RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Maria Elena Martinez and Luz Bazan Gutierrez on 'La Raza Unida' and Beyond

Maria Elena Martinez, left, and Luz Bazan Gutierrez in studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, Friday, July 6, 2012. Photo by Allan Campbell / The Rag Blog.
Rag Radio:
Maria Elena Martinez and Luz Bazan Gutierrez
on the historic legacy of La Raza Unida

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / July 14, 2012

Maria Elena Martinez and and Luz Bazan Gutierrez discussed the colorful legacy of the historic La Raza Unida Party with Thorne Dreyer on Rag Radio, Friday, July 6, 2012. Both women played instrumental roles with La Raza Unida from its founding in 1970.

They discussed the history of the party, which grew out of the Chicano activist group, the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), its role in empowering Mexican-Americans in Texas and elsewhere, and its lasting political and cultural impact.

Former La Raza Unida activists joined together for a lively reunion in Austin, July 6-7, 2012.

Listen to the Rag Radio interview with Maria Elena Martinez and Luz Bazan Gutierrez here:


Rag Radio features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. The syndicated show is produced in the studios of KOOP-FM, Austin's cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station. It is broadcast live on KOOP and streamed live on the Internet, and is rebroadcast on Sunday mornings on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA.

Juan Castillo wrote in the Austin American-Statesman :

In 1970 young Mexican American firebrands in South Texas rose up to demand change, speaking out against discrimination and creating their own political party, which they called La Raza Unida. In the span of about eight years, La Raza Unida energized a youthful following, spread to other states and elected candidates in Texas' predominantly rural Mexican American communities where Anglos historically dominated...

Now graying and with a few in their 70s and beyond, some party activists [gathered in Austin, Texas, July 6-7, 2012] for a rare La Raza Unida reunion and conference.

Maria Elena Martinez was the last chair of the Raza Unida Party in Texas, serving from 1976–78. Maria Elena, who has a Masters in Education from the University of Texas at Austin, worked in private and public education for 34 years, specializing in bilingual education.

A volunteer at Alma de Mujer Center for Social Change, a project of the Indigenous Women's Network, Martinez now dedicates her time to spiritual work and healing. Since 1992 she has studied Shamanism through the Foundation for Shamanic Studies and is a Minister of the Circle of the Sacred Earth.

Luz Bazan Gutierrez was in Crystal City at the formation of the Raza Unida Party and was the first Raza Unida Party county chair for the state of Texas. Then married to Raza Unida founder Jose Angel Guitterez, she was instrumental in a move to empower women in the male-dominated movement.

Luz Bazan was named one of “100 People of Influence” by Pacific Magazine, and has received a national Lifetime Achievement Award for her work with the Latino community and a Peace and Justice award for her work related to empowering low income persons. She is president and CEO of Rural Community Development Resources in Yakima, Washington.

Watch Jeff Zavala's video of the Rag Radio show:

Maria Elena Martinez and Luz Bazan Gutierrez discussed the legacy of La Raza Unida on Rag Radio, Friday, July 6, 2012. Video by Jeff Zavala of ZGraphics who filmed the show live in the KOOP studios in Austin.
Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP, 91.7-fM in Austin, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio: FRIDAY, July 27, 2012, Actor, Musician & former Movement Lawyer Brady Coleman, with live performance by The Melancholy Ramblers.

The Rag Blog

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Tony Platt : My Friend Betita Martinez

Betita Martinez. Photo from SF Gate.
'The heart just insists':
My friend Betita Martinez

As the daughter of a dark-skinned immigrant from Mexico City and a blue-eyed North American, she felt racism in the air, 'but I did not have words for it then.'

By Tony Platt / The Rag Blog / December 27, 2010

I’m visiting my old friend Betita Martínez a few days before her 85th birthday. I bring chocolate chip cookies, and my laptop to show her photographs of a recent trip to Europe and Morocco. Our conversation is not the grand political discourse it used to be. It’s more of an ode to the everyday.

We’ve known each other for 35 years, from the time we worked together on a radical pamphlet about the police, through our years as comrades in a Marxist organization, and during the last two decades as leftists struggling to find our way through the dystopian gloom.

While most of us licked our wounds and picked up our interrupted lives, she protested with anybody who would march in the 1990s and was never without a sheaf of leaflets in the 2000s. She kept the faith, while mine wavered. “The heart just insists on it,” she once explained.

