Although the African American civil rights movement was the most prominent of the crusades for racial justice, other Americans marginalized due to race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality also worked to seize their piece of the American dream during the promising years of the 1960s. Several movements, perhaps most notably the activism of Mexican Americans during the 1960s, were influenced by the African American cause and often used similar tactics. By 1960, over 6 million Americans could trace their heritage to Mexico and other Latin American countries. Many of them were concentrated in the Southwest, in lands that were once under Mexico’s domain. As agriculture and industry in places such as Southern California boomed, a labor market became available for the region’s vineyards, orange groves, and other specialized farms. Chicanos and other Hispanic peoples often readily filled this labor market, with many migrating back and forth between Mexico to the United States.

Sadly, this system lent itself easily to exploitation. Large-scale growers used these farmers’ desperate situations–and often their lack of citizenship–to their advantage. Shoddy housing, long hours in the hot sun, and vulnerability to violence and sexual exploitation were often the result. Perhaps nothing symbolized the hard life of a Chicano fieldworker more than a farming instrument: a short-handled backhoe called “el cortito,” or “the short one.” Growers claimed that this tool encouraged precision when working with tender crops like lettuce or sugar beets, but “el cortito” also required field hands to stoop down uncomfortably throughout the working day, leading to chronic back pain. Such conditions explained why the life expectancy of a Mexican migrant worker at this time was only fifty years.

The Chicano Movement

The word Chicano was considered a derogatory term for Mexican immigrants until activists reclaimed the term and used it as a term of pride as they campaigned for political and social change among Mexican Americans. Like the African American civil rights movement, the Chicano movement won its earliest victories in the federal courts. In 1947, in Mendez v. Westminster, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that segregating children of Hispanic descent was unconstitutional. In 1954, the same year as Brown v. Board of Education, Mexican Americans prevailed in Hernandez v. Texas, when the U.S. Supreme Court extended the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment to all ethnic groups in the United States.

The bulk of the fight for Chicano rights, though, took place at the grassroots level. Like their Black counterparts, Chicano activists demanded increased political power for Mexican Americans. They also advocated for education that recognized their cultural heritage and the restoration of lands taken from them at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848. Organizations like the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) and the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDF) buoyed the Chicano movement and patterned themselves after similar influential groups in the African American civil rights movement.

One of the founding members of the Chicano Movement, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, launched the Crusade for Justice in Denver in 1965, to provide jobs, legal services, and healthcare for Mexican Americans. In addition, the organization established the first annual Chicano Liberation Day and composed the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, a Chicano nationalist manifesto that reflected Gonzales’s vision of Chicanos as a unified, historically grounded, all-encompassing group fighting against discrimination in the United States.

From this movement arose La Raza Unida, a political party that attracted many Mexican-American college students. Elsewhere, Reies López Tijerina fought for years to reclaim lost and illegally expropriated ancestral lands in New Mexico, going so far as to attempt an armed takeover of a New Mexico county courthouse in 1967 in an effort to free prisoners arrested in a land dispute. One early victory for La Raza and other like-minded groups was in the census of 1970. For the first time, “Hispanic” was listed as a separate category, acknowledging this demographic as a distinct people. With this important step, data on America’s Hispanic population could now be gathered.

César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and the United Farm Workers

Figure 1. César Chávez’s nonviolent efforts for farmworkers led many to compare him to Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Perhaps the most well-known activism of the Chicano movement is Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta’s work to secure economic equality for migrant workers. In 1962, activists Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), which used nonviolent tactics to campaign for workers’ rights in the grape fields in California. Recognizing their common cause, the NFWA joined Filipino grape pickers, led by Larry Itliong, in their strike to call attention to low wages and poor working conditions. From 1965 to 1970, Chavez, Huerta, Itliong, and other members of the United Farm Workers of America (a merger of the NFWA and the Filipino-led Agricultural Worker’s Organizing Committee) waged strikes and called for boycotts to pressure landowners to negotiate more equitable payment and treatment of workers.

Figure 2. Dolores Huerta has continued her social activism efforts. In 2012, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama.

When Chavez asked American consumers to boycott grapes, politically-conscious people around the country, spurred on by Huerta’s organizing prowess, heeded his call. In solidarity, many unionized longshoremen refused to unload grape shipments. In 1966, Chavez led striking workers to the state capitol in Sacramento, further publicizing the cause. Martin Luther King, Jr. telegraphed words of encouragement to Chavez, affirming to him that “our separate struggles are really one – a struggle for freedom, for dignity and for humanity.”^[1] The United Farm Workers of America’s (UFWA) initial efforts were eventually successful. In 1970, the UFWA secured a three-year collective bargaining agreement with the entire California table grape industry. Though work toward better working conditions and pay remained, the 1970 victory legitimized the use of nonviolent strikes and boycotts to achieve greater equality.

Exercising Rights, Creating a Chicano Consciousness

For all of Chavez’s work in bringing the plight of Mexican-Americans to public attention, Chicano activism took place in even humbler circles. In March of 1968, thousands of Chicano Los Angeles-area high school students walked out of their classrooms in protest of degrading conditions in their public schools. In an overwhelmingly Chicano area, textbooks ignored Mexican culture, speaking Spanish in school was forbidden, and low expectations were reinforced by the lack of guidance counselors and college preparatory courses. In what became known as the East L.A. walkouts or “blowouts,” students demanded an education that validated their culture and prepared them for success rather than low-paying manual labor. Although few of these demands were met immediately, this act of civil disobedience politicized a generation of young Angelinos.

Two years later, the Vietnam War elicited another wave of Chicano protest in the face of discrimination. Perhaps as many as 30,000 Chicanos in East Los Angeles, and thousands more in other cities, took to the streets demanding a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Their grievances were uniquely tied to their experiences as Chicanos; young men from this background were drafted and died in numbers that were proportionally much higher than their White counterparts. The unemployment and lack of access to higher education closed off avenues that more affluent Americans used to avoid the draft. Fearing looting and violence similar to the Watts riots of 1965, The Los Angeles Police Department declared the gathering illegal and dispersed participants with tear gas. Yet even as the marchers fled, they had made history; this was the largest gathering of Mexican-Americans up to this point.