FOUR
THE CHICANO MOVEMENT,
1969-1970
LOS ANGELES TIMES

Militants Fight to Retain Spanish as Their Language
January 14, 1969

EL PASO—The Spanish language, spoken in the Southwest long before Plymouth Bay and Jamestown were settled, is under fire in some quarters as being detrimental to Americanism.

The result is that militant Mexican-Americans, who prefer to call themselves Chicanos, are fighting back with a rising chauvinism which had begun to blur after years of conditioning by U.S. society.

Throughout the Southwest, and especially along the Mexican border, the old controversy of whether Mexican-American students should speak Spanish in school and on the playground is stirring racial sensitivities.

In the lower Rio Grande Valley, more than half of 150 high school students demonstrating against a rule that prohibited the use of Spanish on the playground were recently arrested.

Students Threaten Walkout

In El Paso, students threatened a massive walkout at Bowie High School, composed of about 95% Mexican-Americans, over a rule against students speaking Spanish. The rule was enforced with detention for any violations.

In both cases the defenders won the day—the lower Rio Grande Valley students were exonerated and the contested rule at Bowie was rescinded. Nevertheless, the issue, long an explosive one in the Southwest, is again out in the open with its complicated implications.

Shortly after the Rio Grande Valley and the El Paso incidents, Mexican-American high school students at Uvalde —the Texas hometown of the late Vice President John N. Garner^[*] —staged a "Chicano happening."

* John Nance Garner served as vice president of the United States between 1933 and 1936 under Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Attending the year-end school dance, which is the semester's big affair, Mexican-American students showed up in Mexican ponchos, while the rest of the students came dressed in conventional dark suits and long dresses. The Mexican-Americans then segregated themselves from the rest of the crowd and started making tacos with tortillas, chili and meat which the girls had brought in containers.

It caused a stir, not only among Anglo students, parents and teachers, but also among Mexican-American parents who couldn't understand why their children were "disgracing" themselves after they (the parents) had worked so hard to give them clothes like the ones the other students wore.

Puzzled by Youth

Mike Gonzales, an attorney and controversial Mexican-American leader in Del Rio, said: "Anglos and older Mexican-Americans just don't seem to know what is happening. Mexican-American kids are in the throes of self-identification."

Use of the Spanish language, say other leaders, is one thing that Mexican-Americans have over other students and they tend to exploit it.

The controversy centers on two arguments:

Mexican-American students should concentrate on English because speaking Spanish too much hurts their proficiency in the "national language," English. Besides, said a school psychologist, children growing up in a bicultural environment are more prone than others to neurosis and mental disorders.

Mexicans are indigenous to the Southwest, and so the Spanish language is part of their culture which should not be tampered with. Having colonized the Southwest, Spanish-speaking people refuse to abandon their traditions because of the advent of Anglo-American culture.

The controversy is not one of whether Spanish, or any other foreign language, should be taught in school. All educators agree that a person is better off speaking two or more languages. But some school officials object to Mexican-American students speaking Spanish in school and on the playground not only on the basis of it being detrimental to their English but because it irks other students who don't speak Spanish.

In south Texas, a teacher, commenting on the controversial issue, wrote a pamphlet which reads in part:

"They are good people. Their only handicap is the bag full of superstitions and silly notions they inherited from Mexico. When they get rid

of these superstitions, they will be good Americans. Their schools help more than anything else."

Change Foreseen

"In time, the Latin will think and act like Americans. A lot depends on whether we can get them to switch from Spanish to English. When they speak English at home like the rest of us, they will be part of the American way of life. I just don't understand why they are so insistent about using Spanish. They should realize that it's not the American tongue."

This approach infuriates the growing number of militant Mexican-American leaders, many of whom now insist that meetings held to discuss the problems of this ethnic group should be conducted in Spanish.

Some education experts say that what is needed in the Southwest is for non-Mexican-Americans to become "Mexicanized"—not the other way around. Asked how the Mexican-American can find his way into U.S. society, Dr. Jack D. Forbes, research program director of UC Berkeley's Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development, recently told the U.S. Civil Rights Commission:

"The Anglo-American, quite obviously, is the new-comer." It is the Anglo-American, he said, who should learn more about the Mexican-American, his heritage and his culture. No one, he continued, can truly call himself a Southwesterner "unless he is a Mexicanized person to a considerable degree."

Not Enough

To the extremist Mexican-American leaders not even this is enough. What these leaders want for the 5 million Mexican-Americans in the five Southwestern states—California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas—is separatism not a "Mexicanized" society.

The controversial New Mexico Spanish-speaking leader, Reies Lopez Tijerina, who preaches to his followers that they should speak Spanish as often as possible, is a prime advocate of a separate—but equal—state for Mexican-Americans.^[*]

Though few take the separatist movement seriously, educators in the Southwest worry about Mexican-Americans retreating into a "Mexican shell." Not only are many Mexican-American students affecting Mexican

* Beginning in 1963, Reies López Tijerina organized the Alianza Federal de Mercedes in New Mexico to renew claims to land grants stolen from Mexican Americans as a result of the conquest and annexation of New Mexico by the United States in 1848.

rural dress but many have posters in their bedrooms depicting such Mexican revolutionary heroes as Emiliano Zapata and slogans reading "Primero la Raza" (the Mexican race first).

"Attempts to prohibit the use of the Spanish language, no matter how lofty the reasons, will only make things worse," says an El Paso teacher.

Those who would try to abolish the use of Spanish in informal situations in school and on the playground are guilty of the "cowboy-and-Indian viewpoint," says Harold Howe II, former U.S. Commissioner of Education.

Mexican-Americans Threaten Action for Movie, TV Jobs
January 17, 1969

The militant Mexican-American Political Assn. Thursday threatened to instigate picketing, boycotts and legal action against the movie-television industry despite new efforts to establish a better relationship between the industry and the nation's 5 million Spanish-speaking people.

Abe Tapia, MAPA president, said the recent formation of the Latin American Performing Arts Foundation "does not change the fact that the industry's management is bigoted against Mexican-Americans."

The foundation was formed to seek an improved image of Latin Americans in motion pictures and television and to find employment for them. One founder was Al Ortega, a Mexican-American representative of Mayor Sam Yorty and a member of the Board of Public Works.

Ortega said the foundation will work in the "same pattern" the NAACP has used to promote jobs for Negroes in the movie and television industry and to improve the image of the Negro in the entertainment world.

A spokesman for the Assn. of Motion Picture and Television Producers said the industry's relations with the NAACP are "very good" and that, as a result, more Negroes are working in the industry than ever before.

The spokesman said the industry hopes it can work through the newly formed foundation to iron out employment problems between the industry and Mexican-Americans. He said meetings with MAPA representatives "have been disastrous" and punctuated with personal insults "which the industry does not have to take."

Celes King, president of the Los Angeles central branch of the NAACP, agreed that Negroes are getting good jobs in the industry but

said his branch had to use tactics—such as MAPA now threatens—to get results.

Ray Martel, a television and movie actor who heads the MAPA committee dealing with the industry, said meetings with movie and television executives have failed because the "industry is run by Jews who themselves have been persecuted but still fail to understand the problems of the Mexican-Americans."

MAPA contends that Mexican-Americans are stereotyped by the industry "as serape and sombrero clad, stupid, shiftless, immoral bandidos."

In the meetings with the producers association and the writers guild, MAPA has demanded, among other things, that Mexican-Americans be depicted in all walks of life—lawyers, doctors, engineers, teachers, etc. that they get "full and equitable employment across the board" and that the industry "immediately cease portraying Mexican people in a derogatory and abusive" manner.

MAPA charges that the movie and television industry is "violating Federal Communications Commission regulations in its unfair treatment of Mexican-Americans" and said their organization will prosecute if necessary.

A spokesman for the producers association released a report showing that 442 Mexican-Americans were employed in motion pictures, television film productions and television film pilots during the quarter period ending Oct. 30, 1968, as compared to 362 Negroes employed during the same period.

Employers' Group Warned Minorities Must Have Jobs
January 30, 1969

Mexican-American leaders and members of unemployment-ridden barrios have personally warned management representatives that to avoid "economic decay" they must provide good jobs for racial minorities instead of just finding means to sell them color television sets and new cars.

In a two-day Southern California Employers' Conference on Mexican-American Employment which ended Wednesday, industry and business representatives were taken to task by members of such militant Spanish-speaking organizations as the Brown Berets, the League of United Citizens to Help Addicts (LUCHA) and ALMA (Soul).

At conference workshops at Whittier College, confrontations be-

tween Mexican-Americans and employers led to heated discussions which ranged from alleged prejudice by management against how Mexican-Americans dress to charges that business and industry training programs are inadequate.

Tells of Frustration

Jose Avila of the East Los Angeles Labor Community Action Committee summed up what he described as the "frustration faced by Mexican-Americans trying to find employment."

Speaking to representatives of the oil industry, public utilities, large department stores and communications media, Avila said:

"You say you can't find qualified Mexican-Americans. How in hell can you find them if you won't appreciate the fact that Spanish-speaking people must struggle to get jobs, educate themselves and fight old prejudices all at the same time."

"Industry and business must readjust their thinking and training programs to suit these special problems just like they have designed their sales campaign to attract racial minorities."

Avila also hit the education Mexican-Americans receive in schools saying that "many Mexican-Americans are out in the streets who learned how to make ash trays in school craft shops but did not learn any skills which would help them get jobs."

Vincent T. Ximenes, chairman of the cabinet-level Inter-Agency Committee on Mexican-American Affairs, was the conference's luncheon speaker Wednesday.

He said that by 1990 there will be 18 million Spanish surnamed Americans in the United States and noted that "it remains for the government to lead the way to a better educated American populace."

He said that Mexican-Americans are now "dropping out of school at a rate double the national average and getting only about eight years of schooling compared to 12 years for the average Anglo-American youngster.

"We all know the reasons . . . A Spanish-speaking child goes to school and finds a teacher who expects to teach him English. His confidence is further whittled away when he is left without part of his biocultural heritage to which he has a right . . . . He has a right to know that the early Mexican-Americans contributed much to governmental organization; he has a right to know that they were as brave and resourceful as the New England colonists."

Mexican-American Community Groups Plan 'Neglect' Protest
February 11, 1969

Representatives of Mexican-American community welfare groups plan to formally complain to the Board of Supervisors today about alleged neglect by the County Department of Public Services in dealing with East Los Angeles residents.

The move will follow charges by Mrs. Alice Escalante, head of the Los Angeles Welfare Rights Organization, that Ellis P. Murphy, director of the county's social services, walked out of a meeting Monday with East Los Angeles community leaders before they had an opportunity to air their grievances.

Steve Monroe, a spokesman for the county's social services, said Murphy left the meeting after a county social worker, who admitted he had been prohibited from attending the meeting, defied Murphy's "suggestion that he go back to work."

Mrs. Escalante heads an East Los Angeles group which has been at odds with Murphy since his department refused to allow her to speak at a social workers union meeting held in county social service facilities.

Union meetings were then banned at the county facilities and 43 social workers were suspended for breaking the ban.

Pickets later paraded in front of the East Los Angeles county office. The protesters belonged to the AFL-CIO Social Workers Local 535, the Brown Berets and Mrs. Escalante's Welfare Rights Organization.

Mrs. Escalante said her group will not only complain to the Board of Supervisors about "Murphy's lack of courtesy and concern" but will also present the board with a copy of 43 demands by East Los Angeles welfare recipients and social workers.

The demands include a public apology to the East Los Angeles community, transfer of Fred Gustafson, head of the social services office in East Los Angeles, and the naming of Mexican-Americans to posts of deputy directors in the East Los Angeles and Belvedere social services centers.

Latins Fail to Get Apology, Walk Out of County Hearing
February 12, 1969

Mexican-American militants walked out of a Board of Supervisors hearing Tuesday after they demanded and did not get a public apology to the

East Los Angeles community from Ellis P. Murphy, director of the county's social services.

Tension rose at the verbally explosive meeting when members of the Brown Berets quietly walked to the side of Mrs. Alicia Escalante, head of a welfare group demanding the apology, as she was being ordered by a deputy sheriff to leave the speaking stand and sit down.

Mrs. Escalante, chairman of the Los Angeles Welfare Rights Organization, at first refused to budge but then decided to walk away, followed by four Brown Berets, thus avoiding a possible confrontation.

Under Attack Earlier

Earlier, Murphy had been under attack by East Los Angeles organization spokesmen for allegedly walking out of a meeting with them Monday as they tried to discuss their problems with the official.

Murphy contends that he left the meeting because he had ordered a county social worker to leave the meeting but that the worker, technically an employee of Murphy, refused to do so.

Board of Supervisors' chairman Ernest Debs backed Murphy, saying the social worker was "insubordinate," but ordered Murphy to again meet with a small group headed by Mrs. Escalante. Debs said no county social worker could attend this meeting.

After Mrs. Escalante led an exodus of about 50 representatives of various East Los Angeles organizations, she told the Times that her group would not meet with Murphy unless Supervisor Debs, whose district includes East Los Angeles, is present.

Debs ordered his field representative, Arnold Martinez, to arrange a meeting between Mrs. Escalante's group and Murphy but it was not clear whether Debs would attend.

Mrs. Escalante claimed at the board meeting that Murphy has "insulted Los Angeles publicly three times." She said Murphy showed his "lack of concern for East Los Angeles" when his department refused to allow her to speak to social workers in a county facility when he walked out of the Monday meeting.

Murphy, who was present at the Board of Supervisors meeting, told the group he would meet with them any time. He was booed and called names from the audience.

Supervisors Debs, Warren Dorn and Kenneth Hahn publicly praised Murphy and condemned the hecklers as rude and undemocratic.

Appearing with Murphy was Armando Torrez, a Mexican-American

Public Social Services advisory commissioner, who defended Murphy's action Monday. The militants shouted "Tio Taco" (Mexican Uncle Tom) and "vendido" (sellout).

Ex-Dope User Tries to Help Mexican-American Addicts
February 18, 1969

Joe Ortiz hopes that it's true that "you can't go home again."

An ex-drug addict fighting desperately to resist the temptations of easily available heroin, Ortiz often visits a fetid slum area known as Hicks Camp where he started using drugs 18 years ago.

He goes to Hicks Camp as a volunteer worker for the League of United Citizens to Help Addicts (LUCHA). Ortiz knows that the difference between attempting to help "junkies" and falling back into the drug world is sometimes a sliver of self-control.

On this particular morning, as Ortiz entered Hicks Camp, he spotted an old "carnal" (soul brother) with whom he had in the past shared the bliss and misery which all addicts experience.

Ortiz' friend looked as if he would collapse into a nervous breakdown any moment. Ortiz recognized the state: dope withdrawal symptoms.

"I'm with LUCHA now," Ortiz told his friend. "If you want to 'dry out' we'll help you."

"Maybe if things get really bad I'll call you," said the suffering man. Another man approached and Ortiz' friend started to leave with him.

Ortiz quickly jotted down LUCHA's telephone number and handed it to his friend. He took it with trembling hands and then walked down a bush ravine with his other friend.

"They're going down there to shoot heroin," Ortiz said. "Maybe someday he'll call me."

Called Spiritual Vacuum

A 20-acre island of misery, unpaved streets and crumbling shacks, Hicks Camp is surrounded by a neat El Monte residential area, the El Monte Airport and an industrial district.

In its isolation in the midst of plenty, Hicks Camp is symbolic of the spiritual and material vacuum surrounding many Mexican-Americans who live in barrio pockets throughout Southern California.

Hicks Camp is a depressing refuge for Mexican-American families who can't or won't cope with the outside "Anglo world." County offi-

cials say that health and housing regulations are difficult to enforce in the privately owned camp unless formal complaints are made by "interested persons."

According to Ortiz, Hicks Camp people are "too uneducated, too scared or too apathetic to make complaints."

"When you're trapped by circumstances as these people are, you get to accept it and try to forget it by leaving reality," says Ortiz, who in his 33 years has spent 11 years and 7 months in prisons.

While living in Hicks Camp, Ortiz found school was a "drag" because the teachers tried to "teach me as if I was just another gabacho (Anglo) kid."

He says he also noted early that even those who "sweated out school" never got good jobs.

(According to the National Advisory Committee on Mexican-American Education, a recent study in California showed that in some schools more than 50% of Mexican-American high school students drop out between grades 10 and 11 and that Mexican-Americans account for more than 40% of the so-called "mentally handicapped" in California . . .)

("These facts give tragic evidence of our failure to provide genuine educational opportunity to Mexican-American youth," says the committee, which was created to advise the U.S. commissioner of education, "and today there are nearly 2 million of these children between the ages of 13 and 18.")

As a kid, Ortiz' hero was his brother who hung around the "Pachucos," Mexican-American rebels who battled with U.S. sailors in the early 1940's East Los Angeles racial riots.