Betita looms large in my memory as a professional revolutionary who managed on a few hours of sleep and an occasional steak, with little time for small talk. This wasn’t always the case. At one time she was on the fast track to professional success.

Elizabeth Martínez grew up in the white section of Washington, D.C.’s segregated suburbs in the 1920s and 1930s. As the daughter of a dark-skinned immigrant from Mexico City and a blue-eyed North American, she felt racism in the air, “but I did not have words for it then.”

Her father, Manuel Guillermo Martínez, who had witnessed the Mexican revolution as a young man, worked his way up from a clerk in the Mexican Embassy to professor of Spanish literature at Georgetown; and her mother, Ruth Sutherland Phillips, got a master’s degree from George Washington and taught advanced high school Spanish.

Soon Betita was emulating her parents’ hard work ethic, joining the bridge club in high school and prepping for college and a career. She was the first Latina at Swarthmore, graduating with honors in history and literature in 1946. Here she began a lifelong friendship with fellow student (and later renowned economist) Andre Gunder Frank, a Jewish scholarship boy from Europe who, like Betita, knew what it felt like to be in exile, never feeling quite settled anywhere.

After college, using her mother’s vaguely British middle name, Liz Sutherland plunged into the post-war ferment of New York’s cultural scene. With her contacts from Swarthmore opening doors to institutions typically closed to women and Latinos, jobs came quickly and easily: as a translator and researcher at the United Nations (1947-1953), an administrative assistant in the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art (1957-1958), an editor at Simon and Schuster (1958-1963), and Books and Arts Editor at The Nation (1963-1964).

Betita Martinez. Photo by Margaret Randall.
For some 15 years Liz hobnobbed with cutting edge artists and literati, and married one, the writer-activist Hans Koning. She moved easily between the beat milieu of the Village -- hanging out with Diane Di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and other demimonde intellectuals -- and chic patrons at Fifth Avenue soirées. This ability to function in very different worlds would serve her well later in life when she had to fundraise for grassroots causes and translate radical rhetoric into palatable liberalism for middle-class audiences.

Among her friends were photographers Edward Steichen (her boss at MoMA) and Robert Frank, and the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. She could more than hold her own reviewing French new wave and English kitchen sink movies in the la-di-da Film Quarterly.

“If the film speaks its piece well, it lacks the magic of the unsaid,” she wrote in 1961 about Karel Reiz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. “There is nothing here to make you shiver, no awareness of ‘the million-eyed Spyder that hath no name.’ The characters are all there, but they are more recognizable than illuminating.”

Unusually for somebody still in her 30s, she had honed literary skills as an editor, designer, and writer. Most of us hope to be good at one of these things in a lifetime. She did them all really well.

In 1960, just two years into her job with a prestigious publishing firm, Simon and Schuster -- and already an editor -- she was assigned to work with the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman on the publication of Four Screenplays (including “Wild Strawberries” and “Seventh Seal”). She saw the landmark book “through from start to finish,” she told a reporter for Saturday Review. During a visit to Sweden to meet Bergman, they had lunch together on a set. “What was it like to talk with him, what’s he like?” I once asked her, wide-eyed. “He said I had nice legs,” she replied.

The following year she was off to Cuba, meeting with writers and filmmakers creating a “cinema of revolution.” That was her first turning point: “When Cuba declared itself socialist, so did I.”

In 1964, Liz served as go-between and editor for the militant black-led organization SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and Simon and Schuster, resulting in an extraordinary book of photographs, The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality. It opens with three tranquil, rural images of the Deep South, followed by a carnival scene of a lynching in graphic detail.

Lorraine Hansberry gets credited for the introduction, as do Danny Lyon, Roy de Carava, and others for their photographs, but Betita’s name is nowhere to be seen. (She was similarly unacknowledged for her editing role in Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power, another iconic publication.)

She finally gets her due years later for helping Jim Forman write one of the most significant memoirs of the civil rights movement, The Making of Black Revolutionaries. Holed up in a house in Puerto Rico, she helped him not only get his writing in shape, but also broaden his “understanding of the vast and deplorable role of the United States government in suppressing the rights of all nonwhite people.”

In the mid-1960s, now in the prime of her life, Liz Sutherland made the shift from publishing to joining the Movement, giving up a sure-thing life of privilege for long hours and low pay for the next 45 years.

She became director of SNCC’s New York office, getting the word out and raising funds from Jewish sympathizers when she wasn’t on the road in Mississippi and Alabama, or making overtures on behalf of black nationalists to the Chicano-led UFW organizing migrant workers in California.

