Chicanos Revisit ’69 Movement

It was 1969. The revolution was coming and for this crowd the enemy was “Tio Taco,” wannabe gringos who forgot where they came from.

More than 100 men and women, militant Chicanos, met in Santa Barbara with a vague notion that the tranquil beachside city would be ground-zero for their movement. They could smell it in the air. Before they left, they had put together El Plan.

College students and professors arrived from barrios and campuses around the state in beat-up Chevys and boat-like station wagons with fake wood paneling.

Crackling with “Chicano Power,” a social brush fire set just months before, the young revolutionaries hatched El Plan de Santa Barbara amid the Spanish mission architecture and Mexican adobe influences of UC Santa Barbara.

They started with the goal of reclaiming “La Alta California, Aztlan,” the land of their ancestors. They wanted to take back California.

El Plan was the intellectual blueprint for what has evolved into more than 50 college Chicano studies programs in California, enrolling thousands and helping to shape some of the state’s most influential Latino leaders.

This weekend, the veteranos were at it again, returning to UC Santa Barbara for a conference organized by a new generation of students out to duplicate the seminal 1969 meeting. They arrived in soap-bar-shaped economy sedans, eyes puffy with age and photos of new grandkids tucked in their wallets.

With their passion for la causa, tempered only slightly by time, the veteran scholars and activists joined the students in taking a hard look at the future of Chicanos in California.

With campus conflicts and hunger strikes still occurring in places such as UC Berkeley, perhaps it’s time for a new plan, they concluded. As things now stand, “I’m very pessimistic about the future of Chicano studies,” said Carlos Munoz Jr., director of ethnic studies at Berkeley.

Nonetheless, “We’ve come a long way,” said Rita Zepeda, who attended the first conference and was recently named president of Santa Ana College in Orange County.

But since the 1960s and ‘70s, when the chief concern was establishing a greater Chicano presence at state colleges, the Latino world has become far more complex, she said.

Though such measures as Propositions 187, 209 and 227 stirred much the same sentiments that helped launch the “Chicano Power” movement, Latinos today face much more than simple anti-Mexican sentiment, Zepeda said.

“The paradigms are shifting,” she said. “We have to think about reforming ourselves.”

For instance, with such a diverse Latino population now living in California, some at the conference wondered whether the term “Chicano” is still valid. A political label used to describe Mexican descendants in Aztlan, or the occupied land of their ancestors, Chicano is a hybrid of the Aztec “Mexica” (pronounced mecheeka) and the Spanish “Mexicano” (pronounced meheekano), both meaning Mexican.

Identifying with the politics of Chicanos, several Latinos nonetheless believe that the term does not apply to them in the same way it does to Mexican Americans.

“I feel like a minority within a minority,” said Carlos Martinez, a biology student at UC Santa Barbara who was born in Nicaragua.

With about 800,000 Central Americans in California, the fact that Chicano studies programs in the state do not typically address their experiences here shows how the dialogue within the Latino community is failing, he said.

“We’re not all the same,” he said. “We have to recognize and appreciate each other’s differences.”

Yolanda Marquez, a UC Santa Barbara graduate student writing a dissertation on her school’s Chicano studies department, said the field is evolving in that direction.

The initial core courses laid out in El Plan looked at linguistic barriers confronting Mexican American children or political activism in the barrio, she said. Chicano studies now focus on more specialized topics such as critical race theory, the history of Chicano consciousness, and gender and homosexual theories, she said.

Spreading from California to other Southwestern states, Mexico and even Indiana, Chicano studies has developed its own academic lexicon, Marquez said.

Where a student 30 years ago might have used Chicano studies as a way to understand his or her culture, today’s scholar can critique different theories on what it means to be Chicano, she said.

To several at the conference, that evolution strays far from the original intent of El Plan, to lead the fight for self-empowerment in the barrios.

Over time, however, a few at the first conference forgot that call for continued grass-roots activism, said Rene Nunez, a professor at San Diego State University who organized the first meeting.

“The fact that we have a number of Chicano institutions and programs in place is good,” he said. “But we lost sight of the politics.”

Bert Corona, a longtime labor and immigrant activist who now heads Los Angeles-based Hermandad Mexicana, was more critical.

“Where have these college professors been all these years?” he asked. “They’re safely ensconced in their positions of academia. That is not where the struggle is. We contrived a great plan, but we are far lacking in the implementation of that plan.”

Part of the problem is a faculty shortage, said Luis Arroyo, chairman of the department of Chicano and Latino studies at Cal State Long Beach. The usual 12 professors in his department, many of whom are older than 50, are too tied up with student and administrative concerns to work in the community, he said.

Like others, he voiced concerns that many of these professors won’t be replaced when they retire and that younger teachers are needed to help bridge a generation gap with the students.

Seferino Garcia, director of the Anaheim-based Solevar Community Development Corporation, said the focus should be placed on developing Chicano studies programs in elementary and high schools--a proposal in El Plan that was never implemented.

“Where are the Chicano studies textbooks for junior high and high school?” asked Garcia, whose group has helped area elementary and secondary schools incorporate some Chicano history into their programs.

Armando Vazquez-Ramos, a Chicano studies professor on several Cal State campuses, said university programs should also concentrate on teacher training programs aimed at filling the shortage of Latino instructors in state public schools.

Vazquez hopes to convince the Cal State system to establish teaching programs utilizing faculty from universities in Mexico.

Monica Marquez, a Pacoima native studying math and Chicano studies at the Santa Barbara campus, said she would be eager to enter such a program.

After a three-hour round-table discussion on the complexities faced by Latinos in the 1990s, Marquez and other students left the session that ended at 10 p.m. and continued the conversation on their own for three more hours.

Most of the discussion focused on potential strategies to address the teacher shortage, bilingual education and other school issues, she said.

“It was inspiring,” said Marquez, wondering aloud if the veteran activists realized they were making history during their own late-night rap sessions.

Monte Perez, director of a national teen outreach organization called Youth Build USA, said he and his contemporaries were only vaguely aware they were on to something important during that first conference.

Along with several other veterans, he was skeptical that much concrete action would follow the current conference.

“Those were volatile times,” he said of the ‘60s, while sipping margaritas with old friends, lamenting current Latino problems.

Perez remembered the frenzy of the East L.A. school walkouts, a national Chicano conference in Texas that inspired the El Plan gathering, and the run-ins he had with state officials during several protests.

“But they can’t get demoralized,” he said of today’s students. “This is a movement. I, for one, will not stop fighting for justice until the day I die.”