laws. With respect to political rights, their condition shall be on an equality with that of the inhabitants of the other territories of the United States; and at least equally good as that of the inhabitants of Louisiana and the Floridas, when these provinces by transfer from the French republic and the Crown of Spain, became territories of the United States.

(Meier and Gutiérrez 2000: 277–8)

The failure to uphold the treaty and the subsequent implementation of Mexican American civil and property rights became the basis of Tijerina’s argument and formed much of his political rhetoric, though he also based his arguments on the Recopilación de Leyes de las Indias, a seventeenth-century document that had been the legal framework for the Spanish land grants (Griswold del Castillo and de León 1996: 129–30, Tijerina 2000: 62). By using these foundational documents, ultimately he sought to bring these issues to national attention, and for the most part he was successful. He also worked with different groups and befriended African American militants such as H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panthers in order to strengthen the Alianza’s protests. He also attempted on one occasion to make a citizen’s arrest of the District Attorney in Arriba County, and on another occasion he and his supporters stormed a courtroom in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, in order to free Alianza members held in custody there. These activities certainly attracted large-scale interest, although not necessarily of the kind he hoped. Tijerina’s style of militant armed action meant that his politics became the subject of heated debate and his credentials as a bona-fide movement leader were questioned as some of the Alianza’s activities clearly went beyond the movement’s praxis of ‘nonviolent revolution’ (I. M. García 1997: 4, Tijerina 2000: viii). Many Chicanos also resented the close ties between Tijerina and African American civil-rights leaders and tactics, preferring a more separatist stance for their protest activity. Likewise, most of the Mexican American middle classes strongly objected to what they saw as Tijerina’s ‘bandit-like’ activities. He also never advocated Chicano nationalism or the quest for Chicano identity and power as other members of the movement did. Tijerina and his followers in fact consistently referred to themselves as Indo-Hispanos and not as Chicanos.

These differences and Tijerina’s own confrontational style ultimately undermined the cohesion of his own organisation. As a result of the raid on Tierra Amarilla he was jailed for two years in 1969 and the Alianza never subsequently regained the degree of cohesion and political bite that characterised its early years (Griswold del Castillo and de León 1996, Gonzales 2000). Despite these major setbacks, Tijerina was nonetheless successful in several ways, first, by bringing Hispanic land-grant issues to national attention and, second, by mobilising thousands of Mexican Americans in the name of the Alianza’s cause. Beginning with about 6,000 members in the early 1960s, by the latter part of the decade this number of followers had grown to approximately 20,000 in all.

César Chávez and the United Farm Workers

Another key organisation of these early years was undoubtedly the UFW, a union that was particularly powerful in the south-west and especially in the states of California and Texas. Initially termed the Farm Workers Association (FWA), it was organised under the leadership of César Chávez and Dolores Huerta and was primarily concerned with solving farm worke...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Chicano movement
• 2 Chicana feminism
• 3 Critical approaches to Chicana/o literature
• 4 The relationship between Chicano and Chicana literature
• 5 Mexican American theatre and the politics of Chicana/o identity
• 6 Women, confinement and familia ideology
• 7 The search for Aztlán: the Chicano nation
• 8 Mestiza Aztlán: a nation without borders
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index