The Brown Power Movement of the 1960s

a.k.a. El Movimiento, a.k.a. Latino Liberation a.k.a. Chicanismo

Roundtable Discussion notes for Spirit of the Sixties class, Spring 2007

Sparrow Rose Jones

 

• The origins – chicanismo, wetbacks, land, and labor
  • “Chicanismo” is a cultural movement that began in the 1930s. It was a movement of self-identification and embraced the ideas of the power of creative earth and labor upon it, political transformation through collective efforts, strong family ties going all the way back to Mesoamerican pre-historical roots, and spiritually-influenced creative artistic imagination as reflected in the visual arts. Along with this came the mutualistas which were community-based mutual aid societies created by Mexican immigrants in the United States.
  • The Zoot Suit riots of the 1940s – racial tension in Los Angeles found returning sailors, soldiers and marines attacking the Pachuchos (members of a Mexican-American subculture with its own style of dress and language (Caló). Pachucos were not all gang members but there was enough cross-pollination that they were assumed to be), often ripping off their characteristic Zoot Suits and burning them in the streets.
  • Bracero Program – 1942 dual-nation program to bring workers from Mexico to work on farms and railroads. The agricultural part of the program continued until 1964 when it was shut down due to harsh criticism and accusations of human rights abuses.
  • “Operation Wetback” – 1954, U.S. Government claimed illegal immigration had increased 6,000% from 1944 to 1954. Deported almost four million people (most without deportation hearings) and enacted human rights violations in the process that politicized many workers. Working conditions for Mexican farm workers were very bad in the 1950s and 1960s, and it doesn’t take much to politicize those who are already suffering.
  • The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The treaty, made in 1848, promised that Mexican ranchers in Northern New Mexico could keep their land but the land was steadily taken away from the ranchers, starting in the 1860s because the version of the treaty that was finally ratified by the United States was radically different than the version first presented to Mexico. By the 1960s, many ranchers and farmers were being treated as criminals and trespassers for remaining on their land and many demanded the U.S. government observe articles 8 through 10 of the original treaty.
  • The culture of activism in the 1960s (black rights, women’s rights, gay rights) helped already-politicized Latino leaders to frame their arguments and attract newly-politicized youth to the movement
  • “Black vs. Brown” – tensions between the races developed as a result of competing for the same low-wage, dead-end jobs. On the other hand, many chicano activists first became politicized by working for the black liberation movement.
  • Aztlán – A Nahuatl word (the Aztec language) and was the name of the land where the Aztec lived. Although scholars are not in agreement as to where Aztlán was, some radical Chicano groups adopted the name to refer to parts of the United States that Mexico had ceded at the end of the
    Mexican-American War (along with the political idea that the land still
    belonged to Mexico.) (Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming.)
  • End of “the Sixties” for the Brown Power movement was the National Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War in 1970in Laguna Park, California in which 10,000 to 30,000 Chicanos marched and protested the high casuality rate of Chicanos in Vietnam and the draft. This peaceful protest became chaotic when the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department decided to end the event by attacking attendees, using a nearby liquor store theft as their excuse. Fighting back against police violence turned the event into a full-blown riot. Three Chicano activists were killed (two of them Brown Berets), including journalist Rubén Salazar who was shot in the head with a tear-gas missile.
• Movers and Shakers in the Brown Power movement
  • César Chávez – the “Martin Luther King of the Chicano movement”. Mexican American (born in Arizona) and a farm worker. He and Dolores Huerta organized the farm workers in 1962 with a group called National Farm Workers and got the immigrant farm workers to start going on strike for better working conditions. In 1965, the National Farm Workers began their famous grape boycott.
  • Dolores Huerta – feminist and chicano rights activist. Helped get AFDC extended to children of California farmworkers. Currently serves on the boards of People for the American Way and Feminist Majority Foundation.
  • Reies López Tijerina (“El Tigre”) – started Alianza Federal de
    Mercedes (The Federal Land Grant Alliance) in 1963which was a grassroots movement aimed toward winning back community land grants (Hidalgo Treaty) in Northern New Mexico. In October, 1966, Tijerina and 350 members of La Alianza occupy Kit Carson National Forest Camp Echo Amphitheater on behalf of the "Pueblo de San Joaquín de Chama." Within a week state police, Rangers and sheriff's deputies move in. La Alianza "arrests" two rangers and tries them for trespassing. One year later, Tijerina conducts an armed raid in Tierra Amarilla on the Rio Arriba County Courthouse to make a citizen's arrest of Distict Attorney Alfonso Sánchez. There were shots fired and two men were wounded. La Alianza held the courthouse for two hours, ransacking it, but the district attorney was out of town. The National Guard, equipped with armored tanks, was called in by Governor of New Mexico David Cargo. While the gunmen were in hiding, the National Guard held many of their family members captive. This incident received national publicity and brought the Alianza's cause to public attention.
  • Henry Gonzales - a Mexican-American from Texas, was elected to
    Congress in 1962. He was the first Latino from Texas to sit on Congress but Gonzalez doesn't like to be identified that way because he doesn't
    want to be the "token Latino" or the token-anything, for that matter.
    Although Gonzalez himself doesn't identify with the Latino Liberation Movement, he is one of the heroes because of all the work he did to help the poor, especially with housing.
  • Joseph Montoya - a Mexican-American from New Mexico, was
    elected to the Senate in 1963. Montoya did a lot of work for civil
    rights and migrant workers.
  • Luis Valdez – founded the Teatro Campesino (Farmers’ Theater) in 1965. It was the cultural arm of the United Farm Workers and began by putting on plays on flat bed trucks in the middle of fields in Delano, California. Still in operation today, the Teatro is especially known for its annual Christmas pageants.
  • Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales – a political activist and leader of the Crusade for Justice and the Youth Liberation Movement. Appointed director of Denver’s War on Poverty program in 1965. With Crusade for Justice, he organized the first Latino youth conference in 1969.
  • Sal Castro – a teacher at Lincoln High School in East L.A. who inspired the East L.A. Walkouts / Chicano Blowouts – a series of protests in 1968 organized by a militant Chicano youth group called the Brown Berets in which students walked out of their classes to protest unequal and racist education opportunities, the Vietnam War, and chicano civil rights campaigns. Castro and twelve students – the “East L.A. Thirteen” – were arrested on conspiracy charges that were later dropped. Their actions inspired future protestors, including the 1994 student walkouts against California Proposition 187 and the 2006 student walkouts against H.R. 4437.
• Movers and Shakers today who came from the Brown Power movement
  • Cruz Bustamante – the 45^th lieutenant governor of California was in the Youth Liberation Movement
  • Moctesuma Esparza – producer and filmmaker (Milagro Beanfield War, Gettysburg, Gods and Generals) was one of the East L.A. Thirteen.
• Oscar Zeta Acosta: the Brown Buffalo
  • Beat and post-beat author
  • Latino liberation lawyer
  • Radical activist and bomb-maker
  • Historical counter-culture figure (Hunter S. Thompson’s “300 pound Samoan lawyer”, Dr. Gonzo)

