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  • ¡Raza Si! ¡Guerra No!: Chicano Protest and Patriotism During the Vietnam War Era
  • Ernesto Chávez
¡Raza Si! ¡Guerra No!: Chicano Protest and Patriotism During the Vietnam War Era. By Lorena Oropeza. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Pp. xviii, 278. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $21.95 paper.

Lorena Oropeza provides a thorough examination of Chicano opposition to the conflict in Southeast Asia. Using oral histories, movement newspapers, pamphlets, government documents, and cultural productions, Oropeza argues that anti-Viet Nam war activism played a central role in the larger Chicano movement. Mexican Americans' stand against the war pushed them to argue that they constituted a race rather than an ethnic group, and made them question the meaning of masculinity within the group as well as the use of bravery in time of war as a means to equality.

Broken into five chapters and an Epilogue, ¡Raza Si! ¡Guerra No! focuses on the ascendancy and demise of the Chicano anti-war movement. In order to contextualize Mexican American opposition to the war and its larger place within Chicano history, Oropeza begins her study by examining that community's views towards U.S. military action during the Second World War. Here she argues that ethnic Mexicans supported U.S. efforts in Europe and the Pacific as a means to demand greater equality at home. The book then moves to an examination of the fissures created among an older generation of Mexican American activists, with ties to the Democratic Party and President Lyndon B. Johnson, who supported the Viet Nam war, and an emerging Chicano cadre who opposed it. One major reason for their opposition, as Oropeza shows in Chapter 3, is that Chicano activists imagined that the Vietnamese people were engaged in a civil war whose root cause was U.S. imperialism. This perspective paralleled their own status as a colonized people in the Southwest and their struggle for self-determination. It was a vision propagated in poems, plays, and movement newspapers. Thus, to go to war against Southeast Asians was tantamount to fighting against one's own community. For this reason, and because ethnic Mexicans were dying in disproportionate numbers in Viet Nam, Chicanos felt compelled to oppose the war. Oropeza details the Chicano mobilization against the conflict in Viet Nam in Chapter 4, exploring these efforts throughout the Southwest and arguing that the war raised the consciousness and melded the fortunes of a cross section of the ethnic Mexican community regardless of gender, class, and citizenship status.

From this macro analysis, Oropeza then moves to a micro investigation of the efforts of a group of Los Angeles activists who organized the August 29, 1970 mass demonstration against the war known as the Chicano Moratorium. The demonstration attracted 30,000 people from across the nation who marched through the streets [End Page 164] of East Los Angeles. It ended in violence initiated by Southern California law enforcement authorities. For Oropeza, the Chicano Moratorium was both the peak—given the number of protesters—and nadir of Chicano anti-war organizing, owing to the inability of activists to regain momentum after the police brutality. In an Epilogue, Oropeza connects the vision, tactic, and personae of the Viet Nam era's anti-war efforts to ethnic Mexicans' current opposition to U.S. involvement in Iraq. Ultimately, Oropeza believes that the lasting impact of Mexican American resistance to the Viet Nam war was the propagation of a Chicano cultural nationalism. Although this nationalism had a problematic masculinist vision of community at its core, it nonetheless served to empower those involved and to set the foundation for the continuing critique of U.S. culture and society by Chicano Studies scholars.

This is an impressive and important addition to the body of literature on the Viet Nam era and ensures that Chicanos are written into the narrative of that period. However, by taking a macro approach to ethnic Mexican organizing against the war, Oropeza sometimes conflates the experiences of this multifaceted group and in so doing presents a consensus history that ultimately essentializes these dynamic communities. Perhaps this is a result of taking her sources, who emphasized the cohesiveness of the Chicano experience, at face...

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