Chicano Activists Research Articles

“In Honorable Remembrance to All Generations”: Commemoration and the Making of Mormon Battalion Memory, 1921–2021

“In Honorable Remembrance to All Generations”: Commemoration and the Making of Mormon Battalion Memory, 1921–2021

Pathways in Oral History: José Ángel Gutiérrez

In this interview feature, the attorney and Chicano activist José Ángel Gutiérrez discusses founding the Voces of Tejanos Oral History Project, a project dedicated to highlighting public leaders of Mexican origin, Chicanos and Chicanas, to continue storytelling and to correct the historical record about the Chicano community. In addition, Gutiérrez recounts his introduction to oral history as a method, significant oral history interviews, useful sources, and the importance of using oral history in the classroom.

The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement by Lorena Oropeza

Reviewed by: The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement by Lorena Oropeza Ignacio M. García The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement. By Lorena Oropeza. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 392. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) The last time I saw Reies López Tijerina was at a Chicano studies conference in the 1980s. He walked silently and unnoticed through the book exhibits, looking fragile and less imposing than he used to. Many young scholars were oblivious to the fact that a legend was among them. Ten years earlier, the first time I met him, he had been an imposing figure, commanding attention whether he spoke to a full auditorium or to students who sat literally at his feet while he discussed themes, such as Chicanos being part of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, more commonly heard at a religious revival than a political discussion. Even those, however, had sounded like a political rallying cry against an unfair system. Tijerina was always a complicated man, quite different from the other three members of the “Four Horsemen” of the Chicano movement, César Chávez, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, and José Ángel Gutiérrez. While Tijerina was less ideological than they were, his early scathing assessments of American society previewed the Chicano activist agenda as it related to stolen land, the use of the Spanish language, the Indigenous roots of Mexican Americans, the reality of white racism, and the need for ethnic alliances. Many Chicano activists and scholars gave his occasional contradictions a pass because he was the only one who had literally taken up arms against the system in 1967 with his Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants). [End Page 100] In The King of Adobe, Lorena Oropeza provides a nuanced biography of Tijerina, allowing readers to see how the man most would remember as a militant land grant activist and fiery Chicano leader constructed his own life. Extreme poverty, weak parental support, and the lack of significant education might have resulted in an insignificant life had Tijerina not found religion as a young man. Oropeza demonstrates how his embrace of a rigid form of Protestantism, his experience as a traveling Pentecostal preacher, and his effort to establish a utopian community all helped to mold his character into the shape of an activist. She points to his failure as a religious prophet being followed by his rebirth as a land grants advocate, a cause he learned about while preaching through New Mexico. His passion, she argues, dovetailed neatly with his bitter dislike of whites, whom he saw as exploiting his people, robbing them of their land, their language, and their culture. Oropeza’s work is meticulous in detail, incisive in analysis, and provides another facet of the rich history of Mexican people on the American side of the border. Studying Tijerina, Oropeza shows, helps readers understand the radicalization of the Mexican American civil rights agenda and its evolution into a human rights crusade. I wish, however, that the author had spent more time on his relationships with the other three “horsemen” of the movement because he helped radicalize them and provided a foundation for their politics. That omission notwithstanding, this welcome biography significantly contributes to our understanding of the Chicano movement and of the Mexican American struggle for liberation. Ignacio M. García Brigham Young University Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association

Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958–1977 by Joshua Glick (review)

