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10 “We Want Justice!” Police Murder, Mexican American Community Response, and the Chicano Movement BRIAN D. BEHNKEN In August 1971, the National Chicano Moratorium Committee, the leading Mexican American anti–Vietnam War organization, dissolved in the wake of police harassment and brutality.1 Much of this violence occurred in Los Angeles at the 1970 Chicano Moratorium March, where police killed journalist Ruben Salazar and two others, wounding many more. In May 1972, a Mexican American boycott against the public school system in Houston, Texas, fell apart after nearly three years of successful protest. At about the same time, the Los Angeles–based Brown Berets, perhaps the most militant symbol of the Chicano civil rights movement, succumbed to internal factionalism and disbanded. In late 1972, the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), the Chicano corollary to the black freedom struggle’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, dissolved to make way for a new organization, La Raza Unida Party (RUP). But RUP’s tenure as a major Chicano movement organization proved short-lived. The party, suffering from internal divisions, voter intimidation, and electoral losses, was largely defunct by 1974.2 It is no small wonder why many historians and the lay public consider the early 1970s the end of the Chicano struggle for rights.3 By 1972, Chicano activism in numerous local communities seemed to dissipate in the wake of government intimidation, internal bickering, and the conservative reaction to minority radicalism . The demise of so many heretofore vibrant organizations certainly makes this chronology appear accurate. But such a timeframe is inherently problematic for two reasons. First, scholars have largely created this chronology in order to neatly periodize a host of local social movements that occurred spontaneously and at irregular intervals. Thus, it is artificial. Second, and more simply, the Chicano movement did not end in 1972. Rather, in numerous locales it evolved into a more sophisticated and mature civil rights struggle. By examining Chicano responses to police murder, scholars can begin to appreciate this transformation. Across the United States, Mexican Americans suffered from persistent police intimidation, harassment, and violent death. With the Chicano movement, Mexican-descent 195 people began to forcefully respond to police murder. As in the black freedom struggle, Mexican Americans reacted to police violence by working with local government agencies, by protesting, and, on occasion, by rioting.4 This chapter examines two instances of police murder in Texas. In 1973, a Dallas police officer executed twelve-year-old Santos Rodríguez. The Chicano community responded by forming a local self-defense unit, demanded that the city implement a police review board, and engaged in a massive march decrying police violence.5 The march ultimately degenerated into a riot. In 1977, Houston police murdered twenty-three-year-old army veteran Jose “Joe” Campos Torres. Chicanos organized grievance committees, worked with the Houston Police Department to create an internal affairs office, and anxiously watched the trial of the officers responsible for Torres’s death. When an all-white jury handed down guilty verdicts but sentenced only two police officers to one-year jail terms, the Mexican American community rioted. In both cities, Mexican Americans from all walks of life and all social classes participated in the demonstrations. While some Chicanos were affiliated with groups like the Dallas Brown Berets, Houston’s People United to Fight Police Brutality, and the Revolutionary Communist Party—all radical leftist organizations—most did not identify with this brand of politics. Instead, they were concerned about civil rights, justice, and the inability of community members to protect the freedom of young people like Santos Rodríguez and Joe Campos Torres. By examining the Rodríguez and Torres cases, this chapter elucidates Chicano civil rights activism outside the timeframe that most scholars consider part of the Chicano movement. In so doing, I show that the Chicano movement, and the concept of chicanismo, continued well beyond 1972. The Murder of Santos Rodríguez: Dallas, 1973 Dallas emerged as a major commercial center in the early twentieth century.6 A distinctly southern metropolis, the city’s racial climate was like that of other New South cities. But Dallas’s Jim Crow system also extended to its small Mexicanorigin population. Throughout much of the twentieth century, the city could claim a Mexican American population of about 5 percent, or approximately three thousand to five thousand people. In the 1950s, however, Mexican immigrants began arriving in greater numbers. By 1970, nearly one million people inhabited Dallas, and approximately forty thousand, or 8 percent, of...

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