“I did not grapple with my particular identity then, with being half Mexican and half white,” she recalls. “The work said who I was.” And the work was grueling, especially for a single parent. Her pre-teen daughter Tessa “endured many lonely hours and TV dinners” when her mother was interviewing civil rights workers in the South. “She understands about Mississippi.”

A few years later, three pivotal events propelled her political development in a new direction. First, SNCC had, as she put it, “an identity crisis” and decided it “should be an all-black organization.” Stokely Carmichael made clear in a speech given in Berkeley in 1966 that “we cannot have white people working in the black community.” No one “white-baited me to my face,” says Betita recently, but to most of the SNCC staff she was “classified as white.”

Secondly, Elizabeth Sutherland and several other refugees from SNCC contributed to “an energized convergence of women in New York City,” as one observer has noted, and were in on the ground floor of the women’s liberation movement. Elizabeth was a member of the New York Radical Women’s collective -- a group that included Joan Brown and Shulamith Firestone -- and contributed an article (with Carol Hanisch, instigator of the celebrated protest of the Miss America pageant in 1968) to the first issue of Notes From The First Year, a theoretical journal of radical feminism, priced 50 cents to women and one dollar to men.

The Hanisch-Sutherland essay, which follows right after Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal Organism,” is organized as a series of answers to typically asked questions about feminism. For example, don’t some women “naturally want to be housewives?” To which the authors of “Women of the World Unite -- We Have Nothing To Lose But Our Men!” reply: “Anyone who thinks she feels good as she surveys her kitchen after washing the 146,789th batch of sparkling dishes isn’t being ‘natural’; she’s literally lost her mind.”

As Elizabeth Sutherland became Betita Martínez, she made sure that issues of gender were not put on the back burner. In 1970, she contributed “Colonized Women: The Chicana” to Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Powerful, an anthology that became required reading for a generation of feminists. Today, Morgan quickly recalls Betita’s “intensely feminist intelligence and commitment. Her stubborn insistence on freedom and power for all members of communities of color -- including, surprise! women -- got her into a lot of hot water. But that never stopped her.”

Thirdly, a trip to Cuba in 1967 connected her with an inspirational gathering of Latin American revolutionaries that triggered her own identity crisis: “the ground of my life was shifting, stretching.” She took off for New Mexico in 1968, where she founded a Chicano movement newspaper, El Grito del Norte, and organized the Chicano Communications Center. “A voice inside of me said, ‘You can be Betita Martínez here. It feels like home’.”

It felt like home until the mid-1970s, when Betita left New Mexico and joined a leftist organization in San Francisco, hoping to be part of a movement that would transcend identity politics. Ten years later, after the Marxist left imploded, she returned to grassroots work, searching for ways to bring communities of color together, speaking out fiercely against racism, sexism, and war -- saying “NO to any definition of social justice that does not affirm our human oneness.”

While illness limited Betita’s mobility when she reached her 80s, she kept on writing, as she’d done all her life. Without a university base or philanthropic support, she has accomplished what most academics never do in a lifetime: written several books that have left a deep impact on readers searching for socially relevant, well researched, and thoughtful history and commentary.

Among her lasting contributions are Letters From Mississippi (1964), The Youngest Revolution: A Personal Report on Cuba (1969), 500 Years of Chicano History (1976), and 500 Years of Chicana Women’s History (2008), not to mention hundreds of journalistic essays. In 2000, she received an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, but not the private pension, home ownership, and other perks that typically crown an academic career.

Betita Martinez. Photo by Tony Platt / The Rag Blog.
Recently, Betita looked more deeply and honestly into the self-inflicted wounds that can’t simply be blamed on the Man, “the human toll of righting wrong.” It troubles her that for too long the Chicano movement was seen as a subsidiary of the African American movement; that women in SNCC and Chicano organizations were too often considered subordinate to “male warriors” and assigned housewifely duties; that in the name of fighting for a “humanist society,” Marxist organizations could treat its cadre so brutally.

And while she gave all to her extended political family, Betita “deeply regrets neglecting another identity: being the mother of a young daughter who needed much more attention than she received in those years.”

Now it’s the mother who needs and gets much more attention from her daughter. A stroke makes it hard for Betita to see, hear, and remember yesterday’s visitors, yet she insists on living by herself with her dog Honey in a small, rented apartment in San Francisco’s Mission district, surrounded by books, posters, mementos, and rows of filing cabinets. "I love all dogs and some people," she says. But she’s always delighted to see visitors, and disappointed when we leave.