By the time Ortiz was 13 he was using marijuana and at 14 he took his first shot of heroin at Hicks Camp. Says Ortiz:

"I was sure my brother was using heroin so I thought it would be all right if I used it, since I wanted to be just like him and I wanted my brother to accept me."

When Ortiz' brother was sent to San Quentin, Ortiz felt a pang of envy. "There it was—my brother being sent to San Quentin and the thing that came to my mind was that some day I would be with him there," says Ortiz. "That became my goal."

After a series of arrests and convictions for robberies and narcotics addiction, Ortiz, at the age of 20, was picked up for possession of heroin.

He was sent to San Quentin where he shared a cell with his brother for two years. After Quentin, Ortiz decided his goal needed a drastic change.

Back to Camp

That change had led back to Hicks Camp, where by now a cluster of "batos locos" (crazy guys) had gathered at the "plaza," a cement slab once part of a shack which burned down years ago.

They milled about aimlessly, talking in low voices. A middle-age wino, whom police say is handed the junkies' hypodermic needles when Hicks is raided, sat by a tree.

From time to time a "bato loco," the young elite of Hicks Camp, headed down the ravine to shoot heroin while another kept watch by the railroad tracks. It was only 11 o'clock in the morning.

"At nights, nobody ever bothers to hide," Ortiz said.

Ortiz gave some of his old buddies LUCHA's telephone number and tried to explain to them that his organization works much like Alcoholics Anonymous—that if they call the number they'll be helped by people who understand ex-dope addicts.

Self-Help Plan

"LUCHA does not accept funds from city, county or federal government agencies," says Ortiz. "That money always has strings attached to it. We try to help ourselves by working at odd jobs and any private contributions that might come our way."

Hicks Camp was originally part of the domain of a giant ranch in the pioneer days of Southern California. In 1917 it was sold to a family by the name of Hicks and since then has changed hands several times. At first a shantytown for agricultural workers, Hicks Camp has been shrunk through the years by growing El Monte and industrial zoning. It undoubtedly will disappear completely in the next few years.

Nevertheless, it is still a microcosm of much of the Mexican-American condition in the Southwest, according to mounting studies.

The serious narcotics problem among Mexican-Americans, say experts, is to a large extent symptomatic of this ethnic group's social and cultural isolation.

Many Mexican-Americans, say these experts, feel neither Mexican nor American. They feel especially "out of it" in a society where to be white English-speaking is of the utmost importance, adds Ortiz.

Before leaving Hicks Camp, Ortiz knocked on a few doors to renew old acquaintances. At one shack, an old, toothless man appeared at the door and Ortiz asked for an old friend, "Chuy."

'Nothing can be done'

"Oh, he's been in jail for the past two years," said the man, who turned out to be Chuy's father. The man had lived in Hicks Camp for 25 years when he paid $3 a month rent. Now he pays $45.

"Nothing can be done here," he said in answer to a question as to whether conditions could be improved in Hicks Camp. "It's too late."

At another shack, a "three-bedroom home," a young mother of seven invited Ortiz in. She spoke in a combination of English and Spanish, common with many Chicanos.

Her problems tumbled out as if discussing personal misfortunes were as easy to her as gossip is to other women. Her brother, a narcotics violator, had just been arrested and her husband was out of a job.

("The lowest income per capita, the lowest sub-standard housing, the lowest educational achievement, the highest high school dropout rate, the highest narcotics rate for youths, the lowest level of job classification and the least amount of government or private resource assistance is in the Mexican-American community and not . . . in Watts . . ." So said Richard S. Amador, executive director of Community and Human Resources Agency, to a recent Southern California Employers Conference on Mexican-American Employment.)

Family Grows

"My husband is too proud to go on welfare," the woman continued, "but I'm not so worried about that as about my brother. Why can't the police leave him alone?"

Ortiz then went to visit his mother, who lives in a neat, well-furnished home just outside Hicks Camp. After telling her not to worry about him, that he's staying "clean," Ortiz got in the car, relieved at leaving Hicks Camp.

Chicanos Hold 5-State Event in Colorado
March 30, 1969

DENVER—Chicano youths from the five Southwestern states—where Mexican-Americans are asserting themselves politically—are meeting here in an attempt to focus their potential power.

They hitchhiked, drove and flew from California, Arizona, New Mex-

ico, Texas and other parts of Colorado to discuss what is "bugging" them: society's alleged neglect.

About 1,000 of these youths, bilingual, angry and energetic, have congregated in the former Calvary Baptist Church, now the headquarters of the Mexican-American Crusade for Justice organization, to articulate their frustrations.

Long-Haired Boys

The boys wear brown berets, Zapata moustaches and long hair. The girls sport miniskirts and Mexican serapes. To "belong" in this group one must speak Spanish. The few black and Anglo youths present stay in the background.

The guru of this Chicano youth conference is Rodolfo (Corky) Gonzales, a former prizefighter, who has just won an important victory from the Denver superintendent of schools.

Last week, students at West High School, whose enrollment is about half-Mexican-American, walked out in protest against what Chicanos felt were anti-Mexican-American school policies.

Victory Claimed

The three-day walkout, which produced nasty police-student confrontations, ended after Gonzales announced that the superintendent had acceded to most of the Chicano demands.

A teacher accused of racism was transferred, walkout leaders were exonerated and Mexican-American studies were expanded.

Ethnic nationalism, the unofficial theme of the conference, was dramatized Friday when Chicano youths lowered an American flag in front of the State Legislature and hoisted a Mexican flag.

Of the 1,000 Chicano youths attending the conference, more than 100 are from the Los Angeles area, representing such organizations as the United Mexican-American Students (UMAS), the Brown Berets and Alma (Soul).

Papers to Guide

The meeting, which ends Monday, will produce "position papers" which will try to guide the Chicano youth movement.

The interim steering committee of the revolutionary caucus has already released a statement which claims Mexican-Americans "for 144

years have been trying to peacefully coexist yet no peace has come to our communities."

"Revolution is the only means available to us," continues the statement. "We owe no allegiance, no respect, to any of the laws of this racist country. Our liberation struggle is a war of survival."^[*]

Chicano Conferees Plan 5-State School Walkout
April 1, 1969

DENVER—About 1,500 youths attending the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference Monday committed themselves to work for a massive school walkout in the five southwestern states on Sept. 16, Mexican Independence Day.

Chicano nationalism was preached throughout the five-day conference which Monday projected the walkouts as a first step toward "liberating" Mexican-American youths from "Anglo concepts."

At the final session of the revolutionary-rhetoric-filled conference the plan of Aztlan was read to the cheering youths from California, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and Colorado.

Aztlan is the Indian word for northern Mexico. The plan says that Chicano youths do not recognize the "Anglo conquest of the Southwest" and that as indigenous people of that area they are loyal only to Chicanoism.

Victory for Leader

It was a victory for Rodolfo (Corky) Gonzales, leader of the Denver-based Crusade for Justice, a civil rights organization, who contends that ethnic nationalism must be the ideology of the Chicano movement.

The conference was in danger of breaking up at times over such issues as whether Chicano youths should form coalitions with the Negro youth groups and whether the movement should start "internationalizing" itself by making contacts with the rebel youths of other countries.

Gonzales was able to sell the conference the idea that such issues can wait until the Chicano youth movement is powerful enough to "deal from a strong base and not one which we have to ask for favors."

Though Gonzales did not say it, it was obvious to the observer of the

* The National Chicano Youth Conference is best known for its proclamation of the Plan de Aztlán, a Chicano "declaration of independence" that articulated the theme of ethnic and cultural nationalism as the guiding ideology of the Chicano movement.

present Mexican-American movement that when he talks of "liberation" he is in effect calling for independence from Mexican-American leaders who get their financial support from the government and who have ties with the "establishment."

Ex-Prize Fighter

Gonzales, 40, a former prize fighter, left the war-on-poverty program which he headed in the Denver Mexican-American community and resigned from the Democratic Party after running unsuccessfully for public office.

Since then he has been calling not only for nationalism but also selfreliance to the Mexican-American community.

"The Chicano must do his thing by himself and for himself," says Gonzales, who feuded with the black leadership during the Poor Peoples' March on Washington.

Rebel youths at conference workshops spoke glowingly of Ernesto (Che) Guevara, Fidel Castro, Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. But when it came to identifying their leaders in the Southwest, only Corky Gonzales and Reies Lopez Tijerina, the New Mexican land-grants crusader, were mentioned.

Pomona Student

Says Jorge Licon, 19, a Pomona College student:

"The young people are turned on by 'Corky,' not only because he talks of revolution but because he is beholden to no one. We young people are sick of the old established so-called Mexican-American leaders who talk but don't act, Corky acts."

Licon was referring to Gonzales' leadership in a recent walkout by West High School, located in the Mexican-American community. According to Gonzales the Chicano students won most of the demands made by the walkout leaders, including the transferring of a teacher accused of racism, the serving of Mexican-American food in the school cafeteria and the expansion of a Mexican-American studies program.

Should Gonzales have some success in leading a Southwest school walkout on Sept. 16, he will become the most important leader among the Chicano youth movement.

So far, most of the Mexican-American civil rights activities have been funnelled through war-on-poverty programs and through such organizations as the Ford Foundation.

Many of the youths who returned home Monday will be preaching Chicano nationalism, liberation and "Corky" Gonzales to their fellow students.

Chancellor Says He Agrees with Thrust but Not Specifics
April 5, 1969

UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young agreed Friday with the "thrust" but not the specifics of seven demands made by the United Mexican-American Students [UMAS], among them the enlargement of the campus Chicano enrollment to at least 12% of the student body.

UMAS said this does not satisfy the organization and set Monday as a deadline for Young to answer the demands specifically.

The university says there are about 700 Mexican-Americans in an enrollment of 35,000 but UMAS claims the "true figure is less than 300."

Not from the U.S.

More than half of the students the university calls Mexican-Americans, according to UMAS, are actually Latin Americans from outside the country and not Southwest Chicanos.

Young told newsmen that "my intent is not to answer the proposal point by point, but to take the thrust of what their proposals say and respond favorably to the thrust, rather than the specifics."

In referring to the deadline, UMAS, which calls the demands "non-negotiable," said it has the backing of the Mexican-American community.

"We have contacted the relevant organizations in the Mexican-American community and they are behind us," a UMAS spokesman said.

There are about 100 UMAS members at UCLA.

The demands were originally made on March 12 with the following introduction:

Special Entry Program

"It is a primary goal of UCLA United Mexican-American Students that within five years the proportion of Mexican-American student population at UCLA minimally match the proportion of Mexican-American population of the local area predominantly served by UCLA, that this

proportion be maintained thereafter, and that the education offered the Mexican-American at UCLA be relevant—in terms of what is taught, who teaches, what degrees and certificates are offered, what research and special programs are fostered and by whom—to the problems, other concerns and interests of the Mexican-American community."

The demands include the appointment of four Mexican-Americans to positions paralleling existing posts and the establishment this fall of a permanent special entry program for Mexican-Americans modeled on the experimental High Potential program.

One proposal, setting up a Mexican-American Urban Center, was satisfied Wednesday with the official opening of the center in East Los Angeles, Young said.

UMAS also wanted the appointment of a Chicano "as assistant to the dean of graduate admissions to help assure the greater recruitment and financial aiding of the Chicano into the graduate division" and the "assigning of a central campus building to house the special entry program . . ."

While noting the significance of the proposals, Young said "some of the requests are not capable of a positive response by anyone because the response would be illegal—to the extent they're asking for, separate programs, if that's what's really meant."

UMAS responded that the organization "along with the rest of the Mexican-American community, of which we students are only a part, insist that our goal is just and that the specifics of our presentation are feasible."

UMAS to Be Reinstated at Roosevelt High
April 23, 1969

Roosevelt High School has agreed to reinstate the United Mexican-American Students (UMAS) provided a teacher who has publicly denounced the organization is named its faculty co-sponsor.

UMAS President Mario Esparza said Tuesday the school's suggestion was "an insult" because "an enemy of UMAS is being named as faculty sponsor so she can control our organization and destroy it."

UMAS was suspended for one month by Principal Thomas Dyer, who said the organization has violated its own constitution by working in conjunction with other UMAS chapters, by sponsoring a sit-in when it said it would favor a speak-in instead, and by failing to keep "outsiders" off-campus.

Faculty sponsors Antonio Ortiz, Miss Alice Sandoval and Fred Sanchez contend that the alleged violations were made by individuals and not UMAS as an organization and that the suspension was unfair.

This was the first time an activist student organization has been suspended in the Los Angeles school district.

Under a proposal made by Roosevelt's administration staff, UMAS was reinstated as of Monday under certain conditions, among them being that Mrs. Carmen Terrazas be appointed co-sponsor along with Ortiz.

Miss Sandoval and Sanchez would be dropped as faculty sponsors. Ortiz said he has told Dyer he will resign as sponsor.

Mrs. Terrazas, a teacher and chairman of the school's scholarship committee, recently wrote The Times a letter highly critical of UMAS. Published last Saturday, the letter implied that UMAS "perpetuates racism."

Unpublished Portion

In a portion of the letter not published, Mrs. Terrazas said, "A sampling of teachers indicates that the majority of teachers at Roosevelt feel strongly that UMAS disrupts the educational process at the school . . ."

Asked by The Times why she agreed to be co-sponsor of UMAS considering her feelings about the organization, Mrs. Terrazas said she did not care to comment now.

UMAS President Esparza told The Times that he and "most of the members of UMAS" would have agreed to have Mrs. Terrazas as cosponsor but that her letter to The Times "ended all that."

Union Marchers to Hold Rally, Woo Mexican Farm Workers
May 13, 1969

MEXICALI—Juan Gomez, 24, a farm worker, gets up at 1 a.m. in Mexico to work in the Coachella Valley across the border.

He takes the bus to the international line and crosses the border after showing his immigration green card.

His green card says that Gomez is a legal alien resident of the United States—an immigrant.

But because he prefers to live in Mexico, one of the reasons being that it is cheaper there, Gomez commutes to the fields of Imperial and Coachella valleys.

On the American side of the border he and many like him are picked

up by labor contractors' trucks who charge them $2 a piece for the ride to the farms.

Gomez is usually up five hours before he even begins to work. But he is not unhappy. Gomez, father of four children, is making $1.69 an hour, much more than he could ever make working in the fields of Mexicali Valley.

A group of farm workers, belonging to Cesar Chavez' grape striking farm workers union, is marching to the border to tell Gomez and his fellow commuters that they should join the union.

On the Mexican side, some officials of the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) are helping to plan the event.

On Monday the marchers, who started from Indio Saturday in weather of up to 106 degrees, were camped at Salt Creek by the Salton Sea. They hope to reach Calexico by next Sunday where they plan an "international solidarity of farm workers rally" at the border.

Chavez' people, many of whom are green-card holders themselves but live on the American side, plan to tell the commuters that if they join the union they can force the growers to pay for their transportation to work and that their pay and benefits will improve as union members.

The grape harvest at Coachella Valley is due to begin at the end of this month and union officials claim the workers are ready for a strike.

But they also know that, as in 1968, the growers were able to replace striking workers with commuters from Mexico.

A survey made by the U.S. Immigration Department indicates that there are fewer than 50,000 commuters who work on the American side and live on the Mexican side along the 1,800-mile U.S.-Mexico border.

The AFL-CIO, however, claims the figure is closer to 150,000.

According to a report prepared by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, there is also, but to a smaller extent, commuter traffic across the American-Canadian border.

However, the report says, "Canadian commuters do not depress local economic conditions, as do Mexican commuters, because they live in a substantially identical cost-of-living economy, work in highly unionized occupations and are highly unionized themselves.

"Being well assimilated into the labor force, they offer no undue competition to American labor."

Encouraged by the demise of the bracero program, which brought hundreds of thousands of Mexican national farm workers to American farms under a U.S.-Mexico agreement, unions have been trying to find ways to end the commuter system.

The marchers, whose number varies from 100 to 500 depending on

how hot the weather is, are in effect conceding that the commuter system is probably here to stay and that the only way the commuters can stop them being "strike breakers" is to unionize them.

The march is due to reach the more populated areas in Brawley, El Centro and Calexico this weekend and so increase in number, according to its planners.

Jim Drake, an official of Chavez' union, said the feeling among union members now is not to fight the commuter system as such but to sympathize with the commuter's problem and help them by inviting them to join the union.

Brown Berets Hail 'La Raza' and Scorn the Establishment
June 16, 1969

David Sanchez, prime minister of the Brown Berets, was at the East Los Angeles Free Clinic when he learned two of his top aides, along with eight other people, had been indicted for involvement in disturbances and fires set in the Biltmore April 24.

The fires in several floors of the hotel were started just before Gov. Reagan was to address a Mexican-American educator's conference. The disturbances occurred during the governor's speech.

Authorities say a rookie policeman who had infiltrated the militant Chicano organization tipped off police and firemen in advance, which probably prevented a catastrophe.

