Raza Sí, Migra No

Chicano Movement Struggles for Immigrant Rights in San Diego

Jimmy Patiño

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781469635569, 9781469635552
• eBook ISBN: 9781469635576
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

As immigration from Mexico to the United States grew through the 1970s and 1980s, the Border Patrol, police, and other state agents exerted increasing violence against ethnic Mexicans in San Diego’s volatile border region. In response, many San Diego activists rallied around the leadership of the small-scale print shop owner Herman Baca in the Chicano movement to empower Mexican Americans through Chicano self-determination. The combination of increasing repression and Chicano activism gradually produced a new conception of ethnic and racial community that included both established Mexican Americans and new Mexican immigrants. Here, Jimmy Patiño narrates the rise of this Chicano/Mexicano consciousness and the dawning awareness that Mexican Americans and Mexicans would have to work together to fight border enforcement policies that subjected Latinos of all statuses to legal violence.

By placing the Chicano and Latino civil rights struggle on explicitly transnational terrain, Patiño fundamentally reorients the understanding of the Chicano movement. Ultimately, Patiño tells the story of how Chicano/Mexicano politics articulated an “abolitionist” position on immigration — going beyond the agreed upon assumptions shared by liberals and conservatives alike that deportations are inherent to any solutions to the still burgeoning immigration debate.

Part I The Mexican American Left and Early Struggles against the Deportation Regime, 1924–1968

1 Historical Rights in the Territory

Struggles for Mexican Immigrant Rights from El Congreso to La Hermandad

In April 1939, San Diego delegates attended the first Congreso del Pueblo que Habla Español (Congress of Spanish-Speaking People) in Los Angeles. Luisa Moreno, a labor activist in Los Angeles and San Diego and a major Congreso organizer, brought forward a number of Mexican, Mexican American, and other workers to provide testimony of their suffering to the nationally convened group of activists. Humberto Lozano’s face was burned by chemicals while working in a factory. Ambrosio Escudero had lost three of his fingers while working as a machinist. The Congreso’s focus on labor inequity also brought forth ethnic Japanese and Filipino workers who shared their experiences of racial violence in rural areas where they farmed in California.1

Mexican and Mexican American labor organizers in San Diego had mobilized along with other workers to address these types of abuses in the midst of vigilante KKK harassment and “illegal alien” roundups by the newly created Border Patrol during the repatriations of the 1930s. Congreso chapters emerged in San Diego proper and in the San Diego County towns of Escondido, National City, and Oceanside to organize ethnic Mexican workers and face KKK and Border Patrol repression.2 Congreso members in the San Diego borderlands forged solidarity among Mexican-origin workers across differences in legal status independently and through ongoing efforts of the CIO’s movement to organize historically unrepresented workers—blacks, ethnic Mexicans, women, immigrants—across the United States during the Great Depression. The Congreso emerged to articulate what activist Bert Corona called “the Mexican American Left” as an innovative new voice that privileged the experiences of abused racialized laborers and noncitizens to develop a politics at the intersection of ethno-racial autonomy and labor rights.3 Indeed, Tejana Communist Emma Tenayuca and other radicals in the Mexican American Left network asserted key concepts by articulating an analysis of deportation-oriented immigration restrictions that asserted that Mexican nationals held “historical rights in the territory … regardless of their citizenship …” and called for “the abolition of all restrictions—economic, political, and cultural—and for the due recognition of the historic rights of the Mexican people and territory.”4 Another leftist union organizer, Luisa Moreno, later tied these “historical rights” in regard to land with the human entitlements embedded within acts of labor. She asserted, “These people are not aliens—they have contributed their endurance, sacrifices, youth and labor to the Southwest.”5 Tenayuca’s outlook, while unclear about the relationship between Spanish-speaking and indigenous peoples, asserted historic rights among ethnic Mexicans to critique the settler-colonialism of the United States takeover since the Mexican American War of 1848 and, alongside Moreno’s critique of capitalist exploitation of migrant labor, countered the emergent logic of deportation.6