Today, the talk is about a trip Cecilia and I took recently. Her eyesight is not good, so she sits almost on top of the screen of my laptop as I scroll through hundreds of photographs that for me are already in the twilight between just now and the past.

As she imagines the photos through a blur, I tell her stories to go with the images: riding a lurching camel through pillowy sand dunes in the Sahara, shopping in an outdoor market in Provence for just-picked fruits and vegetables, circling Jeff Koons' gigantic flowering puppy that sits calmly outside the Guggenheim in Bilbao, watching kids splashing through a swimming pool installation on the roof of the Hayward Gallery in London, and stumbling over memory plaques in Berlin.

She happily munches cookies, and lights up when I come to photos of our new dog. "You must bring Buster here,” she says. We must all go to Morocco to see the camels." She laughs at the absurdity and attractiveness of the possibility.

She’s thirsty and I look for a glass near her sink. "This one?" I ask. "Yes," she replies, "that one. It's a mere bagatelle." I do a double take and she laughs. "I haven't heard that in a long time," I say. "Me neither," says Betita. "How come I can remember that, but can't remember the name of the person who helps me every day?"

We stop for a moment, pondering the marvelous trickiness of the brain. Then, just as we have often done together, we muse about the meaning and origins of this trifle of a word. As I search her well-used English and French dictionaries, and read out aloud all the detailed information I can find, I am reminded of the many times that we have done this together, sharing our pleasure in words and language, and for this moment all is as it was.

Happy birthday to Elizabeth (Betita) Martínez, born 12 December 1925.

[Tony Platt is the author of 10 books and 150 essays and articles dealing with issues of race, inequality, and social justice in American history. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Truthdig.com, History News Network, Z Magazine, Monthly Review, and the Guardian. Platt, now an emeritus professor living in Berkeley, California, taught at the University of Chicago, University of California (Berkeley), and California State University (Sacramento). This article was also posted to his blog, GoodToGo.]

Thanks to Bernardine Dohrn /The Rag Blog

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Carlos Calbillo : On the Passing of Carlos Guerra

“America’s friendliest angry looking retired columnist... and feared by fish.” -- Carlos Guerra, on Twitter.
Columnist and Sixties Chicano
activist Carlos Guerra dies

See "Memories from 'the day': On the passing of Carlos Guerra," by Carlos Calbillo / The Rag Blog, Below.

Carlos Guerra, 63, an icon of the Sixties Chicano movement, a former columnist for the San Antonio Express-News, and a leader in social justice issues throughout his life, died December 6, in Port Aransas, Texas.

Arnold Garcia, Jr., wrote in the Austin American-Statesman that Carlos Guerra "was a student activist, grant writer, political organizer, fundraiser, legislative aide, jeweler, opinion writer and a pretty darned good cook." And, Garcia said, Guerra "was a man whose intellect -- like his humor -- refused to recognize boundaries."

Guerra was, according to the Texas Observer’s Melissa Del Bosque, “one of the first prominent Latino columnists in American newspapers,” and was “one of Texas' most recognizable voices and a role model for countless younger journalists.” In an obituary, the San Antonio Express-News said that Guerra “was an outspoken advocate for increased access to higher education, environmental issues and Latino participation in government and politics.”

Guerra, who grew up in Robstown, Texas, became an early leader in the Sixties Chicano movement. He was national chairman of the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) and worked with La Raza Unida Party, serving as chairman of Ramsey Muniz’s second race for Texas governor.

At a memorial service for Carlos Guerra December 11 at Palo Alto College in San Antonio, former Raza Unida leader Mario Campeon said, “He stood for the well-being of others, particularly the poor. He fought…the fierce discrimination that existed at that time.” “All of us of that generation had the passion,” said Campeon, “but Carlos was also a gifted speaker in articulating the agenda of the Chicano movement.”

-- Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / December 15, 2010

Carlos Guerra on the cover of Caracol, a Texas-based Chicano literary/news magazine from the 1970s. Image from National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
Memories from 'the day':
On the passing of Carlos Guerra

By Carlos Calbillo / The Rag Blog / December 15, 2010

The 60's of course were a different time, and we as thinking young people were being influenced and bombarded by the dominant American culture: the music, the militancy -- revolution was in the air -- and of course the fashion. We wore bell bottoms, paisley shirts, and desert boots with our serapes and brown berets. We were young and crazy -- some of us actually idealistic -- trying to find a new way in the reality that was Texas of the times.