"It looks bad all right," Sanchez said about the indictments, "but La Raza (the race) will understand. La Raza knows it's just another maneuver by The Man to destroy us."

Sanchez, voicing the unanimous sentiment of Brown Beret leadership, says he doesn't care what "the white establishment or press" thinks of the organization.

But, he adds, if it is true that his ministers of information and discipline were involved in arson "they did it as individuals and not as Brown Berets."

The East Los Angeles Free Clinic at 5106 E. Whittier Blvd. was opened by the Brown Berets May 31 with financial help from the Ford Foundation.

Sanchez says the sparsely furnished facility was modeled after the Fairfax Free Clinic in Hollywood and is offering free medical, social and psychological services to Mexican-Americans with volunteer help of professionals.

Indicted himself for his part in the East Los Angeles High School

walkouts last year, Sanchez, 20, looks like a clean-cut Mexican-American boy.

But he's much more complicated than that. He heads a tightly knit, quasi-military organization of about 60 disciplined youths which the police consider dangerous.

Besides Los Angeles, the Brown Berets claim to have chapters in 27 other cities including Fresno, San Francisco, Sacramento, Berkeley, Oxnard, Denver, Albuquerque and San Antonio. The members range in age from 14 to 35.

At a recent Chicano youth liberation conference in Denver, at which many Brown Berets participated mostly as security guards, about 1,500 Chicano youths from the five Southwestern states adopted a statement of beliefs which condemned the "brutal gringo invasion of our territories."

Brown Berets look up to the leadership of Reies Lopez Tijerina, the New Mexico land grants crusader, and Rodolfo (Corky) Gonzales, leader of the Denver-based civil rights organization, the Crusade for Justice. Both men preach ethnic nationalism and separatism.

Admirers of Cesar Chavez

"We especially admire Cesar Chavez (the farm labor leader) for his advocacy of nonviolence," Sanchez says.

The Brown Beret manual, however, indicates the organization does not entirely condemn violence as does Chavez.

The manual says: "If those Anglos in power are willing to (give Chicanos their rights) in a peaceful and orderly process, then we will be only too happy to accept this way. Otherwise, we will be forced to other alternatives."

The manual also points out that there are three ways to apply pressure: by direct communication with persons or agencies "you wish to change," by "demonstrations or pickets" or "by any and all means necessary."

As if remembering the rule in the Brown Beret manual which says, "The problem is not a problem, it is a situation that must be dealt with," Sanchez perked up.

Legal Defense Needed

"Our job now is to get adequate legal defense," Sanchez said. The phone rang often and Sanchez would usually answer. "Raise the money for bail," Sanchez said into the phone several times.

In the clinic's outer office were Rona Fields, an instructor of educational psychology and sociology at San Fernando Valley State College, and her husband, Charles Fox, a political science teacher at Cal State Los Angeles.

Without commenting on the indictments, Miss Fields, who goes by her maiden name for professional reasons, agreed with Sanchez that the authorities are out to destroy the Brown Berets.

"In the context of East Los Angeles, the Brown Berets can be compared to the Israeli youth underground," Miss Fields said.

Miss Fields Tells Views

A wiry Jewish woman with intense light eyes, Miss Fields, who hopes to write her Ph.D. dissertation on the Brown Berets, has written:

"As an organization the Brown Berets are continually confronted with the established institutions in a social matrix which rigidifies structures and becomes irrelevant through antiquation before new institutions can be enacted.

"The consequent frustration would apparently provide only two alternatives for the Chicano youth—acquiescence to the established order, which would include acceptance of assimilation, or violence, either revolutionary style or delinquency.

"The Brown Berets are trying to develop a third alternative. This third alternative is embodied in the East Los Angeles Free Clinic. This alternative is to create new institutions which are devised to be flexible, to be continually responsive to the community and which grow out of and for the needs of the community as the community sees them."

There is no doubt that the Brown Berets have rejected the first alternative Miss Fields talks about—assimilation. "There are very few Gabachos (Anglos) who don't turn me off," says Sanchez. "To the Anglo, justice means just us."

In the Brown Beret manual, written by Sanchez, when he was in jail for disturbing the peace, appears a statement which must be memorized by every Brown Beret.

"For over 120 years the Mexican-American has suffered at the hands of the Anglo establishment. He is discriminated against in schooling, housing, employment and in every other phase of life. Because of this situation, the Mexican-American has become the lowest achiever of any minority group in the entire Southwest."

It's when you discuss the second alternative that the Brown Berets are vague.

"We're not a violent or a nonviolent organization," says Sanchez, "we are an emergency organization."

What does that mean?

"Well, if we see a cop beating up a Chicano we move in and stop the cop," Sanchez says. "We try to be ready for every emergency."

But the testimony to the county grand jury by the undercover policeman Fernando Sumaya would indicate the Chicano militant organization is definitely violence-oriented.

Sumaya's Account

Sumaya, 23, told the grand jury that the day of the Biltmore fires, he attended a meeting at East Los Angeles College with the Brown Berets and friends where guerrilla warfare tactics and civil disobedience were discussed.

According to Sumaya, Carlos Montez, 21, the Brown Berets' minister of information, interrupted the meeting, saying the group shouldn't just sit around talking about guerrilla warfare tactics but should put them into practice.

Sumaya said Montez urged the group to begin that night at the Biltmore, when Gov. Reagan was to speak.

Indicted with Montez and eight non-Brown Berets was Ralph Ramirez, 19, the Berets' minister of discipline.

Original Leaders

Sanchez, Montez and Ramirez are the original leadership of an organization which began in 1967 as Young Citizens for Community Action. As it became militant, the organization's name evolved into the Young Chicanos for Community Action and then the Brown Berets.

Sanchez, who was president of Mayor Sam Yorty's Advisory Commission on Youth in 1967, still lives with his parents in a neat, well-furnished home (including a color TV set) in East Los Angeles.

On the wall of the living room is one of those silk souvenir banners service men buy for their mothers or sweethearts. This one was sent to Sanchez' mother by her other son, Michael, 23, who recently returned from fighting in Vietnam.

Well-Kept Home

The well-kept lower middle-class home is in sharp contrast to the Brown Beret headquarters at 4715 E. Olympic Blvd. where Sanchez spends much of his time after attending classes at Cal State Los Angeles.

The headquarters windows are boarded up and revolutionary posters pasted on them. Inside, the walls are covered with murals depicting Mexican-Indian civilizations.

On one wall is the startling legend in large black letters "Por mi raza mato." (For my race, I kill.) The organization was recently given an eviction notice by the landlord. The previous Brown Beret headquarters on Soto St. was bombed last Christmas Eve.

Montez Background

Montez, who tends to be the organization's visionary, used to work as an assistant Teen Post director, lives near Sanchez' home and is a native of Mexico. A lean, intense young man who often sports a Zapata moustache, Montez is noted for his articulateness on the Chicano movement and his wit.

Ramirez, a beefy and laconic young tough, often travels to New Mexico from where his family came and likes to identify with the Indian as well as the Chicano.

"We try to bring about changes to help our people by working through conventional channels, including war on poverty programs," says Sanchez. "But we soon found out the insensitivity and corruption of establishment bureaucracy and left in disgust."

Open Coffee Shop

Changing their organization's name to Young Chicano Youths for Community Action, Sanchez, Montez and Ramirez opened up a coffee house, La Piranya, in late 1967 with the help of an interfaith church organization.

By now the Young Chicano Youths for Community Action had taken on an ethnic nationalism image and were openly feuding with the Sheriffs Department and the police.

The coffee house served as an office and meeting hall. Reies Tijerina, Cesar Chavez and black militants H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael and Ron Karenga met there with the group which by now had adopted its present name, the Brown Berets.

Plagued by inadequate licensing, curfew violations, insufficient funds and "police harassment," La Piranya closed on March 3, 1968, three days before the East Los Angeles High School walkouts.

At the time of the walkouts, Sanchez denied that the Brown Berets were, as the police charged, among the "outside agitators" who helped cause the student disturbances.

"The Chicano students were the main action group," Sanchez says. "The Brown Berets were at the walkouts to protect our younger people. When they (law officers) started hitting with sticks, we went in, did our business, and got out."

The "business" Sanchez explains, means that "we put ourselves between the police and the kids, and took the beating."

Shock Troops

Sanchez says the Brown Berets, which could be called the shock troops of the Chicano movement, think and feel so alike that "we need few words to communicate with each other."

Most of the members were once "batos locos," literally barrio gang toughs, successors to the zootsuiters of the 1940s.

"The Brown Berets recruit from the rebels without a cause and make them rebels with a cause," says Sanchez.

The Brown Beret Manual stresses personal cleanliness, strict discipline, prohibition of drugs and excessive drinking and strict attendance at "all meetings, all demonstrations and drills."

"I wear the Brown Beret," says the organization's pledge, "because it signifies my dignity and pride in the color of my skin and race."

Because of the presumed close-knit makeup of the Brown Berets, it came as quite a shock to them that they had been infiltrated by the police.

On May 10, before the Biltmore fires, Sumaya, the police infiltrator, and three others who Sanchez says were trying to become Brown Berets but were not, were arrested following a fire at an East Los Angeles Safeway store.

Sumaya said he tipped off the police but allowed himself to be arrested for security reasons. The other three have been indicted by the grand jury.

As for Sumaya, Sanchez says "his mind has been messed with—the poor guy is trying to be a white Anglo."

"I was in jail when he joined the Brown Berets last December," Sanchez said. "It is a clear case of entrapment. It is obvious that he designed and manufactured the events that led to the indictments."

"The day after the fires he told me how it was he who removed the battery from the Biltmore elevator to stop it. He said he was afraid the hotel manager might have seen him but he really bragged about his part."

Sanchez said he started suspecting Sumaya early "because he would never be with me by himself. He always had someone with him."

The Brown Beret leader said he then had someone call Sumaya's old school in Calexico. Posing as a potential employer, the Brown Beret asked where Sumaya's school transcripts had been sent.

The school said they had been mailed to an Alhambra adult school. Using the same ruse, the Brown Berets learned Sumaya's transcripts were then sent to the Los Angeles Police Department.

One day, a Brown Beret called Sumaya's home and asked whether S-257, Sumaya's code name, was there, according to Sanchez. Told that he was, the Beret instructed the officer to report to Hollenbeck Police Station. When Sumaya reported there, the Brown Berets were sure they had been infiltrated.

Other Infiltration

At a recent news conference at the Greater Los Angeles Press Club, Sanchez claimed two other law-enforcement officers infiltrated the Brown Berets. The Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, financed by the Ford Foundation, says it is interested in looking into the Brown Berets' charge of entrapment.

Asked whether the Brown Berets would retaliate against Sumaya if they could, Sanchez said: "No, he's got a wife and a family and he was doing what he thought was his job. Besides, we don't do things which will be used by the press merely for the entertainment of the white middle class."

On the issue of anti-Anglo sentiment, the Brown Beret leadership is unequivocal. They say they don't care what the "white establishment or press" thinks of the organization. "Our only concern is Chicanos," said Sanchez.

Dangerous Aspect

This extreme ethnic nationalism, say some concerned observers, is what could be the most dangerous aspect of the Brown Berets. Admired by activists and high school students, the Brown Berets are working hard to polarize "Chicano youth."

In a study by social scientists Fields and Fox it is pointed out that "the militancy of the Brown Berets is not much different from that of the Students for Democratic Society (SDS), Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the earlier Israeli Youth in Palmach."

"As for the group (Brown Berets) as it is currently constituted, its main concern is to achieve an interfactional unity which would, through

presenting a united front, give Chicanos a modicum of political power at least comparable to the current Negro condition . . .," the study said.

UC Mexican-American Adviser Quits in Anger
July 3, 1969

The University of California's top adviser on Mexican-Americans has resigned, calling the university program for Chicano students "totally inadequate," The Times learned Wednesday.

Paul Sanchez, special adviser on Mexican-American affairs to UC President Charles Hitch, quit after serving six months. In a letter to Hitch, Sanchez charged that he found "pervasive elements of racism exist with most people I met (in the university system) from chancellors on down."

He said his "evaluation" after six months is that the university's efforts in Mexican-American student recruitment, employment, curriculum development, studies and research "are so negligible as to stand as an indictment of the institution's meager commitment to the largest minority population in the state."

Sanchez said his letter, dated June 30, has not been answered by Hitch. He said he has accepted the directorship of San Jose State College's graduate department of social work.

Plans Meeting

In a telephone interview from Berkeley, Hitch told The Times he declined comment on Sanchez' letter but said he was "very concerned and very disappointed that there are so few Chicanos at the university in all levels."

"I don't know why this is so," Hitch said, "but I am determined to do something about it. I will soon meet with a group of concerned Chicano faculty members and administrators to discuss the problem."

Asked whether there was any question about Sanchez' competency prior to his resignation, Hitch said no. He would not comment on why he has not answered Sanchez' letter, saying only that he plans to meet with "concerned Chicano faculty members and administrators."

Sanchez, who holds a master of arts degree in social science from the University of Colorado, was a member of the Santa Clara County Social Planning Council before joining the UC staff.

In his letter, Sanchez said that with rare exceptions he found "the

university staff completely lacks a sensitivity and commitment to Chicano needs."

"The (Mexican-American) exclusion processes have been solidly institutionalized, and administrators are clearly ignorant of the nature of these processes," Sanchez continued.

"The pervasive elements of racism exist with most people I met from chancellors on down . . ."

Sanchez charged that this alleged racism "is not only tolerated but abetted by responsible people." The University, he asserted, "is not marshalling its resources or rearranging its priorities to deal with the needs of Chicanos in any kind of equitable or realistic manner, which is clear evidence to me of the failure to face up to these university-wide problems."

Sanchez said that of the 600 persons employed at University Hall, the administration headquarters of the 100,000-student university system, there were only "two Chicanos on significant positions" (himself and another one) and "about half a dozen secretaries."

"This is typical of the situation which does not even approach the reprehensible level of a token effort," Sanchez said.

University officials said there is no way of accurately telling how many Mexican-American students are enrolled at the university campuses, but Hitch said that "whatever the number there are too few."

Local Control Held Key to Chicanos' Struggle
September 9, 1969

Stanford's new assistant dean of students for Mexican-American relations thinks community control of schools, the police force and hospitals is essential if California Chicanos are to catch up with Negroes in the struggle for equality of opportunity.

Felix Gutierrez, 26, former public information officer for the Los Angeles Economic and Youth Opportunities Agency, became Stanford's first Mexican-American assistant dean of students Sept. 1.

In a telephone interview, Gutierrez said that "when a situation demands militancy, Chicano and black students can well join forces to achieve mutual goals."

"But in the long run," Gutierrez said, "Chicanos must work apart from the blacks because of national and language differences and also work apart from the white community because of the apparently unbridgeable gulf of prejudice and hostility of the Anglo population."

Community control, especially in places like East Los Angeles, Gutierrez said, is especially important because "outsiders who don't know or care about the community's needs" control the schools, the economy, the police force and the hospitals.

"Chicanos should be able to control their present and future as does the establishment," Gutierrez asserted.

Stanford has increased its enrollment of Chicano students from last year's 57 to about 200, Gutierrez said.

Gutierrez, who was student body president of Cal State Los Angeles and that college's adviser to the United Mexican-American Students, said he expects there will be some special problems among new Chicano students at Stanford because of the university's "upper middle-class white orientation."

He said, however, that private institutions "do not bow to backlash as readily as do public ones."

Gutierrez expressed surprise at Stanford's "far-flung efforts to recruit Chicano students," noting that the neighboring San Jose area has one of the largest Mexican-American populations in the state.

Stanford plans a series of seminars on the Mexican-American community in early October.

Black and Chicano Ties Worsen After Walkout at Santa Barbara
September 15, 1969

Relations between Mexican-American and black activists in California colleges and universities—which are cool at best—have deteriorated as a result of a Chicano walkout during an educational opportunity workshop at UC Santa Barbara.

Chicano students and administrators stalked out of the private conference after black participants refused to support a resolution which in effect emphasized that there are more Mexican-Americans than there are Negroes in California.

Black and Chicano students and administrators—representing most California colleges and universities—met August 13-15 in the Francisco Torres Conference Center to discuss problems faced by Educational Opportunity Programs throughout the state.

In a report of the closed conference just released, however, it was revealed that much of the conference time was used "to bring into the open underlying hostilities between the Chicanos and black participants."

The report said the Chicano caucus charged at the conference that:

—"The black, because of his national push, has gotten the lion's share of the 'goodies."'

—"In California and the Southwest he (the black) is using the Chicano to get funds but utilizing these funds only for his own people."

(This meant, a Chicano caucus spokesman said later, that Negro officials receive money to help "minorities" and help only blacks.)

—"All major positions opening up are filled by black faces," especially on campuses, "with the result that Chicano kids are not entering colleges at the rate they should be."

Chicanos told the conference that it is the blacks who are "pushing" for a "coalition" but that when such a coalition is formed the blacks try to control it.

