By Francisco “Chavo” Romero

It was 40 years ago on a bright, beautiful Saturday morning in which nearly 30,000 people marched against the Vietnam War, a march that flowed through East Los Angeles, down the Whittier Boulevard stretch, a marvelous, inspiring time for the Chicano Movement. Children, the elderly, men, women, and young vibrant activistas, had come from other cities, states and beyond to march at this historic event. Reverberations of the chant, “Raza Si! Guerra No!” traveled throughout and around East Los.

That wonderful moment, was brought to a sudden halt when hundreds of Los Angeles Sheriffs and LAPD descended upon a peaceful, organized community action at Laguna Park (now Ruben F. Salazar Park), where families danced to corridos and listened to powerful political speeches about the injustices in the barrio and the atrocities of La Guerra en Vietnam by movement leaders. Their pretext was that a “suspect” had allegedly stolen a six pack of beers from a nearby liquor store and had run into the park. What transpired next was a brutal assault by armed, baton-swinging, and tear gas-shooting puercos.

My heart aches, still, when I watch the old footage of the Sheriff Pig smashing down a young woman with his baton, striking her full force at her neck and knocking her to the ground unconscious. The first time I saw this I was sitting in my first ever Chicano Studies class at the local community college and I was so enraged by those images that I slammed the desk with my fist. That was over 15 years ago, when I joined El Movimiento.

I clearly recall my first ever political marcha against California Governor Pete Wilson’s Proposition 187. I had recently joined M.E.Ch.A, el Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, and they called for a demonstration to protest Prop. 187 by marching from Ventura Community College down to the Ventura County Government Center… I proudly carried a placard that I made the night before, which denounced the racist attack on my gente. I also remember that it was that day, a couple of fellows, now my great comrades, the Moreno brothers, gave me a flyer to join them in an organizing meeting for the National Chicano Moratorium Committee. It was a planning session to mobilize for the following year’s 25th Commemoration of the August 29, 1970 East Los Angeles historic march. I grabbed the flyer and glanced at it.

The following week, I went ahead and joined them for the meeting at the old United Farm Workers’ union hall located on north “A” Street. I sat in the back of the room on a squeaky old fold up chair, and then listened in. I was immediately drawn to the sharp analysis that was being presented about how important it was to continue to organize the Chicano Moratorium, because it was one of the most critical moments in La Raza’s history on this side of the Frontera Falsa. After ending their week-long hunger strike against Proposition 187 at the Placita, within the center of the City of Oxnard, student leaders and other activists formed the Oxnard Chapter of the National Chicano Moratorium.

From those days on, many of us have worked tirelessly to keep the struggle moving forward, to keep El Movimiento alive in our town, Chiques, Califas. The only way, that many of us have been able to keep a steady rhythm and survive the ebbs and flows of our revolution, is through collectivism, accountability and through organization. Over 15 years ago, I joined Union del Barrio and my entire life changed; it has been this humble, grassroots, barrio-grounded organization that has inspired me to wake up every morning and fight! I recall picking up Voz Fronteriza and ¡La Verdad! newspapers and I would read every single article, not once, but twice and sometimes even a third time. I remember reading information that I had never read anywhere else before, especially the analysis and perspectives on colonialism and liberation.

In 1994, I joined El Movimiento, and in the early dawn of New Years of that same year, the Ejercito Zapitasta por la Liberacion Nacional (EZLN), the Zapatista insurgency in the state of Chiapas, Mexico declared, “¡Ya Basta!” The armed insurrection of indigenous peoples’ refused to remain silent, so they “wore masks to be seen and shot rifles to be heard,” and millions within Mexico and from around the world joined in this Peoples’ War against the North American Free Trade Agreement, Neoliberalism and Capitalism.
It was an inspiring moment in time. A spirit of resistance that had for a long time been silenced, it seemed, had spilled onto the streets. Revolution was in the air once again.

In reality, every year since the mid 1970’s, during the height of what is now known as the Black Power and Chicano Power Period, which encompassed the years of 1965-1975, there has been an ongoing, arduous trek to keep the struggle for liberation moving forward, despite all odds. We have been walking this centuries old path of resistance for more than 518 years…

The U.S. Government and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counter-revolutionary attack, COINTELPRO, the Counter Intelligence Program, was a systematic, scientific assault to destroy any semblance of independent revolutionary activity within what is, now, U.S. territory. COINTELPRO was responsible for the monitoring, infiltration and disruption of organizations and individuals who were actively posing a basic threat to the hegemony of Imperialism in all its forms. Socialist, Communist, Black, Indigenous Peoples, Chicano/Mexicano and Puerto Rican peoples, Anti-War, Women’s Rights, student groups, among others, were targeted to be, as then FBI Director Hoover stated, “exposed, disrupted, misdirected, discredited, or otherwise neutralized.”

