Brown Is Beautiful

Abstract

Brown Is Beautiful Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice. By Ian F. Haney Lopez. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. vii + 324 pp. $27.95 cloth. In one of his most compelling speeches Malcolm X cried out, want freedom by any means necessary. We want justice by any means necessary. We want equality by any means necessary (Malcolm X 1970:37). In this conservative era, it feels a bit odd to recall how fervently students, activists, parents, and even a few parish priests debated the range of strategies and goals available to the Chicano Movement (1960s to early 1970s). Dozens of scholarly works have examined the Chicano Movement, including diverse groups ranging from the United Farm Workers (UFW)1 (Matthiessen 1969; Ferriss & Sandoval 1997; Jenkins 1985; Levy 1975) to the Chicano Liberation Front2 (August Twenty-Ninth Movement 1975), from the G.I. Forum3 (Allsup 1976; Marquez 1993) to the Crusade for Justice4 (Vigil 1999) and La Alianza Federal de Mercedes5 (Nabokov 1969; Tijerina 2000; Blawis 1971). Movement struggles have included the fight for bilingual education and school desegregation (Carter & Segura 1979; Donato 1997), attempts to gain representation on school boards (San Miguel 1987, 2001), and seeking representation in local and state government and on juries (Acuna 1981), but the movement has also included bombings (Vigil 1999); Reies Lopez Tijerina's 1967 courthouse raid (Nabokov 1969), student walkouts in spring 1968 (jail breaks, as they were frequently called) (Munoz 1989), the August 29, 1970, Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War (Chavez 2002; Mariscal 1999), and an incredible loathing toward the police (Morales 1972). A growing number of books (e.g., Trevino 2001; Chavez 2002; Resales 2000), dissertations (e.g., Gomez 2003), and articles (e.g., Chavez 2000), as well as a documentary film series (Norberg 1995), have contributed to preserving as well as interpreting the history of the Chicano Movement. Each addition to this project adds new perspectives, challenges interpretations, and identifies new links connecting past approaches to current political agendas. Ian F. Haney Lopez's Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice focuses on two pivotal criminal cases during the Chicano Movement involving litigation that Mexican identity is a distinct racial group. Lopez uncovers court proceedings providing detailed descriptions that he dissects alongside his insightful analysis of the defendants' legal defense. These are important sources that social scientists and historians have not mined in studying the Chicano Movement. Court cases and lawyering strategies open a perspective on the Chicano Movement that adds to studies of more familiar struggles: in the streets, against police brutality; in the schools, for better education; in the fields, for the unions; and on college campuses, for admissions and relevant curricula. The first part of the book sets up the increasing activism in Los Angeles that led up to cases known as the East L.A. Thirteen and the Biltmore Six in 1968 and examines the challenges posed by the decision to use an equal protection defense to expose judicial bias. By examining legal violence toward Mexican American youth, and the responses that Los Angeles Superior Court judges gave to inquiry about their grand jury selections, Lopez unearths micro-levels of the social construction of race and begins to reveal the rise, dissemination, and acceptance of racial ideas, racist practices, and racial inequality. Lopez postulates the notion of race as common sense to explain how Chicano youth, community activists, and judges draw from their everyday experiences to construct racial ideas that are then acted upon. Applying his common-sense theory of racism and court and police discrimination as legal violence, the second part analyzes judges' selection of grand juries and policing in Mexican American communities. In the last section, Lopez demonstrates the increasing use of race rather than ethnicity as identity in the Chicano Movement and draws a connection between protest, legal repression, and race. …