"Blacks say that blacks and browns are fighting over the white man's bone, but that isn't so," the report said. "The black man has the white man's bone and is fighting to keep the Chicano away from it."

Chicanos walked out of the conference, the Chicano caucus said, after the blacks refused to support a resolution which said in part:

"Each institution of higher education must reflect in its student body, representation of Chicanos proportional to the Chicano population of its immediate service area or to the Chicano population statewide, whichever is higher."

Had the blacks supported this resolution, it would have meant in effect that blacks approved the Chicano demand that Chicanos be given preference in California colleges on the basis that Spanish-speaking people are the largest minority in California.

The argument, plus the continuing shortage of money, had earlier threatened the Educational Opportunity Program at San Jose State College. There, Chicanos demanded and got a larger share of this year's EOP students.

San Jose Figures

At first, there were to have been 275 new Chicano students at San Jose State and 225 blacks. After bitter protests by Chicanos, the figures were changed to 350 for Chicanos and 250 for blacks.

The Chicanos won this victory by pointing out that in the San Jose area there are 50,000 to 60,000 Mexican-Americans and only about 4,000 or 5,000 Negroes.

Chicanos complain that national exposure of Negro problems has

clouded the fact that in California and throughout the Southwest, Mexican-Americans outnumber Negroes.

Latest U.S. Census Bureau figures show there are about 22 million Negroes in the United States. Figures for Mexican-Americans are much more difficult to determine because Spanish-surname people are counted as "whites."

After pressuring from the U.S. Inter-Agency Committee on Mexican-American Affairs and many Mexican-American organizations in the Southwest, the U.S. Census had committed itself to a comprehensive count of Spanish-surname people in the United States during the 1970 census.

Mexican-American organizations contend there are from 8 to 10 million Spanish-surname Americans. In California, the Mexican-American Opportunity Foundation says that information obtained from the census bureau shows that Mexican-Americans comprised 53.1% of the state's minority population, while the Negroes number 32.9% of the minority population.

Request to Blacks

When the Chicanos at the Santa Barbara conference asked the blacks to back the resolution demanding representation of Chicanos in California colleges proportional to the Chicano population, the Chicanos were asking that the blacks admit publicly Mexican-Americans' greater numbers in California and in the Southwest.

The blacks caucused for about an hour and a half and then returned to the conference to report that the blacks voted not to support the resolution because they were not representative of all black people.

The blacks said, however, that they would ask the Black Educators Conference in Atlanta Aug. 21-24 for consideration of the Chicano demand.

At this point the Chicanos accused the blacks of "copping out" and walked out of the conference.

Ernie Clark, black EOP director at Cal State Long Beach, said the Black Educators Conference voted to cooperate with Chicanos but that it did not back the resolution.

"The black educators at the Atlanta conference felt supporting the Chicano resolution might enhance blacks to Chicanos in California but would be unrealistic in other parts of the country," he said.

Judge's Latin Slurs Bring Call for Removal
October 2, 1969

SAN JOSE—Demands mounted here Wednesday for the resignation of a Superior Court judge who made anti-Mexican remarks from the bench and said "maybe Hitler was right" about destroying the "animals in our society."

A court transcript shows that Judge Gerald S. Chargin in sentencing a 17-year-old Mexican-American boy for incest said:

". . . Mexican people, after 13 years of age, think it is perfectly all right to go out and act like an animal . . . we ought to send you out of the country—send you back to Mexico. You belong in prison for the rest of your life for doing things of this kind. You ought to commit suicide . . . ."

The judge then went on to say that "maybe Hitler was right. The animals in our society probably ought to be destroyed because they have no right to live among human beings . . ."

Wednesday about 200 members of Mexican-American organizations and civil rights groups picketed the Superior Court building in downtown San Jose. This city of 450,000 people has the largest Spanish surname population in urban Northern California.

A meeting between community representatives and presiding judge Joseph Kelley was unproductive, according to Paul Sanchez, chairman of the graduate school of social welfare at San Jose State College.

"Judge Kelley informed about 30 leaders of the Mexican-American community that he could do nothing," Sanchez said.

"He rightfully informed us that he has no jurisdiction in getting Judge Chargin off the bench. However, what shocked us is that Judge Kelley was not sufficiently morally shocked by Judge Chargin's behavior to support us even philosophically."

Sanchez said that the community is in a very volatile mood and that "anything could happen."

Chargin, 65, member of an old San Jose family of ranchers, told newsmen that "juvenile court proceedings are private for the protection of the minor and the family involved."

"Only those persons directly concerned are allowed to be present. For this reason it is difficult to comment as fully and freely as otherwise might be the case."

Excerpts from the transcript which showed what Chargin said were distributed by the California Rural Legal Assistance and the Community

Service Organization, a Mexican-American group. The names of the juveniles involved were not disclosed in the excerpts distributed.

The Mexican-American boy was charged with incest with his 15-year-old sister, who is mentally retarded. The boy claims he is innocent and that he pleaded guilty only because attorneys advised him to do so in order that the case would not go to trial.

The boy was arrested after the County Welfare Department learned about the girl's pregnancy.

Chargin placed the boy on probation.

Because of the controversy and because juvenile cases are usually dealt with in private, it could not be confirmed that attorneys advised the young defendant to plead guilty.

However, Al Pinon, head of the San Jose Community Organization, said this aspect of the case "is of much interest to the community and we are going to insist that it be explored."

Pinon, a San Jose real estate man, said he had "good information" that the youth had been told to plead guilty.

"Not only was the whole Mexican-American community insulted," Pinon said, "but apparently our people are also forced, you might say, to plead guilty to crimes their have not committed."

Don Kates of the California Rural Legal Assistance said he understands the youth was advised to plead guilty but that "this is strictly what the boy said and I have nothing to back it up right now."

Kates said that if the case had gone to trial and the boy had been found guilty, he could have received up to 20 years in prison.

Judge 'Goes Along'

The court transcript shows that Judge Chargin decided to "go along with the [Juvenile Probation Department's] recommendation" and placed the boy on probation.

The San Jose Human Relations Commission, in a meeting marked with emotional protests from the Mexican-American community, voted unanimously Tuesday to ask that Judge Chargin be disbarred "if it is true that he said what the transcript says he said."

Judge Chargin has not denied the authenticity of the transcript made available to the public.

Speaking about the remarks that he made in court, Chargin told newsmen that the distribution of the excerpts was "not only a disservice to the youth and family involved but may involve a violation of the law."

The California Rural Legal Assistance said no law has been violated because the names of the minors were not divulged.

The group confirmed that it has complained to the State Judicial Qualifications Commission which has been asked to remove Chargin from the bench.

The judge told newsmen that "I am compelled to set the record straight in this regard. The case involved the admitted unnatural crime of incest between a 17-year-old boy and his 15-year-old sister, who is now pregnant. Without revealing more of the facts, it was a situation which was so revolting it offended my sense of morality and conscience."

Chargin said that he is not prejudiced against any ethnic group.

"I am pleased to say that my entire adult life, both in the law and on the Superior Court bench, has been an effort and a striving for justice for all."

"The most recent example of this is my nomination of the only Mexican-American individual presently serving on the County Grand Jury."

Pinon told newsmen that Chargin's remarks were "racist, bigoted, biased and defamatory to all individuals of Mexican ancestry and we cannot in good conscience, remain silent . . ."

According to the court transcript, right after Chargin made his remarks about the Mexican people, animals and Hitler, the boy's attorney, Fred Lucero, interrupted:

"Your honor, I don't think I can sit here and listen to that sort of thing."

The judge answered, "You're going to have to listen to it because I consider this a very vulgar rotten human being."

Later, Lucero said, "What appalls me is that the court is saying that Hitler was right in genocide."

To that the judge answered:

"What are we going to do with mad dogs in our society? Either we have to kill them or send them to an institution or place them out of the hands of good people because that's the theory—one theory of punishment is that they get to the position that they want to act like mad dogs, then we have to separate them from society."

In his statement to the press, Chargin said that the reason he made those statements was that "it is an accepted fact that these lectures (in court) are stated in harsh terms to impress upon the minds of the youth the seriousness of the situation in which they find themselves."

"Sometimes, the words of the lecture are purposely accentuated and

exaggerated. However, it is to the ultimate disposition of this case that one must look."

"In this case, the youth was returned to his grandmother, as a ward of the court under supervision of the Juvenile Probation Department, which followed the recommendation of the Juvenile Probation Department."

"Suffice it to say, much harsher alternative dispositions were available to me."

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights said that it would investigate the matter.

Meanwhile, leaders of the Mexican-American community in San Jose said they were having trouble keeping militants from taking drastic steps.

Pinon said the Mexican-American community would be satisfied only with the removal of Chargin from the bench. He said that although it is true that Judge Kelley cannot remove Chargin, he does have the authority to transfer him from the juvenile court.

"But Judge Kelley is not willing to do even that," Pinon said. "It seems to us that Judge Kelley has a moral responsibility here as far as the Mexican-American community is concerned to at least side with us philosophically. We cannot have this sort of man (Chargin) on the bench." ^[*]

800 Supporters of Sal Castro March on School Board
October 7, 1969

About 800 supporters of controversial teacher Sal Castro marched Monday from the Old Plaza near Olvera St. to the Board of Education to protest the proposed transfer of the East Los Angeles Chicano teacher.

Led by a mariachi band the peaceful marchers held a rally in the board building's patio while representatives of the group spoke before the board.

Castro, under indictment for alleged conspiracy in last year's eastside high school walkouts had been transferred from Lincoln High School but later was reinstated by the board.

Before the summer vacation this year, Principal George Ingles again asked for the transfer of Castro, charging that the teacher had violated school rules, including tardiness.

* Judge Gerald S. Chargin was not removed from the bench but was instead transferred to a nonjuvenile court.

At the beginning of the current semester Castro was assigned temporarily as a translator in the administration offices downtown pending a ruling by a board of review.

The Rev. Vahac Madirosian, chairman of the board-created Mexican-American Education Commission, charged at Monday's board meeting that in assigning Castro to a downtown job while the board of review was studying the case, a board rule had been violated.

The rule was adopted after Castro was transferred last time to protect teachers from being transferred until they had hearings.

Board president Arthur Gardner told the meeting the rule did not apply in this case and later addressed the unfriendly crowd in the patio.

Gardner explained that since a review board will start deliberations on the Castro case Oct. 15, the board cannot return Castro to Lincoln High School now, as the crowd demanded.^[*]

Bilingual Texas Public School Gains Support
October 13, 1969

LAREDO, Tex.—When the children at Nye Elementary School here pledge allegiance to the Flag, they do it in English and in Spanish. These children are participating in what is probably the only truly bilingual public school educational program in the United States.

In Los Angeles and other parts of the Southwest with large Mexican-American populations, limited bilingual programs are geared to helping Spanish-speaking students make the transition into English instruction as soon as possible.

Spanish is used as a tool only until the children are proficient enough in English to use it exclusively in classes. No attempt is made to improve the quality of the children's Spanish, much less make Spanish an educational tool for the whole community.

At Nye, where the students are roughly half Anglo and half Mexican-American, the teachers and school administrators believe the Southwest's bicultural and bilingual traditions should be expanded instead of "phased-out."

Nye is one of three grammar schools in the rural United Consolidated School District of Webb County, Tex., which borders on Mexico.

The children from grade one to five not only pay their respects to the

* By late 1969 Sal Castro was reinstated to his former teaching post at Lincoln High School. He continues to teach in the East Los Angeles schools.

Flag in both languages but are taught all their classes, reading, writing and arithmetic, in English and in Spanish concurrently.

At a recent second grade reading class, a blond, blue-eyed boy went to the blackboard to take dictation from the teacher, Mrs. Rosario Garcia.

Yo tengo un libro rojo , the Anglo boy wrote as the teacher dictated. A Mexican-American boy was then called to translate the sentence into English. The Spanish-speaking student wrote, "I have a book red." "What is wrong with that sentence?" the teacher asked the class.

An Anglo boy made the correction on the board. "I have a red book." The adjective in English, unlike in Spanish comes before the noun and not after it, the boy explained in simple English all could understand.

"This time the English-speaking student helped the Spanish-speaking one correct his English," Mrs. Garcia told a visitor. "Sometimes it's the other way around. The result is that both learn English and Spanish at the same time. Communication among kids is fantastic."

After much experimentation, the district has decided to work on this theory: As long as there are Anglos and Mexican-Americans attending school together the language of both should be used to the advantage of both.

Bilingual education in most areas is conducted in classes totally Mexican-American because the idea is to use Spanish only until English is learned.

"This is not truly bilingual education," says Mrs. Dolores Alvarado Earles, chairman of the district's program. "This is just a way of helping the Spanish-speaking student rid himself of what is considered a hindrance, the Spanish language."

"We believe the knowledge of Spanish is a blessing which should be developed by the Mexican-American child and shared with his Anglo fellow student."

The district's superintendent, Harold C. Brantley, has made a national reputation for expounding this philosophy in the pedagogic world where bilingual education is still a vaguely defined concept.

Brantley, as Texas as Lyndon B. Johnson, on the surface seems an unlikely exponent of bilingualism, especially in a state where in parts

"Mexican" is still a dirty word.

The 60-year-old educator has the demeanor of a no-nonsense Texan, wears a diamond in his Rotary pin and has no sympathy for school militants, whether they be Chicano, black or Anglo.

This "conservative" appearance is deceiving. On the wall of his office,

decorated with student art work, is a sign which reads, "If a child lives with ridicule, he learns to be shy. If he lives with approval, he learns to like himself."

To him, terms such as "culturally deprived" or "disadvantaged" when used to describe children make no sense at all.

No fuzzy-brained idealist, Brantley makes it clear that helping the Mexican-American child "enter the mainstream of the dominant culture and the dominant language of the country is very important."

Provide Opportunity

"We try to do this," says Brantley. "But we also try to stress to that child who comes from this other culture, speaking this other language, that we want to provide him with the opportunity to improve upon his knowledge of his culture and his ability to function in his own vernacular."

"We try to create an atmosphere in the classroom where the children who come to us from the dominant culture, speaking the dominant language recognize that the Mexican-American kid has something that he, the Anglo child, doesn't have and that Anglo kids ought to be interested in getting what this other little kid can teach him."

The Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame University and chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, has said Brantley's program has "cut the Gordian knot," because it has "taken what seems to many people to be a problem and made it a great education advantage."

For years, educators in the Southwest have tried to sell the idea that both Anglos and Mexican-Americans could benefit from bilingual education.

Resistance to this idea has been constant since the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, when Mexico lost half of its territory to the United States. The general attitude of the Anglo establishment has been that the English language and Anglo culture should be stressed exclusively.

Historians say that one of the reasons New Mexico and Arizona were admitted to the union so late was legislators' resistance to a bilingual and bicultural people.

Differing View

Some educators feel the plan is utopian at best and that bilingual education should confine itself to helping the Mexican-American child make

the all important transition into the mainstream of our dominant English language and Anglo culture.

Armando Rodriguez, chief of the Mexican-American affairs unit of the U.S. Office of Education, disagrees:

"We must use the Mexican-American cultural heritage to rich advantage in our educational system," he says. "This country has assumed the monocultural and monolingual role for generations. We have always stripped our immigrants of their language and culture and expected them to conform to our customs and traditions . . . to the American way of life."

"We must recognize the contribution of other cultures to the American heritage and must stop trying to blot out differences."

The scarcity of bilingual teachers, of course, prevents most school districts from adopting such a successful bilingual program.

One of the reasons for this is that Texas has a better record than California in the enrollment of and graduating of college students of Spanish surnames who would presumably become bilingual teachers.

In the 1968-69 school year, for instance, figures from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare for the Inter-Agency Committee on Mexican-American Affairs show that while University of Texas enrolled 852 Mexican-American students, UCLA enrolled only 325 (UCLA says the figure should be closer to 500).

The figures show that of the 852 Mexican-American students enrolled at the University of Texas, 208 graduated. Figures for UCLA's graduating Mexican-Americans for this year are not available.

The figures also show that Arizona and New Mexico were ahead of UCLA in the number of enrolled and graduating Mexican-Americans.

In Los Angeles, which has the largest Mexican-American population in the country, the school district has not as yet defined its bilingual education programs as clearly as has Supt. Brantley in Laredo.

The Malabar project, for instance, Los Angeles' best-known bilingual program, almost lost its federal funds because, according to the U.S. Office of Education:

"The foundation for the program rests almost exclusively . . . in [a proposal] concerned entirely with English-as-a-second-language instruction, rather than a bilingual approach. Nowhere is there any indication that the child's mother tongue will be used as a tool of instruction in grades one through three."

The Malabar project, highly praised by those educators who do not feel the district is ready to define bilingual education, at least until more bilingual teachers are available, was saved through the pressure applied by the California congressional delegation.

