Mexican Americans and Sports: A Reader on Athletics and Barrio Life

Wearing The Red, White, and Blue Trunks of Aztlan: Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales and the Convergence of American and Chicano Nationalism

When Rodolfo (“Corky”) Gonzales, chair of the Crusade for Justice, filed a $30 million libel suit against the Rocky Mountain News in February 1974, he was not merely suing a local newspaper for its inaccurate representation of those involved in his organization.1 Gonzales was also using a revered U.S. institution —the courts—to challenge the terms and conditions upon which the local mainstream press, another venerated institution, portrayed the goals and objectives of the Chicano movement. A few years earlier, Gonzales had described his feelings about the nation’s mainstream media: “The press is a powerful voice feeding ideas, conventional falsehoods, and biased opinions by their daily brainwashing bombardment that mesmerizes and hypnotizes our American public in a state of apathetical drowsiness and confused patriotism .”2 Despite such rhetoric, however, Gonzales’s lawsuit against the Rocky Mountain News suggested that he understood how the press could effect social change.3 In arguing that the press had the ability to plant “the seed of guilt, doubt or misunderstanding in other people’s minds,” Gonzales recognized the ability of a public representation to seriously undermine the ability of Chicanos and Chicanas to mobilize against inequity and injustice in the United States.4 More than twenty years earlier, however, Palmer Hoyt, the young pub89 W E A R I N G T H E R E D , W H I T E , A N D B L U E T R U N K S O F A Z T L Á N Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales and the Convergence of American and Chicano Nationalism tom i. romero ii lisher of the Denver Post, had described a much different role for the press in the cause of social change. According to Hoyt, “The only protection that American civil liberties have, and thus minority groups, is in the free press of America. In the free press, which includes newspaper[s], radio, magazines, and motion pictures, everybody gets a chance to present their side.”5 Although Hoyt believed that the unfettered presentation of ideas would uphold American values, he knew that such representations would not lead to radical or rapid change—and to him, this was a good thing. To a fellow publisher who had recently come into conflict with members of Colorado’s Chicano community, Hoyt had this caustic reply: “We have to keep working with them, and one of the best ways to do a job is printing all of their demands. There are many reasons for this, but one of these is . . . the unreasonableness of their demands, due largely to the fact that they have no leaders to whom they listen. It makes it important that the rank and file of the Chicanos and the public generally know or just find out how preposterous their demands and requests are.”6 Alluding to the “militant” stances taken by Colorado Chicano such as Gonzales and the Crusade for Justice, Hoyt implied that the civil liberty demands of Chicano nationalists were not legitimate in the minds of the American public. Rather than a reasonable claim to be part of multicultural and multiracial United States, Gonzales’s rhetoric, which included an appeal for Chicano nationalism, represented to Hoyt—and to others in the Colorado press—a rejection of the nation they envisioned. While Hoyt, along with his fellow editors and publishers, held a largely negative view of Chicano and Chicana activists, he ignored the ways in which the “free press” in the United States was a crucial component in shaping the public persona and political emergence of Gonzales in the formative years of the Chicano movement. Indeed, Hoyt failed to grasp the language and symbolism of America in the Chicano nationalism articulated by Corky Gonzales. For a majority of Chicanos and Chicanas, racial, gender, class, and ethnic biases have limited their ability to influence public representations of themselves.7 Yet social justice activists like Gonzales have relied heavily upon the news media to advance their particular cause.8 As Gonzales demanded concessions from U.S. society while positioning his place in the Chicano community, his public image in the media was critical to his ultimate failure or success. The surfacing of Gonzales in the mainstream press and his subsequent 90 T O M I . R O M E R O I I political capital rested in part on his connection to the ideas, imagery, and symbols of the United States. As Gary...