BY GREG McCARTAN AND RÓGER CALERO
The Politics of Chicano Liberation, Pathfinder Press, First Edition 1977; Second printing, 1995. Edited by Olga Rodríguez. 186 pages, photos and index; $15.95.
BY RO'GER CALERO AND GREG MCCARTAN
From a people considered the silent or forgotten minority to the rise of a powerful movement by Chicanos that dealt blows to entrenched oppression and divisions within the working class based on language and national origin - that is the history told in the reissued Politics of Chicano Liberation.
This book contains reports and documents of the Socialist Workers Party on the fight for Chicano freedom. The selection grows out of the direct participation of party members in the Chicano struggle in the late 1960s and 1970s.
The documents are remarkable in their factual presentation and Marxist analysis of the roots of Chicano oppression. The book explains why national liberation is a central question in the struggle for socialism.
Editor Olga Rodríguez, a participant in many of the events recounted in the book, provides a preface updating her 1977 introduction. An airline worker and member of the International Association of Machinists, she remains a political activist in New Jersey, where she resides today. The book contains an index and a number of pictures from the 1960s and 1970s.
Included in the reports and documents is a rich accounting of the struggles to organize the mainly-Chicano and Mexicano agricultural workers in the giant "factories in fields" in the Southwest; against the U.S. slaughter in Vietnam; for bilingual and bicultural education, affirmative action and Chicano studies programs; and for equal rights of undocumented immigrant workers
Several sections take up the formation of the Raza Unida Party in different areas - independent political formations that sought to challenge the control by the Democratic and Republican parties of the Chicano communities.
Forging an oppressed nationality
The Politics of Chicano Liberation explains how Chicanos
were forged into a distinct oppressed nationality in the wake
of the expansionist drive of U.S. capital in the 19th century,
in which over two-thirds of what was then Mexico's national
territory was forcibly incorporated into the United States.
With the taking of this huge land mass, the original inhabitants were "set apart by race, language, culture, [and] not assimilated as full and equal citizens," explains the 1971 SWP resolution "The Struggle for Chicano Liberation." Instead, "they were systematically discriminated against as a people, and forged by expanding American capitalism into a distinct oppressed nationality."
"For many years the Chicano people were considered the silent or forgotten minority," the resolution states. But with the end of World War II, colonial revolutions swept Asia, Africa, and the Mideast. Anti-imperialist struggles exploded in Latin America, including the victory of the Cuban revolution in 1959. The opening of the first socialist revolution in the Americas had an especially important impact on young fighters in the vanguard of the Chicano struggle.
These developments, together with the victory over Jim Crow segregation in the South and the blows dealt to discrimination in the fight for Black rights, led the situation of the "silent minority" to "change dramatically in the mid- and late-1960s as an independent movement developed in response to the specific oppression of the Chicano people, which had a dynamic and revolutionary logic of its own," the document adds.
Developments in the Chicano liberation struggle are carefully detailed in these documents, from debates within the movement to state-by-state efforts to form independent political organizations. Several sections explain the perspectives advanced by other political currents within the movement, such as the Stalinist Communist Party, ultraleft organizations, and liberals.
The SWP sought above all to advance the struggle along a road of independent political action, rejecting reliance on the Democratic Party, toward actions that would increase the self-confidence and mobilization of the Chicano people themselves, and for building organizations on the basis of the mobilized power of the oppressed nationality.
"One necessary step in the construction of a mass independent Chicano party is the elaboration of a program of democratic and transitional demands capable of mobilizing the masses of La Raza in struggle," the 1971 resolution states.
Self-determination
The SWP resolution places "as a contribution to the
formulation of a transitional program for Chicano liberation"
several key demands, including, "The Right of Self-
Determination." Since the "Chicano people are oppressed as a
nationality, they have the right to fully and unconditionally
determine their own destiny, including the right to establish
a separate state if they so decide collectively.
"The most immediate and compelling struggles to determine the destiny of the Chicano people are those aiming at Chicano control of the Chicano community," it states.
Demands on control of education, for the right of Chicano workers to unionize and for a minimum wage, equal rights for Raza women, democratic election laws and the 18-year-old vote, "against mass-media stereotypes," for ending the draft of Chicano youth and support to liberation struggles of oppressed peoples, for "land to those who work it," and the formation of a Chicano political party are included in this section.
The 1976 resolution, "The Crisis of American Capitalism and the Struggle for Chicano Liberation," points out that the "Chicano movement has gained valuable experience that will help guide future battles. But the movement today faces new challenges stemming from the changed international and national context in which its struggles are unfolding."
"In keeping with a centuries-old policy of divide and rule, the American ruling class will make every effort to shift a disproportionate burden of this economic crisis onto the Chicano population."