Latins' Image in Advertising Held 'Inferior'
October 20, 1969

Some mass media advertisers are depicting Mexican-Americans in a prejudiced, stereotyped fashion, according to a Stanford University sociologist.

In a study called "Advertising and Racism: The Case of the Mexican-American," Thomas M. Martinez, director of Stanford's Mexican-American Seminars, asserted that "racist thinking" is behind many T.V. magazine and newspaper ads depicting Spanish-speaking people.

The study, researched with the help of sociology students, is being widely distributed among educators and Mexican-American organizations.

Presented at Stanford's first seminar on Mexican-Americans, now in progress, the study asserts that this advertising trend "symbolically reaffirms the inferior social status of Mexicans" in the eyes of viewers and readers of the mass media.

The "Frito Bandido" corn chip TV commercial, which has been fought by the Mexican-American Anti-Defamation Committee throughout the country, is given special attention in the study.

'Frito' Cartoon Character

"Seldom a day goes by in the United States without at least one young Mexican-American being called, 'Frito Bandido,"' it says. "Indeed, this cartoon caricature of a short, mustached, two-gunned thief is very effective . . . in terms of making the out-group appear inferior and the in-group superior."

"The Mexican-American children are paying the price in loss of self-esteem for the Frito-Lay Corp.'s successful advertising attempt at product association."

A student of Martinez' racial and cultural minorities course, who wrote the company complaining about the Frito Bandido commercial, got the following answer from the corporation's director of advertising:

" . . .We did not and never have had any racist intentions in presenting the Frito Bandido cartoon character. It was meant to be a single character which is intended to make you laugh, in turn we hope that this laughter will leave our trademark implanted in your memory . . ."

"Tell this to the Mexican-American kids," said Martinez. "They have the Frito-Lay Corp. to thank for adding another racial stereotype to our language."

As for the corporation's explanation that Frito Bandido was created "to make you laugh," Martinez asked, "Is humor less harmful . . . than outright verbal statements expressing deeply held racial prejudice?"

The Stanford sociologist said that "Freud believed that humor was a reflection of unconscious, repressed feelings."

"Many of the same people who claim not to be prejudiced easily laugh at ethnocentric jokes and are amused by stereotyped characters. Does our laughter betray us? It most certainly does," Martinez said.

To find nothing objectionable or distasteful about advertising's image of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans suggests tacit agreement with the image, he added.

Martinez cited nine major advertisers, which the study charges with slurring Mexican-Americans.

For example, he told about the TV commercial that shows "a band of horse-riding, ferocious looking Mexican bandidos emerging from a cloud of dust." The band is called to a halt by the sombrero-covered, thick-mustached, fat-bellied leader, who, upon stopping, reaches with the utmost care for a small object from his saddlebags.

He picks up the object, lifts up his arm and smiles slyly-to spray Arid deodorant.

An American Midwestern voice is then heard over the television saying "If it works for him, it will work for you."

"The message," says Martinez, "is that Mexicans stink the most."

Others Mentioned

Other mass media advertisements in this same vein mentioned by the study include those of Granny Goose Potato Chips, Liggett & Meyers, A. J. Reynolds, Camel Cigarets, General Motors, Philco-Ford and Frigidaire.

"Not only are advertisers exhibiting racist thinking at the expense of everyone of Mexican descent," the study says, "but they are also creating, in many cases, unfavorable racial and cultural stereotypes in minds that previously did not harbor them."

Latins Form Distinct Class, U.S. Aide Says
October 23, 1969

A spokesman for the federal government Wednesday told a Superior Court hearing on the makeup of the County Grand Jury that Mexican-Americans are a "separate and distinct" class of people.

Phillip Montez, western regional director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, made the assertion at a hearing on a motion to quash the indictment of a Brown Beret and five others on the grounds that the grand jury is "illegally constituted."

The hearing is of special significance to a group which in the past has been identified as "Caucasian."

DA's Position

Because of this, the district attorney has argued that since there are Caucasians on the grand jury, Mexican-Americans are represented.

Oscar Z. Acosta of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund told the hearing that before he can prove Mexican-Americans have been systematically excluded from grand jury service, it must be acknowledged that this ethnic group constitutes a "class" of people.^[*]

To this, Judge Adolph Alexander commented: "Does anyone deny that Mexican-Americans are a definable group?"

"The district attorney does," answered Acosta. Dep. Dist. Atty. Bruce Campbell did not object.

Biltmore Incident

The motion was filed on behalf of Carlos Montez, Brown Beret information minister, and five other Mexican-American activists involved in disturbances April 24 at the Biltmore where Gov. Reagan addressed a Mexican-American education conference.

A similar motion was denied last year in the case of an Eastside high school walkout leader Salvador Castro after the district attorney contended that Mexican-Americans cannot be considered a separate class. This case is on appeal.

Attorneys for Carlos Montez and the five other defendants contend they were wrongfully indicted by the grand jury "in that there has been, and to the present still exists, an unconstitutional underrepresentation of the defendant's peer group of American citizens of Spanish surname on [grand juries], all in violation of the due process and equal protection clauses" of the U.S. Constitution.

* Oscar Zeta Acosta was a writer as well as a militant Chicano attorney. His first book, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (New York: Vintage Books, 1989; orig. pub. 1972), was followed by The Revolt of the Cockroach People (New York: Vintage Books, 1989; orig. pub. 1973). In the mid-1970s, Acosta vanished during a trip to Acapulco. His disappearance has never been explained.

Judges Subpoenaed

Seventy of the 150 Superior Court judges already have been subpoenaed to testify in the hearing, which is expected to last a month.

Acosta says he intends to ask the judges, among other things, the race, ethnic origin, wealth and education of the judges' nominees to the grand jury to determine the class or classes exclusively considered for nomination.

Attorneys Acosta and Hugh Manes presented lists of grand jurors which show that only 1.7% of the ultimately selected persons over the past 11 years have been of Spanish-surname ethnic minority even though this "class" represents about 13% of the county's population.

Judge Alexander told the attorneys he would at first only hear testimony concerning the 1969 grand jury.

The present grand jury has no Mexican-Americans on it. Sitting on the jury, however, are two Negroes, one Chinese and one Filipino.

All, according to Acosta, voted against the indictments.

In 1970 , Salazar became the news director at KMEX , the Spanish-language television station in Los Angeles , and started writing a weekly column for the Times on Chicano issues .

Who Is a Chicano? And What Is It the Chicanos Want?
February 6, 1970

A Chicano is a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself.

He resents being told Columbus "discovered" America when the Chicano's ancestors, the Mayans and the Aztecs, founded highly sophisticated civilizations centuries before Spain financed the Italian explorer's trip to the "New World."

Chicanos resent also Anglo pronouncements that Chicanos are "culturally deprived" or that the fact that they speak Spanish is a "problem."

Chicanos will tell you that their culture predates that of the Pilgrims and that Spanish was spoken in America before English and so the "problem" is not theirs but the Anglos' who don't speak Spanish.

Having told you that, the Chicano will then contend that Anglos are Spanish-oriented at the expense of Mexicans.

They will complain that when the governor dressed up as a Spanish nobleman for the Santa Barbara Fiesta he's insulting Mexicans because the Spanish conquered and exploited the Mexicans.

It's as if the governor dressed like an English Redcoat for a Fourth of July parade, Chicanos say.

When you think you know what Chicanos are getting at, a Mexican-American will tell you that Chicano is an insulting term and may even quote the Spanish Academy to prove that Chicano derives from chicanery.

A Chicano will scoff at this and say that such Mexican-Americans have been brainwashed by Anglos and that they're Tio Tacos (Uncle Toms). This type of Mexican-American, Chicanos will argue, don't like the word Chicano because it's abrasive to their Anglo-oriented minds.

These poor people are brown Anglos, Chicanos will smirk.

What, then, is a Chicano? Chicanos say that if you have to ask you'll never understand, much less become, a Chicano.

Actually, the word Chicano is as difficult to define as "soul."

For those who like simplistic answers, Chicano can be defined as short for Mexicano. For those who prefer complicated answers, it has been suggested that Chicano may have come from the word Chihuahua—the name of a Mexican state bordering on the United States. Getting trickier, this version then contends that Mexicans who migrated to Texas call themselves Chicanos because having crossed into the United States from Chihuahua they adopted the first three letters of that state, Chi, and then added cano, for the latter part of Texano.

Such explanations, however, tend to miss the whole point as to why Mexican-American activists call themselves Chicanos.

Mexican-Americans, the second largest minority in the country and the largest in the Southwestern states (California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado), have always had difficulty making up their minds what to call themselves.

In New Mexico, they call themselves Spanish-Americans. In other parts of the Southwest they call themselves Americans of Mexican descent, people with Spanish surnames or Hispanos.

Why, ask some Mexican-Americans, can't we just call ourselves Americans?

Chicanos are trying to explain why not. Mexican-Americans, though indigenous to the Southwest, are on the lowest rung scholastically, economically, socially and politically. Chicanos feel cheated. They want to effect change. Now.

Mexican-Americans average eight years of schooling compared to the Negroes' 10 years. Farm workers, most of whom are Mexican-American in the Southwest, are excluded from the National Labor Relations Act,

unlike other workers. Also, Mexican-Americans often have to compete for low-paying jobs with their Mexican brothers from across the border who are willing to work for even less. Mexican-Americans have to live with the stinging fact that the word Mexican is the synonym for inferior in many parts of the Southwest.

That is why Mexican-American activists flaunt the barrio word Chicano—as an act of defiance and a badge of honor. Mexican-Americans, though large in numbers, are so politically impotent that in Los Angeles, where the country's largest single concentration of Spanish-speaking live, they have no one of their own on the City Council. This, in a city politically sophisticated enough to have three Negro councilmen.

Chicanos, then, are merely fighting to become "Americans." Yes, but with a Chicano outlook.

A Mexican-American Hyphen
February 13, 1970

The U.S.-Mexican border, or la frontera, is an 1,800-mile-long, virtually imaginary line of barbed wire fencing, an undergrowth of mesquite or chaparral and an easily forded river.

Orators, both American and Mexican, like to describe the border separating their countries as one of the two only such unfortified frontiers in the world, the other being the U.S.-Canadian border.

To many Americans living in the Southwest and to many Mexicans living in northern Mexico, however, the border is symbolic of the negative differences between the two nations.

Americans who know only the shady aspects of the border towns think of Mexico as a place where they can enjoy doing what is not allowed at home—but would be shocked, the morning after, if such goings on were allowed in "America."

Mexicans not lucky enough to be among the Latin affluent think of the American border towns as gold mines where nuggets can be picked off the streets. And when they discover this is not true, they blast the Americans as exploiters, unmindful that they had created their own false image of the United States.

These superficial and inaccurate concepts of both countries help only to widen the understanding gap between two peoples who are so close geographically and in many other ways so far apart.

That may help explain why Mexican-Americans can feel a deep and agonizing ambivalence about themselves.

They can love the United States for reasons Mexicans cannot understand, while loving Mexico for reasons Americans can understand.

Being a Mexican-American, a wag once said, can leave you with only the hyphen.

On the United States' other border there are no such esoteric considerations.

Canadians may conceivably feel bitter about the fact that the British Empire lost the 13 colonies but this chauvinism is tempered by knowing that, after all, Canadians and Americans communicate easily and enjoy more or less the same material goods.

Chauvinistic Mexicans, however, are very cognizant of the fact that Mexico lost what is now the American Southwest to the United States in the Mexican-American War which even Gen. Ulysses S. Grant called "unfair."

Mexicans like to argue that if the United States had not "stolen" half of Mexico's territory, Mexico would be as rich as the United States is now. This historical controversy, now for the most part taken lightly, might have disappeared altogether by now, it is said, if Mexicans and Americans spoke the same language on both sides of the border and so understood each other better.

Yet, many Mexican-Americans in the Southwest, who speak both languages and admire both countries, feel strangely foreign in their own land.

Members of other minorities—Italians, Irish, Poles, etc.—often wonder why Mexican-Americans have not been able to assimilate as well as they have.

They tend to forget that Italy, Ireland, Poland, etc., are oceans away from the United States while Mexico is very much in evidence to the Southwest's eight million or so Mexican-Americans.

This makes it difficult for the Mexican-Americans to think of Mexico in the abstract as, for instance, Irish-Americans might think of Ireland.

The problems of Mexico are and will remain relevant to the Mexican-American. Relations between Mexico and the United States can affect the Mexican-American in the Southwest materially and emotionally.

In the border areas, for instance, the large number of Mexicans crossing the international line everyday to work in the United States can directly affect the economic lives of Mexican-Americans, who must compete with this cheap labor.

Projects such as Operation Intercept, a crackdown on dope smuggling across the Mexican border, hurt the pride of southwest Mexican-

Americans who feel the United States is trying to blame Mexicans for a problem which is to a large extent uniquely "Anglo."

The border may indeed be unfortified, but it separates two people who created the Mexican-American—a person many times tormented by the pull of two distinct cultures.

Chicanos Would Find Identity Before Coalition with Blacks
February 20, 1970

Mexicans and Negroes are learning that they must know each other better if their differences are not to help those who would like to kill the civil rights movement.

This necessary lesson is not easy to come by.

Blacks, scarred by the bitter and sometimes bloody struggle for equality, consider Mexican-Americans or Chicanos as Johnnies-come-lately who should follow black leadership until the Chicanos earn their spurs.

Chicanos, not untouched by bigotry and wary of the more sophisticated black leadership, insist on going their own way because, as they put it, "our problems are different from those of the Negroes."

Despite the loud mouthings of radicals, most blacks and Chicanos want the same thing: a fair chance to enter the mainstream of American society without abandoning their culture and uniqueness.

Much has been made of late of the growing rift between Negroes and Mexican-Americans. Chicanos complain that blacks get most of the government help in the fight against racism, while Negroes scoff that Mexican-Americans have not carried their share of the burden in the civil rights movement.

Leaders of both communities throw up their arms in despair, saying that the blacks and browns are fighting over peanuts and that political coalitions must be formed to make a real impact on the establishment.

Blacks and browns have always been cast together by the forces of history and the needs of these two peoples.

Los Angeles, for instance, was founded not by Spanish caballeros, as romantics would have it, but by blacks and browns.

Historian H. Bancroft points out that Los Angeles was founded on Sept. 4, 1781, with 12 settlers and their families, 46 persons in all, "whose blood was a strange mixture of Indian (Mexican) and Negro with here and there a trace of Spanish."

C. D. Willard, another historian, adds that "cataloguing this extraordinary collection of adults by nationality or color, we have two Spaniards, one mestizo, two Negroes, eight mulattoes and nine [Mexican] Indians."

The children of the settlers, continues Willard, were even more mixed, as follows: Spanish-Indian, four; Spanish-Negro, five; NegroIndian, eight; Spanish-Negro-Indian, eight; Spanish-Negro-Indian, three; Indian, two.

Since then, Mexicans and Negroes have more or less followed their own separate destinies, due partly to their cultural and language differences but also because of the racist strain in American society.

Mexican-Americans have a saying about Negroes that goes, "Juntos pero no revueltos"—together but not mixed. Negroes, on the other hand, tend to think of Mexican-Americans—as do many Anglos—as "quaint and foreign."

One hundred and eighty years after the small group of black and brown people settled in what became Los Angeles, however, six Mexican-American children and six Negro children are involved in a Superior Court ruling in which Judge Alfred Gitelson ordered the Los Angeles school district desegregated.

When the Los Angeles school district is finally integrated, history will again have thrown the blacks and the browns together again.

To understand why Mexicans and Negroes are having their differences now, one must look at it in the light of the black revolution.

The revolution exploded partly from a condition which had been known all along but which became the basis for a black-white confrontation: the color of one's skin is all too important in America. White is good, Black is bad.

Faced with an identity crisis, many Mexican-Americans—especially the young who were excited by black militancy—decided they had been misled by the Mexican establishment into apathetic confusion.

It came as a shock at first: Mexican-Americans felt caught between the white and the black. Though counted as "white" by the Bureau of Census, Mexican-Americans were never really thought of as such.

The ambivalence felt vaguely and in silence for so long seemed to crystallize in the wake of the black revolution. A Mexican-American was neither white nor black.

One of the reasons for the growing distrust between Mexicans and Negroes is that the Chicano is still searching for his identity.

As yet, most Mexican-Americans seem not to identify with any one

single overriding problem as Americans. Though they know they're somehow different, many still cling to the idea that Mexican-Americans are Caucasian, thus white, thus "one of the boys."

Many prove it: By looking and living like white Americans, by obtaining and keeping good jobs and by intermarrying with Anglos who never think of it as a "mixed marriage."

Many others, however, feel they have for too long been cheated by tacitly agreeing to be Caucasian in name only. These Mexican-Americans, especially the young Chicanos, feel that the coalition with the Anglos has failed.

And they're not about ready to form a new coalition—this time with the blacks—until they, the Chicanos, find their own identity in their own way.

