Honoring the past to forge a new future: the Chicano Moratorium 50 years on
An interview with Lupe Carrasco Cardona, of the 50th Chicano Moratorium Organizing Committee
Chicano Moratorium March 1970
This past weekend in Los Angeles, thousands took to the streets to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium, the largest Chicano-led mass protest in U.S. history. On August 29th, 1970, over 20,000 Mexican and Chicano youth poured throughout the streets of Los Angeles to protest the Vietnam war, police brutality, and ongoing inequality that the Mexican and Chicano community faced in California and throughout the southwest.
The Chicano Moratorium of 1970 was a massive demonstration organized by students, Mexican farm and industry workers, and civil rights activists. This and preceding mass actions such as the Chicano “blowouts” of 1968, gave momentum to what became a broader Chicano Movement which promoted self-determination and social justice. Politically, this movement was influenced by Black, Indigenous, Marxist and Feminist radical thought and movements.
Largely learning from and following the example of the Black liberation movement, they organized in their local communities and developed critical political education to mobilize and fight state sanctioned violence and segregation. Like other movements, the Chicano movement saw violent and sustained repression in the 1970’s and while it lost momentum, it has continued to influence the politics of Chicanos and Latinxs today.
In the last decade, Mexican, Mexican-Americans and Latinx people have continued to struggle for civil rights and political representation, while being used as scapegoats and criminalized by Democrats and Republicans alike in matters of education, policing, and immigration policy.
Today, the Chicano/Xicanx community is no longer limited to the southwest region of the country. Migration flows that began during the second half of the twentieth century and increased throughout the 1980s and 1990s have formed large enclaves in major metropolitan regions. This was most evident in the spring 2006 “Day Without an Immigrant” marches when millions of Mexican and Latinx people mobilized to defeat the infamous Sensenbrenner-King Bill that would have criminalized all undocumented immigrants and their loved ones.
The 50th Chicano Moratorium march included a week of virtual panels on the history of the Chicano Moratorium and movement as well as a march and car caravan in protest of continued inequality, racist policing, the separation and incarceration of immigrants. At the kick off rally, Cecily Myart-Cruz, a Black/Chicana and the first woman of color president of the United Teachers Los Angeles, spoke on the fight against racism in education. Lupe Carrasco Cardona, another UTLA member, gave a speech on anti-imperialism and the work of Union del Barrio for the past 39 years after its founding on August 29, 1981 after the 11th anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium of 1970.
Other speakers included: Black Lives Matter – LA; Centro CSO; Centro CSO Youth; Lisa Vargas, mother of Anthony Vargas (killed by East LA sheriff’s deputies in 2018); the family of Cesar Rodriguez (killed by Long Beach PD in 2017); the family of Alex Flores (killed by LAPD in 2020). U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN); the family of Enrique Roman-Martinez (murdered on-duty in the army in 2020 while on a camping trip with other soldiers); Los Angeles Indigenous Peoples Alliance (LAIPA), the daughters of Jose Tapete, an immigrant held in the Adelanto Detention Center for over two years; Alex Orellana of Centro CSO; Cholo Scarr and Heron Carrillo of United Brown Coalition.
Chicano Moratorium March 2020
Puntorojo editors Lupita Romero and Eric Nava-Pérez sat down with Lupe Carrasco Cardona, an education activist and co-chair of the 50th Chicano Moratorium Committee. She spoke to us of the lasting impact and lessons of the Moratorium, the fight for Ethnic Studies today, and forging an intersectional and inclusive movement for Black and Brown power and solidarity based on anti-imperialist, abolitionist and feminist perspectives.
LR: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, how you are involved in the Chicano Moratorium and some of the organizations you are a part of?
LCC: I was born in 1976, so it’s interesting how things come around because my dad was very active in the Chicano Movement. Both of my parents were migrant farm workers as youth. He was invited to be a speaker for the 10th anniversary in 1980.
I am a member of Union del Barrio in LA. We’ve done a lot of work around legalizing street vendors, pushing back on ICE, and especially because we have a chapter in San Diego-right by the border-pushing back against (the detention of) children in cages, and prison abolition work. I'm also the chair of the Association of Raza educators, the Los Angeles chapter.
I've been a High School teacher for 21 years. I'm also very active in the Ethnic Studies movement here in the state of California which is set to be one of the first states to have a model curriculum for Ethnic Studies. I was invited to be on the curriculum advisory committee and it got a huge backlash from the conservative community specifically, (and) white nationalists.
LR: The model ethnic studies curriculum would implement ethnic studies in all state schools from K-12, right?
LCC: Correct. We helped create that model curriculum, then it got a pushback from conservatives. So right now, they're trying to push this watered down curriculum. Which we're fighting back on because if it's the first statewide curriculum, the rest of the country is going to follow.
In California, there's a history of the Third World Liberation Front left. They really pushed for four groups in ethnic studies, Chicano & Latino Studies, Asian American, Native American, and African/ Black studies-the four racialized ethnic groups.