Reviewed by: Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958–1977 by Joshua Glick Jerald Podair Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958–1977. Joshua Glick. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. 277 pp. $34.95. Los Angeles, California, home to Hollywood, would at first glance seem a most unlikely place for a robust alternative documentary film culture. It is almost as if the city has no corporeal existence apart from the world of magic and mirrors created by the Hollywood cinematic dream machine. But “L.A.” is a real place, and in this volume, Joshua Glick shows how during a roughly twenty-year period between the late Fifties and Seventies, a group of loosely affiliated contrarians working in the shadow of the major studios and production companies documented the lives and struggles of the everyday people of Los Angeles that go largely unnoticed by moviegoers and tourists. Poorly capitalized, under-publicized, and inadequately distributed, these young documentarians worked the city’s off-ramps: Bunker Hill, the downtown noir of run-down rooming houses and derelict bars and pawn shops that Raymond Chandler called “old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town.” East L.A., home to the city’s neglected and shunned Latino population. Watts, a culde-sac of African American poverty and isolation. Los Angeles’s alternative chroniclers offered a powerful rejoinder to the celebratory portrayals of the city emanating from mainstream Hollywood. Their body of work includes some of the most important films ever made about this most misunderstood and underappreciated city. Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (1961), among the two or three [End Page 57] greatest films of any kind produced about Los Angeles, depicts Native Americans struggling for their bearings in an alien and alienating Bunker Hill neighborhood, which itself is doomed to fall before the redeveloper’s wrecking ball. Chicano activist Jesus Salvador Trevino’s 1971 America Tropical uses the story of a Great Depression muralist commissioned to paint a stereotypical tropical scene but who instead produced a critique of Anglo-American racism and imperialism to offer a commentary on contemporary issues of ethnic identity and power. Killer of Sheep (1977), from Charles Burnett, a leader of a group of African American filmmakers known as the “L.A. Rebellion,” is a study of quotidian ambivalence over the course of three days in the life of a South Los Angeles slaughterhouse worker. Glick juxtaposes these and other critical explorations of the city’s social and racial structures with the work of David Wolper, whose Wolper Productions, headquartered in Los Angeles, was for many years the nation’s leading producer of documentaries and docudramas. Glick astutely describes Wolper as the quintessential Cold War liberal filmmaker, whose programming touched on issues relating to politics, foreign policy, and civil rights with an emphasis on consensus and progress and a faith in the ameliorative powers of the American democratic system. To his credit, Glick does not caricature Wolper Productions as a propagandist or apologist. The company was responsible for Wattstax (1973), a groundbreaking documentary on a Watts Summer Festival concert that was widely praised for its honesty and authenticity, and 1977’s Roots, which exposed a huge white viewing audience to the violence and inhumanity of slavery. Wolper dared not go where Mackenzie, Trevino, and Burnett did, however, and by 1984 and the Age of Reagan he was producing the triumphalist opening ceremonies for the Olympics in a neoliberalized Los Angeles that had reinvented itself as a “World City” entrepot for global finance and capital. Does this mean, however, that Wolper’s filmic vision had won out over its alternatives? Perhaps not. As he brings his story to a close in Reagan’s Eighties, Glick appears to search for a conclusion, like a Hollywood screenwriter unsure of how to wind things up. Glick implies that the decade marked a dead end for activist filmmakers in Los Angeles and elsewhere, as their genre fell before the imperatives of mainstream and profit-generating cinema, television, and new media. But there is still room in our cultural landscape for the kind of transgressive work represented by the likes of The Exiles, Killer of Sheep, or even Wattstax...

"They don't understand their own oppression": Complicating Preservation in John Rechy's The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez

John Rechy's 1991 novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez posits the space of urban Soutwestern barrios as locations where conflicting social relations are mediated. Primary among these conflicting relations are preservation schemes that range from Chicano Movement murals to neoliberal and transnational plans to develop urban space that result in racialized marginalization. The novel demonstrates how Chicana/os mobilize home-grown cultural affirmation and preservation projects designed to counter such marginalization. Yet Rechy takes this critique a step further by portraying how male Chicano activists and state authority figures silence and marginalize Amalia as she traverses the barrio. Placing ecocritical and Latina/o studies methodologies into dialog makes visible how Rechy critiques both sanctioned state preservation efforts and Chicana/o cultural affirmation projects in order to counter Amalia's marginalization. Rechy thus draws attention to neoliberal transnational forces that coopt ethnic preservation schemes.

Mario Jimenez Sifuentez. Of Forests and Fields: Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest.

