The History of Policing America by Laurence Armand French

Author:Laurence Armand French [French, Laurence Armand]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2017-12-18T16:00:00+00:00

Bronze Power Protest and Cesar Chavez’s Farmworkers

During the turbulent civil rights and antiwar era of the 1960s and 1970s, Cesar Chavez became a prominent figure of the Brown-Power Mexican American movement. The Brown Power movement was designed to empower the Mestizo population, mixed-blooded Mexicans—those long ostracized by the middle-class “other white” Hispanics who claimed to be of “pure” Spanish heritage. The intragroup race and class division within Hispanics was borne out with Operation Wetback, when the “other white” Mexican Americans were eager to have their “lesser” brown Hispanics ceremoniously and forcefully removed from the United States and taken back to the peon villages of interior Mexico. Chavez, clearly a Mestizo, got his start within the Mexican American Community Service Organization (CSO), which supported LULAC principles of getting Hispanics involved in language and citizenship classes and registered to vote in local and state elections. Together these efforts were termed La Causa during the 1950s court battles. The ultimate goal of these organizations was getting Hispanics elected in communities in the Borderland regions of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

But Chavez took the CSO in California in a different direction, focusing on labor issues. He essentially shifted the Hispanic focus away from middle-class “other white” Mexican Americans to the brown Indian and Indian-mix Mestizo. This departure led the CSO board to abandon Chavez in 1961, attesting to the intragroup prejudices existing among Mexican Americans themselves. Chavez’s affiliation with farmworkers began in 1965 when he became leader for both striking Filipino and Mexican workers in the vineyards of California (this included both Filipino and Mexicans who were citizens as well as guest workers). The prolonged strike gave Chavez and the National Farm Workers Organization national and international attention and support. In the fall of 1970, the last holdout agreed to the farmworkers’ demands for a minimum wage. This attention occurred at a time when numerous other groups were demonstrating and protesting across the country for civil rights for minorities and against the Vietnam War. Groups that rallied with the Filipino and Mexican farmworkers included college students, African Americans, and those of draft age. With this support and notoriety, Chavez and the farmworkers took their battle to the fruit and vegetable fields and orchards throughout California. This attention to Mestizos ignited a spark in the barrio ghetto slums of Californian cities, leading to the larger Brown Power movement.

Chavez’s farmworkers movement focused attention on the gap created by ending the Bracero Program that once provided some protections for Mexican farmworkers. With the Bracero Program’s demise, new waves of immigration flooded the U.S. borders, including Asians displaced by the Vietnam War and Hispanics from Central and South America as well as Mexico. This new wave of immigrants, legal and illegal, flooded Southern California, adding to the overcrowded conditions of the economically challenged inner cities already occupied by African Americans, Hispanics, and the recently “relocated” American Indians. These interracial tensions forced each ethnic subgroup to fight for their territory and limited resources, as well as forcing the groups to assert their cultural identity within this conflicting ecosystem.

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