A lot of people today don’t even know about the Chicano Moratorium. I live in East LA, this is where it happened and people don't know that it happened 50 years ago even though our local park is named after Ruben Salazar, even though there’s all of these monumental places around us. That is why Ethnic Studies is important.
EN: You mentioned the inter-generational gap in knowing the history of the Chicano movement in East L.A..In the East Coast. And many Mexicans in the US, outside in the southwest have come after the 1980’s and may not identify as Chicanos so for newer generations of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans, how would you describe the Chicano Moratorium?
LCC: The way I would describe it is that Chicanos in the United States in the 70s, oftentimes were pushed out of school and didn't really see opportunities (for them). Many joined the military and went off to the Vietnam War. They realized that the people (there) were even more poor than Chicanos were in East LA, or in the different barrios of the southwest and so their consciousness was raised.
The Chicano moratorium was when poor chicanos in East LA decided that they weren't going to go across the world to someplace they had never been in order to kill other poor people. That it wasn’t their war. I know a vet that says, “I was proud to be over there until I saw that that wasn't my war and then I came home, my legs are messed up, I'm disabled for the rest of my life and I see cops, I see the sheriff, attacking my people in the street right here in my neighborhood. That’s when I realized that my war was at home and I needed to be a soldier for my people here to fight for my people's rights not against the people there.”
The Chicano moratorium was the struggle 50 years ago, but those struggles still exist today. I would also say that we've been in worse-off perpetually since 1970. The military is in a lot of places internationally and that a lot of times, this country actually creates immigration. And so what I would say to newer migrants is that we still need to fight for your rights, our rights, so that the children are not being separated from their moms.
This country goes to El Salvador, goes to Central America, meddles in Mexico and in Puerto Rico and all these different places and that is what triggers immigration. We need to start looking at what is the American dream. You leave your country here to come here so that you can have–the benefits of “the American life”–but the American life is really just a facade. It's full of consumerism to keep the multinational corporations’ pockets lined at the expense of the extraction of resources from the very countries that you come from.
LR: A lot of the issues that prompted the kind of moratorium are actually ongoing, police brutality, xenophobia and hate crimes against Mexicans and Latinos and a growing mistrust of the US military and its treatment of Mexican and Latino soldiers. As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Chicano movement, what would you say is the reason the movimiento declined and wasn’t able to continue to fight those issues in a massive way?
LCC: We have to think about it historically, but I see some of the obstacles in the movements today. I think that a lot of times there's a lot of infighting that happens around identity issues. A lot of times we allow colonial labels and structures to define us, including the border. Folks who are newly arriving are struggling to survive. It’s not like they’ll just pick up a book and learn about the Chicano Movement and know that we're the same people. Most of my family came during the Bracero Program but I still have family that lives in Mexico, or family who are still coming or have chosen to stay there. I think there are a lot of divisions in the community.
It's a lot like what Gloria Anzaldua talks about, like getting criticized because Spanish isn't good enough being criticized as your English isn't good enough. There's all these things that we do against each other that prevents cohesion. A lot of immigration is coming from other countries, not just from Mexico. My students are coming from Guatemala, the school I was in before that, they were mostly coming from El Salvador and Honduras.
We have to start looking at this greater history of colonization and imperialism. The things that we have in common which comes to play with solidarity with other people of color and our black brothers and sisters, who are also within our home countries; such as in Chihuahua, where there's a whole community that is of African descent.
There's common struggles and histories that have to do with this commonality of years of imperialism. We don't talk about imperialism as something that ended in 1821 or 1776. We live in the belly of the imperial beast. Imperialism is alive today. That is why there's separation, because we all think that we have these different and distinct struggles as opposed to we are one people.
The term, La Raza, for example, came into the lexicon before Jose Vasconcelos. Vasconcelos wrote La Raza Cósmica and there is some level of eugenics or racist connotations that come with his Raza Cósmica (framework). But, La Raza as a term actually predates Vasconcelos and it was used before that.
We continue to use it and we recognize that there can be splinters (in our movement) that use it as white-washing. We use it as “the people” and the people from Nuestra América are a very mixed people, but we are very much from Indigenous and Black roots.
LR: For me as a Mexican born immigrant in the East Coast of the US, without roots in the Southwest, I understand Chicanx identity as a political identity and identify as a Xicana. I remember reading about Chicanos and their concept and cause for the liberation of Aztlán. The concept of Aztlán spoke to me because as a Mexican, being told to go back and that I didn’t belong, learning about a history of Mexicanos that centered on self determination and our roots in what is now the U.S. was empowering. However, today there are movements around smashing borders, indigenous movements rising up, how do you see the fight “for Aztlán” as a movement today, is there a fight for Aztlán?
LCC: I think it’s complicated because Aztlán is a physical place and a political “state of mind” but we want to make sure to honor that here in the southwest I am sitting on Tongva land. We know historically that the Azteca people were here and then migrated down south. Many people say (recent migration) is “the return to Aztlán” but I definitely agree on the notion of Chicanismo and Aztlán being a political state of mind and also in recognizing that we are indigenous peoples as well and that and that when we smash these borders, right, which they should be, because they are man- made, created and not real. They're not real, before these borders there was a lot of migration here but the reservation system is what forced us to settle but we were more nomadic, we would travel and there was a lot more trading that happened.
