Mexican Americans

MEXICAN AMERICANS. The radicalism of Mexican Americans before the twenty-first century has taken four primary forms. Irredentist movements sought to restore the lands taken after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; Mexicans organized their own nationals and Mexican Americans for revolution in Mexico; unions have organized both Mexican and mixed locals that were often radical and had ties with American-led organizations such as the Communist Party; and nationalist movements have sought to assert Mexican needs and culture outside the political and social institutions of the United States.

The Mexican War waged for the lands that became the American Southwest and California did not end with a formal treaty in 1848. Excluded from, or literally thrown out of, the economic opportunities of the new territories of the United States, several Mexicans became outlaws and popular heroes. Most notably, Joaquin Murieta, Juan Flóres, and Tiburcio Vásquez took to the hills of California in symbolic protest in the two decades after the war in the pattern of the social bandit described in the work of Eric Hobsbawm. In Texas in 1859 Juan N. Cortina raised an army of 1,200 men that captured the town of Brownsville to secure for Mexicans the rights promised them in the 1848 treaty. Himself a member of the wealthy elite, Cortina railed at the lawlessness that characterized the actions of many Anglo-Texans against lower-class Mexicans. Forced across the border in 1860, he fought against the French during their occupation of Mexico. In a more formal fashion, Las Gorras Blancas (White Caps) organized in New Mexico in association with the Knights of Labor in the late 1880s to protest the alienation of their lands. Land grabbers had dispossessed many Hispanic New Mexicans from their ancestral common lands, pressing them into dependence on wage labor, particularly for the railroads.

There many, such as Las Gorras Blancas’ founder Juan José Herrera, became involved in the Knights and were exposed to its philosophy of cooperativism. Their activities, though, centered around cutting the fences that had to come to exclude them from their old lands, especially in and around the town of Las Vegas in San Miguel County. In 1890 many of them joined the Peoples Party, which won the county elections, though with little programmatic effect. Factionalized over the use of violence, that some were landowners, and involvement in elections, Las Gorras Blancas faded from the New Mexican landscape by the mid-1890s, though symbolic wire-cutting continued. In the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, Mexicans organized a military movement to regain sovereignty over their lands. In 1914 and 1915 El Plan de San Diego proclaimed “the independence and segregation of the states bordering on the Mexican nation of which states the Republic of Mexico was robbed in a most perfidious manner by North American Imperialism.” Such native Tejanos as Aniceto Pizaña and Luis de la Rosa directed armed bands of from twenty-five to one hundred in the valley. By July 1915, raids had become nearly a daily occurrence. By this time over half of the Rio Grande Valley’s population left and the area’s economy was in ruins. This state of war existed until October, when the border patrols on both sides increased and the raids declined. Again, the land question motivated most of the fighters, though the Texas Rangers—essentially the land-grabbing ranchers’ thugs—and the commercialization of life brought by the railroads sparked their actions.

In the late 1950s Reies López Tijerina (1926-2015) initiated new efforts to restore the ancestral lands of New Mexico that had been granted by the Spanish Crown before 1846. Trying to enlist the support of the Mexican government, the United Nations, and the American courts, Tijerina attempted to enforce the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the legality of the land grants. Legal channels produced only frustration. In 1963 he organized the Alianza Federal de Mercedes, which attracted hundreds of barrio dwellers in Albuquerque who had been pressured off the land and into welfare or wage dependency, and thousands of Hispanic farmers from northern New Mexico and southern Colorado who barely subsisted on the remains of their ancestral lands. Through marches on the New Mexico capital, this organization brought mass pressure, albeit futile, on the state government to recognize their cause.

Then, in October 1966, Tijerina and 350 Aliancistas occupied a portion of Kit Carson National Forest that they understood to be part of the San Joaquín del Rio Chama grant. Arresting two rangers for trespassing, they elected a traditional alcalde and ayuntamiento. After they were turned out, Tijerina was arrested and released on bail. The state’s establishment—Anglo and Mexican—called him a Communist and a “creature of darkness.” On 5 June 1967, Tijerina and twenty armed Aliancistas captured the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse in an effort to place District Attorney Alfonso Sanchez under citizens’ arrest. The ensuing shootout seriously wounded two officers. The rebels fled to the hills, as a two-thousand-man army terrorized the countryside searching for them. After their surrender, a jury remarkably acquitted Tijerina, though he was jailed for the previous incident, effectively causing the demise of the Alianza.

