Chican@/Latin@ – Anarres Project for Alternative Futures

What Does Hispanic Heritage Month Mean to Me?

By Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval (October 6, 2021)

Hispanic Heritage Month initially came into being in 1968 during the height of social unrest in the United States and around the world. 1968 was year that Chicanx high school students in East LA walked out of their classes to demand what we would call Chicana/o Studies today and that same year, more than five hundred people were killed in Mexico City who were pushing for democratic change in Mexico. 1968 was also the year of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the year that Dr. King and Senator Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and the year so many other things happened.

Hispanic Heritage Month starts on September 15, the day that many countries in Latin America became independent from Spain. However, while one form of imperialism ended, a new form of imperialism soon emerged, with the United States becoming a new imperial power in the region. The U.S. intervened regularly in Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and many other countries, toppling democratic governments for decades. Our role in these countries generated tremendous instability, prompting many to flee here where they once again mistreated. Despite systemic racism and widespread discrimination, “Hispanic” peoples, who are often Indigenous and Afro-Latinx, have organized, fought back, and demanded change. Those people–along with so many more, including my grand-grandparents, who left Mexico during the Revolution in the early 20th Century–have transformed the United States–they often sacrificed their lives so their children could have a better life. Those dreams have been elusive for many, but change has occurred and it continues, as Latinx people continue to demand dignity and respect in all social institutions.

How can people continue to listen to and amplify and honor Chicanx/Latinx and Hispanic voices?

Latinx voices are still marginalized in our popular culture–on television and in Hollywood. Despite some advances, most newsrooms, television shows, and films do not highlight Latinx voices and actors. Moreover, the publishing industry still does not publish enough books by Latinx authors, despite the fact that amazing writers such as Cherrie Moraga, Reyna Grande, Sandra Cisneros, Roberto Lovato and many others continue to release tremendous books that raise consciousness and awareness about the broader Latinx community.

One must therefore be diligent and seek these authors, writers, and actors out–they are doing amazing work, sometimes on platforms such as Hulu, Netflix, and other outlets, but they are out there. Once you find them, you can “spread the word,” as we used to say.

Professors like myself can include new and older Latinx authors in their class syllabi. We can also focus on iconic Chicana artists such as Yolanda Lopez who recently passed away and was most well-known for her work on decolonizing la Virgen de Guadalupe.

Chicanx/Latinx voices do exist, but sometimes one must search hard to find them–and so once we do, we must talk about them with our students, family members, friends, and even strangers.

Who are some Hispanic/Latinx leaders that I admire?

I will mention two here. I have always been inspired by Salvadoran Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero. Romero became the leader of the Catholic Church in El Salvador in the late 1970s, just as the country was slipping into a violent, decade-long civil war. Monsenor Romero was installed as Archbishop because was a safe, apolitical choice; he was somebody who would not “rock the boat” or cause any waves. However, shortly after he became Archbishop, one of his closest friends was assassinated by a death squad who had ties to the military government and he started to speak out against repression and torture. Soon people were threatening to kill him, but Monsenor Romero said, “If I die, I will again in the Salvadoran people.” And he did–after he was assassinated in March 1980, his spirit moved people to seek out change in El Salvador and all around the world.

The second Latinx person who inspires me is Luisa Moreno. Moreno was a Guatemalan-born woman who was raised in an affluent family. She was also very light-skinned but had a transformation of sorts. She moved to Mexico City in the 1920s and then to New York City during the Depression in the 1930s. She became politicized and joined radical political organizations and labor unions. She once said, “One person cannot do anything; it’s only with others that things can be accomplished.” Moreno went on became very active in civil rights issues in Los Angeles, but the government targeted her as part of the Red Scare in the late 1940s and she was forced out of the country.

Moreno, along with other Chicana/Latina women, such as Lucy Parsons, Emma Tenayuca, Francisca Flores, Dolores Huerta, Antonia Fernandez, Magadalena Mora, Sylvia Rivera, and so many more inspire me as many of them struggled against all forms of injustice, namely, capitalism, racism, heterosexism, sexism, and imperialism.

Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval is Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Lessons About Police Brutality from the Chicanx Experience

By Joseph Orosco (June 3, 2020)

The past week has seen an explosion of urban uprising that has not been experienced in the US in decades. Almost 5000 people have been arrested nationwide in protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd at the hand of police in Minneapolis. What is unique about this moment is that a majority of Americans support the protests, in part, because they have seen the violent response of police forces all across the country. Even mainstream media outlets are calling the police response disproportionate and many more people are starting to consider the alternative of police abolition as a serious option.