This society we perceived as intolerably oppressive and it definitely seemed to us “enlightened” youth to be designed to keep brown and black people down. So we took up "arms" against it, much to the horror of our parents and other "gente decente," such as LULAC and their ilk.

I met Carlos Guerra at some of these early confabs of the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), and since the Houston MAYO cadres were urban and "hippie-ish," many of us either didn't speak Spanish or did so haltingly. When I began to attend MAYO actions in the small communities across South Texas (small compared to Houston) and discovered that some of the MAYO hermanos/hermanas spoke mostly Spanish, perhaps out of nationalistic zeal, I -- and many of the Houston MAYOs -- would become uncomfortable.

One time we traveled to Robstown, Texas, to support a rally protesting the racist school system, which of course was designed not to educate our people, but to serve as an institutional bludgeon to keep us Mexicans down and ignorant. Robstown was a perfect example of a small Texas town where the population was overwhelmingly Mexican-American yet the economics and politics were tightly controlled by the gringo establishment.

The rally was being held in front of the MAYO headquarters in a down and out barrio and about 100 community people, parents, and students were there, very pissed, carrying protest signs in English and in Spanish. Robstown MAYO chieftain Mateo Vega was delivering a fiery bilingual speech and rant.

The Robstown police, represented by several big white guys in coats, ties, and sunglasses -- and wearing very large pistols prominently on their belts -- were walking around taking our pictures and generally acting like racist thugs out of central casting.

Carlos Guerra was there of course and afterwards we all met to debrief. I will never forget that, unlike the linguistic ideologues who considered those of us from Houston to be culturally pendejos, he was a firme vato who looked upon us, his urban hermanitos, not with scorn or disgust, but with a loving bemusement -- and with an open attitude of inclusion.

Carlos of course was completely tri-lingual and spoke not only English perfectly but also a beautiful Texas Spanish and a stunning pachuco cálo.

From the beginning, Carlos understood the need to unite and not to fight, something that we in the current political arena and climate sometimes appear to forget.

Texas DPS surveillance photo of MAYO/Raza Unida leaders meeting on the campgrounds at Garner State Park, 1970. Carlos Guerra is in the rear, leaning to the right.

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Another incident I remember with my friend "Charlie War" -- as some of us jokingly called him -- was when MAYO and La Raza Unida Party had finally succeeded in taking over Crystal City and surrounding towns, and even entire counties, and Jose Angel Gutierrez called for all chapters to meet and to discuss future strategy at Garner State Park.

It was a beautiful setting with picnic tables under the great oak trees and we munched on barbacoa and tripitas as Jose Angel led us in discussion. We had all noticed several unmarked police vehicles on the periphery and we could see and even hear their cameras -- with telephoto lenses -- clicking away.

Eventually, Carlos Guerra and several others, including myself, made our way over to the parking lot at Garner where most of us had parked our junky cars. The lot filled suddenly with uniformed DPS troupers who began to berate, intimidate, and bait us in the way that only they knew how to do.

They went around writing down the license plate numbers of all of our cars, which they seemed to know well. Being new to this kind of political intimidation, I freaked out and began to back off. Carlos Guerra fearlessly went up to these PENsadores and began an attempt to educate them on the rights of American citizens to peacefully assemble, our right to meet without fear of governmental interference or intimidation.

Several of these sons of Texas seemed shocked and taken aback that their "right" to harass us was being challenged by this long-haired hippie who seemed not to fear them or anything else for that matter. They became very upset but apparently couldn't come up with an excuse to arrest Carlos in front of witnesses; they muttered something and left.

Every time we visited Robstown, Carlos was there ready to assist us, his urban MAYO brothers and sisters, with a meal or with a place to crash. There have been many -- and will be many more -- remembrances of Carlos Guerra, incredible tales, profound and funny adventures, many of them even true. For those of us who were touched by his life, it goes without saying that we, and I for one, will never forget his wit, his love, and his example.

To paraphrase the bard (some vato from Inglatierra): "He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again."

Amen y con safos. Descanse en paz, hermanito en una raza que pronto llegará a ser verdaderamente unida, porque si se puede...