This chapter demonstrates that such positions emerged from the 1920s to the 1960s within important manifestations of Mexican American activism in Southern California. It emerged out of localized community struggles in conjunction with the burgeoning labor movements in the United States to articulate an intersecting ethno-racial and working-class identity that enabled advocacy for undocumented immigrants as fellow coethnics and workers. The rest of the chapter highlights the activism of ethnic-based labor movement organizations such as El Congreso, the Asociación Nacional Mexicana (ANMA), and La Hermandad Mexicana in their struggles to protect undocumented workers as part of the mixed-status ethnic Mexican community. These encuentros convened by these organizations nominally accomplished an understanding of power that centralized workers’ oppression, and as evidenced in the leadership of many women organizers, accomplished a nuanced understanding that racism and sexism conditioned and intensified the oppression of workers. As the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War shaped and reshaped the material conditions and political possibilities that were imagined, these struggles laid the groundwork for a working class ethnic Mexican community critique of immigration policy and deportations, and their ties to racial, gender, and labor exploitation for future generations.

Cross-Citizenship and Transnational Resistance: El Congreso

As early as the 1910s and 1920s, a number of observers commented on the contradictions created when people with different nationalities but very similar class positions and linguistic, religious, and cultural traditions encountered each other as parts of a multinational labor force toiling within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.7 The development of temporary foreign labor programs during both world wars tended to exacerbate the complexities of Mexican/Mexican American interactions as both groups grappled with questions of their own senses of national and cultural affiliation; issues of cultural “authenticity”; and, of course, their attitudes toward one another.8

One of the perennial issues that ethnic Mexican activists in the United States faced after the emergence of a deportation-based immigration regime in the 1920s, therefore, was how best to struggle for full citizenship rights while a large proportion of their constituency were noncitizens. Throughout the twentieth century, ethnic Mexican politics in the United States was fragmented along the lines of nationality (American and Mexican) and citizenship status (U.S. citizen, documented migrant, and undocumented migrant).9 For Mexicans in the United States, the pressures of being racially marked as perpetually “foreign” and inferior, a legacy of the Mexican–American War, were exacerbated further by the establishment of the Border Patrol in 1924 as an agency that more strictly enforced the divide between citizens and noncitizens, chiefly at the U.S–Mexico border.10 Due to these pressures, on the one hand, many Mexican American activists, most prominently the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) beginning in the 1920s emphasized their U.S. citizenship in juxtaposition to the noncitizens in their own communities. On the other hand, a number of ethnic Mexican activists, particularly those involved in the labor movements of the Depression era, enacted an ethno-racial solidarity among Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants that was often grounded in an intersecting working-class identity.

Important to ethnic Mexican activists in the labor movement of the Depression era was how the CIO and radical activists, particularly the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) successfully ventured into communities of color, including a number of Latino/a workers, in their drive to address the dire economic circumstances of the era through organizing groups of workers historically marginalized by dominant labor unions.11 It was in this context that a contingent of ethnic Mexican community members in San Diego and wider California formulated a concerted response to the mechanism of racialized noncitizen exploitation and the related system of deportation across the imposed differences of nationality and citizenship status. Many scholars have noted that El Congreso del Pueblo de Habla Español, a coalition of labor activists, liberal politicians, and leftist artists and organizers, was paramount to a working-class assertion of ethnic Mexican, and to a degree broader panethnic Latino, politics in the United States that crossed lines of citizen and noncitizen via cross-border ethnic ties, identity as workers, women’s rights, and protection of immigrants as vulnerable members of the workforce. Congreso reoriented ethnic Mexican identity to battle the deportation regime and tie ethnic Mexican struggles to larger class concerns across borders.12

Mostly ethnic Mexican labor activists, alongside a small contingent of Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Spanish-origin participants, and their Anglo allies, convened a national meeting of grassroots organizers to determine action against, among other things, the repatriation drives from the perspective of the racialized communities under attack. Repatriation in the 1930s—what historians have called “A Decade of Betrayal”—put into practice the anti-Mexican mechanism of deportation and other coersive measures, resulting in at least half a million Mexican-origin people, about half or more of which were U.S. citizens, being returned to Mexico.13 Within this hostile context, the Congreso held its first meeting in Los Angeles in 1939, where members identified border enforcement policies and deportations as a primary method of worker repression and exploitation, and called for the immediate end to deportations and adjustment of noncitizen workers’ status.

