La Raza Unida Party

Preface

Preface From the womb of the Chicano Movement's militancy and protest, a Chicano thirdparty movement was conceived. After four years of struggles over land grants, farm worker rights, education, police brutality, and the Vietnam War, Chicano activists broadened their social-change agenda to include the people's political empowerment. In 1970, two major leaders of the Chicano Movement, Jose Angel Gutierrez in Texas and Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales in Colorado, led the crusade to organize the first Chicano political party-La Raza Unida. Believing the Democrat and Republican Parties did not represent the interests of Mexicanos, activists iI).spired by RUP's early successes in Texas and by Gonzales's call for a partido (party) joined in the partido experiment, which lasted eleven years. Thus, from 1970 to 1981, from California to Texas to the Midwest, RUP was a defiant third party struggling against the country's two-party dictatorship. This book is a comprehensive examination of the political history of RUP's rise and decline throughout the Southwest and Midwest. It is part of a four-volume series on the Chicano Movement and on the building of a new movement, a "quadrilogy" of interrelated books. The first, Mexican American Youth Organization: Avant-Garde of the Chicano Movement in Texas (1995), is an in-depth case study of the rise and demiSE: of the Mexican American Youth Organization from 1967 to 1972. The second, The Cristal Experiment:A Chicano Struggle for Community Control (1998) is an in-depth case study of the first (1963) and particularly the second (1970) Mexicano electoral takeovers, or revolts, in Crystal City, Texas. The third is this one. The fourth, whose working title is What Needs To Be Done: The Building of a New Movement, is a theoretical work on the strategic options of bui~ding a new movement that includes a new partido in the twenty-first century. This case study is the most comprehensive political history of RUP to date, from its emergence in 1970 to its demise in 1981. The existing literature specifically on RUP is extremely limited. Two early works are Richard Santillan's La Raza Unida (1973) and John Staples Shockley's Chicano Revolt in a Texas Town (1974)· The former provides a" cursory examination of RUP in the Southwest, while the latter is a case study of the Copyrighted Material X PREFACE first three years (1970-1973) of RUP's political takeover of Crystal City, Texas. A few other works on the Chicano Movement include a chapter or two on RUP: Tony Castro, Chicano Power: The Emergence ofMexican America (1974); Carlos Munoz, Youth, Identity, Power:The Chicano Movement (1989); and F. Arturo Rosales, Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (1996). Mexicano historians such as Rodolfo Acuna, Juan Gomez Quinonez, John Chavez, Matt S. Meier, and Feliciano Ribera provide terse accounts of RUP's rise and fall. Historian Ignacio Garcia, in his work United We Win: The Rise and Fall of the Raza Unida Party (1989), was the first scholar to provide a more complete historical account of RUP's development. The introduction to this book provides a theoretical and historical framework for third parties. Over the next ten chapters, I examine the events, leaders, ideology, structure, strategy and tactics, changes effected, organizing problems, issues, and electoral campaigns that shaped RUP's genesis and demise in California, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and the Midwest. In the last two chapters, I look at RUP's national and international politics and its profile as a political party. In the epilogue, I offer several arguments as to why Latinos need to struggle to effect change within the liberal capitalist system, four strategic partido options, and make the call for the creation of a New Movement. Research Methods I have relied on both primary and secondary sources. Specifically, I used three methods : in-depth interviews, document content analysis, and participant-observations. My main source was 56 in-depth interviews conducted with the RUP leaders and organizers. Although the research began in 1974 while I was a professor at the University of Utah, the divisions and power struggles within RUP caused me to suspend my research, although at the time I had secured 10 in-depth interviews with various RUP leaders from California and Texas. Specifically for this study, I conducted 56 additional interviews during 1996 and 1997, which complemented the 10 collected during 1974 and 1975. The 95 in-depth interviews conducted for my previous two books brought...