[Carlos Calbillo is a filmmaking instructor and filmmaker living and working in his hometown of Houston, Texas. He is currently working on a documentary film on emerging Latino political power in Houston and Texas. He can be reached at laszlomurdock@hotmail.com]

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VERSE / Gregg Barrios : Free Ramsey Now!

1972 campaign poster for Ramsey Muniz, Raza Unida candidate for governor of Texas.


FREE RAMSEY NOW!

By Gregg Barrios

When all is said and done
when you and I are dead,
your legend will remain
a true Chicano son.

It never was just us
it was you, me y todos
who believed our time
had come - and it had.

But politics is a fickle
whore who knocks on
every door for a quick
trip around the whirl.

You were the poster
boy for el movimiento
madres y palomilla all
voted La Raza Unida.

Ramsey for Governor
de Tejas was the rally
and the cry until they
put a spell on you.

We stood in disbelief
the gutless cynics
said you betrayed us
by not fighting back.

But where were we
when you received
a life sentence for
drug-trafficking?

Free Peltier, simón que sí.
Free Angela, right on, bro.
Free Ramsey Muñiz, and
the silence is deafening.

No solidarity or support
from those whose road
you paved, now elected
judges, mayors y mas.

Watching them on TV,
I wonder how and why
they lost their raza roots,
cut their native tongue.

I remembered the exiled
brothers Flores Magón
true architects and heroes
de la Revolución jailed.

A century later, you
occupy the same cell
at Leavenworth for a life
sentence of confinement.

We don’t know how to
honor our leaders alive
only after they’re dead
and buried en el olvido.

I saw a documentary on
PBS today a clip of your
vibrant face did express
real strength and grace.

Your voice had been erased
as if truth could cause riots
or upheaval in the realization
of how much we left undone.

When all is said and done
when you and I are dead,
your legend will remain
a true Chicano son.

-- Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog
Posted December 15, 2010


Ramsey Muniz arrives at Nueces County Jail in handcuffs, December 28, 1976.
Ramsey Muniz was a Chicano activist, a civil rights attorney, and twice the Raza Unida Party candidate for governor of Texas, receiving six percent of the vote in 1972. Famed attorney Dick DeGuerin said Muniz "changed the face of politics in Texas. He gave power of inclusion to Hispanic Americans." Muniz was convicted in 1976 on drug charges resulting from a controversial sting operation carried out by the DEA, and in 1994 was given life without parole after a third drug conviction.

[San Antonio poet, playwright, and journalist Gregg Barrios wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin. Gregg is on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. His new book of poetry, in which this poem is included, is La Causa (Hansen, 2010).]

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BOOKS / Gregg Barrios : David Montejano's 'Quixote's Soldiers'

Up from the barrio:
A Chicano son of San Antonio
Reflects on El Movimiento

By Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog / July 6, 2010

See video of Gregg Barrios' interview with David Montejano, Below.

[Quixote’s Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966-1981, by David Montejano (University of Texas Press, 360 pp., $24.95, paperback).]

SAN ANTONIO -- In Quixote’s Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966-1981, author and educator David Montejano posits that San Antonio local history provides a microscopic look at the Chicano civil-rights movement and the social change it forged.

In the book’s preface he declares: “As a San Antonio native, my narrative explanation has a certain autobiographical quality to it.” Montejano grew up in “a West Side subdivision built in the 1950s, in the Edgewood District, one of the poorest in the state and later made famous by its successful challenge of the state’s educational financing schema. My neighborhood was a poor working class surrounded by poorer neighbors on three sides.”

Still, Montejano’s parents made the decision to send him to Catholic school since it provided a better education. He attended Central Catholic High in the mid-1960s along with George and Willie Velásquez and Ernie Cortés, all of whom later played important roles in the movimiento. While future San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros also attended the Catholic high school, Montejano considers Cisneros a beneficiary but not part of the Chicano movement.

The seeds of Montejano’s activism were planted early on: “The Brothers [of Mary] taught a humanistic philosophy of brotherhood that later became liberation theology.” He was drawn to those teachings with their attention to poverty and social inequality.

His freshman year at then South Texas State University in San Marcos proved important to the young man’s education: He witnessed a clash between a Mexican service-station attendant who had refused to put gas in a car of drunken cowboys and how it was effectively defused. Later, when a caravan of striking farmworkers came through the small college town, Montejano joined them.

He transferred to the UT Austin campus where he became involved in the counterculture, anti-war, and black civil-rights movements and helped collect petitions to get La Raza Unida Party on the state ballot. His activism led to his arrest during a student protest in Austin against service-station owner Don Weedon.