LR: As Mexicans, we are grappling with racism now within and against our communities. So pointing to some of the victories from the past we can learn from, what are some of the things that the moratorium actually did do for Mexican Americans?
LCC: Within that whole movement there was also the student movement. I would say it's the reason why we, Mexicans and Latinos, got into Universities in California. Right now my school principal is a Chicana, there are a high number of Black and Mexican teachers here. That’s something that you wouldn't have seen before; that direct relationship to the movement.
My dad was a Head Start teacher, the Head Start program came out of Chicano Movement. The Head Start Program now is so institutional and there's issues with it, but at the time, if you had to work and you had little kids, they would take them to the fields like they took my parents. My step dad talks about his job, because he was the middle (child), it was to take care of the babies. He’d also have the lunches and water ready for his parents until he got a little bit older, then the next sibling got in charge of the little babies. Head Start meant that you could send kids to school. They would have a place to eat, a place to to learn, and get ready for kindergarten.
There's tons of other programs, the lunch programs at school here in East LA. There's a low income health care clinic that came from the movement that didn't exist before. They are actually one of our sponsors for this year's Moratorium Commemoration.
EN: Those are such concrete examples, and I really appreciate you mentioning those because I think that oftentimes people feel that nothing's going to change and that's because of the way we tend to think about change, we don't attribute it to social movements, we end up attributing it to like policy, to politicians that are being voted in.
LCC: Right now in California, there are two politicians, Luis Alejo who is Chicano and Jose Medina, who is Panamanian. Alejo submitted the original Ethnic Studies Bill* and once he got out, Medina picked up the new bill, the one sitting right now and will hopefully get signed.
When the Los Angeles Unified School District pushed the resolution for Ethnic Studies as a graduation requirement to get passed, there were thousands of students that came out of the schools, went downtown and protested, and were marching all the way around the district office. Teachers, parents, and the media completely jammed the school board to push for it, and eventually protests happened across the state of California. Right now we're in a position where we need to make sure we push more. We're going to be pushing back on Louis Alejo and Jose Medina because they want those bills to be passed so badly, because it's part of their legacy, that they're allowing this white-washing to happen.
[*Editor's Note : The Ethnic Studies bill known as Assembly Bill 331 has not yet been implemented but several amendments have been proposed, the most detrimental one would allow a school district's or charter school's governing board to adopt a course that pays little attention to the statewide model ethnic studies curriculum's focus on the four minority groups traditionally covered by ethnic studies courses.]
EN: I really appreciate you coming back and using this experience with the Ethnic Studies model curriculum movement in California. I'm wondering what you think are the main issues affecting Mexicano or Mexican and Chicano communities today and how do you think we can organize around them?
LCC: This is something that's been on my mind a lot. We all can't do everything right and we all can't do the same thing. There are people like me who are the educators. There are people who are the artists that do murals, that do campaign flyers, all of that, the tattoos. We all have our area and in some cases, we're going to have to agree to disagree, but disagree peacefully.
We need people working in prison abolition, we need people working in immigration rights, all of these areas. And we need to be respectful of one another, like we need to honor that we all have different intersections. If something is important and it is part of one of people's identity, even if it's not a part of our own identity, we have to support that. I think that's going to be one of the things that's really going to make or break this movement.
We also need to recognize that all of our (different) struggles are part of the same struggle. For instance LGBTQ issues; if we have members of our community who are being discriminated against, even if we are straight or cisgender, we have to recognize that anybody in our community who's been discriminated against, that that is our struggle too. We are not free until we're all free. You know, we know for sure there were gay people at the original Chicano Moratorium, it just wasn't highlighted, but we know for sure because we know people who are now elders who have come out. But now, 50 years later, we need to make sure to embrace people so that they want to be in the movement because they think it's not about them. It may not be my struggle but you are my people. So, it is my struggle. And that goes for the women, right? For the Chicano Moratorium Commemoration, it was deliberately decided that women were going to be in leadership. A lot of times, the inter-generational (gap), not just in terms of immigration but even (with) the youth.
(Chicano) Elders, it's honorable what they've done. But sometimes, they're still set in some (out-dated) ways and we may not be able to change them, but we need to recognize it in them so that we don't replicate it for another 50 years. And that goes back to me even. I'm a mom right, I have a 25 year old son, and even I have to recognize that some of the ways that I was raised, my parents meant the best for me, but in a lot of ways it wasn't the best for me.
There’s been 500 years of colonialism and imperialism that created all of these really negative behaviors and ideas. But at the same time can play a part in changing that for the future, changing the anti-blackness or homophobia or anti-mujer sentiments.
The PuntoRojo editorial collective is taking the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium as an opportunity to address the historical lessons, political questions, and intergenerational gap that exists between the Chicano Movement of the 1970’s and a newer generation of Mexican and Latinx immigrants today.
