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1 Introduction As Reies López Tijerina stepped to the podium in a small but ornate room at Chicago’s Palmer House hotel, the charismatic Chicano leader exuded both a supreme confidence and a genuine urgency about the state of his people in the fall of 1967. “The black man is marching in the streets,” Tijerina told a mix of supporters and curious observers, emphatically waving his hands. “You think we should sit down and relax?” The landgrant rights leader from New Mexico was in town for the first and only National Conference for New Politics convention, a raucous gathering of New Left activists considering an electoral challenge to President Lyndon Johnson primarily over the Vietnam War. Although not explicitly a war opponent, the onetime itinerant Pentecostal preacher received an invitation after gaining notoriety for his provocative and unorthodox activism. For the previous four years, Tijerina had applied his penchant for rich rhetoric and publicity to the cause of Mexican American land-grant rights long sought by the descendants of deed owners in U.S. territory that had been Mexico until 1848. For Tijerina and his tens of thousands of followers in New Mexico and throughout the Southwest, honoring the land grants under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the U.S.-Mexican War, was the primary way to alleviate the grinding poverty that many Mexican Americans faced in the United States more than a century later. The convention was a prime chance to spread the word to a new audience of potential allies, especially African Americans, with whom Tijerina believed his people had a shared goal. “The black man has his cause and we have ours,” Tijerina reminded his listeners. “It is the same cause—justice.”¹ On the surface, Tijerina’s statement could be interpreted as nothing more than a hopeful but largely rhetorical declaration of multiracial solidarity —a desire to ally with people who had comparable histories of oppression in the United States. But Tijerina’s declaration actually suggested a more complicated reality, one that prompts several questions. Exactly 2 •Introduction what does “justice” mean? Is this vague but powerful term enough upon which to build a sustained multiracial alliance among African Americans and Mexican Americans—Tijerina’s stated goal for attending a convention of New Left activists? Or is justice actually an obstacle? And how could the Chicano movement have both the “same” and a separate “cause,” to quote Tijerina, as the African American freedom struggle? Perhaps his statement simply reflects the bombast he was known for. A talented orator , Tijerina had built a reputation for galvanizing audiences with fiery, fist-pounding speeches that often privileged high-flying rhetoric over exact details, or even reason. Yet, as Tijerina suggested that weekend in Chicago, “justice” could be an effective way to organize poor people precisely because it had so many definitions. The question was whether these definitions overlapped, or at least complemented, each other enough to allow meaningful coalition. For Tijerina and his followers, restoring the land grants from the nineteenth century was the quintessential definition of justice. Even a little communal land control was better than the “justice (that) depends on a handout of powdered milk,” Tijerina noted, referring to more traditional antipoverty approaches. But, he added, justice could take other forms— ones that emerged in the convention’s Spanish-speaking caucus, on the plenary floor, and elsewhere, including access to bilingual and quality education, protections from police brutality and urban renewal, public jobs programs and open housing, and the right to welfare and collective bargaining. In its broadest sense, justice included a wide range of solutions to the poverty of the late 1960s that plagued nearly 12 percent of all Americans, one-third of African Americans, and one-fourth of Mexican Americans.² And to Tijerina, “while this was no new struggle,” the opportunity for Mexican Americans to work with blacks against poverty was ripe. “We must unite,” he concluded.³ Tijerina had been particularly interested in a partnership with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Chicano leader wanted to establish what he called “a solid alliance between the Spanish-Americans and the moderate Negroes.” Such a coalition was “not to support the fight for land grants— we can take care of that ourselves,” Tijerina added, but to find common ground among the nation’s two largest minority groups, Mexican Americans and African Americans.4 King gave the keynote address at the National Conference for New Politics convention and even was rumored to be the delegates’ top...

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