Before World War II, the “GI Generation,” and the Zoot-Suit Riots of 1943, Mexicans in the United States usually focused their political interests on the events south of the border. The Mexican Revolution (1911–1920) particularly fired the passions of Mexicans in the United States, where supporters of all factions could be found. As early as 1891 Catarino Garza, a journalist from South Texas, and a thousand followers attacked across the border to liberate northern Mexico from the dictator Porfírio Díaz. Most significantly, the anarchist Partido Liberal Mexicano organized for the revolution in the American Southwest after its leader, Ricardo Flores Magón, fled there in 1905. He and his fellow Liberales were mostly intellectuals of petit bourgeois backgrounds. Their ideology evolved from the anti-clerical and liberal reform movement of the 19th Century, to the bourgeois revolutionary notions of Francisco Madero, to, by 1911, Anarchism. Fleeing harassment and imprisonment, The Liberales organized and sojourned throughout the Southwestern states. Increasing land monopolization, often foreign, in the years leading up to the Mexican Revolution also cast such people as indigenous Tarrascan Primo Tapia from their ancestral villages, especially in Michoacán. In 1910, Tapia joined with Flores-Magón in Los Angeles and then moved to organize unskilled Rocky Mountain miners and beet workers in Nebraska for the I.W.W. These Liberales north of the border were truly trans-national in scope but their primary concern was revolution in Mexico.

In the Southwest before the 1930s most Mexicans worked seasonally on the railroads and in agriculture. Thus their union struggles tended to be spontaneous and ad hoc until the Communists’ Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union provided stable leadership in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Several exiled anarchists led such Mexican unions as the Confederatión de Uniones Campesinos y Obreros Mexicanos, which organized the fields of southern California in the 1930s. American and Mexican Communists, Mexican anarchists in permanent exile, and the Mexican consulate all competed for leadership of this and other agricultural unions.

In urban centers, Mexican workers participated in the unionization drives of the 1930s including “red” Trade Union Unity League unions and Communist-tinged ones of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The recentness of the Mexican Revolution drew some Mexicans to revolutionary ideology and rhetoric, or at least they did not fear it as much as their Anglo shop-mates. Two of the most remarkable women in Southwestern U.S. history, Guatemalan-born Luisa Moreno (1907-1992) and Emma Tenayuca (1916-1999) of San Antonio, state secretary of the Communist Party in Texas, organized in such unions. In fact, the militance and solidarity of Mexican workers proved essential to the organization of several of the CIO’s more radical unions in the Southwest, particularly the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America; United Furniture Workers; and the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. The Communist Party recruited some Mexican union leaders to its ranks and pushed for equality within the unions. Such Party organizations as the Workers Alliance and the International Labor Defense participated in Mexican causes where no one else treaded. These efforts encouraged some few Mexican American activists, such as Ralph Cuarón, radicalized by the labor and anti-fascist struggles of the 1930s, to join the Communist Party because it best enabled them to do their organizing. Cuarón, at least, maintained his CP membership all the time he inspired Southern California youth in the Chicano Movement

This era also saw the emergence of the Spanish Speaking Peoples Congress, which Luisa Moreno organized in 1938. An explicitly radical organization, it took stands on community, labor, legislative, and immigration issues in the Southwest. Red-baiting and factionalism ended its career in 1940, though it had six thousand members at its peak. Truman-McCarthyism effectively precluded a revival of such Mexican radical activity after World War II, though such groups as the Community Services Organization (CSO), the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), and the reformist American GI Forum and League of United Latin American Citizens maintained a Mexican political presence in California and Texas.

In the 1960s farm workers and youth led the resurgence of a Mexican challenge to Anglo economic, cultural, and political supremacy. Trained at the CSO in San Jose, César Chávez organized the United Farm Workers in 1962, which eventually brought a modicum of justice, though only for a while, to the fields of California through strikes and the famous secondary boycotts of grapes and lettuce. The first Mexican American of true national stature, Chávez inspired a new era of oppositional politics on the part of Mexican Americans.

