The march started at the Escuela Tlatelolco, a bilingual school founded by the Crusade in 1970 and named to commemorate the hundreds of youth killed in the Plaza de Tlatelolco in Mexico City in 1968. The rally ended at Mestizo Park. Hundreds of youth turned out, many chanting “Viva La Raza” and “Chicano Power.” Activists from Chicano student groups in the Denver area and from as far away as Albuquerque, New Mexico, participated.
Many participants in the Chicano movement in the 1960s and ’70s attended. A number of Democratic Party politicians were also there—including Kenneth Salazar, U.S. senator from Colorado, Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, and Federico Peńa, former Denver mayor and a Clinton administration cabinet member. Gonzales’s children moderated the rally. Dolores Huerta, a leader of the United Farm Workers, spoke, as did Kenneth Padilla and Walter Gerash, two lawyers who defended the Crusade and many of its members during the 1970s.
Gonzales, a Democratic Party official from the late 1950s, founded the Crusade for Justice in 1966 and became a national figure during the rise of the Chicano movement.
The Chicano movement rose in the mid-1960s, inspired by the Black struggle that toppled Jim Crow segregation in the South, the rise of a mass antiwar movement inspired by the tenacious liberation struggle of the Vietnamese people, and the wave of national struggles worldwide that culminated in the Cuban Revolution in 1959—the first socialist revolution in the Western Hemisphere. Rebelling against the systematic discrimination that Chicanos faced in education, employment, and on the land, the movement included a powerful wave of student strikes in which some 15,000 Chicano students walked out of the barrio schools in Los Angeles in 1968; the rise of a powerful social movement to organize the unorganized farm laborers in California and throughout the Southwest; the Land Grant movement in New Mexico, which fought to reclaim land that had been stolen from its Chicano/Mexicano owners; and mass protest actions against police brutality, the Vietnam War, and around other social questions.
The Crusade attracted many young Chicano militants eager to join these struggles. It helped build the National Chicano Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam on Aug. 29, 1970, in which 30,000 people marched in East Los Angeles in the largest antiwar action organized by an oppressed nationality in the United States. Hundreds of police assaulted the action, disbursed the crowd, and killed a television news reporter.
The Crusade hosted three national Chicano Youth Liberation Conferences in 1969, 1970, and 1971 that attracted thousands of Chicano youth from throughout the Southwest. The 1969 conference adopted a program called El plan espiritual de Aztlán (The Spiritual Plan of Aztlán). Based on the mass mobilization of Chicanos, the program declared that political liberation would ultimately require “a nation autonomously free, culturally, socially, economically, and politically.” The program called for the formation of an independent political party “since the two-party system is the same animal with two heads that feeds from the same trough.”
At the highpoint of the Chicano movement many activists had come to see the need to break with the Democratic and Republican parties and extend the independent thrust of the movement to the electoral arena. La Raza Unida parties and similar formations were launched in Texas, Colorado, California, and Arizona. Coming out of the 1970 Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, the Crusade for Justice launched La Raza Unida Party in Colorado.
La Raza Unida was an advance in the struggle for Chicano self-determination. The party scored victories in local elections in Crystal City, Texas. It gave expression in the electoral arena of the gains registered through mass mobilizations and combativity of the Chicano people. The party declined and disappeared quickly, following the mid-1970s ebbing of the Chicano movement. Subsequently much of the leadership of the Chicano movement turned away from this course and many of its leaders returned to Democratic Party politics.
Articles in the Los Angeles Times and other papers on the death of Gonzales make no mention of the merciless campaign that the FBI and other police agencies conducted against the Chicano movement. Gonzales and the Crusade for Justice were targets of this campaign, in the course of which a number of leaders of the Crusade were entrapped by cops on various frame-up charges or killed by the Denver police.
Defense for victims of the cops’ assaults was made more difficult when Crusade for Justice leaders failed to repudiate ultraleft rhetoric and actions from time to time, and when they declined to publicly renounce thuggish behavior on the part of a few Crusade for Justice activists.
One such default in leadership was Gonzales’s failure to denounce the October 1976 unprovoked assault on Fred Halstead and Steve Chainey—members of the Socialist Workers Party—by a leader of the Crusade in Denver. Threats of violence directed at activists in the Chicano movement and others with whom the Crusade had disagreements, weakened the group’s ability to put up united-front resistance to the FBI and cop assault, which was directed not only against Chicano groups but also the SWP and other organizations involved in the struggle against the Vietnam War, the fight for Black rights, and other social struggles.
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