The Congreso convened for “unity of the Spanish speaking people of the United States” to struggle for “the defense of Mexican homes in the United States, seeking to prevent their disorganization frequently caused by deportations.”14 Congreso identified deportations as a threat against “Mexican homes” across lines of official citizenship status. Indeed, the Congreso asserted that the repatriation effort more specifically had been “distorted by forces hostile to the Mexican and Spanish-American people in the United States” leading to “abuses upon our people.” The Congreso opted to work independently toward informing noncitizens and other interested parties about the violation of rights and the antilabor effects of repatriation and deportation.15 Furthermore, the Congreso sought to amend “the naturalization laws to permit all noncitizens, who wish to do so, to become American citizens.”16 Their primary reasoning was that fees for naturalization were too high for the working-class wages made by most of these noncitizens, that red tape and bureaucracy worked to bar access to citizenship, and most important, that “in every way except the possession of citizenship papers they (noncitizens) are as thoroughly a part of American society as the citizen population.”17 The Congreso’s political and social platform made clear that such arguments for an easier path to U.S. citizenship did not require an assimilationist strategy that would de-emphasize the maintenance of transnational connections to Mexico and bicultural identities.

These postulations by the Congreso were part of a call for unity as an ethnic group that transcended the boundaries of the nation-state and crossed lines of nationality and citizenship status in a new era in which noncitizens, particularly those of Mexican-origin, were the targets of state repression. Parting ways with middle-class civil rights organizations by emphasizing shared cultural and working-class concerns among Mexican Americans and Mexicans immigrants, Congreso unleashed a critique of U.S. interests that exploited the labor of this community while creating barriers to fundamental life chances.18 Utilizing ethnic identity as a basis for a structural critique of capitalism and larger solidarity with the international working class, Congreso carved out a space of struggle that utilized racial unity to contribute to class struggle on transnational terrain.

By organizing as an ethnic- and class-based entity, in the spirit of uniting with the wider working class, Congreso asserted an autonomous space from which to struggle, build coalition, and locally root radical activism while interconnecting it with transnational and global processes. The Congreso was part of a Communist popular front to address racial issues and incorporate workers of color into the ranks of the labor movement. Like other workers of color, ethnic Mexicans and other Latinos/as utilized the infrastructures of the Communist Party and CIO unions to assert a “politics of opposition” that enabled activists to enact their own, independent political perspective around the notion of ethno-racial identity as it intersected with class oppression as well as gender positionalities.19

Indeed, about 30 percent of Congreso’s membership were women, many of whom held leadership positions, including cofounder Luisa Moreno as well as Josefina Fierro de Bright in the central Los Angeles chapter, and in San Diego women such as Cesaria Valdez, Celia L. de Rodríguez, Aurora Castillo, and Margarita Flores, who battled gender discrimination in the workplace, domestic abuse, and environmental ills.20 Congreso’s official stance on gender oppression, as designed at another 1939 conference, asserted that “The Mexican woman, who for centuries has suffered oppression (and) double discrimination, as a woman and a Mexican” and that in response chapters would create women’s committees “so that she (the Mexican woman) may receive equal wages, enjoy the same rights as men in social, economic, and civic liberties, and use her vote for the defense of the Mexican and Spanish American people, and American democracy.”21

Therefore, the Congreso acted as an autonomous voice for grassroots community and labor activists creating a program to address the intersection of race, class, and gender repression as a transnational entity rooted in the United States but situated in between the United States and Mexico, and even wider Latin America. Congreso worked as a transnational entity in its unequivocal stance that Mexican and wider Latino/a culture and community, built in reaction to a history of class racism for protection and perseverance, as well as the current structural position of both Mexican Americans and Mexican noncitizens as primarily exploited workers, sought to build on connections that transcended the U.S.-Mexico border. Indeed, Congreso put forth a transnational identity as both “American” and “Mexican” from the beginning of the 1939 conference when both the U.S. and Mexican national hymns were honored. The resolutions of the Congreso called for the preservation of Mexican heritage, the establishment of Spanish as anot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: The Mexican American Left and Early Struggles against the Deportation Regime, 1924–1968
• Part II: The Chicano Movement Confronts the Immigration Question, 1968–1976
• Part III: A Chicano/Mexicano Movement
• Conclusion
• Illustrations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index