The history of Mexican American people in the US is one that emphasizes the point that police violence is not recent problem created by the militarization of police forces or of white supremacist infiltration. In the mid 1800s, police forces were created specifically for controlling Mexicans and Mexican American citizens. The Texas Rangers were created during the Republic of Texas era specifically to do border patrol duty with Mexico and then later became a regular unit when Texas was absorbed into the United States. The story of the Rangers is a bloody one of lynchings, massacres, and disappearances. From 1915-1919, in a period named La Hora de Sangre, Rangers abducted and murdered hundreds of Mexican Americans with impunity.

In the 20^th century, several cases are notable, not only for their brutality but also because of what they teach us about responding to police violence today.

Sleepy Lagoon and the Zoot Suit Riots

The first is the 1942 case of the Sleepy Lagoon murder in Los Angeles that was popularized in the play and film by Luis Valdez, Zoot Suit. Dozens of Mexican American youth were arrested for killing another Mexican American under very uncertain circumstances. By this point, the LAPD was notorious for police brutality and especially for being effective at creating a blue wall of silence to protect their own (one famous case that demonstrates this is). But what was significant about this episode was the treatment of the pachuco youth by the whole criminal justice system—police, prosecutors, social workers, and judges. During the trial, the Mexican American men were denied being able to speak to lawyers, they were not allowed to wear clean clothes to hearings, and were subjected to testimony by state “experts” who told the jury about the savagery of the Mexican people and their propensity to use knifes to cut and maim that went back to Aztec times. The girlfriends of the young men refused to testify against them in trial and were then taken away from their families without due process and put into state custody at reform school.

What this points out is that thinking about police state violence will require more than reforming police forces with better training or body cams and so forth. Sleepy Lagoon revealed that there are many sites of power within the criminal justice system that can coerce and harm individuals. Moreover, this case also reveals how institutional reform may not matter much without confronting the way white supremacy structures culture and everyday life. The state dehumanized those young men and women and played off the stereotypes of violent Mexican gangs to secure their imprisonment and family separation. Those stereotypes would just simply explode a year later when police and military forces persecuted Mexican American youth in the Zoot Suit riots of 1943. In other words, police state violence would not have been possible if many white citizens weren’t willing to tolerate it in order to keep Black and Mexican American youth in their place.

The Bloody Christmas Episode

LAPD police brutality against Mexican American youth continued and crested in 1951 with the Bloody Christmas episode (which became popularized in the 1997 film LA Confidential). A group of young Mexican American men were confronted in a bar by police and fought back against the officers that were harassing them. They were arrested and brought back to the city jail. During a drunken Christmas Eve party, dozens of LAPD officers formed a secret gauntlet in the basement of the jail and forced the defendants to run through it while they beat them with clubs. The torture went on for an hour and half and several defendants had broken bones and ruptured internal organs. They were then forced to pose in photos with the officers they had resisted.

The LAPD expected this case to be covered up just like countless of other cases had been. However, the families of the defendants joined together and became part of a grassroots group called the Community Services Organization. The CSO had been organizing with Mexican American communities in Southern California for several years. When the families brought the CSO network to bear on their case, the city and FBI insisted on a review of the Bloody Christmas incident. In the end, a handful of LAPD officers were convicted of crimes and many were reassigned. It was one of the first times that the blue wall of silence was broken.

It should be noted on how CSO accomplished this victory. For some years, CSO had been conducting meetings in the homes of Mexican American families to inform them about issues and the power of collective community action. These meetings inspired thousands to see themselves as agents of change and not just passive subjects of state control. It had created a very successful voter registration drive that empowered thousands of Mexican American voters. CSO also encouraged multicultural alliances with other groups, namely Jewish cultural organizations and Black and Asian labor groups. This kind of solidarity enabled them to help to elect Ed Roybal to the LA City Council in 1949–one of the first Mexican American political officials in the city since the Mexican American War of 1848. Roybal was instrumental in getting pressure on the LAPD during the Bloody Christmas incident.

The organizer that helped to create this Mexican American political bloc was a man by the name of Fred Ross, Sr. He had gained a reputation about Mexican American communities because of helping them to mount a legal case in Southern California to desegregate public schools that went on to be a template for Brown v. Board of Education. After the victory of the Bloody Christmas, Ross went to San Jose to help form CSO chapters. It was there he met a young man by the name of Cesar Chavez, who later went on to become the national organizer for CSO for almost a decade before he helped to form the United Farm Workers with Dolores Huerta (who was also another CSO organizer).