Residents of the Northwest, Mario Jimenez Sifuentez writes in this compact and compelling book, have long “attempted to obscure the presence of ethnic Mexicans in the region and relegated them to being invisible and temporary laborers” (2), an attempt perhaps best reflected in the very scantiness of the archival record of their presence. Though it would be hard to claim any sort of active attempt to obscure Latinos’ presence in the Northwest by historians and other scholars, the dearth of scholarship (especially in comparison with California and the Southwest) has also contributed to their seeming invisibility. Yet, as Sifuentez makes clear in Of Forests and Fields: Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest, ethnic Mexicans have long been not only present, but essential to the development of the Northwest as a highly productive agribusiness and lumbering empire. Rescuing Latinos from the obscurity to which they have been assigned has clearly been no easy task, but Sifuentez accomplishes it well through a thorough survey of state, local, and union/activist newspapers (often read against the grain to discern ethnically Mexican people’s interests and desires out of the interstices of official discourse) as well as original interviews and oral histories with ex-braceros, seasonal Tejano migrants, pineros (forest workers), and Chicano activists. Though promoted in its title as being about the Pacific Northwest as a whole, Sifuentez focuses his attention on Oregon, with only occasional forays into Washington and Idaho. This serves him well, giving the book a sharp focus and a clear narrative coherence.

Cockroach Dreams: Oscar Zeta Acosta, Legal Services, and the Great Society Coalition

Early in Oscar Zeta Acosta's 1972 novel, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, his protagonist, Oscar Acosta, quits his job as a War on Poverty-funded Legal Services lawyer in East Oakland, California, dumping his license in wastepaper basket. His resignation precipitates his search for racial identity in Autobiography and eventual transformation into Buffalo Zeta Brown, activist Chicano lawyer in Acosta's sequel, The Revolt of Cockroach People (1973). (1) Oscar's abrupt departure enacts a double rejection. First, he rejects liberalism led him to take on the enemy our president [Lyndon Johnson] so clearly described in his first State of Union address (Autobiography 22). Instead, especially in Revolt, Oscar/ Brown adopts a militant Chicano/a Cultural Nationalism at odds with politics of integrationist Mexican American leaders affiliated with Democratic Party. (2) Second, he rejects professional aspirations led him to get his license in order to prove that even a fat brown Chicano like me could do it (Revolt 24). Living communally with his clients and helping them bomb courthouse, Brown declares he's the only revolutionary lawyer this side of Florida Gulf ... I'm only one who actually hates law (214). Oscar/Brown's transformation from Democrat to Cultural Nationalist, from upwardly-mobile professional to grass-roots agitator, mirrors of many Chicano/a activists from same period. Many of them began their and professional careers as members of Viva Kennedy Clubs helped elect John F. Kennedy or as paid organizers in Johnson-era Community Action Agencies. (3) The most notable of these militants was Rodolfo Corky Gonzalez, professional boxer turned Democratic insider turned Chicano activist and poet, whom Brown defends against weapons charges in Revolt. As this essay will demonstrate, however, both Autobiography and Revolt are indelibly marked by Acosta's early identification with Democratic Party, in ways overlooked by critics interested in his role as a pioneering radical lawyer and Chicano writer. Specifically, Acosta's work is shaped by his beginnings as a poverty lawyer, associated with one of President Johnson's signature domestic programs. Incorporated into Community Action Program in 1966, Legal Services marked beginning of federally-funded legal representation for poor, connecting and expanding hitherto fragmented and underfunded network of private Legal Aid across United States. In first eighteen months of program's establishment, Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) created a system of and lawyers about size of United States Department of Justice and all of its US Attorneys' offices (Johnson 73), encompassing over 800 in poor neighborhoods, including Oakland office where Oscar begins to practice law. Critics tend to argue a fundamental shift occurs between Autobiography and Revolt, as Acosta's protagonist learns to challenge liberal conceptions of justice and legality; in Ramon Saldivar's terms, Oscar/Brown embraces a view of justice as something cannot be achieved within present institutions (97). Brown's activist turn in Revolt, however, is less a rejection than a realization of principles inspired Legal Services program. Although in quitting Legal Services Oscar/Brown rejects routine concerns of welfare clients with which most OEO-funded lawyers were absorbed in order to focus on what he calls political (Revolt 256) cases, he does so in order to embrace a model of radical lawyering strikingly resembles outlined by program's early theorists. In line with overall orientation of Community Action Program, Legal Services lawyers were supposed to challenge local welfare bureaucracies to make them more responsive to their clients' needs, a challenge Oscar evades throughout Autobiography but takes up in Revolt. …