Montejano is now a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the author of the award-winning Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1936-1986, and the editor of Chicano Politics and Society in the Late Twentieth Century.

Unlike many academic books steeped in jargon, Quixote’s Soldiers is a fascinating look into the making and undoing of el movimento chicano and more specifically traces “some parts and tactics to its history of the Chicano movement in San Antonio.”

Juan Guajardo (foreground) and other Brown Berets leading a march against police brutality, San Antonio, November 20, 1971. Photo from San Antonio Light Collection / UTSA Institute of Texan Cultures / San Antonio Current.

We spoke to Montejano during a brief visit upon the publication of Quixote’s Soldiers.

In the first part of Quixote, you point out how San Antonio’s gang problem in the 1960s wasn’t helped by how it was viewed by the authorities.

There was a real gang problem, but it was exacerbated by the perception by authorities that all the working- and lower-class youth in the barrios were gang members. This included the social scientists that would come from the outside to study the youth. They would come in with this assumption that was an oversimplification and false. But there were gangs and conflicts that were passed on from generation to generation. But when I talk about self-identified gangs, I’m speaking of a very small number, perhaps 10 percent.

Your account of how Mexican-American student activists [many from St. Mary’s University] along with politicized gang social workers mobilized disenfranchised barrio youth is fascinating. And yet organizations like [the Mexican American Youth Organization] and [the Mexican American Unity Council] quickly faced opposition from the Anglo and Mexican-American political elite.

The MAYO leadership and the batos locos of the barrio hanging out truly influenced one another. But once Henry B. shuts down places like [the alternative] La Universidad del Barrios, these young college kids get involved in politics. Symbolic politics. The batos were geared to addressing local issues: police brutality, drug trafficking. If they had remained together who knows how this could have developed.

Where do the Brown Berets fit in the movimiento? I remember there were some Wild West types in the Berets and a few informants as well.

Wild West Side types. The first part of the book deals with barrio youth and gang warfare and how they become involved in the movement and eventually form the Brown Berets. The [academic] literature places little emphasis on the barrio or the batos locos that formed the Berets. The first confederation of the Berets in San Antonio is based on the old gang boundaries and identities.

Did Saul Alinsky’s community-organizing strategy have a bigger influence on MAYO and MAUC than the Mexican Revolution?

The Mexican revolution provided the symbols and the songs [laughs] and the color, but without question, Saul Alinsky. And, of course, the Black Power movement.

Why did the rhetoric turn to the confrontational “Kill the Gringo!”?

Jose Angel Gutiérrez, Nacho Perez, Mario Compean, [and] Norman Guerrero all believed that the only way you could wake up our people was through this confrontational, provocative language. There was an image that we were a passive people, the sleeping giant. Estos batos were going to wake up the sleeping giant through their rhetoric. This scared the hell out of the political establishment -- the Anglo and Mexican-American elite.

You devote several chapters to Henry B. Gonzalez [influential San Antonio politician who served in Congress, 1961-1999], who viewed the Raza movement as racist. Still he was also considered a hero for his liberal stance on issues. Why this division? Was this old crab trying to keep the others down? Political posturing?

That’s a good question. I wrestled with that. Henry B. would say it was out of principle. He opposed any politics based on ethnicity. He thought it was equivalent to corruption. His adversaries believed it was based on his alliance with the [Good Government League], that Henry B. had turned his back on the people who had helped elect him. And so that’s the basis for a lot of animosity between Henry, Albert Peña, Joe Bernal, and others. So was it just principle or was it just money? Was it patrón politics we’re talking about? I’ll let the reader figure that out.

Did the strong showing of Mario Compean [the Committee for Barrio Betterment candidate for mayor in 1969] against GGL incumbent Walter McAllister spark the notion that we could elect our own candidates and create a political party like Raza Unida?

I definitely believe that. It is not just my belief but that of others that I have interviewed -- the fact that CBB was able to place second without any money and just campaigning in the barrios, using mimeograph machines, going to the quinceañeras, clearly a low-budget affair. And they clearly won against the GGL in the West Side. And not by tiny margins; there were some substantial margins. This results in Mario Compean declaring himself Mayor of the West Side.

I was a teacher at Lanier High School at the time. I saw the sense of pride and identity in my students, not only in having Latino teachers, but in the rise of a Chicano renaissance in the arts. While your book centers on the political aspects of the movimiento, I believe both go hand in hand; all art in a sense is political.

