#Betita TaughtMe: Risk-Taking as a Coalitional Gesture

Abstract

#Betita TaughtMe:Risk-Taking as a Coalitional Gesture Rafael R. Solórzano (bio) Betita's History of Risk-Taking Movidas One cannot discuss the waves of youth activism in 1990s California without talking about the indispensable femtorship of Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez.1 As a freedom fighter and icon of the civil rights, Chicana/o, and women's movements, Betita's accessibility and popular education tools shaped youth of color's political activism and "understanding of their roles in social change" over many generations.2 For these youth, "to fight for justice alongside" Betita "was to connect to a lineage of nearly a century of revolutionary struggle."3 As a writer and organizer, Martínez documented and contributed to multiple freedom movements—from San Francisco, California, to Washington, DC. Her commitment to revolutionary politics and the fight against white supremacy led her to become director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) New York office in her forties. She continuously was part of young militant activist efforts to confront "southern strongholds of racism" despite its risks.4 Not only was "the work … grueling, especially for a single parent," as Tony Platt documented, Betita also carried out her activism in areas considered too dangerous to organize, such as rural Mississippi. In 1964, SNCC launched the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project (MFSP) to draw attention to the ways Mississippi Black people and civil rights workers experienced intimidation and violent oppression.5 As part of SNCC's increasing militancy in the region, Betita's stouthearted participation in this project helped document and build a homegrown freedom movement that consisted of traveling across the South to interview civil rights leaders and collect letters from volunteers. She later published this material in Letters from Mississippi (1965). But the act was particularly perilous, and in fact, scholars and organizers have acknowledged that the MFSP movement took "tremendous risks to combat the evil of racism."6 I open this piece with Betita's contributions to SNCC and MFSP to [End Page 1031] situate her activist past and how her many years of activism offered Bay Area youth of color activists in the nineties an understanding of the transformative potential that risk-taking and coalition building can facilitate. As the movement scholar Karma Chavez writes, Betita provides a "helpful model for how to think about such coalitional orientations."7 In a conversation with Angela Davis on May 12, 1993, at UC San Diego, Betita emphasized how building coalitions in a "me-first" generation after the Reagan-Bush administration requires experimentation, risk, and self-sacrifice, similar to the seven Black youth who sat down at the Woolworth's lunch counter at the first sit-in on April 1, 1960.8 She shared: "I want to emphasize the point about risk. There's not a climate of taking risks today. …There has to be some of that spirit today. Let's experiment, we don't have all the answers; we certainly don't have to have the ideology down, you know the whole package. But let's see some things that are wrong and try to change them, and take risks."9 So much of Martínez's writings and activism teaches us to reconsider the possibilities of risk-taking practices, or what I like to call "risk-taking movidas," on behalf of Black, Indigenous, queer, and youth of color activists. Risk-taking movidas not only are high-risk actions linked to activists' personal costs of time and energy and anticipated dangers but are resourceful undertakings meant to inspire mobilizations that center a new vision of racial solidarity among youth of color, queer youth, and women of color.10 At times, these new communityorganizing practices involve discomfort, fear, and sacrifice, such as the sit-ins at bus terminals and lunch counters led by Black leaders in the 1950s and 1960s. It is this teaching that remains most prominent and, I believe, inspired many of us youth of color in California to shift from our comfort zones in order to challenge the intensification of nativism and the state's youth abandonment by building a massive coalition in the 1990s. Drawing on my experience as a queer Chicano youth organizer in academic...