 

The Brown Buffalo. La cucaracha. On his own writerly reckoning “The Samoan.” Hunter Thompson’s 300 pound “Samoan.” Dr. Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972). Under any or all of these sobriquets, Oscar Zeta Acosta (1935-74) supplies a stirring, if often marginalized, name in the making of 1960s American counterculture.

 

There is Acosta the anarcho-libertarian Chicano raised in California’s Riverbank/Modesto and who makes his name as a legal Aid lawyer in Oakland and Los Angeles after qualifying in San Francisco in 1966. There is the Airforce enlistee who, on being sent to Panama, becomes a Pentecostal convert and missionary there (1949-52) before opting for apostasy and a return to California. There is the jailee in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in 1968, forced to argue in local court for his own interests in uncertain street Spanish (or Caló) after a spat with a hotelkeeper. Finally there is the Oscar of the barricades, the battling lawyer of the schools and St. Basil’s protest in 1968. This is the “buffalo” who becomes La Raza Unida independent candidate for Sheriff of Los Angeles in 1970, who regularly affirms his first allegiance by signing himself “Oscar Zeta Acosta, Chicano lawyer,” and who finally leaves for Mexico in despair, madness even, at the internal divisions of Chicano politics.

 

To these, always, have to be added the rumbustious tequila drinker and druggie ten years in therapy, the hugely overweight ulcer sufferer who spat blood, the twice over divorcee, and the eventual desaparecido in 1974, aged 39 who was last seen in Mazatlán, Mexico, and whose end has long been shrouded in mystery. Was he drug or gunrunning, a kind of Chicano Ambrose Bierce who created his own exit from history, or a victim of kidnap or other foul play? Above all, from a literary perspective, there has to be Acosta the legendary “first person singular” writer of The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People. 

-     from “Chicanismo’s Beat Outrider? The Texts and Contexts of Oscar Zeta Acosta” by A. Robert Lee

 

In a letter to Willie L. Brown Jr., resigning from Brown’s campaign for Speaker of the California House of Representatives, 1970, Acosta wrote:

 

“When you speak of civil rights, civil liberties, etc. you think of black vs. white. When there’s talk of investigation of these rights, of federal grants for education, of cheap housing, in other words, discrimination, you speak of Negroes. At the Chinese banquet when all the big whigs got up to talk, they mentioned first Negroes, and, second Chinese . . . And that’s the way it goes. All America is divided into three parts, white, black and yellow.  . . . How about me?”