The Crusade for Justice in Colorado, El Partido la Raza Unida in Texas, the high school student strikes (“Blowouts”) in East Los Angeles and later in South Texas and Denver, and El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) on college campuses, represented a new nationalism that challenged both Anglo cultural and political dominance as well as the accommodationist views of the 1950s generation of Mexican Americans. The youth took the word Chicano to distinguish themselves from assimilationists. (The word, some say, derives from the Nahuatl pronunciation of Mexicano and usually denoted someone of rough, lower-class origins.) They also took the phrase in use in Mexican communities since the nineteenth century to denote the Mexican people—La Raza.

Rodolfo “Corky” González (1928-2005), boxer and author of the inspirational epic poem “I Am Joaquín,” founded the Crusade for Justice in Denver in 1966. Vigilant in its attempts to “nationalize every school in our community” and in its defense of the Chicano community against the police, the crusade founded its own school, newspaper, and social center.

In 1967 college students in San Antonio founded the Mexican-American Youth Organization (MAYO), which gained financial assistance from the Ford Foundation. Challenging the Democratic Party in that city, it lost its funding, and one of MAYO’s organizers and main spokespersons, José Angel Gutiérrez (b.1944), then went to Crystal City in South Texas to put MAYO’s principles into action in his hometown. In mid-1969 his organization and strategy began unfolding as the majority Chicano population began taking over the school board, city council, and even a few businesses through boycotts, and, with the founding of La Raza Unida Party in the spring of 1970, elections. By 1974, Crystal City and Raza Unida had become the pride of the Chicano movement in Texas.

In 1972, though, other nationalists such as Corky González grabbed hold of the idea and, against Gutiérrez’s wishes, thrust the party into national politics. Its zealous supporters’ demands for a Chicano third party factionalized Chicano political leaders and essentially doomed La Raza Unida. Gutiérrez’s efforts did change forever the attitude of Mexican American politics in Texas. There would no longer be the old deference: “Psychologically,” he stated, “if you give in to one of those bastards [the Rangers], you’ve had it. That’s been the life of our parents. That’s why they go around with their hats in their hands. This has to be stopped. We’ve got to be just as arrogant.”

In March 1968, 15,000 students walked out of five East Los Angeles high schools protesting the lack of Chicano teachers, the irrelevance of their Anglo-oriented classes, and general disrespect for their culture. The police and arrests and trials of the leaders eventually restored order, but not before students perfected the tactic of the Blowout, using it for two more years to ensure the responsiveness of school authorities.

The period from fall 1966 to spring 1967 saw the emergence of the first Chicano student groups on California college campuses. Concerned primarily with issues of cultural identity and a sense of obligation to the barrios from which they came, these students later formed the United Mexican American Students (UMAS) in summer and fall of 1967 at the University of California at Los Angeles, from which it quickly spread to other southwestern campuses. Moving away from a service orientation toward political agitation, UMAS, and later MEChA—into which some UMAS chapters had transformed—redefined the goals of education for Chicanos away from preparation for assimilation to “service to the Chicano community … and for the purpose of realizing political, social, and economic change.” The First Annual Chicano Conference in Denver, which Corky González called forth in 1969 with an attendance of over two thousand, proved the high point of this movement. By the mid-1970s, MEChA chapters had begun to divide between nationalists, often affiliated with La Raza Unida; Marxists, who also joined Marxist-Leninist groups; and those who wanted a cultural emphasis.

Toward the mid-1970s many Chicano activists shifted their focus to cross-national issues. Indeed, they came to reject notions of Chicanismo because it divided those who lived north of the border from those who lived in Mexico. Bert Corona (1918-2001), a veteran of the CIO and organizer of MAPA, organized Centro de Acción Autonoma—Hermandad General de Trabajadores (CASA) in Los Angeles to unite all “Mexicanos” against abuses of undocumented workers.

By the 1990s the world historic events of global capitalism and its associated phenomena of mass migrations and de-industrialization in much of the United States were clearly changing the circumstances of the Mexican-descent population. Later, the rise, internationally, of reactionary populist, xenophobic authoritarian politicians intensified the predicaments facing migrants. In the United States, resistance movements saw a shift from emphasis on familiar political and labor movements to ones emphasizing identity, residence status, gender issues, and the border.

Emblematic of this transition was the transformation of scholar-activism. The first generation of scholar-activists, led by Juan Gómez-Quiñones (1940-1920) of UCLA and Rodolfo Acuña (b. 1932) of California State University Northridge, emphasized labor and political organizing in their scholarship and community activism. The newer generation of Latinx scholar-activists affirm LatCrit, which seeks to add to Critical Race Theory’s posing of the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and sexuality issues of nation and language to produce “rebellious knowledge.”