Reclaiming the Rhetoric of Reies López Tijerina: Border Identity and Agency in “The Land Grant Question”

Chicano activist Reies Tijerina's speech known as “The Land Grant Question” provides a point of analysis in this article for assessing contradictory understandings of Tijerina and his movement, La Alianza Federal de Mercedes. The author explores how in both its rhetorical content and form, Tijerina's speech navigated and negotiated identity and agency for the Alianza and Mexican Americans. The speech represents border rhetoric, a type of vernacular discourse that migrates across borders, sustains contradictions, and crafts a middle space. Reclaiming Tijerina's rhetoric extends Chicano movement studies, illuminates notions of rhetorical agency, and highlights a rhetorically-inflected notion of the border.

Mythohistorical Interventions: The Chicano Movement and Its Legacies (review)

Reviewed by: Mythohistorical Interventions: The Chicano Movement and Its Legacies Guisela Latorre Lee Bebout . Mythohistorical Interventions: The Chicano Movement and Its Legacies. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. 243 pp. Chicana/o politics—from the early Chicano Movement to more recent interventions into queer activism—has utilized mythohistorical paradigms to legitimize and frame its radical vision for social justice. This is the subject of Lee Bebout's new and exciting monograph on the legacy of the Chicano Movement. Bebout contends that the mythohistorical encompasses a complex set of narratives, stories, histories, and myths that can be empowering in certain instances and oppressive in others. Bebout, for example, cites the concept of Aztlán, the ancient homeland of the Aztecs that many Chicana/o activists in the 1960s and 1970s identified as the US Southwest. While Aztlán validated Chicana/o presence in US soil and countered dominant narratives such as Manifest Destiny and the "Mexican problem" (4) it also overlooked, Bebout explains, "gendered forms of oppression" (5). Throughout his text, Bebout skillfully deconstructs and unpacks the diverse ways the mythohistorical has been deployed by Chicana/o [End Page 397] activists and cultural producers and thus provides a clear genealogy of Chicana/o political thought over four decades. This clear genealogy, however, should not be mistaken for a linear and static treatment of Chicana/o history. Bebout makes it clear that the phenomenon we call the Chicano Movement was indeed "a complex, diverse collection of struggles" and that the mythohistorical by no means implied a stable and fixed set of signifiers (4). Mythohistorical Interventions is organized in a thematic manner, allowing the history of Chicana/o political thought to unravel in an episodic fashion. Employing a mostly cultural studies theoretical framework and qualitative research methods, Bebout focuses on key and select moments of Chicana/o political and intellectual history. In the introduction, the author grounds the project theoretically by situating his work within the intellectual traditions Chicana/o studies, the myth-symbol school and cultural studies. While Western cultures conceptualize history and myth as diametric opposites—the former stands for truth and objectivity while the latter entails the world of imagination and superstition—the two often operate in function of one another. In chapter 1, Bebout continues fine-tuning the concept of the mythohistorical by focusing on three examples of Chicana/o activist initiatives from the late 1960s, namely the activities of UFW cofounder César Chávez, the epic poem I am Joaquín by Rodolfy "Corky" González, and the institutionalization of Chicana/o studies in the US academy. What these three somewhat disparate examples have in common, Bebout insists, is that they all deploy the mythohistorical as a "crucial component of a counterhegemonic struggle" (69). Chapter 2 turns to the iconic figure of Reies López Tijerina, founder of the Alianza Federal de Merecedes, who utilized the mythohistorical to rally the cause of New Mexican land grants. Further, Bebout shows how Tijerina became the subject of mythohistorical imagination when Chicano activists in the 1970s began to regard him as the quintessential revolutionary/bandido. It is also in chapter 2 that Bebout turns decisively to the challenges that gender and sexuality posed for the mythohistorical tropes of early Chicano nationalism with an insightful analysis into the exclusion of Reies's wife, Patsy Tijerina, from the revolutionary/bandido status. Even though Patsy was actively involved in the land grant movement and took radical approaches to her activism, Bebout observes, she instead became an allegory for the "rape of la raza" and the emasculation of Chicanos after being raped and assaulted while Reies was in prison (102). It is with this critical gender analysis of Patsy's figure that the author transitions into the next two chapters of the book, which deal with gender and sexuality. Chapter 3 documents the early Chicana [End Page 398] feminist movement that emerged simultaneously with the Chicano Movement. Chicana activists from this era, Bebout argues, had to contend with a nationalist discourse that was patriarchal at its core. In reaction to this patriarchal discourse, Chicanas refashioned the mythohistorical pantheon by redefining figures like La Virgen de Guadalupe and La Malinche to fit their model of...

