"¡Mi Raza Primero!" (My People First!): Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966-1978

1. “A Movable Object Meeting an Irresistible Force”: Los Angeles’s Ethnic Mexican Community in the 1950s and Early 1960s

The roots of Chicano insurgency are found in the post–World War II era. The children of the 1950s and early 1960s—the so-called baby boomers— became the rebels of the later 1960s and 1970s. This generation reaped the beneWts of prosperity but also faced discrimination. It was indoctrinated with a Cold War culture that stressed peacetime consensus yet ignored the racial strife that existed at the core of American society. Thus, the Chicano youths of the 1960s reached maturity with rising expectations of abundance , only to be confronted with the realization that they were not part of the tapestry of America. They reacted by constructing a Chicano protonationalism . Their mobilization in the 1960s and 1970s built upon the work of a prior generation of ethnic Mexican activists who in the 1950s and early 1960s employed a residual Mexican culture in their communities as a counterhegemonic tool. A residual culture, according to literary critic Raymond Williams, denotes “some experiences, meanings and values, which cannot be veriWed or cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture, [but which] are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the residue—cultural as well as social—of some previous social formation.”1 This residual culture emerged in part as a result of the substantial population growth of Los Angeles’s ethnic Mexican community. At the beginning of the decade, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the num9 1 “A Movable Object Meeting an Irresistible Force” Los Angeles’s Ethnic Mexican Community in the 1950s and Early 1960s ber of ethnic Mexicans in Los Angeles was 156,356, but by 1960 that number had grown to 291,959, a 51 percent increase.2 In the same period, the number of Anglo residents increased an estimated 37 percent, whereas the total non-white population grew by 49 percent. Though immigration contributed to this growth, the major explanation was a higher ethnic Mexican birthrate—so high that the median age of ethnic Mexicans in 1960 was 20 compared to 30 for Anglos and 24 for non-whites.3 The Los Angeles metropolitan area had more Mexican Americans than the southwestern states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada combined. This growth prompted a group of social scientists to conclude that “the future of Mexican Americans [in the United States] depends largely on their progress in California.”4 Such burgeoning numbers did not translate into economic and political power for ethnic Mexicans in California.5 Census data reveal that their median income for 1959 was $5,700, well below the $7,213 of Anglo families . Mexican males also earned less than their Anglo counterparts, $4,275 as compared to $5,421.6 The income disparities reXected occupational diVerences. Anglo men were four times more likely to be professionals than ethnic Mexican men (13.7 percent versus 3.9 percent), whereas ethnic Mexicans predominated as laborers and farm workers (30.4 percent), occupations held by fewer Asians and African Americans (24.8 percent) and only a handful of Anglos (6.8 percent).7 Ethnic Mexican women, on the other hand, held many more professional jobs than Mexican men (32.4 percent versus 3.9 percent), but these were concentrated primarily in clerical/sales (23.9 percent), with relatively few in professional/technical and managerial/proprietor ranks (8.5 percent). The second largest category of jobs for women was as blue-collar workers (28.1 percent), where most were semiskilled operatives and very few were skilled (craft) or unskilled laborers (1.4 percent). In the same period, ethnic Mexican women made up 27.8 percent of all those employed in service industries in the Southwest, 6.3 percent of the farm workers, and a minuscule 0.3 percent of farm managers.8 Low economic and occupational status did not mean that ethnic Mexicans were utterly powerless. Two organizations of the immediate postwar era, the Community Service Organization and the Asociación Nacional México Americana, struggled vigorously on behalf of civil rights for ethnic Mexicans. Many of their members belonged to the socalled Mexican-American generation that came of age during the upheavals of the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the Cold War.9 They not only shared these common historical experiences, but also 10 CHAPTER 1 held a deep commitment to American democracy while also advocating social reform. They did not constitute a monolithic community, however, for they diVered in their partisan...