As Mexicans, and Central Americans, migrated to most everywhere to work in the United States—the carpet factories of Dalton, Georgia, settlements in Colorado for work in the ski resorts, for restaurant work in New York City and everyplace on the Pacific Coast, to the meat packing plants of the Midwest, and construction sites just about everywhere—matters of immigration status came to the fore. For their children, who greatly outnumbered third and fourth generation students in the public schools in Latino neighborhoods, the demeaning label of “illegal,” for them and their parents, and the precariousness of their futures in the country in which they grew up, sparked new resistance movements.

In the burgeoning Latino community of Las Vegas, Nevada, for example, Latina/o high school and college student spearheaded a movement in 2006 that sought not only to battle for immigrant rights and against cuts to school budgets but to contest the legal and cultural criminalization of their families who did essential work in hotels, restaurants, and casinos on the iconic Strip. Opposition centered around HR 4437, a Congressional bill, that, if it had passed, would have further criminalized undocumented people. In fact, recalling the events of 1968, high school students in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and other places walked out of classes to protest the bill. Later in that year, Las Vegas students walked out to protest insensitive teachers. In a similar vein, efforts to terminate any sort of ethnic studies in Arizona public schools, courses of proven worth in enhancing educational outputs, pushed students of Mexican descent to mobilize against the, eventually successful, bigoted legislation.
In many ways, the self-named “DREAMers” fit a “traditional American” paradigm of well-behaved, productive immigrants seeking entry into the economy and society. But when these students--typically brought to the United States as very young children, yet undocumented and thus liable to deportation--put their bodies on the line, they radically challenged the dominant culture’s legal and imagined constructions of “(il)legality,” belonging, citizenship, and essential labor, or how, in other words, their families were perceived. While the 2020 coronovirus pandemic brought into clearer view the disconnect between the simultaneous dependence on and vilification of undocumented workers, the DREAMers’ sometimes performative actions at the US-Mexico border—such as challenging Immigration Enforcement and Control with news cameras running—taking refuge in liberal churches, and in the streets further challenged all Americans’ thinking about just who undocumented people are, what they do, and how the carpet industry of Georgia, tourism in ski towns and Vegas, construction in Chicago, and restaurants and hotels in most urban centers would all collapse without them.

Furthermore, these youthful DREAMers and their peers in Las Vegas, and certainly other places, grew up in an American youth culture that increasingly affirmed women’s reproductive rights, gender equality, LGBTQ rights, and workers’ rights. Not only did they seek allies in these movements, they prodded their often socially conservative parents to consider such issues, especially in such largely immigrant unions as the remarkably successful (at least in Las Vegas) but mainstream Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union.

As the world changes, so will oppositional movements all over the planet and often in unimaginable ways. Communities of Mixtec Indian agricultural workers in the Imperial Valley strive to forge binational organizations between Sacramento and Oaxaca; Zapotec restaurant workers in Los Angeles struggle to maintain the language and culture; or Maya people in Brooklyn participate in their communities in Guatemala via telecommunications. Are these, and the other recent immigrants, the new “Mexican American” radicals?

Buelna, Enrique M. Chicano Communists and the Struggle for Social Justice. Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 2019.

Castillo, Pedro, and Albert Camarillo, eds. Furia y Muerte: Los Bandidos Chicanos. Los Angeles: Aztlán Publications, 1973.

Chávez, Ernesto. !Mi Raza Primero (My People First): Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in Los Angeles, 1966-1978. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002.

Monroy, Douglas. “Anarquismo y Comunismo: Mexican Radicalism and the Communist Party in Los Angeles during the 1930s.” Labor History 24 (winter 1983).

Monroy, Douglas. “Fence Cutters, Sediciosos, and First-Class Citizens: Mexican Radicalism in America.” In The Immigrant Left in the United States, edited by Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.

Noriega, Chon A., ed. et al, The Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztlán, 1970-2019. Los Angeles, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2020.

Raat, W. Dirk. Revoltosos: Mexico’s Rebels in the United States, 1903-1923. College Station: Texas A & M Press, 1981.

Rosenbaum, Robert J. Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest. Dallas, Southern Methodist University Press, 1998.