Mexican-American's Dilemma: He's Unfit in Either Language
February 27, 1970

". . . A Los Angeles Police Department officer was beating a Spanish-speaking motorist, calling him a dirty Mexican. Occupants in the motorist's car yelled out to the police officer that the person he was beating was not a Mexican, but that he was a Nicaraguan."

"At that moment the officer stopped beating him and obtained medical help for him."

So testified a psychiatric social worker at a hearing before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in December of 1968.

The testimony gives some insight into the complicated subject of the differences among the Spanish-speaking people in the United States.

Mexican-Americans, about 8 million of the 10 million Spanish-speaking people in the country, are, ironically, among the most abused of this minority simply because they're Americans. This holds true for Puerto Ricans who are also Americans.

Non-American Spanish-speaking people, like Nicaraguans, Argentineans and Colombians, are as the police officer knew instantly, treated with more respect.

The reason may be that Americans, originally immigrants to this country, show more consideration for other immigrants than they do for indigenous people like Mexican-Americans and Indians.

Because of the civil rights movement, there has been an intense search for Spanish-speaking teachers, journalists, social workers, salesmen, etc.

Invariably, when found, these specialists turn out to be non-American Spanish-speaking people—Cubans, Central Americans, South Americans and native Mexicans.

The reason is simple. Non-American Spanish-speaking people have a better education—and so speak good Spanish—and assimilate well into Anglo society because they came here expressly to do this.

The Mexican-American, meanwhile, many of whom speak neither good Spanish nor good English, are victims of an educational system which purports to "Americanize" them while downgrading their ethnic background.

For instance, the first truly bilingual education program in this country was set up not for Mexican-Americans but for Cubans in the wake of the Cuban crisis. Bilingual education was made available to Cuban refugees at Florida's Dade County schools in 1963.

Yet, as late as December 1966, educators testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that Mexican-American children were being punished for speaking Spanish on school grounds in other parts of the country.

Cubans today, then, have a better chance of obtaining jobs requiring bilingual people—now that Spanish has been discovered as an asset instead of a liability—than do Mexican-Americans.

Belated bilingual education programs for Mexican-Americans are geared toward using the Spanish language as a tool only until the Chicano kid has learned enough English to overcome the "problem" of speaking Spanish. These are not truly bilingual programs, which should be the teaching of both languages on an equal basis.

The truth of the matter is that despite our talk in the Southwest about "our great Spanish heritage" and the naming of our towns and streets in Spanish, the Spanish language has never been taken seriously by American educators even in areas where both languages could be learned together and correctly.

Too often the difference between a Mexican-American and a non-American Spanish-speaking person is that the non-American can speak better Spanish than the Mexican-American—and so is more qualified for the emerging bilingual job.

And the difference between the Mexican-American and the Anglo-American is that the Anglo speaks better English than the Mexican-American and so is better equipped for the more conventional jobs.

The pattern could change when the American educational system is as considerate of Mexican-Americans as it was of Cubans in 1963.

Chicanos vs. Traditionalists
March 6, 1970

Last Saturday's Chicano Moratorium and the activities of the Catolicos por La Raza dramatize the gulf which exists between the traditional-minded Mexican-Americans and the young activists.

Unless this is understood, observers can fall easily into the simplistic conclusions that the traditionalists are Tio Tacos (Uncle Toms) or that the activists are irresponsible punks.

Either conclusion misses the essence of the present Mexican-American condition.

Traditional-minded Mexican-Americans blush at the mention of the word Chicano. They blanch at the thought of being called brown people. The reason for this, outside of personal views, is the psychological makeup of the Mexican in general.

Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet-essayist-diplomat, has tried to explain it this way: "The Mexican, whether young or old, white or brown, general or lawyer, seems to me to be a person who shuts himself away to protect himself . . . . He is jealous of his own privacy and that of others . . . . He passes through life like a man who has been flayed; everything can hurt him, including words and the very suspicion of words . . . ."

The Mexican, says Paz, "builds a wall of indifference and remoteness between reality and himself, a wall that is no less impenetrable for being invisible. The Mexican is always remote, from the world and from other people. And also from himself."

Is it any wonder, then, that the more conservative Mexican-Americans—and there are many of them—are embarrassed and angered at Chicanos (suspicious word) who say they don't want to fight the war in Vietnam and Catolicos who are questioning the church and the world about them?

The Mexican, says Paz, wears his face as a mask and believes "that opening oneself up is a weakness or a betrayal."

The Chicano activists are trying to rid themselves of their masks and to open themselves to themselves and to others. It is significant that in doing this they should pick as a means the Vietnam war and the Catholic Church.

That more than 3,000 people braved torrential rains last Saturday to participate in the Chicano Moratorium is important not because so

many people showed a distaste for the war—Anglos have done this in a bigger way—but because it was Mexican-Americans who did it.

Mexican-Americans, who include a disproportionate number of Medal of Honor winners and who, like the blacks, are suffering a disproportionate number of deaths in Vietnam, had up to now fought our wars without question.

It was part of the "machismo" traditions. When called to war, Mexican-Americans showed everyone how "macho" or manly they were and never questioned the justification for the war.

Mexicans, says Paz, judge manliness according to their "invulnerability to enemy arms or the impacts of the outside world. Stoicism is the most exalted of (Mexicans') military and political attributes."

The Chicano Moratorium strove to end this stoicism, which is hardly a democratic attribute.

"We weren't shedding our machismo," said a young marcher. "We were proving our machismo by asking the establishment the tough question: 'Why are we dying overseas when the real struggle is at home?"'

When the Catolicos por La Raza demonstrated during a midnight Christmas mass last year, they were also breaking with tradition and asking tough questions at the cost of going through the ordeal of being tried for disturbing the peace.

A San Antonio teacher, testifying before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights last year, said he has noted that the difference between Anglo and Mexican-American students is that when "some situation befalls the Mexican-Americans," the Mexican-American tends to leave things up to God while the Anglo tries to solve it on his own.

Catolicos por La Raza, who greatly embarrassed the traditional-minded Mexican-Americans by their questioning of the Catholic Church's relevance to present society, were breaking with this concept.

Chicanos and traditional-minded Mexican-Americans are suffering from the ever-present communications gap. Traditionalists, more concerned with the, to them, chafing terms like Chicano, are not really listening to what the activists are saying. And the activists forget that tradition is hard to kill.

Latin Newsmen, Police Chief Eat . . . but Fail to Meet
March 13, 1970

The Los Angeles Latin press corps took Police Chief Ed Davis out to dinner the other night. The enchiladas were good but the conversation left both sides hungry for understanding.

The dinner had been planned for some time but it was the chief's bad luck that it came on a night when Roosevelt High School was still much in the minds of the Latin newsmen.

It had been a week in which Spanish-speaking reporters had seen policemen drag teenage girls by the hair on the Roosevelt campus, a predominantly Mexican-American school. It had been a week in which a police captain tried to prevent a cameraman from a Spanish-language television station from filming a student disturbance by putting his hand in front of the camera's lens.

It had been a week in which a Mexican-American editor with 25 years of service in the Spanish-speaking community was denied entrance to the Roosevelt campus because he had a sheriffs press card and not a police press card. And it had been a week in which a policeman had yelled at the manager of a Spanish-language television station: "You ought to be ashamed of yourself for filming this!" (a student walkout).

The Latin newsmen who had invited Chief Davis to dinner were not Chicano underground press types. On the contrary, many were more businessmen than newsmen and far more conservative than the average Anglo newsman.

Yet, on that night the Latin newsmen, while waiting for the chief to arrive, talked about the growing disrespect between the police department and the Spanish-speaking community and voiced the opinion that they now understood [what is meant by] a "police riot."

It was the first time in memory that a Los Angeles police chief had publicly gotten together with a significant number of Spanish-speaking reporters and the newsmen were anxious to get to the guts of the agenda: finding ways to attain mutual respect between the Spanish-language press and the police department so that this respect can be reflected in the community.

It didn't go well.

The chief started by talking about a trip he made recently to Mexico and his great admiration for the country and its pyramids. After a while, the chairman interrupted apologetically and said, "Chief, we know all about Mexico and the pyramids . . . . Could we get on with the business at hand . . . ."

Some of the newsmen insisted that the chief appoint a Spanish-speaking lieutenant for liaison between the Latin media and the police department. The chief explained patiently that this would be impossible because of budget problems but said he might assign a patrolman to the job.

One of the newsmen became indignant, as only touchy Latins can,

and said that perhaps they would have to go to Washington or the Latin embassies to get what they needed.

The chief scored a point by saying that he ran the police department and not President Nixon or anyone else and informed the newsmen that the chief had just written the President telling him off. This would have been a pretty good lesson in democracy except that the chief chose to go further.

Telling the President off could not be done in Mexico, the chief told the Latin newsmen, because Mexico had a "Napoleonic" style of justice which to Americans smacked of "tyranny and dictatorship."

This went over like a dead pinata especially with the newsmen who work for Mexico City newspapers.

It was decided that another meeting be held between Latin newsmen and the chief to further explore their problems. Both sides left feeling frustrated—but not too unhappy over the possibility that a line of communication might be opening. After all, when you eat enchiladas together, it's a beginning.

Police-Community Rift
April 3, 1970

Los Angeles police sergeant Robert J. Thoms, formerly a "community relations" officer, has gone into the intelligence business and has testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee about what he considers subversive and violent organizations.

As a community relations officer from March 26, 1967, to Feb. 11, 1968, Sgt. Thoms worked with many of the barrio and ghetto organizations which, if nothing else, understand the problems of people who do not relate to, much less participate in, the mainstream of American life.

Thoms gained the confidence of leaders in the barrios and ghettos who felt there was still hope for at least a working relationship between frustrated and disadvantaged communities and the equally frustrated but relatively powerful police force.

After working for a year in this sensitive area, Sgt. Thoms was transferred by the police department to intelligence work.

The next time the communities, which had known Sgt. Thoms as a community relations officer, heard from him was as an intelligence officer testifying before a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigating subversive and violent organizations.

Sgt. Thoms told the subcommittee chaired by Sen. Thomas J. Dodd that "the organizations in Los Angeles that are considered to be violent or subversive in nature are: Ron Karenga's US, the Black Congress, the Black Panther Party, the Friends of the Panthers, and the Brown Berets."

In the 59-page report, however, Sgt. Thoms also touches upon such diverse organizations as the Ford Foundation, the League of United Citizens to Help Addicts, the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, the UCLA Industrial Relations Commission and the East Los Angeles Community Union.

Nowhere does Sgt. Thoms say that these organizations are subversive or violent but he leaves the clear impression that they are somehow unsavory. J. G. Sourwine, the subcommittee's chief counsel, asked Thoms, for example, why the sergeant had mentioned the East Los Angeles Community Union.

"Is the organization a violent one?" Sourwine asked.

"No, sir," answered Thoms.

"Perhaps I do not follow you," pressed Sourwine. "Why is it brought out here?"

To this Sgt. Thorns answered: "Just as an example of the umbrella organizations we deal with which will contain some good intentioned organizations to give it an air of respectability."

On page 22, Sgt. Thorns tells the subcommittee that "Next I would like to deal with the federal funding of various organizations in the Los Angeles area."

Sourwine: "Funding subversive and violent organizations?"

Thoms: "Yes, sir."

Sourwine: "Go ahead."

Thoms: "One program known as the educational opportunities program (EOP) for the California State College of Los Angeles, was funded in 1968 in the amount of $250,000 for 124 students."

After explaining that the money was used to give minority students "a monthly stipend for attending school and also used for books and a place to live," Sgt. Thoms said: "I can document that there are 43 students [of the 124 students receiving EOP funds, presumably] attending Cal State College at Los Angeles that belong to militant organizations in Los Angeles."

Perhaps the most revealing part of the Thorns testimony is when Chief Counsel Sourwine asks Thoms whether his information was gathered from a reliable source. Yes, answers Thorns, "the report was made public in May in Chicago."

Who put the report out? asks Sourwine. "I made the report to a convention of the International Security Conference."

Retorts Sourwine: "When I asked you if it came from a source you believed to be reliable I am not surprised you said, 'Yes."'

Thoms' report should be read by all Americans concerned with the problem of the credibility gap.

Reason in Washington, Passion in Denver—What Will Work?
April 10, 1970

WASHINGTON—If Daniel Moynihan speaks of "benign neglect" for the black, what is in store for the Chicano?

This was in the minds of some of us who came here at the invitation of the Urban Coalition to discuss the image of the Spanish-speaking people in the mass media.

It was not long before the chilling truth overcame us. Image? Hell. Washington doesn't even know the Chicano exists, so how can we talk about image?

But we did. The 15 of us—Chicano newsmen, educators, consultants—went through the motions of telling the attentive Urban Coalition people how the news media and the advertising, television and motion picture industries hurt the sensibilities of Spanish-speaking people.

The Coalition set up a meeting for us with members of the Federal Communications Commission—including rebel commissioner Nicholas Johnson. During that meeting it suddenly dawned on me how quaint the Chicano group must seem to Washington bureaucrats.

I got the strong impression that the FCC is not really a regulatory agency in that it does not sit in Washington as a judge ready to correct, for instance, any inequities perpetrated on the Chicano by radio or television.

"The FCC is not only gutless in this respect, but also impotent when it tries to do something on its own," I was told by an FCC staffman.

The FCC, however, is responsive to community or political pressure, I was assured.

Power, Chicano. Power. That's what Washington understands. This obvious conclusion is sometimes hard to come by for those of us who are conditioned to think that reason, information and patience will eventually triumph.

At least one of us, though, seemed to understand Washington instinc-

tively better than most of us. He was a young Chicano from Texas who wore a bush jacket and a badge with Chicano Power printed on it.

After two days of deliberation and exchange of ideas in the plush Mayflower Hotel and in the ultramodern Urban Coalition building, the young Chicano concluded:

"About the only thing accomplished these two days was that the Xerox machine worked overtime."

He then took a plane to Denver to attend Corky Gonzales' Chicano Youth Liberation Conference.

In Denver, Gonzales, an ex-prize fighter and poet, told a crowd of 3,000 young Chicanos, like the ones who left Washington in disgust, that growing Chicano militancy "has turned a spark into fire." With clenched fists in the air, the young Chicanos screamed "Chicano power!" Then, without the help of Xerox machines, they started the job of uniting for "la causa."

In these days of "benign neglect," one wonders how much good such a meeting as the one we had with the Urban Coalition does. And come to think of it, what came out of the dozens of meetings and conferences we've attended throughout the years?

After two days in Washington, the melancholy thought arises that representatives of the Denver Chicanos would have more of an impact on Washington than our carefully prepared papers which probably moved no one except the Xerox machine.

Maligned Word: Mexican
April 17, 1970

Mexican. That good name has been vilified for so long that even in the Southwest, where Mexicans are as plentiful as Yankees in New England, the word is used cautiously.

Most Mexican-Americans have experienced the wary questions from an Anglo: "You're Spanish aren't you?" or "Are you Latin?" Rarely will the Anglo venture: "You're Mexican aren't you?"

The reason is that the word Mexican has been dragged through the mud of racism since the Anglos arrived in the Southwest. History tells us that when King Fisher, the famous Texas gunman, was asked how many notches he had on his gun, he answered: "Thirty-seven not counting Mexicans."

"Remember the Alamo!" is still used as an anti-Mexican insult where "Remember Pearl Harbor" has been forgotten.

Carey McWilliams in his enlightening "North from Mexico"^[*] notes that the word "greaser" was well-known in early California and that it was defined as "Mexican: an opprobrious term." He also reports that "greaser" is "California slang for a mixed race of Mexican and Indians."

"Greaser," McWilliams points out, is defined in the Century Dictionary as "a native Mexican . . . originally applied contemptuously by the Americans of the Southwestern United States to Mexicans."

All this, and more, has contributed to the psychological crippling of the Mexican-American when it comes to the word Mexican. He is unconsciously ashamed of it.

State Sen. Jose Bernal of Texas told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights last year that the "schools have not given us any reason to be proud" of being Mexican. People running the schools "have tried to take away our language," the senator continued, and so Mexican-American children very early are embarrassed by the Spanish language and by being Mexican.

One of the reasons for this, Bernal told the commission, is that "it has been inculcated" in the minds of grammar school children that the Mexican "is no good" by means of, for instance, overly and distortedly emphasizing the Battle of the Alamo and ignoring all contributions made by Mexicans in the Southwest.

Unfortunately, California Superior Judge Gerald S. Chargin has dragged the word Mexican to a new low. In sentencing a 17-year-old Mexican-American boy for incest in San Jose last Sept. 2, Judge Chargin looked down from the bench and told this American citizen that "we ought to send you out of the country—send you back to Mexico . . . You ought to commit suicide. That's what I think of people of this kind. You are lower than animals and haven't the right to live in organized society—just miserable, lousy, rotten people."