The first wave of the struggle "won important concessions," the resolution notes. But with the onset of the world capitalist economic crisis and the initial assaults on the working class, "Today even those gains are under attack."
Most recently this can be seen in the efforts of the California legislature and in other states to reverse affirmative action programs and to eliminate Black, women, and Chicano studies departments in the colleges; the chauvinist English-only movements from New York to Florida; and the continuing drive to scapegoat immigrant workers.
The fight that gained international prominence was that of students and workers in the colleges, high schools and work places in California against passage of the anti-immigrant Proposition 187.
Approved in a 1994 statewide vote, the law seeks to deny access to education and health-care service to undocumented workers and their children. Implementation of much of the law was blocked by a temporary restraining order issued shortly after it was passed. Similar legislation has been introduced by politicians of the Democratic and Republican parties across the nation. These laws are designed first and foremost to intimidate large sections of the working class who don't have the "right" documents and to ratchet up chauvinist pressures, which Chicanos and Mexicanos have been the target of for decades.
The government also hopes to drive a wedge in the working class, with the goal of increasing competition among workers in order to increase the length of the working day, enforce speed-up on the job, and implement cuts in the social wage.
Defense of immigrant rights
The harassment and deportation of immigrant workers is not
new. Mexicano workers have been the victims of massive
deportations organized by the U.S. government going back
decades, and the defense of immigrant workers continues to be
a centerpiece of the struggle for Chicano liberation today.
"A mass antideportation movement that could organize actions in defense of Mexicanos and other immigrants without visas has the potential of drawing in not only Chicanos, other workers, civil libertarians, and students, but of mobilizing workers without papers in defense of their rights," stated the 1976 SWP resolution.
This is something that did develop in the fight against Proposition 187. The high school strikes and protests among college students, involving tens of thousands of youth, included children of immigrant workers who often led the protest activities in Los Angeles.
An important and new component in the demonstrations against Proposition 187 were the organized contingents of immigrant workers - from truck drivers and garment workers, to farm workers, construction workers, and maintenance workers - who swelled the ranks of the protests.
Working-class battles
The Politics of Chicano Liberation explains how the drive
by Mexicano, Chicano, and Filipino agricultural workers in
California was one of the events that launched the new
movement of Chicanos in the 1960s. Their uncompromising
struggle for equality, a decent wage, and a union inspired
thousands of Chicano youth to take up the banner for equality
and justice.
The UFW's success in the California fields in winning some basic rights for what had been an unprotected, super-exploited layer of workers in the United States, was based in part on the fact that the union took up the broader social questions facing the oppressed and exploited.
Like the farm workers, other Mexicano and Latino immigrant workers have organized themselves to fight against entrenched racism, for decent wages and conditions, and, in the process, to organize into trade unions.
Their successes have been contingent on reaching into the Chicano and Mexicano communities, and to the working class as a whole, for solidarity. This was true with the 1993 strike by drywall construction workers in California, and in the battle for Justice for Janitors in Los Angeles in 1990, the majority of whom were Mexicano and other Latino immigrants.
These battles deserve to be studied and provide valuable lessons for workers resisting the rulers' offensive today, and can help combat chauvinist appeals to "America First" being made by Democrats and Republicans. They point to an internationalist course against that of the labor officials whose only answer to unemployment and wage cuts has been calls for legislation to protect "American jobs."
At a time when Washington, together with imperialist partners in NATO, is mounting a war drive against Yugoslavia, the lessons of the militant antiwar mobilizations by Chicanos against the U.S. war in Vietnam, contained in The Politics of Chicano Liberation, will be of interest to those who want to fight against imperialism's war preparations today.
The Politics of Chicano Liberation provides an explanation and concrete example of the combined character of the coming American revolution. It shows how the fight for national liberation gives a mighty boost to the class struggle and provides a basis for unifying the working class in the fight to wrest power from the most brutal capitalist ruling class in the world.
The book is convincing in its case that Chicano fighters should become part of the worldwide struggle for socialism.
"The SWP recognizes that the struggle of Chicanos against their oppression takes place on two intertwined fronts - a fight against the oppression they face as a people, and a struggle against their exploitation as part of the working class," states a 1976 resolution.
"Only the coming American socialist revolution," the resolution states, "a proletarian revolution that also completes the unfulfilled democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution by assuring equality and self-determination to the oppressed national minorities in the United States - can bring about the total liberation of Chicanos."
The capitalist rulers try to convince us we are up against insurmountable odds if we embark on the road of struggle. That was rejected and proven wrong by the farm workers who fought for a union and whose battle cry was "!Sí, se puede!" ("Yes, it can be done!").
This became the slogan of the youthful Chicano movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The lesson of this book is that it can become the slogan of today's generations as well.