(Cesar Chavez, Fred Ross, Luis Valdez, and Dolores Huerta)

Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War

The last episode has eerie resonance with today’s uprisings. This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War. The Chicano Moratorium was a nationwide group that came together in repose to the disprortionate numbers of Chicanx youth that were dying as casualties in the South Asian conflict. For months, the Chicano Moratorium group planned a huge march and rally in Los Angeles for August of 1970. When the day came, almost thirty thousand people showed up for the demonstration, making it one of the largest anti-Vietnam war protests in history. The march ended in a park, where there were speeches and performances. In a nearby neighborhood, there was a break-in of a local business and police were called. County and city officers responded by the dozens and they came with riot gear. Without warning or provocation, they rushed into the protest crowd, shooting tear gas, and indiscriminately beating people with clubs. There were several casualties, including the Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar, who was shot in the head with a tear gas projectile that was launched into an enclosed bar.

The casual nature of the police violence in this case, and the easy manner in which police were able to deploy weapons in a deadly way, demonstrated to many Chicanxs that mainstream America would not tolerate even nonviolent dissent from people of color.

Paths Forward Now

When we see the responses from police in today’s headlines we have to wonder whether anything has really changed in the last 50 years. The magnitude of the uprisings is certainly different, even if the state responses are not. The big question is how will the work on the street translate into the kind of institutional and cultural changes necessary to confront and end police violence?

Chicano leader Corky Gonzales presented an outline of reforms in his “El Plan del Barrio” in 1968, as part of his contribution to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. He suggested a program of economic reforms that included housing, jobs, and wealth redistribution that surely merits revisiting today.

A further lesson from the Chicanx experience is the importance of organized communities, like those with CSO, that can support families who find themselves victims of police violence. Sleepy Lagoon, however, demonstrates the need for more sustained work, because police violence is just the tip of the iceberg of state coercion toward communities of color. The Sleepy Lagoon trial reveals the need to think about reforms in the training of lawyers in law schools, and election of prosecutors and local district attorneys and judges. We need also think about the education of social workers, and others charged with public health and child protective services, to make sure they understand the various forms of aggression, macro and micro, directed at young children and their families from society and the state. This would also involve looking at how juvenile justice programs are operating. Much of this is on the agenda of prison abolition projects around the country already, but that then also raises the topic of the corporate intervention in the prison industrial complex that profits off the dehumanization of youth of color and the politicians that benefit from those business entities. Finally, it also means that ordinary white folks need to seriously contend with lingering white supremacy in their families and communities, and everyone, include Chicanx/Latinx people, need to acknowledge and grapple with anti-Black racism that is a cornerstone of the white supremacy that harms us all. Educators will have to craft explicitly anti racist curriculums, and discussions will need to happen in homes, workplaces, and especially, communities of faith.

The experience of Chicanx communities shows us that police violence is not isolated or even recent; it is also not something that can be solved easily by focusing on entirely on the prosecution of a few “bad apples”, or on police force reform. I hope that this history does not make it seem like dealing with this problem is an overwhelming and impossible task. Rather, I hope that we can see that there are many places to get involved, many different sites of struggle, for our energies. But it will indeed be hard.

Waking Up to the Lie of the Second Amendment

By Teka Lark (August 4, 2019)

The United States is a country which creates narratives to not only create policies, but to shape minds. When the Pilgrims arrived to what is now the Massachusetts in 1620, the tribes of the Wampanoag people prevented them from starving and as a thank you the Europeans brought communicable diseases and enslaved them.

In 1643, William Penn said of the Lenni Lanape “In liberality they excel, nothing is too good for their friend; give them a fine Gun, Coat, or other thing, it may pass twenty hands, before it sticks; the most merry Creatures that live, Feast, Dance almost perpetually; they never have much; Wealth circulateth like the Blood, all parts partake; and though none shall want what another hath, yet exact Observers of Property.” The Europeans saw this and stole the Lenni Lanape’s land between what is now Delaware and New Jersey– in one of the United States’ first narratives of the “fair” and “honest” deals this country “offered” to the Indigenous inhabitants of the country they would later just outright steal.

You probably read about the finished draft of this United States’ “narrative” –the Manifest Destiny.