Is it any wonder, then, that the Mexican-American community is bitterly disappointed in that the California Commission on Judicial Qualifications recommended that the Supreme Court publicly censure Judge Chargin instead of recommending that he be removed from the bench? The commission, in making its recommendation, calls Chargin's re-

* Carey McWilliams was a journalist, writer, and editor who, beginning in the 1930s, wrote exposes of the exploitation of immigrant workers in California agriculture, including Mexicans. He became a defender of Mexican American civil rights. His 1948 book North from Mexico: The Spanish-speaking People of the United States (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968) represented the first significant history of Mexicans in the United States. It was rediscovered in the late 1960s during the period of the Chicano movement, and it influenced the development of Chicano historiography.

marks "improper and inexcusable" and says, they "constituted conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice that brings the judicial office into disrepute."

The commission goes on to say, however, that "there is no evidence of bias or prejudice by (the judge) except for the incident of Sept. 2, 1969. There is evidence," concludes the commission, "that apart from this (the judge) has been a tolerant and compassionate judge with a background of understanding and interest in the problems of the underprivileged and ethnic minorities."

The Mexican-American community seems not to buy that. The general feeling seems to be that if Judge Harold Carswell ^[*] was denied a seat in the Supreme Court for, among other reasons, making a racist speech in his youth, Judge Chargin should be removed from the bench for making anti-Mexican remarks, on record, from the bench.

This, the community seems to feel, would help cleanse the much maligned word Mexican.

The 'Wetback' Problem Has More Than Just One Side April 24, 1970

When la migra calls, the Mexican trembles.

La migra is Chicano slang for the U.S. Immigration Service which, with the Border Patrol, plays an important and sometimes terrifying role in the lives of thousands of Mexicans, Mexican-Americans and other Latins in the Southwest.

A recent crackdown by the immigration department against illegal entrants in the Los Angeles area has again dramatized the human tragedy which can occur when a poor country, Mexico, borders on a rich country, the United States.

The fact that at least one American citizen, a mentally retarded Mexican-American boy, was mistakenly deported in the immigration service dragnet indicates the vulnerability of the underprivileged Chicano to la migra's power.

Wetbacks and Chicanos look alike to the border patrolman.^[**]

* Judge Harold Carswell, nominated in 1970 by President Richard Nixon to a seat on the Supreme Court, was rejected by the U.S. Senate.

** "Wetback" is a derogatory term for undocumented Mexican immigrants. In the 1950S and early 1960s, the term was widely used even by some Mexican Americans, including Salazar, although not necessarily in a derogatory fashion.

The problem of illegal entrants to the United States can be looked at very coldly. It is illegal to enter the United States without the proper papers, so, from time to time, these people must be rounded up and deported.

A closer look at why Los Angeles has become the wetback capital of the world, however, shows why it's unfair to blame only the illegal entrant for the breakdown of the law.

Why is it that it is estimated that at certain times of the year there are at least 80,000 wetbacks working in California? Because employers are willing to hire them.

A wetback lives in constant fear. Fear that he will be discovered. Fear of what might happen to him once la migra finds him. Fear that he will not be paid before being deported.

The wetback employers know no such fear. There is no law against hiring wetbacks. There is only a law against being a wetback.

A sweat shop employer of low-paid wetbacks has only one small worry—the temporary stoppage of production between the time his wetbacks are discovered in his plant and the time the next wave of wetbacks arrives.

When the wetback is caught he is jailed and deported. Nothing, however, happens to the employer. As a matter of fact, the employer can gain from the wetback raid on his plant because he can easily get away without paying the wetbacks' salaries due at the time of the arrests.

State Sen. Lewis Sherman, a Republican from Alameda County, would like to change this. He feels the employer should bear some of the responsibility for the wetback situation. He has introduced a bill (S.B. 1091) which would make it a misdemeanor to knowingly hire wetbacks. Under the proposed law, the employer could be fined as much as $500 for each wetback he hires. Sen. Sherman contends that with "reasonable care" employers could detect wetbacks from legal workers.

Most people concerned with the problem feel this would help immensely.

But it would probably not solve the basic reason for the wetback problem: poor Mexicans willing to take a chance at arrest for what they think will be a good job and the employers willing to take a chance at getting caught because they want cheap labor.

Bert Corona, a leader in the Mexican-American Political Assn., claims that the immigration service, in its dragnets, is "conducting a reign of terror and exploitation against the Mexican people" and that among the 1,600 recently deported there were persons born in the United States

who did not have their papers with them, Mexicans with valid tourist visas, persons separated from their families.

The policeman, this time the immigration and border patrol man, is invariably accused of "brutality" when enforcing the law and undoubtedly they have made mistakes.

But anyone who has seen the fetid shacks in which potential wetbacks live on the Mexican side of the border can better understand why these people become wetbacks. In comparison, the detention center for wetbacks in El Centro—called a "concentration camp" by Chicano activists—looks like a luxury hotel.

The point is that Mexico has a grave poverty problem which is growing alarmingly. Mexico, with its limited resources, has grown from a nation of 15 million in 1910 to an estimated 44 million in 1966. In another 10 years some Mexican demographers estimate an increase to 61 million people and by 1980, to 72 million. Many, many of these will be potential wetbacks.

Though Sen. Sherman's proposed bill should help alleviate the wetback problem, it is obvious that the United States and Mexico must talk and plan on the highest level to forestall an even more serious wetback explosion in the future.

Consecration of Bishop Flores Shows the Strength of an Idea
May 8, 1970

The consecration of Patricio Flores, a former Texas migrant farm worker, as a bishop of the Catholic Church indicated once more the church's growing sensitivity to the Chicano community.

The mass of consecration held Tuesday in San Antonio on the Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo was unusual in many ways. The ceremony was conducted in English, Spanish and Latin and televised in Los Angeles, San Antonio and Mexico City.

Instead of holding the rite in an august cathedral, it was held in an informal convention center to accommodate large numbers of la raza who applauded enthusiastically—unheard of in such ceremonies.

The music came not from a serious choir or majestic organ but from a joyful mariachi band.

Among the special guests of the 41-year-old cleric, who became the first Mexican-American to be raised to the hierarchy of the church, were Cesar Chavez, Bishop Sergio Mendez Arceo of Cuernavaca, Mexico,

and Jose Angel Gutierrez, leader of the activist Chicano organization MAYO.^[*]

The guest list alone showed how involved Bishop Flores is in the problems of the Mexican-American, the farm worker, the young.

Chavez, who read one of the epistles at the mass of consecration, had already been recognized by the church as an important leader when the church's Bishops Committee announced in Los Angeles April 1 that the "breakthrough" agreement between Chavez' grape strikers and the California grape growers had been reached with the help of the Catholic Church.

It was a bitter defeat for those who claimed Chavez was not the true leader of the grape strikers. The defeat for growers wanting to discredit Chavez became more poignant when Archbishop Timothy Manning of Los Angeles told a press conference that he hoped the agreement between Chavez and a small number of growers "will be but the beginning of a chain of such contracts."

The fact that Bishop Mendez Arceo of Cuernavaca was present at the consecration of Bishop Flores publicly revealed the new bishop's affinity to the church's liberal wing. Bishop Mendez Arceo, a maverick in the Mexican conservative hierarchy, has many times proclaimed himself a staunch Zapatista . Emiliano Zapata, a Mexican revolutionary and a land reformer, is a hero of the Chicano movement. ^[**]

Bishop Mendez in 1968 was the only Mexican bishop who refused to sign a declaration in support of the Pope's new ban on artificial contraception and was the only member of the Mexican hierarchy to condemn the Mexican government's repressive acts against students in the riots at the University of Mexico.

The invitation of Gutierrez, MAYO leader, who also read an epistle at the Flores consecration, probably shocked the Texas establishment because Gutierrez is known as one of the most militant Chicano youth

* The Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) was founded in 1967 by José Angel Gutierrez and other Mexican American college students in San Antonio. It concentrated on civil rights and political activity. In the period 1967-1969, it played a leading role in various school walkouts. MAYO took the initiative in the formation of La Raza Unida party in Texas, an independent Chicano political party that functioned in the Southwest during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

** Emiliano Zapata (1879-1919) was one of the leading figures of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Fighting in his home state of Morelos, Zapata stressed agrarian reform for campesinos (peasants). Perceived as too radical for the more moderate forces who gained control of the revolution, Zapata was assassinated in 1919. In search of historical role models of rebellion against oppression, the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s appropriated the figure of Zapata as an "authentic" Chicano hero.

leaders in the Southwest. Unlike Chavez, who is softspoken and dislikes Chicano militant talk, Gutierrez is a forceful speaker on what he considers "Anglo crimes" ranging from the Vietnam war and the draft to bad Mexican-American education and the "suppression" of Mexican culture in the United States.

Bishop Flores, who with his parents and eight brothers and sisters migrated from farm job to farm job in his youth, believes communication between the church and the so-called militants must remain open.

Bishop Flores' consecration was a remarkable spectacle: guitar-playing mariachis mingling with miter-wearing bishops and barrio Chicanos mixing it up with plume-hatted and white-tie-and-tailed Knights of Columbus.

It gave one hope that an ideal, like the Catholic Church, can still bring people together.

Mexican-Americans Come Out 2nd Best in High School Course
May 15, 1970

"The young Mexican-American husband must show his male acquaintances that he has more sexual energy than his wife can accommodate. To prove his prowess, he often continues the sexual hunt of his premarital days. He may demonstrate his physical and financial resources by visiting (a house of prostitution) with drinking companions after an evening in a tavern. The most convincing way of proving machismo and financial ability is to keep a mistress in a second household known as a casa chica ."

A quote from a racist or pornographic tract? No, it's from a paper until recently used in a Pomona high school sophomore class to teach Mexican-American culture.

Before the instructional material was ordered removed by the board of education, Victor Sherreitt, principal of Ganesha High School, tried to defend the paper in this manner:

"At the beginning of each semester, every teacher looks across his class at inquiring students. In their eyes you see one question formed—'Are you, Mr. Teacher, a phony? Are you going to tell it the way it is?'"

"The course, cultural anthropology, offered in the 10th grade, is a study of man and his society. In an attempt to have students gain a broader knowledge of the diverse nature of American society, this essay was incorporated into the unit on family and society."

One wonders if Sherreitt would agree, then, that high school sopho-

mores learning about Anglo culture should be taught about Anglo martini-guzzling, pill-popping, wife-swapping suburbanites?

Sherreitt and the social science teachers who incorporated the paper in the course do not seem to realize that the material contains blatant stereotyping.

One of the reasons Mexican-Americans object to the Frito Bandido television commercial is that it stereotypes Mexican-Americans as ridiculous, sleazy bandit types. This can badly damage the self-image of young, impressionable Mexican-American minds and feed prejudice to young, impressionable Anglo minds.

The Ganesha High School paper stereotypes the Mexican-Americans in many ways but tends to emphasize sexual stereotyping. In a section called Marital Conflict, the paper says in part:

"Sexual promiscuity on the part of the wife is a heinous crime. So fragile is a woman's purity, according to Mexican-American belief, that one sexual indiscretion inevitably leads to a life of complete sexual abandon. No Mexican-American man would remain with a promiscuous wife unless he is already so abused that nothing matters . . . ."

Then the paper gives an example. Reynaldo's "excessive drinking interferes with the employment he needs to provide money for liquor. Quenching his thirst is more important to him than sex or respectability so he allows his wife, Flora, to have a generous Anglo lover. Flora maintains this illicit relationship partly to punish Reynaldo for his failings. Her shame about her promiscuity leads her to give her husband most of the money she receives from her lover. . . ."

Though the paper is no longer used in the course on Mexican-American culture, its very existence and Principal Sherreitt's written defense of it have left a deep wound in Pomona's Mexican-American community.

Sherreitt stoutly defends his social science department and says the controversial paper was "misinterpreted or taken out of context."

Mrs. Ascension Garcia, a school employee who prompted the protest to the board of education, thinks the paper has polarized Pomona's minority population.

"Suddenly we realized that though Mexican-Americans and Negroes comprise 40% of the 90,000 Pomona population there is not one Mexican-American or Negro school principal or even vice principal," says Mrs. Garcia.

"So we Mexican-Americans and Negroes have decided to form a coalition to fight the school district's lack of sensitivity."

Chicano's Long Love Affair with Democratic Party Ends
May 29, 1970

Covering Mexican-American candidates in Tuesday's primary election, a reporter can get the impression that they are more interested in gaining independence from the Democratic Party than they are in getting elected.

The Chicano candidate looks back in bitterness at the Democratic Party and casts a cynically hopeful eye at the Republican Party.

With the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, who publicly thanked the Chicano vote for its significant help in winning the California primary, the Mexican-American politician ended his long love affair with the Democratic Party.

"Actually," says a Chicano party worker, "we discovered that it wasn't a love affair at all but really a kept woman situation. The party took us for granted and gave little in return."

This bitterness stems from the reapportionment of California's political districts in 1962 by a Democratic Assembly under Jess Unruh.^[*]

"Those were hopeful days for the Chicano community," recalls Bert Corona, a longtime Mexican-American activist. "We thought we could get at least four 'safe' Chicano districts. After all, the reapportionment committee was made up of so-called liberal members and who had been more loyal to the party than the Mexican-Americans."

"Instead, we got nothing."

"Why do you think Ed Roybal can not afford to be a truly Chicano congressman?" asks Enrique (Hank) Lopez, another longtime Mexican-American activist. "Because the district he ended up with has more blacks and Anglos than Chicanos."

Lopez, who ran for California secretary of state as the Democratic candidate 12 years ago, recalls his campaign with anger.

"The party gave me a piddling $1,500 to run a difficult statewide campaign and Pat Brown refused to appear on the same platform with me," says Lopez. "Hell, the party wouldn't even let me use a float in a parade."

Lopez, who is now a New York attorney and author but is presently teaching a Chicano course at UC Riverside, feels strongly that one of the reasons blacks have been more successful politically than Chicanos is that they don't allow either party to take them for granted.

* Jess Unruh was Speaker of the House in a Democrat-controlled assembly in the California State Legislature during the 1960s and 1970s.

"Blacks have learned to work within both parties and have not been blinded by unrealistic party loyalty as have Chicanos," says Lopez.

Chicano politicians think that as a result of the treatment they have received from the Democratic Party, Mexican-Americans are becoming politically sophisticated enough to ignore their differences for the sake of eventually electing Chicano candidates.

The trend in the barrios right now is Chicanos first, party second. And the emphasis is on organization more than election.

Herman Sillas, who is running for state controller, is the only Mexican-American candidate officially endorsed by such Democratic bigwigs as Jess Unruh and Sen. Alan Cranston as well as the Mexican-American Unity Congress and the Mexican-American Political Assn.

The two Chicano organizations, however, have refused to endorse Unruh in the primary as they would have automatically in the past. Instead, they are supporting Richard Romo, a Peace and Freedom party candidate for governor, if for nothing else because he's a Chicano.

At the Mexican-American Political Assn. endorsing convention in Fresno, MAPA president Abe Tapia, a candidate for the 45th assembly district, urged Chicanos not to support "traditional liberal Anglo candidates, merely because they are 'friends,' unless they declare themselves as being in full support of all Mexican-American candidates as well as in full support of the farm workers and the grape boycott."

In the barrios at least, Tapia, who has been endorsed by Cesar Chavez, seems to be getting the message through.

As for the Republicans, Chicano politicians feel Mexican-Americans will fare better when a presumed Republican-dominated Assembly will reapportion political districts in 1972.

"In wanting to strengthen their own districts, the Republicans will tend to isolate the Chicano districts the Democrats should have given us and never did," say MAPA strategists.

Narrowly a Candidate Lost
June 2, 1970

When you're as politically impotent as are Mexican-Americans, the extent of the latest election defeat takes on an exaggerated significance.

With characteristic resignation, the Chicano candidate on election night watches for future trends more than immediate victories.

Perhaps the "best defeat" for the Chicano in Tuesday's election was that of Abe Tapia, candidate in the 45th Assembly District. Looking over the election returns, Tapia was realistically jubilant.

"I got 29% of the vote and the district is about 30% Chicano," Tapia said. "I went out for the Chicano vote and that is what I got. Why should I complain?"

President of the Mexican-American Political Assn., Tapia conducted a strictly Chicano campaign: no Anglo advisers, no emphasis on party labels, no compromises.

The advice he did take was from Cesar Chavez who told him to organize the barrios and not to worry about immediate results. Tapia lost the election but won the Chicanos. He's not too sure what it all means right now but he smiles happily when he talks about all those Chicanos who went to the polls for the first time in their lives.

Another Chicano who had an impressive loss was Oscar Z. Acosta, a militant attorney who received more than 100,000 votes for sheriff. During the campaign, he defended establishment-shaking Catolicos por La Raza,^[*] spent a couple of days in jail for contempt of court and vowed if elected to do away with the sheriff's department as it is now constituted.