Vocal leaders of these liberation and social movements were targeted; many were assassinated, including Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and scores of other activists and organizers, including more moderate “civil rights” leaders, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. Countless potential revolutionaries were “neutralized”, via imprisonment, and many fell to the heavy drug importation into poor working-class communities. Specifically, the American Indian Movement, the Black Panther Party, the Brown Berets, the Crusade for Justice, the Young Lords, and an array of other revolutionary-leaning and anti-colonial formations across the landscape were targeted.

Other methods of counter-insurgent measures were implemented.

From the mid 1970’s and throughout the 1980’s, the radical, independent and revolutionary forces within the U.S. were marginalized. The mass influx of the Democratic Party institutionalized effort to contain and absorb any remnants of independent social and left-oriented political alternatives went into full effect. La Raza Unida Party process of creating a third party was nearly completely dismantled. The eighties, then, became “The Decade of the Hispanic”, where mainstream, mainly assimilationist advocacy-type agencies spread like wildfire across Aztlán-Occupied Territories and beyond. For hundreds of activists, the berets and radical buttons that read, “Chicano Power! Y Que!” slowly morphed into suits, ties and swinging leather business briefcases. With the nice pens y todo.

Next came the increased “professionalization” of activism and organizing that spread throughout and within movement socio-political spheres. The gradual institutionalization and containment of the language, study and struggle of revolution subtly gave way to the language of “social justice” and “empowerment” campaigns. The fight for liberation withered from working-class led struggles within the independent and radical movements in the community and on school campuses, into “policy-change” and reformist measures led by “trained community organizers”. The liberation and anti-colonial struggle was repackaged into sanitized, donor-friendly language that would make it through the first review of applications submitted for foundation and corporate funding. Some non-profits, a very small handful, have been able to weather the ruling-class constraints and are finding a delicate balance of maintaining accountability to the community, a balance that is sometimes overwhelmingly difficult to sustain. The reality though, is that the vast sea of these advocacy and empowerment-type agencies, by and large, are trapped within the framework of policy-change and in the main are service-oriented. Organizing for self-determination and liberation was deemed impractical.

It was during the 1980’s, where those that survived the onslaught of attacks by the state, those that met in backyards, in homes in the barrio, on the street corners and in the pintas, that decided, not to give up on El Movimiento, that refused to abandon the basic principles of dignity and devotion to revolution.

So, we met.

Slowly but surely, we began to rebuild.

Out of the ashes, we rekindled the fire, 518 years old… fanning the flames of resistance.

So, during the 1980’s our people defended and supported the Sandinistas, the Farabundistas. We boycotted Coors and fought and fasted in defense of Chicano Studies programs. We reconvened the Chicano Press Association, now known as the Raza Press and Media Association.

The year 1990 arrived and we marched with over 20,000 Raza for the 20th commemoration of the Chicano Moratorium. We walked, ten thousand of us, against 500 Years of Oppression to the Frontera, La Linea en Tijuana y San Ysidro. We watched L.A. burn again, in the fires of injustice and oppression. We came out against Proposition 187. We clamored, “Ya Basta!” We marched for the 25th commemoration of the Chicano Moratorium. We resisted against Propositions 209 and 227. We walked in Tucson against the 150th year of U.S. occupation of our lands. The turn of the century came… and we survived and resisted. All of it.

In this first decade of this millennium, we have once again, as a people, responded to the attacks against our gente, los trabajadores y nuestras familias. The politicos and the ruling elite launched their Secure Communities, 287 (g), HR-4437, and recently SB-1070. Now, they are spending millions of dollars, sending more troops to the border and more Migra/ICE into our barrios and workplaces. The police brutality continues. They continue to build prisons, and we are filling them up. They continue to defund education and social programs, and continue to fund wars.

The oppressors and their apologist collaborators have come at us with everything they have. Yet, we have endured. The painstaking task of daily activism and organizing, a lifetime commitment that many of us have made, takes its toll; nevertheless we trek on, forward always.

On Saturday August 28th, yesterday, on the historic march for 40th Commemoration of the Chicano Moratorium in Los Angeles, we walked down the streets clamoring, “Raza Si! Guerra No!” There were only six hundred of us or so, but, we marched with our heads held high. We walked with dignity.

Today, Sunday August 29, 2010, here in Chiques, we will unfurl the banners of resistance, dignity and an uncompromising commitment and love for Nuestro Pueblo y La Humanidad.

Que Viva El Moratorio Chicano! RAZA SI! GUERRA NO!