“And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us,” from John Louis O’Sullivan in an essay entitled Annexation, in 1845, advocating that the U.S. admit the STOLEN Republic of Texas into the Union.

The United States learned quickly in the beginning in order to continue to enslave, murder, and steal from the Indigenous people of the country they stole and in order to continue kidnapping and enslaving Africans –they couldn’t have the people of the world viewing either of these two groups of people, as people or innocent.

They had to be dehumanized and demeaned, because the average person is not going to sign on to kill and steal from their fellow person, at least not just because, but if the person wasn’t characterized as a person or even better, they were characterized as an enemy, well that might be a better sell.

And it was a better sell.

Had the Indigenous people had been even a ¼ as violent as the Europeans said they were, the great experiment of “America,” would have never happened.

Fast forward to modern day. The European, now the white man has ended slavery, because, apparently Abraham Lincoln was a generous and just man, at least that was the story told in African children (now Black) history books.

“Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature — opposition to it is in his love of justice,” Abraham Lincoln, 1854.

On December 26, 1862 President Abraham Lincoln ordered the execution of 38 Dakota Indians in Mankato, Minnesota, in the largest mass execution in US history.

We didn’t hear that part of the story, because Lincoln freed “the slaves.” Lincoln murdering the people whose land the United States stole, well that wouldn’t have been very consistent.

Because it is all about the consistent lie folks.

The United States has been built on the backs of Black and Brown people.

Both of our names have been changed –to protect the guilty. Our histories have been hidden, and our borders and histories keep shifting to fit whatever lie the United States wants to tell on a particular day.

The Samba, the Tchamba, the Daka. the African, the slave, the n*%ger, the negro, the Negro, the Colored, the Black, the Afro-American, the African American are not really African, according to the United States.

AND

The Nahuatl, the Maya, the Indian, the s*vage, the Native American, the Mexican, the *illegal, the Chicano, the Latino, the Chicanx/Latinx have crossed the border into OUR (white people’s) country “illegally,” according to the United States.

The Second Amendment was ratified to protect the Slave Patrol. The slave patrol is the basis for modern publicly funded police departments (aka white men vigilante types with guns who are institutionally supported to murder and/or round up and detain Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people), the Feds, the Border Patrol, ICE…the reason that Black and Indigenous people die at higher rates by these departments is no accident.

It is by design.

The Second Amendment was created so that white men could continue to kill Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people with the power of the narrative that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people are violent, that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous are stealing white people’s job, that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous are raping white women, that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous are sucking up resources that could go to white people, that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people are loitering in spaces where white people want to walk around and not see us, that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people have crossed the border without the proper paperwork, and that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people need to be controlled lest they do to white men what has been done to them.

Removing the Second Amendment is not about gun control.

Stripping the Second Amendment is about stripping the lie away, from white men that they have the right to kill people for being Mexican, for being Black, and/or for being Indigenous.

This is what I don’t think white men on the far left understand or they don’t care about.

Stripping the Second Amendment from our US Constitution isn’t taking away anyone’s rights, but the white man’s.

Who else can use the Second Amendment, maybe white women…I can’t use it, Chicanx/Latinx people can’t use it, only white people can use it.

Twelve year old Tamir Rice can’t use it. He was sitting around with a toy gun and white men emboldened by their Second Amendment rolled up and shot him.

Philando Castile couldn’t use it, when they shot him with 4-year-old Diamond Reynolds in the car who said after the murder, “Mom, please stop screaming ’cause I don’t want you to get shooted”

Stripping the Second Amendment is removing the symbol and protection that white men have as their god given manifest destiny right to murder people for not just not being white, but for being a descendant of the the people whose land this was stolen from or for being a descendant of the people who were kidnapped and brought here, because that is the only reason the Second Amendment exists. The Second Amendment exists to hold up the lie that built this country and keeps this violent sadistic place pasted together with the blood and tears of our ancestors.

I’m not fighting or debating for the right to empower white men to kill me, again.

The lie told over and over again is one of the most powerful tools the United States has at its disposal, stop letting them tell this one.

From East LA to Ferguson: The long line of violent police response to communities of color

By Joseph Orosco

The protests in Ferguson, Missouri over the past month have captured the nation’s attention, including many commentaries on the Anarres blog. The on going tension draws attention to various issues: continued racial inequality and white supremacy in the United States, and increasing militarization of civilian police forces across the country. Continue reading “From East LA to Ferguson: The long line of violent police response to communities of color”