Bringing Aztlan to Mexican Chicago: My Life, My Work, My Art

3. The MARCH Years (1971-79)

3 The MARCH Years (1971–79) northwest indiana aCtivity and the foUnding of MarCh (1971–72) I left Notre Dame in 1971, and in 1972 I gave birth to the Movimient Artístico Chicano (MARCH). I’d like to tell the story of what happened as I went quickly along a path that led to MARCH. First, I went back to Hammond because that’s where I lived with my mother, and it was in Hammond that I began to get involved with some local Latino organizations. There’s no question that leaving Notre Dame meant a long period of confusion and disorientation for me. I supported myself by taking on part-time freelance work in Chicago. I was literally bouncing between Indiana and Chicago. I had a car in thosedays,whippingaroundbackandforth.But I was very depressed, and I felt that if I kept on being depressed, I was going be unproductive. So that’s when I became the opposite—I became super-involved in Hammond and East Chicago, Indiana, working in different organizations try- Bringing Aztlán to Mexican Chicago 52 ing to find myself and get over the pain of Notre Dame. First, I became very active in Northwest Indiana Chicano politics—with anything Latino that seemed to be worth fighting for. I don’t remember exactly how I got involved in so many Indiana organizations. Almost as soon as I moved to Hammond, I joined the United Farm Workers (UFW) and became the Northwest Indiana coordinator for three years, working as a volunteer. The UFW had started forming picket lines, and I joined some of them and stayed involved with them even as I participated in other organizations and developed MARCH in the years to come. I helped form the Calumet Boycott Committee as the local UFW support group involved in grape and lettuce boycotts (fig. 42). I later cofounded the Concerned Latins of Lake Country (CLLC); later I broke away from that group to form the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO); and still later I got involved with the local Brown Berets, who liked a few of the murals I was doing in the early 1970s. I was inspired by César Chávez and the Farm Workers movement, but there was another personwhocametohaveadirectinfluenceonme ,a community organizer named Ernie Cortez. ErniewasfromSanAntonio , wherehewenttocollegeand thenworked for theMexicanAmerican Unity Council. In 1972, he went to the Industrial Areas Foundation training center in Chicago, where he learned community-development techniques worked out by Saul Alinsky, a famous professional organizer whose methods influenced Chávez and the UFW. Graduating in June 1972, Ernie started organizing Mexicans in Wisconsin and then moved on to Northwest Indiana, where the Bishop’s Commission gave him his startup monies to organize full-time among Chicago-area Indiana Latinos. The first time I met Ernie, I sensed right off that he was very astute (he later won a McFig . 41. José taking on a Brown Beret persona, with the UFW Calumet Boycott Committee, 1972. Photographer unknown. 53 The MARCH Years (1971–79) Arthur Genius Award, so I guess I know how to pick them). He pretended to let it slip that he didn’t meet me by accident, but he was a real recruiter. When he came to the Harbor area, he went to the local library and spent hours there looking at a lot of articles from the East Chicago newspaper, the Latin Times, to see who had appeared in the past few issues and who could be potential members and leaders. I was in the Latin Times a lot because of my boycott work. And that’s how he found me and some of the others he convinced to join him—at local meetings, at dances, and of course in the steelmill neighborhoods. And that’s how he went about founding the CLLC as an Alinsky-style organization, and he convinced me and others to be cofounders and members. The CLLC was involved in attacking the administrations in three cities, Gary, Hammond, and East Chicago , for different things related to jobs, housing , safety, schooling—you name it. We would go to city hall meetings in East Chicago, and we would sit down in protest. For some reason, we never got arrested. But we did get a fair amount of news coverage in the local newspaper. In all my Indiana political work, and even in my work as an arts activist in Chicago, Ernie...