Sonny Montes and Mexican American Activism in Oregon

Introduction

1 Introduction In the mid-1970s, after a decade of intense activity and considerable accomplishment, the Chicano movement, the Mexican American struggle for civil rights and social justice, appeared to be losing steam.1 Cesar Chavez’s well-known union, the United Farm Workers, was engaged in an endless, enervating battle with the Teamsters over the right to represent agricultural laborers in contract negotiations. The New Mexican activist Reies López Tijerina, after several lengthy periods of incarceration, had lost much of his following. The Brown Berets were disbanded. The one concerted effort by Mexican Americans to create a national political party had seemingly failed, crippled by conflict between its two leaders, Corky Gonzales and José Angel Gutiérrez. While not all the signs were unfavorable and, as subsequent developments would reveal, a great deal of creative work by Chicano activists lay ahead, the energy and relentless forward movement of the mid- and late-1960s were more difficult to detect. There were, however, exceptions to the general trend, and one could be found in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, hardly a hotbed of Chicano activism up to then. There, for about four years, Celedonio Montes Jr.—Sonny Montes, as he was generally known—a former migrant farmworker from South Texas, mobilized the state’s nascent Mexican American community and mounted a social movement. The movement’s goal was to save the Colegio Cesar Chavez, a small, besieged, financially challenged college that catered to a largely Mexican American student body. The collective-action movement led by Montes—which featured sit-ins, protest marches, rallies, prayer vigils, and a consistently high level of Chicano support— received a plethora of media attention at the time. Sonny Montes himself became a very visible public figure. This book tells three related stories. The first is Sonny’s. It recounts the process by which a person born to a family of migrant farmworkers became the leader of a social movement. In 1966, at the age of twenty-two, Sonny Montes traveled to Oregon intending to pick the crops and somewhat by chance came into the orbit of— and went to work for—an Oregon-based War on Poverty agency Sonny Montes and Mexican American Activism in Oregon 2 called the Valley Migrant League (VML). Providing educational opportunities, vocational training, and other services to Mexican American migrant farmworkers who came to Oregon’s Upper Willamette Valley, the VML helped many of them to leave the migrant stream and settle in Oregon. Furthermore, at a time of widespread prejudice and discrimination against Mexican Americans, the organization empowered those people to solve their own problems. Due to the efforts of Montes and others, the VML was transformed from an Anglo-run agency created to serve Mexican American migrants into an organization run by and for Mexican Americans. One result of that process of empowerment was the emergence of a Mexican American political elite in the area. In the 1970s working as chief administrative officer for the Colegio and faced with a formidable combination of adversaries, Montes enlisted that elite in his campaign to keep the college alive. A prominent theme in this first story is asymmetry—a problem that remains at the heart of the Mexican American experience in the United States.2 Over the years, most Mexican Americans in the United States, Sonny included, have suffered disadvantages based on five human variables: skin color, ethnic background, level of income, religion, and language. What is more, lurking beneath the surface has been another reality that has set the Mexican-origin population apart: large numbers of them have resided illegally in the country. One unfortunate consequence of that reality has been a tendency on the part of many Anglos to view suspiciously all Mexican-origin people, legal and illegal alike.3 The situation that confronted Sonny and his people was historically constructed. It resulted in part from mid-nineteenthcentury U.S. imperialism, which brought the region that became the states of Texas, California, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Arizona under U.S. control. One consequence of that conquest was the progressive socioeconomic decline of the Mexican population in that region.4 But, in truth, the system of Mexican American subordination did not reach full-blown proportions until the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1890s and continuing until the Great Depression, a massive number of Mexicans—the estimates run upward of a million—entered the United States, escaping Introduction 3...