Mexican Americans with Moxie

Frank P. Barajas has written an original history of the Chicano movement. While other scholars stress generational divisions between Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, and Chicano activists, Barajas tells a story of intergenerational empathy and collaboration. Focusing on Ventura County, California, Barajas reveals that ethnic Mexicans banded together to support farmworkers, victims of police brutality, antiwar protests, and desegregation efforts. Historians have long centered the Chicano movement in Los Angeles and have shown how national figures like Cesar Chavez inspired urban, Mexican American youth to become Chicanos. Barajas shows us that, in Ventura County, the lines between rural and urban and migrant and native were fluid, and an unsung intergenerational cast was at the forefront of the political campaigns in the region.Situated only four hours away from the border, Ventura County drew Mexican migrants into its fields and factories. Early on, these migrants formed mutual aid societies, which lobbied public officials for desperately needed social services. The children of these migrants, including Rachel Murguia Wong and John Soria, went on to uplift their farmworker communities through the Oxnard Farm Labor Service Center, the Community Service Organization (CSO), and Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), which collectively promoted labor and civil rights, voter turnout, and electoral and educational reforms. This broad culture of civic engagement inspired an even younger generation of ethnic Mexicans, such as Yvonne De Los Santos and Roberto Flores. Their parents toiled in the fields, their families and friends included immigrants, and, over time, they came to define themselves as Chicanas and Chicanos who embodied “an emotive spirit of righteous indignation (i.e., anger) that instigated valiant fights against systems of racism to realize the nation's ethos of equality” (3).Police brutality cemented these intergenerational bonds. The leaders of the United Farm Workers, including Chavez, described the police force in Ventura County as one of the most vicious in the country. During agricultural strikes in the early 1900s and 1930s, police officers undermined unionization efforts, spying on organizers and intimidating workers on behalf of powerful growers. Mexican American CSO members began protesting the police after a series of egregious incidents, which included the police beating of Juan Sosa, a seventeen-year-old boy from Oxnard, and a police “riot” that occurred at a church festival, during which officers used tear gas and batons on Mexican parishioners (47–48).Young Chicanos like Flores participated in farmworker strikes and experienced police violence firsthand. Partnering with Vietnam veterans like Armando Lopez, who served as the vice president of MAPA, they concluded that ethnic Mexicans lived in a sort of colonial “occupied state.” They formed a local chapter of the Brown Berets and reached out to Murguia Wong, who served as a community liaison for the Oxnard Elementary School District (OESD), and Dr. Rodolfo F. Acuna, a public intellectual, who would become one of the best-known scholars of the Chicano movement. Together they produced a new and progressive curriculum for local schools and colleges that would bring the exploitation of farmworkers to light, and through initiatives like “Operation Chicano Teacher” they recruited and trained community members to become educators and engaged citizens (117–18, 172). As a result of these educational endeavors, the Brown Berets joined with the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan to organize La Marcha de la Reconquista in 1971, a six-hundred-mile protest march in favor of farmworkers’ rights and funding for Chicano studies programs and against police brutality and the Vietnam War (64–67). Challenging the historiographical depiction of the Mexican American generation, Barajas explains that older Mexican Americans, like Murguia Wong and Soria, did not oppose the turn toward Chicano militancy and antiwar activism; they stood “shoulder to shoulder” with Chicanos (12).Historians of the 1960s have repeatedly addressed the generational divide that developed within white America over the Vietnam War. Mexican Americans with Moxie, like other important works on the Chicano movement, demonstrates that this framework, which so often precedes explanations about the antiwar activism of radical white youth, does not apply to the Mexican American antiwar experience. Ethnic Mexicans were aware of the history of US imperialism, and in Ventura County they experienced injustice in their everyday lives at the hands of the police.Barajas also exposes the fissures in these new coalitions. Students experienced de facto segregation in Ventura County, and as the head of MAPA, Soria challenged this discrimination through the courts, which offered mandated busing to achieve integration. Chicano activists opposed busing and questioned the value of integration. Ethnic Mexicans agreed that the US educational system harmed their children. Schools disciplined students for speaking Spanish and either omitted the history of ethnic Mexicans altogether or depicted them as bandits and buffoons. Chicanos wanted equal resources for their neighborhood schools and a curriculum that empowered ethnic Mexicans to succeed in a “white dominant society” (90). In the end, the Oxnard Elementary School District Board opposed integration in nearly every form, which compelled the Brown Berets and MAPA, representatives of “two generational cohorts” (98), to fuse together into a Chicano campaign for integration and equitable education for all.As Barajas indicates, solidarity was not the default response of ethnic Mexicans; it was cultivated, and activists made compromises. At times, these concessions produced intense conflicts. During a series of strikes chronicled in the final chapters of the book, Cesar Chavez called on the Border Patrol to deport undocumented workers that companies could employ to replace UFW members. This “infuriated” Flores and other Chicanos, who lambasted Chavez and were then marginalized for doing so. Nevertheless, Barajas argues, this Chicano-infused “transgenerational” movement held together. Flores, like so many other Chicanos, was committed to improving the lives of farmworkers through unionization, and he continued to work with the UFW even as he rebuked many of Chavez's decisions (150–53).Mexican Americans with Moxie reframes much of what scholars have asserted about ethnic Mexican political generations. In Ventura County, Mexican Americans do not appear to be jingoistic patriots who aspired to be perceived as white Americans and casually accepted the deportation of undocumented Mexicans, as other monographs suggest. Likewise, in the pages of this book, Chicanos do not seem to be suffering from an identity crisis, nor do they appear as a vanguard force challenging the politics of their parents; instead, the Chicanos of Ventura County are the children of mixed-citizenship families whose parents worked the brutal migrant trail. They knew who they were, worked closely with progressive Mexican Americans, and were willing to make lifelong sacrifices to uplift their communities. Barajas has succeed in recovering their history. This book should be read by those who think they understand the ethnic Mexican people of the United States

Biology · Ethnic group · Gene · Mexican americans · Sociology · Transgenerational epigenetics · Anthropology · Demography · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Race, History, and American Society · Genetics