It’s true, I do in passing mention the teatros, the art, the flourishing of literature. And the identity formation. Now we are Chicanos, Chicanas. That’s a new vocabulary. A new identity. And all of that is buttressed by this cultural renaissance. There is no question about that.

Was José Angel Gutiérrez’s strategy of building the Raza Unida Party county by county instead of running candidates in state elections ultimately the road that should have been taken?

In hindsight it would have been the better alternative. At the time we wanted everything and we wanted it now.

But were we prepared to accept the responsibilities that come with those victories?

We were young. We were 20-something. We were naive. We didn’t know a lot of these things, we just wanted someone elected. And in many cases we didn’t know what to do afterward. We had no plan other than that it might lead to some sort of liberation.

What is the lasting legacy of the Chicano movement?

Certainly the opening up of universities in the creation of Chicano Studies, because that is where we get our history, our art and literature. And in San Antonio, the establishment of UTSA might be considered a logro for us. The changing from at-large electoral politics to single-member districts was a very important change. The building of our political and community capacity by grassroots organizations -- COPS and Southwest Voter Registration Education Project.

Bless Willie [Velásquez] and Ernie [Cortés].

They increased the political capacity of these barrios and the result of all that in tangible, concrete results are parks, housing, flood control, drainage. Those are some of the accomplishments. And I think besides the election of Henry Cisneros in 1981 that symbolizes the changes.

The other major change is the emergence of Chicanas in leadership positions. I mean visible leadership, no longer being in the supportive background but now being upfront, leading the organizations, holding the press conferences, running for office. That to me is an important change.

U.S. Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez, D-TX, during campaign for U.S. Senate, 1961. Photo by Grey Villet / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images.

A few wrong turns

In one of Quixote’s Soldiers’ most interesting and bound to be controversial chapters, Montejano focuses on three individuals as examples of failed leadership. Fred Gómez Carrasco, Ramsey Muñiz, and Henry B. Gonzalez dominated media coverage in Texas in the 1970s -- representing a “Mexican” voice or presence to the larger public.

Montejano writes that some may question his selection of these three men as arbitrary and unreasonable:

The first was a convicted killed and drug dealer, the second a fallen political star, and the last a respected liberal congressman. [F]or better or worse, they represented different paths leading up and away from barrio poverty and isolation.

Fred Gómez Carrasco, the chivalrous drug "don," had been a major heroin supplier for the barrios and ghettos of San Antonio and other points in Texas. Despite the romanticization of his life as a narco-traficante, Carrasco must be remembered as the genius organizer behind a drug operation that tranquilized and criminalized countless barrio and ghetto youths. In short, Carrasco played a critical part in undermining the Chicano movement in the poor, working-class barrios. Yet his last-minute political testaments, given before his staged death, suggests there could have been a different path.

Ramsey Muñiz, athletic star, charismatic leader, and two-time gubernatorial candidate for the Raza Unida Party, stumbled and then self-destructed, taking along with him the fortunes of the party. What happened? [Muñiz was charged with conspiracy to smuggle drugs from Mexico to Alabama.] Yes, it was a setup by the authorities, but how could Muñiz have walked into it? Was the temptation so great? Was it hubris? Ten years after serving time for his first two convictions, Muñiz was arrested and convicted on a third drug charge. As a result, Muñiz has been permanently incarcerated. The loss is irrevocable. What remains is a memory of those inspiring years when Muñiz moved 200,000 voters to believe in a "united people.”

Henry B. Gonzalez, an American of Spanish surnamed descent who held an idealistic "color-blind" view of the world was so upset with the Chicano ethnic demands that he actively opposed the Chicano movement. He was successful in defunding MAYO, forcing MALDEF to move from San Antonio, and restricting MAUC activities. Was it principle that moved his opposition, personal pique at movement rhetoric, or simply interest in maintaining political control? Gonzalez has been charged with undermining the Chicano movement, yet that responsibility must be partitioned among many.

Montejano concludes:

Perhaps this does lead to a judgmental question after all. Can we judge which path was the most flawed? [W]hich is worse, a flawed journey, a flawed decision or a flawed vision?

[San Antonio poet, playwright, and journalist Gregg Barrios is on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. His new book of poetry, La Causa, appears in September and his play I-DJ premieres in October. Gregg wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin. This article was also published in the San Antonio Current.]

• Find Quixote's Soldiers by David Montejano on Amazon.com.

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