Acosta, easily recognized in court by his loud ties and flowered attache case with a Chicano Power sticker, didn't come close to Sheriff Pitchess' 1,300,000 votes but did beat Everett Holladay, Monterey Park chief of police.

A poet of sorts, Acosta complains about a society which prefers "the soft lights to the glare of nakedness" and castigates "people too weak in character to raise the necessary issues."

Looking back at his campaign, which was confined mostly to self-dramatization, Acosta is most proud of running as a Chicano who "stuck to my guns and never copped out to a thing."

Why he got 100,000 votes for sheriff will have to be analyzed by political pundits. But in the Chicano community Acosta's impressive loss was an enigmatic ray of sunshine.

Then there were the Mexican-American candidates who tried to win by more conventional means. The best known, of course, was Dr. Julian Nava who ran for the "non-partisan" office of superintendent of public instruction.^[**]

* Catolicos por La Raza was organized in 1969 in Los Angeles by some Chicano Catholics who believed that the Catholic church in Los Angeles was not sensitive to the conditions of Chicanos.

** Julian Nava was elected to the Los Angeles School Board in 1967. He was the first Mexican American to serve on the school board since the nineteenth century. In 1980, Nava was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Mexico. See Garcia, Memories of Chicano History , 229-231.

He got 300,000 votes to Max Rafferty's 2 million votes and Wilson Riles' one million plus votes. The fact that Nava, a Mexican-American, and Riles, a Negro, ran against each other strained black-brown relationships—unavoidable in the minorities' desperate scramble for meaningful participation in our society.

To the Chicano, despite many valid arguments to the contrary, Riles' victory means simply that blacks receive more support and understanding by California in general than do Chicanos.

Jess Unruh tried to salve this situation by publicly supporting a Mexican-American for controller, Herman Sillas, but apparently it was too late. Sillas lost to fellow Democrat Ronald Cameron and Chicanos, whether fairly or not, blame the Democratic Party. The party, they complain, never goes all out for a Chicano candidate.

The Chicano candidate who may have made his last "impressive loss" and will be missed is Richard Calderon who lost the nomination in the 29th Congressional District to State Sen. George E. Danielson by about 2,000 votes.

This is Calderon's fourth defeat in politics, the last two by very small margins.

Commenting on Tuesday's results, Rep. Ed Roybal, the only Mexican-American California congressman, lamented that Calderon could have won if he had gotten the votes another Mexican-American, Isaac Ruiz Jr., received in the race. Calderon lost by 2,000 votes and Ruiz received 2,000 votes.

Ah, Chicanos.

Don't Make the 'Bato Loco' Go the Way of the Zoot Suiter
June 19, 1970

A bato loco is a zoot suiter with a social conscience.

He may be an ex-con, a marijuana smoker and dangerously defiant. But the difference between the zoot suiter or pachuco of the early 40s and a present bato loco, literally a crazy guy, is that the bato loco is experiencing a social revolution and so is learning and liking political power.

The difference is so important that unless we understand it we can contribute toward reverting the bato loco to an anarchistic zoot suiter.

An anarchistic zoot suiter, as we learned just before World War II, can be easily driven to violence. A bato loco, though impossible to convert into an Eagle Scout, can be dealt with on a political basis.

Because of the civil rights revolution, the so-called Establishment had

deemed it necessary to accept innovations ranging from Head Start to Chicano Studies.

A countering "silent majority" revolution, however, is trying to reverse this acceptance and the trend today is to junk social innovations because, it is felt, they only "pamper" militants.

What we must realize is that it is easier to open a Pandora's box than to close it.

The economy slowdown, the lingering Vietnam War and surging "hard hat" militancy are beginning to strip the bato loco of his newly gained social conscience.

"The gabacho (white man) never really changes," a bato loco said recently. "He gives you an inch and takes away a yard."

It is easy to understand the silent majority's frustration with high taxes, disrespectful militancy and seemingly unending social innovations. But to the bato loco in the barrio this frustration is a luxury which he cannot afford and does not understand.

All the bato loco knows is that things were looking up for a while and that unlike his zoot-suiter predecessor he could get involved in such projects as the Neighborhood Adult Participation Project. Now he knows the heat is on and that such projects are being condemned by political and law-and-order leaders as subversive and money-wasting.

Stripped of his potential political power—and that, after all is what barrio and ghetto social innovations produce—the bato loco has no way to go but to the dangerous shell of an anarchistic zoot suiter.

Recently, a front-page story appeared, in of all places, the Wall Street Journal , which warns of possible violence in the Southwest's Chicano barrios.

According to the newspaper, Jose Angel Gutierrez, a Texas Chicano activist who holds a master's degree in political science, said that "It's too late for the gringo to make amends. Violence has got to come."

This may sound scandalously alarming but the mood in the barrios seems to back it up.

This mood is not being helped by our political and law-and-order leaders who are trying to discredit militants in the barrios as subversive or criminal.

In the traditionally quiet town of Pomona, for instance, a crowd of Mexican-American parents, not known for their civic participation, recently applauded Brown Beret speakers.

The importance of this is that a year ago it would be impossible to find Mexican-American parents hob-nobbing with Brown Berets. Police chiefs, mayors and other leaders must learn that they can no longer dis-

credit a movement by just pointing out that the Brown Berets, or any other militant group, are involved.

In other words, whether we like it or not, Brown Berets are gaining the respect of barrio people at the expense of traditional mores.

But perhaps more importantly, the Mexican-American establishment is finding it more difficult every day to communicate with barrio Chicanos.

Before we scrap all the social innovations which gave the bato loco hope we should probe the probable consequences.

Mexican-American School Walkout Focused on Problem
June 26, 1970

During the massive East Los Angeles high school walkouts in 1968, board of education member Dr. Julian Nava turned to their school superintendent Jack Crowther and said, "Jack, this is BC and AD. The schools will not be the same again."

"Yes," said Crowther, "I know."

Actually, as Nava and Crowther must have suspected, more than the schools were changing. What was happening was that a significant portion of the Mexican-American community, in supporting the walkouts and their symbolic leader, teacher Sal Castro, was asserting itself.

Few will deny that the walkouts marked a new direction for the traditionally apathetic Mexican-American community. Behind the school disorders, an unusual unity was forming which since then has solidified.

The recent decision by Dist. Atty. Evelle J. Younger to refile felony complaints in the walkout and Biltmore disturbance cases necessitates focusing some issues which could be lost in the rhetoric-filled courtroom drama sure to follow.

First, there seems to be a tendency to refer to the incidents as the "Brown Beret cases"—especially by a local wire service which called them that in its dispatches last Monday and Tuesday. Much more than the activities of a small militant group are at stake.

Brown Berets were involved in the walkouts and in the disturbances and fires at the Biltmore during a speech by Gov. Reagan April 24, 1969. But it is important to know, not from a legal but from an overall point of view, that the cases stem from a genuine concern over the quality of education Mexican-Americans are receiving.

Sal Castro, who was indicted by the grand jury on felony conspiracy charges in the school walkout case, has repeatedly been defended, put-

ting aside the indictment, which is a legal matter, by many Mexican-American organizations and such public figures as Dr. Nava, Congressman Ed Roybal and George Brown and Dr. Miguel Montes, former member of the state board of education.

Nava went so far as to tell a news conference July 31, 1969, that Castro "has been singled out for harassment and persecution" for his "telling criticism and disclosures of the ineffectiveness of Los Angeles schools."

Castro, by the way, was called a Brown Beret by a local newspaper (not The Times ) and the controversial teacher carries a printed retraction by the paper.

In the Biltmore case, fires allegedly set by Brown Beret types beclouded the fact that many of those arrested, since exonerated of any crime, merely had wanted to tell Gov. Reagan, if somewhat impolitely, what they thought of our schools.

The very reason why the district attorney decided to refile charges against Castro and 12 others involved in the walkouts and against five persons in the Biltmore case opens important questions.

For some time now the cases have been bogged down in appellate court where the defendants contended that the grand jury indictments were illegal because persons with Spanish surnames are systematically excluded from Los Angeles County grand juries.

Dep. Dist. Atty. Richard Hecht told this column that a decision by the appellate court did not seem forthcoming and that in the interest of a speedy trial for the defendants, the district attorney's office had decided to ask that the present cases on appeal be dismissed. This way, he continued, new charges would be processed by way of preliminary hearings, rather than the grand jury.

Predictably, Castro's attorney, Herman Sillas, takes issue with the district attorney. He says the new move will deny an opportunity to the Mexican-American community to hear what an appellate court has to say about the composition of the grand jury.

Retorts Hecht: "We're as anxious as anyone else to learn whether our grand juries are illegally constituted—which we do not think so—but a ruling from the appellate court does not seem to be in sight."

Hecht also pointed out that there is a Sirhan Sirhan appeal in the State Supreme Court involving his claim that Los Angeles grand juries are not representative and that a ruling in that case could clear the air on the matter.^[*]

* Sirhan Sirhan was convicted of murdering Senator Robert Kennedy on the evening of Kennedy's victory in the 1968 California Democratic presidential primary.

The fact remains, however, that according to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, in Los Angeles County, with almost 500,000 eligible Spanish surname residents, only four served as grand jurors during a 12-year period studied.

Sillas also wonders why if Castro is being charged with felonious conspiracy in the school walkouts, no teacher was so charged during the recent teacher's strike.

Hecht answers that in the first place there is some evidence of violence in the East Los Angeles walkouts—which is denied by the participants and that besides, the teachers' strike involved a union. "Union activities have a greater degree of protection under the First Amendment than do other activities," Hecht said.

The point is that whatever one may think of the merits of either side in these cases, grassroot movements such as the school walkouts bring out these important overall issues. And that is what democracy is about.

Why Does Standard July Fourth Oratory Bug Most Chicanos?
July 10, 1970

A small group of Chicanos sat before a TV the Fourth of July to watch Honor America Day for the explicit reason of trying to determine why such events bug them.

How could a show honoring the Flag, God and country offend any American? The Chicanos knew they had tackled a tough one and that any answer to the nagging question could be easily misinterpreted.

But being that they were merely indulging in mental and emotional calisthenics they tackled the job with alacrity.

The trouble with such patriotic bashes as Honor America Day, the Chicanos decided, is that they tend to dehumanize the Flag, monopolize God and abuse the word America.

For too long the American Flag, the Chicanos agreed, has been the symbol of those who insist that property rights are more important than human rights.

Fourth of July oratory, the Chicanos noted, tends to paint God as a super American who has blessed this country with its great wealth and power because right thinking people—like those who attend Honor America Day celebrations and wave the Flag vigorously—run the place.

But the thing that bugged the Chicanos the most was that the United States is called America, as if that name belonged exclusively to Anglo United States.

All this spelled one thing to the Chicanos: our system insists on Anglicization.

Most Anglos, the Chicanos decided, are unconscious of this and so cannot comprehend why Honor America Day could offend any "good American."

After watching Honor America Day and making their comments the small group of Chicanos unwound and had a good Fourth of July, just like many other Americans.

The thing to remember, however, is that this small group of Chicanos voiced the thinking of a significant part of the Chicano movement. Chicanos are resisting Anglicization.

UCLA's Mexican-American Cultural Center has just released the first issue of a "Chicano Journal of the Social Sciences and the Arts." The journal is called Aztlan for the Mexican Indian word which describes the Southwestern part of this continent which includes the five U.S. Southwestern states and Northern Mexico.

Chicanos explain that they are indigenous to Aztlan and do not relate, at least intellectually and emotionally, to the Anglo United States.

The journal, written by Chicano university scholars, starts off with the "Spiritual Plan of Aztlan" which was adopted by the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference held in Denver in March, 1969.

The wording of the "plan" may shed some light for those wishing to understand the Chicano movement:

"In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud historical heritage, but also of the brutal 'gringo' invasion of our territories, we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlan, from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny."

"We are free and sovereign to determine these tasks which are justly called for by our house, our land, the sweat of our brows and by our hearts, Aztlan belongs to those that plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops, and not to the foreign Europeans. We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent."

"Brotherhood unites us, and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come and who struggles against the foreigner 'gabacho' (white) who exploits our riches and destroys our culture. With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Be-

fore the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlan."

Whether we like it or not Fourth of July Americanism is in disrepute among minorities because they can't seem to relate to it.

Singer Joan Baez, who is part Chicana, recently said that the defense of country, as used in Fourth of July oratory, "has absolutely nothing to do with the defense of people." She continued:

"Once we get rid of the obsession with defending one's country, we will be defending life . . . . That's why I hate flags. I despise any flag, not just the American Flag. It's a symbol of a piece of land that's considered more important than the human lives on it . . . ."

Whether we agree or not, it behooves us to revamp our Fourth of July oratory to relate to people instead of to fixed ideas that apparently are not working.

The Mexican-Americans NEDA Much Better School System
August 28, 1970

A week ago today Vice President Agnew stood in a sea of television lights at the Century Plaza Hotel to announce the formation of a new national organization to promote business development among the nation's 10 million Spanish-speaking citizens.

Agnew said the undertaking would help ensure that "Americans of Hispanic descent get a fair chance at the starting line."

By the end of the day, thanks to the great coverage the Vice President gets from the news media, the whole nation knew of the formation of the National Economic Development Assn. or NEDA.

In the barrios Chicanos immediately started calling NEDA NADA, which in Spanish spells "nothing."

Why this rude put-down about an organization which undoubtedly will help some worthy, energetic Spanish-speaking entrepreneurs?

The bitterness stems from the distortion of priorities in this country.

Just two days before Agnew made his announcement, Sen. Mike Mansfield complained that too much attention was being given to the ABMs and the SSTs ^[*] and not enough to the ABCs.

NEDA, started with a grant from the Small Business Administration, will initiate business development for the Spanish-speaking through

* Acronyms for nuclear missiles.

public and private sources, it was announced. Fine. Great. Long overdue.

But is it accurate for the Vice President to say that NEDA will ensure that "Americans of Hispanic descent get a fair chance at the starting line"?

NEDA, as good a concept as it is, will invariably help only those who have already made it—those who are in business or ready to go into business. This is hardly the "starting line" for the Mexican-American in this country.

The following has been said and written many times but it has yet to effectively penetrate the minds of our national leaders: The Mexican-American has the lowest educational level, below either black or Anglo; the highest dropout rate; and the highest illiteracy rate.

Yet, bilingual education was one of the items President Nixon vetoed in the educational bill. The veto was overridden but the veto indicates a strange definition the Administration has about where the "starting line" is.

Martin G. Castillo, chairman of the Nixon Administration's Cabinet Committee on Opportunity for the Spanish Speaking, said during the NEDA press conference that the Vice President had recently donated $10,000 to the Salesian Boys Club from proceeds of the sale of Spiro Agnew watches.

Castillo complained that this gesture typifying the "other side of the Vice President" got little mention in the news media.

That may be. But something besides the Vice President's Spiro Agnew watch gesture was being ignored by the news media.

On the same day that Agnew was getting nationwide publicity over the formation of NEDA, the U.S. Senate's Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity was winding up a two-day hearing on minority educational problems. The Vice President and NEDA got the lion's share of the publicity.

Complained Sen. Walter Mondale, chairman of the committee: "We found that the best way to get television cameras out of this room and reporters to leave is to hold a hearing on Mexican-American education. There doesn't seem to be any interest. Yet this is the second largest minority in America."

Mario Obledo, director of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told the senators that it was a "tragedy on the part" of federal and state government to ignore the educational problems of Mexican-Americans.

"How do you bring this to the attention of the American public?" asked Obledo. "Does it require some overt act of violence to bring it forth, or can it be handled in a manner that is conducive with the American way of life?"

Father Henry J. Casso, also of the Mexican-American Defense Fund, asked Sen. Mondale: "How long would you and I continue to do business with a lawyer who lost eight out of 10 cases; a doctor who lost eight of every 10 of his patients? Being a religionist, what would my bishop do if I lost eight of 10 parishioners?"

"Yet, the institutions, including government, have remained mute to see eight out of every 10 Mexican-American children drop out, kicked out and pushed out of the educational institutions of this country. No one has asked an accounting for the vast sums of public money that have been wasted. But the young are demanding an accounting and I stand with them."

Dr. Hector Garcia, a Texas physician and former member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights who was dumped from the commission by the Nixon Administration, testified that 80% of Mexican-American students in Texas never get past the sixth grade.^[*]

" . . .the system has not worked for us," Dr. Garcia said. "I am here as a capitalist. I am one of the few Mexicano capitalists. They say, 'Dr. Garcia, why do you criticize?' I say, I only criticize because I want more Mexicano capitalists, educated, in college . . ."

NEDA, then, will mean little until the government is serious about creating more Chicano capitalists—through good schools.

* Dr. Hector Garcia founded the American G.I. Forum in 1949. The Forum, composed of World War II Mexican American veterans, has been an educational and civil rights advocacy organization.

Ruben Salazar was killed by Los Angeles County sheriffs after the disruption of the Chicano Moratorium on August 29 , 1970 .