Freedom Socialist • Vol. 29, No. 3 • June-July 2008

Highlights from Viva la Raza, a sweeping new exploration of Chicana/o identity and resistance

credit: Carolyn Brooks / FS

Viva la Raza: A History of Chicano Identity and Resistance (Red Letter Press) is unique in its panoramic coverage of events from the Spanish conquest to the current day. The book illuminates the nature of Mexican American oppression from a Marxist feminist perspective and conveys the energy and courage of a people hell-bent for freedom.

Viva la Raza highlights the leadership of Chicanas/os throughout U.S. labor history, as partisans of the Mexican Revolution, and in the explosive 1960s and ’70s. It describes Raza participation in movements against the Vietnam War and for the liberation of women and gays, as well as land rights battles, independent electoral efforts, defense of immigrants, and solidarity with Latin American struggles. It includes never-before published accounts of farmworker organizing in Eastern Washington and battles by Chicana feminists in the Seattle movimiento.

Authors Yolanda Alaniz and Megan Cornish bring the passion of committed activists to this analysis, developed for the Freedom Socialist Party. The inspiring saga holds manifold lessons for movements today.

An unconquered people

After decades of a powerful movement for equality, Chicanas/os remain poor, discriminated against, harassed by police, and discouraged by the education establishment.

Such oppression breeds fierce defiance. The courage and knowledge gleaned from generations of community resistance gave an intensely militant coloration to the Chicana/o civil rights upsurge of the 1960s and ’70s. Raza activists displayed a sophisticated consciousness of the fact that achieving liberation hinged on finding a correct political theory. Impressive ideological debates over the nature of Chicana/o oppression were conducted in the very heat of battle with the racist power structure.

A class divided against itself

The modern working class, especially in advanced industrial nations, is not homogeneous. It includes people of different colors and ethnicities, both sexes, sexual minorities, and many immigrant groups. Chauvinism justifies the institutionalized second-class status of workers who are the "wrong” ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation. These "inferior" workers are paid less, employed less, worked harder, given sub-standard housing, education, and social services, and relentlessly maligned and insulted.

As Trotsky and Lenin emphasized, racism, national chauvinism, and sexism are the main internal problems facing the international working class and are therefore the major stumbling blocks in the way of world revolution. The two socialist leaders called on radicals to heal these divisions by orienting to the most oppressed, organizing privileged workers in defense of the less-favored, and demonstrating that unity is to labor’s advantage. When this happens, the entire movement is strengthened.

Racial or national oppression?

Objective analysis has shown that the core of Chicana/o oppression is racism, with the additional aspect of forced assimilation of language and culture that is characteristic of national oppression. ... The fundamental and most typical direction of Chicanas/os has been and is currently toward integration in the U.S. working class, and representation in U.S. politics and social justice movements. Strengthened by 500 years of survival and resistance, they provide vanguard leadership for U.S. workers.

But they cannot do it alone. To revolutionize social relations in the U.S., it is necessary to smash the white racism that props up the labor aristocracy, and keeps the working class tied to the capitalists. It is the responsibility of serious radicals of all colors to lead the labor movement in this cleanup campaign.

The saga of Chicana/o labor

Largely due to [Chicano and Mexicano] influence, the history of labor in the Southwest is one of unsurpassed courage, passion, and persistence. ... Chicana/o labor contributions in both industry and agriculture culminat[ed] in the farmworker battles of the 1960s that sparked the Chicana/o liberation movement and became virtually synonymous with it. The issue of Raza labor is significant not only due to its heroic character, and the window it opens on the little-known and inspiring record of U.S. labor in general, but also because it reveals the nature of the Chicana/o struggle as a movement ... for inclusion with full equality as members of the U.S. working class, rather than for separation aimed at preserving a distinct national identity or economy.

The California farm wars of 1933 were among the first of the giant labor struggles of that decade. ... Thirty-seven major strikes broke out in California’s fields in 1933. Nearly 50,000 workers walked off the job. Growers, government officials, and the federal government were in an uproar. California was at war, a war that foreshadowed a national conflagration.

One of the most dramatic and inspiring struggles of the reactionary McCarthy years was the Empire Zinc Mine strike, which was immortalized in the film Salt of the Earth. ... The battle ... demonstrated the tenacity and strength of Chicana/o unionism. It showed the tremendous power of Chicana leadership when the miners’ wives became the backbone of the strike. The importance of multiracial solidarity was illustrated by the fervent support of locals from throughout the international union.

¡Raza si, guerra no!

Most people of color opposed U.S. aggression in Southeast Asia. But the Black movement at this time, except for the Black Panthers, was highly influenced by cultural nationalism and generally stood apart from what separatist currents defined as the "white” antiwar movement. Chicanas/os, however, jumped in en masse. They constituted a powerful and independent wing of the movement and were instrumental in exposing the racism that assigned a disproportionate number of Brown and Black soldiers to the front lines in Vietnam.
Campus activists, Brown Berets, and members of the Denver-based Crusade for Justice became the first of thousands of Raza draft resisters.

Mujeres mobilize

Chicana feminists were rooted in the working class, steeled by daily resistance to bosses, and driven by the survival needs of their families and by the experience of labor solidarity. Despite denunciation from Chicana/o conservatives, and from the virulently sexist cultural nationalists, masses of women refused to be intimidated. ... They fought for a Chicana/o movement that would represent all their needs as an oppressed race, an enslaved sex, and a super-exploited layer of the working class.

Chicanas were in revolt. But those who looked to the women’s liberation struggle for support were often bitterly disappointed. The general feminist movement was marked by racist indifference to the needs of women of color. ... Though an important sector of the women’s liberation movement was working-class, anti-racist and anti-capitalist, the predominance of petty-bourgeois feminism repelled many women of color and caused them to organize independently within their own racial communities.

... Chicanas have immensely impacted the feminist movement with their demands to prioritize the needs of women of color and end the racism of reformist/careerist organizations that ignore ethnic women and persist in a pallid single-issue focus.

Chicana/o gays emerge

It is not easy to be Chicana/o and to also be lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered. ... Until very recently, Chicana/o lesbians/gays were expected to choose between sexual identity and race.

But Raza sexual minorities and feminists say ¡Basta! Enough!” They insist on the human right to be themselves, and they demand an end to the smothering, bourgeois aspects of all cultures.

¡Adelante Raza!

Raza history illustrates the judgment that people of color are paramount political catalysts in the U.S. — that the movement for racial freedom is at least equal to the struggle for national liberation in its ability to mobilize the oppressed to confront the pillars of capitalist power.

The great intelligence, momentum, and spirit of the Chicana/o struggle shine brilliantly. This is a movement with the power to change history. All that is required is consciousness of its potency and a lucid, historically rooted vision of the road to liberation.

A dazzling future is in store for Chicanas/os. They have earned it and deserve it. Viva Chicana/o liberation! ¡Liberaci—n del pueblo Chicana/o!