Recobrando Recovering The Struggle against Racial Discrimination: The Journey of the Pablo O'higgins Mural for the Seattle Ship Scalers Union

This article analyzes how the thirty-year journey of a mural illustrates changes in a community and the nature of its civil rights activism. Painted by Pablo O'Higgins in 1945 for the Seattle Ship Scalers union hall, The Struggle Against Racial Discrimination depicted aspirations of union coalitions that flourished in the Depression and wartime eras. Mexican and US labor-left collaboration shaped these interracial and international coalitions. Ties with Mexico also transformed the Pacific Rim city of Seattle, and by the 1970s a new generation mobilized for the fresco's restoration. Donated to the University of Washington in 1955, the mural had been “misplaced” in storage for some twenty years, its radical imagery lost to the public. In a new context of civil rights and workplace mobilization, local Chicano activists called for the fresco to be returned “to the people.” Facing various accusations of bias in the early 1970s, the UW administration responded to activists on this issue. The process of recobrando, or recovering, the mural revealed a “struggle against discrimination” both rooted in and different from the struggles of the past, and dramatically shaped by transnational ties.

Working from Within: Chicana and Chicano Activist Educators in Whitestream Schools - By Luis Urrieta Jr.

Working from Within: Chicana and Chicano Activist Educators in Whitestream Schools - By Luis Urrieta Jr.

Standing Up to Sugar Cubes: The Contest over Ethnic Identity in California's Fourth-Grade Mission Curriculum

In the 1960s and 1970s, Native American and Chicano activists launched attacks against the romanticized depiction of the Spanish Past that was taught in California schools. Contests within and among the reform groups (and the eventual resolution found in today's educational standards) reveal a complex effort to shape children's perceptions of race and identity. By tracing the evolution of Native American and Latino activism on this subject and the responses of the state Board of Education, this article shows the symbolic significance of education debates in state politics.

“Rousers of the Rabble” in the New Mexico Land Grant War:La Alianza Federal De Mercedesand the Violence of the State

Abstract: This paper examines the patterns of state-sponsored and state-tolerated violence directed at a social movement organization in New Mexico known as La Alianza Federal de Mercedes during the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning in the 1960s, Alianza mobilized a broad-based movement of Chicano activists and Hispano land grant communities to advocate the return of lands they claimed had been stolen following the Mexican American War of 1846–1848. As a result, its leaders and many of its members became targets of law enforcement surveillance programs and counterintelligence operations. In this paper I examine the patterns of surveillance and physical violence directed at Alianza members. Confronted by Alianza's challenge to racial inequality and economic injustice, the state construed Alianza as a generalized, and racialized, threat to social order that required in response the use of coercive control and physical violence.

Neighborhood Democracy and Chicana/o Cultural Citizenship in Armando Réndon's Chicano Manifesto

In 1971, Chicano activist Armando Réndon began to chart new directions for Chicana/o politics that move away from a narrow emphasis on cultural and ethnic nationalism. He argues that urban Chicana/o neighborhoods ought develop community-based organizations to provide support services for residents and to advocate local concerns to elected officials. In the first part of this essay, I reconstruct Réndon's concept of a ‘barrio union’ as an example of participatory democracy. I situate his concept of neighborhood democracy within Mexican American and Progressive movement history, and then highlight contemporary experiments with this model that are particularly successful in transforming traditionally marginalized individuals into active democratic participants. I then suggest that the barrio union is a repository of cultural, ethical, and political ideals that might be used by progressive Chicana/o activists to challenge the meaning of dominant institutions and political traditions within the United States, particularly the ways in which we conceive of race and American citizenship.

Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice

In 1968, ten thousand students marched in protest over the terrible conditions prevalent in the high schools of East Los Angeles, the largest Mexican community in the United States. Chanting "Chicano Power", the young insurgents not only demanded change but heralded a new racial politics. Frustrated with the previous generation's efforts to win equal treatment by portraying themselves as racially white, the Chicano protesters demanded justice as proud members of a brown race. The legacy of this fundamental shift continues to this day. Ian Haney Lopez tells the story of the Chicano movement in Los Angeles by following two criminal trials, including one arising from the student walkouts. He demonstrates how racial prejudice led to police brutality and judicial discrimination that in turn spurred Chicano militancy. He also shows that legal violence helped to convince Chicano activists that they were nonwhite, thereby encouraging their use of racial ideas to redefine their aspirations, culture and selves. In a groundbreaking advance that further connects legal racism and racial politics, Haney Lopez describes how race functions as "common sense", a set of ideas that we take for granted in our daily lives. This racial common sense, Haney Lopez argues, largely explains why racism and racial affiliation persist today. By tracing the fluid position of Mexican Americans on the divide between white and nonwhite, describing the role of legal violence in producing racial identities, and detailing the commonsense nature of race, Haney Lopez offers a much needed, potentially liberating way to rethink race in the United States.

Experience and Context in the Making of a Chicano Activist

This paper examines the experiences and context in the making of a Chicano activist. Utilizing autoethnographic methodology, I discuss my own identity development, as it was mediated by issues of social capital and mentoring, two significant elements related to Chicano educational activism. I discuss dimensions or race, class, self-esteem, and professional development as they relate to transformative educators and activism.

Racism on trial: the Chicano fight for justice

In 1968, ten thousand students marched in protest over the terrible conditions prevalent in the high schools of East Los Angeles, the largest Mexican community in the United States. Chanting Power, the young insurgents not only demanded change but heralded a new racial politics. Frustrated with the previous generation's efforts to win equal treatment by portraying themselves as racially white, the Chicano protesters demanded justice as proud members of a brown race. The legacy of this fundamental shift continues to this day. Ian Haney Lopez tells the story of the Chicano movement in Los Angeles by following two criminal trials, including one arising from the student walkouts. He demonstrates how racial prejudice led to police brutality and judicial discrimination that in turn spurred Chicano militancy. He also shows that legal violence helped to convince Chicano activists that they were nonwhite, thereby encouraging their use of racial ideas to redefine their aspirations, culture and selves. In a groundbreaking advance that further connects legal racism and racial politics, Haney Lopez describes how race functions as a set of ideas that we take for granted in our daily lives. This racial common sense, Haney Lopez argues, largely explains why racism and racial affiliation persist today. By tracing the fluid position of Mexican Americans on the divide between white and nonwhite, describing the role of legal violence in producing racial identities, and detailing the commonsense nature of race, Haney Lopez offers a much needed, potentially liberating way to rethink race in the United States.

Mesocentrism and Students of Mexican Background: A Community Intervention for Culturally Relevant Instruction

How does the integration of information about a student's ancestral culture elicit a more positive motivation for their learning at school? Chicano activists in the Southwest exposed middle school students to a program of instruction based on Mesoamerican ancestry. The program's effectiveness is analyzed through a quasi-experiment. A pre- and postsurvey measured cultural awareness, desire, effect, reading preference, self-esteem, and self-concept. Informal student narratives were used to interpret treatment effects. Results indicated that the intervention enhanced students' sense of cultural awareness and voluntary reading preferences. Implications for the study include how culturally relevant instruction can be a valuable stepping stone for motivating traditionally marginalized students into a meaningful engagement with content-area literacy. Key words: content area literacy, culturally relevant instruction, mesoamerican, mesocentrism, Mexican American, reading preferences

Roman Mejias: Houston's First Major League Latin Star and the Troubled Legacy of Race Relations in the Lone Star State

During 1999 baseball season, businessman and owner of Houston Astros Drayton McLane was involved in a controversy with Texas Hispanic community. According to Marco Comancho, general manager of KTMD Television and a subsidiary of Telemundo, and Rod Rodriguez, station's sales manager, McLane made disparaging and belittling comments regarding Mexicans and Mexican Americans shortly before a dinner honoring businessman with Houston Advertising Federation's Trailblazer Award for service to community. An outraged McLane vehemently denied having uttered any remarks that might be construed as racist. Following an investigation of incident, Telemundo's chief executive, Roland Hernandez, apologized to McLane, stating that he found no evidence of racially biased comments being made by baseball owner. In a prepared statement, a relieved McLane insisted, Having spent a lifetime honoring values of integrity and honesty, this episode has been unsettling. Despite a rush to judgment by some, this action by Telemundo, hopefully, will help to speed healing process. (1) But if McLane devoted his life to values of integrity, honesty, and community service, why were so many in Hispanic community so quick to question baseball executive's motives? The answer to this question may lie in troubling history of race relations in Lone Star State of Texas, where, in words of Carey McWilliams, have always been 'gringos' to Hispanos while Hispanos have been 'greasers' to Anglos. (2) In Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, Rodolfo Acuna asserts that racial animosities in Texas are a result of Anglo economic domination of Mexican community enforced by official state violence, such as that perpetuated by Texas Rangers, an organization so much admired by dean of Texas historians, Walter Prescott Webb. (3) Jose Angel Gutierrez, as well as other Chicano activists, argues that education in Texas is presented from an Anglo perspective, ignoring fact that the land of West and Southwest, beginning with Texas, was stolen from Mexica ns. (4) While less confrontational and more scholarly in its approach, David Montejano's study of Anglos and Mexicans in Texas, Anglos and Mexicans in Making of Texas, 1836-1986, which received 1988 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from American Historical Association, maintains that history of Texas has been Anglo economic control perpetuated by cultural, political, and social Jim Crow legislation, hegemony of which has been challenged by Chicano civil rights movement. (5) It is within this historical context that alleged racist remarks of Astros owner McLane must be placed. While Houston organization has produced such talented Latin players as Jose Cruz and Joaquin Andujar, it should be noted that Astros management, unlike Los Angeles Dodgers with marketing and pitching success of Fernando Valenzuela, has tended to maintain an Anglo identity, building team around such stars as Nolan Ryan. Jeff Bagwell, and Craig Biggio. While it is impossible to deny athletic achievement of these ballplayers, failure to develop and especially market more Latin star players flies in face of southwestern demographics. From a 1980 base of 8.7 million people of Mexican origin, there was an increase of 4.7 million to a 1990 total of 13.4 million, a 54 percent intercensual increase. And Mexican-origin people constitute approximately two-thirds of Latins, who, in turn, comprise more than 8 percent of U.S. population. Nearly 75 percent of all Mexican-origin per sons live in California and Texas, both of which have populations in excess of 25 percent with Mexican roots. (6) Yet, Major League Baseball establishment in Houston has historically failed to capitalize on these demographics by consistently developing and marketing Latin talent. While perhaps operating on an unconscious level, this policy, nevertheless, may be reflective of city's conservative to reactionary political traditions. …

Reies Lopez Tijerina's “the land grant question”: Creating history through metaphors

Well versed in the history of Mexican, Spanish, and United States land grants, Chicano activist Reies Lopez Tijerina conducted a rhetorical campaign centered in New Mexico in the 1960s. This study analyzes Tijerina's speech, “The Land Grant Question,” presented on November 26, 1967, at the University of Colorado, as an example of interethnic communication and for its use of metaphors in public discourse to create a cultural memory. This examination focuses on the speech's approach to historical relations between Chicano and Anglo culture, and its stylistic aspects.